Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  epigraph

  a forest

  dance along the edge

  don’t talk to me about love

  anywhere out of the world

  theft, and wandering around lost

  we came to dance

  isolation

  doubts even here

  a girl in trouble is a temporary thing

  shouldn’t have done that

  fade to grey

  a person isn’t safe anywhere these days

  faît accompli

  a time for fear (who’s afraid?)

  kiss kiss, bang bang

  spellbound

  heartbreak beat

  watching you without me

  acknowledgments

  author’s note

  about the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Nathan Kotecki

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Houghton Mifflin is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kotecki, Nathan.

  Pull down the night : book two of The Suburban strange / by Nathan Kotecki.

  p. cm. — (The Suburban strange)

  Summary: “Bruno and Sylvio transfer to Suburban High and find themselves entangled in its otherworldly mysteries and the uber chic clique known as the Rosary” —Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-547-73114-8

  [1. High schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Cliques (Sociology)—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction. 6. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.K8537Pul 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013003938

  eISBN 978-0-544-15584-8

  v1.1013

  For Amanda, who only flies when

  she thinks no one is watching.

  We are fortunate to live in a world where we are not limited to experiencing only the things we understand. And as for whether things are possible, if they happen, does it matter whether or not they are possible?

  1

  a forest

  BRUNO OPENED THE BACK door of his family’s new house and stepped into the thickening air of dusk, having no idea he was about to fall in love. He left the flagstone patio and crossed the lawn to a high wall of cypress bordering the backyard. After passing through the hedge, he traversed a grassy alley and climbed two stone steps through another row of trees to the larger rear yard. There a neglected tennis court lay hidden under acorns and leaves, enclosed by more cypress and canopied by tall oaks. A picnic bench languished in the shadow of a tree. Fireflies blinked in the darkening corners.

  Bruno went back to the grassy alley. At one end the peak of the garage roof loomed black against the purple sky. In the opposite direction the alley dead-ended in a copse of dogwoods and shrubs. Bruno figured the exact center of this neighborhood block must lie somewhere on the other side of those trees, surrounded by backyards. He walked to the copse, but it was too dense to see anything through it. A small flock of birds rose, whisking the sky, and resettled in the trees past the tennis court.

  Cicadas thrummed around him. Bruno carefully stepped into the tangle of greenery and near darkness, and just when he thought there was nothing to find, the overgrown area gave way and he emerged in a clearing.

  Bruno found himself on a small square of freshly mown grass, enclosed by solid walls of bushes and trees on all sides. He couldn’t see a roof in any direction. Well-tended clusters of white flowers grew in beds on each side of the clearing. An arched alcove sheltered a small fountain, its laughter echoing quietly off the marble. Turning back, Bruno couldn’t see how he’d made it through the thicket.

  The air in this unexpected place smelled of cloves, with a hint of the seashore. Bruno wondered what could be brining the air here, two hours’ drive inland. He felt as though he had been transported to a remote sanctuary. The deep shadows held a chill.

  There was a rustling that sounded too loud to be a bird, and he considered fleeing back into the trees, fearful of being caught trespassing. But before Bruno could move, a man emerged on the far side of the clearing, clad in a battered oilskin mackintosh, a dark work shirt and pants, and well-worn boots. His rugged face made it hard to guess his age; bits of dried leaves clung to his hair and the rake he carried.

  “I thought I’d see you soon enough,” the man said. He had a deep voice with a little gravel in it and an accent Bruno guessed was Australian. “How d’you do?”

  “You did?” Bruno asked. “Are you our neighbor?”

  “No, I don’t live here.”

  “Are you the gardener?”

  “That’s about right,” the man said, idly hefting the rake. “Are you Bruno, then?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s my job to know. But not many folks come through here, so there aren’t many others it could have been.”

  “Why don’t people come through here?”

  “Because they don’t know how to find it. It’s tucked in the middle of so many places, but most people don’t even realize it’s here.” With the toe of his boot, the man pushed a loose piece of sod back into place at the edge of a flower bed.

  Bruno approached the fountain and read the letters carved into the arch. “Ebentwine?”

  “I don’t know who named it. It’s been called that as long as I’ve been here, and I’ve been here a long time.” The gardener reached up to a branch and pulled it down slightly, inspecting it. “Where are you headed?”

  It sounded like a suggestion that he be on his way. “Home, I guess.” He turned to go but realized he had lost his bearings.

  “Go this way.” The gardener pointed to a hedge on one side.

  “Thank you.” Bruno carefully pushed through the hedge, expecting to reach the grassy alley behind his house. Instead he found himself in the far reaches of a lawn behind a house he didn’t recognize. The scent of the clearing was gone, replaced by the more familiar suburban smells of pine trees and grass clippings. The shades of green around him seemed duller, perhaps because of the fading daylight.

