The Shadow Mask Page 9

  I undid the lock and slid the door open. It was pitch-dark inside. I smelled first — the air was stale and cold, a faint odor of soggy cardboard mixed with the unmistakable but trace smell of home. And it was quiet in there, still and silent, almost like opening up a lost tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years. I turned on the lights and closed the door behind me.

  The room was filled with stacks of boxes piled all the way to the ceiling. Metal racks and shelves by the side of the wall housed smaller boxes and items, while bigger items on top of the boxes were covered in blue tarps and old sheets, a familiar grain of wood or a corner to an old piece of furniture peeking out here and there.

  There was so much of my parents’ stuff that I was overwhelmed. I thought I would feel sad, but oddly, I felt more angry than sad — angry with them for abandoning us. I dashed through the room, taking down boxes at random, ripping them open and dumping their contents on the ground, until the whole storage locker looked like a piñata warehouse attacked by rats.

  The door slid open, and I turned to see Hollis come in.

  “You made it!” I said.

  “Yeah. Who’s that guy with the weird eye? He asked me if you needed any help.”

  “That’s Kyu-ho. He works for Crane.”

  “I figured. Everyone who works for Crane is missing some hunk of their body.”

  “Kyu-ho’s really nice, Hollis, and he’s helping me —”

  “Leo, you never called Trevor last night,” he said, picking up some of Mom’s purses and sunglasses.

  “Ah, man, I forgot. Was he pissed?”

  “You know Trevor, he was puzzled about why you had to cancel Jeremy. I think that’s about as close to pissed as he gets. So are you going to show me your power or what?”

  I could tell from his tone of voice that some of his suspicion had returned. But I was going to fix that.

  “Pick anything in this room, Hollis, and I’ll tell you what I hear.”

  “All right,” he said, slowly walking the aisles, picking up random scraps of our old life and putting them back down. He stopped at a pair of our mom’s sunglasses with red frames and pink lenses. He was quiet, and from the little smile on his face, I knew he was remembering that day she wore them to take us on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. He held them for a minute, and when he looked up at me, I could see him batting back the tears.

  “It’s kind of creepy in here,” he said, putting the sunglasses back in the box. “I still don’t get it, Leo. What are we doing here?”

  “I’m trying to find some old info of Dad’s to help Crane. You know that.”

  “But why?”

  “So things can go back to normal, like before.”

  “Before what, Leo? Things won’t ever be normal again.”

  While Hollis walked through the stuff, I searched as well. I needed to find the mask information for Crane, but I had my own mysteries to investigate. I wanted to find that Spiricom record and any information I could dig up about Bertrand Veirhelst, as well. Most of all, I was hoping to find something about our parents’ trip to Antarctica, something that might help us discover what really happened on that plane. It was a desperate hope, I knew, but maybe there was something in there, some little clue that might indicate that there was still a chance for them. Maybe they really were part of a plot or something; maybe they were still alive, hiding out, counting the minutes until they could come back. And just like one of those mummified Egyptian pharaohs, all their things would be waiting.

  I had opened up a box that had a bunch of my old art projects. I saw one drawing I had made for Father’s Day when I was in kindergarten. A small stick figure meant to be me was on one side of the picture, while on the other side, separated by a blue river, were three other stick figures. Typical of my art style, in the middle of the picture I had also drawn a Venus flytrap getting zapped by lightning. One of the stick figures was wearing headphones, and the other two were wearing giant feather headdresses.

  As I held the picture, my head filled with voices from the past.

  “Is that your father?” I heard my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Elise, say in my inner ear.

  “Yeah,” I squeaked in a five-year-old’s voice. “He’s away on a music trip.”

  “Your picture would be much better, Leo, if you learned to color inside the lines.”

  As soon as I put the picture down, the voices faded, but not the feeling. I remembered why I had drawn that Venus flytrap — that was Ms. Elise. She was always telling me not to make noises and to color in the lines, and she used to make me feel so bad about myself that once I wrote, “I hate Ms. Elise,” on a scrap of paper, and because I felt so bad about writing that, I hid the scrap of paper deep in my desk.

