Acceleration

  It's not the kind of diary where he'll describe his day. It reads more like a rap sheet, a journal of his crimes. There'll be page after page of clippings that span an eight-month period, but nothing about what happened in his life during that time.

  Enough of this! I skip ahead to the later parts of the diary to see how this twisted tale turns out.

  This is kids’ stuff, he writes after detailing another arson. Need something BIGGER.

  Then a few pages farther on:

  Been hunting. Riding the subway, searching the faces for the right one. All the pretty ladies sitting across from me. It's like an audition. A cattle call.

  Hunting. He's hunting. He's moved past the animals and the fires. The “kids’ stuff.” Now he's going after bigger game. The real thing. A woman.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM DELL LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

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  OVERBOARD, Elizabeth Farm

  THE KILLER’S COUSIN, Nancy Werlin

  DORP DEAD, Julia Cunningham

  THE SILENT BOY, Lois Lowry

  DEATH AND THE ARROW, Chris Priestley

  ONE

  This is a nightmare.

  Working at the Toronto Transit Commission's lost and found. Nine to five. Monday to Friday. A little slice of death, one day at a time.

  For me it's a two-month sentence, July and August. I would have been happy bumming around till September, but Dad called in a favor to get me in here. And at least I don’t have to wear a uniform like my bud Wayne over at the Dairy Barn. Wayne's planning to torch the thing on Labor Day (the uniform, not the Barn) before we head back for our last year of high school.

  So I’m here under protest, a political prisoner of the capitalist overlord otherwise known as Dad.

  Here's the one-minute tour of the place. First, to get here you have to come to Bay subway station and take the service elevator down to the subbasement. At the end of the hall to your left you'll find the door marked LOST AND FOUND. Jacob, my supervisor, sits at the front counter cataloguing the lost junk that comes in from the buses and subways in the transit system. If you think of a half-deflated soccer ball with two of the hairiest ears you’ve ever seen attached to it, you’ve got a good picture of Jacob. Past the counter there's a maze of stacks holding row after row, shelf after dusty shelf of lost stuff.

  I’m trying on a black leather jacket in the stacks when the bell at the counter dings. The jacket's term expires in a week, so it'll soon be appearing in my closet as part of the Duncan collection. One ding of the bell means Jacob needs me to search for something. Two dings means hurry up. Three dings—things get ugly.

  When I get to the counter, Jacob's asking an old woman about the weather up on the surface. Spending eight hours a day in this dungeon, you tend to forget that the sun is still shining up there.

  “They say it's going to hit a hundred and three today,” the woman tells him. “Not a cloud in the sky.”

  It's been six weeks with no rain. Major heat wave. But down here you’d never know. The city could be bombed to ashes and we’d still be here sorting through the piles.

  “Duncan, we’re looking for a pair of glasses,” Jacob tells me. “Silver frames. Bifocals.”

  I sigh. “Right. This might take a while.”

  Eyeglasses rank in the top four on the list of most often lost items, right up there with umbrellas, cell phones, and books.

  I’m the runner, the one who does the actual searching. Jacob does the actual sitting.

  I don’t know who did this job before me—don’t know if anybody did it before me—but the place is a mess. The way it works, stuff gets held here for three months. Everything's got a Post-it with an expiration date. Anything unclaimed gets boxed up for the quarterly sale down at the YMCA. But if you poke around, you'll find stuff that's been here for two years or more. I pulled a college sweater off the top shelf the other day, and the dust coming off it drifted down like snow.

  Lost junk is organized in sections. All the jackets are together, including my black leather beauty. Dozens of umbrellas are heaped in a pile, enough rain protection to keep every last flea on Noah's ark dry. There's a library of forgotten books overflowing the packed shelves. And there are two boxes of eyeglasses, separated into sunglasses and regular. I dig in.

