(Posted July 31, 2018)

Watch the Walls

Year of Water, Spring of the Aligned Raindrops

Friday, May 14th, 2004 - 7:57 pm

Okay. The spotlights trained on his position he could accept. The podium, sure. Fake applause? Understandable. But it was the corny game show music that set Kevin's teeth on edge. Where was that even coming from? Sure, the living room was dark (minus the lights on him and his uncle), but Kevin couldn't see any trailing wires or pumping speakers nearby.

None of this seemed to bother his uncle, who didn't seem to have a problem sweeping the nephew he'd never met into a fairy-catching net trap, so he probably didn't have a problem blasting music through the house at this time of night either. When Kevin raised his head from the podium, he saw Uncle Denzel straightening his tie.

"And we're back, folks, on Crocker or Fairy? Where today, my nephew Kevin (If that's who he really is) will prove his identity to both me and the world if he can correctly deliver the answers to five simple trivia questions I have here in my hands." Uncle Denzel laughed. "Simple! As if! Now, let's jump straight into it, shall we? Kevin Crocker?"

Kevin straightened to attention. His hands gripped the sides of the podium he stood behind. "Um. Yes, Uncle Denzel?" His voice squeaked in the microphone jutting up at his mouth.

"Your first question. What was… 11th United States president James Polk's middle name?"

Thankfully, an easy one to answer. Kevin's fingers didn't relax anyway. "Um. Knox?"

The applause rocketed from the corners of the room again. "He got it right," Uncle Denzel shouted, clinging to the railing of his platform as he hopped up and down. "Astounding! Stupendous! Ohh, Kevin's alibi is looking promising straight out of the gate! Now, let's see how he defends himself against the sharkvark stampede!"

"How I what the which what when?"

Another net fell from the ceiling. His Uncle Denzel seemed to keep a lot of those around. He also seemed quite happy to keep a lot of levers around, as he for some reason had a giant red one protruding from the wall near the platform where he stood. When he thrust it down, grinning like a maniac, a panel slid sideways in a nearby wall just like the one in the tree. A single snarling… thing rocketed into the room. Kevin screamed, diving behind the podium. "Gurrp! Mommy, why?!"

The alleged sharkvark scuttled straight past him and disappeared under a sagging armchair before Kevin could get a close look at its face.

"Excellent form! Top notch duck and cover! A classic response! The desperate plea for mercy could use a bit of work, but I sense the pathetic Crocker genes in his blood already." Uncle Denzel whipped out a second index card from someplace or other and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his glasses. "And speaking of sharks, we're onto Round 2. Kevin? If you're so clever, then what do you call the type of scales that cover a shark's cartilaginous body?"

Kevin, still rocking back and forth, brought his hands away from his eyes. He crawled out from under this new net, brushing loops and tendrils of it from his shoulders. "Uh… shagreen? I mean, I mean, uh… dermal denticles?"

"That's fantastic! And something only a real Crocker would know! You live with your mother and her shark-skin elbows for sure. Way to familiarize yourself with those unusual adjectives, my boy. They'll come in handy when you're ranting about her furiously to a crowd of snot-nosed brats someday, so keep it up. Almost to the finish line here. And now, for your third question… It's something your mother promised that only her little boy could answer. What is a mesioden?"

"Ooh!" Kevin flashed to his feet, abandoning his trepidation. He beat his hand back and forth in the air. "Ooh ooh ooh! I know this one! A mesioden is a super rare molar that might grow in the back of your mouth if you have a condition called hyperdontia!"

"Absolutely! Now, pop quiz! Tell me the only place in the world where you could walk outside and find a gelada monkey in its natural habitat?"

"Ethiopia!"

Uncle Denzel clapped his hand against his head. "I can't believe it! He's a natural! He's hit every curveball I've thrown at him! Clearly a boy after my own heart! Ladies and gentlemen, we only have one question left. If today's contestant answers correctly, then not only would it prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he really is my estranged nephew from Peachfield, Idaho, but also that-"

"Just read my final card, Uncle Denzel!"

Uncle Denzel raised his arm for silence. "Now, now, Kevin. Keep your socks on. Okay. Are you ready for this?"

"I'm ready!"

"Are you really ready for it?"

