The Voice of the Night (7 page)

“Well, we could kill it some other way.”

“What would we do—bite it?”

A night bird sang in the branches above them.

The sea breeze was cooler than it had been ten minutes ago.

Colin was tired of pushing the bike, but he sensed that Roy still had a lot to say and wanted to say it quietly, which he couldn’t do if they were riding.

Roy said, “We could tie the dog up and kill it with a pitchfork.”

“Jeez.”

“That would be a popper!”

“You’re making me sick.”

“Would you help me?”

“You don’t need my help.”

“But it would prove you’re not just a fair-weather friend.”

After a long while Colin said, “I suppose if it was really important to you, if you just had to do it or die, I could be there when you did it.”

“What do you mean by ‘be there’?”

“I mean... I guess I could watch.”

“What if I wanted you to do more than watch?”

“Like what?”

“What if I wanted you to take the pitchfork and stab the dog a few times yourself?”

“Sometimes you can be really weird, Roy.”

“Could you stab it?” Roy persisted.

“No.”

“I’ll bet you could.”

“I couldn’t ever kill anything.”

“But you could watch?”

“Well, if it would prove to you once and for all that I’m your friend and that I can be trusted...”

They entered the circle of light under a street lamp, and Roy stopped. He was grinning. “You’re getting better every day.”

“Oh?”

“You’re developing nicely,” Roy said.

“Am I?”

“Yesterday, you’d have said you couldn’t even watch a dog being killed. Today, you say you could watch but you couldn’t participate. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, you’ll tell me you could find it within yourself to pick up that pitchfork and make mincemeat of that damned dog.”

“No. Never.”

“And a week from now, you’ll finally admit that you’d enjoy killing something.”

“No. You’re wrong. This is stupid.”

“I’m right. You’re just like me.”

“And you’re no killer.”

“I am.”

“Not in a million years.”

“You don’t know me.”

“You’re Roy Borden.”

“I mean what’s inside me. You don’t know, but you’ll learn.”

“There’s no cat-and-dog killer inside you.”

“I’ve killed things bigger than a cat.”

“Like what?”

“Like people.”

“And then I suppose you moved on to even bigger things—like elephants.”

“No elephants. just people.”

“I guess with an elephant there’s problems disposing of the corpse.”

“Just people.”

Another night bird cried hollowly from its perch in a nearby tree, and in the distance two lonely dogs howled to each other.

“This is ridiculous,” Colin said.

“No, it’s true.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’ve killed people?”

“Twice.”

“Why not a hundred times?”

“Because it was only twice.”

“Next you’ll be saying you’re really an eight-legged, six-eyed creature from Mars disguised as a human being.”

“I was born in Santa Leona,” Roy said soberly. “We’ve always lived here, all my life. I’ve never been to Mars.”

“Roy, this is getting boring.”

“Oh, it’ll be anything but boring. Before the summer’s through, you and me together, we’re going to kill someone.”

Colin pretended to think about it. “The President of the United States maybe?”

“Just someone here in Santa Leona. It’ll be a real popper.”

“Roy, you might as well give up. I don’t believe a word of this, and I’m never going to believe it.”

“You will. Eventually you will.”

“No. It’s just a fairy tale, a game, a test of some sort that you’re putting me through. And I wish you’d tell me what I’m being tested for.”

Roy said nothing.

“Well, so far as I can see,” Colin said, “I’ve passed the test, whatever it is. I’ve proven to you that I can’t be fooled. I won’t fall for this dumb story of yours. You understand?”

Roy smiled and nodded. He glanced at his watch. “Hey, what do you want to do now? Want to go out to the Fairmont and see a movie?”

Colin was disconcerted by the sudden change of subject and Roy’s abruptly transformed attitude. “What’s the Fairmont?”

“The Fairmont Drive-in, of course. If we ride way the hell out on Ranch Road and then double back through the hills, we’ll come out on the slope above the Fairmont. We can sit up there and watch the movie for nothing.”

“But can you hear it?”

“No, but you don’t need to hear the kind of movies they play at the Fairmont.”

“What the hell do they play—silent films?”

Roy was amazed. “You mean you’ve lived here a whole month and you don’t know what the Fairmont is?”

“You’re making me feel retarded.”

“You really don’t
know?”

“You said it was a drive-in.”

“It’s more than that,” Roy said. “Boy, are you in for a surprise!”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Roy climbed onto his bike and pedaled away. Colin followed, off the sidewalk and into the street, from lamppost to lamppost, through alternating patches of shadow and light, pumping his legs hard to keep up.

When they reached Ranch Road and headed southeast, away from town, there were no more street lamps, and they switched on their headlights. The last traces of the sun had disappeared from the westward edges of the high-flying clouds: Night had arrived. Chains of gentle, treeless, pitch-black hills rose on both sides, silhouetted against a gray-black sky. Now and then a car passed them, but most of the time they had the road to themselves.

