During the next few days, Carmen found herself feeling very tense. Al had seemed angry all weekend, and he'd allowed it to come out Saturday night with Stephen. She was sure that living in a motel and driving all that way every weekend was taking its toll on him, but she thought he'd been a little rough on Stephen, and she felt it was her duty to make it up to the boy.
Al's mood over the weekend had left a bad taste in her mouth and, after he'd gone, she did not feel rested or relaxed, as the weekend usually left her. She'd planned for this weekend to be especially fun, but it had been less enjoyable than most.
Unfortunately, Stephen's claim that he'd seen a pale young man with long black hair down in the basement didn't make her feel any better. In fact, she suspected—although she tried not to admit it to herself—that Stephen's story was the biggest cause of her discomfort.
Why? she'd asked herself several times. Why would a silly story like that make you so jumpy?
But every time she asked herself that question, she remembered the plates and silverware returning to the cupboard and drawer from which she'd taken them. She tried, again and again, to tell herself that it had been a mistake, that she hadn't actually taken the plates from the cupboard or the silverware from the drawer, that she'd only thought she had, but she was never quite able to convince herself. She knew she'd gotten the plates and silverware, could still feel them in her hands when she thought about it, but somehow, they had returned to the cupboard, to the drawer.
Unable to dismiss it, she brought it up with Tanya as they drank iced tea on Tanya's front porch while the baby slept just inside.
"Yeah, I do that all the time," Tanya said. "It's like going all the way across the house for something, and then forgetting what you were after once you get there. It's distraction, is all it is. When you have stuff on your mind, you do stupid, embarrassing things like that. Don't worry about it. We all do it."
"But I was so sure that I—"
"Yeah, I know, I always feel that way. But I've gotten so used to it happening that I don't even think about it anymore."
Rather than talking about it any longer, Carmen felt it was time to change the subject. But although she didn't say as much, she did not agree with Tanya.
That night—Monday night—Stephen and Michael went to bed early. They'd both been tired since Saturday night because neither of them had gotten much sleep. They spent much of their time Saturday and Sunday nights talking to one another in the dark. They talked about nothing in particular—music, movies, what Michael had done at Grandma's—just anything that might get their minds off what Stephen had seen. So, come Monday night, they were exhausted. They knew they had only a week of summer left before they would have to go back to school and they wanted to stay up late and watch television, but they couldn't stay awake.
And yet, once they got into bed, they couldn't quite get to sleep. They lay on their backs and stared into the darkness, talking now and then in soft tones about the coming school year and about the new Schwarzenegger movie when there was a sound in the room and both boys lifted their heads from their pillows. Michael drew in a ragged, frightened gasp of breath....
Carmen was in the kitchen fixing herself a cup of cocoa. She'd put Peter to bed and told Stephanie to go, and now she just wanted to relax and, eventually, get to sleep.
She returned to the living room with her steaming cup and found Stephanie still on the floor scraping a crayon over a page in a coloring book.
"I thought I told you to go to bed," Carmen said.
"Can't I stay up a little longer? I'm not tired."
"You'll be tired in the morning when you have to go to school, and then I'll have to listen to you whine, so go. Now!' She softened her tone. "Okay, hon?"
"Oh, awright, Mom." Stephanie stood and gave Carmen a kiss, then went to her bedroom with her coloring book tucked under one arm.
Carmen sat in ATs recliner and turned the television to Murder, She Wrote, leaning back in the recliner to relax....
Stephen and Michael stared at the dresser against the wall across the room from their beds. On top of the dresser was a toy robot that belonged to Michael.
Staring at the robot, touching it, examining it, were three men. They stood in the dark tilting their heads this way and that, looking at the robot from different angles.
One man, the tallest, wore a pin-striped suit and a fedora. The other two wore dark clothes that blended with the darkness in an indistinguishable, shadowy mass.
Their voices hissed in the silence as the man in the suit picked up the robot and examined it. He turned and faced the boys.
Neither Stephen nor Michael could move.
The man holding the robot looked at them for a long time, and the other two, standing on either side of him, turned and did the same.
They whispered, gesturing toward the boys, their words indistinguishable, but their voices sibilant, secretive.
Suddenly, the man in the suit spun around, raised the robot high above his head and held it there, turning his eyes to Stephen. "Toys," he hissed, smiling around teeth that looked grimy and broken. "Mere toys." Then he brought his arm down hard and smashed the robot on the top of the dresser.
Stephen stared wildly as the man smashed the robot down again and bits of its body scattered in the darkness, chittering against the walls and floor.
One of the men laughed, a low, throaty chuckle, and Stephen blurted, "Run!" as he bounded from his bed and headed up the stairs, followed closely by Michael.
The boys took two steps at a time, both of them screaming, "Mom! Maawwwm!"
Carmen spilled a drop of cocoa on her shirt and muttered, "Oh, damn," as she leaned forward in the recliner, grimacing at the boys' screaming.
"Okay," she said, setting her mug on the coffee table, "okay, okay!”