"Heh! Heheheheheh! Do I look like I'm not? You're facing down the lifelong champion of random useless trivia back home, Uncle Denzel! Hit me and hit me with it hard!"

"Then allow me to present you with your final question. What would you call a human with extraordinary abilities far beyond the norm who draws these powers from mechanical enhancements embedded into his flesh and blood?"

This was it. This was his moment. Kevin crouched as low as he could get, drawing in all his muscle power, and sprang as high as possible. In mid-air, he twisted around. His arms crossed. His eyes rolled about. His legs flailed.

"A CYBORG!"

"Ding ding ding!" Uncle Denzel flung his hands in the air. Index cards rained in all directions. "Congratulations, Kevin, my boy! You passed with phenomenal marks! It's a brand new Crocker or Fairy? record! Show him what he's won, Mother!"

Kevin jumped up and down behind the podium, kicking up his heels each time. "Woo-hoo! I won! I won!" He stopped, hands still high above his head. "Wait, what do I win?"

The spotlight that had been trained on Uncle Denzel swiveled over to the opposite corner of the living room. Kevin cocked his head. No one was there, although a plate of fresh-smelling white chocolate macadamia cookies sat unattended on a small table with an old-fashioned house phone. Three cat figurines and a bowl of gumdrops sat beside it. One figurine fell over with a rattle, as though the nervous table had purposely knocked it to the floor.

"Oh, right." Deflating like a Crocker-shaped balloon, Uncle Denzel dropped his weight back onto his heels and touched a finger to his chin. "It's Bingo Night again. Of course the vile shrew would do this to me. Well, at least Mother isn't around to yell at me for dirtying up her good china." And he shrugged. "Help yourself to a cookie, Kevin, and ignore me when I refuse them myself. Those babies wouldn't be doing anything for my cholesterol or my internal plumbing, if you know what I mean."

Despite the curious giddy feeling now racing through his veins, Kevin took a cookie from the plate with some reluctance. He couldn't help but wonder if his uncle knew about his MSG sensitivity. Maybe he'd had the cookies laced with glutamate, and this was all still part of the test to prove he really was Kevin Quinton Crocker from Peachfield, Idaho. Still chewing through his cookie, Kevin idly reached for the gumdrop bowl.

"Don't eat those!"

"Mmuh?" Kevin asked through his cookie.

All of a sudden, Uncle Denzel looked embarrassed. "Those, uh… aren't really… sanitary. Even the cats won't touch them. I just keep them around to hand out to children from my class who I hate."

"Oh." Kevin brushed crumbs from his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Uh… So, um, not that this wasn't real fun and all, but what's going on, Uncle Denzel? I thought your note said you were going to the hardware store. Maybe for some light switch covers?"

Uncle Denzel swung his arm, brandishing his index finger. "Ha! Of course you'd expect that! That's exactly what I wanted you to think!"

Well, yeah. That's what he had thought.

Uncle Denzel hopped down from his platform for the first time. Actually, "hopped" probably wasn't the right word for it. He dove sideways, cartwheeling from the stand and flipping over when he hit the ground so he landed perfectly on his feet. Oh. Okay. Without even pausing, he threw an arm around Kevin's shoulders and gave him a few pats on the chest with the other hand. "Come in, come in! Though watch your step. As you can clearly see, over the years I've had to set traps and tests around the house in order to prevent it from being infiltrated by FAIRIES! After all, I'm Denzel Crocker, world-class FAIRY-CATCHER extraordinaire!"

"Oh," Kevin said. Each time his uncle used the word "fairy," he jerked about like a shrieking mess. Sometimes he kicked his legs into the air behind him. Kevin was starting to see which side of the family he got his cyborg fascination from.

"And, because I care about your mental health, and NOT because I need a convenient excuse to leave you in the house while I stalk Turner and Carmichael halfway across town, I've invited over a set of three stepsiblings who attend the fifth-grade like you over at good ol' Dimmsdale Elementary, where you'll be attending school starting Monday, and where I teach snot-nosed little brats who refuse to hand over their FAIRY GODPARENTS!"

On that phrase, Uncle Denzel suddenly snapped up straight despite the hump on his back. His arms went one way. His legs went another. For a good three seconds, the man actually appeared to be hovering in midair, like some sort of pasty, nearsighted vampire bat. He landed on the floor again, and looked over at Kevin.

"Where was I?"