  “Okay, Leo,” Hollis said. “I’ve made my choice. Try this.”

  Hanging from his hand was a silver necklace with a beautiful stone of green and red, almost like a watermelon. My mom wore that necklace every day. Her violin teacher gave it to her after her first recital. He had told her that her hard work and her gift had made music as beautiful as that crystal, and that there was a whole world of other precious stones out there for her to find if she worked hard and fulfilled her potential.

  Hollis put the necklace in my hand. I held it but I didn’t hear anything. I closed my eyes and concentrated hard. Still nothing. I opened my eyes to tell Hollis that it wasn’t working and that he should pick something else. His face looked so hopeful.

  “Can you hear her?” he whispered. “Tell me you can.”

  Hollis had always had a special connection with our mom. Maybe it was because they shared a musical gift. Or maybe it was because he was the baby of the family. Or maybe because Dad and I were always such a team, they formed their own bond. I could feel how much he missed her, and I felt how unfair it was that she’d left him alone without anyone to understand him. I trembled — with anger, with sadness, I couldn’t say — and for a brief moment, I clutched the necklace tight and snapped into a sound from the past.

  Momentarily, the aisles of the storage locker hummed with her cello, playing something sweet, moving, sad.

  “What do you hear, Leo?” Hollis’s voice snapped me back to reality.

  I opened my eyes and saw his green eyes, hopeful and sad at the same time. I broke the connection with Hollis and looked down at the green and red jewel in my hand, my knuckles white.

  “I heard Mom,” I said. “She was playing, I think.” And then without thinking, I added, “She said that she was going to give this to you one day.” I dropped the necklace into his hand.

  “Really? She wanted me to have it?”

  I nodded. I had lied, but I was sure what I said was true, or at least it would have been true.

  “But what song was she playing? Or did you hear her first recital, or what Mr. Yatzik told her when he gave it to her?”

  “No, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “So how does it work?” he asked, putting the necklace back into its red satin drawstring bag and then into his jacket pocket. “What’s it like? Does it work on everything? Why do you only hear some parts, and not others?”

  “I don’t know how it works, it just does. Each time is different. Trevor and I have been trying to figure it out, but we haven’t made much progress. Most things that I touch, I get nothing. I have to be in the right mood, I guess. Or the object has to be tied to something important, or emotional. It’s hard to explain.”

  “But what’s it like when you do hear something?”

  “Sometimes, if it’s not a serious trance, it’s almost like normal life. I touch something, and I just know — like when you know the answer before the question.”

  “That’s happened to me,” Hollis said, nodding his head. “I get that feeling in music — especially when I’m just jamming with other kids. I can sense what they’re going to play next.”

  “I bet that’s true, Hollis. I can sound bend, but you and Mom have the power to make music. My power is complicated
. Some objects, Hollis, are almost like magnets. Like that dolphin helmet — it grabbed me, called out to me, and when I touched it, I was in this other world for what felt like hours. I call it the space. I can see things in that other world, the space, but it’s —”

  “Hold on, bro. You see things?”

  “Yeah. What I’m seeing are sounds, I think. Like I’m seeing sounds with my ears. Almost like what you see when you listen to music with headphones on and close your eyes. It’s exactly like that. But it’s been changing lately. It seems to work best when I’m angry or let myself feel …”

  I was going to go on, but I noticed Hollis had stopped listening and started to sort through another box. He does that when the conversation gets too intense for him, just kind of checks out. I watched him dig into a box marked toys, take off the lid, and dump its contents onto the floor. Out came almost every single old toy that we’d had since I could remember. Toy cars, action figures, stuffed animals, Frankenstein LEGO contraptions superglued together — I never followed the directions.

  “Hey, look!” he cried. “There’s Ghosty!” His eyes lit up, and we both huddled close to the little toy car.

