Page 46 of Going Home in the Dark

“I’ve got this,” Bobby said, and he pulled his amigo into a fireman’s carry.

By the time the amigos returned to the mechanical room, the molts had veered toward the door on the left. Maybe something waited behind it, or maybe their desire for a reunion would go unrequited. Despite the potential for a dramatic and touching resolution to the quest of the molts, Rebecca wasn’t emotionally involved enough to tarry in anticipation of it.

Following Bobby and his burden, Spencer suddenly stopped and turned and looked at the molts. “Yes! I’ve painted things like this. They’re in some of my works. I’ve never known what they are. No one has known what they are. I still don’t know what the hell they are, but I’ve painted them. I’ve painted them!”

Spencer was so ecstatic to have discovered the source of his inspiration that he glowed like an excited child thrilled to have walked into a surprise birthday party.

Rebecca was loath to put out the flame of Spencer’s delight, but she slapped him on the back to hurry him along. “Move, move, move. Get your ass in gear, Picasso.”

Cellars were among the worst places to linger when an eleven-fingered psychopath in a mask might be nearby, and especially when youknewthat a molting slime creature of unknown provenance was lurking behind one door or another, and not with benign intent. Rebecca was dismayed that somany people saw threats where none existed, especially when propagandized to fear them, yet failed to see a true disaster even as it avalanched toward them. But she was amazed that Spencer, considering his baleful life experiences, would tarry in a cellar, goggling at the molts when the thing from which they had sloughed might at any moment erupt from the shadows, seize him, infuse him with its fiercely potent gastric acid, and dissolve him into itself in mere seconds—assuming that was how the thing worked. But here he stood, delaying, transfixed. Artists.

As a heavy door swung open behind them with a rasping of steel hinges, she clapped Spencer hard upside the head and cried, “Go, go!”

Throughout the foregoing, Bobby had kept moving. Blessed—or perhaps cursed—with the fertile imagination of a novelist, he had been sufficiently terrified to have already made it nearly to the top of the stairs in spite of his burden.

Spencer clambered after him, and Rebecca followed. They burst into the kitchen as if flung out of an alternate universe by a force that only a physicist of vast knowledge would understand. Rebecca slammed the cellar door, and Spencer snared a sturdy chair from the breakfast table, and Rebecca jammed it under the knob to brace the door shut, as if there might be even a remote chance that would work.

26Stashing Ernie Again

The residence on Harriet Nelson Lane remained in the Truedove family, such as there was a family. Spencer’s father had thus far served eleven years in state prison for robbing Brinks trucks, and he had six more years in, as he called it, “the hoosegow.” If the guards caught him carving a fake gun from a bar of soap to be used in an escape attempt or if he stabbed a fellow prisoner with a shiv fashioned from a dining hall spoon, a few years would be added to his sentence before he’d be eligible for parole, and rightly so.

The house was, as it had always been, a lovely Victorian with much decorative millwork, in sync with the pretty but stultifying sameness of picturesque Maple Grove. During the divorce, so eager was Spencer’s mother to get on with her exciting new life that she had lost all interest in the house, just as she’d lost all interest in her husband, and she surrendered her equity. Meanwhile, Father had been comfortable in the parsonage of the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation, where he indulged extreme desires with Venus Porifera; he considered selling the place on Harriet Nelson Lane. Even then, however, he dreamed of remaking himself into a romantic figure in the Bonnie and Clyde tradition, and he knew that if he were caught, everything he owned would be liquidated to repay those from whom he hadstolen, leaving him homeless. So without his son’s knowledge, he transferred the title of the property to Spencer, who was a fast-rising star in the fine-arts world. Since his father’s conviction, Spencer paid the taxes and engaged a service to maintain the house, although not because the place had any sentimental value for him. He was terrified that, if his father was paroled with nowhere to go, the old man would travel to Chicago to live with his son, and Spencer’s childhood would start all over again.

At this point, some might raise the question of what happened to Venus Porifera and why, as Mr. Truedove’s wife, she didn’t at least claim half of the residence on Harriet Nelson Lane, so that might as well be addressed here. Venus and Reverend Truedove were married by Reverend Truedove himself at the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation before 286 degenerate parishioners, who all agreed the bride looked beautiful in her wedding dress, although most would have preferred her to be nude. To no one’s surprise except Venus’s, Father had obtained his theological degree for twenty-six dollars from a university in Thailand that didn’t exist. Please understand, Thailand existed then, as it does now, but theuniversitywas bogus; it didn’t even have a school mascot. The marriage was invalid, and Venus had no claim whatsoever on the house. Although you might think a woman of that character would make trouble for Spencer in such a situation, she did not. She treated him with kindness. After all, when Spencer had been fourteen, Venus had been only eighteen; the year Father went to prison, Spencer was twenty-five and Venus was twenty-nine. She still looked fabulous, an absolute knockout, and whatever condition once caused her to sweat excessively had abated. With a master of business administration degree that she acquired for thirty-one dollars from a five-star university in the Republic ofVanuatu, she went to Las Vegas, where she applied for a position with a casino magnate who hired the dear girl on the spot for $325,000 a year to keep his checkbook balanced.

