by Dean Koontz
“I suspected it last night. When I mentioned it to Roy, he said I was right. He told me you were very upset with him because he wouldn’t come to the party—”
“He tried to kill me!”
“—and because he wouldn’t contribute any money to buy the pills.”
“There weren’t any pills.”
“Roy says there were, and it explains a lot.”
“Did he name even one of these wild dopers I’m supposed to be hanging out with?”
“They’re none of my concern. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Jeez.”
“I am worried about you.”
“But for the wrong reason.”
“Playing with drugs is stupid and dangerous.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“If you want to be treated like an adult, you’ve got to start acting like one,” she said in a lecturing tone that galled him.
“An adult admits his mistakes. An adult always accepts the consequences of his acts.”
“Not most of the adults I see.”
“If you persist in this bullheaded attempt to—”
“How can you believe him instead of me?”
“He’s a very nice boy. He—”
“You’ve only talked to him a couple of times!”
“Often enough to know he’s a well-rounded boy and very mature for his age.”
“He’s not! He’s not like that at all. He’s lying!”
“His story certainly rings truer than yours,” Weezy said. “And he strikes me as a sensible boy.”
“You think I’m not sensible?”
“Colin, how many nights have you gotten me out of bed because you were convinced something was crawling around in the attic?”
“Not that often,” he mumbled.
“Yes. That often. Quite often. And was there ever anything there when we looked?”
He sighed.
“Was there?” she insisted.
“No.”
“How many nights have you been absolutely certain that something was lurking outside the house, trying to get in through your window?”
He didn’t answer.
She pressed her advantage. “And do level-headed boys spend all of their time building plastic models of movie monsters?”
“Is that why you don’t believe me? Because I watch a lot of horror movies? Because I read science fiction?”
“Stop that. Don’t try to make me sound simple-minded,” she said.
“Shit.”
“You’re also picking up bad language from this crowd you’re running around with, and I won’t allow it.”
He walked away from her, into the junkyard.
“Where are you going?”
As he walked away, he said, “I can show you proof.”
“We’re leaving,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“I should have been at the gallery an hour ago.”
“I can show you proof, if you’ll bother to look at it.”
He walked through the junkyard, toward the point at which the hill dropped down to the railroad tracks. He didn’t know for sure if she was following him, but he tried to act as if he had no doubt about it. He believed that looking back would be a sign of weakness, and he felt that he had been a weakling for too damned long.
Last night Hermit Hobson’s collection of wrecks had been a sinister labyrinth. Now, in the bright daylight, it was only sad, a very sad and lonely place. By squinting slightly, you could look through the dead and pitted surface, through the sorry present, and see the past glowing in all of it. Once, the cars had been shiny and beautiful. People had invested work and money and dreams in these machines, and all that had come to this: rust.
When he reached the western end of the junkyard, he had trouble believing what he could plainly see. The proof he had intended to show Weezy was gone.
The dilapidated pickup still stood ten feet from the brink, where Roy had been forced to abandon it, but the corrugated metal runners were not there any more. Although the truck had stopped with its angled front wheels in the dirt, the rear wheels had remained squarely on the tracks. Colin clearly remembered that. But now all four wheels rested upon bare earth.
Colin realized what had happened and knew that he should have expected it. Last night, when he had hidden successfully from Roy in the arroyo west of the railway line, Roy had not rushed immediately into town to wait for him at the house, but had finally given up the chase and had come back here to erase all traces of his plan to wreck the train. He had carted away every loose section of the make-shift track that he’d constructed for the truck. Then he had even jacked up the rear wheels of the Ford to retrieve the last two incriminating sheets of metal that were pinned under them.
The grass behind the truck, which surely must have been smashed flat when the Ford passed over it, now stood nearly as tall and undisturbed as the grass on all other sides of the junker; it swayed gently in the breeze. Roy had taken time to rake it, thereby removing the twin impressions of the pickup’s wake. On closer inspection, Colin saw that the resilient blades of grass had sustained minor damage. A few were broken. A few more were bent. Some were pinched. But those subtle signs would not be proof enough to convince Weezy that his story was true.
Although it was twenty feet closer to the brow of the hill than any of the other wrecks, the Ford looked as if it had been in that same spot, undisturbed, for years and years.
Colin knelt beside the pickup and reached behind one of the rusty wheels. He brought out a gob of grease.
“What are you doing?” Weezy asked.
He turned to her and held up his greasy hand. “This is all I can show you. He took away everything else, all the other proof.”
“What’s that?”
“Grease.”
“So?”
It was hopeless.
PART TWO
28
For seven days Colin remained in the house.
Restriction to quarters was one part of his punishment. His mother made certain that he endured the confinement; she called home six or eight times every day, checking on him. Sometimes two or three hours would pass between the calls, and sometimes she would ring him three times in thirty minutes. He did not dare sneak out.
