The Voice of the Night

34

Colin ate supper alone, in his room.

He called Heather, and they made a date to go to the beach on Saturday. He wanted to tell her about Roy’s madness, but he was afraid she wouldn’t believe him. Besides, he still didn’t feel confident enough about their relationship to tell her that he and Roy were now enemies. Initially, she had seemed attracted to him because he and Roy were friends. Would she lose interest when she discovered he was no longer Roy’s buddy? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to risk losing her.

Later, he read the psychology books that Mrs. Larkin had chosen for him. He finished both volumes by two in the morning. For a while he sat in bed, staring and thinking. Then, mentally exhausted, he slept without nightmares-and without a single thought for the monsters in the attic.

Friday morning, before Weezy woke, he went to the library, returned the psychology books, and checked out three more.

“Is the science-fiction novel good?” Mrs. Larkin asked.

“Haven’t started it yet,” Colin said. “Maybe tonight.”

From the library he went down to the harbor. He didn’t want to go home while Weezy was still there; he wasn’t ready to endure another interrogation. He ate breakfast at the counter in a waterfront coffee shop. Later, he strolled to the southern end of the boardwalk, leaned against the railing, and watched the dozens of crabs that were sunning on the rocks a few feet below.

At eleven o‘clock he went home. He let himself into the house with the spare key that was kept in the redwood planter near the front door. Weezy was long gone; the coffee in the pot was cold.

He got a Pepsi from the refrigerator and went upstairs with the three psychology books. In his room, sitting on the bed, he took only one swallow of the soda and read only one paragraph of the first book before he sensed that he was not alone.

He heard a muffled, scraping sound.

Something was in the closet.

— Ridiculous.

I heard it.

— You imagined it.

He had read two books on psychology, and he knew that he was probably guilty of transference. That’s what the psychologists called it: transference. He couldn’t face up to the people and things he was really afraid of, couldn’t admit those fears to himself, so he transferred the anxiety to other things, to simple things-even simple-minded things-like werewolves and vampires and imaginary monsters that hid in the closet. That’s what he had been doing all of his life.

Yeah, maybe that’s true, he thought. But I’m sure I heard something move in the closet.

He leaned away from the headboard. He held his breath and listened intently.

Nothing. Silence.

The closet door was shut tight. He couldn’t remember if he had left it that way.

There! Again. A soft, scraping sound.

He slid silently off the bed and took a few steps toward the hall door, away from the closet.

The closet doorknob began to turn. The door eased open an inch.

Colin stopped. He desperately wanted to keep moving, but he was frozen in place as if a spell had been cast upon him. He felt as if he had been transformed into a specimen fly trapped in air that, through sorcery, had been turned to solid amber. From within that magic prison, he was watching a nightmare come to life; he stared at the closet, transfixed.

The door suddenly opened wide. There was no monster hiding among the clothes, no werewolf, no vampire, no hideous beast-god out of H. P. Lovecraft. Just Roy.

Roy looked surprised. He had started toward the bed, thinking his prey was there. Now he saw that Colin had anticipated him and was only a few steps from the open door that led to the second-floor hall. Roy stopped, and for an instant they stared at each other.

Then Roy grinned and raised his hands so that Colin could see what he held.

“No,” Colin said softly.

In Roy’s right hand: a cigarette lighter.

“No.”

In his left hand: a can of lighter fluid.

“No, no, no! Get out of here!”

Roy took a step toward him. Then another.

“No,” Colin said. But he couldn’t move.

Roy pointed the squeeze can and pressed on it. A jet of clear liquid arced through the air.

Colin ducked to the left, and the lighter fluid missed him, and he ran.

“Bastard!” Roy said.

Colin dashed through the open door and slammed it.

Even as the door was being drawn shut, Roy crashed into the other side.

Colin sprinted for the stairs.

Roy jerked open the door and rushed out of the bedroom. “Hey!”

Colin descended two steps at a time, but he had gone only halfway when he heard Roy thundering down after him. He plunged on. He jumped the last four steps, into the first-floor hall, and ran to the front door.

“Got ya!” Roy shouted triumphantly behind him. “Got ya, damnit!”

Before Colin could throw off the two locks on the door, he felt something cold and wet pouring down his back. He gasped in surprise and turned to Roy.

Lighter fluid!

Roy squirted him again, drenched the front of his thin cotton shirt.

Colin shielded his eyes with his hands. He was just in time.

