Lost Boy Lost Girl by Peter Straub Page A

he knew he’d been warned.
    A recognition bloomed at the center of his terror.
Oh,
Mark understood,
he’s what I saw last night. He climbed over the fence and came into our backyard.
He saw the vague snout lift and the empty steel-colored eyes find him at his window.
    Then one of those new, funny-looking Chryslers turned left at the top of the street and rolled directly past the place on the sidewalk where that
thing
had been standing with his back to Mark. On his porch, Skip dragged himself upright and, without much urgency, barked twice. Like Mr. Hillyard’s mutt, Mark forced himself upright. The ground beneath him swayed right—left, then right—before settling down.
    Everything inside Mark’s body and most of his appendages seemed to be trembling, hands knees stomach heart viscera. It was almost funny, watching his hands jitter. The way his knees were jumping around, he was amazed that the legs of his jeans were not shaking. All of a sudden he was sweating like crazy.
    Let’s pretend we have a clean slate,
he thought.
Let’s go up and look at that place as though nothing had happened before this moment.
    He was going to waste a couple of minutes standing in front of a house that was rotting away from within. After he got tired of standing there, he would walk away.
    A sentence from his uncle’s book popped into his mind: “What was at stake here, he thought, was the solidity of the world.” All right, how solid
is
the world? This time, he told himself, he would look at that house as never before. What could be seen, he
would
see; if it was nothing but an empty shell, he would go away knowing that his imagination really needed to be held in check.
    Set thirty feet before him on its slightly tilting lawn, the house appeared subtly to shift its ground without actually moving in any way. Mark stood stock-still, as immobile as Skip had been a few minutes earlier. The house looked exactly the same, but it had altered itself nonetheless. In some internal fashion he had no hope of identifying, the house had adjusted to his presence. Mark waited. Chill drops of sweat glided down the sides of his chest. Unconsciously, he had balled his hands into fists, and the muscles in his calves and upper arms became unbearably taut. His eyes seemed to grow hot with the concentration of his staring. Mark’s entire body felt as if he were straining against an immovable force.
    He dared not blink.
    Then he wondered if he had missed it anyhow—a faint change in the texture of an area of darkness beyond the right front window. Too vague to be defined, the difference nearly escaped his notice. Mark could not be certain that he had not invented what he thought he had seen. Now the darkness behind the window presented a uniform charcoal gray. A second later, he thought he saw the slight alteration occur again, bringing with it this time a suggestion of solidity and movement.
    The thought of that bulky figure from the top of Michigan Street hanging back in the darkness while looking out at him caused a sudden pressure in his bladder. Behind the window, an indistinct portion of the general shadow drifted forward and acquired an unmistakable solidity. Another step brought into greater visibility what could almost be identified as a human head atop a human body perhaps smaller and slimmer than that of the creature who had so alarmed him. With another gliding step, the dark figure emerged into sharper, though still uncertain, focus.
    To Mark, the figure seemed too small and slight to be anything but a girl. The person inside the house had come forward to see him, as well as to be seen by him. She hung unmoving in the obscurity beyond the window, declaring her presence, exactly as the house had declared itself. Look at me, take me in, I am here. The house and its inhabitant had chosen him. That he had been chosen implied an invitation, a summons, a pact of some kind. Something had been decided, he knew not what, except that it had been decided