Dark Specter Read online

  Jamie started to panic. It had never occurred to him that the thing might light while he was in there. Would the pipes he was lying on start to heat up? He was already wedged tight between them. If they expanded and turned red-hot, he would be trapped and scalded to death! No one would hear his screams. The darkness grew dense and choking, an unbreathable mass in which he lay suffocating like that guy they’d buried alive in the video he and Kevin had rented from Blockbuster while their mom was out with that creep from work.

  He had to get out, had to. The time must be almost up anyway. He was afraid to check his watch again because his fingers were sweaty and ached from keeping hold of that little sliver of metal. If only he could hear them going upstairs, he could crawl out and go hide in Kevin’s room, under the bed or something. They’d never come looking for him there, not when they’d been in the room the whole time.

  A widening glimmer of light appeared as he began to lose his grip on the metal fastener. The panel dropped down about half an inch on one side. Jamie desperately clenched his fingers tight again, ignoring the pain, and managed to stop the hatch slipping any further. He couldn’t get it back in position, though. He didn’t have enough of a grip on the thing to lift it up and pull it in. If he tried, he’d lose it altogether. He just hoped that the triangular crack at the top of the hatch didn’t show too much from the outside. But was there anyone there? Surely Kevin and Ronnie must have searched the basement by now and gone upstairs. That’s if they were looking for him at all. Maybe they’d just gone to grab a snack or something.

  All he could see through the gap between the hatch and the paneling was a patch of bare concrete floor and a strip of unpainted baseboard. He felt as though he’d been trapped in there for hours, not minutes, and although the pipes beneath him weren’t getting any hotter, the air was. Jamie remembered something he’d seen on TV about some guy who’d died from working on his car in the garage with the engine running. There was this poisonous stuff, silent and invisible and deadly. You never even knew what was happening until it was too late. Creepy.

  He tensed up. There was a flicker of movement in the triangular sliver of light above the hatch. Even when it came to rest, it took Jamie a moment to figure out that he was looking at the leg of a pair of faded blue jeans, a patch of white sport sock and a shoe.

  And what a shoe! A Nike Air Jordan! Jamie recognized it right away, black all over with the silhouette of the basketball star Michael Jordan picked out in bright red on the side of a sole as thick as a Big Mac. A shoe to kill for! $125 a pair! No one he knew had stuff like that, not even Jamal Davis, who’d once told Mr. Olson not to dis him, right there in front of the whole class.

  Jamie shut his eyes tight and counted to ten. When he opened them again, all he could see through the crack was the patch of floor, the strip of baseboard. The shoe was gone. He must have imagined it. No one in the house had shoes like that, and none of Kevin’s friends either. Maybe the fumes were getting to him, warping his brain, making him see things and act strange, like Dad when he’d been drinking.

  Something close by started beeping, a high-pitched electronic sound. Jamie cursed as he remembered setting the alarm on his watch. Even if the time was up, he didn’t want to reveal his hiding place. He might want to use it again. He stabbed frantically at the button with one free finger of his right hand. As he did so, the metal fastener slipped from his tired fingers and the hatch clattered to the concrete flooring.

  With a sigh, the furnace turned off. Jamie lay there without moving, as though his cramped, painful stillness could somehow cancel the noise of the falling cover, erase it so that no one would hear. But he knew it was pointless. If Kevin and Ronnie came to investigate, they’d see the hatch lying on the ground and find him right away. But maybe they were upstairs, out of hearing. The music seemed to have stopped, and he couldn’t hear anyone around.

  There was a creak on the stairs, then another. Someone was coming down. Footsteps scuffed on the concrete floor.

  “Just a piece of wood fell off the …”

  It was a voice Jamie had never heard before. A man. He was just inches away, on the other side of the plywood paneling.

  “What?”

  Another strange voice, this time upstairs. There was no reply, only the scuffle of footsteps close by.

  “Russ?” the second man called again.

