We were talking one night, my brother and I, when I was eleven or twelve--my brother was about two years younger than I--and I brought up the subject of question marks.
We slept in bunk beds in that back room, me on the top and him on the bottom. Every night after Mom and Dad had shut off the TV, taken one last look at us and thumped their way upstairs, we would stop pretending to be asleep and start talking. I don't remember why question marks came up, but I'd always wondered about "firsts." I mean, who invented tables? When did people start using combs? And who could have thought of a thing like the question mark?
Yes, I know it's stupid; it's like asking who invented the letter 'c' or something. But that's me all over.
Well, my brother got quiet all of a sudden. We'd been laughing, or I wouldn't have noticed; my brother was always a quiet kid. He had a way of being quiet, though, a way I didn't miss till he was gone and there was nothing left in that lower bunk but regular silence.
Anyway, I stopped then, too. "What? Is Dad coming?"
"No," I heard him say. "It's just that, well, about question marks. I helped them build the first one, y'know."
"You what?" I stuck my head over the side of the bunk and peered through the darkness at him. All I could see was the white of the pillow around the black ball of his head, a shape lying next to him that was Sammy, his stuffed squirrel.
The bed squeaked and jiggled as he shifted in his blankets. "Yeah. It was last week after school. You weren't home yet, so me and Sammy went down into the closet."
I thought I had it then. See, we used to tell all kinds of stories about that closet: about the stairway in the back that went down through the catacombs and came out beside a big lake in the woods. We put everything in those woods--mines and oracles and haunted caves--and we told stories about the folks who lived there. My brother had given each one a different voice, and he'd drawn a map of the whole place on the plywood above his bed that my mattress rested on.
So I was on familiar ground. "They do question marks down there? I guess I should ask the Monster about this."
"No, he wasn't there: just me and Sammy and Hasdrubal."
"Who?"
"Oh, yeah. You haven't met him yet."
I slapped my blankets. "All right! Somebody new! What was his name again?"
"Hasdrubal. He was sitting on one of those blue rocks the Monster put by the catacomb mouth 'cause he said they went with the flowers. Sammy was telling one of his stupid jokes as we came out into the sunlight--"
"Why does he always tell jokes in the catacombs?"
I heard my brother sigh. "He says dead people don't laugh enough. You know what he's like."
"Yeah."
"So we were just coming out of the cave when I see this big black cone thing on one of the rocks. I thought maybe the Monster had decided that the rocks needed hats now, but then it unfolded, and this bat guy was sitting there, only his face was more like a dog's than a regular bat's.
"Sammy stopped when he saw him and fluffed his tail up. 'Oh, great,' he said. 'Another freeloader.'
"I've always liked bats, so I went over and said, 'Hi. I've never seen you here before.'
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