by Dean Koontz
Colin walked west on Broadway, through the shopping district, just passing time. He looked in store windows, but he didn’t see anything.
At ten minutes past one, he went back to the telephone booth. He dialed his home number, let it ring fifteen times, then hung up.
—Business my ass.
She works hard.
—At what?
He stood there for several minutes, one hand on the receiver, as if he were expecting a call.
—She’s out screwing around.
It’s business. A business dinner.
—This late?
A long, late business dinner.
He tried the number again.
No answer.
He sat down on the floor of the booth, in the darkness, and hugged himself.
—She’s out screwing around when I need her.
You don’t know for sure.
—I know.
You can’t.
—Face it. She screws like everyone else.
Now you sound like Roy.
—Sometimes Roy makes sense.
He’s crazy.
—Maybe not about everything.
At one-thirty he stood up, popped a dime into the phone, and called home again. It rang twenty-two times before he hung up.
It might be safe to walk home now. Wasn’t it too late for Roy to keep a vigil? He was a killer, but he was also a fourteen-year-old boy; he couldn’t stay out all night. His folks would wonder where he was. They might even call the cops. Roy would be in terrible trouble if he stayed out all night, wouldn’t he?
Maybe. And maybe not.
Colin wasn’t sure that the Bordens really cared what Roy did or what happened to him. So far as Colin knew, they had never set down rules for their son, other than the one about staying away from his father’s trains. Roy did pretty much what he wanted, when he wanted.
Something was wrong with the Borden family. The relationships were curious, indefinable. Theirs was not a traditional parent-child arrangement. Colin had met Mr. and Mrs. Borden only twice; but both times he had sensed the strangeness in them, in their attitudes toward each other, and in their treatment of Roy. Mother, father, and son seemed like strangers. There was a peculiar stiffness in the way they talked among themselves, as if they were reciting lines from a script they hadn’t learned very well. They were so formal. They almost seemed... afraid of one another. Colin had been aware of a coldness in the center of the family, but he had never spent much time wondering about it. Now that he gave it some thought, however, he realized that the Bordens were like people living in a rooming house; they smiled and nodded when they passed in the hall; they said hello when they met in the kitchen; but otherwise they led separate, distant lives. He didn’t know why that was true. Something had happened to turn them away from one another. He couldn’t imagine what it might have been. But he was certain that Mr. and Mrs. Borden wouldn’t care very much if Roy stayed out until daybreak or even disappeared forever.
Therefore it wasn’t safe for him to walk home. Roy would be waiting.
Colin dialed the number again, and he was surprised when his mother answered on the second ring.
“Mom, you’ve got to come get me.”
“Skipper?”
“I’ll wait for you at—”
“I thought you were upstairs, asleep.”
“No. I’m over at—”
“I just got in. I thought you were home. What are you doing out at this hour?”
“It’s not my fault. I was—”
“Oh, my God, have you been hurt?”
“No, no. I just—”
“You’re hurt.”
“No, just a few scrapes and bruises. I need—”
“What happened? What’s happened to you?”
“If you’d shut up and listen, you’d find out,” Colin said impatiently.
She was stunned. “Don’t you snap at me. Don’t you dare.”
“I need help!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to help me.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Real bad trouble.”
“What the hell have you done?”
“It’s not what I’ve done. It‘s—”
“Where are you?”
“I’m over here at—”
“Have you been arrested?”
“What?”
“Is it that kind of trouble?”
“No, no. I‘m—”
“Are you at the police station?”
“Nothing like that. I‘m—”
“Where are you?”
“Near the Broadway Diner.”
“What trouble have you caused at the diner?”
“That’s not it. I—”
“Let me talk to someone there.”
“Who? What do you mean?”
“Let me talk to a waitress or someone.”
“I’m not in the diner.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“In a phone booth.”
“Colin, what’s the matter with you?”
“I’m waiting for you to come get me.”
“You’re only a few blocks from home.”
“I can’t walk. He’s waiting for me along the way.”
“Who?”
“He wants to kill me.”
A pause.
“Colin, you come straight home.”
“I can’t.”
“This minute. I mean it.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m getting angry, young man.”
“Roy tried to kill me tonight. He’s still out there, waiting for me.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not joking!”
Another pause.
“Colin, did you take something?”
“Huh?”
“Did you take a pill or something?”
“Drugs?”
“Did you?”
“Jeez.”
“Did you?”
“Where would I get drugs?”
“I know you kids can get them. It’s as easy as buying aspirins.”
