Date: 1987-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Mystery; Fiction; Thriller
Description: A boy is blessed with second sight--and cursed by what he sees--in this terrifying thriller from the bestselling author of The Devil's Advocate. A little knowledge can be a deadly thing. Everyone knows that David is a smart one. He can tell you the end of a story from the first sentence. The other kids won't even go to the movies with him anymore; he always spoils the ending. People begin to wonder about David. There is, after all, such a thing as being too smart for your own good. David has learned the hard way to keep his thoughts to himself. But now David is growing up, and his gift is turn

Sight Unseen

Andrew Neiderman

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 1987 by Andrew Neiderman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

First Diversion Books edition May 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-793-7

Also by Andrew Neiderman

After Life
Duplicates
The Maddening
Perfect Little Angels
Deadly Verdict
The Magic Bullet
The Solomon Organization
Guardian Angel
Teacher’s Pet
Child’s Play

For Art, Gene, Gussie, Rosalie, and Trudy, teachers who had Gypsy Eyes.

Preface

In the beginning there was always that high-pitched ringing in his ears. It didn’t last long, but that didn’t matter. It forced him to close his eyes, and when he did, the visions would come. Pictures would flash on the inside of his eyelids. It was like going to the movies.

He wanted to open his eyes and put an end to it; he wanted to ignore the visions because most often they were terrifying. But at the same time, they were fascinating. It was as though his eyes had been glued shut. He couldn’t open them if he wanted to; at least, not until the sequences were finished.

Usually the people in the visions were strangers. He had no idea why he would see them walking, driving, or talking to one another. In some of the more violent visions, he would see someone get hit by a car or someone slip on a stairway and fall violently to the bottom.

Once he saw a long scene in which a man was folding clothes in his bedroom and putting them in his dresser drawer. Suddenly the door opened and another man came in, walked right up to the first man and stabbed him in the stomach. The killer had a dark face with gray eyes, but he knew neither him nor the victim. It was a particularly vicious murder because the killer kept turning the knife in the victim’s chest. He didn’t want to watch it, but he couldn’t open his eyes until the blood had started pouring out over the attacker’s knife and hand.

He first thought they might be pictures from comic books he had read or from movies he had seen, but gradually he realized there was something different about his visions, something more realistic. Sometimes he felt like he was a human radio receiving transmissions from far away. He even imagined his face glowing like the dial when the visions occurred. His face always felt hot afterward, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he was always flushed.

He was only ten and in the fifth grade the first time it happened. It was a beautiful spring day, and the class had gone out for recess. There was a small playground just behind the school. Even though all it had were swings, a sliding pond, a monkey bars, and a five foot square sandbox, the class couldn’t wait to get out to it.

Mona Benson was on the swings, going higher and higher. Mrs. Schoonmaker wasn’t watching her, although he had heard their teacher repeatedly warn Mona about going too high and not holding on tightly.

He turned from his game of marbles to look at her. It was as though someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Mona was a chubby girl with eyes that reminded him of fish. She wore an ecstatic smile as she kicked her feet toward the sky. Her teeth glittered in the sunlight. For a moment he was jealous of her obvious pleasure, and he returned with less interest to the game of marbles. He was half tempted to go to the swings himself.

But then the ringing started, and he closed his eyes. In the vision that followed, he saw her swinging and then saw Ralph Beekman pointing at her, making fun of the way her dress went up over her knees. She turned to shout something back, and when she did, she released her grip on the chain. A moment later she slipped from the swing and started to fall, but in his vision it was a slow descent. She fell like a kite whose string had snapped.

He was able to open his eyes before he envisioned her hitting the ground. Bobby Smith was telling him it was his turn to shoot a marble, but for a few moments he couldn’t remember what he was doing. He could see Bobby talking, his face animated, but he couldn’t hear him, and he didn’t understand what he wanted. Then the screaming began. They all turned toward the swings. Mona was sprawled on the ground.

Afterward, they found out that Ralph Beekman had been teasing her. She lost her balance when she turned abruptly on the swings and slipped off. She had broken her arm. When they went back into school, Mrs. Schoonmaker lectured about safety to the class. All of the children had become frightened and quiet, but none were as frightened and quiet as he.

He couldn’t help feeling guilty about what had happened. He was afraid Mrs. Schoonmaker would look at him and know that he could have warned Mona. She would see just how flushed and excited he was, and then force him to tell her why in front of all the others. Fortunately, she attributed his look to the general excitement caused by Mona’s accident. When it came time to leave for home, he said nothing to any of his friends. He rushed out of the school as quickly as he could.

He couldn’t wait to get home to tell his mother what had happened. She was in the kitchen doing a crossword puzzle and didn’t want him to interrupt her concentration, but he was persistent. Finally, she looked up, and he told her about the ringing and the vision and Mona Benson. For a moment she said nothing and did nothing. Then she tilted her head and smirked.

“Did you read about such a thing in one of your comic books?” she asked. “I told you not to buy those scary ones.”

“No. I didn’t read it,” he said indignantly. “And I’m not making it up. It happened.”

“Did you tell anyone else this story?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t ever tell people things like that. Who knows? In this crazy world, someone’s liable to hear and believe you.” She went back to her crossword book, signaling an end to such a discussion.

“So what?” he asked. Couldn’t she see how important all this was and how much of a dramatic effect it had had on him? Sometimes his mother made him feel invisible.

“So what? So then they’ll kidnap you and try to get you to do it for them.” She leaned toward him and made her eyes big the way she always did when she wanted to frighten him away from doing something. “Someone will take you to a racetrack and try to get you to tell which horse will win so they can bet on it and make a lot of money.”

He thought for a moment. Did what happened in the playground mean that he could do such a thing?

