It had four arms, but only three seemed to work. Naked and hairless, and strangely off balance. Like the extra arms were attached wrong. It didn’t look natural, except that it did kind of look human. It kind of looked like a kid.
Whatever it was, it clearly wanted Smiling Jack dead. It had the jump on Jack, and knocked him off his feet. It clawed at Jack’s face, tearing the fake face-mask to shreds. Jack kept trying to get to his feet, but the thing kept knocking him off balance. Spencer watched the silent battle of monsters in fascination, praying that the Hollow Men wouldn’t get back in time to save Jack. But soon he saw it was in vain. As savage as the attack was, the thing wasn’t doing any major harm to Jack. Finally Jack did regain his footing. The thing jumped at him and with an acrobats nimbleness Jack sidestepped it, grabbing it by a leg on the pass. With incredible strength Jack swung the thing into a tree trunk. Spencer heard the crack of its skull echo even from his hiding spot. And the one after, and the one after that.
There was no longer any question in Spencer’s mind of his ability to kill Jack through a surprise attack. Jack was the king of the monsters here.
As the week wore on back home with his parents, Spencer couldn’t shake the feeling that he was an unwelcome guest in the house. He figured out after a while that both his parents still had jobs, jobs they weren’t going to because of him. Baby Suzie apparently had a day care place to go to. But him…well he just sat on the couch and watched TV all day.
They just can’t seem to figure out what the fuck to do with me, he thought.
Mother had suggested a party, for Spencer’s old friends to come over and see him. Spencer was as surprised at the idea as he was horrified. He’d never even thought about the fact that he had old friends still around. Somehow in his mind it was like they had all died or disappeared or something. The idea of seeing them again was so terrible that he considered talking just to tell her not to do it. Fortunately he didn’t have to. His father immediately put the kibosh on the idea.
“He’s just not ready,” said his father. “We have to give him time.”
It didn’t take much to convince his mother this was the truth, though he didn’t think this was why his dad didn’t like the idea. In truth they hadn’t had anyone over at all since Spencer got home, nor did they make him go to a psychologist like he had felt sure they would. He remembered how it had been before with his father. Spencer always had to be the perfect son. Brave, tough, good at sports, good at school. When Spencer didn’t live up to expectations, his dad always was angry about how it reflected on him.
He saw how as the days wore on they looked at him with some kind of mix between confusion and disappointment in their eyes, like he was supposed to be something he wasn’t. Looking in the mirror he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t entirely clear on what he had looked like before he left, but now he looked like one of the escaped mental patients he’d seen on an afternoon TV show. Eyes red and sunken, cheeks hollow, hair wild. There was a jagged scar on his forehead from the cave incident not so long ago, which had also left his nose crooked. Not the image of the perfect son anymore, Spencer guessed he wouldn’t reflect very well on his father at all now. His father was still the business mogul, and appearances were everything. His father may have looked older, but Spencer guessed he was mostly still the same. Except Spencer didn’t remember his father drinking near as much as he did now.
They should at count themselves lucky I don’t smile at them, the way my teeth look now, he thought as he grimaced into the mirror.
After weeks wandering the rooftops and back alleys of Nowhere Blvd, Spencer was getting as lonely as he was hungry. He’d managed to supplement the candy with bits of food left in the parks and other areas that children had carried with them from Nanny Gurdy’s kitchen (if he could get to the scraps before the Hollow Men cleaned them, for in addition to their true job as enforcers, they really did do all the chores). But watching people through the telescope wasn’t really like having friends, although he liked to pretend otherwise. Most of all he liked to watch Perfect Girl Julie. Even though they hadn’t had the chance to be friends for very long, he would daydream of them escaping together. If she couldn’t find her parents, he was sure he could convince his own parents to let her stay with them.
For awhile he had thought that maybe the Perfects were in league with Jack. But the more he watched, the more it didn’t seem like it. They did what he said, and smiled and played when he came around, but they also avoided him when they could, he’d seen it. They were afraid of him. And besides, he had a sense, as all children did, that all adults were keeping secrets from all children.
Surely Julie doesn’t know what Jack does with the kids that visit Nowhere Blvd, he thought. She must think that they leave the same way they came in. She couldn’t just play with us and not warn us if she knew what Jack did. She’s just a kid. She’s my friend.
So he made up his mind. He was going to sneak into her house during the day. The Perfects all lived alone for reasons Spencer couldn’t guess, so he’d hide and wait till night to let her know he was there. That way if she started screaming, at least he could sneak off in the dark.
The plan was ruined in its first stages, but it didn’t matter. He scouted first, using the telescope to chart the locations of all of Jack’s minions. Nanny Gurdy in her house, Mr. Buttons in the woods, Jack likely still at home and the Hollow Men wandering about predictably in their search of his hiding places. He made his way along his open course to Perfect Girl Julie’s house, hopped the fence into her back yard, opened her bedroom window, and climbed right in.
Her bedroom didn’t look quite like he thought. He expected pink frills and unicorns, in keeping with Jack’s childhood ideals that he seemed to decorate all the other buildings with. Instead it was more muted, more “tasteful” as his mom might have said. There were dollhouses and stuffed ponies, but at the same time there were old Victorian portraits on the wall rather than rainbows or butterflies like he had envisioned it.
He shut the window and was preparing to see what food might be in the kitchen when she walked right into the bedroom. His one forgotten detail was so glaring that he was shocked by the obviousness of it. He had scouted the locations of everyone except her. The emotions danced across her expressive face so fast it made him dizzy. Fear, confusion, recognition, relief, excitement.
You’re not supposed to be here he was getting ready to say, when she interrupted him by running up and hugging him.
“Spence, you’re alive!,” she said. She was taller than him and his mouth was against her shoulder. She smelled so clean. Her skin, her sky blue dress. She smelled like the real world. He put his arms around her. Tentatively at first, then holding on tight. It had been so long since anyone had hugged him.
“How did you escape,” she asked as she pulled away.
“I… I hid in the amusement park,” he said, knowing how lame that sounded but not being able to find the words for all that had happened to him. Spence had figured out a while ago that he was better at doing things than saying things.
“But, look at you! You’re so dirty, and you smell bad,” she said crinkling her nose. “And you’re so thin now, you look sick.”