Flammable liquid splashed over his forehead, over his fingers, nose, and chin.

Roy laughed.

Colin couldn’t breathe. The fumes choked him.

“What a popper!”

Finally the can of lighter fluid was empty. Roy threw it aside, and it clattered along the hardwood floor of the hallway.

Coughing, wheezing, Colin took his hands from his face and tried to see what was happening. The fumes stung his eyes; he closed them again. Tears oozed from beneath his eyelids. Though darkness had always terrified him, it had never been so awful as it was now.

“You stinking bastard,” Roy said. “Now you’ll pay for turning on me. Now you’ll pay. You’re gonna burn.”

Gasping for breath, barely able to get any air at all, temporarily blinded, hysterical, Colin threw himself toward the sound of the other boy’s voice. He collided with Roy, clutched him, and held on.

Roy staggered backward and tried to shake loose, as if he were a cornered fox wrestling free of a determined terrier. He put his hands against Colin’s chin, tried to force his head up and back, then grabbed him by the throat and attempted to strangle him. But they were face to face, and much too close for Roy to get sufficient leverage to be effective.

“Do it now,” Colin wheezed through the acrid fumes that filled his nose and mouth and lungs. “Do it… and we’ll … bum together.”

Roy tried again to throw him off. In the process, he stumbled and fell.

Colin went down with him. He held tightly to Roy; his life depended on it.

Cursing, Roy punched him, pummeled his back, slapped him alongside the head, pulled his hair. He even twisted Colin’s ears until it seemed that they would come out by the roots.

Colin howled in pain and tried to fight back. But the moment he let go of Roy in order to hit him, Roy rolled away. Colin grabbed for him and missed.

Roy scrambled to his feet. He backed up against the wall.

Even through the veil of stinging tears brought on by the fumes, Colin could see that the lighter was still in Roy’s right hand.

Roy snapped the flint wheel with his thumb. It didn’t spark, but it surely would the next time or the time after that.

Frantic, Colin launched himself at the other boy, slammed into him, and knocked the lighter out of his hand. It flew through the open archway, into the living room, where it banged against a piece of furniture.

“You creep!” Roy shoved him out of the way and ran after the lighter.

Having imbibed nothing more than the reeky air around him, Colin staggered drunkenly to the front door. He threw off the deadbolt lock with no difficulty, but then he fumbled with the stubborn security chain for what seemed like hours. Seemed. But of course couldn’t be. Probably only a few seconds. Or maybe even just fractions of a single second. He had no real sense of time. He was spinning. Floating. High on the fumes. He was getting just enough air to keep from passing out but not one whiff more. That’s why he was having so much trouble with the security chain. He was dizzy. The security chain seemed to be evaporating in his fingers, just as the lighter fluid was evaporating from his clothes and hands and face. His ears were ringing. The security chain. Concentrate on the security chain. Second by second, his coordination was deteriorating. Getting sloppy. The damned security chain. Sloppier and sloppier. Sick and burning. Going to bum. Like a torch. The goddamned, fucking security chain! At last, in a burst of concentrated effort, he tore the chain out of its slot and opened the door wide. Expecting flames to explode along his back at any second, he ran from the house, down the walk, across the street, and stopped at the edge of the small park. A wonderfully sweet wind washed over him and began to scour the fumes away. He drew several deep breaths, trying to regain a measure of sobriety.

On the far side of the street, Roy Borden came out of the house. He spotted his prey at once and loped to the end of the walk, but he didn’t cross the roadway. He stood over there, hands on his hips, staring at Colin.

Colin stared back at him. He was still dizzy. He still had difficulty drawing his breath. But he was ready to scream for help and run like hell the instant that Roy stepped off the curb.

Realizing that the game was lost, Roy walked away. In the first block, he looked back half a dozen times. In the second block, he glanced over his shoulder only twice. In the third block, he didn’t look back at all, and then he turned the corner and was gone.

On the way into the house, angry with himself, Colin stopped at the redwood planter and took the key from its place under the ivy. He was amazed that he had been so unthinking, so stupid. He had brought Roy to the house half a dozen times during the past month. Roy had known where the spare key was kept, and Colin had been careless enough to leave it there. From now on, he would carry it with him; and hereafter, he would maintain his defenses with considerably more diligence than he had shown to date.

He was at war.

Nothing less.

He went inside and locked the door.

