The Fading Page 13

  ‘Of course I know it,’ he said. ‘I grew up in Boulder, remember?’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ John said. ‘What I meant is, how well do you know it? The people, the scene?’

  ‘Oh. Not very. It’s not my thing.’

  ‘Well, we’re worried it might have become a bit too much of Julie’s scene.’ John paused, clearing his throat in that way he always had done when he wanted to impart the seriousness of the matter. ‘I was thinking maybe you could take a walk by her place. See what you see. Shit, that sounds awfully creepy. We don’t need be dishonest about this. We’re just concerned. Just knock on the door, introduce yourself to the roommates – the one I spoke to is a Sarah? Sarah or Sasha. If you can find Julie and get a look at her, see for yourself how she’s doing, that’d help Lisa calm down a good bit.’

  ‘And you’re worried she’s, what? An addict now? No offense, I just want to understand what I’m walking into.’

  John sounded relieved someone was asking straight questions. ‘I don’t know, but yes, maybe. There was an incident a couple years ago, when she was in high school. Pot. A few pills. We didn’t think it that unusual for an eighteen-year-old, and her grades were still top-flight. But she’s been going through a lot of money this semester and her grades have tanked. Her emergency credit card is maxed out. Can you take a walk for me, Noel?’

  ‘I guess so. Yeah.’

  John caught the hesitation in his voice. ‘But what?’

  How should he word this? ‘Well, last time I saw her, she wasn’t exactly … I mean, it’s a little weird me showing up out of nowhere now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hear you. But time has passed. Lisa and I agree it wasn’t all your fault. I think the two of you were young and impressionable. Got your hormones mixed up, all right?’

  ‘That’s not how you felt two days ago.’

  ‘I was angry, Noel. We were talking about things I thought we agreed were not helpful.’

  ‘So you don’t think I forced myself on her? I just want to be clear.’

  John sighed for the third or fourth time. ‘Whatever happened, it was an accident. We know that. Julie knows that. And my sense was, aside from the scare she had, I think she liked you just fine. You’re a good guy. I can count on you to do the right thing and avoid any, ah, decisions that might upset her, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Noel said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you go by tonight?’ John said. ‘Lisa’s starting to panic, so the sooner the better. Call me back collect.’

  ‘It’s gonna be midnight by the time I get there,’ Noel said.

  ‘Is it that late? Even so, might be the right time to have a peek, nothing more if the lights are off. But if there’s a party, you see what I mean?’

  ‘Okay,’ Noel said. ‘I’ll do a walk-by tonight, see if the place is Animal House. If not, I’ll go back tomorrow morning and knock on the door.’

  John gave him the address on 10th Street, one block off College. Noel started to write it on his palm, but the ink became disappearing ink and he had to start over on the back of the frozen dinner box.

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Thanks, Noel. Keep warm out there. We saw on the weather you got yourself some new snow.’

  ‘Not yet, but probably soon.’

  ‘Let me know.’

  Before Noel could answer, John hung up.

  Noel went upstairs and dressed warmly, knowing he couldn’t take the 4-Runner. Two days he’d been under. How was he going to contact Julie in this state, the same state he had been in when he nearly killed her mother? Maybe it would release him tomorrow. Tonight he would just have a look, see what he could see while no one could see him. If she was up to no good, his current condition might even prove to be an asset.

  At just a few minutes past midnight, Noel stepped out to find that his father had been right. The sky had formed a blanket of deep gray and was now releasing a slowly descending storm of snowflakes. He would have to be careful. Soon there would be enough for him to leave footprints. He shouldn’t be doing this. But being outdoors and walking in the cold felt good, woke him up and made him feel alive in ways he hadn’t felt in months.

  He found the Boulder Creek path and trekked past Boulder High, across the now white football field, then cut up Broadway, which at this hour and in this weather was mostly deserted. The university came into view, and then the Hill proper, with its loud bars and coffee-shop urchins and rowdy students trying to make snowballs while they smoked on the sidewalks. After the Hill he moved into the residential streets, circling until he found 10th and College.

