What Eli Sees – Chapter 8
“The Dead Boy’s Name”
The dead boy from the classroom — the one with the suspenders and the too-wide smile — started following Eli home.
Eli noticed him first on the third Monday of October, in the peripheral way he noticed most of the dead: a flicker at the edge of his vision as he walked down Cemetery Road, a presence that was there when he looked straight ahead and gone when he turned his head. By Wednesday the boy had moved into his direct field of vision, walking perhaps fifteen feet behind him, his feet not quite touching the ground, his expression — when Eli looked directly at him, steeling himself — no longer the awful smile but something more ambiguous. Something almost like appeal.
Eli stopped walking.
He turned around.
The dead boy stopped too. He stood on the road in his wrong-decade clothes and he looked at Eli and he raised one hand — not a wave, more like a plea — and he opened his mouth.
No sound came out. His lips moved. Eli watched them carefully, trying to read the shape.
Two syllables. A name.
He went back to the library that afternoon.
He went through the Dunmore school records — the old enrollment books, 1920 to 1960, kept in the archive room that Mrs. Pearce unlocked for him without asking why. He was looking for a boy of ten or eleven, died young, possibly in or near Dunmore Elementary.
He found him on a Tuesday morning in November, in the enrollment book for 1941-1942: Walter Finch, age 11, enrolled September 1941. Noted absent November 14, 1941. Removed from rolls December 1941. A pencilled note in the margin: Accident. Pond.
The Dunmore Gazette, November 1941: Walter Finch, 11, Lost in Unfortunate Pond Accident Near School Property. Family Requests Privacy.
Walter. That was the name the dead boy had been mouthing.
Eli wrote it in his notebook and closed it and sat in the archive room in the smell of old paper and thought about what Mrs. Pearce had said. Something has been waiting for someone who can see it.
He thought: Edmund Harwick, dead in the barn, the worst presence, the one with the sound like a pipe organ. The woman with no eyes, who had come to him on the first night and announced herself. The voice in the corner that called his mother’s name. The dead boy Walter Finch who had been following him home.
It was building. Something was building. He didn’t know toward what.
That night he woke at two in the morning to find Walter Finch standing beside his bed. Not at the end of the bed — beside it, his face twelve inches from Eli’s, his eyes wide and dark and frightened, a child’s eyes, genuinely frightened, and this was worse somehow than any of the other manifestations because this was a child and children should not look like that. Walter’s mouth was moving. No sound. Eli lay on his back and made himself breathe and made himself look at the moving lips and this time, in the close dark, he could read them: “She knows. She knows you’re here. She’s coming for your mother.” Eli sat up. “Who?” he whispered. Walter pointed toward the wall — toward the northeast corner, through two walls and a hallway — and his expression was pure terror and then he was gone and the room was empty and Eli sat in the dark listening to his own heart and the voice from the corner had started up again, low and steady, saying something he could not quite hear.
He did not sleep again that night.
In the morning he told his mother he didn’t feel well.
It was not entirely a lie.