lost boy lost girl by Peter Straub Page B

refused to talk about the particularities of that terror, his mother expressed it in another way, by focusing on her son. She acted as though she were worried solely on his behalf; he could not return home at night without facing interrogation. Most of the scant conversation she directed his way had to do with his schedule. Where was he going, who was he going there with, what time would he get home? Because the truth would have sounded so bizarre, Mark found himself inventing tasks and errands that the Nancy of old would have seen through in an eye blink. Checking out the new puppies at the dog-breeding business run by a classmate’s parents, going to the county museum to wander through the exhibits, taking the nature trail alongside the Kinninnick River were things he’d enjoyed doing in grade school. At fifteen, he was no longer friends with the boy whose parents bred border collies, and the dioramas of alert-looking Indians and Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal in the Millhaven County Museum retained nothing of their old ramshackle appeal. And his almost magically clueless parents would never find out in a million years, but the nature trail had disappeared when a budget cut had let the banks of the Kinninnick revert to a secretive brushy wasteland lately popular, according to the teenage bush telegraph, as a pickup bazaar for gay men.
    Mark did not enjoy lying to his mother, but he was sure that telling her the truth would give rise to a hundred new questions, none of which he could answer. He could not explain why he should have become so fascinated by the house on Michigan Street, but fascinated he was. He would no longer have argued with the word “obsessed.” In fact, Mark liked being obsessed. Being obsessed absorbed into itself a good deal of his concern about his mother. When his attention was focused on the house, his mother might as well have been on the other side of the world.
    Or on the moon. The house seemed to vacuum his ordinary concerns out of his mind and replace them with itself. Although Mark knew that his idea was absurd, 3323 North Michigan Street felt as much an active partner in his obsession as himself. Present from the first moment the place revealed itself to him, the sense that it possessed a will, even the capacity for desire, had taken hold in him while he and Jimbo had stood before it with their skateboards in their hands. When they returned to Michigan Street, Mark could feel in himself very little of the afternoon’s hesitancy. Half of him wanted to go up the flagged walk and prowl around the house; the other half was content to do no more than stand on the sidewalk and let his eyes roam over the roofline, the porch, the front windows. Dark to the point of opacity that afternoon, the windows were now, a couple of days later, a dead, flat black. To see anything through them, he would have to hold a flashlight up to the glass.
    What would the flashlight reveal? An empty room. There was no point in even thinking about going in there. Mark had no interest in seeing a handful of dusty, long-neglected rooms.
    Yet something kept him rooted to the sidewalk, resisting Jimbo’s irritated suggestions that they go back to his house and watch some TV.
    After twenty minutes, Jimbo persuaded him to leave. The two of them went to his house and spent hours switching back and forth between music videos and foul-mouthed cartoons on the elderly fifteen-inch Motorola in Jimbo’s room. At ten-fifteen, he went downstairs; did his utmost not to ogle Margo Monaghan while bidding good night to her and a red-faced Jackie, tilting a nice slug of Powers Whiskey into his glass; proceeded homeward past vacant porches and lighted windows, in his mind seeing only the dull, remembered face of Shane Auslander and hoping that he had run away to Chicago, or New Orleans, or somewhere else where weed was plentiful; turned up his own path to his own porch and let himself in through his own unlocked front door; and for some reason