The Voice of the Night

25

Running at his top speed, Colin saw the tire a split second before it would have tripped him. He jumped over it, side-stepped a pile of fenders, and ran on through the high grass. He turned left and rounded a battered Dodge delivery van that was up on blocks. After a brief hesitation and a quick glance behind him, he sank to the ground and wriggled under the truck.

As Colin slipped out of sight, Roy came around the front of the van and stopped, looked both ways. When he saw that that avenue of the maze was deserted, he spat on the ground. “Damn.”

The night was very dark, but from his hiding place beneath the Dodge, Colin could see Roy’s white sneakers. Colin was lying on his belly, his head turned to the left, right cheek pressed against the earth; and Roy was standing no more than a yard away. He could have grabbed the other boy’s ankle and toppled him. But then what?

After a moment of indecision, Roy opened the door on the driver’s side of the van. When he saw that no one was in there, he slammed the door and stalked to the rear of the Dodge.

Colin drew shallow breaths through his mouth and wished he could soften the pounding beat of his heart. If he made any sound at all that Roy could hear, he would die for it.

At the back of the delivery van, Roy opened one of the double doors. When he peered into the rear compartment, he apparently could not see every corner of it to his satisfaction, for he opened the second door as well, then climbed into the cargo hold.

Colin listened to him poking at the shadows in the metal box overhead. He considered squeezing out from under the truck and creeping swiftly to another shelter, but he didn’t think he would have sufficient time to get away undetected.

Even as Colin was assessing his chances, Roy came out of the truck and closed the doors. The opportunity, if there had ever been one, was lost.

Colin twisted around a bit and looked over his shoulder. He saw the white tennis shoes, and he prayed that Roy wouldn’t think to investigate the narrow space beneath the Dodge.

Incredibly, his prayers were answered. Roy stepped to the front of the truck, paused, seemed to be looking at the junkyard on all sides, and said, “Where the hell …?” He stood there for a while, drumming his fingers on the van, and then he walked northward until Colin could no longer see his shoes or hear his footsteps.

For a long time Colin lay motionless. He found the courage to breathe normally once more, but he still thought it wise to be as silent as possible.

His situation had improved in at least one respect: The air circulating under the van was not as stale and disgusting as that in the Chevrolet had been. He could smell wildflowers, the teasing scent of goldenrod, and the dusty aroma of the parched grass.

His nose itched. Tickled.

To his horror, he realized he was going to sneeze. He clamped one hand to his face, pinched his nose, but found he couldn’t stop the inevitable. He muffled the noise as best he could and waited with dread to be discovered.

But Roy didn’t come. He evidently hadn’t been close enough to hear.

Colin passed another couple of minutes under the truck, just to be safe, then slithered out. Roy was not in sight, but he could be hunkered down in any of a thousand pockets of darkness, waiting to strike.

Cautiously, Colin stole eastward through the cemetery of dead machinery. He ran in a crouch across the open spaces, lingered in the wreckage between until he was fairly certain that the next unprotected patch of ground was safe, then dashed on. When he was fifty or sixty yards from the delivery van where he had last seen Roy, he turned north, toward Hermit Hobson’s shack.

If only he could get to the bicycles while Roy was searching for him elsewhere, he would be able to escape. He would damage Roy’s bike-bend a wheel or something-and then leave on his own, confident that there could be no effective pursuit.

He reached the edge of the junkyard and huddled next to a demolished station wagon while he surveyed the deep pools of blackness that lay around Hobson’s shack. He saw the bicycles at the foot of the sagging porch steps, lying side by side where the grass was stunted and still a bit green, but he didn’t go straight to them. Roy might expect him to come back to this place; he might be concealed already in those shadows, tense, waiting to pounce. Colin stared hard at each trouble spot, looking for movement or the glint of an errant moonbeam on a shape that did not belong there. In time he was able to see through most of the dark pockets and to determine that they were uninhabited. But in a few small areas the night seemed to back up like river sludge; and in those puddles it was far too thick for the eye to penetrate it.

At last Colin decided that the possibility of escape outweighed the risk of going to the bicycles and making a target of himself. He stood, wiped sweat from his brow, and walked into the twenty-yard-wide band of open ground between the junkyard and the shack. Nothing moved in the darkness. He advanced slowly at first, then more boldly, and finally sprinted the last ten yards.

Roy had locked their bikes together. He had used his security parking chain and padlock to bind one wheel of his bicycle to one wheel of Colin’s.

Colin pulled on the chain and tugged angrily at the gate of the lock, but his efforts were wasted; the device was heavy and sturdy. He could see no way to get the bikes apart without the combination to Roy’s lock. And he certainly couldn’t use them in tandem, even if the chain had been loose enough to permit them to be stood on their wheels and moved simultaneously-which it was not.

Crestfallen, he scurried back to the station wagon to consider his options. He really had only two. He could try to get home on foot-or he could continue to play cat-and-mouse with Roy in the endless passageways of the junkyard.

