The Collectors Read online

  3

  SuperVan

  VAN couldn’t quite remember his father.

  So he imagined him instead.

  “Your father was a magic worker,” his mother would say, whenever Van asked about him. For years, Van had pictured his father wearing a long silk cape and shiny top hat, flourishing decks of cards, and making rabbits disappear in little puffs of smoke. Eventually he realized that this wasn’t what his mother meant.

  In fact, his father was a stage designer. His name was Antonio Phillippe Gaugez-Garcia, and he created the kind of special effects with light and fabric and shadows and dry ice that made audiences gasp. As far as Van knew, he was still out there somewhere, probably in some busy European city, sketching scenery and hanging strange contraptions from fly rods.

  If Van had ever missed his father, he couldn’t remember that, either.

  But he had inherited something from him—something besides his dark eyes and hair, and parts of his too-long name.

  A model stage.

  His mother had been about to get rid of it. According to her, there was no point in saving a bunch of bulky things when you were going to move again in six months, so she was always throwing things out, and Van was always rescuing things from the about-to-be-thrown-out pile.

  And the model stage was especially worth saving. It had a black wooden floor about one foot deep and two feet wide, and black velvet walls around the back and sides, and a fancy gold proscenium with red curtains that opened and closed when you pulled a cord.

  It was the perfect size for Van’s collection.

  That evening, as soon as he and his mother got back to their current apartment, Van scurried through the kitchen, down the narrow hallway, and into his bedroom. He closed the door behind him. He took off his hearing aids and set them down in their spot on the bedside table. Van usually took the hearing aids off as soon as he was home for the day. Removing them felt like having a big broom whisk through his head, sweeping all the dirt and clutter away. Now he could focus on the important things.

  Van hurried across the room and knelt down in front of the miniature stage.

  He tugged a heavy plastic box out from under the bed. Inside the box were hundreds of small things—things that other people had lost, dropped, thrown away, or forgotten, and that Van had found, picked up, cleaned off, and saved.

  There were tiny plastic swords and paper umbrellas from sidewalk cafes. There were miniature animals and cups and cars, and broken jewelry, and tokens from board games. There was a tin soldier he’d found on the London Underground, and a tiny stone frog he’d sat on in a German train, and a three-legged lion from a public bathroom somewhere in Austria.

  Van had been to a lot of places. Most of them were a blur—London was a big grayish blur, Paris was a big ivory blur, Rome was a big sunny blur—except for the objects that he collected. These stood out in his mind like rubber ducks floating in a big, blurry sea.

  Now Van took the red plastic spaceman out of his pocket and added him to the box. He dug around until he’d found a miniature mirror and an old egg cup. He balanced the mirror on the cup and placed it in the center of the miniature stage, where it looked a little bit like a fountain. There were a few plastic trees in the box, and Van set these up around the stage’s edge. He didn’t have any squirrels in his collection, but there were two cats, and one of them was white, with a plumy tail. It was close enough. Van examined a few dolls, but they were all too poofy and princessy to be the girl in the big coat. He thought about using one of the plastic army men, or the little statue of a saint he’d found on a sidewalk in Buenos Aires, but in the end, he settled on a wooden pawn from a chess set. It wasn’t right for the strange girl, but it was the only thing that didn’t feel wrong.

  The role of Van would be played, as always, by a little plastic superhero in a black cape.

  SuperVan.

  Van set the cat-squirrel next to the fountain. He scattered a few of his foreign coins over the top of the miniature mirror. Then he posed the pawn beside it. The pawn leaned in to grab a coin. SuperVan strode onto the scene.

  “You know, you really shouldn’t take those,” SuperVan said boldly. “They’re people’s wishes.”

  Instead of whirling around, splashing the squirrel, and shoving Van backward with a wet pointer finger, the pawn bowed its knobby head.

  “Oh,” Pawn Girl said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just need the money so much.”

  “What do you need money for?” asked SuperVan. “Are you hungry? Do you need help?”

  “Yes,” said Pawn Girl. “Yes, please. I’m so hungry. . . .”