“Maybe we should do that,” he said.

She shook her head and sat back.

“I’m going to tell your grandmother to talk to you. She knows more about what can happen to someone if he plays around with ideas like that. She’ll tell you how dangerous it is to tell such stories. She’s seen terrible things happen to people in Europe.”

“I’m not telling stories,” he said. “I’m telling the truth,” he added, but with much less enthusiasm. References to his grandmother’s knowledge of terrible things done in Europe did drive fear into him. He understood that his grandmother had lived through horrors, even though the details were always kept well hidden from him. If any discussions ever wound their way back to the past, he was asked to leave the room.

“Hopeless,” his mother said, opening her crossword puzzle book again. “You’re getting to act more and more like your father every day.”

“Could Daddy see things happen before they happened too?” he asked excitedly. He knew so little about his father as it was. He thought it might make things better if he and his father shared something. Maybe this was why his mother kept his father such a mystery.

“Your father? He couldn’t see the future if it was right before him. He couldn’t see the present. That’s why he was a bum. The best thing I did for us was get a divorce from him and send him packing.”

“Then why did you say I was acting more like Daddy?” he asked with disappointment.

“Because he was stubborn and stupid, just the way you’re acting now. Go do your homework and leave such stories for the comic books and the radio.”

She went back to her crossword book, and he asked no more questions. Instinctively, he understood that she couldn’t give him the right answers anyway.

As far as he knew, she didn’t tell his grandmother. He wanted to tell her himself, but his mother had made him afraid to do so. He said nothing more about it, and she never brought it up. He kept it all to himself for as long as he could, no matter how many times the ringing occurred and the pictures flashed before him.

He kept the visions locked away until one night, when his grandmother came into his room and looked at a picture he had drawn. He was really just doodling, but the images had appeared so quickly on the paper that he was surprised by them himself. He had drawn the face of a boy, not unlike himself, but he had made the eyes extra large and had drawn lines out from them as though they radiated sunlight.

She looked at the picture and then she looked at him. Their gaze locked, and in that moment he knew she understood his secret. And she was afraid for him.

1

David sat on the ground by the side of his house, keeping himself in the shadows so he could remain unseen. He leaned back against the egg-white stucco wall and stared into the night. From the outside looking in, the lights in his house looked yellow, yet when they spilled their illumination through the slightly opened venetian blinds on the windows, they drew irregular, pale-white fingers over the small lawn that sloped downward to the driveway.

As the breeze blew through the large maple tree beside the house, the shadows cast by the branches shifted and stirred like sleeping beasts, unhappy with anything that disturbed their nocturnal peace.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds coming through the wall. He heard the audience laughter emerging from the cathedral-shaped RCA radio in the living room. When he closed his eyes like this, it was as though he could see through the wall into the small living room. The radio was on a square wooden table under the front window, so if they wanted to sit out on the front porch during warm summer evenings and listen to music, they could do so.

But right now his grandmother was sitting in her soft cushioned, maple-wood chair. Her feet were up on the small, brown hassock, and her hands were pressed softly against each other in her lap as if she were getting herself ready to applaud. She was settled comfortably in the warm sounds that came from the glowing radio dial, staring at it as if she could not only hear but follow the sounds back through the radio, through the wires and airwaves to the studio to see the scenes being vocalized.

She was listening to the “Jack Benny Show,” and David could easily envision her grinning. Usually, he sat with her, intrigued with her reactions almost as much as he was with the magic of sound effects and being able to hear people speaking hundreds of miles away.

Actually, he was fascinated with his grandmother. She embodied the entire mystery of his family. Through her and her memories, the ones she was willing to relate, he had traveled back in time, moving over the stories and images like a blind one touching stones of different sizes and textures. His fingers groped for an understanding. She was weaving the fabric of his identity, and he longed for it to be completed.

Because of the vivid way in which she described their relatives, he felt as if he knew them all: his great grandmother and great grandfather, their fathers and mothers, and their grandparents. Some of them had been captured in the sepia photographs that were pasted in the yellow cloth-covered album. They stared out at him with what he thought were expressions of curiosity and wonder. He imagined that they had been fascinated by the camera, but he also fantasized their having an extrasensory experience through which they could look into the camera lens and see him looking at them years and years later.

All of them gathered within him, spoke to him in a myriad of whispers, tugged on his imagination, and forced him to wonder and to question. He listened for answers.

He had come to believe that the blood of his ancestors commingled within him to form a unique descendant. Their passions clashed; their emotions did battle, and the result was what and who he was. He told no one about these ideas, not even his grandmother, although he was tempted to do so many times because he believed she would understand.

Perhaps he was a new kind of creature. That idea tormented him. He believed that he was different from all his friends, even though the differences were not immediately visible. He was afraid that some of them had begun to sense it. This idea was giving him nightmares. Maybe there was a werewolf in his past or even a vampire. One day he might be transformed into something horrible. There were nights he awoke abruptly and sat up to actually feel his face and body to be sure it was all the same.

He couldn’t imagine telling his mother these things. If anything, he was growing further and further away from her. In fact, he was beginning to think that his mother was merely a surrogate for his true maternal parent. He had camped within her for nine months, been born, and now grew into something so alien he could barely converse with her. Rarely did he feel the need to tell about his deeper feelings anymore, and as long as he didn’t tell his grandmother, there was no one he could talk to about them. It was something he had to deal with alone.

And that was why he was often alone; why, as he had done so many times before, he had gone out of the house tonight to sit in the darkness and think. Wasn’t there anyone out there like him? Someone who felt and saw the same things? Loneliness made the shadows deeper. It distorted sounds and made the car horns he heard coming from the village seem like the dying moans of metallic beasts.

