Will slept with the amethyst clutched tight in his fist like a sacrament, the spiky rock somewhere between purple and blue, same as blood when it’s still inside your body, before the air coaxes it red. But now that his friend Marcus had left Thunder Bay and those bomb-making twins hadn’t exactly welcomed Will into their group, he’d been afflicted with a painful vacancy in the center of his chest that could only be alleviated with two hours of daily exercise biking. With no longer any reason to go Outside, he’d vowed to do only productive activities during Relaxation Time. He bounced balls off the corners where the wall met the roof, performing a hundred catches in a row without a drop. He strained through sit-ups, jumping jacks, and gut-wrenching exercises he invented himself. Upstairs, he crouched over the heating vents like a hunter to dry his sweat-soaked pajamas.

But one bonus of his Outside near-death experience was that it had rekindled the house’s wonder. As summer dwindled, days passing like clouds, the sky gas-flame blue in their windows, Will re-counted the stripes in the wallpaper, recalculated the surface area of the rooms, and reached his arms as deep as possible into the heating vents. Again he relished the medieval crawl space, the perfumed confines of his mother’s closet, the menacing pig-faced outlets, the raw smell from behind the fridge, the chugging alchemy of the laundry machines. He made recordings on her old reel-to-reel, indoor field studies. Music like John Cage, who was also a genius. “This. Is the sound of safety. Scissors,” Will said, before snapping them loudly at the microphone. “This. Is the sound of a garbage. Bag,” he said, rustling. His mother loved his sound collage, and he played the tape for an Italian pharmacy deliveryman, who declared it “real freaking interesting.”

Mostly, however, Will painted a new series of masterpieces. The totality of his entire artistic output, everything he’d ever painted, constructed, designed, or slapped together, was archived in Toronto. The magnificence of his masterpieces routinely made his mother weep (not a great feat for someone who literally feared her shadow, admittedly, but she knew art). “I’m keeping them for posterity,” she’d once said. “Why would you keep it for someone’s butt?” Will had asked. “That’s posterior.” Which was why she said “for posterior” all the time, because things got tacked to a corkboard inside her head and stayed there. Which, he suspected, may have been her problem. Will harbored a magical hope that Marcus would reappear one day and ping her in the head with his slingshot, just once, hard enough to give her the gift of amnesia. Then she’d step Outside with no clue she was a person who was afraid of everything.

In the evenings they screened films in Cairo, with the VCR or her 16mm projector. Will loved action movies best, which she couldn’t stomach. No movies for her with guns or where anyone died, except if it was from tuberculosis or lovelorn suicide. That’s what happened in all her favorites, which were in other languages and featured half-beautiful, half-ugly people staring at each other for long stretches of time as though they’d been robbed of speech. They unsettled Will as much as his movies did her.

Years before, for his ninth birthday, they’d watched the 3D version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon on the projector. He’d ordered the print from the library, and it even came with 3D glasses that had been retaped a hundred times. He used the leverage of his special day to make her promise to sit through it. It was the most excited he’d ever been.

But she was already breathing funny during the film’s opening, repeatedly burying her eyes in her hands and steaming her red-and-blue lenses with hoarse breaths. “Just make yourself watch,” he said. “The Creeetuuure can’t kill you,” he added in a gravelly monster voice, attempting to pry her hands from her face with his fingernails.

“I don’t want to make myself,” she said, eyes closed tight as a boxer’s fists.

She was fine for a few more minutes as the story was established. Then the murderous amphibian appeared beneath the unsuspecting woman as she front-crawled across the lagoon. He lurked just inches from her, menacing, but also curious, as if he wanted to help her and get sexy with her vagina and kill her all at the same time, as an entire orchestra’s brass section blasted away unnervingly, as it did whenever the Creature—or usually only its gnarled, dinosaurish hand—graced the screen. It was more than enough to kidnap his mother’s brain.

In old movies when people get afraid—when the killer’s shadow seeps through the crack under the door or when the giant radioactive bug crests the skyline—the actors stuff their fists into their mouths like they are eating them. Like eating yourself alive is better than staring down an unmentionable horror. That’s what his mother did then, except in real life. Sometimes Will thought she’d eat her whole body if she could somehow get it into her mouth. “What about my birthday?” he’d called out as she fled to San Francisco and didn’t emerge for a whole week. Now whenever she Black Lagooned, he pictured the monster swimming inches beneath her. Except she’s the only person who could see it.

One morning late in August, his mother was reading the paper in her good green robe, her hair puffed with sleep, when she gasped.

“What?” Will said.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, the Black Lagoon a harried shadow on her face. She rose, neatly folded, then ripped the page into strips, setting them in the garbage instead of the recycling. “I’m going to do a Session.”

When he heard her door click, Will extracted the strips from the trash and reconstructed them on the table. Normally, newspaper stories were of little relevance to Will. He found an article about how it was too expensive to demolish the “blight” of the old grain elevators by the lake, so the city had to leave them there; an article about some Indian treaty talks that went nowhere; another about a local hockey team that won a tournament.

Then he found it. Small, in the corner near the back. A boy. Missing. It said he lived in a foster home, and they hadn’t noticed him gone for weeks. There was a tiny photo, and the boy had the same crooked bangs and bright look as when he’d offered Will his T-shirt to dab the blood from his eyes. Marcus. His friend. His only friend.

That evening, New York seemed shrunken. Insomnia settled over Will, the minutes grinding and endless, quiet as surgery. Will’s mind turned with a terrible waterwheel of tantalizing questions: Why had the Twins reacted so guiltily when he approached? Why did they say Marcus had left town? Why the garden hoses and match bombs? And what did any of it have to do with Marcus going missing?

Whatever, sure, brave Marcus had said that day when Will asked if they were friends, a mental reel Will had nearly worn out with replaying. Will looked up this word whatever in their old dictionary, the one with the name Charlie written in the front, and found that it meant “no matter what.” At the permanence of this beautiful sentiment Will wept, tears tapping the dictionary’s oniony pages.

Even before Will closed the book, his mind had already seized upon a whole new trajectory to aim the Roman candle of his life. He couldn’t just go wandering Outside aimlessly like last time. It was much too dangerous. Will needed somewhere to go, a reason to leave. He needed more than masterpieces and smoothies. He needed answers. He needed Adventure. He needed to find his friend Marcus.

He needed everything.

6

The night before his first day of school, Will lay awake, twisting with anticipation. The previous week he’d searched the muskeg where he’d met the Twins—a walk around the block, he told his mother—and found his Helmet gone, no trace of hoses or matches. The next day during Relaxation Time, Will phoned Tom Sprague, the wiry man who’d been doing their yard work for years, and asked if anyone in the neighborhood was missing garden hoses. “Oh, sure, most of my clients had their hoses stolen at one time or another this past summer,” said Tom. “Your street in particular. Had to pick up a new one for you.” Will asked whether it was mostly on the creek side. “Come to think of it, most of them backed the creek, yeah.” After Will placed a call to the police station and was put on hold for an hour until he hung up, he deemed his only move was to go undercover to gather information. He’d known school happened in September because that was when kids trudged past his house in early morning like soldiers with their whole lives stuffed into backpacks.