4

On a day like this, Corey was jealous of Leila Sharp. Ever since her dad left her family, she had been seeing a shrink once a week. He did not envy the dad part, only the shrink part. He wished he were seeing one, too. “I think I’m losing it,” he said, pacing back and forth in front of her building on Central Park West.

“Stop moving,” Leila said, dabbing Corey’s face and shirt with wet wipes. “I think biting the blood pack traumatized you.”

“You didn’t hear any thunder?” Corey asked. “Or horses?”

“Just a second.” Leila pulled back, scrutinizing his face. She had soft greenish-blue eyes in a field of freckles as red as her hair. She had a way of being annoying but also making Corey feel calmer. “There. All clean. Nope, no thunder. No horses. But no biggie either, okay? You have a very active imagination, that’s all.”

“I hate when people say that,” Corey snapped. “Everyone tells me that.”

“Dude, how long have I known you? You’ve always been this way. You’re just being Corey.”

“It was as real as you are, Leila! Everything changed. This guy on a horse tried to tie me up. Emma’s house was gone. A man was walking a goat. Somebody threw a pail of pee out the window. This locket got super hot, and I could see every detail of the face of the lady inside. Look at her now!”

Corey held out his hand and snapped open the locket. The lady’s face was nothing more than two vague eyes in a faded oval outline.

“Okay, you do need a shrink.” Leila checked her watch. “I’m seeing mine tomorrow. But I can call her after school and before the Halloween party, and I’ll tell her you’re looking.”

“There’s a Halloween party tonight?” Corey asked, snapping the locket shut.

“Sorry for the confusion, Mr. Time Traveler, but today is still October thirty-first, and you told me you’d be my date. So to refresh your memory, we are going to school without costumes because costumes have been forbidden this year. Then you’re coming to my house for pizza after school and we’re going to the Halloween party together, in costume. That last part is nonnegotiable.” Leila picked up her backpack from the sidewalk and hooked it over her shoulders. “Now let’s go or we’ll be late.”

“It’s not a date,” Corey grumbled. “Parties aren’t dates.”

But Leila had already started off.

With a weary sigh, Corey followed. He felt numb. He liked the idea of going to a psychologist, but it seemed weird. His family didn’t do stuff like that. None of them needed to. They were too normal.

Still. What happened this morning was not normal.

They turned right onto Ninety-Fourth Street, in the direction of George Washington Carver Middle School. Leila was walking at her usual warp speed. But after what had just happened, Corey was wary. He eyed the block carefully. No horses. No weird weather. Just like every morning, yellow buses were double-parked in front of school. Just like every morning, angry drivers were stuck behind them, bumper-to-bumper. Corey had never in his life been so happy to hear the honking of twenty-first-century car horns. He quickened his pace and caught up with Leila at the base of the school steps.

A zombie, holding a severed human arm, greeted him and Leila at the front door. “Shake,” he said.

Corey nearly hurled his breakfast but Leila burst out laughing. It took him a moment to realize the zombie was Mr. Skiptunis, the assistant principal. Just behind him in the lobby, a group of kids from Ms. Lee’s history class were shooting questions at Wonder Woman . . . who looked suspiciously like Ms. Lee. Marching in and out of the school office were two overweight Batmen, a five-foot-two Supergirl, a not-so-Incredible Hulk, and a King Kong who was bossing people around in a muffled version of the principal’s voice.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to wear costumes to school,” Corey said to Zombie Skiptunis. “You told us to wear normal clothes today.”

“Those were yooour rules, not oooours, bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” said the assistant principal with a ridiculous evil laugh. “Surprise!”

“They tricked us,” Leila said, pulling Corey through the door.

“Halloween for teachers only is a very lame idea,” Corey said.

“Is that why you came to school as Grumpy?” Leila asked.

Inside, teachers in costume were acting like kids, and kids were screaming and posing for selfies. But the strangest thing was a team of people with professional-looking cameras roaming around, recording it all. Leila let out a joyous squeal. Instantly a guy with a thick beard and man bun darted over with a mic, followed by a woman carrying a big camera that said NY-2 Local News. “So, kids, what do you think of NYC Pop-up Halloween?” the guy said in a voice that was one part too loud and three parts too jolly.

“Wait, what?” Corey said.

The guy chuckled. “It’s a thing. All over the city this year. But this is the first time a group of teachers have done it! Are you surprised?”

“It’s awesome!” Leila cried.

As they asked her a few more questions, Corey slunk away. He quickly pulled out his phone and searched for NYC Pop-up Halloween. Instantly he saw images of all kinds of costumed people walking the streets of Manhattan. A guy dressed as Thor on the East Side. A team of pirates called the ARGHHH Society in the West Village, complete with parrots on their shoulders. A snake charmer floating down Broadway on a realistic-looking flying carpet.