  There was a pause, then the creak of the stairs. Going up this time, the fifth step and then the second.

  “C’mon, let’s go.”

  The first voice. There was no reply, no further sound of any kind. Jamie huddled up between the pipes. The dark, confined space which had oppressed him just a moment earlier had become a haven, a refuge. It was the open hatchway which scared him now. He expected a face to appear there at any moment, a strange face, smiling a strange smile. He wished he could reach out and replace the panel, but he was afraid to move a muscle. Play dead, he told himself. Play dead.

  When he dared move a hand to check his watch again, he found that time had speeded up. Five and a half minutes had gone by. The house was completely still, but Jamie made no move. Even the dull pain of the pipes digging into his back and shoulder seemed a kind of comfort. But in the end the throbbing of his cramped muscles became unendurable. Taking as much care as he could not to make any noise, Jamie started to struggle out of his hiding place. It was even harder getting out than getting in. His ankle had got wedged between two pipes, and there seemed no way to wrench it loose. He remembered the kid in seventh grade who’d gone into the wrecking yard over on 33rd and got trapped when a parted-out car collapsed on him. A surge of panic almost made him cry out for help, but he bit his lip and forced himself to calm down.

  Eventually he found the trick to free himself, by pushing his foot into the cleft and twisting it. After that, it was just a matter of squeezing through the narrow opening and lowering himself on his hands, carefully avoiding the loose hatch cover. He crouched on the concrete floor, taking up no more space than he had inside the paneling, listening intently. Silence lay on the house like a fall of snow. The only sound was the whine of the freezer in the corner and a car engine revving up outside in the street. Jamie recognized the deep, throaty roar of Mr. Valdez’s Pontiac.

  The thought that normal life was going on close at hand gave him the courage to stand up and look around. Everything looked the same as it had when he came down to hide. Jamie stepped cautiously, on tiptoe, to the door of Kevin’s room. He turned the handle and opened the door a crack. His brother lay stretched out on the bed as though asleep. Jamie opened the door wider, and sniffed. There was a funny smell, kind of nice, like fireworks or something. Then he saw Ronnie Ho lying face down on the floor. Jamie’s fear abruptly left him.

  “C’mon guys!” he said in the edgy tone he knew Kevin hated. “Pay-up time.”

  Neither of them moved. Jamie began to feel irritated. They were playing one of their stupid games, ignoring what he said, acting like he wasn’t there.

  “You owe me a dollar, Kevin!” he said, taking a step into the room.

  Still there was no response. The stress and strain of the past twenty minutes had left Jamie’s nerves ragged. Being treated like a dumb younger brother was the last straw. He picked up a social studies textbook lying on the chest of drawers and spun it across the room like a frisbee. It was a heavy book, and the corner struck Kevin just below the ear. Realizing that he’d gone too far, Jamie sprinted quickly across the basement and upstairs before Kevin could catch up and give him hell.

  In the hall at the top of the stairs, he paused. There was no sound of pursuit. In fact there was no sound at all. Even the Accident had stopped whining for attention. Jamie was still standing there uncertainly when the phone began to ring, doubled by the electronic warble of the portable. He waited for his mom to answer, but the phone kept right on ringing. Jamie walked through to the living room. The portable was still lying on the sofa where his mom had thrown it. He picked it up and pushed the button.

/>   “Hello?”

  “Hi! Is this Jamie? This is Kelly Shelden. Your mom left a message on my voice mail. Can I speak to her?”

  “Hold on.”

  He lowered the phone.

  “Mom!”

  There was no reply. Jamie wandered down the room toward the dining area.

  “Mom!”

  He stumbled on something and grabbed the back of the sofa to stop himself falling. The portable went flying. Jamie looked at the thing he had tripped over. It was wrapped in shiny blue fabric, with pieces of crinkly white appearing here and there.

  Mrs. Shelden was hollering something in a squeaky voice. Stepping carefully over the obstacle on the floor, Jamie reached down and picked up the portable.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Jamie? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I dropped the phone.”

