On the Night Border

Marco Polo-1

Marco Polo

“What if it’s not there? What if someone else got it?”

“Wuss.” Mark flipped Henry his middle finger. “You’re chickening out.”

“Am not.” Henry glared at him. “It’s been, like, a year, right? Anybody could’ve gone in there and grabbed it. Maybe it burned up. I don’t want to catch s**t from you if I come out empty handed because the thing isn’t even there.”

“It’s there. My brother saw it,” Nabhi said.

“When?” Henry asked.

“Last month. His crew worked there.”

“Why didn’t he take it?”

“His boss would fire him if he took anything. They get out the toxic stuff, that’s all. What would he want with it anyway?”

“People collect that sick s**t. Sell it on eBay,” Henry said.

“Not my brother.”

“Well, someone else could’ve taken it since then,” Henry said.

“We’d have heard about it,” Mark said.

“If it was someone we knew, maybe. But who would blab about stealing something like that? Or what if the cops took it for evidence?” said Henry.

“The cops didn’t need evidence, douchebag. Grandin died in the fire. No charges, no trial. Case closed,” Mark said.

“I don’t know. I heard they couldn’t identify his body,” said Henry.

“Yeah, his face burned off, and the heat cracked his teeth,” Nabhi said.

Mark frowned then punched Henry in the shoulder. “Chickenshit. I knew you’d p***y out. Don’t play the game if you don’t have the balls to follow through.”

“Shut up, loser.” Henry swatted Mark away. “I said I’d do it, and I’ll do it. But if it’s not there, I still did it, okay? I go in there and it’s gone or I can’t find it, I still did the dare.”

“Fine. Whatever. But you have to go down to the cellar and hunt for it. You either come out with the mask, prove you searched high and low, or I kick your ass. Now get in there before you bore us all to tears,” said Mark.

Henry faced the burned-out Super Family Mart, the big box store’s scorched walls and cracked glass only ashy, lightless smudges in the night. Clouds shifted, leaking moonlight down onto red-and-white “No Trespassing” signs plastered on the boarded-up entrances. Day-Glo orange posters touted the building’s condemned status. The store’s name and logo—a smiling, red dollar sign in a blue cape—loomed overhead, its high-wattage lights darkened more than a year.

Henry shivered.

He had shopped here dozens of times before the place burned, often with his dad on runs for supplies to fix up the house. He had even applied for a part-time job once, and shaken hands with the store manager, “the demon of Quogue Neck” himself, Avery Grandin; and when the man’s sleeve tugged back, revealing vertical scabs on his forearm, Henry barely noticed them. He had other worries then. Two days before Grandin torched the store, Henry had shopped there with a black eye and three boxes of screws to exchange for the right size ones his father needed, the size written down this time, rushing to get them home before his father got off work.

Marie’s gentle hand squeezed his arm.

“Don’t go in, Henry. It isn’t safe. Let’s go home, all right? Dad will kill you if he finds out you went in there.”

Henry scowled at her. “He’s not going to find out, right?”

Marie shook her head and covered her mouth with her hand, all her plastic gypsy rings glittering with moonlight. A freshman, Henry’s kid sister still liked to dress up for Halloween. At her side, her best friend, Sam, a year older, zipped her leather coat against the breeze and gave an exasperated sigh. She held Henry’s hand for a moment. Her touch set his hairs on end and gave him goosebumps before she let go to tighten the black scarf around her neck.

“It’s too risky. The floors could give out. Something might fall on you. You could cut yourself on broken glass or rusty nails. Breathe in something poison. Forget this. Let’s go back to the bonfire, okay? My brother has a cooler. Maybe he’ll slip us a few beers. Who cares what Mark thinks?” she said.

Henry mustered up a smile for his sister and her friend. His friend too now—much more than a friend if he didn’t screw things up. “If Nabhi’s brother did a job in there, how bad could it be? Right, Nabhi?”

Nabhi flashed an exaggerated expression of disgust. “My brother wore a hazmat suit. They worked in groups of three for two hours at a time, max. They didn’t even see rats, man, and they always see rats.”

Henry’s smile faltered. “Guess I’ll have the place to myself then.”

“Screw this. I’m going back to the bonfire. You lose, Henrietta,” said Mark.

“Shut up, tool, I’m going already.”

Henry pulled an LED flashlight keychain from his pocket. He switched it on and, aiming through a gap in the boards, speared part of a window with its cold, white beam. Light pooled on the sooty glass, faltering when it reached the darkness beyond. Henry leaned against the window, pressed the flashlight right up to the glass, and cupped one hand over his eyes.

“What do you see?” Nabhi asked.

Henry smirked. “Mark’s mom, blowing a hobo.”

“Asshole,” said Mark. “You got ten seconds to get your ass in there before you lose and I beat the s**t out of you for talking smack about my mom.”

“Sorry.” Henry edged along the front of the store, putting distance between himself and Mark, heading for an emergency exit rumored to be broken and unlocked. Rounding the corner, he shouted back: “I shouldn’t have said that about your mom. I mean, it was your sister blowing the hobo.”

Mark swore. His footfalls slapped the crumbly pavement.

Henry bolted out of sight and rushed to the windowless side door, praying to find the lock smashed as promised, wishing suddenly for more assurance than the word of Adam Hammill from computer club. The door looked perfectly intact. Henry’s insides twisted in an anxious knot. He grabbed the handle, jerked it, then winced at the sharp jag of the lever biting his palm as it held rock solid. Mark skidded into sight, stopped, pushed up the sleeves of his varsity football jacket, and then, with fists clenched, stalked toward Henry.