“Jeez.”
“It’s a big problem these days. Is that it? Are you high and having trouble getting down?”
“Me? You really think that’s a problem with me?”
“If you’ve been popping pills—”
“If that’s what you really think—”
“—or if you’ve been drinking—”
“—then you don’t know me at all.”
“—mixing booze and pills—”
“If you want to hear about it,” Colin said sharply, “you’ll have to bring the car and pick me up.”
“Don’t use that tone with me.”
“If you don’t come,” he said, “then I guess I’ll just rot here.”
He banged the receiver into the cradle and left the telephone booth.
“Shit!”
He kicked an empty soda can that was lying beside the walkway. It spun and rattled across the street.
He went to the Broadway Diner and stood at the curb, looking east, where Weezy would turn the corner if she bothered to come for him.
He was shaking uncontrollably with anger and fear.
He felt something else, too, something dark and devastating, something far more disturbing than anger, far more debilitating than fear, something uglier, like a terrible loneliness, but much worse than loneliness. It was a suspicion—no, a conviction—that he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.
He felt as if he would vomit.
Five minutes later she drew alongside him in the blue Cadillac. She leaned across the front seat and opened the door on
the passenger’s side.
When he saw her, he lost the grip that he’d had on himself ever since the nightmare at Hermit Hobson’s place. Tears streamed down his face. By the time he got into the car and closed the door, he was sobbing like a baby.
27
She didn’t believe him. She refused to call the cops, and she wouldn’t disturb the Bordens with a call at that hour.
At nine-thirty the following morning, she talked to Roy on the phone. Then she talked to his mother. She insisted on privacy, so Colin didn’t even hear her side of the conversation.
After she had spoken with the Bordens, she tried to make Colin recant his story. When he wouldn’t she became furious.
At eleven o‘clock, after an extended argument, she and Colin went to the junkyard. Neither of them spoke during the drive.
She parked at the end of the dirt lane, near the shack. They got out of the car.
Colin was uneasy. Echoes of last night’s terror still reverberated in his mind.
His bicycle was lying near the front porch steps. Roy’s bike was gone, of course.
“You see,” he said. “I was here.”
She didn’t respond. She wheeled the bike around to the back of the car.
Colin followed her. “It happened exactly the way I said it did.”
She unlocked the trunk. “Help me.”
They lifted the bicycle into the back of the car, but it wouldn’t fit well enough to allow the compartment to be closed and locked. She found a spool of wire in the tool kit and used a length of that to tie down the trunk lid.
“Doesn’t the bicycle prove anything?” Colin demanded.
She turned on him. “It proves you were here.”
“Like I said.”
“But not with Roy.”
“He tried to kill me!”
“He tells me he was home last night from nine-thirty on.”
“Well, of course that’s what he’d tell you! But—”
“That’s also what his mother tells me.”
“It’s not true.”
“Are you calling Mrs. Borden a liar?”
“Well, she probably doesn’t know she’s lying.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Roy probably told her he was home, in his room, and she believed him.”
“She knows he was home, not just because he told her so, but because she was home last night, too.”
“But did she actually talk to him?”
“What?”
“Last night? Did she talk to him? Or did she just assume he was up in his room?”
“I didn’t grill her in detail about—”
“Did she actually see him last night?”
“Colin—”
“If she didn’t actually see him,” Colin said excitedly, “she can’t know for sure that he was up there in his room.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No. It isn’t. They don’t talk to each other much in that house. They don’t pay attention to each other. They don’t go looking for each other to strike up a conversation.”
“She’d know he was there when she looked in to say good night.”
“But that’s just what I’m trying to tell you. She’d never do that. She’d never go out of her way to say good night to him. I know it. I’d bet on it. They don’t act like other people. There’s something really strange about them. There’s something wrong in that house.”
“What do you think it is?” she asked angrily. “Are they invaders from another planet?”
“Of course not.”
“Like in one of those crazy goddamned books you’re always reading?”
“No.”
“Should we call Buck Rogers to save us?”
“I just... I was only trying to say that they don’t seem to love Roy.”
“That’s an awful thing to say.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s true.”
She shook her head, amazed. “Did it ever occur to you that you might be too young to fully understand an emotion as complex as love, let alone all the forms it can take? My God, you’re an inexperienced fourteen-year-old boy! Who are you to judge the Bordens on something like that?”
“But if you could see the way they act. If you could hear the way they talk to each other. And they never do anything together. Even we do more things together than the Bordens do.”