The boys stumbled into the living room in their underwear, out of breath, saucered eyes frantic, both of them talking at once.
"Mom, men, there are men, down in the room, right now, right now!" Stephen screamed.
"My robot,” Michael gasped, "they broke my robot, they came outta nowhere and—"
"Stop it this instant!" Carmen shouted.
The boys fell silent, their shoulders heaving as they tried to catch their breath.
"Now, what the hell are you talking—screaming—about? And please talk slowly and quietly and one at a time."
The boys glanced at one another and Stephen said, "There are three men down in our room, Mom. They were standing around the dresser fooling with Michael's Robby the Robot and—"
"Wait, just wait a minute," Carmen said, holding up a hand. "How did they get in?"
"They were just there,” Michael said.
"But the windows are locked and nobody came through the front door, so how—"
"Mom, they were talking about us," Stephen said, "whispering to each other about us, laughing."
"Okay, okay, c'mon." She walked between the boys, out of the living room and down the stairs. At the bottom, she flicked on the bedroom light and looked back up the stairs at the boys who stood at the top, huddled close together.
She walked away from the stairs, then froze in the center of the room.
What if there really was someone in the basement? She'd come down unarmed, unprepared, automatically assuming the boys had just scared each other. She felt her heartbeat speed up, felt her palms become moist and sticky.
Moving slowly, cautiously, she looked around the room. The more she looked, the more she relaxed, and a little smile curled the corners of her mouth.
"There's nobody down here, you guys," she called over her shoulder, her relief disguised by her firm tone of voice.
She heard their footsteps hurrying down the stairs.
Her anger returned and she said, "Now exactly what the hell were you trying to—"
She stopped when her eyes fell on Michael's robot on the dresser. It lay on its side; an arm and a leg were missing, and the transparent plastic cover that had been over the face was gone. Fragmented bits of black plastic were scattered over the top of the dresser and on the floor below.
"Did one of you do this?" Carmen asked angrily as the boys came into the room.
"No, Mom, they did," Michael insisted.
"There was no one in this room but you two, so stop saying that."
"Mom," Michael said deliberately, as if he were speaking to a small child, "the guy picked up the robot and—"
"Okay, hold it, just hold it a second," Carmen said, holding up both palms. She studied the boys a moment. They not only looked sincere, they looked terrified. But it would have been impossible for anyone to get into the basement. She looked at the French doors; they were shut, with only darkness beyond them. All the windows were locked, she was certain of that.
Well...pretty certain.
No, they had to be making it up. At the very most, it was probably just the result of Stephen's telling Michael about all the voices he claimed to have heard. He probably scared the hell out of Michael and, before they knew it, both their imaginations were running away with them.
And Carmen was pretty sure she could prove it.
"Go upstairs a minute, Stephen," she said.
"What?"
"Just go upstairs and leave me with Michael. We won't be long."
Reluctantly, Stephen climbed the stairs, puzzled and a little angry.
"Okay, Michael," Carmen said, sitting on the edge of Stephen's bed and patting the mattress beside her, "sit down and tell me about it. Tell me everything you saw."
"Well, there were these three guys. They were standing over there by the dresser foolin' around with Robby the Robot and whispering to each other."
"What did they look like? What were they wearing?"
"Well, two of 'em were hard to see because they wore dark clothes and, well, the room was dark, so...but the one guy was wearing this suit. It was striped...thin little stripes, kind of oldfashioned."
"Pinstripes?"
"Yeah. And he wore a hat. An old-fashioned hat, the kind men wore in the old movies all the time."
"What did they do?"
"They looked at the robot and whispered, then they looked at us and whispered. One of 'em laughed. Then, the guy in the suit said something about...about toys, and picked up the robot and smashed it down on the dresser."
"Where'd they go?"
Michael shrugged. "I dunno. We ran."
"And they just stood here and let you run after you'd seen them standing in your room busting up a toy? Doesn't that seem odd to you?"
"Maybe it's odd, but...you wanted me to tell you what happened. That's what happened."
Carmen studied Michael's face, looking for some sign of guilt, for one of the familiar clues that he was lying. He was a lousy liar, always had been. Stephen could get away with it, but she'd only seen him use his poker face to pull pranks on her and Al, harmless jokes that required a straight face until the payoff, never anything as pointless as this.
But she saw nothing in Michael's face that told her he was lying, so either he'd picked up his big brother's talent for keeping a straight face, or...
Or he was telling the truth.
"Okay, stay here," she said as she stood and started up the stairs.
"You don't believe us, do you?" Michael asked softly.
Carmen stopped and turned to him. "Just stay here, hon. I'll be back in a minute."
Upstairs, she found Stephen slumped on the sofa with his arms folded over his thin chest looking dejected as he whispered to Stephanie, who sat beside him, leaning close. Stephen stopped and Stephanie pulled away the moment Carmen entered the room.
"I thought I sent you to bed, Steph," Carmen said.
Stephanie stood and headed for her room, saying, "I'm going, Mom, I'm going."