  “Wait right here,” commanded SuperVan.

  With SuperVan in his fist, Van dug through his treasure box. He found a set of beautiful plastic fruits he’d almost stepped on in a park in Tokyo, and a little silver goblet that had probably once belonged to a little silver king, and a pizza and a hamburger and several other miniature snacks that were actually erasers.

  “Look out below!” shouted SuperVan. He soared over the stage, dropping food items like edible bombs. Pawn Girl and the squirrel cheered.

  “You saved me!” cried Pawn Girl, as SuperVan landed gracefully on top of the fountain. “I’ll never forget you! What’s your name, so that I can find you again?”

  “You can call me SuperVan. And what’s your name?”

  “I’m—”

  Van paused, twirling the little wooden piece around in his fingers. What was the right sort of name for a girl who wandered city parks with a too-long coat and a noisy squirrel on her shoulder? He thought about the names of the girls at his school, and at his last school, and at the school before that. None of them seemed quite right. In fact, there was no ordinary name that he could think of that would suit this strange, squirrel-wearing girl.

  He was still twirling the little pawn back and forth when his bedroom door swung open. Van smelled his mother’s lily perfume just before she touched his shoulder.

  “Playing with your maquette?” she asked.

  Van’s mother liked to call things by their fanciest names. The little stage was a maquette. A movie theatre was a cinema. Coffee with milk was café au lait. Van’s mother was never “in the bathroom.” She was indisposed.

  “Kind of,” said Van.

  “I just realized that I forgot one of our errands today,” said his mother, swishing away and sitting down on the edge of Van’s bed. Van followed her with his eyes. “We should have picked up a birthday present for Peter Grey.”

  Van gave a little jerk. His elbow bumped the stage. SuperVan toppled into the fountain. “Why do we need to get a birthday present for Peter Grey?”

  “Because you’re going to his party on Saturday. I told you about this.” Ingrid Markson looked into Van’s wide eyes. “I thought I told you about this. He invited you weeks ago.”

  “He invited me?”

  “Well . . . Charles invited you on Peter’s behalf.”

  “Who’s Charles?”

  “Mr. Grey.” His mother smiled brightly. “He has a first name, you know.”

  Mr. Grey was the artistic director of the opera company that had hired Van’s mother for the season. Van knew he was important. Mr. Grey obviously knew it too. He always wore a suit, and he always spoke with a British accent that Van thought might have been fake, and he always seemed a bit bored with everything happening around him. His son, Peter, was just the same—minus the suit and the accent.

  “Do I have to go?” Van asked.

  His mother leaned back on the bed and patted her upswept hair. “Do you really need to ask that question?”

  Van set the pawn on the stage. “No.”

  “I’ll pick up a gift for Peter tomorrow,” his mother said. Van looked up at her face again. She rose from the bed, stretching languidly. “There are plenty of leftovers from Leo’s in the refrigerator, when you’re hungry.”

  His mother signed the last word as she spoke it, cupping one hand and moving it downward over her ches
t. His mother always spoke aloud while she signed—which wasn’t very often. Van had been almost five years old when his mother had noticed the trouble with his hearing. Since then—besides getting the little blue hearing aids—he’d become an expert face watcher and sound follower. While Van thought it might have been cool to use a secret, silent language with his hands, there was really only his mother to use it with. And she didn’t do anything silently.

  “Okay,” said Van.

  His mother swept out the door.

  A minute later, Van caught the faint trickling hum that meant his mother was at the living-room piano. The higher, clearer hum of her singing followed it. Her voice glided up the scale like a paintbrush moving across a canvas, its colors fading out at the edges, where the notes grew too high for Van’s ears to catch.

  Van pushed his door shut.

  Then he knelt back down in front of the little stage and picked up SuperVan and Pawn Girl. But now, for some reason, he couldn’t think of anything to make them say. He set them down again and picked up the cat-squirrel instead.

  “Quickquickquick!” it said.

  Van set it back down too. He let out a heavy sigh.