His mind was flying with thoughts. A guy with a big mustache and a horse . . . a goat farmer . . .

“Ohhhhh . . . !” Corey felt like a fool. This morning’s ridiculousness all made some kind of crazy sense now. He put away the phone and smacked himself in the head. “I am such a dummy.”

“I could have told you that,” said Leila. She was walking toward him, away from the wandering TV team.

“No, I mean about all my weirdness this morning.” Corey held up his phone. “Sorry. All that stuff I was freaking about—it must have been one of those pop-up things. Some of them are really elaborate. Right now, somebody’s probably posting a YouTube clip of me spitting fake blood on that guy.”

“So you’re not out of your mind after all,” Leila said.

“Nope,” Corey replied. “Well, not completely. But maybe I’m close to not-out-of-my-mindness. There were still some things I can’t explain.”

Leila raised an eyebrow. “Like, missing buildings? Thunder that never happened?”

Corey nodded. “So yeah, maybe you should call your shrink for me.”

“Just stay sane enough to go to the party tonight,” Leila replied.

As they shared a fist bump, the bell echoed through the hall. Together they raced to homeroom.

That afternoon, the first thing Corey noticed in Leila’s extremely neat bedroom was an extremely messy stack of cardboard boxes marked Toxic by the door. The second thing was a photo she had propped up in her window. He kept his eyes on the photo intently, not wavering his gaze. This was mainly because Leila was busy clearing away all the underwear she had left on her bed. And those were the last things Corey wanted to see.

“Are you done yet?” he asked, trying to keep his face from turning red.

“Almost.”

The photo was practically burning itself into his eyes now. It was sitting on Leila’s old windowsill, which was chipped and cracked. Each of those cracks revealed several layers of paint. You could tell the age of the building with those layers, like rings of a tree. But the photo was frozen in time, black-and-white and maybe five inches by seven.

It was a New York City street scene. In the foreground was a dirt road with telegraph poles. To the far left, a small team of men was building a stone wall along that road. In the background, a hilly, treeless landscape stretched to the horizon. Here and there were signs of a construction project, like a team of horses pulling an enormous boulder on a flatbed cart. At the right was a wood-frame contraption about two stories tall, with a system of pulleys.

It was pretty blurry, but there was something both eerie and familiar about the image. He picked it up off the window to look closer. “Leila,” he said, “what’s this—?”

“Ta-da!” Leila’s voice interrupted his question. “Which one should I wear?”

Corey turned around. Leila was holding up a Catwoman and a Wonder Woman costume. “Whichever fits, I guess,” he replied. “I like them both.”

Leila sighed. “You are such a boy. Okay, get out of here while I change. And don’t steal my auntie Flora’s photo.”

“I met her, right?” Corey asked. “She brought that weird musical instrument to your Christmas party—the dirigible?”

“Didgeridoo. Made from a bamboo pole. Yes. She finds stuff like that. She disappears for days or weeks at a time and never says where she’s been. She also says she talks to dead people. Mostly you have to tune her out. Those boxes stacked by my door? Her stuff.”

“And this photo?” Corey asked. “Is it—?”

“A view of Central Park? Yeah. Auntie Flora finds old photos that she feels some kind of weird mystical connection to. She thinks that one was probably taken in this exact room back in the 1860s, when they were constructing the park. That’s why there are no trees. This apartment building was new then.”

“Wow . . . ,” Corey said. “She sounds awesome.”

Leila shrugged. “Well, she left my uncle Lazslo months ago, no explanation. None of us knew where she went. When she finally wrote my uncle, she said she couldn’t come back. ‘Just know that I love you, I love you all,’ she wrote. He’s devastated and angry, and he wanted to toss all her junk. That’s why he wrote Toxic on it. It’s not really toxic. Anyway, my mom thinks they’ll work it out. She claims Lazslo and Flora have a healthier relationship than she and Dad did. So she told my uncle not to throw it out. ‘I know—let’s store it in Leila’s room!’ she said. Imagine my surprise. Grrrrr. You want any of it?”

“Your aunt’s old-lady stuff? I don’t think so.” Corey eyed the boxes, which were sealed except the top one. It had been opened roughly and the side was torn. An old framed photograph had fallen out, so Corey stooped to pick it up. As he tried to place it back in, he stopped.

The image was odd. At first glance it was just a group of about twelve people in stiff, old-fashioned clothing. Most of them were staring unsmilingly at the camera. But among them were a fluffy polar bear, a kangaroo, and a small triceratops. All looking very civilized.

