Chapter 2

The rain didn't let up for weeks. It beat an irregular rhythm on the rooftops and in the rusted beds of wheelbarrows and on the glistening oil drums standing like menhirs in the many unkempt tall grassy places around our neighbourhood. Even the great blue herons seemed weighted down with the moisture, flying so low over the town that I feared they'd smash into the telephone poles or get tangled in the wires. Normally, I didn't mind the rain; like most children everywhere, I simply existed in the weather without question, having more important matters on my mind, such as how much extra money I could earn collecting beer and pop bottles along the muddy riverbank at low tide to help finance my comic collecting habit.

Also - and I admit this now with some regret, thinking of all those wasted hours - I fretted about where I could play road hockey.

No doubt this problem seems an antiquated one in today's sedentary digital culture, but in the 1970s, even television provided limited viewing for children. Cartoons ran on Saturdays, and there were some early morning kids' shows during the week, but the rest of the time we had only reruns of '50s and '60s shows to watch, and they didn't always appeal. Opie's cuteness and Gilligan's idiocy would entertain for only so long, and inevitably the great outdoors became more attractive, especially when you could slap a tennis ball past your friend standing in the net with just a baseball glove and one of my older brother's broken goalie sticks for additional defence.

In the fall, when it got dark at 4:00 p.m., we played road hockey for hours wherever we could find a light source. Usually that meant under a dim streetlamp or under the freight entrance light at the back of our town's tallest building, the grain elevator of the co-op store. Darkness we could handle, but rain was more of a challenge. We did try to play in it, of course, but the fun didn't last, so we mostly waited out the rainiest times of the year.

That October, however, wore our patience thin, which meant we had to improvise. After being kicked out of an apartment building's undercover parking compound, Jay and I came upon the brilliant idea - brilliant because it was so obvious - to take shots inside one of my neighbourhood's many derelict buildings.

You see, I grew up in a period of economic decline in a town filled with ruins. Within a five-minute walk from my house, I could enter any of six condemned Edwardian houses, a boarded-up movie theatre, a half-block row of empty stores and an abandoned vegetable canning factory the length of a football field. Or if I preferred smaller shelters, I had my pick of rotting fish boats on the banks of the river, including a ghostly sternwheeler right out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and any number of rusting vehicles with missing doors and backseats clunky with empty beer bottles. Indeed, in my neighbourhood, the oldest and most decaying part of town, every yard had a junked car, a dry-docked boat and someone out of work. Most of my schoolmates, including Jay, lived in newer subdivisions a few miles south of the river, which made coming to the original townsite in the fall or winter rather like stepping into another world - a dark, drizzly world of foghorns, dim lighting and sometimes unsavoury characters. A very questionable pub, a half block from the Haunted Bookshop, contributed greatly to this disturbing culture, but history played a greater part, its wars still spreading terror and confusion long after the bombs had stopped exploding.

But all of that will be explained later.

For now, it's necessary to see another dark night of incessant sideways rain and two boys, one carrying an aluminum hockey net on his back like a set of cumbersome wings, the other carrying a coal-oil lantern and a flashlight. Jay and I didn't have far to go. We left the gravel driveway of my front yard and crossed the street to the soaked thigh-high grass of the vacant lot. Within a few minutes, we'd managed to force the net and ourselves through the glassless window of a two-storey house built sometime in the early years of the twentieth century.

Immediately I felt the presence of ghosts. Almost always, day or night, I sensed the presence of long-dead children in my neighbourhood's many vacant buildings, perhaps because I was a child myself and more sensitive to their departed energies. Regardless of the reason, I was chilled, not warmed, by the feeling. To compose myself, I asked Jay what he thought. My voice echoed up to the twelve-foot ceiling and slid toward the particularly ominous staircase leading to the second floor.

"I think," he said in his consistently upbeat and confident voice, "that we stupidly forgot the sticks."