Their house was located about halfway up a long hill that rose above Centerville proper. Until the summer tourists came to stay at the two bungalow colonies above and beyond them, the street was relatively quiet. Tonight it seemed even more subdued than usual. The warm, strong breeze played on the branches of trees that rustled leaves and scratched the face of the moon. Across the street two bats, seemingly tormented by the streetlight, flew madly around the pole. Even though he couldn’t see them, he heard the murmuring voices of the Novaks and Levines who were sitting next door on the porch of their two story apartment house talking themselves onto the threshold of sleep.

It was an unusually warm spring night. The summer resort season in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York loomed just over the next month or so. Already, bungalow colony owners had opened water pipes and cleaned out their units. Everywhere, people were painting, washing, mending. The world was getting ready to change again. His quiet, rural community would soon become a bustling urban neighborhood.

The approaching summer spread itself out before him. He could see every day, every moment. His mother would have to work longer hours at Rosenblatt’s drugstore, handling the sale of nonprescription items and sometimes working the soda fountain. They couldn’t afford to send him to summer camp, but his mother would make an arrangement with Mr. Kaplan so he could go swimming at the sulfur-spring lake just outside of town any time he wanted. He would enter the ring-toss contest and baseball games at the school, part of the recreational program run by the village. Last year he won the junior ring-toss championship.

He and his friends would roam the village streets at night. Sometimes he would go to the movies, but most of the time they would scrounge up some change to play the pinball machines or would just sit on the stoops by the corner stores and watch the older kids gather around their cars. There would be music and noise, and often he would feel a great excitement. He would believe in himself and fantasize many things.

He was going to be fifteen years old this summer, and he felt it was going to be the most important summer of his life so far. He did not know why he had this belief. So many times lately, he would say things or think something and be unable to explain, even to himself, where it had come from. His mind, racing forward, reached the ends of stories before their beginnings were even completed. Mrs. Stang, his English teacher, stopped asking how the class thought a story would end. David’s hand would shoot up almost automatically, and he would rattle off the events as though he were the author. She said he must be reading ahead, but he denied it vehemently because it wasn’t true. But neither she nor his friends believed that.

Now it was getting to be the same way with the movies. His friends hated to go with him. It did no good to swear he had never seen the pictures before. He tried to keep his knowledge to himself, but lately that was getting harder and harder to do.

Things flowed and spilled too fast. He couldn’t stop them. His thoughts became words so quickly he barely had time to consider what they meant. It was as if—and this was what frightened him the most—as if someone else lived within him, and he had no control of this second self. He had nightmares about that, too. He even went so far as to stand before the mirror in the bathroom and open his mouth widely to see if he could spot someone.

It was a weird idea. He would be the first to admit it, but his imagination had no boundaries. It was as if thoughts and dreams, and especially nightmares intermingled. All he had to do was stare at something for a while, just the way he was staring at the fingers of light on the lawn, and something would come to him.

Right now he was imagining the light lifting from the grass and worming its way through the night until it found a dark house to invade. Once inside, it soaked the sleeping inhabitants in the hot illumination, melting them into some dark liquid that would soak through the sheets. In the morning their friends and relatives would come looking for them and find only a grayish-black stain in each bed. He pressed his eyelids closed tightly in order to end the horrible images. Sometimes that worked; sometimes it made things worse. Tonight, it seemed to be making things worse.

“David?”

He welcomed the sound of his name. It helped rescue him from these terrible thoughts. He looked up at the kitchen window. His mother pressed her forehead against the screen to get a glimpse of him, but she couldn’t see him. He knew it and he didn’t move or respond. Her shadow was enormous on the lawn. He was fascinated by the size of it.

And then he thought, maybe our shadows are our real selves released only when light presses upon us. His mother was really that big. Her physical body was the illusion, only she didn’t know it. Few people, if any, knew it. Maybe only he knew it. What he had to do was find someone else who saw and thought the same things. He always came back to that: the need to share, the need to find someone who could help him understand.

“David, are you out there?” She waited a moment. He held his breath. “I know you’re out there, David. I want you to come in. It’s late and it’s getting cooler, and you remember what I told you about polio. David?”

He remembered what she had said. Her words were filled with warnings, but he didn’t believe them nor did he fear them because he didn’t see it happening to him. He was confident about it, even though three new cases had been reported in Monticello, a village only ten miles away.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re such a rotten kid. Get inside or I won’t let you out tomorrow night. Did you hear me, David? I won’t let you go anywhere with your friends if you don’t come right in this minute.” She spit her words out and waited, her face still pressed against the screen.

He closed his eyes and thought about her threat. No, she would let him out, he concluded. She was going to play Mah-jongg tomorrow night. All her friends would be over, and she’d want him out of her way. Her threats didn’t matter.

“David, if I have to come out there, you’re going to be one sorry child.”

She waited; he waited. Then he heard her mutter and saw her pull back. She didn’t come out. The “Jack Benny Show” ended. He could barely hear his mother and grandmother talking, but from the rhythms of their dialogue and the tone of their voices, he knew his mother had appealed to her for help. A few moments later his grandmother was at the window. Her shadow on the lawn was even bigger, but to him it was warmer.

“David. You should come in. Come.”

He stood up. The darkness had been so comforting. He hated to leave it and was reluctant to go in to sleep. He was afraid of the dreams.

“David.”

“I’m coming.”

“Good. He’s coming, Roselyn,” she told his mother. “I’ll make him some hot milk.”

“You baby him too much,” his mother said. “He’s fourteen years old.”

He avoided the reach of escaped illumination as though moving through it would be painful. He didn’t trust the white light since he had just imagined the distortions and animations. He hovered along the house and walked to the door.

