“WAKE UP, gearbox, you’re home.”
The voice cut through the music in Dec’s head. A horse-faced boy brayed at him, reeking of Hot Rods and vinegar chips.
Dec stood as if in a trance at the foot of his driveway as the school bus rumbled away. Half-Handed Cloud was in his earphones. Something Ezra Harlow had downloaded for his immediate attention.
Camelot looked even drearier than it had that morning. Fake half-timbering and fake shutters and fake diamondpaned windows. Birdie had been working up the soil in the garden but it was too early for planting. There was only a garden gnome to greet him, and from the sneer on his face, Dec could imagine what he was thinking. “Welcome home, gearbox.”
Sunny was standing in the bay window, all five years, nine months of her. She was still in her nightie, having fussed all night. There was a cardboard box in her arms. Behind the sheer curtains her face looked ghostly in its corona of red hair. Their mother’s hair.
Dec pushed his own hair out of his eyes, just a mangy shade of his mother’s glory.
“It’s time for my Polly Pockets to go to the Big House,” she said, greeting him at the door. He could barely hear her over the music blaring out of his MP3: “Can’t Even Breathe on My Own Two Feet.” She held up the box. He looked at the assorted pastel-coloured toys: Fifi, Midge, Suki…all the tiny gals of Pollyville.
“I thought you were sick,” he said.
“Daddy says I need Air.”
Dec shrugged off his backpack and crouched down to Sunny’s level. “So why doesn’t Daddy take you?” he said, too loudly, pitching his voice above the clamour in his ears.
She stared at his headphones. “What are you Listening to?” she shouted, leaning close to his face. Clearing away her uncombed hair, he placed the earphones on her head. She jerked away and made a face. “Ezra music,” she said.
He switched it off.
“Daddy says he’s had Enough of me for One Day. He couldn’t do Nothing More.”
“Anything.”
“Not even Anything,” she said.
“I can imagine,” muttered Dec. “D-Day will seem like a holiday.”
“Pardon?”
“Can’t you wait for Birdie to get home?”
“It’s Friday.”
Which meant that Birdie wouldn’t be home until ten. Dec sighed. Sunny was a force of nature. There was no way out.
“Just let me get something to eat,” he said wearily. Her face lit up. “Go put on some clothes,” he added.
“I’m going to put the Polly Pockets on the pink dresser. They can keep Princess Jasmine company.”
“Lucky Princess Jasmine,” he said, as his sister galloped up the stairs to her room. Her interest in the old family home was new. She had been a baby when they left so she had no memories of it, good or bad. For Sunny it was a giant fun-house. The fun had long since drained out of the place for Dec.
He heated up a slice of pizza in the microwave and found himself growing edgy at the prospect of going up there. He wasn’t sure why. When they first moved he went up all the time. Then the emptiness had got to him. Emptiness? That was rich. Steeple Hall was a monstrous time capsule, a house so big you didn’t need to throw anything away, just close the door on one room’s worth of memories and start in on another. It was his father’s monument to the Steeple clan. There were over a hundred years of history up there, but the place still felt empty to Dec. It was like the shed snakeskin you found sometimes in the woodpile, beautiful but lifeless.
The timer dinged for his pizza, and there was Sunny. She wore a bright yellow slicker over her nightie, yellow gum-boots and an impatient frown.
So they set off, Sunny chattering away like a spring-high stream about Midge’s flower shop and Suki’s teahouse. Dec swallowed a bite of pizza and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Are you sure you’re ready to part with those Polly doodles?” he asked.
“Polly Pockets. And I’m not Parting with them. They’re just going to live at the Big House from Now On.” She talked like that, in capitals.
They slogged through the gumbo of a low stretch of road. The big house was a game to her. Their father encouraged it. On her last birthday he had said to her, “The past is what happens when the present has no future in it anymore.” She had hugged the doll she was holding fiercely, as if he were going to snatch it from her.
“Hurry, Deckly Speckly.”