  At the moment, Van would rather have been headed to the bottom of a scummy park fountain than to Peter Grey’s birthday party. But he didn’t have a choice.

  4

  Something Dark

  LATE that night, something pushed Van over the edge of asleep and into awake.

  After he opened his eyes, Van couldn’t remember what had done the pushing. He lay in his bed, trying to think backward. Had it been a dream? Or something tickling his arm? Or a flash of lights in his window? He wasn’t sure. But as he lay there, and the minutes ticked by, he became more and more sure of something else.

  He was thirsty.

  Van threw his legs out of bed and padded to the door.

  The hall was dim. Van and his mother had stayed in so many different places, every time Van woke up he had to stop and look around to remind himself where he was. Now he glanced carefully to the left and right. His mother’s bedroom door, to the left, was closed. The kitchen waited to his right. His striped pajamas whisked softly around his legs as he hurried out the door and down the hall.

  The lights of the nighttime city dusted the kitchen with silver. Van yanked open the heavy refrigerator door, pushing aside stacks of cardboard takeout containers until he’d uncovered the jug of orange juice. He had to climb up onto the counter to reach a drinking glass. Then, with his full glass of juice, he tiptoed out of the kitchen and across the living room, past the piano, to the big dormer window.

  Van knelt on the padded bench and leaned his forehead against the cool windowpane. If he leaned steeply enough, he could imagine he was flying, just like SuperVan. He was soaring over the sleepy streets, taller than the trees, taller than the buildings, taller than the tallest kids at school. Van wriggled his toes and sipped his orange juice.

  It had rained lightly during the night. The streets were black and glittery. A gust of wind blew, and a few wet petals shivered down from a tree across the street, glinting in the lamplight. A taxi streaked by. If he had been looking at one of the puddles in the gutter, Van might have seen the tiny reflected wink of a falling star.

  But Van didn’t see that falling star. What he saw came immediately after.

  What he saw was something dark.

  It seeped out of the shadows. It scuttled out of sewer grates. It crept around corners. It ducked behind tree trunks. It moved so smoothly, at first Van thought it must be one large, singular thing, like a flood of black water. But then the flood began to break apart, and Van saw that it wasn’t a flood of water at all, but a flood of thousands of small, dark animals: rats and raccoons and mice and bats and birds and creatures he couldn’t identify. Some of them scurried up the stoops of the apartment buildings. Others clambered up fire escapes and drainpipes. The ones with wings soared up to the rooftops and windowsills.

  Van watched, keeping perfectly still.

  The winged creatures wriggled between closed curtains, slid through blinds, slipped under sills. Seconds later, they reappeared. Meanwhile, the scurrying shapes that had squeezed up the drainpipes and through cracks in doorways squeezed out again. And now, several of those creatures carried with them tiny, glimmering lights.

  Van squinted. He pressed his forehead against the glass as hard as he could.

  The creatures hurried into the street, little golden lights glinting in their beaks and mouths and claws. Soon dozens of steady golden sparks seemed to mix with that sea of shadows, like a swarm of fireflies on a black river.

  The shadows and sparks swept back up the wet street. Before Van could blink, they had poured back through the sewer grates, glided around corners, and disappeared as quietly as they had come.

  A droplet of orange juice slid over Van’s fingers. His entire body had been so focused on the shadows that his hand had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing. Van straightened the glass. Then he pressed his forehead back to the windowpane.

  The street below him looked perfectly normal.

  A car shushed past, its roof sheening under the street-lamps.

  For several minutes more, Van watched the street, his eyes catching every glimmer of motion. Each glint turned out to be nothing but a wet leaf or a blowing candy wrapper. Still, Van went on staring until his eyes itched and his feet fell asleep.

  Finally he inched back off the bench and tiptoed down the hall to his bed, where the rest of him quickly fell asleep too. By the time he woke up the next morning, the small, scurrying shadows seemed as unlikely as a dream. And Van told himself that was all they were.

  But he didn’t quite believe it.

