He sneezed and rubbed the tip of his nose with his fingers. His own face in the mirror stared back at him, its knitted brow and puckered frown, and he exaggerated the effect, trying to look angry and disappointed, practicing the scowl until it felt convincing. The sudden appearance of a pale white arm surprised him, but it was only Jack Peter in a state of undress, shucking off his pajamas to reveal a reedy chest and two nipples like staring eyes. Bone-white skin glowed in the thin light, for he was an inside boy who rarely left the house, rarely stood directly in the sun or the rain or the wind. The sunlight might pass right through him, and the very air bruise his skin. Jack Peter pulled on a dark hooded sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and then sat on the floor to wrestle his feet into his socks.
At the window, Jack Peter wrote on the glass with his fingertip. “Do you know this trick?” He breathed hard upon the window, and in the condensation appeared the word “wicked.”
“Epic,” Nick said, hiding an edge of sarcasm.
“Let’s go scare my daddy.” Raising his hood like a cowl around his head, Jack Peter gathered the notebook from the bed and a fistful of pencils from his desk. With a crook of a finger, he bid Nick follow, and they sneaked down and stationed themselves at the kitchen table without a sound.
Nick’s mother had gone off to her party, leaving Mr. Keenan all alone. He was just staring through the bay window, unaware and lost in his thoughts. When he finally noticed them at the table, he seemed mildly distressed at how they had managed to materialize unnoticed.
“You’re like a couple of ghosts. Time for me to hit the shower, boys,” he said at last. “You two be all right without me?”
Soon the plumbing moaned as water gushed in the shower overhead. Taking the notebook in hand, Jack Peter leafed through the pages again, stopping momentarily at pictures that caught his eye. “These are good,” he said. “Some scary. Did you make some of them up?”
Small guilt pulled at Nick’s stomach, as though he had somehow failed him. A string of mucus ran from his nose, and he wiped it away with the back of his sleeve. “No, I copied them from books or movies. Some I remembered in my head.”
Jack Peter grunted and closed the book. “Did you ever see someone who was dead?”
“Besides that time you drowned and everyone thought you were dead for a few minutes?”
A rare laugh escaped Jack Peter’s mouth. “I mean someone who was dead a long time?”
Once when he was cutting through the pine forest on his way home from school, Nick had come across a dead cat, half buried in dry needles. Weatherworn, it was a desiccated bag of matted fur and bones, but when he flipped over the corpse with a stick, a squirm of maggots writhed in its guts, and he retched and ran away. But he had never seen a dead person, much less a body dead a long time. Nick thought of his parents, drowned and hanging in his closet, but he figured they did not count because he could not prove they were real. He shook his head.
Taking a clean sheet of paper, Jack Peter began to draw, concentrating intently on moving the pencil. Nick watched in silence, curious and patient, wondering what strange thoughts danced in his friend’s mind.
“Do you mean dead like zombies?”
The boy across the table paused and lifted his eyes. “Not zombies.”
“They’re called the living dead.”
“Not zombies.” He continued his line, the tip of his tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth. “Zombies eat brains. And they are slow. Not zombies.”
“But dead, anyhow.”
“Definitely,” Jack Peter said. “Or at least I think so.”
Above them the shower stopped, and Nick thought he heard Mr. Keenan call out, but Jack Peter made no move to answer. He finished and rotated the paper so Nick could take a look. The creature faced him from a head-on perspective, a man of sorts, his arms longer than his legs and bent at the elbows, the legs bent at the knees, so that he appeared crablike, scrabbling toward the viewer. His hands and feet were splayed outward, and his face, full front, was wild and ruined. Bug-eyed, he stared beneath a tangle of hair thick as seaweed. He wore no clothes, which only emphasized his preternatural physique, as though made of skin stretched over wire. Nick recognized him at once. The creature he had encountered on the road that night with Mr. Keenan.
“That’s him. I’ve seen his face before.” He stared at the page and laughed to himself. “You missed one thing though. He’s got no pecker.”
“What’s a pecker?”
“You know, your thing between your legs. If this dude is naked, you’d see his pecker.”
Jack Peter giggled and tilted his head at the image. “You mean his penis.”
“Whatever you want to call it. His is missing.”
Across the room, a window flew open, snapping as though spring-loaded, and the curtains unfurled like two flags. A gust of cold wind blew and scattered the loose pages onto the floor.
“What the heck was that?” Nick rose to close the window.