  There's an amazing variety, everything from prescription swimming goggles to your basic thick-black-framed geek glasses to your old-lady specials with the necklace holders attached to the arms. I find a pair that fits the lady's description—bifocals, silver frames. Holding them up to peer through the lenses, I see they’ve got enough magnifying power to count the hairs on a mosquito's butt.

  “That's them,” the old woman says after trying them on.

  Jacob makes her sign the claims book, as if the glasses are worth more than the dollar they’d get at the Y sale.

  “I’m lost without these,” she tells us. “I’m so blind without them, I didn’t realize until I was halfway here that I’d put hand lotion on my face instead of sunscreen. I can already feel a burn starting up.”

  Jacob nods. “Yeah. With the holes in the ozone and global warming, the sun's not as friendly as it used to be.”

  The woman shivers, pulling her jacket closed. “Well, it's certainly cool down here.”

  “We’re about fifty feet underground—deeper than the subway tunnels—so the temperature stays a constant cool year-round. This must be what it feels like to be buried alive.” That's Jacob's idea of funny. I think he's been down here too long.

  The woman gives him a nervous look and mumbles her thanks as she makes for the door.

  “You’ve really got a way with the ladies,” I say when she's gone.

  No response.

  I fill a paper cup at the cooler, leaning on it as it gurgles to itself, and watch the clock crawl toward eternity. Jacob goes back to reading the newspaper.

  Past him, there's a glass case on the wall that once held a fire axe but now has an artificial leg standing inside. That leg is like the official mascot of all the forgotten junk in the lost and found. There's a worn-down blue men's Puma running shoe on its foot, and it's obviously been well used. It always gets me wondering—how do you lose something like that? I mean, didn’t the guy notice something was missing when he went hopping off the subway—that the world was bouncing up and down more than usual? What happened, that he never came back to claim it? Jacob says the thing's been here for three years.

  He taps his pen on the counter, pondering the word jumble in today's Lifestyle section. He taps the seconds away, tapping seconds into hours into days. Jacob's a lifer. He doesn’t even hear the clock anymore.

  I’m going stir-crazy down here. I mean, look at Jacob with his hairy gray ears; wrinkles creasing into other wrinkles until his face looks like he fell asleep on a screen door. Then there's the wet clicking sound he makes when he's playing with the upper plate of his false teeth. Two months down here and that's what I’m going to look like.

  I push off from the cooler and wander back into the stacks to kill the last half hour of the day. Subway thunder rumbles through the ceiling as a train pulls into Bay Station. A slight draft breezes through the room whenever a train goes by, and the fluorescent lights overhead flicker at the rumbling, like torches in the wind. It feels like a medieval dungeon down here.

  I have a lawn chair set up back in the stacks for when I get tired of staring at Jacob and he gets tired of me bitching. Nearby are the shelves of lost books. Old and new. Hardcover, paperback, science fiction, romance, mystery, medical, true crime, horror, history—anything and everything.

  Scanning the titles, I see a few Stephen Kings I’ve already read.

  And then there's
a small, thick hardcover. No jacket, no title on the spine. Just plain brown leather. I sit back on my lawn chair and flip through it.

  Not really a book book at all, it's some kind of journal or notebook. I turn the yellow-edged pages. Near the beginning I find what looks like notes from a science experiment. There's a graph showing different times running vertically up the side, with different liquids listed horizontally along the bottom. At first I think it's a graph of how long each liquid takes to reach the boiling point. We did that one in chemistry a few years ago.

  It's hard to tell. This person's handwriting is like epileptic chicken scratch. Filling the margins are doodles in black and green ink of all different kinds of eyes. Round eyes, slit eyes, bloodshot and crying eyes, and ones that look like they’ve come loose from their sockets. Real seventh-grade gross-out stuff.

  It takes me a couple seconds to crack the code and decipher what the caption says at the top. DROWNING TIMES. It's underlined twice in green. I focus on the crabbed writing at the bottom of the page.

  white mice, litter of six. ten weeks old.

  I study the graph again. On the side are times ranging from zero to five minutes. Along the bottom different liquids are listed: water, turpentine, beer, Windex, gasoline.

