After everything came tumbling down—after the tornado of shouts and awkward silences, after the furiously packed bags and his mother dragging Kaye from the house, after they drove away, leaving him in the middle of the country road—came a long, slow stretch of days and months and years when Cohen felt mostly numb. In their passing, they were lonely and quiet. But when Cohen looked back on those years from age nine to fourteen, they were blank. He knew he lived them. He knew he existed then, during the latter half of the 1980s, but there was very little to remember.
During the fog of the first few months after his mother left them, his father made an awkward but rather quick transition into a new occupation, from pastor to funeral director. The church would not have him, not after what he had done. There were rumors about Miss Flynne of the decorative socks, Miss Flynne of the neon-green nail polish, that she had fled west. Cohen never saw her again.
Kaye and Cohen’s mother found a place to live in Philadelphia, closer to her own family, and Cohen and his father moved into an old apartment above the funeral parlor, right there in the small city only a few miles from their old place. The country road gave way to a grid of cement and concrete and macadam. The forest of tangled oaks and maples and pines transformed into straight lines of sycamores lining streets named after the monarchy: King and Queen and Prince and Duke. A sky once filled with the light from distant stars was overwhelmed by streetlights and headlights and the glow of the monolithic hospital a few blocks south.
The previous owner of the funeral home hadn’t lived in the apartment. It had been empty for years, unused, and smelled like shadows, so they left the windows open for the rest of the summer and into the fall. Cohen lay stretched out flat in his bed and tried to sleep but couldn’t for the sound of the city and the heat and the presence of all the bodies coming and going in the basement.
“That is no place for a boy,” he had heard his mother hiss to his father during one of their rare in-person encounters, soon after the separation, just before the divorce. His father had only stared at the floor before looking back up at her with empty eyes. It was as if, now that the woman who had written his sermons was gone, he could not find the words.
Cohen had wondered if his mother might be right, if a funeral home was no place for a boy to live. He took to wandering the apartment at night, not because he was especially brave but because it was only slightly less terrifying than lying in his bed, waiting for a resurrected corpse to come for him. If he remained in bed, he stared through the dark at his bedroom door, the very same door that always seemed to be creaking open ever so slowly. He couldn’t take his eyes from it or the door handle, which always seemed to be rotating as someone or something tried to slide in and join him.
At some point during those lost years, he began getting out of bed and wandering. He carried a flashlight and an aluminum Louisville Slugger baseball bat, hidden during the day between his mattress and box spring. He soon located, and knew how to avoid, the loose floorboards so as not to alert his father to this new nighttime restlessness.
Not that his father would have heard him. When they first moved into the funeral home apartment on the second floor, his father had begun taking a nightly glass of port. Which soon became two glasses. Which soon became four tumblers each night before bed. His father’s snoring reverberated in an outward ripple the way his preaching always had, and it could be heard from anywhere in the second-floor apartment. Cohen could even hear his father’s snoring in most areas of the first floor, where the coffin displays and chapel were located.
But then came 1989, when a blurry half decade ended and the memories began again.
It was winter, and everything stood sharp and dry. He was awake, standing in the dark kitchen, when the sound of a car traveling at a ridiculously high speed eased its way into the silence, the high whine of an engine at its max, the squeal of tires going too fast around a sharp turn. He opened the window, stuck his head out into the freezing-cold air, and saw headlights bobbing and weaving, going back and forth from one lane to the other, coming fast.
The car came up the street and onto his block without stopping at the traffic lights, and the driver lost control, slid sideways, rediscovered the car’s traction, and shot off the road, slamming into the blue post office box and lurching to a stop near the house across the street from Cohen’s living room window. He sat staring, eyes wide. The car remained eerily still on top of the post office box, tilted to the point that it might fall over on its top, steam or smoke rising from the engine.
Various lights winked on as people who had heard the crash pulled themselves from their beds and came to their windows. But Cohen wasn’t paying attention to the house lights. He was completely absorbed by what crawled out from under the wreck.
At first he thought a shadow was stretching from the side of the car, perhaps because one of the neighbors had turned on their outside light. It was like a slowly spreading pool of darkness, but it had a form, which made him wonder if the driver of the car had been wearing some kind of a costume. But it was no costume, and he was not coming out of the door.
“What?” Cohen whispered, reaching down for the previously forgotten Louisville Slugger without taking his eyes from the spreading blackness. At that moment, at that same exact moment, all the streetlights in the town winked out. Maybe the car had hit something that brought on the darkness. Maybe some other car had also crashed and taken out a utility pole. Whatever had happened, the city fell into a deeper layer of inky blackness, and the only remaining light came from the windows of houses where people had woken up, and these were few.
The thing that climbed out from under the car still had no clear shape, but Cohen saw enough of it to know that it had a head, and it had things like arms and legs, but not in a million years could he have described it. There was something of death about it, and the strong, metallic smell of fresh blood swept up through the open window where Cohen stood.
The thing, the Beast, the whatever-it-was, had something like eyes and something like a face, and it looked up at the window and saw him. He knew it. He could feel that it had seen him, and its seeing of him was an ache that filled his mind.
The thing began moving to cross the empty, dark street toward the sycamore tree and the glass doors of the funeral parlor.
Cohen froze. He squeezed the baseball bat, held it in two white-knuckled hands. Should he shout for his father? Should he run and make sure the doors were locked? Should he go hide?
Sirens pierced the night, and flashing lights approached from a long way off. The thing turned and looked at the lights, and it moved in the opposite direction, vanishing down unlit Duke Street. For a moment Cohen thought he could see the darkened trail it had left, like a slug’s. A trail of cold and fear.
He realized he had barely been breathing, and his hands trembled as he moved to put the flashlight away, laid down the bat. He sat with his back against the wall, and the cold night air rushed in over the windowsill behind him and poured down his back. He heard the loud sound of a siren outside the funeral home, and the shouts of neighbors. His father, now moving noisily through the house, stumbled out the door, going to see what was happening.