"Uh…" Kevin pushed up his glasses with two fingers. Uncle Denzel had knocked them askew.

"Oh, yes. I remember it all so clearly now. Well, I invited the three of them to come over and welcome you into our quaint little town with open arms. Can't say I know them all that well or even like them very much, but who cares? They agreed! Someone accepted one of my invitations! A whole three of them!" He sounded as giddy as a child on a top-speed merry-go-round.

"What?" Kevin's question was actually, You're a school teacher? as in, You're a school teacher, and you endanger small children and crush their dreams of a pleasant, uneventful summer spent doing whatever they want? And you can afford high-tech speaker systems inside of trees and instant game show equipment inside your living room? Even a simple What just happened? would be a valid thing to ask. But Uncle Denzel seemed to interpret the stammered word as something else. Admiringly, he held his nephew away from him by the shoulders.

"Oh, don't look so abashed, Kevin! My estranged half-sister Denise, who happens to be fourteen years younger than me and ran off with her chump train-hopping boyfriend while I was still attending North Baltimore Community College in order to receive my teaching degree after losing out on the chance and financial gains of a lifetime here at both Harvard and Dimmsdale University, informed me that you've been struggling with the whole 'new stepsibling' thing! Since she's your mother and it's her job to unexpectedly ruin your life in order to bestow upon you valuable life skills you'll never actually use and really could have been taught another way, then logically that must mean it's my job to ensure you're health and safety while I strip you of all the inhibitions your mother believes may come between her and this marriage with a man you never intended to view as a father figure and his daughter, who's lived two towns over from you your entire life and you really don't feel ready to bring into your bubble of personal space this soon after learning your mother expects you to act as though she's been your sister ever since you were born."

Kevin… remained speechless. Uncle Denzel didn't seem to require or even desire a response, so he steered Kevin into the wood-paneled hallway and babbled on.

"Well, since I had no real idea when you'd arrive and I couldn't be bothered to look up the bus schedule online, I told your sympathizers to stop by around, oh, 8:53ish tonight. So, you still have an hour to start getting comfortable with the place. Over there's the kitchen, and the dining room is in the back. Not that we ever get any use out of it unless Mother has her biker or Bridge friends over, so basically, it's yours! The bathroom's right here in the hall in case you happen to end up needing it. Not that you'll want to use this one very often if it can be avoided. Let's not get into the reasons why." He chuckled to himself and pushed Kevin a little faster. "Well, come upstairs, and I'll show you to your room."

"O-okay…" Kevin was still wearing his backpack, and he had his toolbox. His suitcase and pillow were apparently staying downstairs for now. He didn't have much say in that.

The stairs doubled back on themselves halfway up, folding into triangles in a way that reminded Kevin of Mommy's grilled cheese sandwiches. Two cats sunned themselves in the last of the sunlight leaking through a small window, their heads and paws nestled together. Both pricked their ears as the Crockers came close. The smoky black one fled upstairs at top speed, his puffed tail streaming behind him. Kevin didn't see where he went. The second cat was one of those hairless skinned-potato cats with wrinkles instead of fur, and a few dark blotches on her chest and back. One of them looked rather a lot like the state of Idaho, although the rest were unremarkable. Her eyes were blue-violet, searing into Kevin's forehead with intelligence beyond his expectations. Her fangs stuck out like snaggleteeth. Uncle Denzel brightened when she sat up. He even released Kevin's shoulders, although he continued to block the stairs–and therefore Kevin's path to the front door, which was too bad. You know. In case of emergencies.

"Girlfriend, you're awake!" Uncle Denzel scooped the sluggish cat into his arms. "Have you met my nephew, Kevin?"

"Mrrow," said the cat, snuggling against his shoulder. Her slitted eyes stared down at Kevin, fiery as a warning bell. Her face was narrow, her ears enormous. In fact, she was just plain weird. But those eyes were the worst. They were like flashing police lights breathing down his neck. Or headlights flaring to life on a smashed junkyard car. Kevin flinched against the banister. Disregarding this, Uncle Denzel turned and offered him the cat with proud arms.

"Go on, Kevin. Don't be shy. You'll like Girlfriend. She's a real hoot after dark, and unlike Smokey, she actually belongs to me instead of Mother! It's just like winning the lottery, except this way I get to own a cat!" Uncle Denzel suddenly paused. "You're not allergic to cats, are you?"