The bats turned into the streetlight and then flew off. And then he thought he heard someone whisper his name. He paused for a moment to listen harder. There was someone out there, someone like him, waiting. There had to be. Who was it? Maybe he was right about shadows being the true self, and maybe he had left his shadow in the darkness. Maybe shadows could be peeled away like snakeskins. Maybe he was getting closer and closer to discovering who he really was. But that possibility didn’t excite him; it frightened him.

“I don’t want to know who I am,” he whispered into the night. He thought he heard laughter. The shadows knew he had no choice. He would have to know.

David was always fascinated by morning, by the beginning of a new day, by the opening of his eyes and the discovery that so much time apparently had passed so quickly. Night had to be an illusion. He had plans to stay up throughout the night so he could witness all of it and believe in the hours, but always, he became too tired and fell asleep, betraying himself.

But more disturbing, there were these new dreams. His fear of them was growing to the point where he would try to stay awake for as long as possible in order to stave them off. In these new and more intense nightmares, he would be walking through the village, moving in slow motion, turning and capturing everything like a movie camera. Usually, there was no one else around, but lately, people were looking at him from behind closed windows, their faces pressed into the glass so firmly they looked painted on. For some reason they were afraid to come out into the streets when he was there. He could see the fear in their faces. Why should they be afraid of him? he wondered.

After he awoke he would lie there and remember the dreams. This morning he was more frightened than usual. In last night’s dream, he had walked to the center of town as usual. Only this time there was a coffin there, an opened coffin. There was no one around it. It looked as if it had slipped out of the back of a hearse, but the driver hadn’t realized it. Although he struggled with himself to turn away, he couldn’t stop his legs and his forward motion. Despite his efforts for a retreat, he went right to the coffin and looked in.

Mr. Hoffman was there, pale and waxy in his death. He looked nothing like the rosy-faced owner of the village bakery, the man with the heavy German accent who enjoyed giving cookies to little children. At night the aroma of his bread baking permeated the village. It was his best advertisement. His cousin Carl owned and operated the bagel bakery right behind his. Often, David and his friends would go down there and buy a string of bagels for a dime. They would get cream sodas in the quart bottles and sit on the hill by the railroad tracks, eating their bagels and waiting for the nine o’clock to go through.

The nine o’clock didn’t stop at the station in his village. It was a freight train, and on bright moonlit evenings, David and his friends could read the boxcars and be fascinated by the names of the different states. To them it seemed as though the train connected all America. Usually, there was someone at the back of the caboose, someone to call to, a man with a dark face waving back at them forlornly, a prisoner of time and space, locked and submerged within the metallic snake. Where did he go? Where had he come from?

Once, in one of his dreams, David could see the man’s face. It wasn’t the face of a man, though; it was more like the face of a skeleton, the face of death. When the moonlight hit his chalky cheekbones, he smiled knowingly and nodded slowly. It was almost as though he and David were old friends. That dream left him in a sweat.

He and his friends could feel the freight train long before it appeared. The grassy knoll began to tremble beneath them. Tony Martin liked to run down to the tracks and put his ear on one, just the way they saw an Indian do it in a movie. Just before it came around the far turn into town, Tony would charge back up the hill. It was a steep little slope. Often, he, like any of them, would stumble and slide on the grass. There was a danger in that, and the danger filled them with additional excitement.

As the train rushed by and the cars rattled and thundered, they would all scream in unison, delighting in the way their voices were swallowed by the roar of the metal. It drove them back into a huddle of laughter and fear.

The train had come in his coffin dream. Just as he reached the casket, it sounded to his left. He stood back as it rushed by; the caboose appeared, and the skeleton in a conductor’s uniform was there, waving and smiling at him. He tried to cover his face so he wouldn’t see, but his hands were frozen against his sides. After the train passed, his arms were free.

He ran up the hill toward his house, but everyone was still asleep. It made him think that the dream had really happened. He got back into his bed and awoke, as he had just done. Now it seemed impossible to distinguish between fantasy and fact. He was afraid to get up, afraid to discover what was the truth. His grandmother had to come to rouse him so he would get to school on time.

“You’ll be late, David.”

“Okay,” he said. He started to rise. He was tempted to say he was sick and remain in bed all day, but then he was afraid he might fall asleep and dream again. His grandmother sensed something was wrong. She came into the room to feel his forehead. “I’m all right,” he said. “Just tired.”

“Why are you so tired? You went to bed early enough, didn’t you?”

“Another new dream,” he said.

She stepped back as if he had spit at her.

“What this time?”

He hesitated to say anything, but she remained standing by the bed, waiting. He looked down at the floor when he spoke.

“There was a coffin in the middle of town.” He looked up to see her reaction. Her eyes were small, and her expression was so serious it made him ponder his choice of words. “It was opened and I looked. Mr. Hoffman was in it. His eyes were open, but his skin was as pale as flour.”

“Don’t talk about it,” she said slowly, thoughtfully.

“Why did I dream about Mr. Hoffman?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hardly ever see him. I can’t remember when I went to the bakery last. We just go to the bagel bakery.”

“Don’t think about it and it’ll go away.”

“You said that about the other dreams, and they don’t go away. Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of doing something, and one of them will come back to me. Even when I’m just walking up the street, it happens.”

“They will go away,” she insisted. “Come, get up and get washed. I’ll make you scrambled eggs,” she added and left him quickly. He had a sense of her fear, and that made him even more afraid. Usually, she was willing to answer his questions and talk about things, but when it came to the dreams, she was very short with him.

Nevertheless, he did what she said. She had a way of bringing even more light into the morning. The aroma of the eggs and toast churned his stomach. She sang one of her Hungarian songs softly as she worked. He watched her shoulders sway. She had become heavier in old age. Her body softened and widened as though it were settling under the weight of her years.

