I set down the grocery bags inside the door, then went back to the truck to get my duffel and O’Connell’s bag. O’Connell followed me out and retrieved a pizza box from the seat of the car. She said, “We’d better get set up before it gets dark.”
We ferried everything upstairs and split up the supplies. I didn’t have to ask if she wanted to sleep separately. O’Connell took the back bedroom with the double bed; I, of course, took the room with the comics.
The things that looked like towels were exactly that: Kansas State University beach towels. I guessed she couldn’t afford sleeping bags.
“Can I show you something?” I called. O’Connell came to my door. “Please,” I said.
She sat on the purple towel I’d spread out on the bed. I sat next to her, and handed her the book I’d found, opened to the inside cover. In a wobbly hand someone had written, “Property of Bobby Noon.”
“His name was Bobby,” I said.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And that’s not all.” I began to show her the magazines and comics I’d set aside. I pointed out the heroes and villains on the covers: the Shadow, Captain America, the crazed Japanese soldiers.
“They’re blueprints for the cohort,” I said. “The Truth, the Captain, the Kamikaze—they’re all here.”
“What about the Little Angel?” O’Connell’s demon, the little girl in the white gown. “What comic book character is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of Shirley Temple–Little Lulu amalgam. Like what’s-her-face in The Little Rascals—the token girl.”
“Who kills old people and terminal patients.”
“Hey, I’m not saying this explains everything. But think about it—
so many of the cohort are like characters straight out of the pulps.” I looked around for the Katzenjammer Kids book, spotted it by the bookcase, and brought it back to her, stepping around the many small piles of pages. I carefully opened the book to the page I’d seen. “Look at this—it predates anything in Dennis the Menace.”
One of the panels showed the blond-haired Katzenjammer boy firing a slingshot at his drunken uncle, knocking his glasses into the air. “O’Connell, I’m in here.”
She stared at the page for a long moment, then stood quickly and walked to the window—I winced as her foot came down on a Hit Comics with Kid Eternity on the cover. She leaned close to the cracked glass, gazing across the fields. “This doesn’t tell us anything new, Del. We already know the archetypes take whatever forms exist in the culture—”
“No! No. Look at all this. I was drawn here for a reason. This is ground zero. This is where it started. With Bobby Noon, the boy on the rock.”
“What are you saying?” She didn’t look at me. “He dreamed you into being?”
“Or summoned me.”
The dying glow made a moon of her face. In a few minutes the room would be dark. I looked around for the flashlight, and O’Connell suddenly jerked back from the window.
“What is it? O’Connell?”
She took another step back. “I just realized . . . I can see the lights on the top floors of the hospital from here.”
“Yeah?” Then, “Oh, right, we should cover the windows, they’ll see the flashlight bouncing around in here.”
I helped her take the dusty covers from the beds. We carried them downstairs, shook them out in the front yard, then went back in and covered the window in my room. We did the same in O’Connell’s room, even though we could see nothing out the window but darkness.
“Del,” she said softly.
I couldn’t see her face. She held the flashlight pointing at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then: “I’m sorry if you felt like I doubted you.”
That wasn’t what she was going to say.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have believed me. Tomorrow we’ll go into town, find out about the Noon family.” I almost said, Find out about the plane crash.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I said.
I crossed the hall to my room, using the edge of the door frame to guide me. I moved gingerly through the dark, trying to remember where I’d left comics on the floor, and found the bed with my shins. The sheet glowed faintly against the window. I stepped forward, pulled it down. A three-quarter moon was rising over the hospital. Several of the top windows of the building flickered a faint blue: television light.
The air coming through the hole in the window was frosty. I felt my way into the duffel, pulled out a cotton sweater, and something clattered onto the floor. I reached down, and my fingers found the wooden handle of the slingshot. I held on to it, moving it from hand to hand as I pulled on the sweater.
I lay down and the bed frame popped alarmingly, but didn’t collapse. I used the duffel for a pillow, my feet framing the moonlit window. Not enough light to read by, though. I should have taken the flashlight.
I’d found the farm and the House that Time Forgot. I’d found the boy on the rock. Tomorrow I’d pull answers from this town like teeth. And somehow, eventually, I’d figure out what to do with the body I’d stolen. The kid rested inside my head like a spent bullet. I stretched the slingshot, aiming the empty pouch between my feet, through the hole, straight at the moon’s villainous chin. Draw, O Coward!
I fired. The moon refused to go out.
BOBBY NOON , BOY MARVEL
OLYMPIA, KANSAS, 1944
“Prepare to be annihilated, imperialist dogs!”
The Boy Marvel appears above them, his white cape fluttering in the breeze, feet planted wide on the cement wall of the bridge. The summer sun makes a halo behind his head.
The girl on the bank, the innocent hostage, says nothing. The two Jap spies disguise their fear with laughter. “I dare you to come down here and say that,” the taller one says. “I double dare you!” says his partner. The Johnson brothers are waist-deep in the creek, leaning against the big rock that pokes out of the water like the back of a hippo. Their sister, a six-yearold with pigtails, waits with wide eyes.
“Just watch me,” says the Boy Marvel. He adjusts the knot at his neck, straightens his cape. The sheet was stolen from his grandmother’s linen closet and cut down with his pocket knife—a crime, perhaps, but one the Boy Marvel deemed necessary.
He crouches and stretches out his arms. After a moment, he straightens, readjusts the cape.
“Ha!” the taller Johnson boy says. “You’re a damn coward!” He’s thirteen, a year older than the Boy Marvel, and he curses whenever adults are out of earshot. His younger brother and fellow spy is only eight, but he’s too scared of his brother to ever tell on him. Their sister is allowed to watch as long as she doesn’t talk or get in the way.
The rock is eight feet from the bridge, give or take. They’ve all seen the high school boys jump from the bridge and land in the deep water on the other side of the rock, but none of the trio have ever attempted it. It’s a daredevil stunt. You can’t even get a running start; you have to do it right from the wall.
“Don’t call me that,” Bobby Noon says.
The Johnson brothers crack up again. “Coward!” they shout. Bobby’s been called a lot of names. Crybaby, scaredy-cat, liar-liar-pants-on-fire. He’s missed a lot of school for what the teacher called “emotional problems.” Bobby used to hear voices, see people who weren’t there. Bobby acted so crazy, the kids said, that even his momma couldn’t take it, and that’s why she ran off with that Kansas City man. But ever since his dad’s ship went down somewhere in the Pacific, he won’t stand for being called a coward. You can get him to do almost anything if you call him that. Bobby knows this about himself but can’t help it. He crouches again, summoning mysterious energies. The spies step away from the rock—they don’t want Bobby to land on them. Their sister covers her eyes.