Briefly, Kevin debated saying yes. The hairless cat dangling in front of him looked more like a naked human baby than a feline, and not at all something he really wanted to pet. But then that would be lying, and as crazy as his uncle had shown himself to be so far, Kevin really didn't want to lie to him. He shook his head and in slow motion brought his hand to Girlfriend's head. She flattened her ears.

"Don't worry," his uncle assured him. "That just means she likes it."

"But I haven't even touched her yet."

Uncle Denzel continued to hold out the scrawny cat. Oh gosh, he was actually waiting for Kevin to pet her. And he would probably continue waiting for Kevin to pet her. So Kevin did. The cat's flesh was warm and vaguely fuzzy like the skin of a peach. His fingers touched weird wrinkles along her body. When his fingers passed over the Idaho-shaped mark on the back of her neck, she growled at him, flashing her teeth. Kevin withdrew his hand, fast, and twisted his body away.

"Iih! She's giving me a funny look, Uncle Denzel."

"That's just my face, dear," said the cat.

Kevin jerked back so quickly, he hit his funny bone on the banister. "Ahh! It talks!"

"What?" Uncle Denzel looked down at the cat in his hands. But instead of saying "That's ridiculous, animals can't talk," you know, like a normal person, he studied the cat in honest surprise. "Really? I thought Girlfriend only talked to Mother."

"But didn't you hear her?"

"She meows a little funny every now and again, but she doesn't mean anyone any harm."

"But… but…" Kevin searched Girlfriend's bored face for clues and answers. "She did talk! Honest!"

"Then she's been holding out on me," his uncle muttered.

The cat mewed again. This time it sounded like mockery. Kevin had started to look away, but upon hearing her, he snapped his attention back around. Creepy and naked as she was, he brought his face right up against hers and squinted. Hard. At least if she chose to strike at his eyes with her claws, she'd hit his glasses first. "Ooh. Maybe she's a robot, Uncle Denzel. She could be a cyborg!"

Uncle Denzel sighed. "No, Kevin. Cyborg was Mother's other pet cat. Believe it or not, that was his name even before he lost his front legs in a treadmill accident and was taken in to be fitted for prosthetics. He had his own cushy cat bed, but he always tried to sleep under Mother's dresser whenever the door was open. If he were still alive, I'd bring him downstairs whenever I serve my students detention over the weekends. Ha! That would keep them from following me home after school!"

The bald cat wasn't revealing any further signs of intelligence, so Kevin pulled away. "Hmm. Can I take her apart–I mean, take her to my room, Uncle Denzel?"

Girlfriend continued to look just as unenthusiastic about this idea as she looked about everything. But Uncle Denzel gave the question some thought. "Well… as long as she wants to go, I suppose I can't object. After all, it's her life and her body, and she can do what she wants with them. Which is more than I can say for me and my own choices sometimes."

Finally, Girlfriend reacted. She tilted back her head and let out a cross mew. Uncle Denzel snickered.

"Oh, don't say that, Girlfriend. You'll hurt his feelings. Not you," he told Kevin, although Kevin swore his uncle whispered, "I just told him 'Not you,'" into the cat's ear.

"She's very, um…" Kevin stared blankly at the cat for a few seconds as he picked up his toolbox again. "Pretty?"

"Pretty? Ha! She's gorgeous! A real tigress in the alley if you ever saw one. Who knows? She might even have Smokey's kittens one of these days."

Girlfriend hissed like this idea didn't appeal to her at all. Bemused, Uncle Denzel returned her to the floor. The cat squirmed between his legs, bounded up the stairs, and stalked off down the hall with her bare tail twitching like a lightning bolt. With that, Uncle Denzel grabbed Kevin by the elbow and dragged him after her. "Now, on with the show!"

Upstairs was dim, and it took Kevin a few seconds to figure out why. The only light in the hallway was all the way at the far end, centered above a grandfather clock with a rather damaged case. The pendulum was missing. Kevin hadn't realized a clock that didn't tick could ever be creepier than one that did, but the sight of the thing sent the hairs standing up along his arms. The flickering light bulb above the old clock gave it alone a halo, but the rest of the upstairs was dark. Luckily that wasn't totally disturbing. He clutched his toolbox tighter, taking in the repeating floral pattern on the wallpaper all the way down the hall. Girlfriend sat halfway between him and the clock, crouched and glaring.

