Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,150

seek, freeze tag, Simon Says, all those games that children love. We learned how to ride bikes together, and together we slogged through adolescence. Peter took Julie to the prom when we graduated from Middle Falls High, and I, in my powder blue tuxedo and dun brown shoes, went with Priscilla Chao, a sweet, shy girl who was as happy to be asked as I was relieved that she, or anyone, would bother to accompany me; not that I wanted to go in the first place. We four stood at the back of the gymnasium, far away from the rock band, watching classmates flailing like fools beneath oscillating lights, as our teachers stood nodding by the long sheeted tables set with punch bowls and chips and cheese wheels. In retrospect, I realize how normal—for unassimilateds—Jul and I must have seemed to anyone who bothered to watch. Throughout those years we subtly kept poor Peter at a near-far distance, especially when it came to some of our more transgressive ventures—indeed, he never knew about our passion for the mortuary home, its mourners, hearse driver, gun-for-hire pallbearers, and all the rest. Doubtless, he would have thought us not a little odd if he had any idea about our graveyard rambles under the full moon, headstones sparkling naughtily under their berets of fresh-fallen snow. But then no one truly knew Julie and me. A bond formed in the womb was, it seemed, as impossible for others to fathom as to break. I believe Peter married a nice woman he met during his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, having fled Middle Falls in the wake of Julie’s rejection of his marriage proposal. To this day, I never wished Peter Rhodes ill. I know Julie didn’t, either.

Like she, I went to college. A scholarship to Columbia saved me from having to lean on my father for tuition money—I’d sooner have committed myself to an assembly line in a clothes-hanger plant. After dabbling in history and the arts, I settled into the sciences and knew early on that archaeology was my calling. Just as Audubon made his sketches from nature morte, I believed the best portrait of a person, or civilization, was only accomplishable after the death knell tolled. Schliemann and Layard were like gods to me, just as Troy and Nineveh were secular heavens. Conze at Samothrace; Andrae in Assyria. Grad work at Oxford was floated on more scholarships, and I’d truly discovered my métier, I felt. A first excursion to Africa, and I was all but over the moon.

As with most disciplines, archaeology is fundamentally the art of attempting to understand ourselves through understanding others. All cultures eventually connect. Language, myth, variant customs, mores, bones, are like cultural continental drifts. Put them on a reverse-time trajectory and they relink. They become a single supercontinent called Pangea. My inability, my stubborn refusal to admit to having a true familial home, an ancestral hearth from which I set forth on my specialized journeying, I’d always considered a hidden asset. I had a knack for entering others’ homes, that is to say ruins and burial sites, and quickly understand, sometimes even master, the essential idiom of a locale and its inhabitants. Middle Falls I simply never understood. With Julie gone, if I wanted to comprehend this place of personal origin, I might be forever locked out. All the more reason to honor our covenant. Perhaps, through my twin as medium, I might come to some understanding of who I’d been and was no more.

The house was empty. I assumed our mother had gone out somewhere to finalize arrangements. The front door was unlocked, a practice poor Mom inaugurated after the divorce, saying there wasn’t anything left to steal here (morose absurdity, but whatever), so I let myself in. Odd, she’d obviously been baking cookies, Julie’s beloved peanut butter and pecans, as the whole house was redolent with the warm scent. Maybe she planned to host a small gathering of mourners at the house after the rites. Upstairs in my old room, I saw Julie’s private garden of potted orchids and exotic herbs was as opulent as she’d described it in letters and during our monthly phone conversations (it didn’t matter how distant I was, I never failed to call her). The scent, it struck me, was precisely what heaven should smell like, were there such a place. Fluid, rich, evocative, somehow soft. I closed my eyes and breathed this sensual air, and as I did, a