A Matter of Life and Death or Something (19 page)

“Right under your nose, man!” said the doorknob.

I couldn't believe Simon left it out in the open like that. Was he stupid? I felt weird picking it up. I held it tight in my hands, and I realized that maybe he didn't hide it really well because maybe he trusted me. All of the sudden I felt like a bank robber. The moon glow from the window blinds made stripes on my black sweater like it was a bank-robbing sweater on TV. I felt bad that he trusted me. I felt like a murderer. But I was trying to be the opposite.

I held onto the book anyway and tiptoed back to the door. I took another look at Simon. He was on his side now with his back towards me, and he was still snoring.

“Good luck, brother,” said the doorknob, and I closed the door with him, giving him a quiet high-five.

Back in my room, I packed my backpack, putting in Phil last. I looked over the clues, and then I left my room. In the kitchen I pulled the biggest knife out of the wooden thing that holds our knives and I wrapped it in a dishcloth and quietly put it in my backpack too, which made me feel a little mental but also a little safer. When I got to the hallway I got a funny feeling. I went back to my room and picked up a bright green towel from my clothes pile, for some reason. I tied two corners of it around my neck like a cape.

Then I left. I was super quiet, and I snuck down the hall and past the kitchen and out the front door. It was definitely the first time I'd been outside by myself at two in the morning. It was just me and my breath. Every time I exhaled there was a puff of ice in front of me. I wanted to breathe on somebody and completely freeze them, not to be a jerk, but so that they could wake up in the future like I read about on Wikipedia before.

“Where am I?”

“I'm Doctor Arthur Williams, welcome to the year 3000.”

“Where is my family?”

“There are some things we must sacrifice for the sake of science.”

“You mean to tell me that I was just about to sit down to a lovely lasagna dinner, and now suddenly it's the year 3000 and you think that's just
grand?
”

“Isn't it fantastic?”

“Take me back.”

But meanwhile back in the actual year, I was walking up the first small hill of our street, away from my house. I'd definitely walked up that street five thousand times in the past two weeks, but still it felt a little different every time.

This time the walk was longer and more freezing than ever. And darker. Gosh was it dark. I could kind of see my feet moving, and that was it. Our street had barely any streetlights, I guess 'cause of how far it was from downtown, and I could see absolutely nothing without my flashlight. I couldn't find the moon anywhere, even though I knew it was somewhere. I shone my flashlight to stay alive.

As usual when I walked, or as usual when I did anything at all, my brain became an infinite list of questions and memories. There was the hermit's
house,
first of all, and how terrible and destroyed it looked. There was the fact that I had only ever seen it from halfway up the driveway, and it still looked amazingly spooky. I knew it had a porch with a broken railing, and no railing at all in some spots. And the whole thing was damp and grey looking, and wood showed through the grey paint in really big patches on the front.

Then also Finch had told me that the hermit ate kids. While Finch was generally a person full of crap, it was still in my head. More realistic, I'd also heard he was a thief. And that no one ever actually
saw
the guy because he was such an anti-socialist. He stayed home, and then hunted his own meals in the woods after dark. To sum up everything I knew: he was a murderer, a cannibal, a crack dealer (whatever “crack” was), a robber, a vegetarian, an insane asylum patient, and he owned a bunch of guns. I wasn't stupid enough to believe that he was every one of those things, but even if he was only two or three of them I had a problem. Plus, I wasn't exactly as prepared as I wished I was. I didn't have my camouflage suit or my silence boots or anything. I figured maybe I'd just try to go right up and knock on the door first and try to just be normal, and then if anything especially evil happened, I'd have to improvise. When I imagined improvising my knees started to get shakier. I could feel the not-sharp side of the kitchen knife pushing against a bump on my spine.

