Oliver

  It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind,

  that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths

  be let alone.

  They ran like fools out to the road and down the deserted street. Oliver was pushing as hard as he could, thinking of that meaty black hand shining in the firelight. It had grasped at nothing in the brief moment he’d looked at it, and in his mind’s eye he could still see it. The fingers had been short and thick, and he’d had the briefest thought that there had been too many of them.

  The girl was leaving him in the dust. She was a tough one, no question, but that hand… He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t even dare look back as he ran for fear that its owner had burst into the street and was gallumphing behind him, drawing closer with every wet, stinking step. It would catch them. He knew it, and he’d known it since he heard that first step. The only hope was to hide.

  “Here!” he called ahead to Amrita, who was a good fifty feet ahead of him despite the fact they’d only been running for maybe forty-five seconds. He veered across the weedy asphalt of Gambon Street, making a beeline for the rusty chain-link fence that marked the boundary of old Dunwich Steel. The links had peeled back from the support pole in one bottom corner, leaving a gap tall enough to scuttle through on all fours, and there were tall fronded grasses growing beneath the trees that would hide them from the road and anyone – anything – passing by.

  The girl doubled back without a word and dove through the gap right after him. They burrowed quickly into the thick grass, heedless of the marshy ground under their knees and hands. They reached the dubious safety of a tree trunk and paused, staring at each other with wide eyes, trying to quiet their harsh, ragged breath. Neither of them spoke. Oliver wasn’t sure if he was listening for pursuit or just didn’t want to talk about what they’d seen. The girl seemed happy to keep quiet too, though what she was thinking he could only guess. Her brown eyes were lighter than he’d thought they’d be, like some kind of dark polished amber. He looked away. They’d escaped death, it seemed, and he didn’t want her to think he was going to make it weird.

  Their breath grew quieter, and the minutes ticked by. Olly heard nothing but a faint breeze in the grass and the clacking of dried leaves overhead. Without a word, Amrita turned on all fours and started inching through the grass back toward the fence.

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  She looked back. “After that bullshit, I’m at least going to watch it burn.”

  Olly had to admit he wanted to do the same, so he followed her until they reached the front ranks of tall grasses nearest the chain-link. They were careful to stay concealed within it, but from here they could see back up the street to the Ambrose house. There was no one in sight, human or otherwise, and the only thing unusual they could see was a thick plume of smoke gushing out the upper half of the front door. He reached into his mostly empty bag and pulled out a granola bar. It smelled like lighter fluid, but when he handed it over, she stripped it open and ate without complaint. He got out another one and did the same. It tasted more like it was rotten than like gas.

  Amrita glanced over as she chewed. “Nose,” she said, gesturing to his face.

  Black nosebleed stained his snack bar. Flushing with embarrassment, he pulled out his already stained tissue and held it to his face. “Sorry.”

  She shrugged and looked back to the smoking portal. “That happens a lot. Do you have cancer or something?”

  “No, I’m fine. It’s just a sinus thing. Had it for a long time. It comes and goes.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Did you close the front door when we came out?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” He thought back to their panicked exit and found the memory strangely spotty. All he could remember was that hand. “I’m not sure.”

  “I keep waiting for sirens.”

  “That’s not what I keep waiting for,” Olly whispered, hunkering into the grass. Nothing moved in the house. Flames were dancing in the doorframe.

  “Well, yeah. That too. How long you think until the fire department gets here?”

  “I’m not sure they’ll come at all. It’s not like anyone’s in danger.”

  “I’m not leaving until I watch this place fall down,” she said with quiet ferocity. “That thing’s gonna fry.”

  Oliver thought of the tunnel in the basement, touched the statuette in his jacket pocket, and said nothing.

  For hours they watched, jeans wet on the damp earth, as the structure caught fire and lit up the night. It was strangely beautiful to see tongues of flame reaching thirty, forty feet into the air, and as Oliver’s heart slowed, he found himself suddenly happy. He was alive, and having this odd, angry girl sitting next to him to share in his secret project was unexpectedly satisfying. Nothing ever came out of the house, not even when the roof collapsed in a thunder of sparks and billowing smoke. Oliver was glad the wind was blowing the other direction. Even as looped out as his dad was these days, he’d ask questions if Olly came home soot-faced and stinking of smoke.

  The fire department never appeared, just like Oliver had predicted. There were only four full-timers and a handful of volunteers, and when he’d discreetly asked a couple of adults at the school more than a month before, Oliver had discovered that the chief spent most of his time locked in his office drinking bourbon. A police car did crawl past them about an hour after dark, and Olly and Amrita hunkered low in the grass, watching like hawks. The squad car rolled to a stop well away from the house, which was in full blaze at the time. Its siren stayed silent and its lights off.

  Bulky old Officer Legrasse hauled himself out of the car. It was the first time Olly had seen him anywhere other than the high school cafeteria, where he sat in the corner every day drinking endless cartons of chocolate milk and eyeing the students like they were about to riot. He surveyed the scene calmly, his hands tucked behind his belt. He was facing away from them, so it was impossible to see his face, but judging from his stance Olly would have sworn that he seemed… satisfied.

