The Triad of Finity Read Free Page B

keep watch, anyway.”
    Oliver nodded. “See you in a minute.”
    He stepped over the side of the house, flipping under the eave so that he hung inverted like a bat. More memories … of watching from here as a door opened, as hands opened the first gift he’d given her, a new camera …
    Oliver dropped to the ground. The basement door was locked, dead-bolted from the inside. To the right, a window was covered with plywood. It appeared to be thoroughly nailed shut, but only the four corner nails were actually sunk into the wall. The rest were just show. Oliver peeled the plywood carefully away so as not to bend the nails, leaned it against the base of the wall, and wormed through the narrow space. There were still a few glass shards sticking up here and there, but Oliver had learned how to avoid them. Without oven mitts , he thought to himself, considering not for the first time that now he was the intruder sneaking into the abandoned house, as she had once been.
    The cobwebs seemed to double every time he visited. He brushed the gray curtains aside, moving through the pitch-black basement, between walls of cardboard boxes, until he reached the open space, bordered on two sides by boxes, on the third by a rusty washer and dryer, and on the fourth by a double sink. Water dripped from the leaky faucet. Oliver inspected the room but saw disappointedly that things were just as he’d left them. The pile of darkroom supplies on the shelf beside the sink, the strings that crisscrossed the ceiling strung with black-and-white photos …
    Emalie’s space. Her presence was everywhere.
    After she and her parents and Great Aunt Kathleen had left for the old-west town of Arcana and the year 1868, a realtor friend of Aunt Kathleen’s had come by and put that “For Sale” sign out front. It was just for show, though. The house was being held until they came back.
    When Oliver first returned here, he’d found Emalie’s piles of photographs beneath the sink. There were hundreds in all, and Oliver had strung some across the ceiling, taped more to the box sides around him and all over the washer and dryer. He’d tiled the floor with others.
    He sat down now in the middle of the darkroom space, a collage all around him; it was like being in Emalie’s mind, the world she’d seen through her camera eye. Over by the sink were some of the photos from the abandoned house above Oliver’s home. From that first December morning, the chance encounter that had changed everything, set them off on so many adventures … and led to her leaving.
    There was one thing in the room that wasn’t Emalie’s. In the middle of the floor was a foot-tall box, made of delicate wood and hinged at its sides so that it could be folded up and stored flat when not in use. Oliver flipped open the lid and reached inside without looking. His fingers brushed through the contents, making a quiet clattering sound, and emerged with a small, silver teardrop-shaped earring.
    He held the earring, sniffed it gently, winced at the memories it unearthed, and then placed it on the floor, inside a small circle drawn with rose-colored gypsum sand. Then, he stood, cocked his ear toward the far corner of the room, and crept away. He returned to his seat a moment later, his hands cupped in front of him.
    He opened them, revealing a tiny gray mouse lying on its side, unmoving except for the rapid rise and fall of its chest. It was alive, yet Oliver had stilled its soul, which put the creature in such a state of fear that it became frozen in a kind of paralyzed state.
    The stilling gaze was a new skill which Oliver and his classmates had been learning this year. First, you identified the scents and force signatures of fear in the creature, and then you tried to project the essence of these feelings back through your gaze, which literally froze the creature in fright. You couldn’t perform it on anything large, like a human, until you had your demon—Oliver had tried it on Dean one