What Eli Sees – Chapter 3
What the Other Children Know”
Dunmore Elementary School smelled of chalk and floor wax and the particular industrial lunch smell of every elementary school in America in 1974 — a combination of tater tots and tomato soup and something unidentifiable that the children called Mystery Gray. Eli started at Dunmore Elementary on a Wednesday in October and by Thursday he had already counted seven dead people in the building.
Three were in the hallway near the gymnasium — a cluster of them, an older man and two women, standing close together and turned toward the wall in the way some of the dead stood, as if they were still oriented toward a room that no longer existed, as if the building that had replaced whatever they remembered had not fully registered with them. They were faded, less distinct than the woman with no eyes, their edges blurred the way old photographs blur. Eli walked past them with his eyes forward and his hands in his pockets.
The fourth was in his classroom.
It sat — he, Eli decided, though he couldn’t have said exactly why — in the back corner by the coat hooks, in a desk that was always empty because the children had a vague, wordless sense that this was not a desk to sit in. He was a boy. Not much older than Eli, perhaps ten or eleven, dressed in clothes that were wrong for 1974 — a collared shirt and short pants and suspenders, the clothes of someone from a different decade. He sat with his hands flat on the desktop and his head slightly bowed and he did not look up when Eli came in.
Eli sat at his assigned desk, three rows forward, and spent the morning’s math lesson trying not to look at the corner. He failed, as he always failed. His eyes kept going back, the way your tongue keeps finding the sore tooth.
The dead boy looked up.
He looked directly at Eli.
He smiled.
It was not a child’s smile. It was the smile of something that had been waiting in that corner for a very long time and had just been given a reason to stop waiting. Too wide. Too still. The kind of smile that knew things about you it shouldn’t know. Eli gripped the edge of his desk and looked at the blackboard and Mrs. Albright was saying something about carrying the one and the dead boy’s smile stretched wider and wider in Eli’s peripheral vision until he turned fully, unable to stop himself, and the desk in the corner was empty and the coat hooks swayed gently on the wall above it, though there was no wind.
“Elijah.” Mrs. Albright’s voice. “Are you with us?”
“Yes ma’am,” Eli said.
At recess a boy named Thomas Birch attached himself to Eli with the cheerful efficiency of a child who had been designated class ambassador and took the responsibility seriously. Thomas was round-faced and gap-toothed and wore a New England Patriots jacket and talked constantly about things Eli would need to know: which lunch table was safe, which teachers gave homework on Fridays, which section of the schoolyard was controlled by the sixth graders and was therefore no-man’s-land for anyone younger.
“The Harwick house,” Thomas said, when Eli mentioned where he lived, and his cheerful efficiency stopped briefly — like a record skipping — before resuming. “On Cemetery Road.”
“Yeah,” Eli said.
Thomas looked at him with an expression Eli was learning to read — the expression of someone deciding how much to say. He had been seeing this expression on the adults in Dunmore since they arrived, in the grocery store, at the post office, in church. The Cranes would say they lived in the Harwick house and something would pass across the face of whoever they were talking to, something that was tamped down quickly and buried under the ordinary social surface.
“My grandma says that house has bad bones,” Thomas said finally.
“What does that mean?” Eli asked.
Thomas chewed his lip. He was eight years old and he had the good instincts of a child who had grown up in a small town full of old stories told in half-sentences and meaningful silences.
“It means stuff happened there,” he said. “Old stuff. And old stuff doesn’t go away, my grandma says. It stays in the wood.”
Eli thought about the cold corner. About the smell of what had been in the glass.
“What kind of stuff?” he asked.
Thomas looked over his shoulder. The sixth graders were playing kickball. Mrs. Albright was by the door. Nobody was listening.
“There was a man,” Thomas said. “A long time ago. He did something. In the barn.” He looked at Eli directly. “Do you sleep okay in that house?”
“Not really,” Eli said honestly.
Thomas nodded as if this was the expected answer. “My grandma says nobody sleeps okay in that house.” He paused. “She says the house remembers.“
Eli said nothing. He was thinking about the woman with no eyes, about the weight of her attention in the dark room, about what it meant to be seen by something that had no means of seeing.
He was thinking that perhaps the house was not the only thing in Dunmore that remembered.
End of Chapter Thre