The Voice of the Night

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.