"Now, Kevin. The first stop on our extensive tour is the bathroom I assume you'll want to use most frequently. And here it is now. Across from this fine destination is scenic Mother's bedroom, which I firmly advise against wandering into lest you step inside one of the fox traps I left out for the old bat." Again, Uncle Denzel laughed and gave Kevin's shoulders a squeeze, clearly inviting him to join in on this great joke. Kevin forced out a nervous noise that he hoped sounded vaguely amused and not too alarmed. He had a sudden thought, then: He had a Grandmama living here, but where was Grandpapa anyway?

Then a new line of thought popped into his head. Wait. Mommy and Uncle Denzel shared the same mother, but different dads. Did that mean his Uncle Denzel had welcomed a stepfather into his life long ago, too? He would have been 14 when Mommy was born, so maybe a little closer to Kevin's age (11 as of last January) when Grandmama and Grandpapa had been married. Assuming they ever were. Had Uncle Denzel had to adjust to living with any stepsiblings too? Or had he been the only one?

They stopped in front of the last door in the hallway. Streaks of its paint were chipping off, but Uncle Denzel gestured to it proudly nonetheless.

"This is the room I used when I was your age, Kevin. Back before I graduated college with a low-paying teacher's assistant position and was forced to move back in with Mother to survive, that is. Of course, by then Mother had rented out my room, and her kooky father moved in with us not too long after that, so I had to carve out space above the garage, and there I've been ever since. But since Grampy's left us now, this room's all yours." He continued his mutterings as he fumbled with the doorknob. "Well, here you are. This room has everything a growing boy could want. A bathroom next door, a hamper for your dirty clothes, a lamp for your lamp needs… Ooh, and there's a closet for hanging up all your clean shirts! I need to get me one of those for my room."

Kevin toed one of the circle patterns in the thin carpet. "If Great-Grampy's gone, why didn't you move back into your old room before you knew I was coming?" Not that he was ungrateful. After all, there were bound to be more working electric sockets in here than above the garage. He'd be able to make good use of those.

"Ha! I like you, kiddo. You're real funtown material!" And with that, Uncle Denzel swung open the door.

Kevin really hadn't been hoping for much. In fact, as of five minutes ago, he'd set the bar pretty low, with "no game show music and no heavy nets dropping from the ceiling" being his main requirement for a comfortable place to stay. Not smelling like cat litter would be a nice bonus on the side. Obviously, he should have thought his list through a little more. His toolbox slipped from his hand.

There were boxes everywhere.

Stacks of them. Towers of them. Standing in his way. Piled on the bed. Shoved under the bed. Blocking half the window. Covering the dresser. Spilling from the closet. In fact, Kevin considered it a major accomplishment that he could even see all the boxes in the room, there were that many boxes in the room.

And then, before Kevin had fully processed the sheer amount of boxes there were, Uncle Denzel picked him up and chucked him into one of the shorter stacks near the bed. Shorter meaning, a Kevin and a half could have stood beside it without their eyes even reaching the top. He landed face-first in a folded quilt, the part of his brain that wasn't freaking out over the fact that his uncle had just thrown him across the room reflecting on how lucky it was that the entire box hadn't tipped from the stack with him inside.

"Have fun while I'm at the hardware store, Kevin!" Uncle Denzel called. His arms spazzed in opposite directions. "My nephew!" And with that, he back-handspringed away down the hall, as happy as an oyster with a pearl. Kevin heard him tumbling merrily down the stairs, and eventually the front door slammed shut. He might have even heard the click of a key in the lock. Oh yeah. Hopefully he hadn't lost that one he'd taken from the tree. He was pretty sure he still had it in his pocket.

Kevin sighed. He climbed out of the box, then went to work pulling packing peanuts from his hair and shirt. When Girlfriend oozed around the corner and into his room, he muttered, "You know, I'm beginning to suspect that Uncle Denzel isn't a cyborg after all. No cyborg can bust a move like that."