My footsteps were getting closer and closer together. I was halfway there. My throat started to do funny things, like sometimes it would forget how to swallow, or try to swallow a big lump and get all shaky and tight. I stopped walking, and turned all around and pointed my flashlight quickly at everything. Nothing was around. I kept walking. There weren't really any sounds around either. Well, it just sounded like God was rubbing two pieces of paper together, forever. What I mean is, in that dark early morning on my street the wind wasn't quite silent, but it was close. It softly flicked millions of leaves in the woods all at the same time, so it made this
hiss, hiss
sound through the trees, and that's all I could hear. I figured it was what being alone sounds like.

When I was thirty steps from the hermit's driveway my legs started acting up. They sort of loosened up and shook around, as if my scared brains were in my kneecaps instead of my skull. My heart punched my stomach and the brains inside my kneecaps were asking “What the hell are we doing?” and I kept walking even though my whole body was thinking all over the place.

The driveway was about four times longer than all the other driveways on the street, and it went up a little hill at first with tall trees making dark walls on both sides, then it curved up to the left as the hill got steeper. I shone my flashlight up it for a while, but it wasn't much use. From the road, you couldn't really see where it went.

This was it. I was actually at the hermit's house and it was actually the middle of the most pitch black night. I was probably going to die. Here it was: the last day of my life. I was only ten years old. I hadn't even become anything yet. All suddenly I got this empty feeling inside of me, as if my whole body was a completely empty jar and time was on pause. I stood there on pause and even though it was springtime, the breeze was cold enough on the back of my neck that my bones shivered. And it was just so black. What the hell was I doing? The crazy hermit wasn't going to know anything about Phil; he didn't even leave the house. The trees hissed. It was the last house to check. I had to do it. I'd made a promise inside myself. I couldn't just give up. It's not like Rosie just
gives up
every time God decides it's going to get cold and dark.

I thought about Phil and Page 43 and maybe it was just because I was so groggy and my brain was mental but somehow I all of the sudden realized I didn't even care if I died. Or I cared, because it might hurt for a minute and Simon might be amazingly sad, but I also didn't care because if I actually did die it would be while I was trying to do the most important thing, so my life would have been a good life.

“Hello God,” I said out loud. “Whatever you do, please don't let me get cannibalized.”

I took one deep breath and then I was sprinting up the hill full speed, shining my flashlight on anything scary as I ran. I kept running like that, I just felt like it—like if I just kept going so
fast
and if I never lost my momentum then nothing could catch me and I couldn't chicken out. I ran up the curvy driveway, through all the mucky leaves covering the gravel and I didn't even think about the gravel on the beach because my brain was so empty and I went right up to the house without losing my momentum, splashing leaves everywhere the whole time.

I jumped up the four squeaky steps to the porch and rang the doorbell before Scared Arthur could tell me not to. Scared Arthur wasn't quite as fast as me. He was still running up the driveway and it was exactly when the doorbell ding-donged so loudly that he caught up and stood inside me so that we became the same Arthur and I realized. It was two in the morning. The porch light was on, but that didn't mean he was awake. I was so paranoid and I felt
so
annoying, and what happens if you annoy a cannibal?

I barely had the time to think about it before my knees started vibrating again. I crunched up my fists and made a squeak and stood there. I kept standing there. A sound came from inside the door and I was about to run but I closed my eyes.
Hello God, Hello God, Hello...

I heard the door creak and I opened my eyes.

“Hello?” someone said.

It was an old man in a wheelchair.

“Hi,” I tried to say but I didn't say anything.

The man smiled at me.

“Mr. Williams—what a delight—what the devil are you doing here, if you don't mind me asking? Shouldn't you be in bed?”

I couldn't say anything.

“Come in, first of all! Come-in-come-in-come-in!”

“How do you know who—”

“Come in!”

He was flapping his hand like a fish's tail.

I unlocked my knees. I looked backwards at the driveway and the yard, and I really hoped it wouldn't be the last time I ever saw the world. Then I slowly started to move inside the house, tiptoeing.