  Now he was sure he was trespassing. The gardener hadn’t seen him come in; how could he have known which house was Bruno’s? Then again, how had he known Bruno’s name? Bruno turned to go, then stopped.

  Music was playing somewhere—a song that tugged at him like a ghost. He scanned the house in front of him, looking for the source. In an open upstairs window, a slender girl stood in profile, pulling a brush through her shiny dark hair. Bruno stepped out from his cover among the trees, mesmerized by the sight. The music was faint, but wavering notes from an electric guitar reached him, and the low voice of a woman. The past and the future fell away.

  He didn’t pay much attention to girls usually, and when he did, he only compared them unfavorably with his older sister, Sophia. But now it was as if Bruno were seeing a girl for the first time. The air around her figure seemed to vibrate like heat above asphalt, and everything outside her window went out of focus.

  She set her brush down and looked out over the trees. Bruno guessed she was a few years older than he was, and her pale face was more elegant than that of any teenager Bruno had ever seen. The song floated down to him over the wash of guitar, the lyrics unclear. All of it was so unexpected, so otherworldly; Bruno no longer care
d that he didn’t quite know where he was. He would have stood there all night watching her.

  In the upstairs room, the shadow of another person slid across the ceiling, and the ethereal girl turned away from the window. She moved out of sight, and the spell on Bruno was broken. He became aware of the cicadas in the trees again, and he swatted at an insect by his ear. He waited, but after a minute the chill began to seep through his shirt. Picking through the wall of dark green, he found his way back to the clearing.

  The gardener was still there. “Back so soon?”

  “That’s not my house,” Bruno said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why did you . . . I thought you said . . .”

  “Come back whenever you like,” the man told him, pointing to another place in the hedges.

  “My house is that way?” Bruno couldn’t tell if the nodding man was amused or annoyed. Bruno stepped carefully into the thicket, concerned he would wind up in yet another unknown place. But he emerged in the grassy alley and returned to his own backyard. In his mind he still saw the girl in the window. Who was she? He wondered how he might meet her. It felt like the easiest thing and the hardest thing in the world. He went inside his house.

  His brother was calling his name as Bruno climbed the stairs, and the last bit of adventure faded from his mind. He shouted back, “What!”

  “What time do we have to be there tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know.” Bruno did know, but he liked holding out on his older brother. He went into his bedroom and over to his window. Across the trees the neighboring roof darkened as evening took hold. It was not the same roof he had seen on the other side of that strange little clearing named Ebentwine. Bruno must have gotten turned around; the girl must live on the other side of them.

  He sat on his bed and considered the two sealed moving boxes huddled together in the middle of the wood floor. His bare dresser, empty desk, and lamp stood against the far wall.

  “What did you say?” his brother called.

  “I said I don’t know!” Bruno went down the hall to his brother’s bedroom. Sylvio was sitting at his computer, dressed in gray slacks and a black shirt, his black hair parted as if with a knife. Bruno wondered why he went to all that trouble when he hadn’t left the house all day.

  “We’d better find out.”

  Bruno pushed his hands down in his jeans pockets and looked around his brother’s room. After only two weeks it already looked as though he had been living there for years. Three walls were covered with the same posters and clippings that had decorated Sylvio’s room in their old house. Dozens of wine crates were stacked on their sides against the fourth wall to make shelves that crowded the ceiling. All the same books, CDs, and notebooks were there. Bruno recognized the gloomy song that was playing on Sylvio’s computer, though he didn’t know its name or the name of the band. He wondered if Sylvio knew the song he had just heard in the beautiful girl’s backyard, but there was no way he’d be able to describe it. “Do we have to make dinner?”

  “Probably. They’re out meeting people from the new parish. They didn’t say when they’d be back.”

  Bruno wandered out into the hall. He had acclimated quickly to the dimensions of the new house. It was bigger than their last house, but older. The first bedroom at the top of the stairs had been put together as a guest room, which pained him a little, because it would have been their older sister’s. But Sophia was off at college, and even farther, studying abroad. She had left for Argentina before she’d even had the chance to see this house. She wouldn’t set foot in Whiterose until Christmas.

  Later, Sylvio teased him as they ate the omelets Bruno had made. “So, are you going to start mowing all the lawns and walking all the dogs here, too?”

  “Maybe. Who knows, maybe someone else has all the jobs already.”

  “I hope not; what would you do with all your time? Are you curious about high school?”

  “Not really. Maybe a little.”

  “It sounds like Suburban is a lot bigger than Franklin High.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  “True. I may not see you very much at school. I remember when I was a first year and Sophia was a senior, we saw each other all the time. She kind of looked out for me. It’s probably not going to be like that here.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Have you decided what you’re going to wear?”