  This is no science experiment—at least none we ever did in school.

  I look at the various times in relation to liquids, understanding finally what it means. My stomach twists around. It's an experiment to find out how long it takes for mice to drown in different liquids.

  This is really warped.

  I turn a few more pages and find some yellowed newspaper clippings. One reads:

  On March 14, two cats were found hanging by their necks from lengths of chain, nailed to telephone poles in a back alley of Wilson Heights. The animals had been eviscerated. Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers.

  The word eviscerated is circled in red, and in the margin the writer of this thing has scribbled: Big word from a small mind.

  There are other clippings, with headlines reading: GRISLY

  DISCOVERY, ANIMAL ABUSE EPIDEMIC, PET OWNERS WARNED TO KEEP CATS INDOORS.

  This is some sick nut's little diary.

  I drop the book on the floor, wiping my palms on my jeans, feeling dirty just from touching it. I shake my head. The world is full of ugly, twisted people. There, that's my Mr. Rogers thought for the day.

  The bell at the front desk rings five times. Either it's quitting time or Jacob's having a stroke. Getting up, I step on the book like it's a roach I’m trying to kill. Then I kick it so it skitters across the cement floor.

  Walking away down the aisle, I can’t help thinking how it's not always that easy to kill a roach.

  TWO

  I had the dream again. It's been a couple of months since the last one. I was hoping I could forget about it, hoping it would forget about me. Leave me alone.

  The dream's always the same. When I was little I used to hate reruns on TV, the way everybody would make the same mistakes over again. That's what the dream is, a rerun where everything that went wrong the first time goes wrong again. And no matter how hard I fight I can’t change anything.

  Here's how it goes.

  A blistering day at Kayuga Beach. I’m in the water, about eight feet deep, skimming along the sandy bottom. It's clear enough that I can see the muddy clouds my hands stir up with every stroke.

  Mom says I was born to swim. She took me to baby swim classes before I could even walk. She’d hold her hand under my stomach and I’d start paddling like I was ready to do laps. I saw on TV somewhere how it's a natural instinct; comes from evolving from fish. They say when you’re real tiny in the womb, for a few weeks there, you have gills.

  So that's me. Fishboy.

  I used to time how long I could hold my breath underwater. Two minutes thirty seconds I hit one time, turning purple with my lungs exploding.

  I’m running out of air now, kicking up to the surface to breathe again. I squint against the million-watt sunlight. Back on the beach I can just make out where Wayne and Vinny are sucking down Slurpees.

  There's a girl screaming in the water, probably getting splashed or playing tag. Girls are always screaming—at the beach, in school, on MTV.

  I dive under again, where it's quieter. Some sound travels underwater. Like those motorboats out on the lake. They’re a mile away, but I can still hear them down here, kind of like a mosquito buzzing. The water's getting deeper, the bottom dark and cool, the sand turning to black mud.

  Pearl divers can hold their breath for five minutes, so they can get to the bottom, where the oysters are, and back. I once watched a frog sit underwater for fifteen minutes, just hanging out. No panic. Like it could live down there.

  Between one stroke and the next, the temperature drops from cool to near freezing, and the light filtering down disappears. Dark as midnight here. I can’t have gone so deep so fast. Pushing off the bottom, my feet sink into the mud a few inches. For a second it's like the mud doesn’t want to let me go, and I have to kick to get loose. Swimming to the surface takes longer than it should. It's as if with every stroke I take, the water gets that much deeper, like I’m swimming in place. My lungs start to burn, and there's the growing thunder in my ears of my own heartbeat amplified. I feel like shouting but there's no air left, and nobody to hear.

  I break the surface gasping, blinded by the sun after the cold midnight below. Feeling dazed and dizzy, I hear screaming. I’m so disoriented for a second I wonder if it's me.

