Chapter 11: Billy Boy.

Billy found the keys in his dad's truck one day, shortly after they shuttered the kitchen store and the place that once sold bargain books. His dad had changed light fixtures, mended walls, and tightened pipes for five years, but without the tenants, the building no longer needed maintenance. Searching for work at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, he didn't miss the keys. Not until later.

So the mall was abandoned, a playground in which our imaginations touched other places.

We rode our bikes after school and stashed them out back, in the high gra.s.s just off the trail near the railroad tracks behind the building. Billy was always eager to go on nights his mom worked late. We first entered the dark s.p.a.ces while the world shed her summer greens for the browns and tans of fall, the dingy grey of winter lurking behind the turn of the calendar.

The game was Billy's idea.

We built a circular wall of boxes in the storeroom of one of the anchors to the mall, the largest building on the south end. In our circle, our sanctuary, we told stories, we pushed our imaginations to the blackened corners to flirt with spiders and dust. Our stories grew arms and legs, fingers and eyes; they flickered just past our musty cardboard fortress. Our flashlights inspired stacks of empty boxes to cast shadows of strange cities on the walls. Games of chicken hung on who could bear the darkness the longest, who could leave his flashlight off in the dead, empty s.p.a.ce.

We made monsters, and Billy was the best.

Maybe his father was the inspiration: the rasping, liquor tainted voice, scuffed knuckles, and gla.s.sy glare. Maybe Billy saw something different through the bruises around his eyes. Maybe he found something in the worry lining his mother's face. Billy's beasts crawled out of the darkness and ran their stunted claws over the cardboard boxes on the outer ring of that wall, sending a twist of delightful terror into my bones. Gabe's expression echoed mine, both of us pale and contorted, hanging on Billy's voice.

A tiny voice, really.

Lost and afraid.

We heard the sirens, Gabe and I, one night just after supper. We met in the street, both of us all wide eyes and whispering mouths. My guts could have been ice, frozen and scooped by the shovel load from my aching chest. The sirens came from three blocks down, police and ambulance, together.

"You think it's Billy's place?" Gabe asked, breathless.

"Let's go."

We planned to meet again that night, all three of us, and perfect our tales. We planned to go together into the darkness of the old mall, flashlights in hand, creeping through the silence, lonesomeness of the place. Billy promised mystery that night.

At his house, lights from the police cruisers and ambulance chopped the night into tiny bits. Billy's dad leaned face down on a police cruiser, hands cuffed behind him. The paramedics wheeled another body down the concrete steps, thump, thump, thump. I searched the crowd for our friend.

Gabe looked at me.

I nodded.

The October air numbed my cheeks and my hands, frosting my heart while it hammered against my ribs. I felt every b.u.mp, every jostle of the pocked asphalt in the streets, the gra.s.s that snapped against my legs as we arrived behind the building. We rode through the dark at other times, but never with so much fire, so much recklessness.

Panting, Gabe and I found one service entrance open, the key still in the lock. Neither of us brought a light.

We staggered into the darkness, the abyss, Billy's world, groping against the painted cinderblock walls. We stumbled toward the end of the line, the big storeroom, our ring fortress of empty cardboard and stories. A single, stationary light reflected on the ceiling, casting square shadows in looming distortion.

"Billy?" Gabe's voice was a tiny thing, prey swallowed by the predator darkness.

No answer.

I followed the glow and found Billy's flashlight on the floor next to a crumpled pile of his clothes. Our friend was gone, naked and alone into the other places. We knew. On his words, the shadows had swallowed him. He joined them.

Billy's face was printed in the paper, and they spoke of him on the evening news for weeks.

The smaller minds called him a runaway, just another missing boy. All too common.

Gabe and I knew the truth. We had heard the tap of claws on cardboard and tasted the frosty air from Billy's words. We lived his world in that dark, lonesome place.

Chapter 12: Soul Marbles.

Mom had already been crying when she found me sitting on the concrete floor of the garage with a hammer in my hand. I'd been smashing marbles. All of them-the clear ones with the sparkly centers that I won from Zane Bibble in a game of chicken on the monkey bars at recess. I hammered them all to powder in the middle of the floor, right where Dad's car should have been.

Almost everybody in the 3rdgrade hated Zane. Once day at lunch, he poked Inez McIntosh with his thumbnail so hard she bled all over the table. There was the time he jabbed a stick-a stick he'd sharpened to a point by rubbing it against the playground slab-into all of Mrs. Wilson's rubber four-square b.a.l.l.s. Mom helped organize a bake sale at the school carnival to help buy new b.a.l.l.s for the cla.s.s, but Zane rode his bike over and tipped our card table, sending brownies and sugar cookies to the ground in a heap. We hated Zane.

So naturally, the day he brought the bag of marbles-the special marbles from his dad sent from halfway around the world-naturally I wanted them. A jerk like Zane shouldn't have marbles like that. During lunch, I fantasized about stealing them when we had afternoon reading group. I was no Zane Bibble, though. The best I could muster was a game of chicken.

"On the monkey bars," I told him. "First one down loses."

"What do I get," he said. "These are special. My dad said all the men he's killed are trapped inside."

I didn't really believe him because he was a compulsive liar-that's what my mom said anyway, but those marbles did sparkle in a cool way, like little stars trapped in gla.s.s. I wanted them, souls or no souls.

"My new Power Ranger, the black one with light up face that says 'Tranformation Go!' when you push his belt."

He narrowed his eyes.