  He followed the addresses, and double-checked the torn piece of TV dinner carton in his pocket to make sure he’d gotten it right. 1024 College. But here was 1016, 1020, and past this out-of-control stand of pine trees, 1028.

  No 1024.

  He went around the same block three times, checking both sides of the street, but he couldn’t find the house. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He continued on, circling, checking numbers, certain he had it wrong. Her house had to be here somewhere. But it wasn’t. Julie had lied about her address. Which meant she was probably lying about much more than her address.

  Noel found himself roaming in a broadening spiral, further and further from home, deeper into the old bungalows and Victorians and brick Colonials that had been divided for student living. He strolled past fraternity and sorority houses. He watched the windows and covered front porches and alleyways for signs of life, and the more he walked the less tired he became.

  The trees turned white, and the streets brightened under twilight as the storm settled in. Snowflakes fell on his shoulders and eyelashes and whether they melted upon impact or were absorbed by his mighty shield against the world, he could not say.

  Midnight turned to one, and one blurred past two in the morning. The sky became one great big shredded down pillow of a storm. Noel walked on, looking for a sign, lost and searching for the only girl he had ever opened his heart to and who, for a few sweet days that seemed a lifetime ago, had opened her heart to him.

  16

  After canvassing most of the Hill, up to the cemetery at 9th, he had navigated the south side of campus, around the student housing towers behind The Dark Horse Tavern and the old Wheels Roller Rink (now a health club, dormant at this hour), then cut back through campus, as if Julie might choose the middle of the night during a snowstorm to join a game of disc golf. Feeling like the most extreme case of foreign exchange student as he gazed up at the departmental buildings with their rows of darkened classroom windows, at nearly three in the morning, he began retracing his original route back toward home.

  The snow had stopped falling, but it was everywhere and thick. Noel was tired and his feet, even clad in two pairs of socks and his heavy Sorels, were numb. His thighs were weak from trudging and slipping through the storm. The twin churning tunnels made by his weevil-burrowing feet were the only signatures of his passage through the eight inches of fresh powder.

  He got within two blocks of his apartment, but the thought of calling his father with no update was too depressing, so he continued east, then south, cutting back up to Folsom Stadium, the CU football field, and further east until he was within spitting distance of the Foothills Parkway, scraping Boulder’s fringes.

  Boulder had close to a hundred thousand residents, thirty or forty thousand of them students. The citizenry were a haystack buried under a snowstorm and Julie was a needle with a fake address. He didn’t know any of her friends. He didn’t know anybody. What the hell had he been thinking? He was useless. He was dizzy, hungry, having left his frozen TV dinner in his new microwave. If he was really worried about Julie, he would go home now and call his dad, tell him about the mistaken address, tell John it was past time to call campus security or the local police. Someone who could actually do something about a missing girl.

  The shortest route home led back through
campus, and he lost his sense of direction, cutting through more buildings and courtyard commons, running into a wall of pine trees. The trees were planted ten or twenty feet apart but the lower rungs of their branches fanned into each other like gears, making his passage through them a gauntlet of spiked turnstiles springing into his thighs and chest, hurling snow at his face.

  When he got out of that mess, he saw that he was now back on the Hill, right across Broadway, only two or three blocks from his original destination. Delirious and beyond tired, he started to laugh and before he knew it he was standing at the corner of 11th and College again. He went toward the mountains, turned onto 10th, and slowed, watching every mailbox, every driveway, more trees, this goddamned town was nothing but trees, and nearly tripped over somebody’s frozen newspaper – wait a minute.

  Those trees.

  Noel backed up ten, then twenty paces, wiping snow from his eyes.

