Pandemonium

the edges of the window until the shards were cleared. I leaned in. The sunlight showed a dim room populated by hulking furniture. I put a leg through the window and levered myself inside.

“Coming?” I said.

“Why not.”

We were in a front room, surrounded by couches and chairs. It looked like the occupants had walked out of the house one day and never looked back. A cup sat on the end table. The lamp was still plugged in by its huge black plug. Everything lay under a thick coating of dust, and a faint animal funk hung in the air. I moved toward a bookcase crowded with knickknacks and squinted at a framed photograph that held pride of place. A man in a navy uniform, my age or maybe younger, stared humorlessly at the camera. He held the hand of a boy who could have been ten or eleven, head tilted as if he doubted the picture would come out. The soldier and the boy shared narrow eyes and a thin nose.

“Jesus,” O’Connell said. She stood just behind me. “That boy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The boy on the rock.” We’d been looking at pictures of him for days. We moved from room to room, through shafts of dusty light. The small dining room held a table and six chairs. In the middle of the table was a vase sporting a dozen dead twigs, the leaves long turned to dust and blown away.

In the kitchen was a low iron stove and a small round-shouldered refrigerator. The floor was decorated with mouse turds, and the counters were coated with dirt, accumulating topsoil. Dishes sat in the black, mold-covered sink. A nearly intact snakeskin curled against a baseboard.

I didn’t want to open the refrigerator, but I pulled open the cabinets. The shelves were full of white dishes and orange-tinted glass bowls and tall drinking glasses.

O’Connell nodded toward the calendar hanging near the back door: May, 1947.

“Shit,” I said.

I’d expected an empty house, or a trashed hangout for teenagers, but not this museum. It looked like no one had entered the place in fifty years.

“Is any of this familiar?” O’Connell said.

“Not exactly,” I said. But it didn’t feel unfamiliar. It felt like a copy of a copy of someplace I’d visited, or maybe a place I’d read about in a book. “Let’s try upstairs.”

The stairs groaned and creaked under my weight, and I walked up gripping the gritty banister. At the top was a short hallway with four doors, two in each direction. The peaked ceiling was close, designed for smaller people.

I went right, pushed open a door that faced the rear of the house. The small room contained a double bed with a knitted blue bedcover, and a chest of drawers topped by a framed mirror. Dust coated every surface, but not as thickly as downstairs.

I opened the door on the other side of the hallway. Only one window here, overlooking the front yard. It was the cracked window I’d seen from outside: The hole was the bull’s-eye. It was a little boy’s room. A narrow bed occupied one corner, under a St. Louis Cardinals pennant. The closet was open, empty metal hangers glinting like teeth, and clothes had slipped from the hangers into a pile. Two tall bookshelves, half the shelves full of hardcover books leaning against each other, the other half filled with stacks of magazines, some of them spilling across the floor.

“You’ve got that look on your face again,” O’Connell said. I walked into the room and stooped to pick up the nearest magazine, already knowing what it was. The page was torn down the right side, and grime had faded the colors and muddied the lines, but I still could make out the pictures. In the first panel, a golden-age Captain America, skinny and goofy looking in his half mask, punched a buck-toothed Japanese soldier across the room. It had to be from the early days of Captain America Comics, 1941 or 1942.

O’Connell stepped into the room and I held out a hand. “Just don’t step on anything.”