  He watched the blaze for a good five minutes before approaching to the edge of the Ambrose property right at the front gate. Embers and ashes fell down all around him, but he didn’t seem to care. He stood there for a moment, moving his hands in front of himself in a way they couldn’t see but seemed oddly familiar to Olly. Then he stilled himself and stared up at the sky, sighing.

  “Is he…” Amrita paused, shocked. “Is he taking a piss?”

  He was. A stream of urine glittered in the firelight, splashing against the stone supports of the front gate.

  “I guess he had to go,” Olly said.

  “Your public servants, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. He was already zipping up, and he spat on the sidewalk for good measure. Then he crammed himself into his car and was gone. No one else came by the entire time. This part of town wasn’t worth bothering with, and everyone knew it.

  When the front wall finally crumbled, Amrita stood and stretched. “Well, this was fun.”

  Oliver looked around cautiously before standing, but with how deserted as the street was, he could have jumped around in the middle of the street screaming and swearing and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The fire was mostly glowing embers now, and it made him sad. He realized he’d been halfway hoping folks on nearby streets would see the blaze and come together to fight it. Idiot. The whole point was to burn it down. Still, if order and community was the goal, it was obviously going to take more than arson to accomplish it.

  “What about the…?” he asked, gesturing to the wreckage.

  “It burned or it ran away,” she said, stooping through the gap in the fence and onto the sidewalk.

  “And you’re okay not knowing?” he asked, following her. He wrapped his hand around the broken statuette in one jacket pocket and the other fingered the broken marble in the other pocket.

  “I’m not gonna dig around in those ashes looking for it, are you?”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “Still…”

  “Look, Weirdo Boy, Oliver, whatever: I’m going back to my nasty little trailer, I’m gonna sneak a big swig of my parents’ booze, and I’m gonna sleep real hard. When I wake up, I’m gonna tell myself I burned down a house with my new cancer friend and then had a bonkers dream about it.”

  “You can’t just…”

  “I can. You should too unless your folks have a bundle to spend on therapy.”

  Oliver chewed on his lip. “Yeah.”

  They crossed the intersection and didn’t look back at the house. All the streetlights were out, so they trudged in darkness. Amrita eventually stopped and turned on him.

  “Let me see it.”

  Oliver didn’t need to ask what she meant. He handed her the broken green idol and tried to pretend letting go of it didn’t bother him. He switched on his Maglite and they stared at it together.

  “You think it’s worth something?”

  “To a museum, maybe, but where would we say we got it?”

  “It feels…”

  “Heavy.”

  “Yeah, but like… good heavy.” Her voice was soft, and she stroked the thing. Olly felt a stab of formless jealousy.

  “I’m going to try to find out where it comes from,” he said, holding out his hand.

  She looked at him and didn’t hand it back. “I could do that.”

  “I’ve been researching architecture and art for years.”

  “Look it up on your phone, why don’t you?” She pulled it a little closer, edging the figurine toward the pocket in her hoodie.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nettled, “it’s weird, fine. I don’t have a phone. Electronics don’t work right for me. It’s why I use the library. Just use yours if you want to look something up.”

  She snorted and fished an ancient brick of a phone out of her jeans pocket. “Not exactly Internet capable. My family can’t afford that shit.”

  He laughed, feeling a little of his tension ease. “That’s the ugliest phone I’ve ever seen.”

  A smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Come on, it’s not bad. It works like, at least forty percent of the time, and we’ve been grandfathered on a five-dollar plan for the last fifteen years. These old bastards just won’t die.”

  “It’s honestly kind of impressive. You really use that thing?”

  Her lips twitched. “If you’re trying to get my number, insulting my phone is a bold choice, bro.”

  His heart lurched and Oliver suddenly found himself trying to say twelve different words all at once. “No, I! I mean, that’s… I wouldn’t mind, that’s fine, of course, but, uh, it’s just…”

  She regarded him impassively. “Was there an actual statement buried in there somewhere?”

  He took a deep breath. “What I’m saying is that I’d like to research that little statue because I’ve done a lot of reading on stuff like this, and I think the library folks could help me. I’m good at this.”

  She frowned, hefted the statue in her palm, and then abruptly handed it over. “Fine.” She shrugged, acting like it was no big deal, but she seemed a little jittery. “I want a turn with it later, though.”

  “Yeah, cool.” He pocketed the idol, feeling immediate relief. “You could hang onto the marble piece if you want. See what you can find.”

  “Nah. I’m not really a languages person.”

  Oliver took a deep breath and bit the bullet. “But it’d be good if we could talk about it, you know, later, because you did find it. So, yeah, if you want to, um, give me your number, I could call. About that. Later.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Very smooth.”

  “Shut up, geez.”

  She cackled and punched him in the shoulder. It hurt. “Hope you can remember my number all the way home.”

  He pulled a pen out of his bag. “I got this.”