Henry yanked the handle up and down and pulled on the door; neither budged.

“You’re so dead. I don’t even care about the dare anymore. I can’t wait to beat you,” Mark said.

Too nervous to censor himself, Henry said, “It’ll be a change of pace for you, beating on me instead of beating off right?”

Mark laughed. “Oh, keep it coming, dead man.”

Panicked, Henry thrust with all his weight and strength against the door, pushing inward instead of yanking outward. The frame creaked and popped. The door jolted, scraping open into a darkness that swallowed the moonlight. Henry stared into a perfect void across the threshold. The stink of ash and mildew, of burnt plastic and moldering drywall poured out. In the vast husk of the abandoned store, something dripped, and the walls seemed to groan with the weight of the darkness. Henry wanted to turn back, but Mark—approaching red-faced with a nasty grin—left him nowhere to go.

Behind Mark, the store parking lot seemed like an impassable stone sea, the high chain link fence along its perimeter a rogue wave, frozen as it broke on the unreachable shore of the empty street. Sodium vapor streetlamps gilded everything copper. The distance hadn’t seemed so great on the way in. A paper Halloween decoration blew down the road like an enormous, orange-and-black winged moth, snagged on the fence for a moment, then tumbled away. Then the moonshadows of Henry’s friends jumped from around front of the store as they caught up to Mark.

Henry picked out Sam’s long, graceful shadow and that decided him. He never wanted Sam to see him as weak or frightened. Nothing would flip the killswitch on their young romance faster than Sam watching her junior, would-be boyfriend reduced to ground meat by her shithead, senior ex—and Henry didn’t want to fight anyway, didn’t want to be the asshole who solved his problems with his fists. The thought stiff-armed him into the blackness. He jogged several yards into the store then cut down a vaguely discernable aisle, dousing his light to hide from Mark, whose broad figure towered in the moonlit doorway.

“I’ll be waiting for you, asshole. You come out without the mask, I’ll f*****g break you. You hear me, dead man?”

Mark’s voice echoed in the darkness.

The voices of Henry’s friends joined it—Nabhi warning him to be careful, Marie and Sam yelling for him to come out, but the sound of Sam’s voice only urged him deeper into the dead store, where his feet scuffed debris, and a cobweb brushed his ear. He switched on his keychain light to check his location. He stood two-thirds of the way down the outdoor aisle, its shelves empty except for the dregs of melted rubber hoses and a gathering of garden gnomes with blackened beards and scorched eyes, their red and green hats miraculously intact.

He walked to the rear of the store and the stockroom entrance. The stale stench of char and wet wood and the musty odor of rot invaded his nostrils. He gagged, raised the collar of his T-shirt over his mouth and nose, then entered the stockroom and located the cellar stairs. Giving himself no time to reconsider, he started down, spotting each sagging riser with his light as he descended, expecting one to break anytime. At the bottom, he swept the cellar with his light, which suddenly seemed inadequate for anything more than finding one’s keys in the driveway.

The quiet of the cellar amplified the rapid whoosh of his breathing.

He pulled out his iPhone, checked the time—he’d been in the store about six minutes—then turned the light of its display forward, kicking himself for never downloading the flashlight app Marie had showed him. He would’ve nabbed it now if he got any kind of signal down here just for a little extra light. Orienting himself, he recalled the diagram he’d seen in news reports online that showed Avery Grandin’s hidden dungeon in the northwest corner, and then he picked his way past the burned remains of stock shelves and inventory reduced to ash, walking almost an entire block under the store before he found what remained of Grandin’s false walls. They lay dismantled, probably by police and fire investigators, and stacked outside the narrow opening into the dungeon they had hidden. The news said it had once been an electrical room.

Henry confronted the doorway.

Another blank space.

Another chance to prove himself to Mark, to Sam.

To himself.

To his father.

A tiny step on a passage away from fear, a path he hoped—if he proved determined enough—would lead him far away from home. Maybe with Sam beside him, the two of them leaving Quogue Neck behind and never looking back. Sam made it all seem real—or at least possible. It still awed him that she liked him, that she’d even kissed him once. Sam, who’d quit cheer squad to take AP classes, the same as Henry took. More than anything, as silent waves of darkness swirled around him, he wanted to smell Sam’s hair and feel the warmth of her hand in his again. He didn’t know what she saw in him, but he wanted to be that person, the brave version of himself worthy of Sam’s heart—not the version who cowered in his bedroom with tears in his eyes until his father’s rages passed, or the version pushed around by Mark since the fourth grade.

He entered Grandin’s dungeon and inhaled its dank air.

His light revealed rusty chains bolted to a concrete floor stained by the remnants of black, liquid splotches. A rancid odor tickled his nose. Everything turned real then—and for a moment, Henry thought he might pee himself. His heart pounded in his chest, and his muscles quivered. A voice from the back of his mind told him he didn’t belong here, that he should get out, that he should’ve chosen to tell a truth, to answer the question he knew Mark would ask, and admit how he felt about Sam and what he wanted to do with her—but Mark would’ve asked it in the nastiest way possible simply to humiliate Sam. Henry couldn’t take part in that if he wanted to keep his promise to himself to be nothing like his father. The dare had been his only choice.