  1016 College.

  1020 College.

  And now a long, wide stand of pines, just like the ones he had hacked through minutes ago. This border was similar, and he went a few more steps, peering around the wide snow-laden branches. There was a driveway here, a very narrow path made of parallel sidewalks, most of it grown over. Noel shoved his way through and popped out on a small lawn in front of a house that was set maybe a dozen paces deeper on its lot than the neighboring houses were on theirs.

  ‘Dumb dumb dumb …’

  He’d walked a good six, maybe ten miles tonight and it had been here all along.

  1024.

  The address was painted on the middle of six concrete steps leading to the covered front porch of a brown-trimmed, deep purple brick bungalow. All the lights were off. The driveway was empty, but who would bother parking back here when they had to drive through a Christmas tree lot to do so? There were no mountain bikes or lawn chairs, no candles on the window sills, no hammocks or beer bottles, nothing that said here there be students. The porch’s front barrier wall of brick was bulging, the concrete seams crumbled and missing in many places. One good kick, he could topple that wall into the yard. Safety hazard, landlord headache. Though the house was less than three blocks from the Hill’s nightlife, the street was so quiet and the house so solemn it may as well have been ten miles from the town center.

  He thought of those old ladies, the holdovers, the real bone and liver spot warriors on a walker, ninety-year-old crazies who refuse to sell even when the neighbors are raining beer bottles down on the roof and some developer or pregnant yuppie couple was offering half a million to just please go away and die already.

  Noel climbed the steps, trailing little worms of snow from his boot soles onto the clean dry porch. More disrepair: two of the three front windows were cracked, none had blinds or curtains. The third was broken, a few triangular glass teeth dangling by the last of the putty, allowing the cold air to flow directly into the living room.

  The front door was thick with many semesters of paint, the latest coat a yellowing cue ball white with a dirty brass mail slot. At the top of the door, in lurid orange streaks, someone had painted FUNHOUSE. The doorknob was missing, only the stripped bolt jutting forth. Noel pressed his nose to the left window and saw a narrow closet door and a mess of styrofoam peanuts spilled across the wood floor. A small bedroom was his guess; vacant not a guess at all. The window on the other side of the door gave him a view into the living room. A white stone fireplace streaked with soot, more bare floorboards, leaves blown into one corner, and a single cable antenna extended from the wall like a crooked twig.

  If anyone lived in this house, they were squatters, derelicts.

  But already he knew that no one lived here.

  Just to be sure, Noel removed his right glove, sticky with pine sap, and reached through the broken pane, up to his shoulder, and waved his hand in the empty air. No heat. If such thing were possible, the living room was colder than the air outside. Outside the temperature was probably no more than twenty-five degrees, but to his naked hand the air inside the house felt like a deep freezer in someone’s garage. He withdrew his arm and turned, looking at the trees, the tops of the other houses beyond, recalling the rest of the block, the neighborhood.

  This was strange in a number of ways. The house was prime real estate. These houses, so close to campus and the action on the Hill, were never vacant. Three to six students usually chipped in, splitting rent of a couple thousand dollars. Demand was high. The other houses within sight, and the tall white apartment building at the corner, looked occupied. Cars, bikes, lights on in at least some of the windows, kids studying, pulling an all-nighter.

  Why not this house? What was wrong with it?

  It was February, which meant the spring semester had only recently begun, which meant Julie probably hadn’t moved in and left so soon, which meant one way or another she was lying to her parents and had been for some time. Even if you’re on a downward spiral, it takes more than a few weeks of a new semester to get kicked out. John had mentioned roommates. They all got kicked out? Not likely.

  So, no one had lived here for a while. The landlord was losing maybe twenty-five hundred a month. Noel hadn’t seen a FOR SALE or FOR RENT sign in the window, or out on the sidewalk. Why wasn’t it on the market?

  During his inspection, the healing lines of stitched flesh along Noel’s left arm had begun to itch. They were burning now. Despite having stopped walking almost ten minutes ago, he was sweating inside his new parka and jeans and the two pairs of socks he’d pulled on before stepping into his boots. And he didn’t feel like he was catching a cold. This wasn’t a fever.