He had seen pictures of her when she was his mother’s age, and although there were great resemblances between them, there were great differences, too. His grandmother looked stronger, leaner, much older. Once he made a comment about that, and his mother replied that his grandmother had been through experiences that age a person faster. He didn’t understand what she meant then, but he thought he was beginning to understand it now.

His grandmother’s life was a mystery and a wonder to him. She revealed it slowly in anecdotes and stories. To him it was as though she had lived two lives: one in Europe filled with mystery and adventure and what he suspected was a great deal of sadness and agony; and then this life here in America. She moved in with them right after his grandfather died.

Rarely did she tell things in chronological order. Something always suggested something; and when she would begin to reminisce, he would put whatever he was doing aside and listen intently. He was even careful about asking questions when she spoke. He hated to interrupt or chance an ending to her tale. If he could just keep her from realizing what she was doing, she would go on. Once he brought her out of her reverie, she usually stopped. It was as though her past were filled with many terrifying things, and she was afraid she would slip and reveal some of them. What were they? Did they have anything to do with him?

As usual she made him finish every bit of his breakfast. He ate too much and found it hard to work up enthusiasm for the walk to school, but she ushered him back into the bathroom. He did his hair the best he could and emerged awake and alert. His mother was just rising by the time he was ready to leave.

“Why didn’t anyone wake me?” she asked and yawned. She was wrapped in her light-brown cotton bathrobe and wore his father’s old, dark-brown leather slippers, one of the few possessions of his that she permitted in the house. He used to think it was odd that his father left without his slippers. He would stare at them as though there were qualities about them that would reveal things about his father, but they were just a pair of old, comfortable slippers. Nothing magical happened if he slipped his feet into them.

“Wake you for what, Roselyn?” his grandmother asked. She had already washed, rinsed and dried all his dishes. “You don’t go to work at the drugstore until eleven today.”

“Did he eat?” his mother asked and yawned again. She ran her fingers through her shoulder-length black hair. Lately he had begun to notice more and more gray strands. She used to blame their appearance on anything he did to aggravate her, but there were too many of them now to justify that fantasy.

His mother had been a very pretty woman. She had a slim figure and large, dark eyes. Her skin was still olive colored, but the smoothness had been disturbed by deepening wrinkles around her mouth, the corners of her eyes, and in her forehead. Whenever anyone looking at the photograph album commented about her good looks, she would invariably say, “That was before I got married.” David used to believe that marriage was the same as casting a spell on someone. Until it was over, he or she was stuck in the magic. But he soon realized that all marriages weren’t the same as the marriage his mother had experienced.

“He ate, he ate, Roselyn. Let him go. He’ll be late and he’ll blame it on you.”

“I went to bed late,” she said, more of an excuse to herself than to him or his grandmother. He let her kiss him, an act of forgiveness. Her body still had the scents of warm blankets and starched sheets. His look of reproachful silence woke her a little more. “Are you all right? You look a little pale this morning. Did something happen?”

He shot a quick glance at his grandmother. She closed and opened her eyes. He understood.

“No, nothing happened. I gotta go.”

Before she could ask any more questions, he rushed out the back door and down the back porch steps, nearly taking the railing off when he made the turn into the yard. There was a path through the bushes and woods that he used as a shortcut to school, which was only a half a mile from his house.

He could hear the other students shouting at one another as they reached the school grounds. There was also the sound of buses arriving with the children who lived more than a mile and a quarter from the school. As he drew closer, he heard the laughter of elementary kids. Bells rang. Teachers were shouting out of doors and windows. The world was coming alive just on the other side of the trees, and he felt good about it. All his nightmares could be left behind until he went home again.

It was warmer than usual in school. Everyone predicted one of the hottest summers on record would be coming. He sensed that this was so. The overheated rooms made everything sticky and heavy, but when he and his friends came charging out of the building, they were disappointed because they didn’t rush out into cool, reviving air. They made plans to meet down at the train station where they could play box ball with a Spaulding rubber ball. They could play under the overhang because that part of the structure had a cement floor. He looked forward to it, and that filled him with some renewed energy.

He ran back over the path to home, charging under branches and feeling the exuberance that came from the freedom and speed of his legs. He felt he could almost fly, and he took an ecstatic pleasure in himself.

Then he saw her and stopped quickly, unable for the moment to do anything else but look at her.

His grandmother was waiting for him at the back door, standing on the porch. Her hands grasped the railing where she had been leaning over to peer down the path toward the school. He could tell she had been there for a while, and that frightened him. She looked white with anxiety. He moved forward, slowing down to a walk; but she beckoned him to come faster, so he picked up the pace and charged up the steps, pounding the rungs so hard the entire wooden structure shook.

“Quiet,” she said. His heart was beating so hard, he thought his grandmother could hear it thump. He held his school books against his chest.

“What’s the matter?”

“Your mother is home from the store already. She got a headache, and Mr. Rosenblatt gave her the rest of the day off.”

“Oh,” he said relieved. If that was all, he could deal with it. He wasn’t going to hang around the house long anyway. He wouldn’t have to worry about disturbing her. The headaches had become part of who his mother was. Almost anything could give her one, especially something annoying that he might do. He had come to accept it, and he believed his grandmother had done the same. Vaguely, he thought that it might all have something to do with his mother’s bad marriage and his father’s leaving. He couldn’t imagine the woman in the early pictures, taken during happier times, having any headaches.

His grandmother didn’t move. She continued to glare at him, her large blue eyes on fire with excitement. She had her silver-gray hair pinned back as usual, but some strands had escaped and curled over her forehead. He thought she would stop to fix it if she knew. She was a fanatic for neatness and cleanliness.

He started to go around her, but she seized his wrist. He was surprised at how tight her grip was.