Actually, he didn’t want to go anywhere. He was well accustomed to loneliness, comfortable and satisfied with just his own company. For most of his life, his room had been the largest part of his world, and for a while at least it would serve admirably as his entire universe. He had his books, horror comics, monster models, and radio; he could entertain himself for a week or a month or even longer. And he was afraid that if he set foot outside the door, Roy Borden would get him.
Weezy had also made it clear that when he had served his one-week sentence he would be on probation for a long time. For the remainder of the summer he would have to be home before dark. He didn’t tell her how he felt about that when she laid down the rule, but in fact he didn’t think of it as punishment. He had no intention of going anywhere at night. As long as Roy was running around loose, Colin would view every sunset with dread, as if he were a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
In addition to imposing a curfew, Weezy took away his allowance for one month. He wasn’t bothered by that either. He had a big metal bank in the shape of a flying saucer, and it was full of coins and dollar bills that he had saved over the past two years.
He was distressed only by the fact that the restrictions would interfere with his courtship of Heather Lipshitz. He’d never had a girlfriend. No girl had ever been interested in him before. Not even a little bit. Now that he finally had a chance with a girl, he didn’t want to spoil it.
He called Heather and explained that he had been grounded and could not keep their movie date. He didn’t tell her the truth about why he had been restricted to the house; he didn’t mention that Roy had attempted to kill him. She didn’t know him well enough yet to accept such a wild story. And of all
the people in Colin’s life, Heather was the one whose opinion mattered the most right now; he didn’t want her to think he was a nut case. When he explained his situation, she was very understanding, and they rescheduled their date for the following Wednesday, when he would be allowed out of the house again. She didn’t even mind that they would have to go to the early show and that he would have to be home by dark to satisfy the curfew his mother had imposed. For twenty minutes they chatted about movies and books, and she was easier to talk to than any girl he had ever known.
When he hung up he felt better than he had before he’d telephoned her. For a third of an hour, at least, he had been able to push thoughts of Roy Borden to the back of his mind.
He called Heather every day during the week that he was grounded, and they were never at a loss for words. He learned a great many things about her, and the more he learned the more he liked her. He hoped he was making an equally good impression on her, and he was impatient to see her again.
He expected Roy to show up at the door some afternoon, or at least to call and make a lot of threats; but the days passed uneventfully. He considered taking the initiative, just to see what would happen. Once or twice each day, he picked up the telephone, but he never got farther than dialing the first three digits of the Borden number. Then the shakes always took him, and he hung up.
He read half a dozen new paperbacks: science fiction, sword and sorcery, occult stories, stuff that was filled with monstrous villains, the sort of thing he liked the most. But there must have been something wrong with the plots or with the writers’ prose styles, because he didn’t get that familiar cold thrill from them.
He reread a few pieces that he had found hair-raising when he’d first encountered them a couple of years ago. He discovered that he still could appreciate the color and suspense of Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, but the terror that it had communicated to him so forcefully when he had first read it was no longer there. John Campbell’s Who Goes There? and Theodore Sturgeon’s scariest stories—It and The Professor’s Teddy-Bear among others—still pulsed with a rich vision of evil, but they no longer made him look over his shoulder while he turned the pages.
He had trouble sleeping. If he closed his eyes for more than a minute, he heard strange sounds: the furtive but insistent noises someone might make if he were trying to get into the bedroom through the locked door or window. Colin heard something in the attic, too, something heavy that kept dragging itself back and forth, as if it were looking for a weak spot in his bedroom ceiling. He thought about the things his mother had said with such scorn, and he told himself there was nothing in the attic; told himself that it was just his overactive imagination, but he continued to hear it nonetheless. After two bad nights, he surrendered to the fear and stayed up reading until dawn; then in the early light, he was able to sleep.
29
Wednesday morning, eight days after the events at Hermit Hobson’s junkyard, Colin was no longer restricted to quarters. He was reluctant to leave the house. He studied the surrounding grounds through all the first-floor windows; and although he could detect nothing out of the ordinary, his own front lawn seemed to him far more dangerous than any battlefield in any war there’d ever been, in spite of the lack of bursting bombs and whistling bullets.
—Roy wouldn’t try anything in broad daylight.
He’s crazy. How can you know what he’ll do?
—Go. Go on. Get out and do what you have to do.
If he’s waiting...
—You can’t hide here for the rest of your life.
He went to the library. As he cycled along the sunny streets, he looked repeatedly behind. He was fairly sure that Roy was not following him.
Though Colin slept only three hours the night before, he was waiting at the front doors of the library when Mrs. Larkin, the librarian, opened for business. He’d gone to the library twice a week since they’d moved to town, and Mrs. Larkin had quickly learned what he liked. When she saw him standing on the steps, she said, “We received the new Arthur C. Clarke novel last Friday.”