"I brought it for show and tell last week."

"Deal." Zane had only one sort-of friend in cla.s.s, Luke Gilmore, and that was only because Luke was a rotten kid who smelled like p.o.o.p all the time. n.o.body liked Luke either, mostly because he picked his boogers and stuck them to the underside of his desk. True story-I crawled under there during indoor recess once and saw the whole, grey-brown clump. So Zane let Luke hold the bag while we mounted the monkey bars.

The metal bars were cold on a cloudy October afternoon, so cold they burned my hands as I started to swing toward Zane. We met in the middle, neither one conceding until I wrapped my legs around his waist like a pincer and pulled. His face turned red like the water after Mom boiled her garden beets. When his hands slipped off, he made a little sound like the McIntosh's dog did when Dad accidently hit him with the car after having "another big fight" with Mom.

The other kids roared.

Luke might have been a smelly kid, but he was honest enough, and handed me the marble bag while Zane picked himself off the ground. It was heavy, that bag. Zane's eyes burned like soul marbles, and he charged me. Wham. Flat on my back, I couldn't fight back while he drummed on my chest with bony fists. Of course the recess monitors yanked him off and he howled and howled and spent the rest of the day in Mr. Bay's office.

I had a bag of soul marbles and a couple of bruises.

The trouble started when I tried to go to bed. I hadn't shown the marbles to Mom, and Dad was "working late" again. She tucked me in, her eyes red and puffy, and I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how red and puffy Zane's eyes were when we rode the bus earlier in the evening.

Then I heard them, the marbles.

Crying.

First I stuffed my head under a pillow, but the voices cut through that like there was a speaker tucked inside. I couldn't make out what they said, but the emotion was there. Sadness. Pain. Fear. Then I realized they were crying in a foreign language, whatever language they spoke in the country where Zane's dad killed them. My throat felt hollow and cold and hurt so much I wanted to cry, too, like tears would dissolve the hurt.

But I couldn't.

Mom was on the phone when I tiptoed downstairs, carrying the bag of soul marbles like a wounded baby. I used Dad's big hammer, laid out the marbles on the floor of the garage where the car would be but he was working late-later than he ever had-and started smashing. The hammer made a sweet ting when it struck concrete. Each blow stung my arm.

I guess it was the pounding that brought Mom outside. Her face was wet and red from crying-maybe she'd heard the soul marbles, too. My eyes dropped to the mess, the little piles of white dust, all that was left of Zane's marbles.

"I'm sorry," I said. Dad's hammer was still in my hand.

We were alone but not alone, standing in the cold of the garage with all the ghosts I'd set free. Mom just hugged me then, wrapped me in her arms and squeezed until I thought my ribcage would snap.

Chapter 13: Luck.

"There's a couple of things you're going to have to understand about this job."

Jerry nods.

"First of all," Franz speaks slowly, like he's explaining the why the sky's blue to a five-year-old, "the job has some drawbacks."

"Drawbacks. Check." A pen wiggles against a notepad in Jerry's hand.

"The temperature in here for one. Get yourself a nice coat. A jacket. Light and flexible but enough to keep the chill off."

"Jacket, check."

Franz grips a handle and walks the drawer out to full extension. A body lays between them, covered with a sheet. "Second of all, these poor sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes smell pretty bad."

"Bad smell, check."

Franz grips the sheet at one end and pulls back enough to reveal a pair of bluish feet. A toe tag dangles on the left big toe. He bends forward, squinting at the tag. "92 years old, well..."

Jerry's pencil is motionless. "I don't get it."

Franz produces a pair of snips and slides one of the dead man's toes between its blades. He squeezes the handles together. A click echoes through the morgue, and the toe drops into Franz's waiting palm. "There's some benefits, too."

Jerry scribbles. "Benefits..."

"For one, n.o.body ever checks too closely after we're done with them."

"Right." Jerry pauses for a moment and frowns. "I don't get it."

"Toes, man." Franz draws the sheet over the corpse's feet and slides the drawer home with a resonate thunk. "I figure they're better than rabbits' feet, especially on some SOB that lives this long. Lot of luck in making it to 92, Jerry."

Chapter 14: Why We Decided to Use a Blender.

Jack wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. "You ever read that Poe story?"

I look up, but my hands keep working. "Which one? The guy wrote tons of stuff."

"The one with the old guy." Jack thrusts deeper with the knife.

A spurt of crimson strikes my ap.r.o.n and I flinch. "Be careful, d.a.m.nit."

"So, have you read that one?"

"Jack, there's a couple with old guys." My knees are tired from kneeling on the tile, but the job is almost finished.

Jack stops. He looks at the bathroom light as if the answer's hiding there.

"The Tell-Tale Heart," he says, puffing out his smile like he just won the Kentucky Derby or something.

"Oh yeah." I look at the mess in the tub. We've got most of the corpse dismembered. "Cuts the old guy up, buries him under the floorboards."

Jack nods and holds up a lump of meat. A few ticks pa.s.s before I realize what he's holding. "Be a shame if we heard this thing beating later on, wouldn't it?"

Chapter 15: Poe's Bas.e.m.e.nt.

"d.a.m.n, Jack. I told you we should have rolled him up in the carpet first."

"We still can. You have no imagination."

I step away from the spreading pool of blood. "No, dumba.s.s. If you wrap him first and shoot through the rug, it doesn't splatter so much. Easier clean up."

Jack runs a hand through his hair."Oh. Right. Sorry."