Shining the flashlight at his face, I was met with the usual Joker-wide grin, dark and almost chestnut-sized restless eyes and flop of curls, like shavings of mahogany, emerging from under his vivid white bucket hat, which he wore as faithfully as Gilligan wore his own or as Jughead wears his beanie. For a twelve-year-old, Jay had a strikingly noble bearing - a large forehead, Romanesque nose and sharp cheekbones. But his ceaseless effervescence - always talking, always moving, even to the point of tapping his feet when reading comics - kept his physical appearance just childish and goofy enough to throw adults off. By the time they realized that this loquacious and regal child Caesar was just a loping, joking boy with a Grape Crush and a Crunchie in his hands who had read more books and seen more movies than they had, they'd already identified him as a threat. Only Mr. Edison at the Haunted Bookshop seemed to derive great amusement from Jay's overwhelming intellectual curiosity. After all, it was a rare adult, let alone a child, who had seen every episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus and read The Communist Manifesto and who wrote and drew his own versions of the Bazooka Joe strips found in packs of bubble gum. Mr. Edison must have felt at once astonished, grateful and bewildered to have a twelve-year-old customer as a break from bargain-seeking elderly Scotswomen. As for me . well, looking back after almost fifty years, I can best describe Jay's effect on my intellectual world as a combination of Dr. Frankenstein and his creation at the exact moment that the corpse is jolted into life. That is, I experienced the scientist's thrill of discovery along with the monster's growing knowledge of the horrors of existence. If that seems like an extreme statement, then you don't understand the burden of critical thought in a world of violence and injustice.

"I'll go," I said, aware as always of my unwillingness to be alone in any abandoned house - or, rather, not really alone. If a swimming pool could potentially hold a shark, then certainly an ancient and decaying house could harbour ungentle spirits. I left Jay with the oil lantern and hurried back to the side yard of my house to collect the hockey sticks.

When I returned, no dim light shone in the living room of cobwebs and spiders, and there was no sound except the swishing rain.

"Jay?" My quiet tone sounded like a shout.

But only my own voice echoed back. For comfort, I took a tennis ball from my jacket pocket and bounced it on the floor. When my second call received no response, I tightened my grip on my trusty Sherwood and decided to wait a few minutes before letting fear drive me outside. Simultaneously, I heard a thump overhead and saw a wavering light approaching from another room on my level.

"I had to pee," Jay said as the lantern illuminated his grin. "And I thought I might as well take the light."

"Did you hear something?"

"When?"

"Just now. When you were coming in."

"Like what? The wind?"

I shook my head and slapped the tennis ball at the net, which Jay had positioned in front of the old brick fireplace. "From upstairs." I pointed the flashlight at the staircase as if forcing it through sand. "A sort of thump."

Jay bent down and picked up the goalie stick and baseball glove. "I'll go in net first." He somehow managed to carry the shimmering lantern and place it to one side of the net. "Unless you want to go upstairs and investigate."

"It was probably just a squirrel or something." I set the flashlight beside me and asked if he could see well enough.

Jay laughed. "Only one way to find out. Come on, let her go."

I blasted the tennis ball toward him and he didn't even move.

He laughed louder. "Okay. Any time you're ready." Then he bent into the net to retrieve the tennis ball.

After a few more shots, none of which Jay even moved for, I'd almost forgotten about the overhead thump when I heard someone coming down the stairs.

"Who's that?" Jay said, an edge in his voice.

Two blunt sounds - hopefully just footsteps - came out of the darkness. Then a third and a fourth. If someone was descending the staircase, they weren't in any great hurry. But then, killers always took their time.

"Shine the flashlight over there," Jay said under his breath. "Go on. Do it."

By the time I mustered up the courage, several more blunt sounds had ensued, followed by silence. I stared at the darkness exactly the way Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws stares at the surface of the ocean. No matter how desperately I wanted the tension to end, I couldn't bring myself to point the light at the staircase. By now, I could hear breathing coming from no more than twenty feet...