  Ghosty was Hollis’s Matchbox car. It was all black and had the words ghost rider written on it. We used to play this game with our toy cars and a plastic parking-garage set. The parking garage had a little elevator that could fit two model cars, and when you spun the crank, it would raise the elevator up to the top of the garage, it would ding, and the elevator would open up onto this curly slide. The cars would go streaming down the curly slide for three levels. Hollis and I spent hours racing our cars on that thing. Ghosty was Hollis’s car, and something about it — I think it was because it had a broken wheel — made it unbeatable. It would make a grinding noise and edge the other car into the side of the slide and then go flying right past it.

  Ghosty. That car used to drive me nuts. No matter which car I used, I never beat it. And Hollis would always squirrel it away, and wait for just the right moment to use it and break my heart.

  “Let me see that,” I said, and grabbed it. My head filled with sounds from the past.

  “Ghosty’s like magic,” I heard a younger Hollis say in my secret ear. “It can’t be beat.”

  “It’s not fair that you have Ghosty,” I heard myself whine. “Let me use it this time.” And I heard skin slapping skin.

  “Give it back, Leo, it’s mine!”

  Within my trance, I remembered this moment, could see it as clear as life. Hollis and I were in suits and had snuck off to our room to play. But I knew this wasn’t a good memory, because I remembered what I said next to Hollis, the lie I told to get even and break his heart.

  “Fine. You can have Ghosty, Hollis. But guess what, Mom told me you’re adopted. And that means you’re not their real kid.”

  Suddenly, I was back in the storage locker in the present, holding Ghosty and hearing myself say, “I’m sorry, Hollis. So sorry.” Even though the trance had ended, I could still see Hollis’s face that day, how it was first flat and confused, and then how his forehead scrunched up, his eyes squinted, and his lips trembled. I saw him blink out tears that rolled down his suddenly red face. I knew I’d done a terrible thing. That was the first time I ever felt awful, like maybe I was a bad person, but I didn’t say sorry, I just opened the door to our room to leave. Outside, everybody was wearing black and sitting on couches and mumbling with these masklike half smiles on their faces. My mom’s mom had just died, I think.

  “What’d you hear this time, Leo?” Hollis said, taking the car back and putting it in his pocket. “And what are you so sorry about?”

  “I just heard you beating me with Ghosty for the millionth time. I’m sorry you always won, you little punk.”

  The kid had gone through enough already, I figured I didn’t need to lay on another emotional apology. Besides, the good news was that at least Hollis wasn’t resisting the idea that I had this power. That was progress.

  “I’m going to look for this stuff for Crane,” I told him. “You should look around, too, and find me anything that seems interesting.”

  “Um … okay.” Then he paused. “Actually, I think I’m just going to find a few things from our old room, and then have Stump take me home. I don’t like it in here — it’s too quiet. All this stuff … it just keeps reminding me that they’re never coming back.”

  “Maybe …” I said. “Hey, look, there’s my old Fisher-Price record player! Think there’s an outlet in here?”

  “I don’t know, Leo,” Hollis said, and I recognized the expression on his face — the scrunched-up forehead, the squinty eyes, the red color seeping into his cheeks, the lower lip starting to tremble.

  “Hollis, I’ll only be a few minutes more. If you just wait for me, we can go home together. Okay?”

  But he didn’t answer. He had turned his head from mine, but I knew he was starting to cry as he opened the door and let himself out of our parents’ tomb.

  I felt terrible for Hollis, and part of me knew that I should get out of there and go home with him, be there for him. But I still had a lot of work to do for Crane, and a few things to find for myself. And then maybe, if I were lucky, Hollis wouldn’t have to feel so sad all the time.

  I decided to find the Spiricom record first. The whole back wall of the storage locker was filled with boxes of my dad’s records. I can’t possibly estimate how many records he had, but his collection took up our whole living room and eventually snaked its way into the hall.

  As I looked at the wall of boxes, I imagined a map of the world overlaying the boxes and tried to match up my world map with how they were arranged back at home. But where in the world was Spiricom from? It could be anywhere. I paced the aisles, saying, “Spiricom, Spiricom, Spiricom,” under my breath until I was carrying on an imaginary conversation with my dad.