Carmen sat down beside Stephen. "Okay. I want you to tell me exactly what happened down there."
She listened carefully as he told her exactly the same thing Michael had told her. When she questioned him—"What did they look like? What were they wearing?"—his answers were identical to Michael's, right down to what the man said: "He said, Toys, mere toys.'"
When he was finished, Carmen realized she was frowning. If the boys were lying, then they had to have made up the story in great detail before breaking the robot and telling her, otherwise their stories would not have been identical in every detail.
A chill fell over her like a blanket as she seriously considered, for the first time, the possibility that there had been three men in the boys' room.
Why would they come in just to whisper to one another right in front of Stephen and Michael, break a toy robot, then leave?
That was what she found so frightening about it: It was completely senseless.
Should I call the police? she wondered. But what if they come and it turns out the boys are lying?
She decided that if three men had indeed broken into the house, there would have to be some sign of entry somewhere, and it would have to be down in the basement.
"Okay,” she said decisively as she stood. "That's all I wanted to know." She left the room and, as she started down the stairs, she heard Stephen call, "What're you gonna do?" But she didn't respond.
Downstairs, she was asked the same question by Michael.
"Just stay here," she said as she opened the French doors and went into the next room, reaching out to flick on the light. She looked around the room that was supposed to be Stephen's, saw that the two windows were still locked and went into the wide hallway beyond, turning on another light.
She checked the tool room at the end of the hall; the window there was untouched, too.
She walked up the ramp at the opposite end of the hall and checked the door. Locked.
In the next room, she tried not to look at the plank covering the blood tank—tried to avoid even thinking about it—and devoted all her attention to the two windows there.
Nothing had been broken or pried open.
She turned to the doorway that led to the morgue. Although she hadn't admitted it to Al or anyone else, she didn't like to go in there. She didn't think it was evil, or anything like that; it just made her...uncomfortable. But there were three windows in there and, although she was pretty sure the boys had been pulling her chain, she supposed she should check those, too.
With a sigh, she walked into the dingy room and turned on the light. It was much more tolerable since Al had painted it, but still...
She checked the window across from the door, then the two on the back wall.
There were footsteps behind her.
"Michael?" she said. "There's no way anyone could have—" She turned and her voice caught in her throat and she froze in place, mouth open, as the air around her became icy cold, as if she were standing in front of an open freezer, and just as she turned, she felt someone brush by her, rubbing against her only slightly, and felt the shift in the cold air as someone passed. There was no one there.
Stephen went downstairs to find Michael sitting on the edge of his bed, frowning as he stared intensely through the open French doors. The light was on in the next room.
"Where's Mom?" Stephen asked.
Michael nodded toward the doors. "She went back there. I think she's—"
Suddenly, they heard a rush of movement in another part of the basement: footsteps, a rapid series of clicks as the lights were turned off, doors slamming, and Carmen walked quickly through the next door, flicked off the light as she came out and closed the French doors hard.
For a moment, Stephen thought she might scream. There was an odd look on her face, one he'd never seen before, one he thought, at first, was abject terror. Then she stood before them, set her jaw, and put her fists on her hips.
"There was no one in here tonight, you understand?" she said, her voice low but unsteady. "No windows or locks were broken. Everything's closed up. No one was in here. Now, if you thought that was funny, you're wrong, and if you do anything like that again, you're both gonna be in big trouble."
She spun away from them and stomped up the stairs.
Stephen and Michael exchanged a silent glance, then Stephen called, "Mom? There really was—"
"I don't wanna hear it, Stephen!" she snapped, turning back and pointing a finger at him. "I told you a long time ago to keep your stories to yourself, but you had to go and tell Michael and you got him all worked up and now you're both upset, which is exactly what I said would happen, remember? Well, remember?”
Slowly, Stephen nodded.
Carmen started up the stairs again.
Stephen turned to Michael, released a long sigh, then started slowly up the stairs behind his mom.
"Where do you think you're going?" she asked over her shoulder.
"I...um, I was just gonna come up and watch a little—"
"You're going to bed, is "Can I at least come get a glass of water?" Stephen asked quietly.
"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
He waited on the step until she was gone, then turned to Michael again.
"Boy," Michael whispered, "she's pissed."
"Or something," Stephen said before going upstairs.
Carmen went into the living room and flopped into the recliner. The picture on the television screen disappeared in a blur of colors as tears stung her eyes. She sucked in a deep breath, wiped her eyes quickly and grabbed her pack of Marlboros from the end table. Her hands trembled as she lit her cigarette and she shook the match harder than usual, as if to shake the tremors out of her bones.
She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and savored her anger. She was angry because, with their vivid story and their wide, frightened eyes, the boys had managed to convince her that strangers had been in the house. Three of them! She'd allowed her imagination to get caught up with her sons'.
"Yeah," she breathed, thinking, That's all it was. Just my imagination and that stupid story of theirs. Right?
But the tiny little voice of her conscience that usually spoke from deep within her mind remained silent.