Girlfriend stretched, then leaped into a box stuffed with scraps of felt and yarn and made herself comfortable. Despite all the junk stuffed inside the bedroom, nothing else let out the slightest peep in response, either. Hmm. Kevin glanced around, sizing up the clutter from this new angle and feeling rather a lot like he was inside a snow fort in the middle of summer. His room had a window, and since it faced west, he had a great view of the setting sun. The carpet sure looked like it was from the '70s, with flowers and rivets everywhere you turned. The walls were painted pink. Possibly from when Mommy still lived in this house, because surely if Uncle Denzel had gone off to college when she was 4 or 5, she must have used this same room once upon a time.

Or, maybe Uncle Denzel had liked pink as a child. Kevin wouldn't be fazed.

He turned a suspicious eye on Girlfriend again. "I know I heard you talk out there. And I'm not crazy, if that's what you're thinking."

The cat yawned and turned her face away.

For his first order of business, Kevin finally gave his pants a thorough check. He groaned when he found out he really had wet himself outside when that fairy-catching net had dropped on his head. Okay, well, he'd just get in pajamas, then. After fetching his suitcase and pillow from their place beside the front door, he changed his clothes in the green bathroom upstairs. No way was he undressing in front of Girlfriend. Her eyes just gave him the creeps all over. Only after he'd changed did Kevin remember that Uncle Denzel had invited those three kids over to see him at 8:53ish. He stared blearily at his reflection, smoothing out the wrinkles in his shirt. It was white, with a simple blue bear on the chest, and the pants were covered with more black bears in various sitting, standing, climbing, and fishing poses. Of all his limited options, it was probably his least embarrassing one. Now that it was already on him, he didn't really want to change back into regular clothes. Maybe those kids wouldn't mind.

His cell phone was still in his pants pocket. It hadn't been damaged, and it still had a bit of juice left. Kevin searched his room for an outlet to plug it in, but the only one he could find was wedged behind the headboard of the rumpled bed. That wouldn't be easy to get to, especially with all this clutter in the way. Kevin sat down on the only visible corner of tangerine bedcovers and nudged one of the smaller boxes with his feet.

Well. Uncle Denzel did say he had an hour to kill before these mysterious stepsiblings showed up to tell him why he was a bad person for being upset about Mommy's engagement or whatever. He may as well spend the time doing something useful.

Kevin kicked his shoes into the corner. Then he checked his phone battery again, almost wishing there wasn't enough power left in it to complete a call. But there was. He searched out Mommy's contact information in his 'Recents' list and slid off the bed. As he waited for her to pick up, he started searching the room for a good place to start cleaning. Well, he'd definitely want to get the bed cleared off before he went to sleep tonight. All the rest could wait until later.

The phone went to voicemail. Kevin pulled it away from his ear in disgust, staring at the taunting little red circle on the screen that would let him hang up the call without leaving a message. Great. So not only had Mommy sent him 18 hours away to California without her, but she hadn't even bothered to keep her phone around to check up on him. She and Marvin had probably gone out to dinner or something. Maybe they'd brought Molly along too. She hadn't been sent to California. Well, at least he knew where he fell on Mommy's new list of priorities.

Kevin paced back and forth in one of the few clear areas of the room, waiting impatiently for the voicemail message to end. Girlfriend watched him through half-closed eyes. After his phone beeped, he said, "Hello? Mommy? I made it safely to Dimmsdale. I'm calling from Grandmama and Uncle Denzel's house."

Pause.

"No, I haven't met Grandmama yet. She's out playing Bingo, but she'll be back soon. I have my own room. It's great. The house is great. Uncle Denzel seems… great."

Pause again.

"I miss you." Kevin heard his voice crack, but he didn't try to stop it. "Call me soon, okay? Let me know what's going on with you. Love you, Mommy."

He ended the call and was about to return to pacing, when a glimmer of metal and a tangle of wires caught his attention. Kevin paused, one foot in the air, then swiveled over to face the box in question. It was stacked on top of another, and when he took it down, he found himself with two overstuffed boxes of buttons, switches, dials, and little lights that served no purpose except blinking at all the right times and entertaining everybody.

Maybe there were more things like this around here. Kevin raised his eyebrow and tossed his phone on the bed. More hopeful now, he hunted around the room with renewed vigor. But try as he might, he couldn't find anything else that relatively interested him. Just some rather inappropriate-looking pieces of ladies' underwear. Kevin was about to shove that box in the farthest possible corner of the closet and collapse onto the floor with exaggerated gagging noises in an attempt to relieve some of his boredom, when he spotted something in the box that definitely wasn't underwear.

