Rick Moody - Demonology

— Everyone keeps saying that.

He felt a powerful urge to reach for a laundry marker on the shelf above her, so that he might connect her freckles.

— Where is everyone?

— If you got here earlier, you wouldn’t be asking.

The exchange might have been considered flirtatious, at least according to his mother’s theory, Disregard as Complex Coital Strategy, but he decided that the tone was actually intended to be callous. No festivity without cruelty. Gatherings of kids always had their body counts. He thought of Peltz, and of the dwindling of his own opportunities at the party. Time was passing. He didn’t even have any candy to show for himself.

— Will you kiss me? he asked.

— No. Why would I want to kiss you? What’s your name, anyway?

— Gerry.

— Oh, yeah. Are you going to help me carry all this bedding?

— Must be a lot of beds.

— Have any gum?

He did have gum, of course. Sugarless, according to recommendations of four out of five doctors. She handed him the stack of flat sheets as she worked to finish up the fitted counterparts. And it was true, she had a perfect intention, a complete knowledge of tactics, if not the total command of muscular adjustments required for fitted sheets. Later in life she would be as good at folding sheets as the German army was at lockstep, but she would pay someone else to do it. The transfer of sheets into his arms, an important symbolic exchange, and the exchange of gum, these required the abandonment of his beer, unfinished, on a rattling Maytag dryer. Polly demurely snapped the gum as she led him down the corridor at the rear of the house. Through the pantry. There was an empty gallon crate of ice cream sweating off its remains that he hadn’t noticed earlier. And in a door jamb, at the rear of the pantry, was the Fosters’ genealogical measuring station. Nick Foster had once been little Nicky, who smiled recklessly and admired the action of waves on lifeless Long Island Sound. A wobbly line, made with Old Man Foster’s golf pencil, indicated Nicky, Age 6yrs, 6mos, another, Nicky, 8th birthday, and so on, likewise for his little sisters, whom Nicky had terrorized into submission, and who were nowhere to be seen this night, Annabelle and Grace. With his mother, they had relocated, probably to the Fosters’ pied à terre in the East Fifties. Next right was the servants’ staircase to the second floor, half in shadow. He bolted up these back stairs, and Polly, who waited behind, likely understood the implications of these researches. Every kid who came to the Fosters’ house had to know its complete architectural layout, as if this were to understand all American power, its implied antagonism of classes, its scant beachhead against wilderness, its scantly concealed totalitarianism. Polly was impatient, though. She sighed. Nevertheless, he embarked on his frolic, without leaving aside the fitted sheets, no, carrying them upon his person. There weren’t enough lights at the top of the servants’ staircase. There were low doorways, irregular construction, pneumatic tubes, messages from below. Spiders everywhere, their astounding constructions brushing against his brow, spiders of finality, existing beyond the great net of causality. The servants’ rooms were closed, storage vaults, now, in which boxes of neglected dolls’ dresses and cadets’ uniforms moldered. An aunt had climbed these stairs in search of Christmas ornaments, several years past, never to return. But Gerry survived these adventures. But soon he passed into the larger corridor of bedchambers on the second floor. These were constructed on a plan of increasing size and ornament. The bed in each was more floral than the last. Simple double beds gave way to fabulous poster beds with too many pillows. (A subject on which subject his father had recently expatiated, Interior designers make their margin on the pillows. It’s a percentage of whatever fabric you use, so they buy these pillows, different kinds of fabric, put the pillows all over the goddamned place. Any time you want to sit down, you dislodge pillows. ) There were sheer window dressings, draperies as convoluted as the waterfall outdoors, there was wallpaper with velvet upon it. And a television in every room, a stunning luxury from Gerry’s point of view, since his mother’s regulations allowed him to watch two hours of television per week. No more. He was permitted to bank time from one week and use it toward the following week, but more frequently he squandered it spinning the dial.

All the screens in the various rooms of the second floor of the Fosters’ house were tuned to horror films. From the sacred to the profane: Bride of Frankenstein juxtaposed with The Fly, Plan Nine from Outer Space with Night of the Living Dead. In every room, a huddle of teens, as if born there, each in his or her Platonic cave, taking in the broadcast fuzz of UHF stations. Gerry and his sheets swept past one of the guest rooms, where the mirror over the vanity captured in reverse the image on the screen, Raymond Burr, from the original Godzilla, rumbling in monotone about destruction and waste, This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which, up until a few days ago, was entirely beyond the scope of mans imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this moment still prevails. In the deep space of the mirror image, featureless backs of teenaged heads. For a second it seemed that these were the faces of his acquaintances, each a blank mask. In each of the six bedrooms, this stultified tableau. In each, Gerry stopped and inquired after the story:

— I was a Teenage Werewolf, said Margaret Nagle, stirring from anesthesia.

— The part where he’s in front of the bathroom mirror? Gerry said. — You know, sprouting fresh growth on his —

— Didn’t get there yet.

— Want to kiss me, Margaret?

And so on. From one tomb of lethargy to the next. The sheets, in his arms, grew heavy. Wherever he paused he leaned against a wall with this burden. As with any kid of his age, he avoided the master bedroom. Everyone knew that the beds of parents had been protected with hexes of witchcraft and if you glimpsed them, especially unmade beds of parents, you’d be turned into a pedophile or a foot fetishist or one of those guys who could tell you the weather on the day of Lincoln’s inaugural but couldn’t hold a job. According to blueprints of the second floor, the master bedroom was immediately to his left, here, at the top of the main staircase, where Danny Henderson and Pete Mars, the harlequins of his school, were engaged in a sinister prank. They were attempting to roll an enormous fire extinguisher down the main staircase of the Fosters’ house. A chemical fire extinguisher. As Gerry came upon them at the summit of the staircase, Henderson, practical joker, tried anew to lift the extinguisher. This should have been feasible, since Mars was captain of the wrestling team. But no. There was a danger of herniated disks. They dropped the extinguisher again, narrowly avoiding crushing metatarsals. The thud of the cylinder on ancient beams rippled along the main staircase.

— Can I get by? Gerry said.

— Don’t help us or anything, Abramowitz. What if we had an emergency? Sheets might come in handy in an emergency like this. You never know.

— I promised to get these sheets to Polly Firestone.

They twisted the extinguisher around, another revolution, and its penile hose swiveled and whacked Gerry on the back of his thighs as he passed. Henderson giggled, and then, in a heroic attempt to keep the rusted bottom of the extinguisher from fouling the maroon carpeting that ran the length of the main staircase, he put another tremendous effort into lifting it up. But, having failed to warn Pete Mars, he dropped it altogether and only Pete’s body block kept them, Danny and Pete and the fire extinguisher, from plunging down the staircase.