So fifteen minutes after driving away from Ernie’s house with their rescued amigo concealed under a blanket in the cargo area of Spencer’s Genesis SUV, the three friends arrived at the house where Spencer had lived alone throughout high school, when he had sold off much of the contents for spending money. Unlike at Ernie’s house, here the garage and residence were attached, and a connecting door allowed the transfer of Ernie from one to the other without the risk of being seen.

That was important because those who lived on this last block of Harriet Nelson Lane, which ended in a cul-de-sac, formed a close-knit neighborhood. There had been little turnover of real estate since Spencer was a boy, and in spite of the years that had passed, he would be recognized. All these people went to one of two churches. Their children had gone to the same schools, in some cases had dated one another, and in more cases than you would think had married one another. These neighbors once played tennis together and now played pickleball or golf in competitive but polite groups. They regularly invited one another to dinner or a barbecue in the backyard. They played cards together and watched over one another’s homes when a neighbor went on vacation. They laughed together, cried together, celebrated together when a grandchild came into the world. They had purchased a block of plots in the same cemetery, and when they died, they were buried on the same hill as those who passed before them and as would be those who died after them. The Truedoves had been the only standoffish people on the block, almost extraterrestrial by comparison to the others, though the neighbors had nevergiven up on them. If Spencer had not been able to drive straight into the garage and put down the door behind the Genesis, if he and his amigos had needed to transport limp Ernie from the driveway to the back door of the house, out in the open, welcoming neighbors would have been all over them. As it was, once they had moved their insensate buddy into the house, they still weren’t off the hook.

En route from Ernie’s place, Spencer had figured out where to stash the songwriter in anticipation of his recovery. Putting him in the cellar seemed to be asking for trouble. The attic would be too hot in August. As Bobby was a bit worn down by having hauled Ernie out of the basement at the previous house, Spencer helped him carry their amigo to the second floor, while Rebecca stood at the top, urging them not to drop Ernie, for God’s sake, or knock his head into a stair post, as if that was their nefarious secret plan.

They carried Ernie into a spacious wood-paneled chamber with a view of Harriet Nelson Lane, which was a lovely tree-lined street. This had doubled as an upstairs office and a spare bedroom until Angelina made it into a sewing room, which it had remained for five years. Perhaps already suspecting that in a past life she’d been a member of the French royal family, she suddenly found sewing to be beneath her, work for the lower classes. Since then it had been a vacant space. As there was no apparent furniture, they put Ernie on the floor, and Rebecca objected that there was nowhere to hide him. Spencer smiled and pointed to one of the blank paneled walls. “If someone broke in and searched the place, they would never know he’s here. There’s a foldaway bed.”

Rebecca was appalled. “What—you mean strap him to the mattress and fold him out of sight into the wall? Good grief,Spencer, what if he wakes up? How does he unstrap himself? How does he get out of there?”

“Relax. I long ago sold the mattress.” He gripped a finger-pull concealed in a vertical molding. The springs sang as they were released, and the bed descended without further assistance.

Looking into the revealed niche, Bobby said, “Cool. Without the mattress, the space is at least two feet deep. We can lay him in there with no problem.”

If Rebecca was perhaps no longer appalled, she was nonetheless resistant to the plan. “What if he wakes up in the dark and manages to get to his feet? He’s in a vertical coffin. He’ll panic.”

“He won’t panic. That isn’t like Ernie. Anyway, after a minute or two, he’ll know exactly where he is. He was here the day I sold the mattress. He helped me move it downstairs and put it in the buyer’s pickup truck.”

“That was—what?—twenty years ago?”

“Eighteen. I remember it like it was yesterday. I thought I’d given myself a hernia, but it was just a strained groin muscle.”

“Yeah, well, Ernie might not remember it as clearly as you do. Eighteen years is a long time.”

Bobby said, “Did Ernie pull a groin muscle, too? If both of you pulled groin muscles, he might remember it.”

“No, he didn’t pull a groin muscle. I think Ernie has always had a very strong groin. But listen, if even I remember the incident so clearly, it only makes sense that Ernie will as well, considering that I’m the one who suffers fugues and he never does.”

Actually, Spencer was aware that resorting to the fugue gambit made no sense at all. It was a non sequitur. It was like being in an argument with someone about whether chili was better with orwithout beans and trying to win the debate by suddenly declaring,Okay, if you’re so sure you’re right, then how do you explain squirrels?

Maybe Rebecca and Bobby were convinced by the fugue business. Or maybe they just wanted to stow Ernie where he couldn’t be found and get the hell out of there. Whichever was the case, they looked solemn, nodded sagely, and resisted answering one non sequitur with another by raising the issue of squirrels. “Sounds good,” Bobby said, and Rebecca said, “Let’s get it done.”

In the end, all that mattered was putting Ernie somewhere that a mortician wouldn’t get him and embalm him, or where monsters were unlikely to discover him.

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