It was a picture frame. One of those old-fashioned ones that folds out and collapses up again, with black felt on the back of each frame and a little latch to keep the stack shut.

Kevin hesitated. Then, reaching deep inside himself for all the courage and manliness he could muster, he thrust his hand into the box of bras and lace and yanked the foldable picture frame out. The latch was just a bit of old velcro and came off easily, but Kevin groaned when he saw the pictures inside.

"Oh boy. These are all pictures of Uncle Denzel as a teenager. I reached into that box for nothing. No. Hey, wait a minute…"

There were four pictures in the folding frame. Two of them showed Uncle Denzel with his scraggly black hair sticking up in messy tufts, hunting toads or something in the creek. In the second picture, he'd toppled in and ended up soaked, a stunned expression on his face and a lily pad balanced on his head. One picture included what seemed to be a youthful version of fluffy-haired Grandmama. But Kevin squinted at the last picture in the row. The person who'd caught his eye was dressed in baggy cargo pants that Kevin wouldn't have expected to see on a little girl, mostly since she was barely more than a toddler in this picture and her shirt was off, and that kind of threw him for a second. But that was definitely Denise Crocker. She had the short black curls bouncing around her ears, and the same thick-rimmed glasses she still wore today.

The picture seemed to be of a lake somewhere, with pine trees running up the distant blue hills on either side. Little Denise stood at the end of a pier with a floppy hat on her head and an enormous grin on her face, holding a worm she'd speared on a hook up for the camera to see. Grandmama must have taken this picture. Out in the lake, two men floated in a little green rowboat. One of them was obviously younger than the other, stuffed in an orange life vest and not looking too happy about it. Kevin had the feeling that the older, broad-shouldered man must be Grandpapa. So that unhappy boy in the rowboat must be Uncle Denzel.

Kevin hadn't ever seen a picture of Mommy as a kid before, and he'd definitely never seen a picture of Grandpapa either. What a great find. He propped the picture frame up on the nightstand next to his bed, tilting it so he'd be able to see the lake picture while his head was on his pillow. It looked nice there, like it belonged. Kevin had a picture just like this by his bed back home, which showed him as a toddler fascinated by the rusty old harpoons on display at the aquarium. Most kids liked the sharks or the otters or at least a fish there, but Mommy swore up and down that she'd had to peel Kevin away from all the historical fishing equipment by force, and he'd cried the whole way home. The only thing that she could calm him down with was the shark's tooth necklace she'd grabbed at random from the gift shop. It was the only souvenir he owned from a trip that hadn't been to visit caves or bats or creepy old castles that held Mommy's interest way more than his own, so Kevin had been inseparable from that shark's tooth ever since. What could he say? Teeth were cool, and animal teeth were even cooler.

No one in this new picture he'd found was even holding a fish. That felt right, somehow. They made for a matching set.

Having lost interest in cleaning and not having eaten since pouring fruit snacks into his hand and praying the bus driver wouldn't notice and kick him off, Kevin wandered back into the hallway. Yep. The broken clock was still there, bearing down on him. He shivered and hurried away. Too bad he had to turn his back on it.

The upstairs wasn't very big, and Kevin wasn't expecting it to be exciting either, until he spotted a door on the other side of the stairs that he hadn't seen since Uncle Denzel had pushed him in the other direction. Actually, he hadn't even noticed it when he came this way to grab his stuff from downstairs. He stopped.

Wait a second. Where did that door go? It faced him like a rhino about to charge, king of the hallway and all it surveyed. Kevin ran a split-second review of the house's front through his head. By his calculations, the room behind that door should be right above the living room downstairs.

But there wasn't supposed to be a room there. He'd seen the building from the outside. The front of the house was too low to have an upstairs. The roof didn't go that high.

It was probably just a linen closet or some tiny bit of hall containing the ladder to the attic or whatever, but Kevin's curiosity had been piqued. He walked past the stairs and tried the knob. Locked. Well, that figured. He rattled it again. Still locked.

Dropping to the floor, he took off his glasses and brought his eye to the crack between the door and the carpet. Though, maybe he hadn't needed to. It was an awfully large crack.

