Walter Dragonette's curtains had been open only two or three inches, a narrow gap, ordinarily nothing but entirely wide enough for two small boys, Akeem and Kwanza Johnson, to look through, giggling and jostling each other out of the way, fighting to press their faces up against the glass.
Akeem and Kwanza, nine and seven, lived across the street from Walter Dragonette. Their father was Kenneth Johnson, the English teacher who had been addressed as "Rastus" by a Millhaven policeman eighteen months before. The Johnson house had four bedrooms and a porch and a second floor, and Mr. Johnson had himself installed in his living room floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, every spacious shelf of which was packed with books. Subsidiary piles of books stood on the coffee table, on the night-stands and end tables, on the floor, and even on top of the twelve-inch black-and-white television that was the only set Mr. Johnson had in his house.
Akeem and Kwanza Johnson were much more interested in television than in books. They hated the old black-and-white set in their kitchen. They wanted to watch TV in the living room, the way their friends did, and they wanted to watch it in color on a big screen. Akeem and Kwanza would have settled for a twenty-one-inch set, as long as it was color, but what they really wanted, what they dreamed of persuading their father to buy, was something roughly the size of the oak bookshelves. And they knew that their neighbor across the street owned such a television set. They had been hearing him watch late-night horror movies for years, and they knew Walter's TV had to be dope. Walter's TV set was so great their father called up the police twice to complain about it. Walter's TV set was so bad that you could hear it all the way across the street.
On the night before the morning when Walter Dragonette greeted fifteen armed policemen by telling them that he was the Meat Man, nine-year-old Akeem Johnson had come awake to hear the faint but unmistakable sounds of a grade-A horror movie coming from the speakers of the wonderful television set across the street. His father never let him go to horror movies and did not permit them on the television set at home, but a friend of Akeem's had shown him videotapes of Jason in his hockey mask and Freddy Krueger in his hat, and he knew what horror movies sounded like. What he was listening to, faint as it was, made Jason and Freddy sound like wimps. It had to be one of those movies he had heard about but never seen, like The Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where folks got hunted down and cut up, man, right there in your face. Akeem heard a man howling like a dog, sobbing like a woman, roaring, screeching, wailing…
He got out of bed and walked to his window and looked across the street. Instead of meeting as they usually did, Walter's curtains showed a narrow gap filled with yellow light. Akeem realized that if he got out of bed and sneaked out of the house, he could hide beneath the window, peek in, and actually watch the movie playing on Walter's big television. He also realized that he was not going to do that. What he could do, however, was wait for Walter to leave his house in the morning, and then just walk across the street and take a look inside that window and at least see if Walter's TV was the beast it sounded like.
The faint sounds from across the street came to an end as the movie shifted to one of the boring parts that always followed the excitement.
In the morning, Akeem went down to the kitchen and poured milk over his Cocoa Puffs and parked himself at the kitchen table where he could watch Walter's house through the window. About ten minutes later, his little brother dragged in, rubbing his eyes and complaining about a bad dream. After Akeem told him what he was doing, Kwanza got his own bowl of cereal and sat beside him at the table, and the two of them watched the house across the street like a pair of burglars.
Walter burst through his front door just after seven. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, so wherever he was going, he would have to come back to change clothes before he went to work. Walter hustled down his walk, looked over both his shoulders as he unlocked his car, got in, and zoomed off.
"Okay?" Akeem asked.
"Yo," said his brother.
They slid out of their chairs and went to the front door. Akeem quietly unlocked and opened it. They stepped outside, and Akeem gently let the door slide back into the frame without quite closing. The brothers walked over their front lawn. The dew pasted grass shavings to their bare feet. They felt funny and exposed when they stepped onto Walter's front yard and ran up to the window hunched over. Akeem reached the window first, but Kwanza butted him sideways, like a little goat, before he got a good look in through the curtains.
"You take your turn," Akeem said. "Yo, this was my idea."
"Me too, I wanna look too," Kwanza complained, and slipped in front of him when he bent his face again to the uncovered stripe of glass. Both boys peered in to see the enormous television set.
At first, it looked as though Walter had been painting his living room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the far wall, and newspapers covered the floor. "Akeem," Kwanza said.
"Where is that thing?" Akeem said. "I know it's here, no way it ain't here."
"Akeem," his brother said again, in exactly the same tone of voice.
Akeem looked down at the floor where his brother was pointing, and he too saw the corpse of a large, heavy black man stretched out in a swamp of bloody newspapers. The man's head lay some feet away, rolled on its side so that it seemed to be contemplating the broken hacksaw blade stuck halfway through what had been its left shoulder. The broad back, about the color of the Cocoa Puffs dissolving into mush back on the Johnsons' kitchen table, stared up at them. Deep cuts punctured it, and sections of skin had been sliced off, leaving red horizontal gashes.
A few houses away, a car started up, and both boys screamed, thinking that Walter had come back and caught them. Akeem was the first to be able to move, and he stepped back and put his right arm around his brother's waist and pulled him away from Walter's house.
"Akeem, it wasn't no movie," Kwanza said.
Too shocked and frightened to speak, Akeem grimaced at him, frantically gesturing that Kwanza should start running for home right now. "Damn," Kwanza said, and sprinted away like a jackrabbit. In seconds they were pounding up their own lawn toward the front door.
Akeem yanked the door open, and the boys tumbled inside.
"It wasn't no movie," Kwanza said. "It wasn't—"
Akeem ran up the stairs toward his parents' bedroom.
He woke up his father, shaking his shoulder and babbling about a dead man with his head cut off across the street, this guy was all dead, his head was all cut off, blood was all around…
Kenneth Johnson told his wife to stop screaming at the kid. "You saw a dead man in the house across the street? Mr. Dragonette's house?"
Akeem nodded. He had begun to cry, and his brother sidled into the bedroom to witness this astonishing spectacle.
"And you saw it, too?"
Kwanza nodded. "It wasn't no movie."
His wife sat up straight and grabbed Akeem and pulled him into her chest. She gave her husband a warning look.
"Don't worry, I'm not going over there," he said. "I'm calling the police. We'll see what happens this time."
Two policemen pulled up in a black-and-white about ten minutes later. One of them marched up to the Johnson house and rang the bell, and the other sauntered across the lawn and peered through the gap in the curtains. Just as Kenneth Johnson opened the door, the second policeman stepped away from the window with a stunned expression on his face. "I think your friend would like you to join him," Johnson said to the man on his doorstep.