  * * *

  Olly shut his front door very quietly. It’s not that he worried his dad would be mad – far from it – but he’d found lately that it was easier to come and go without suffering through his father’s attempts to string together a normal conversation. Much better to just make himself a peanut butter sandwich, go to bed, and say bye to him on his way out the door the next morning.

  “Son?”

  No such luck.

  Oliver peeked around the corner into the living room. It was comfortably shabby, everything old but clean. There was Dad in his usual spot just past the faded tartan couch, kneeling on his prayer cushion in front of the shrine that got bigger and more cluttered every year. Little Jesus and Mary statues, candles, and incense sticks all played second fiddle to the old framed photograph of Mom in the center. She stared out from behind her huge thick glasses with a lively smile, but Olly had spent too much time staring at it as a kid to feel much anymore.

  “It’s late, Oliver.” His father pushed his glasses up his nose, looking past him rather than at him. He seemed smaller every time Olly saw him. More faded, less real. He died when Mom did, and he just never realized it.

  “Yeah, sorry, I was out with a friend, and all they had was a cell phone. You know I can never get those things to work right, so… I couldn’t call. Sorry.”

  He brightened a bit, his pale face and bald head gleaming in the soft yellow light of the single lamp in the corner. Olly couldn’t remember the last time Dad had opened the blinds in here. “A friend. That’s good. So glad. Good, good.”

  “Yeah, we had fun.”

  “Excellent, son. It’s good to have friends.” Dad, still on his knees in front of the shrine, patted his thighs like always when he searched for something to say, his prayer beads clicking erratically. “Do you need some dinner?”

  “I’ll make myself something later. But if you haven’t eaten, I’ll sit with you.” Olly thought he might be willing to cut off a finger to get his father to stand up and leave that damn shrine alone for a little while.

  “No, son, thank you. I’m not done yet.” He turned back to his statues, back to his picture. “You get your homework done, please.”

  Olly turned to head upstairs, a dozen arguments churning in his head, same as always. No. You burnt down a house. You got a girl’s number. You can talk to your father, coward.

  He stopped at the base of the stairs. “Dad. God’s not going to bring her back.”

  His father looked up, his eyes hidden behind the glare of his glasses. “I know, son.”

  Olly clenched a fist, jamming it in his pocket to hide the churn of his emotions. “Then why do you spend every day praying for her? She’s gone!”

  His father, his dear, meek washcloth of a dad simply folded his hands in his lap, a calm smile on his face. “There’s so much more to life than we see, Oliver. I wish I knew how to show you that.”

  Oliver shook his head. Talking religion with his dad felt like trying to communicate with someone speaking a foreign language. “Fifteen years, Dad. That’s nearly my whole life. She’s dead. I don’t remember a single thing about her.”

  His father nodded, looking sad and pained. “I wish you could. She was the most wonderful woman. But just be patient, son. The world is so much older and stranger than you know. Give it enough time, and even death can die.”

  Olly felt tired. His determination threw one last fist against the wall of his father’s faith and threw in the towel. “Yeah, okay. Good night, Dad.”

  His father said nothing. He was already back at his prayers.

  Up in his cramped room, Olly opened his bag, threw away the granola wrappers and garbage rustling in the bottom seam, and opened his window, setting the bag upside down on the gentle slope of the roof to air out overnight. Next time wrap the lighter fluid in plastic bags. He hooked the looped nylon at the end of one strap onto an old nail sticking out from the window frame so the decrepit Jansport wouldn’t blow away if the wind picked up. He left the window open. It was a nice night.

  He fed the fish in his aquarium and cleaned the books off his bed so he could sit. He was almost done with Cities of Tomorrow, even though he thought Hall was full of himself and missing some basic ideas. He was anxious to get to Paradise Now, but it was due in four days. He’d have to renew it. His well-thumbed copy of Utopia fell to the floor and he left it there. He’d probably want to read a few pages before he slept.

  He pulled the headless statuette out of his jacket and ran his hands over it. As queasy and excited as he felt about having Amrita’s number, this was what he kept thinking about. The imperfectness of the carving made the heavy-limbed body seem brutal and dangerous. Alive, almost. “Where’d you come from?” he whispered. He felt at the nubs of jade where the stubby fingers had broken off. Looking closer, he saw that the crudely-shaped hand bore the remains of six digits, not five.

  In a flash he remembered the dark hand he’d seen crash through the basement door as it burned, and he jerked his hands off the idol like it was a live wire. Too many fingers. Without thinking about it, he scooped up the idol and dumped it into his fish tank, letting it sink to the bottom. His betta fish trailed down after it, but the guppies flitted about aimlessly, ignoring it.

  Somehow, having it under water made him feel better. The anxiety in his chest eased, and he was able to stop thinking about the house, the basement, and the tunnel that went… somewhere. He wished his father kept any alcohol in the house; Amrita’s advice sounded pretty good at the moment. He fingered the chunk of marble from the broken altar. FHTAGN, it proclaimed proudly.

  “Tomorrow,” he told it. “I’m finding out what you mean.”