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Authors: Richard Zimler
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bought it for her.
Beside the bed, seven pairs of colourful sneakers, from midnight blue through electric pink, hung on nails hammered into the wall. A lime-green pair with golden laces was my favourite. Sandra must have liked standing out. I admired her courage.
On a wooden shelf leading from her desk towards the back wall were about 200 CDs, most of them American and English rock. A small glass table below her window was reserved for photos of Nero. He was grey and bouncy-looking. His long pink tongue seemed always to be hanging out.
Sandra had a teenage vampire novel called Queimada – Burnt – on her night table, along with three CDs: Day & Age by The Killers, Lungs by Florence + the Machine and Let England Shake, by P J Harvey. I’d heard of Harvey but not the others. Sandra’s alarm clock doubled as a CD player. It was 11.47 a.m.
Struck by the notion that something was missing, I turned in a circle. A dark stain on the belly of her stuffed bear’s belly drew my attention. As I touched it, I sensed someone approaching me from behind. Before I could turn, a blow caught me at the back of my head.
I found myself looking down at my fists, unsure of where I was. My heart was racing and my lips were dry. I was sweating as though I’d made a dash for safety. My mouth tasted of tobacco.
My writing pad was on the floor near my feet. I was seated on Sandra’s bed. Her alarm clock read 12.19. I’d lost just over half an hour.
Only a few moments earlier, I seemed to have taken hold of my brother’s wrist to keep him from falling; we’d been standing on the roof of our home in Colorado.
Closing my eyes, I became certain that the house in my dream wasn’t just in my memory but was a design of my memory. The roof and all the rooms below – my bedroom and closet, most of all – were where everything I’d ever experienced was stored. By going up to the roof and taking my brother with me, I was trying to locate events I’d long forgotten – hoping, it now seemed to me, to find moments from the past that would help me solve this case.
As I stood up, I caught sight of the ink on my left hand. Running across my palm and along my thumb was a message from Gabriel: H: bad memories under girl’s bed. Painting by Almeida in the wrong place. Sneak a peek at the French–Farsi dictionary. Why doesn’t Sandi display any photos of herself?
Under the last line, Gabriel had drawn crossed arrows, an indication that he wanted me again – and soon.
Chapter 5
I first received a message on the palm of my left hand when I was eight years old. It was written in blue ink, in crooked, ant-sized letters. I read it while seated on the floral-patterned couch on our wooden porch. The handwriting didn’t look like my mom’s or mine. The message said: H – Your dad will want to test you and Ernie on Friday. So after school, take Ernie away from the house and don’t return until after dark.
Who could have written it? And how had it been scribbled on my hand without my being aware of it?
Figuring that the writing could get me into trouble with my father, I ran to the rusty faucet at the back of our house and scrubbed it off.
Bigger kids had told me stories of haunted houses by then, and while I was examining the residue of ink on my palm that night – shining my flashlight on it while sitting up under my bed sheet – I came to the conclusion that a ghost had gotten in touch with me. That notion didn’t scare me; the message had been meant to keep me safe, I concluded, and the idea that someone from beyond the grave was watching me made me tingle in that way kids do when they’re embarking on a big – and potentially dangerous – adventure. I started to call him the Spectre because Dad had given me his old comic book collection, and there were several featuring that ghostly superhero.
I don’t know how I formed my ideas about the Spectre, but I came to believe that he was an adult who’d lost his battle with a fatal illness
Beside the bed, seven pairs of colourful sneakers, from midnight blue through electric pink, hung on nails hammered into the wall. A lime-green pair with golden laces was my favourite. Sandra must have liked standing out. I admired her courage.
On a wooden shelf leading from her desk towards the back wall were about 200 CDs, most of them American and English rock. A small glass table below her window was reserved for photos of Nero. He was grey and bouncy-looking. His long pink tongue seemed always to be hanging out.
Sandra had a teenage vampire novel called Queimada – Burnt – on her night table, along with three CDs: Day & Age by The Killers, Lungs by Florence + the Machine and Let England Shake, by P J Harvey. I’d heard of Harvey but not the others. Sandra’s alarm clock doubled as a CD player. It was 11.47 a.m.
Struck by the notion that something was missing, I turned in a circle. A dark stain on the belly of her stuffed bear’s belly drew my attention. As I touched it, I sensed someone approaching me from behind. Before I could turn, a blow caught me at the back of my head.
I found myself looking down at my fists, unsure of where I was. My heart was racing and my lips were dry. I was sweating as though I’d made a dash for safety. My mouth tasted of tobacco.
My writing pad was on the floor near my feet. I was seated on Sandra’s bed. Her alarm clock read 12.19. I’d lost just over half an hour.
Only a few moments earlier, I seemed to have taken hold of my brother’s wrist to keep him from falling; we’d been standing on the roof of our home in Colorado.
Closing my eyes, I became certain that the house in my dream wasn’t just in my memory but was a design of my memory. The roof and all the rooms below – my bedroom and closet, most of all – were where everything I’d ever experienced was stored. By going up to the roof and taking my brother with me, I was trying to locate events I’d long forgotten – hoping, it now seemed to me, to find moments from the past that would help me solve this case.
As I stood up, I caught sight of the ink on my left hand. Running across my palm and along my thumb was a message from Gabriel: H: bad memories under girl’s bed. Painting by Almeida in the wrong place. Sneak a peek at the French–Farsi dictionary. Why doesn’t Sandi display any photos of herself?
Under the last line, Gabriel had drawn crossed arrows, an indication that he wanted me again – and soon.
Chapter 5
I first received a message on the palm of my left hand when I was eight years old. It was written in blue ink, in crooked, ant-sized letters. I read it while seated on the floral-patterned couch on our wooden porch. The handwriting didn’t look like my mom’s or mine. The message said: H – Your dad will want to test you and Ernie on Friday. So after school, take Ernie away from the house and don’t return until after dark.
Who could have written it? And how had it been scribbled on my hand without my being aware of it?
Figuring that the writing could get me into trouble with my father, I ran to the rusty faucet at the back of our house and scrubbed it off.
Bigger kids had told me stories of haunted houses by then, and while I was examining the residue of ink on my palm that night – shining my flashlight on it while sitting up under my bed sheet – I came to the conclusion that a ghost had gotten in touch with me. That notion didn’t scare me; the message had been meant to keep me safe, I concluded, and the idea that someone from beyond the grave was watching me made me tingle in that way kids do when they’re embarking on a big – and potentially dangerous – adventure. I started to call him the Spectre because Dad had given me his old comic book collection, and there were several featuring that ghostly superhero.
I don’t know how I formed my ideas about the Spectre, but I came to believe that he was an adult who’d lost his battle with a fatal illness
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