  “Oh, OK. Did you find your mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK.”

  Jamie turned and looked down again.

  “Hello?” said Kelly Shelden.

  “I’m here,” said Jamie.

  “Well, are you going to put your mom on or what?”

  “I can’t.”

  “How come? Is she in the bathroom or something?”

  He did not answer.

  “Jamie? What the heck are you playing at?”

  “Could you get over here, Mrs. Shelden? Like now?”

  “Oh boy, you must be kidding! I’ve got a zillion things to do. Listen, I’ll call back in ten minutes. Will she be able to talk then?”

  “I think she’s dead.”

  “Well, have her call me when she’s free. I’ll be home till four, then I have to bring Ryan to baseball practice, but I should be back by-”

  “You’ve gotta come!” Jamie shouted. “I’m only a kid!”

  Kelly Shelden’s voice softened into concern.

  “Why, Jamie! What’s the matter, honey?”

  Jamie broke into sobs.

  “I’m feeling weirded out. Like totally.”

  2

  The time I remember best is the night we ended up down at the Commercial, and all that happened afterward. It would be nice and neat to be able to say that that’s where the whole thing started, but there must have been a lot more behind it, a slow shifting of psychological fault lines under the pressure of life events about which I know nothing, about which maybe no one ever knew anything, and never will now.

  Minneapolis is not exactly notorious for its seedy lowlife, but there is-or was, back in the seventies-a part of downtown, a couple of blocks either side of the railroad tracks, which got reasonably lively after dark. The Commercial Hotel was right in the middle of it. They knocked it down later and built a mall with fountains and escalators and shops selling things which no reasonable person could need, but I don’t recall anyone circulating a petition to save the place. The Commercial was one of those oppressively huge hotels which went up all over the country around the turn of the century near major railroad depots.Its fortunes exactly mirrored those of the transportation system it was built to serve, and during its last decade the rooms were used only by prostitutes, winos and other down-and-outs. What kept the place in business was its liquor license. The bar was the biggest and rowdiest in town and they had pretty tight bands on the weekends, but for us the main attraction was the atmosphere of sleaze and failure. It appealed to our sense of living on the edge.

  Maybe that was what held the group together. It’s hard, in retrospect, to see what else we had in common. Even calling it a group is misleading. We were just a bunch of guys who liked to hang out together. The membership was never clearly defined. The basic core-Greg, Sam, Larry, Vince and me-was more or less stable, but it also included a temporary assortment of girlfriends, buddies, hangers-on and anyone who happened to be crashing at our pad at the time.

  We were all young, of course, but so was everyone else back then. Greg, Sam and I were all connected in one way or another with the university, but the links were so tenuous and diverse that this too is a false trail. Greg had been an athlete, a college football star, but had been dropped from the team in his second year following a much-publicized drug bust. Sam had studied English for two years-we’d taken some classes together, which is where we met-before dropping out to complete his studies at the University of Life, while I was in my third year of Comparative Literature.

  As for Larry and Vince, they came from other worlds altogether. Larry worked for a painting contractor, and got home every night covered in specks and streaks of various hues, stoned out of his mind on paint thinner. Vince’s means of support remained a mystery. We suspected that he was subsidized by his parents, but that was not something you could either admit or inquire about in those days. He spent most of the day fiddling with a bank of stereo equipment he had put together from kits and spare parts, which provided a mind-numbing volume of sound that was the envy of our friends and the despair of our neighbors.

  What brought us together originally was the house. It was a pleasantly decrepit wood-framed place with an overgrown yard and a huge maple out front, in a run-down blue-collar neighborhood south of the river. Many lots had been demolished and rebuilt as condos or walk-ups, and the surviving older houses had a provisional, doomed look accentuated by lack of care and upkeep. Respectable renters steered clear of such properties, but the combination of low rent and no hassle was just what we were looking for. The landlord, an old Swede, was waiting for some redevelopment company to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he didn’t much care what we did with, to, or in the house just as long as the rent was there on time every month.