  But no. It's that girl still, her shrieks broken up by coughs and splashing. I turn in the water, dog-paddling. The people back on the beach are so far away they look like insects. And they’re all rushing into the lake now, a dozen ants swimming out toward me. But it's not me they’re headed for. It's the girl. I try to stretch up and see farther across the surface, above the small waves making their way to shore.

  And there, about thirty feet away, between me and the beach, I see an arm flailing, fighting against the water. For maybe a quarter of a second a face is visible above the surface, a pair of eyes. Wide eyes, blind with fear.

  I’m frozen for a second by that look. I’ve never seen anyone so scared. But then my brain clicks and I realize that we’re too far out for those people rushing toward us to get here in time.

  There's only me. So I kick toward her, my arms flying in a frantic crawl. The water seems to stretch like before, only now it's not getting deeper but wider, dragging her farther away from me like some freak riptide. Between strokes, I catch freeze-frames of her going under, the water churning around her. Her mouth wide open, choking and screaming, fighting for air. Eyes wild, and dark as the black mud at the bottom of the lake. Then there's just an arm sticking up. I’m maybe ten feet away when her hand disappears.

  Sucking a deep breath, I go after her into the dark, my arms swinging around like a blind man's, searching for anything—a hand, a foot, a head.

  Nothing. I plunge deeper, my eyes wide but useless. The water's so cold it hurts, freezing my muscles into tight cramps. My hands find nothing. And my breath finally gives out.

  That's when I wake up in bed, gasping, my heart like a machine gun. The dark of my room is a soft gray, nothing like the dead black of the water. It takes me a few minutes to convince myself I’ve really escaped the nightmare.

  It's the kind of dream that makes you try and stay awake after, because you know it's waiting there for you behind your closed eyelids.

  A dream. But not a dream. It happened for real last September. Labor Day weekend at Kayuga Beach, Lake Ontario. The last blast of summer before school. The girl's name was Maya. I didn’t know her, but I was the last person to see her alive.

  I was the one who didn’t save her.

  THREE

  I need a name. If you don’t make one up for yourself, the media slaps one on you. They called David Berkowitz the .44-Caliber Killer, but that was weak. He called himself Son of Sam. Sounds better. Don’t know w
hat it means, but it sounds good. The Green River Killer—again, weak. They just named him after his dumping ground. The Zodiac Killer picked his own name, and nobody ever forgot it.

  1 need a name. It's going to be on everybody's lips. I’m going down in history.

  FOUR

  “What do you think?” I ask Vinny, showing off my new black leather jacket in his living room.

  “Man, how much are they paying you?”

  “Not enough. But I got this beauty for free.”

  “What? You ripped it off?” Vinny says.

  “I got it from work,” I tell him. “Unclaimed at the lost and found.”

  “So you ripped it off.”

  “Please. Unclaimed items go to a sale over at the Y. I just saved it the trip. It's one of the perks of the job. This baby was lost, but now it's found.”

  I grab a seat on the couch.

  Vinny's mom is crazy about colors—he says she's still trying to recover from not getting the sixty-four-piece crayon set in kindergarten—so the color scheme in this apartment is kind of intense. Deep orange walls (Tangerine Gold, she calls it), red furniture (Autumn Burgundy), and yellow carpeting (Amber Sunset). The weird thing is, you get this explosion of hues in here, but the windows are all covered in tinfoil, blocking the wicked afternoon sun. It gives the room a weird, artificial-sunset kind of feel.

  “I just got off work,” I say. “Come on, let's go grab something at the Dairy Barn.”

  “You buying?”

  “We’re going to use our employee discount.” Which means our Wayne discount, him being the new slave to minimum wage down at that grease pit.

  Vinny takes a minute to change from his ratty old sweatshirt into his uniform: jeans, black T-shirt, and an army surplus jacket two sizes too big. Poor guy has no sense of style. He wears the same thing every day, winter or summer, blizzard or blistering. His left hand, which was hidden in the stretched sleeve of his sweatshirt before, is now stuffed in his jacket pocket. He usually keeps it out of sight. Tell you why later.