“That’s swell.”
“Well, I didn’t put it out on the shelf right away because I thought you’d be in the same day or Saturday at the latest.”
He followed her into the big, cool, stucco building, into the main room where their footsteps were smothered by the mammoth stacks of books, and where the air smelled of glue and yellowing paper.
“When you hadn’t showed up by Monday afternoon,” Mrs. Larkin said, “I felt I couldn’t hold the book any longer. And now, wouldn’t you just know it, someone checked it out a few minutes till five yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s all right,” Colin said. “Thanks a lot for thinking about me.”
Mrs. Larkin was a sweet-tempered, red-haired woman with too little brow, too much chin, too little bosom, and too much behind. Her glasses were as thick as Colin’s. She loved books and bookish people, and Colin liked her.
“I mainly came to use one of the microfilm readers,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry, but we don’t have any science fiction on microfilm.”
“I’m not interested in science fiction today. What I’d like to see is back issues of the Santa Leona News Register.”
“Whatever for?” She made a face, as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “Perhaps I’m being a traitor to my own hometown when I say this, but the News Register is just about the dullest reading you can find. Lots of stories about bake sales and church socials, and reports of City Council meetings where silly politicians argue for hours about whether or not they should fill the potholes on Broadway.”
“Well...I’m sort of looking ahead to starting school in September,” Colin said, wondering if that sounded as ridiculous to her as it did to him. “English composition always gives me a little bit of trouble, so I like to think ahead.”
“I can’t believe that anything in school gives you trouble,” Mrs. Larkin said.
“Anyway ... I have this idea for an essay about summer in Santa Leona, not my summer but summer in general, and summer historically. I want to do some research.”
She smiled approvingly. “You’re an ambitious young man, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
She shook her head. “In all the years I’ve worked here, you’re the first boy who’s come in during summer vacation to prepare for next fall’s school assignments. I’d call that ambitious. I surely would. And it’s refreshing, too. You keep that attitude, and you’ll go a long way in this world.”
Colin was embarrassed because he did not deserve the praise and because he had lied to her. He felt his face turn red, and he suddenly realized that this was the first time he had blushed in a week, maybe longer than that, which was some kind of record for him.
He went to the microfilm alcove, and Mrs. Larkin brought spools of film that contained every page of the News Register for June, July, and August of last year, and for the same three months of the year before that. She showed him how to use the machine, watched over his shoulder until she was certain that he had no questions, then left him to his work.
Rose.
Something Rose.
Jim Rose?
Arthur Rose?
Michael Rose?
He remembered the last name by associating it with the flower, but he couldn’t quite recall what the boy’s first name had been.
Phil Pacino.
He remembered that one because it was like Al Pacino, the movie actor.
He decided to start with Phil. He lined up the spools of last summer’s newspapers.
He assumed both deaths would be front-page news, so he skimmed, looking for bold headlines.
He couldn’t remember the date Roy had given. He started with June and worked all the way through to the first of August before he found the story.
LOCAL BOY DIES IN FIRE
He was reading the last paragraph of the article when he sensed a change in the air and knew that Roy was behind him.
He whirled, bolting up from the swivel chair as he turned—but Roy wasn’t there. No one was there. No one was at the worktables. No one was browsing through the stacks. Mrs. Larkin wasn’t at her desk. He had imagined it.
He sat down and read the article again. It was exactly as Roy said. The Pacino house had burned to the ground, a total loss. In the rubble, firemen had found the blackened body of Philip Pacino, age fourteen.
Colin felt beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. He wiped his face with one hand and dried his hands on his jeans.
He went through the papers for the next week with special care, looking for follow-up stories. There were three.
FIRE MARSHAL’S REPORT
PLAYING WITH MATCHES
According to the final, official statement, Philip Pacino had caused the blaze. He had been playing with matches near a workbench on which he constructed model airplanes. Apparently there had been a number of highly flammable items on the bench, including several tubes and pots of glue, a can of lighter fluid, and an open bottle of paint remover.
The second follow-up was a page-two report of the boy’s funeral. The story contained tributes from Philip’s teachers, teary remembrances from his friends, and excerpts from the eulogy. A photograph of the grieving parents headed the three-column piece.
Colin read it twice with great interest because one of Philip Pacino’s friends quoted in the story was Roy Borden.
Two days later there was a long editorial that was hard-hitting by the News Register’s standards.
PREVENTING TRAGEDY WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?
In none of the four pieces was there the slightest indication that the police or the fire department suspected murder and arson. From the beginning they had assumed it was an accident, the result of carelessness or adolescent foolishness.
But I know the truth, Colin thought.
He was weary. He had been at the microfilm reader for almost two hours. He switched off the machine, stood up, and stretched.