“‘Even we’? What do you mean by that?”
“Well, we don’t do many things together, do we? I mean as a family.”
There were things in her eyes that he didn’t want to see. He looked away.
“In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “I’m divorced from your father. And also in case it somehow slipped your mind, it was a bitter divorce. The pits. So what the hell do you expect? Do you think the three of us should go on picnics now and then?”
Colin shuffled his feet in the grass. “I mean even just you and me. The two of us. We don’t see much of each other, and the Bordens see even less of Roy.”
“When do I have time, for God’s sake?”
He shrugged.
“I work hard,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you think I like working as hard as I do?”
“You seem to.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Then why—”
“I’m trying to build a future for us. Can you understand? I want to be sure we never have to worry about money. I want security. Big security. But you don’t appreciate it.”
“I do. I know you work hard.”
“If you appreciated what I’m doing for us, for you, then you wouldn’t have tried to upset me with this bullshit story about Roy trying to kill you and—”
“It’s not bullshit.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“What word?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Bullshit?”
She slapped his face.
Shocked, he put a hand to his cheek.
“Don’t smirk at me,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
She turned away from him. She walked a few steps into the grass and stared at the junkyard for a while.
He almost cried. But he didn’t want her to see him crying, so he bit his lip and held the tears back. After a while, the hurt and humiliation were replaced by anger, and then he didn’t have to bite his lip any more.
When she gathered her composure, she came back to him. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I lost my temper, and that’s a bad example to set.”
“It didn’t hurt.”
“You upset me so much.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“You upset me because I know what’s going on.” He waited.
“You came out here last night on your bike,” she said. “But not with Roy. I know who you came with.”
He said nothing.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know their names, but I know what kind of kids they are.”
He blinked. “Who’re you talking about?”
“You know who I’m talking about. I’m talking about these other friends of yours, these smart-ass kids you see standing on street comers these days, the punks on those skateboards who try to run you off in the gutter when you walk by them.”
“You think kids like that would want anything to do with me? I’m one of the people they’d run into the gutter.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“I’m telling the truth. Roy was the only friend I had.”
“Nonsense.”
“I don’t make friends easily.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
He was silent.
“Since we moved to Santa Leona,” she said, “you’ve gotten mixed up with the wrong kids.”
“No.”
“And last night you came out here with some of them because this is probably a popular place—in fact, it’s just an ideal place—to sneak away and
smoke some dope and do... all sorts of other things.”
“No.”
“Last night you came here with them, popped a few pills—God knows what they were—and then you tripped out.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
“It’s not true.”
“Colin, I know you’re basically a good boy. You’ve never been in any trouble before. Now you’ve made a mistake. You’ve let some other kids lead you astray.”
“No.”
“If you’ll just admit it, if you’ll face up to it, I won’t be mad at you. I’ll respect you for accepting your medicine. I’ll help you, Colin, if you’ll just give me a chance.”
“Give me a chance.”
“You popped a couple of pills—”
“No.”
“—and for a few hours you were really gone, really out of it.”
“No.”
“When you finally came around, you realized you’d wandered away, back toward town, without your bike.”
“Jeez.”
“You weren’t sure how to get back here and find your bike. Your clothes were torn, filthy, and it was one o‘clock in the morning. You panicked. You didn’t know how you were going to explain all that, so you made up this foolish story about Roy Borden.”
“Will you listen?” He was barely able to keep from screaming at her.
“I’m listening.”
“Roy Borden is a killer. He—”
“You disappoint me.”
“Look at what I am, for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Can’t you see me?”
“Don’t shout at me.”
“Can’t you see what I am?”
“You’re a boy in trouble and getting deeper.”
Colin was furious with her because she was forcing him to reveal himself in a way he never had done before. “Do I look like one of those kids? Do I look like the kind of guy they’d even bother to say hello to? They wouldn’t even take time to spit on me. To them, I’m just a skinny, bashful, near-sighted creep.” Tears shimmered in the corners of his eyes. He hated himself for being unable to hold them back. “Roy was the best friend I had. He was the only friend. Why would I make up a crazy story just to get him in trouble?”
“You were confused and desperate.” She stared at him as if her gaze would crack him and reveal the truth as she imagined it to be. “And according to Roy, you were mad at him because he wouldn’t come out here with you and the others.”
Colin gaped at her. “You mean you got this whole theory from Roy? This whole dumb thing about me taking drugs—it comes from Roy?”