Printed across the bottom of the photo was a title:

KNICKERBOCKERS

APRIL 1914

“I guess people had strange senses of humor back then,” Corey said. “Those are really convincing costumes. What was her mystical connection to this photo?”

“What?” Leila said.

“You told me she had connections to all her photos.”

“Oh.” Leila peered at it briefly. “I think she collected this one because one of the old ladies in the picture looks like her.”

“Maybe it is her.” Corey shoved the framed photo back in the box.

“In 1914?”

Corey shrugged. “Maybe she left your uncle because she’s dating a man her age—two hundred years old.”

“Are you dissing my aunt, Corey Fletcher?” Leila snapped.

As Corey slipped out the door, giggling, he caught a Catwoman mask in the back of his head. “I’m having second thoughts about being your date tonight!” Leila shouted.

“It’s not a date!” Corey shouted back.

Still holding on to the black-and-white photo, he ducked into the bathroom next to Leila’s room. The window, which overlooked Central Park, was slightly open.

On the margin of the photo, someone had written the date OCT 1862. He stared at it. That date rang a bell for Corey, and it took a moment to figure out why.

He unbuckled his belt, the one Papou had left him. Checking the back of the buckle, he glanced at the stamped-in date: Oct 31, 1862.

The exact same vintage.

“Cool . . . ,” he murmured.

He kneeled on the toilet for a better angle, shoved the window higher up, and stared at the view of the park across the street. It was so foggy, Corey could only see vague shapes. He could barely even make out the park’s stone wall.

He loved when the fog got thick like this. You could imagine that you were in the wilderness. Or at least the country. Or the suburbs. To a New Yorker, the suburbs could be pretty exotic.

Corey balanced the photo on the windowsill. He looked from the photo to the scene across the street, and back again. In his mind, he tried to superimpose the photo image on the thick fog—the stonecutter kneeling by the half-built wall, the crane and the contraption in the background.

Somebody flushed the toilet in the apartment above, and the lights flickered. Corey smiled. Old apartment buildings were so quirky. Across the street, the particles of fog seemed to swirl. They thickened and gathered on a howling wind. In the distance Corey heard thunder again. There. It wasn’t fake after all. This time he was sure Leila could hear it, too. He watched the swirls of fog forming a shape, rising, squaring off. He saw a big derrick through the mist. That seemed a little weird. But not really. They were always renovating the playground.

Now a man emerged from the cloud, wearing a cap and baggy pants and smoking a cigarette. He sank to his knees, lifted a trowel from the sidewalk, and stuck it into a metal container. Corey blinked. That was something he hadn’t seen. Had the container been there all along?

Now the guy was slathering mortar on a stone block. It was pretty strange. The dude really did look like the guy in the image.

Corey glanced down for the photo, to compare. It was no longer on the windowsill, so he looked toward the bathroom floor.

The breath caught in his throat. The floor was wooden and sagging in the middle. He could have sworn it had been tiled. The toilet had a tank overhead with a pull cord. He hadn’t noticed that either.

“Leila . . . ?” he called out.

He heard voices out the window. Across the street, another man shuffled into view. His clothes were old and ragged, his beard long and gray. The man stopped to watch the stonemason for a moment, and then struck up a conversation.

Corey kneeled, sticking his head out a little further, trying to hear them. To his right, farther down Central Park West, came the distant clang of a bell. The two men laughed, and the older guy turned to go. As he waved good-bye, he looked over his shoulder. “Ta-ta!” he shouted. “Don’t take any wooden nickels!”

Corey froze.

That phrase. He only knew one person who said it.

As the man turned again, Corey could see his face clearer. Through the soupy thickness of the fog he recognized the deep-set eyes. The long nose and cleft chin.

He shoved the window as high up as it would go.

“PAPOU!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He expected his voice to be swallowed up in the city noise, but it echoed loud and clear across the empty street. “UP HERE!”

The old man looked startled. He glanced around, confused. Corey called again, waving his arms until finally the man looked up. His eyes met Corey’s for a split second.

With a loud clang, a trolley rolled up Central Park West. It came to a noisy stop at the curb, directly in front of the man who looked like Papou.

Corey turned. From somewhere in the apartment a voice called out, but he didn’t know or care who it was. He went to grab the doorknob, but there was none, just a black metal latch. Jamming it downward, he ran out of the bathroom.

He crashed straight into a short but stocky woman he’d never seen before, wearing an apron and clunky black shoes.

The woman let out a scream. Corey pivoted and ran for Leila’s door. “Open up!” he shouted.

He pushed the door open. Inside, another strange woman, with a craggy face and silver hair, jumped out of a rocking chair and let out an even louder scream.

Corey turned, ran for the front door, and didn’t look back.