“I want you to say nothing about your dream.”

“Dream?” He had almost forgotten about it.

“The dream you told me about this morning.”

“You already told me not to say anything this morning, remember?” He didn’t need another warning. He didn’t like talking about it anyway because when he talked about it, the visions were nearly as vivid as they were when he dreamt them.

But her look of terror did not diminish. He couldn’t remember her staring at him so intently before. It made him feel like a stranger. She still had not released her grip on his wrist. It was beginning to hurt.

“What’s the matter, Grandma? Is there something else wrong with Mom?”

She shook her head.

“Just let her sleep.”

“Then what is it?” He raised his voice and tugged his wrist out of her grip. His heart had begun to beat rapidly again, and the warm air had become hot and uncomfortable. His blue polo shirt was sticking to his back, and he felt the redness in his cheeks turn into fire under his skin.

“Mr. Hoffman,” she said. “He had a heart attack this afternoon and died.”

2

When spring in the Catskills was as warm as this, David couldn’t resist going out at night. The stars were magnetic; they drew him away from books, away from the glow of the radio with its promise of adventure or mystery, and away from lights and other voices. He liked to go to the school and lie down on the front lawn that sloped up from the road. With his hands back and under his head, he could lie there and look up at the sky for what seemed to be hours. Sometimes, if he looked hard and long enough, he would feel the earth turning, and he would imagine falling upward into the constellations.

But lately, when night came, there was a new stirring within him. His skin felt more sensitive; his clothing was confining. Something was being born inside him, he thought, and whatever it was, it turned his fingers into spiders exploring his own body. His blood rushed toward whatever spot he touched. It made him feverish and so hot that he believed he could scorch the earth wherever he lay.

David had only a vague understanding of sex. In those years, little was said about it formally in school, and it was usually disguised through lessons in animal and plant reproduction. Certainly nothing was said about it at home, except for the references his mother made to dirty women and diseases. Whenever she and his grandmother got into a conversation about anything that could remotely be thought of as sexual, they stopped immediately if he were within earshot.

This had the effect of making sex more mysterious and enticing. From what he could see, sex was something older people horded. They did what they wanted to do behind closed doors and in dark rooms, and what they did, they never discussed. If he were to believe what they said and the way they said it, he would think that most children were born out of immaculate conception.

For one thing it was especially hard for him to accept that his mother and his father ever had sexual relations. From the way his mother spoke about his father, he couldn’t imagine their ever touching each other affectionately. He almost believed that story Charlie Burger told about the girl who got pregnant after going to the bathroom and sitting on the dirty toilet seat. Supposedly it happened in the rest room at Skip’s garage.

There were a number of stories like that passed around. Didn’t he hear a group of senior boys talking about Shirley Dorfman, who went into the same bath water her brother Tommy had just finished using, and then two months later she got pregnant. She had to be sent away to have it fixed.

David’s entire sexual education so far had come from his classmates. They shared tidbits greedily, each one trying to surprise and astound the others with some new information, verified by an older brother or an older boy. Lately, he was more interested in what was being said because girls had become more interesting to him. He sensed a new aura about them, an aura that was even around the girls he had known all his life. Whenever he entered their galaxies, he was held like a planet, circling them and kept in orbit by their smiles, their laughter, and their promise of something greater.

What was that promise? The mystery was becoming more and more fascinating with every day that passed. The solution was buried in the magic of their bodies, in the way they moved and turned their shoulders, and in the way they smiled at him when they found him staring with this new interest. Girls were smarter when it came to all this, he thought. Those his age already knew much more than he did.

One night he came home from the village via Turtle Avenue, a shortcut to his house and, purely by accident, saw seventeen-year-old Diane Jones in her bra and panties, walking through her bedroom. Her shades were up and her house, built on a little knoll, was slightly above eye level, making it easy for him to see her. The sight of her stopped him, and he took refuge behind a wide maple tree, waiting for her to reappear.

When she did reappear in the flesh, she seemed unreal, like an actress in a motion picture. The distance between them kept her aloof and larger than life, despite the fact that he was only about twenty yards away. He couldn’t imagine why she kept her shades up, making the view so clear and complete, even though there were no other houses behind hers. Women were usually more careful about such things. At least his mother was. Her shades were always down, and if it wasn’t for his grandmother, the shades on the other windows would be down most of the time, too.

As soon as she stood in the window, David pressed his body hard against the tree, almost as though the pressure and resulting pain were necessary to calm him. He was awash with excitement, his gaze so intense that all the rest of the world was shut out.

Diane moved across her room and sat at her vanity table. He shifted to the other side of the tree so he could maintain a good view of her. For a few moments she just stared at herself. Then she turned toward the window, and his heart skipped a beat. Would she close the shades and end it? He willed her not to.

He had willed things before. It was more than simply making a wish and leaving things to chance and hope. Willing something meant grimacing hard, concentrating and chanting silently. Sometimes it literally exhausted him, but he had come to believe in the process, even though it didn’t work all the time. Tonight it did.

She didn’t close her window shades. Instead, she began to brush her light-brown hair. All of her strokes were slow and soft, the strokes of someone in deep thought. What was she thinking? he wondered. That curiosity, as much as anything, pulled him out of the shadows and toward the window.

Bending over, he scurried through the darkness until he reached the small picket fence, which was about a dozen yards from the house. The light spilling out of her windows nearly reached him. He squatted within the protective shadows, but kept himself high enough to see her fully. He could see her face in the mirror, and that reflection was fascinating.

As he concentrated on it, he felt as though he were moving out of his body and right up to the window. He could see deeply into her eyes. Their thoughts crisscrossed. It was her voice that he heard in his own mind.