  His brother was serious. “I haven’t even thought about it.”

  “You kill me, you know that? It’s the first impression you’re going to make on everybody! You can’t do that over.”

  “What are you going to wear?” Bruno already knew.

  “White shirt, polka dot tie, black sweater vest, black velvet trousers. I know I’m breaking the rule, wearing velvet when it’s not between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But this is a special occasion.”

  “And when you go out dancing.”

  “What?”

  “You wear velvet when you go out dancing.”

  “Oh, yeah. But I don’t know if there’s anything like that around here. I had to drive forty minutes to get to Hermetica. Who knows; here I might have to drive a couple hours to find a club like that. I don’t want to think about it.”

  Bruno thought only that his brother was going to be warm in velvet pants. The garage door motor churned on the other side of the mudroom door, and in a minute their parents came in.

  “Oh, good, you ate!” Mr. Perilunas kissed them. “We met some really lovely people tonight. I think this new parish is going to be fantastic.”

  “Mom, what time do we have to be at school tomorrow?” Sylvio asked.

  Seven forty-five, Bruno thought.

  “Seven forty-five,” his mother said. “You must be so excited!”

  After dinner, Bruno studied himself in the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. The edges of his sweatshirt were frayed, and his wavy brown hair bristled on his forehead as though he had toweled it dry and forgotten about it, which he had. He went back to his room and sat on the edge of his bed. Out the window the roof of the house next door was barely visible in the night sky. He went to the lonely moving boxes and pulled up the packing tape. He dug out a big burgundy book with Maps of the World written in gold on the spine and went back to his bed.

  He opened the book at random, confident the cities he found would be familiar. “Pardubice,” he said carefully, sounding out the letters on the map. He knew the names on these maps by sight, but not by sound. This was his favorite book, but during the move a different map had captured his attention: the full-scale one, where one mile equals one mile. His family had pulled up their pin from a place Bruno knew as well as the lines on his hand, and pushed it down again in a new place. He knew this new place decently well already—he had studied its map obsessively from the moment he had learned about the move—but the streets and corners of Whiterose waited for him to walk them or see them from a car window. There was a particular pleasure in proving a map right by going there in person, and that anticipated pleasure outweighed any sadness Bruno had felt about what he was leaving behind. He was ready for the next thing.

  “WELL, YOU LOOK ALL RIGHT, I guess,” Sylvio said the next morning. Bruno looked down at his jeans and striped polo. He only felt self-conscious when his brother looked at him. But then, Bruno always thought Sylvio looked as if he was dressing for the movie he hoped to be cast in someday. “You ready?”

  They went out to the garage and got into the old black car that had been purchased after forty-five minutes of negotiations between Bruno’s brother and his father in a sales lot the previous week. Bruno liked the car. With rounded surfaces that would have been more sharply angled on a new car, it had the look some older cars do, as though it enjoyed its job of driving. Sylvio plugged his music player into the new stereo in the dashboard, and they coasted down the driveway.

  His brother sang along with the opening lines of “Fascination Street.” He looked over at Bruno. “You like this
one, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Bruno said.

  “You know who it is, right?”

  “Um, no,” Bruno said, thinking, The Cure.

  “C’mon—you do! The Cure!”

  “Right,” Bruno said. He was paying more attention to the world outside his window. He knew their street, populated by large houses with large lawns to keep them apart. He didn’t see the house from the night before. Where is it? How did I wind up somewhere else? The first day of school might have intrigued him more if the girl he had glimpsed wasn’t still vivid in his mind. There was nothing to be done about it now. He knew the next two turns, and then he mentally unfolded his map, predicting the street names and confirming them on the corner posts when they passed. “Why’d you go this way?” he asked when his brother turned.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could have stayed straight and turned on King Street, and saved about half a mile.”

  “God, I forget how freaky you are,” Sylvio muttered. “I can get there this way, though, can’t I?”

  “Sure,” Bruno said. He watched Sylvio for a moment. “You’re nervous.”

  “Yes, I am. You’re not the one who’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. I know it’s a bigger school, but what if people don’t really get my style here? At Franklin everyone was used to me. It could be a lot harder here.”

  “I like the stuff you like,” Bruno said.

  “No you don’t, not really. But I’m glad to know that if I get pasted in the parking lot, you’ll step in and get pasted with me.” Sylvio grinned.

  “I didn’t say I would do that.” Bruno grinned back at him. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. There might even be some people like you.”

  As they approached Suburban High School, Bruno stared out the window at the imposing building that sprawled like a set of massive building blocks dumped out on the lawn. He was confused; something didn’t match the pictures and plans of Suburban he’d seen on the Internet. “That wing is new,” he said, pointing out the window.