He was expecting blackness, and that's what he got. Mostly. But he wasn't expecting the two blue lights across the room staring back at him like a pair of eyes.

Kevin jerked up again, fumbling with his glasses. Once they were on, he took a breath and peeked beneath the door again. Maybe he'd be able to figure out what he was looking at now.

The blue lights were still there. That was almost creepier than them not being there when he looked again. There was a window on the opposite side of the room with the blinds slightly cracked, so Kevin waited two minutes for his vision to adjust to the dark. He made out some vague silhouettes of what appeared to be lamps and desktop computer monitors, but no sign of what the lights were. What a weird house.

Wait. Did those lights just… blink?

Rustling noises. Kevin had visited zoos and caves with Mommy enough times to know what bat wings sounded like, and that was exactly what he heard. The lights began to move. They drifted towards him as though pulled by a string. As they passed in front of the window, Kevin realized the lights weren't floating freely. They were attached to a body.

A pale-skinned, child-sized, human-shaped body suspended in the air.

Well, um. It was probably some kind of robot or drone. That had to be it. But if it was just a robot, then why would those blinking eyes look so much like–

"Mrrrow?"

"Greeep!" Kevin whirled around, still in a crouch. His eyes darted left and right. At the top of the stairs sat a pale pink cat with a rosy collar around her neck.

"Oh. It's just you, Girlfriend." Kevin was more than happy to have an excuse to move away from the weird door. He crawled towards the cat, who didn't shift away. "I guess you followed me here from my room, huh?"

The cat studied him, amusement twitching in her whiskers. Cautiously, Kevin stretched out his hand. To his surprise, the cat rose to her paws and butted his palm with her head. Then she slid past him, allowing him to stroke her hairless back. It felt a lot like petting the flat bottom of a cheese grater, or maybe the inside of a really old couch, but Kevin appreciated the sentiment anyway. Especially when the back of his neck began to tingle. A chill rattled down his spine. Cold mist wafted around his feet.

Kevin didn't want to turn around. So he didn't. He continued staring through the window above the stairs. With slow hands, he scooped the friendly cat into his arms and got to his feet. "Girlfriend?" he whispered. "Is there something behind me?"

Girlfriend peered up at him with an expression like curiosity, or perhaps concern. Kevin wished he hadn't left his phone on the bed. Something about this house wasn't right. It just wasn't. Not at all. Maybe it was the sudden chill that shouldn't have come from any conveniently broken heater, or the mist curling around his ankles.

Maybe it was the pale boyish figure standing behind him. He was reflected perfectly in the black window now that the sun had set. Gray skin. Glasses. Blue eyes. An enormous hat that ended in a sharp point.

Kevin whirled. His breaths heaved through his teeth, shaking them straight to their roots and probably setting off every "about to fall out" alarm the Tooth Fairy had in her magical castle.

The door was gone. So was the figure–the ghost, or whatever it was.

Just gone.

Kevin blinked several times, knowing his glasses were still in place and that his prescription hadn't dropped twenty points in the last five minutes, but it didn't change the fact that both the figure and the door were gone. The checkered wallpaper was as smooth as it had ever been.

Okay. Well, that wasn't creepy. Kevin hugged the cat as he hurried down the stairs, burying his nose into her… skin flaps. "You know it too, don't you?" he mumbled. "Yes you do. You've got to. Something's going on in this house. But what is it?"

Girlfriend blinked slowly and batted at his hair. Kevin stumbled at the bottom of the stairs, but not because of her touch. He almost dropped the cat then and there. Instead, he caught himself and only switched her weight from one of his arms to the other. His eyes darted up and down the hallway.

Unlike the door or the boy, what he was looking at now didn't disappear. Kevin caught his breath. The walls in the downstairs hall had completely changed.

Just… changed!

He backed up a step, bumping into the banister. The noise that popped from his lips wasn't a squeak, but it wasn't a howl either. Kevin slapped the hand that wasn't holding the cat over his mouth.

It was undeniable. Stretching before him now, from here to the cracked-open kitchen door, were two walls now lined with pale brown and yellow bricks.

And for one split second before he blinked, Kevin swore he saw a bespectacled boy in a wool shirt and breeches sitting at the bottom of the stairs, a pointed hat covering most of his fuzzy black hair, holding a kitten in his lap that was missing both of its front legs.