He sought to influence her, to get her to continue her undressing. He willed it with all his mental might. Suddenly her hand stopped in midair. She held it there so firmly and still that he suspected she sensed his presence. His heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t lower his body; he couldn’t hide. It was almost as though he wanted her to discover him standing there and watching her, but she didn’t turn around.

Instead, she put the brush down softly and reached behind her back to unfasten her bra. With a quick but graceful movement, she undid the garment and slipped it down her arms. For a long moment she simply sat there like that.

Then she spun around as though she heard his thoughts and his heavy breathing. He pulled back farther into the darkness and stared at her as he would stare into the flame of a burning candle. She wavered; her breasts flickered before him when she stood up and walked to the window. She stood there looking out. Could she sense him in the same way he felt he could sense her? He held his breath until she pulled the shade down. And then her silhouette retreated and was gone.

Almost immediately, he experienced a sense of cool relief. His body had been all aglow, the excitement consuming him. He found that even his palms were damp with sweat. He put his hand to his chest and felt the heavy thump slow down and lessen. It was over almost as quickly and as unexpectedly as it had begun. He looked about guiltily and then rushed away, running toward home with a new and frantic burst of speed. He was being pursued by Diane Jones’s image in the window.

He was disappointed when he got home because he wanted to enjoy quiet meditation. Instead, he found a house filled with noise and activity. He had forgotten that it was his mother’s night to host the Mah-jongg game. His grandmother was preparing coffee cake for them. The women looked crowded about the small table. Their bodies, their chatter, and the smoke from their cigarettes made the room look bloated and stuffed. He felt as though the walls were straining at their corners. The kitchen was overwhelmed with the combination of different scents: the burning cigarettes, the inexpensive toilette water, the sweet cinnamon cake. He thought only of escape.

No one paid much attention to his entrance anyway. His grandmother gave him the big eyes which meant, “Stay out of their way.” He thought about going right to his room and closing his door, but he knew that would be no good. His room was too close to the kitchen. So he backed out. No one called to him. His mother was too involved with her game, and his grandmother was too involved with her work.

At first he decided he would sit on the porch until he knew he was too tired to be bothered by their noise; but almost immediately he felt a need for real solitude. He left the front yard and continued up the hill until he came to the entrance of Okun’s bungalow colony.

Okun’s colony was a big collection of resort cottages with an olympic-size pool, a handball court, baseball field, and playground. It had a large casino building for entertainment and weekly bingo games as well.

There were no streetlights this far out of the village, but the quarter moon peekabooing the clouds provided enough light to silhouette his surroundings. There was a fieldstone wall at the entrance. He boosted himself onto it and sat there listening to the peepers. Behind him, the summer bungalows waited in anticipation against the inky background. Soon enough, he thought, they would be overrun by an invasion of tourists. He felt an affinity with these little vacation homes. He felt as though they shared an understanding, a sadness.

This year, for the first time, he had noticed that his village and its surroundings seemed to lean more. The weight of the summers had either grown heavier or the community had grown weaker, older, and more tired. Store buildings sagged, the roads had more potholes and cracks, and the small hotels and bungalow colonies like the one behind him showed their age. He detected that some significant change had begun, but he wasn’t sure yet what it all meant. The visions and images that flashed across his mind occasionally were still not clear enough for him to make any conclusions, but it was almost as if he could see the end of one world and the beginning of another.

His gaze went out through the darkness in the direction of Diane Jones’s house. He couldn’t actually see it from where he sat, but he was able to conjure it up before him so clearly and distinctly that it was as though he were back there standing beside that tree.

Had she seen him out there, outlined against the tree? What if he saw her in the village tomorrow? Would she acknowledge him and let him know she knew? He felt as if he had stolen something from her. But what? The secret of her body? Would it change the way he looked at her?

It had to. Surely he would feel something intimate every time he passed her, whether it be in the school corridors or on the street. He closed his eyes and imagined the experience. He wondered. Would he see her half naked every time he saw her? And more importantly, would she see it in his face? Would she blush? Would she be embarrassed? He didn’t want her to feel embarrassed. He didn’t want to hurt her.

Somehow, he didn’t think she would be. When he closed his eyes and imagined the confrontations, Diane had a knowing look on her face, but there was warmth there, and there was sexual sophistication. No matter what she wore, her breasts were uncovered to him. He had X-ray eyes like Superman.

What a great thing this was. Realizing his power to reproduce this erotic image so vividly was a wonderful discovery, so it couldn’t be something evil. He wouldn’t let it be. Of course, he would tell no one about it. To do so would diminish its significance and reduce it to something dirty.

He had looked with intensity at Diane Jones before, admiring her hair, her angelic smile, her small hands, and the way she could turn an ordinary street into something spectacular when she walked. He always had paused to stare at her even though he was only a ninth grader and she was a senior. If she saw him, her eyes brightened. She was like a princess granting him a smile. Surely someone so beautiful was aware of how easily she captured adoration.

But what happened tonight was different, he thought. It shattered the air around him. It changed the face of the night and made the darkness sensual.

He closed his eyes to remember the erotic scenes, but this time it was different. He wasn’t outside by the tree looking in at her; he was in the room. He was sitting on her bed, and she had her back to him as she looked out the window and closed the shades. It was incredible. He was in that room! He saw her clearly from this new and even more intimate perspective. When she turned, she didn’t acknowledge him. He was invisible to her, but he was there.

She slipped her panties off. Totally naked now, she was moving about the room, preparing for her shower. Everything she did was so vivid and so close. He watched her take her robe from the closet. He saw her lay out her nightgown beside him on the bed. When she leaned over, her face nearly grazed his. He could actually smell the scent of her hair. Her warm breath caressed his cheek.

She gazed at herself in the mirror, pressed her hands against her hips as though to measure them, and then left the room. When she did that, he opened his eyes again.