In the powder room at the end of the hall, he stripped out of his saturated shirt and threw it on the floor. He scrubbed his hands vigorously, using lots of perfumed soap and hot water. Then he washed his face several times. Although he could still detect the fumes, the worst of the stench was gone. His eyes stopped tearing, and he was able to breathe normally once again.

In the kitchen he went directly to the telephone, but he hesitated with his hand on the receiver. He couldn’t call Weezy. The only proof he had that Roy attacked him was the soaked shirt, and that was really no proof at all. Besides, by the time she got home, most of the lighter fluid would have evaporated, leaving no stains. The empty can was on the floor in the hallway, and Roy’s fingerprints probably were all over it. But, of course, only the police had the equipment and expertise to test for prints and to prove whose they were, and the police would never take his story seriously. Weezy would think he had popped pills and hallucinated the whole thing, and he would be in trouble again.

If he explained the situation to his father and asked for help, the old man would call Weezy and demand to know what was happening. Pressed for an explanation, she would tell him a lot of silly stories about pills and pot and all-night drug parties. In spite of the fact that everything she would have to say would be clearly absurd, she would convince Frank because that was the kind of thing he would want to hear. The old man would accuse her of neglecting her duties as a parent. He’d be very self-righteous. He’d use her failure as an excuse to bring in his pack of hungry attorneys. A telephone call to Frank Jacobs would lead inevitably to another custody battle, and that was the last thing Colin wanted.

The only other people to whom he could turn were his grandparents. All four of them were alive. His mother’s folks lived in Sarasota, Florida, in a big white stucco place with lots of windows and shiny terrazzo floors. His father’s people had a small farm in Vermont. Colin hadn’t seen his grandparents in three years, and he’d never been close to any of them. If he called them, they would call Weezy. His relationships with them were not such that they would keep a secret for him. And they certainly wouldn’t come across country to take his side in this little war, not in a million years; that was a pipe dream.

Heather? Perhaps it was time to tell her, to ask for her help and suggestions. He could not hide his separation from Roy forever. But what could she do? She was a slender, rather timid girl, very pretty and nice and smart, but not much good in a fight like this.

He sighed.

“Jeez.”

He took his hand off the telephone.

There was no one on earth from whom he could hope to get help. No one.

He was as alone as if he had been standing at the North Pole. Utterly, perfectly, unrelievedly alone. But he was accustomed to that.

When had it ever been different?

He went upstairs.

In the past, whenever the world seemed too harsh and difficult to handle, he simply retreated from it. He had squirreled away with his monster models, his comic-book collection, and his shelves of science-fiction and horror novels. His room had been a sanctuary, the eye of the hurricane, where the storm could not touch him, where it could even be forgotten for a while. His room had always done for him what a hospital did for a sick man and what a monastery did for a monk: It healed him and it made him feel that in some mystical way he was part of something far, far more important and better than everyday life. His room had been filled with magic. It had been his refuge and his stage, where he could either hide from the world and from himself, too-or act out his fantasies for an audience of one. His room had been his place to weep and his playground, his church and his laboratory, the repository of his dreams.

Now it was just a room like any other. A ceiling. Four walls. A floor. A window. A door. Nothing more than that. Just one more place to be.

When Roy had come in here alone, uninvited, unwanted, he had broken the delicate spell that made this place unique. He had surely snooped through all the drawers and books and monster model kits, and in doing that he had also pawed through Colin’s soul without ever realizing it. With his crude touch he had drained the magic out of everything in the room, just as a lightning rod draws magnificent bolts of energy from the sky and disperses them so widely in the earth that they cease to exist at all. Nothing here was special any longer, and none of it would ever be special again. Colin felt violated, raped; he felt used and discarded. But Roy Borden had stolen a great deal more than privacy and pride; he had also made off with what remained of Colin’s shaky sense of security. And even more than that, much worse than that, he was a thief of illusions; he had taken all of those false but wonderfully comforting beliefs that Colin had long cherished.

Colin was depressed, yet he was also aware of a strange new power that was beginning to shine within him. Although he nearly had been killed just minutes ago, he was less afraid at this moment than at any time in memory. For the first time in his life, he did not feel weak or inferior. He was still the same second-rate physical specimen that he had always been-skinny, myopic, poorly coordinated-but inside he felt all new, fresh, and capable of anything.

He did not cry, and he was proud of that.

At the moment there was no room in him for tears; he was filled with a need for revenge.