  Dad, if you’d just talk to me, tell me, it’d be so much easier. I know you’re trying to leave me a message. I know there’s something I’m supposed to find. Just talk to me, communicate. Communicate.

  I’m not saying there was any connection, but in the next second, I suddenly knew what I was looking for. Spiricom. It meant “spirit communication.” It had to. I looked at the wall of boxes again and saw my old living room in my mind. I saw the whole wall of records on their shelves — I even saw all the pencil marks on the measuring wall next to the shelves, where my dad used to mark our heights.

  And I remembered! Way at the top of the shelves, near the highest window, he had a tiny section that was labeled EXTRATERRESTRIAL. I tore through about seven or eight boxes until I found one with about fifty really weird records in it — recordings of séances and freaky psychology experiments, records about rockets and space travel, UFOs and the moon landing, a record called Starbody, Star Trek records, Space: 1999 records. He had several of this weirdo named Sun Ra — this jazz guy with freaky eyes and a distant stare, always dressed in robes and Egyptian jewelry. And then I was holding it: Spiricom!

  The Spiricom record had a white cover with blue writing. There were two records inside of the jacket, and a pamphlet called “The Magic of Living Forever.” It was a deluxe and complicated record, a special record, and not one that Jeremy would have forgotten giving to my dad. Jeremy didn’t forget records. But I could see why he didn’t want to talk about it. Even though everything on it seemed friendly and inviting, the record gave me the creeps.

  I stayed perfectly still, holding it in my lap. Shivers crept up and down my spine and to the back of my neck. I knew I should put the Spiricom record away — but I couldn’t. I had to hear what was on there. I plugged in my Fisher-Price record player and put on the record, preparing myself to be really terrified.

  Like I had thought, the Spiricom record was about communicating with spirits. It started with this old geezer talking, explaining the history of electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, and talking about the scientist named Raudive, who had made all those white-noise recordings of people from beyon
d the grave. Finally, he played some of the recordings Raudive made. Frankly, they didn’t sound much more interesting than walkie-talkie static. But he played one recording several times, and when he slowed it way down, I did hear a voice in there. It was distorted and flat and speaking in another language, but it was a voice of some kind.

  Then the old geezer started claiming that he had recorded actual two-way conversations between living and dead people. He had spent years inventing a piece of equipment called a Spiricom device, which a voice from the dead had told him how to build. The idea sounded completely nuts, but then, my power was nuts, too. And the speaker didn’t sound nuts — he sounded like a milkman on an old black-and-white TV show.

  Still half hoping to be terrified, I flipped the record over to the other side. As I played it, I began to get really sleepy and leaned against the wall, half closing my eyes. I listened as if in a dream. One guy would talk in a normal voice, ask a question, and then there would be a response in this distant mechanical voice, distorted, muffled, and impossible to understand — the voice surrounded with these piercing tones of sound — almost like those artificial voice boxes in all those antismoking commercials — the voice of the dead man, Dr. Bill they called him. He spoke slowly and unintelligibly in his mechanical voice — I kept listening with the hope that maybe Dr. Bill might say something that was unquestionably real, something that really proved the possibility of communicating with the dead, and that maybe there was more to death than we thought. I was incredibly tired but fought off my exhaustion with the thought that real proof for life after death was just around the corner, just a few more rotations of the record away, but my body was inching sideways and down toward the floor with each turn of the record, until I was lying in a pile of my oldest stuffed animals and I was catapulted into my earliest memories.

  My mom’s voice surrounded me. These were early times, happy times, when there was nothing in the world that couldn’t be cured by her hug, her laugh, her voice singing to me. Half asleep and dimly aware of the record playing the ghostly electronic voice, I let my hands explore the stuffed animals and the old blankets around me, taking in all the sweetness and warmth I could from each old soft thing. I heard my toddler voice mixing with their laughter, music and love surrounding me like a warm hug. I felt no anger toward them, only longing. I missed them so much.