The Neighbor

6

I was not a particularly brave lad of twelve. I well knew my limitations, and I was aware that if I ever got into a fight with another boy, I was less likely to beat him up than I was to knock myself out. In a confrontation with something supernatural, I would not fare well against an adversary more threatening than Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Nevertheless, I was compelled to cross the backyard of the Clockenwall place and climb the steps to the rear porch, because I loved my sister more than I loved myself, and I felt that it had fallen to me somehow to resolve this bizarre situation. I had never seen Amalia a fraction as disturbed as she had been when telling me about the lecherous teacher. She was fearless and resolute and more competent than anyone else I had ever known. I was loath to see her diminished by fear, and I was angered and depressed when I thought of her retreating to her bedroom and hiding behind a book, because that’s what it seemed to me she was doing, although I would never have told her so.

When I crossed the porch of the Clockenwall house, I was not surprised to find the back door ajar, as the front door had been earlier. Stepping into the kitchen, where less sunlight penetrated than previously, I boldly switched on the overhead lights. If the spirit of a dead man had returned home a month after his funeral, there was no way to prowl his house without his knowledge; I mean, surely a ghost is omniscient as concerns what happens in the place that it haunts.

The dish smeared with dry egg yolk and the dirty flatware were on the table, across which toast crumbs were scattered as before. Clockenwall had not returned to clean up after himself.

Switching on lights, I went through the house to the front stairs, where something invisible to the eye had earlier descended. Facing the first flight, I stood listening, but there was only silence so deep that the house might not have been located in the city any longer, might have been enveloped by some bubble in space — time and set adrift in eternity.

At last I thought to ask myself what I hoped to accomplish in that place. I wasn’t an exorcist. My family didn’t even attend a church. My parents weren’t atheists; they were just indifferent to the issues of God and an afterlife, as they were indifferent to everything except what could be eaten, drunk, smoked, and watched on television without inspiring too much thinking. I had no good answer to the question that I’d asked myself; therefore, with what passed for logic in a twelve-year-old mind, I decided that I had been brought to that place by intuition and that I should trust it as a dog trusted its sense of smell.

When suddenly I heard a rapid pounding, I cringed and retreated from the staircase, but only until I realized that I had become aware of my heart drumming. Disappointed in myself, chagrined, I thrust my shoulders back and lifted my head and, telling myself the incredible lie that the Pomerantz family tree branched broadly with generations of warriors, I ascended to the second floor.

One of the good things about being twelve or younger is that you tend to believe that you’ll live forever. Therefore, you take stupid risks with little hesitation, and sometimes the risk pays off. Except when it doesn’t.

Upstairs, door by door, room by room, I searched for what I did not know, trusting my intuition to lead me to some revelation, some knowledge or instrument with which Clockenwall’s spirit could be sent back where it belonged, if in fact it had returned from the Other Side to leer at my sister. In the Teacher of the Year’s bedroom stood a desk where someone else might have put a vanity, and I was drawn toward it as an iron filing to a magnet.

Then a disturbing thing happened. With no memory of having sat down or of having opened any of the drawers, I was in the desk chair and had before me a scrapbook containing newspaper articles about a girl named Melinda Lee Harmony. Sweet Melinda. She’d been a middle-school student who, three months before her thirteenth birthday, disappeared while walking home after classes. Some of the clippings were dated — all from 1949, eighteen years earlier. I pored through them with growing dread, but I couldn’t stop turning pages, as though I had forfeited control of my body. The police, assisted by a large contingent of citizen volunteers, had searched the school grounds, surrounding neighborhoods, and Balfour Park, which lay along the route that the girl usually took from school to home. They found no trace of her. A reward was offered, never claimed. Members of her anguished family, her pastor, and a few teachers at her school spoke highly of her, this gentle and intelligent and charming child of great promise. One of the teachers was Rupert Clockenwall. Three photographs had been provided to the newspapers, all taken soon before she had gone missing. She had been a pretty girl, blond and slim, with a gamine smile, and as I stared at her, I heard myself say, “Such a delectable little tease.”