The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [7]
***
“He gave you a spaceship?” Matthew said. “That’s stupid.”
“Not a real one....” argued Dabby.
“I know not a real one, lunkhead. He gave you a piece of aluminum foil. It can’t fly, you told me yourself.”
“I like looking at it.”
“Awe,” remarked Matthew, glancing back through the fence at the guard, “He’s no different than a bum from the ghetto. Only thing is, he gets paid for sleeping in his car.”
“Idiot. Bums don’t have cars.”
“Really,” agreed the third smallest, to which the girl nearly snapped back, irritable from Matthew’s cruel remarks, but instead quieted. He was also a pudgy one, this other boy, although much smaller than even she. He was a cheerfully innocent boy of African heritage with skin of the darkest kind, as spunky as a Saturday morning cartoon, with a smile which inflated his cheeks to the extent that they appeared to be stuffed with cheeseburgers. His oversized clothes hung about him like toga-type drapery, and at times his walk would catch the ends of his drooping pant legs beneath his shoes, sending him tumbling forward.
Before the three children, stood yet another building of brick, heavily boarded at its windows and entranceways, embellished with billings and advertisements which even the oldest child found difficulty reading, with the exception of....
“I know this sign,” exclaimed the girl. She pointed to a bright red series of words spread across the boards of what apparently was the building’s main door. “NO TRESPASSING. You know what that means?”
“Of course I do, lunkhead,” spat the oldest, “I go to church. And lead us not into trespassing as we forgive those who are trespassing against us.”
“But we can’t go in there.”
“Like hell we can’t,” said the boy eagerly, climbing from his bike, his irregularly-cut brown hair falling into his face like stringy tendrils. The two others dismounted as well, joining him in momentary awe at the monster of brick and board. “This is where the Wraith-child lives.”
“Really,” challenged the smallest inquisitively.
“Yes really,” said the oldest with a mystical sincerity. “People get killed here. That’s what they say. People get killed, because there’s this baby that lives here. People hear it crying, and they go inside, and they never come out. Never!”
“Really,” replied the other boy, and his cheeseburger smile faltered in halfhearted disbelief.
“And you want us to go in there,” Dabby acknowledged frigidly. Then, “I’m not going inside.”
But Matthew was going inside. Defiantly, he abandoned his bike and proceeded toward the building’s side walkway. He gave the two a quick look back, after which he exclaimed, “This is what we came here for, Dabby! You’d think after coming all this way, bein’ such good friends and all, you wouldn’t let me go in alone like this....”
Dabby swallowed. She wanted to call after him, tell him to stop if only to postpone the sudden nagging persuasion to give in. She ignored the temptation to tell him to go to hell, for she feared hell was precisely where he wished to go. She pressed forward in pursuit, the other boy nearly stumbling over his pant legs as he hurryingly waddled to catch up.
Dabby halted to wait for her waddling friend, sighed, straightened her cap. “Come on, Nigel. There’s probably no Wraith-kid anyway.”
“Really?” replied Nigel, as he joined her, stealing an anxious look back upon his lonely bike sandwiched safely between the other two.
Lingering impatiently beside a boarded section of window, Matthew was tempted but hesitated to pry apart a medial opening from loose splinters of wood. His companions arrived, the girl folding her arms and slouching against a corresponding wall with equal impatience at Matthew. Nigel imitated her, his melancholy eyes fixed in playful preparation of her next move.
Matthew gazed within the child-sized porthole he had created the next moment. He listened. His fellow adventurers joined him at his side.