  Something was wrong here. He was starting to feel nauseated the way he had in The Cork two (or was it three?) nights ago.

  Something inside the house was affecting him. It wanted him to enter. He was being called to it, the way he had been called to the restaurant’s men’s room from his dinner table. He looked at the door again. FUN-HOUSE. The cracked and broken windows. The house was dark and cold and, hell no, he did not want to go inside and have a look around.

  But his arm was crawling with trails of fire ants. The cuts themselves felt alive. Noel’s body, this strange vessel that moved with its own mysterious cloak, was responding to whatever was in here. Which convinced him that whatever was inside this house, however benign or malignant it might prove to be, had something to do with Julie, or with his own peculiar condition. He had not walked all night and been drawn back here to chicken out. Julie was in some kind of trouble, and the clues to her situation (or his own) were only steps away. He was sure of this.

  Noel took hold of the threaded peg where the knob used to be, jabbed it forward with the heel of his gloved palm, heard it clang and roll on the wood floor. He jabbed again and the door cracked free, swinging into the house as a small rain of dried paint crumbled at his invisible feet.

  ‘Hello,’ he called out, knowing no one would answer, but needing to do it anyway. ‘I’m coming in. No harm here, I’m just looking for a friend.’

  But he was wrong, quite wrong, for he had gone no more than a dozen steps through the living room and was angling toward the kitchen when someone did answer.

  17

  What was that? No, seriously. What in the name of Christ was that sound?

  The sound, or words, if that’s what they were, had come from the back of the kitchen and Noel didn’t really want to turn his back on whatever had made them. He stood in the living room, waiting for it to come again, to say something else, but the minutes wore on and nothing happened.

  I want to go home.

  That’s what it had sounded like. A genderless voice, soft and tired. Only, it wasn’t normal human speech. It was as if someone had said, ‘I want to go home’ through a mouthful of wooden toothpicks. And then it came again, in more of a slur of word-sounds, as if the speaker were slipping under the rubber nitrous mask before a brief but painful medical procedure from which it might never wake up.

  Eye-ont-oo-O-home.

  Fo
llowed by two minutes of silence.

  Behind him was the first, empty bedroom he had glimpsed on the left side of the house. Closer to where he now stood, also on the left, was a closed door. Another small bedroom, he assumed, but the sound hadn’t come from this direction.

  Directly in front of him, to the right of the kitchen, was a bathroom. This door was open, and he could see the side lip of a bathtub, the protruding flare of the toilet bowl. The bathroom was empty (of course it was empty, the whole house was empty, except for that splintered voice) and, besides, the voice sounded like it had come through the arched entrance to the kitchen.

  The fire-itching burn along the cuts in his left arm wasn’t so bad now that he was inside. The maddening ant-crawling had ceased. Now there was only a mild warmth, soothing, like ointment. This did not make him feel better about being here.

  ‘Oh God, please,’ the voice came again, more strained but not as garbled. ‘I can’t breathe in here.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Noel said, surprising himself. ‘Where are you?’

  The voice did not answer.

  He walked quickly into the kitchen. A sink, an old blue or aqua green refrigerator, a brown electrical stove. Appliances that had been new and stylish in the sixties or seventies. The floor was tacky, stained with grease and dirt. On the back wall, hanging over a little breakfast table, was a warped paper calendar turned to the month of May. Noel moved closer. The picture above the date boxes was of a man on a ladder, painting the exterior of a house. His blond hair was perfectly parted and his painting attire consisted of trousers, dress shoes and a button-down shirt. Kwal Paint Turns a House into a Home! read the jaunty tagline above the man’s head. The year was 1964. Almost thirty years ago. Long time to leave a calendar hanging on a wall.

  ‘I’m going to miss you all so much.’

  There it was again. The wounded voice, clarifying with every new complaint. Noel thought it was coming from the kitchen closet, but the voice sounded farther away than right behind this door.