The man spun his wheelchair halfway around, in three tiny jerks, as if he'd been practising the move for years. He smoothly rolled through a doorway and into his living room, like how a swan swims. I mean like how a swan doesn't have to go really slow-motion to be smooth, and they can go pretty fast but still stay smooth. That's exactly how the man drove his wheelchair.

“Sit-down-sit-down-sit-down!”

I looked around the place and decided on the big red couch. It was red and black plaid, like a lumberjack couch. Somehow it was excruciatingly hard for me to do anything normal like sit down on a couch or breathe. But I eventually made it over to the red couch and it was so poofy that I sank really deep into the cushion. I put my backpack on the table right in front of me, which was so close to the couch that my legs almost didn't fit in between. I was still so shaky and my heart was still fast but I manufactured some more bravery and started the routine. I took out the tape recorder, set it down and popped it open. I slid a brand new blank tape into it and pressed RECORD. But I didn't want to give myself away completely, so I left Phil in my backpack for right then. The man just watched me start recording as if it wasn't weird at all, as if people came over to his cottage every day at two in the morning and recorded tapes of him.

“How are you
doing,
Arthur boy?”

Could he read my mind and see my name in there? I told him I was fine.

“You seem a bit... shaken up, I might notice.” He had a way of saying half a sentence fast and half of it slow that somehow made it easy to listen to him. It made him sound kind of smooth or something, like how he wheeled his chair. It sounds stupid, but that's how it was.

“Maybe a bit,” I said, and my voice shook when I said the word “bit” so that it sounded like two or three sounds instead of one. I laid my back against the back of the couch.

“Well I'm not going to
kill
you, for God sakes.”

I blinked and looked at him. His face looked worried. He really wasn't going to kill me.

“Are you going to kill
me?
” he asked.

I looked at him for a second then shook my head.

“I don't think so.”

“Good!”

He wheeled out into the kitchen, humming something I didn't recognize, from deep down in his throat. It sounded kind of wet and grumbly, but also triumphing, like some war-ending song or something. He was out of my sight soon, doing something inside the kitchen. I looked in and saw that his countertops were all half the height of ours at home, and there were no cupboards overtop, just photos and letters and things in frames. The walls were the same colour as robins' eggs, or maybe a little greener. I heard the sink running for a moment and then it stopped.

“You must drink coffee then,” he yelled, “on the graveyard shift and all?”

“No thanks!”

“Water?”

“No thanks!”

“Milk?”

“Okay!”

“Chocolate?”

“Yes please!”

“‘Yes please,' he says!”

I didn't think I was supposed to keep answering then, so I sat quietly and calmed down my shaking and kept checking out the place. The living room was a dark red colour, kinda like the colour of my room at home. It was either maroon or burgundy, whatever the difference is. As far as furniture, there was the lumberjack couch I was on, and the oval table at my shins, and a pale green comfy-looking chair with flowers on it, and a giant bookshelf full of billions of books, every size and colour. But the books were only on the bottom half of the shelves, with the top shelves empty, probably holding only dust. Ice ages worth of dust. There were three other square tables against some of the walls, and they had lamps and small stacks of papers and books, two cameras, big boxes of matches, and a pair of field glasses. The coolest thing was against the wall on the right side of the room, on top of a low dresser. It was a pretty big fish tank, and it was all lit up glowing green, with four little turtles swimming all around. They looked very young. I wanted to go over and put my forehead on the glass and say hello, hello, hello, hello to the four of them, but I was still nervous so I didn't.

His house was tidy. Everything was tucked away somewhere and there was nothing lying on the floor. The orange carpet spread to every room around except for the kitchen, and it was clean looking, but it had these pairs of skinny lines faded and dented into it, because they must have been the paths that the man's wheelchair took every day. There was a path from the door of the bedroom to the kitchen that was really faded orange, a path from the kitchen door to the dinner table in the corner which was almost as faded, and a path that went all the way from the kitchen to the woodstove on the back wall, and then continued over to the front of the turtles, which was lighter orange than I would have expected. I couldn't really find a path from anywhere to the front door.