He preferred to stick where he was. The chief recommendation for it was that he had survived thus far. If he held out long enough, his mother would report him missing. She might not get home until one or two o‘clock in the morning, but it must be past midnight now. He pushed the button on his digital watch and was stunned to see how early it was: a quarter till ten. He could have sworn that he had been playing this dangerous game of hide-and-seek for at least three or four hours. Well, maybe Weezy would get home early. And if he wasn’t in by midnight, she’d call Roy’s folks and find out Roy wasn’t home either. By one o’clock at the very latest, they would call the cops. The police would start looking for them at once and-Yeah, but where would they begin the search? Not out here in the junkyard. In town. And down at the beach. Then in the nearby hills. It would be late afternoon tomorrow, maybe even Thursday or Friday, before they came all the way out to Hermit Hobson’s. As much as he wanted to stay near the myriad bolt-holes of the rubble-covered hilltop, he knew he could not keep out of Roy’s grasp for forty-eight or thirty-six or even twenty-four hours. He’d be damned lucky to make it through to daylight.

He would have to walk home. Of course, he couldn’t go back the way they had come, for if Roy suspected he’d left the junkyard and came looking for him, there was too great a danger that they would meet on a lonely stretch of road. A bicycle made little or no noise on a paved surface, and Colin was afraid he would not hear Roy coming in time to hide. He would have to trek overland, down the hill to the railroad tracks, along the tracks to the dry creekbed near Ranch Road, then into Santa Leona. That route would be more arduous than the other, especially in the dark, but it might also cut the distance from eight miles to seven or even six.

Colin was painfully aware that his planning was guided by one overriding consideration: cowardice. Hide. Run. Hide. Run. He seemed incapable of entertaining any alternative to those weak courses of action, and he felt miserably inadequate.

— So stay here. Turn the tables on Roy.

Fat chance.

— Don’t run. Attack.

That’s a pleasant fantasy, but it’s impossible.

— It isn’t. Become the aggressor. Surprise him. He’s faster and stronger than me.

— Then be devious. Set a trap.

He’s too clever to fall for any trap I could set.

— How can you know if you don’t try?

I know.

— How?

Because I’m me. And he’s Roy.

Colin put a quick end to the interior dialogue because it was a waste of time. He understood himself all too well. He simply did not have within him the power or the will to transform himself. Before he tried to become the cat, he would have to be convinced that there was absolutely no percentage whatsoever in continuing to be the mouse.

This was one of those bleak and too-frequent moments in which he despised himself.

Pausing every few yards to reconnoiter the way ahead before pressing on, Colin crept from one car to another. He moved steadily toward the hill where Roy had attempted to push the Ford pickup into the train, for it was there that he most easily could get down to the railroad tracks. The night was much too still. Every rustle of his shoes in the brittle grass sounded like thunder and seemed certain to bring Roy down on him. Eventually, however, he came undiscovered to the far end of the junkyard.

In front of him, the open space between the last of the cars and the brow of the hill was approximately forty feet wide. At the moment it looked like a mile. The moon was shining unhindered, and that stretch of grass was bathed in far too much milky light to make a crossing feasible. If this area were being watched, he would be spotted before he had covered a quarter of the distance. Fortunately, scattered but solid masses of clouds had rolled in from the ocean during the past hour. Each time that a cluster of them shrouded the moon, the resultant darkness offered excellent cover. He waited for one of these brief eclipses. When the broad belt of grass fell under a shadow, he ran as silently as he could manage, up on his toes, holding his breath, to the brink, and then over.

The hillside was steep, but not so precipitous as to be unnegotiable. He went down fast because there was no other way to go; the pull of gravity was irresistible. He bounded wildly from one foot to the other, out of control, taking big, ungainly steps, and halfway to the bottom he found that he suddenly was dancing on a landslide. The dry, sandy soil collapsed under him. For an instant he rode it as if he were a surfer on a wave, but then he lost his footing, fell, and rolled the last twenty feet. He came to a stop in a cloud of dust, flat on his back, on the railroad right-of-way, one arm across the tracks.

Stupid. Stupid and clumsy. Stupid, clumsy idiot.

jeez.

He lay still for several seconds, a bit winded, but surprised that nothing hurt. His pride was injured, of course, but not anything else.

The dust began to settle.

As he started to sit up, Roy called to him: “Blood brother?”

Colin shook his head in disbelief and looked left, right, then up.

“Blood brother, is that you?”

The moon sailed out from behind the clouds.

In the wash of pale light, Colin saw Roy standing at the top of the eighty-foot slope, silhouetted against the sky, staring down.

He can’t see me, Colin told himself. At least he can’t see me as clearly as I see him. He’s there with the sky behind him; I’m here in the shadows.

“It is you,” Roy said.

He charged down the hillside.

Colin got up, stumbled over the railroad tracks, and hurried into the wasteland beyond.