Colin was not on good terms with darkness. He had never lost his childish fear of being alone at night, a weakness that sometimes dismayed his mother and never failed to infuriate his father. He always slept with a light on. And right now he stayed close to Roy, genuinely afraid that if he fell behind he would be in extreme danger; something hideous, something unhuman, something hiding in the impenetrable shadows of the roadside would reach out for him, seize him in ghastly claws as big as sickles, tear him from his seat, and devour him alive with a noisy crunching of bones and splattering of blood. Or worse. He was a devoted fan of horror movies and novels, not because they dealt with colorful myths and were crammed full of movement and excitement, but because, to his way of thinking, they explored a sobering reality that most adults refused to take seriously. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, decaying corpses that would not rest peacefully in their coffins, and a hundred other hellish creatures did exist. Intellectually he could dismiss them as mere beasts of fantasy, denizens of the imagination, but in his heart he knew the truth. They were out there. The undead. Lurking. Waiting. Concealed. Hungry. The night was a vast, dank cellar, home to that which crept and crawled and slithered. The night had ears and eyes. It had a horrible, scratchy old voice. If you listened closely, tuning out your doubt and keeping an open mind, you could hear the dreadful voice of the night. It whispered about graves and rotting flesh and demons and ghosts and swamp monsters. It spoke of unspeakable things.

I have absolutely got to stop this, he told himself. Why do I do this to myself all the time? Jeez.

He rose slightly from the bicycle seat to gain better leverage and jammed his thin legs down hard on the pedals, determined to stay close to Roy.

His arms had broken out in gooseflesh.

From Ranch Road they turned onto a dirt track that was barely visible in the moonlight. Roy led the way. Over the crown of the first hill, the track became a narrow footpath. A quarter of a mile farther on, the footpath turned north, and they continued west, pushing their bicycles through coarse grass and sandy soil.

Less than a minute after they left the path, Roy’s bike light went out.

Colin stopped at once, heart leaping wildly like a startled rabbit in a cage. “Roy? Where are you? What’s wrong? What’s happened, Roy?”

Roy walked out of the darkness, into the pale fan of light that spread in front of Colin’s bicycle. “We’ve got two more hills to cross before we reach the drive-in. No sense struggling with the bikes any further than this. We’ll leave them here and pick them up on the way back.”

“What if somebody steals them?”

“Who?”

“How should I know? But what if somebody does?”

“An international ring of bicycle thieves with undercover operatives in every town?” Roy shook his head, making no effort to conceal his exasperation. “You worry about more goddamned things than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“If somebody stole them, we’d have to walk all the way home—five or six miles, maybe more.”

“For Christ’s sake, Colin, no one even knows the bikes are here! No one’s going to see them, let alone steal them.”

“Well, what if we come back and can’t find them in the dark?” Colin asked.

Roy grimaced, and he looked not just disgusted but demonic. It was a trick of light; the headlamp’s glow illuminated only the sharp edges of his features, leaving most of his face in darkness, so that he looked distorted, less than human.

“I know this place,” Roy said impatiently. “I come here all the time. Trust me. Now will you come on? We’re missing the movie.”

He turned and walked away.

Colin hesitated until he realized that if he didn’t leave the bike, Roy would leave him. He didn’t want to be alone in the middle of nowhere. He put the bike on its side and switched off the lamp.

The darkness enfolded him. He was suddenly acutely aware of a thousand eerie songs: the incessant croaking of toads. just toads? Perhaps something much more dangerous than that. The many strange voices of the night rose in a screeching chorus.

Fear washed through him like bile spreading from a pierced gut. The muscles in his throat grew tight. He had difficulty swallowing. If Roy had spoken to him, he could not have replied. In spite of the cool breeze, he began to sweat.

You’re no longer a child, he told himself. Don’t act like a baby.

He desperately wanted to bend down and switch on the bike light again, but he didn’t want Roy to discover that he was afraid of the dark. He wanted to be like Roy, and Roy wasn’t afraid of anything.

Fortunately Colin was not entirely blind. The bike light was not terribly powerful, and his eyes adapted quickly to a world without it. Milky moonlight spilled across the rolling land. He could see Roy loping swiftly up the hillside ahead.

Colin tried to move; he couldn’t. His legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds each.

Something hissed.

Colin tilted his head. Listened.

The hissing again. Louder. Closer.

Something rustled through the grass a few inches from his foot, and Colin bolted. It might have been only a harmless toad, but it gave him the motivation he needed to get moving.

He caught up with Roy, and a few minutes later they reached the slope behind and above the Fairmont. They descended halfway down the hill and sat on the ground, side by side in the dark.

Below them, the parked cars in the bowl of the drive-in pointed westward. The movie screen faced them, and beyond lay the main highway to Santa Leona.

On the giant screen a man and a woman were walking on the beach at sunset. Although there was no speaker on the hillside and therefore no sound, Colin could see from the close-ups that the actors were talking animatedly, and he wished he could read lips.

After a while Colin said, “I’m beginning to think this was a dumb idea—coming all the way out here to see a movie we can’t even hear.”

“You don’t need to hear this one,” Roy said.

“If we can’t hear it, how can we follow the plot?”

“People don’t go to the Fairmont for plot. All they want to see here is tits and ass.”

Colin gaped at Roy. “What are you talking about?”

“The Fairmont’s got a good location. No houses nearby. You can’t see the screen from the highway. So they play soft-core porn.”

“They play what?” Colin asked.

“Soft-core pom. Don’t you know what that is?”

“No.”

“You got a lot to learn, good buddy. Fortunately, you have a good teacher. Namely, me. It’s pornography. Dirty movies.”

“Y-you mean we’re going to see people... doing
it?”

Roy grinned. His teeth and eyes caught the moonlight. “That’s what we’d see if this was hard-core,” Roy said. “But it’s only soft stuff.”

“Oh,” Colin said. He didn’t have the slightest idea what Roy meant.

“So all we get to see,” Roy explained, “is naked people pretending to do it.”

“They’re... really naked?”

“Sure.”