  5

  Petty Theft

  INGRID Markson turned to Van, who sat beside her in the back of the cab. “I’ll be back for you in three hours,” she said, in a voice that made the whole taxi ring. “You’ve got the gift?”

  Van held up the package containing a Lego spaceship.

  “Good,” said his mother. “Be sure to thank everyone. Especially Peter. And have fun!”

  Van wriggled out onto the curb. He stared up at the Greys’ house, an imposing four-story stone house in a row of imposing four-story stone houses. He was still staring up at it when the cab whizzed away behind him.

  There was no escape now.

  Van hadn’t been to many other kids’ birthday parties. In general, he and his mother didn’t stay in any one place long enough for him to get to know any kids who were having one. His own birthday parties were usually made up of a bunch of singers and musicians from his mother’s current show, or sometimes they were just Van and his mother. The two of them would visit a zoo or amusement park, and then go out for big dishes of gelato, and those turned out to be the best birthdays of all.

  But now he was on his own.

  Van climbed the broad stairs, stepping twice on each one. The Greys’ front door looked so solid and shiny and unfriendly, knocking on it would have been like punching an armored giant. Van pressed the doorbell instead.

  The door flew open. A young woman with glossy brown hair smiled down at him.

  “Hello,” said Van as politely and clearly as he could. “I’m Van Markson. I’m here for the birthday party. You must be Mrs. Grey.”

  The woman giggled. “Oh, no, I’m the nanny. But you’re at the right place. Come on inside.”

  Van stepped through the unfriendly door and flinched as it boomed shut behind him. The nanny spoke at the same time. Because she was behind him, and because the noise of the door soaked through her words, Van couldn’t quite decipher them. At first he thought she’d said, “The poison’s on the eater’s spoon,” but that didn’t seem likely.

  The nanny pointed toward the staircase. “Go on up and join them.”

  Oh, thought Van. The boys are up in Peter’s room. A little better than poison. Maybe.

  The nanny had already bustled away. With one last deep breath, Van ventured tow
ard the staircase.

  The stairs curved around the high-ceilinged foyer. The wall that curved with them was lined with opera photographs. Van glanced at the singers’ wide-open mouths as he trudged past, imagining that they were trying to swallow him, like greedy fish lunging up from a pond.

  He reached the upper hall. The first door on his left led into a bathroom. For just a second, Van pictured himself hiding in that bathroom for the rest of the party. Then he pictured one of Peter’s friends running in to use the toilet and finding Van crouched inside the bathtub.

  Probably not a good idea.

  The next door was shut. Van tugged it open cautiously, and found himself staring up at shelves full of towels.

  The door beyond the towel closet stood open. Flashes of colored light and rumbles of noise poured through it into the hallway. Van let the flashes drag him the rest of the way into what was obviously Peter’s room.

  There were eight other boys inside. Their heads swiveled around as Van tiptoed in. They all stared at him for a second, their faces as identically blank as eggs in a carton, before swiveling back to the game on the TV screen.

  “Hello,” said Van, because nobody else said anything.

  Nobody said anything to that, either.

  “Happy birthday, Peter,” said Van.

  A boy with light brown hair and a controller in his hands said, “Thanks.” His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “On a hiccup at camel back.”

  Van altered the sounds in his head, rearranging them like figurines on a little stage. Connor, pick up that camo bag. Or maybe, Colin, pick up that ammo pack. It didn’t matter. Either way, Peter wasn’t talking to him.

  Van inched farther into the room. Peter and three other boys were holding controllers. Four more boys were sprawled on the carpet beside them. Avoiding the logjam of legs, Van backed into the corner and sat down on the edge of Peter’s bed. He looked around.

  The walls were painted pale gray and hung with framed movie posters. The huge TV took up most of the opposite wall. Video games and consoles and wires spilled out of the cabinet beneath it. On the built-in shelves above the bed, just to Van’s right, an army of action figures and models and finished Lego spaceships stood in silent rows. One of the spaceships, Van noticed, was the very same ship that was currently waiting downstairs, wrapped in sparkly blue paper, with a tag that read To Peter, From Van.