The Shining Girls

Kirby ^{13 JUNE 1993}

She should walk away and call the police. She knows this deep in the base of her skull. She’s found him. She knows where he is. But what if, the thought nags at her. What if it’s a ruse? The house, by all appearances, is an abandoned wreck. One of several on this block. He could have gone into it because he was aware of her following him. She’s not exactly subtle in this neighborhood. Which means that he might be lying in wait.

Her hands are numb. Just call the cops, you idiot. Make it their problem. You passed two payphones on the way here. Sure, she thinks. And both of them were trashed. The glass smashed and the receivers pulled off. She tucks her hands into her armpits, miserable and shaky. Standing under a tree, which Englewood, unlike the West Side, still has plenty of. She’s pretty sure he can’t see her, because she can’t see the broken windows on the second floor. But she can’t tell if he is peering through a crack in the plywood boarding up the windows downstairs, or hell, if he is sitting on the front steps waiting for her.

The plain, terrible truth is that, if she leaves, she will lose him.

Shit-shit-shit-shit.

‘You going in?’ says someone at her shoulder.

‘Jesus!’ she jumps. The homeless guy’s eyes bulge slightly, making him look innocent or intensely interested. Half the teeth in his smile are gone and he’s wearing a faded Kris Kross T-shirt and a red beanie despite the heat.

‘I wouldn’t go in, I was you. I wasn’t even sure which one it was. But I kept watchin’ him. He comes out at strange times, dressed funny. I been in. You wouldn’t be able to tell from outside, but it’s done up all nice. You want to go in? You need a ticket to get in.’ He holds up a crumpled piece of paper. It takes her long seconds to recognize it as money. ‘I’ll sell you one for a hundred bucks. Otherwise it won’t work. You won’t see it.’

She feels a jab of relief that he’s clearly crazy. ‘I’ll give you twenty if you show me where to go.’

He changes his mind. ‘Nah. Nah, wait. I been in. It wasn’t good. Place is cursed. Haunted. Devil’s own. You don’t want to go in. You give me twenty for the good advice and you don’t go in, you hear?’

‘I have to.’ God help her.

Everything she has in her wallet amounts to seventeen dollars and change. The homeless guy is not very impressed, but he takes her round and helps boost her onto the wooden staircase zig-zagging up the back of the house, regardless.

‘You won’t see shit, anyway. Not without a ticket. Guess that means you safe. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘Please be quiet.’

She uses Dan’s jacket to climb over the barbed wire that has been looped round the base of the outside stairs precisely to stop people getting in. Sorry, Dan, she thinks as the wire rips into the sleeve. You need new clothes anyway.

The paint is flaking on the boards. The stairs are rotten. They complain under her every step as she gingerly picks her way to the ground-floor window that gapes open like a hole in a head. There is broken glass all over the ledge. The shards are dirty and rain-spattered.

‘Did you break the window?’ she whispers down to the crazy man.

‘You shouldn’t ask me nothing,’ he sulks. ‘Your business, you want to go in.’

Shit. The house is dark inside, but she can see through the open window that it’s trashed. Junkies went to town in there. The floorboards have been ripped up, along with the piping, walls busted up and stripped to the bone. Through a door on the other side, she can make out the naked porcelain of a broken toilet. The seat has been wrenched off, the sink kicked to the ground and cracked open. It’s absurd that he would be hiding in there. Waiting for her. She falters on the edge. ‘Can you call the police?’ she whispers.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘In case he kills me.’ This comes out more matter-of-fact than she would have liked.

‘Dead people in there already,’ Mal hisses back.

‘Please. Give them the address.’

‘All right, all right!’ He whacks at the air. Swatting at promises. ‘But I ain’t sticking around.’

‘Sure.’ Kirby mutters under her breath. She doesn’t look back. She lays Dan’s jacket down on the windowsill over the broken glass. There’s a lump in the pocket. Her pony, she realizes. She hauls herself into the house.