Peter Straub - Lost Boy Lost Girl

On a recent night, he had come home shortly before eleven P.M. after being out with Jimbo Monaghan – ‘being out’ a euphemism for the one activity that had compelled him during these past days – hoping not to be punished for having missed his curfew by twenty minutes or so. Ten-thirty was a ridiculously early hour for a fifteen-year-old to have to be home, anyhow. In he had come, twenty minutes past his curfew, expecting to be interrogated longer than he had been AWOL and ordered into bed. However, Mark did not take off his shoes or tiptoe to the stairs. Some unacknowledged part of him regretted that the living room was dark except for the dim light leaking in from the kitchen, and that neither of his parents was ensconced on the davenport, tapping the crystal of a wristwatch.

From the foyer he could see a light burning at the top of the stairs. That would be for both his benefit and his parents’ peace of mind: if they woke up to see that the hallway was dark, they would know he had come home, and they could perfect the scolding he would get in the morning. The dim yellow haze in the living room probably meant that either his father or his mother had grown sick of lying in bed and gone downstairs to wait for their errant son.

He moved into the living room and looked through to the kitchen. Curiouser and curiouser. The kitchen did not appear to be the source of the light. The floor tiles and the sink were touched by a faint illumination leaking in from the side, which meant that the overhead light in the downstairs bathroom was on.

Riddle: since the upstairs bathroom is right across the hall from their bedroom, why would one of his parents come downstairs for a nocturnal pee?

Answer: because she was downstairs already, dummy, waiting to give you hell.

That light spilled into the kitchen meant that the bathroom door was either completely or partially open, thereby presenting Mark with a problem. He made a little more noise than was necessary on his journey across the dining room. He coughed. When he heard nothing from the region in question, he said, ‘Mom? Are you up?’

There was no answer.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. We forgot what time it was.’ Emboldened, he took another step forward. ‘I don’t know why my curfew’s so early anyhow. Almost everybody in my class …’

The silence continued. He hoped his mother had not fallen asleep in the bathroom. A less embarrassing possibility was that she had gone upstairs without switching off the light.

Mark braced himself for whatever he might see, went into the kitchen, and looked at the bathroom. The door hung half open. Through the gap between the door and the frame, he could see a vertical section of his mother. She was seated on the edge of the bathtub in a white nightgown, and on her face was an expression of dazed incomprehension, shot through with what he thought was fear. It was the expression of one who awakens from a nightmare and does not yet fully realize that nothing she had seen was real.

‘Mom,’ he said.

She failed to register his presence. A chill slithered from the bottom of his spine all the way up his back.

‘Mom,’ he said, ‘wake up. What are you doing?’

His mother continued to stare with empty eyes at something that was nowhere in front of her. Folded tightly together, her hands rested on the tops of her clamped knees. Her shoulders slumped, and her hair looked dull and rumpled. Mark wondered if she could actually see anything at all; he wondered if she had drifted downstairs in her sleep. He came within a foot of the bathroom door and gently pulled it all the way open.

‘Do you need help, Mom?’

To his relief, increments of consciousness slowly returned to his mother’s face. Her hands released each other, and she wiped her palms on the fabric spread across her knees. She blinked, then blinked again, as if deliberately. A tentative hand rose to her cheek, and awareness dimly appeared in her eyes. Very slowly, she lifted her head and met his gaze.

‘Mark.’

‘Are you okay, Mom?’

She swallowed and again lightly stroked her cheek.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him.

NOT FINE, SHE was emerging from the aftereffects of a profound shock. Just now, a girl of five or six in ripped, dirty coveralls had materialized in front of her, simply come into being, like an eerily solid hologram. The child was inconsolable, her weeping would never stop, so great, so crushing, were the injuries this child had endured. Frightened and dismayed, Nancy had thought to reach out and stroke her hair. But before she was able to raise her hand, the sobbing child turned her head and gave Nancy a glance of concentrated ill will that struck her like a blow. Pure vindictive animosity streamed from her, directed entirely at Nancy. This happened . Having happened, it spoke of a ferocious guilt, as ferocious as the child herself.

Yes I am here, yes I was real. You denied me .

Nancy found she was trembling violently and was incapable of speech. She had nothing to say anyhow. Back in the shabby little suburban house in Carrollton Gardens, she could have spoken, but then she had remained silent. Terror rooted her to the side of the tub. Why had she come in here in the first place?

Having communicated, the little girl vanished, leaving Nancy in shock. She had never seen that child before, but she knew who she was, yes she did. And she knew her name. Finally, Lily had come searching for her, after all.

‘ARE YOU SURE?’ Mark asked.

‘I’m just … you surprised me.’

‘Why are you sitting here?’

Nancy raised her left arm and looked at her bare wrist. ‘You’re late.’

‘Mom, you’re not wearing your watch.’

She lowered her arm. ‘What time is it?’

‘About eleven. I was with Jimbo. I guess we forgot about the time.’

‘What do you and Jimbo do at night hour after hour?’

‘Hang out,’ he said. ‘You know.’ He changed the subject. ‘What are you doing down here?’

‘Well,’ she said, collecting herself a bit more successfully. ‘I was worried because you hadn’t come home. So I went downstairs … I guess I dozed off.’

‘You looked funny,’ he said.

Nancy wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, her mouth flickering between mirth and despair. ‘Get yourself to bed, young man. I won’t say anything to your father, but this is the last time, understand?’

Mark understood. He was not to say anything to his father, either.

MARK’S OBSESSION HAD begun quietly and unobtrusively, as simple curiosity, with no hint of the urgency it would so quickly acquire. He and Jimbo had been out with their skateboards, trying simultaneously to improve their skills, look at least faintly impressive, and irritate a few neighbors. Over and over they had seen it proved that the average adult cannot abide the sight of a teenage boy on a skateboard. Something about the combination of baggy jeans, bent knees, a backward baseball cap, and a fiberglass board rattling along on two sets of wheels made the average adult male hyperventilate. The longer the run, the angrier they got. If you fell down, they yelled, ‘Hurt yourself, kid?’

Unsurprisingly, the city of Millhaven offered no skateboarding venues with half-pipes, bowls, and purpose-built ramps. What it had instead were parking lots, the steps of municipal buildings, construction sites, and a few hills. The best parking lots tended to be dominated by older kids who had no patience with newbies like Mark and Jimbo and tended either to mock their equipment or to try to steal it from them. They did have amazingly good equipment. Mark had seen a Ledger classified ad placed by a dreadlocked twenty-year-old hippie named Jeffie Matusczak who was giving up the sport to pursue his spiritual life in India and was willing to sell his two boards for fifty dollars apiece. They went on the Internet and spent the last of their money on DC Manteca shoes. Their outfits looked great, but their skills were drastically under par. Because they wished to avoid ridicule and humiliation, they did some of their skateboarding in the playground at Quincy; some on the front steps of the county museum, far downtown; but most of it on the streets around their houses, especially Michigan Street, one block west.