The hill grew steep. From County Road 10, you wouldn’t know there was a driveway there at all, the grass was so thick. More a cow path than a grand entrance. Bernard didn’t like the way to the big house to be well defined. No need to go advertising the house’s whereabouts.
The driveway curved again and Camelot was lost to view. The old macadam showed through up here. It was easier to walk now but Sunny panted a bit. She looked a little feverish, clutching her cardboard box to her chest. Dec offered to carry it. She turned away.
“We’re Talking,” said Sunny. “I’m telling Suki what a Great Time she’ll have being a Memory.”
One more year, thought Dec. I’ll be out of here and this whole place will become a memory. But when, through the maples, he finally caught sight of the tower, the peaked roofline, the many gables and chimney stacks — he felt an ache inside.
They rounded the final curve and the big house sprang fully into view. Light glinted off the glass of the conservatory. The newly budding maples shhhhhed in the breeze. There was always wind up here.
Steeple Hall. The words were carved in stone above the entranceway with a shamrock on either side. Sunny broke into a run. Her yellow boots made a galumphing noise on the wide stone pathway.
She waited for him by the door, wiggling like a puppy back from a walk. Dec dug out the long brass key. The tumblers turned. Sunny pushed open the door.
He smelled it before he saw it, a disturbing scent on the dry, old air. The frosted-glass vestibule door was slightly ajar. Sunny slithered out of her boots, pushed open the door and stopped dead.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
A glass-panelled bookcase had fallen. The spacious front hallway was lined with bookcases over three metres high and a metre wide on the eastern wall. One of those cases lay before them. Books were strewn everywhere. A bronze bust of Plato lay at Sunny’s feet. She stepped back into her brother’s arms.
Then they saw the hand.
Their eyes found it at the same moment. It was sticking out from under the massive pile of debris, the fingers curled into a claw. Sunny muttered Dec’s name quietly, like a prayer.
He held his sister close. His eyes darted to the parlour on his left, the drawing room on his right, and down the long passageway to the study. No sound came to him but the steady tock of the grandfather clock and Sunny breathing fast through her mouth. Nothing moved. And when he dared to look again, the hand had not moved, either. It was clutching something. He saw a glint of gold.
Sunny dropped her box of Polly Pockets and Dec was jolted out of his stupor. He lifted his sister up and sat her on the old church pew in the vestibule with her box of toys on her lap. She didn’t argue until he turned to head back into the house.
“Just stay put,” he said.
The bookshelf was solid oak. It took all of his strength to budge it. Books still trapped behind a lattice of wood and broken glass tumbled out. His great-grandfather’s legal books. One of them, as heavy as an anvil, fell on his foot. He cut himself on a shard of glass and pressed his hand hard against his pant leg.
The man was buried in law books, drowning in a green and gold sea. Dec knelt down and pulled away the rubble until he uncovered the man’s face. He had never seen a corpse before, but there was a dullness to the battered face that quickly made him abandon any idea of heroic rescue. You could not attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on lips that blue and swollen.
Then he saw the Chinese letters tattooed on the man’s neck and gasped.
“Mr. Play-Doh.”
He swung around. Sunny was in the doorway again, wide-eyed, clutching one of her dolls and crouching by the bust lying on its side by the door. “Mr. Play-Doh is hurt,” she said.
“He’ll be okay,” said Dec, turning her away and closing the door on the grisly scene. They hurried down the steps and across the drive. Dec turned, half afraid that a dead man might be following them. But what he saw, or thought he saw, stopped him in his tracks.
His mother.
She was standing at an upstairs window, dressed as Wonder Woman, her fingertips resting on the glass, an expectant look on her face. For a few seconds, the sun glinted off her golden tiara. Then she vanished.
“What are you looking at?” asked Sunny, looking at the same window, her hand shielding her eyes.
“Nothing,” he answered, taking Sunny’s hand.
“Not so tight,” she said, as they set off towards Camelot. “Not so fast.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were almost home.
“Who was that man?” she asked at last.
“Nobody we know,” he said.
But that was only half true.