  It’s all part of the general pattern that the guy who originally found the place didn’t go on to become a member of the group at all. He was a dour jock who’d been a wide receiver on the same team as Greg, but had now graduated and was working as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. He and a coworker took the house and invited Greg to share it with them. Greg brought in Sam, who in turn mentioned the place to me. I was living with a girlfriend that year, but I was looking for an excuse to break up so I said I’d give it a try.

  The arrangement was doomed from the start, of course. The two car salesmen may have looked and sounded very much the same as us when we met them over a beer one Saturday night, wearing their weekend tie-dyes and faded Levis, but they had in fact crossed the shadow line which separated our floating world from the uncompromising grid of straight society, and were none too happy about this transition. Monday through Friday they had to be up at seven, showered and shaved, suited and wide-tied, and get out there and move stock. Their servitude was thrown into sharp relief by our anarchistic lifestyle, and they tended to react particularly badly when we staggered back in from an all-night party just as they were leaving for work, or decided to play The Who Live at Leeds at the appropriate volume around three in the morning.

  But what brought things to a crisis was the question of drugs. We had a fairly large stash of these on hand at any given time, mostly pot and hash, but also more exotic treats. This gave the car salesmen the jitters. If the house got busted, their careers would be over before they’d started. At first they came on heavy and tried to enforce a ban, but there were three of us and only two of them, plus we had the advantage of being able to drop some uppers to improve our attitude, or toke up and mellow out if the vibes got too heavy. It must have been a bitch. They finally gave up and moved out to a squeaky-clean high-rise near the dealership, leaving us to find replacements quickly to make up the next month’s rent. Larry turned up on the first trawl-he’d been to school with Sam and they used to shoot pool together once in a while-along with another guy who didn’t last, and the following month Vince materialized from somewhere, I still don’t know how or why, and stuck.

  Such a casual, disparate grouping seems pretty unlikely now, yet at the time none of us thought twice about it. Later, looking back nostalgically fro
m the far side of my own shadow line at that lost world of ease and excitement, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what it was that made the whole thing work. I can’t speak for the others, but I think I know what drew me to them: a passion for the tawdry and the transient, a weakness for the power not just of cheap music but of cheap emotion, cheap ideas and cheap thrills of every kind.

  To Greg and Larry, all this came naturally. It was where they had grown up, a language they had spoken all their lives. With Vince it was a little more forced. He never talked about his parents, but one or two comments he let drop in unguarded moments suggested that he’d been raised in the kind of small-town home where they subscribed to the New Yorker and listened to the live broadcast from the Met every Saturday morning. He had to work his catechism of popular culture, but did so with all the zeal of a recent convert. For Sam, the journey had been even longer. His parents had permitted only one book in the house, the family Bible, and regarded television and popular music as works of the Devil. Even the radio was only turned on for farm bulletins and religious broadcasts on Sunday.

  But despite their differences, the other four were merely expressing or reappropriating a culture native to them. They were Americans. So was I, on paper. I had been born in Maine and carried an American passport, but none of this made me an American, in my own eyes at least. My father had been European marketing director for a Boston-based company, and from the age of six to eighteen I lived and went to school in Holland, Switzerland and France. Despite summer vacations back in the States, when I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, I felt a foreigner in my own country.

  So my association with Sam, Vince, Greg and Larry meant more than just a good time. At the risk of sounding pompous, it was a rediscovery of my roots, an affirmation of my identity. I was discovering for the first time the unique experience of American low taste, the authentic, unexportable cultural product. I reveled in its shameless excess, its triumphant vulgarity, and looked to the others as my guides through a heritage I possessed in name only. They were naturally flattered by this, and the fact that I embodied various qualities which they aspired to-a classy veneer of sophistication and cosmopolitanism-helped soothe any tensions which might have arisen from our differences in other respects.