For a moment he forgot where he was. Then, moving in a daze, he slipped off the stone wall and started down the hill toward home. As he walked, the realization about what had just happened took hold of him. He had really seen her again. He hadn’t imagined it; he had done it. He didn’t know how he had done it, but he had done it. It was something special that he could do. But how?

All he had done was concentrate, shutting out everything else from his thoughts and directing his full thought power to one thing. Could he do it again? Do it at will? It made him tremble to think so. What was really happening to him? Was he going crazy? Who would believe this? Dreams were one thing. Everyone had dreams and talked about them, but to actually move yourself through the darkness and place yourself somewhere else—to go beyond walls and within the minds of other people—to know the next moment before the hands of the clock touched it—

He stopped before the house to test himself. The very idea made his heart pound again. He looked at his house and closed his eyes. He concentrated on his grandmother until she was so vivid and close he could touch her. She was taking the cake out of the oven and placing it on the counter. Now she cut a corner piece to save for him. She wrapped it in wax paper and put it up in the cupboard with the cups and saucers. After that, she cut pieces for the women at the table. He knew her motives. If she didn’t hide his piece, they would eat it along with the rest of the cake. He smiled, realizing how she always thought about him.

An approaching car, its headlights bright, its engine accelerating, headed toward him. He didn’t move, and the driver leaned hard on the horn. The blaring noise brought him back outside the house. He stepped off the road quickly and watched it rush by, the driver shouting a curse. It made him wonder: When he drifted off like this, what happened to his body? What if he hadn’t heard that horn? Would he have died out here or in the house?

He decided to go back into the house. The women had taken a break to enjoy their coffee and cake, so now they all acknowledged him.

“Where were you?” his mother asked. “You should be getting ready for bed.”

“I wasn’t tired yet so I went for a walk.”

“You hear?” she said, directing herself to the other women as if she were in a performance. He didn’t like her when she became so dramatic; he recognized how false it was. The women nodded and smiled when they looked at him. Then they took on that sympathetic look that said, “We’ve all been through this many times.” For a moment he despised them all for their smug understanding of motherhood.

“They’re never tired, Roselyn,” Tillie Green said. Her cigarette dangling threateningly from the corner of her mouth. The ashes looked as though they would fall into her coffee any moment.

“My son would stay up all night and listen to the radio if I let him, and then in the morning, he wonders why he can’t get up for school,” Marion Wells said. David thought she was right. Bobby Wells always looked half asleep.

“That cake smells good,” he said quickly, before anyone else could add support to his mother’s complaint.

“Well it’s all gone,” his mother said, gesturing at the cake plates. “If you would have come home early, you would have had a piece. Grandma made it with cinnamon,” she added with an almost sadistic air. “Your favorite.”

He didn’t mean to sound arrogant and all knowing, but it was the only way he could respond.

“She saved me a piece,” he said. He said it with such assurance that all the women looked up at him and then looked at his grandmother. She didn’t smile, but when their gazes met, her eyes widened with understanding. Without speaking, she went to the cupboard and took out his piece, the corner piece.

“You see how she spoils him? You see?” There was some sympathetic laughter.

“I’ll go to sleep after I hear the end of ‘Inner Sanctum,’” he said and went into the living room. His grandmother brought him his cake and milk and stood there watching him eat it. The heavy, eerie organ music of the radio program seemed a fitting soundtrack for his mood.

“I want you to tell me things,” he said without looking up at her.

“What things?”

“Things about yourself when you were a little girl. Things you remember.”

“I always tell you those things.”

“I want to know other things,” he said and looked up abruptly. For a moment she did not speak. The heavy voice on the radio seemed to belong to someone beside them in the room. He had a quick vision of the two of them being sucked into the radio and made part of the tale of terror. They were both scratching on the inside of the dial, trying to get out.

“I tell you what I remember. What else can I tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

“You know the things I mean,” he said. He didn’t fully understand himself why he said that. It seemed the right thing to say. This time, when he looked at her, however, she looked afraid. Her lower lip quivered, and she brought her hands closer to her body.

“You should go to sleep soon. Tomorrow’s a school day.” She turned to go back to the kitchen, but he stopped her.

“There’s more than just the dreams now,” he said. When she looked back at him, her face was whiter. “I can do things.”

“Don’t talk about them,” she said quickly. She looked behind her to see if anyone had heard what he said. He lowered his voice.

“But I’m telling only you.”

“Not even me. No one. Such talk…such talk brings trouble. Don’t talk.”

“What trouble?”

“Trouble, trouble.” She lowered her voice and widened her eyes in such a way that it frightened him. “Forget these ideas. Go to sleep, David.”

He shook his head.

“You’re going to have to talk to me,” he said. He sounded so definite that he surprised himself. “These things won’t stop.”

He waited for her anger, but it didn’t come. Instead, she looked sad. She shook her head and left him.

He went to the opened blinds of his living room window and stared out at the road for a moment. Suddenly, without his even drawing the images up out of his bank of memories, he saw Diane Jones standing at her window looking out at him. In a moment her breasts had captured him. He saw now that he was a prisoner of the memory, but this was different from the other memories and images that had been occurring.

From this one, he had no desire to escape.

During the next few days, he noticed that he began to feel different when he awoke in the morning. Now he would feel great relief. He awoke from sleep abruptly, fleeing from it like a prisoner just released. He didn’t like the loss of control that he experienced when he slept. He could conjure and control his thoughts and images only for that short time before he fell into unconsciousness. After that, something else took over, something that he suspected reached back even before his own birth. It frightened him, and so he smiled gratefully at the sunlight of morning.

Besides, there were other things happening to him now, things that he looked forward to during the waking hours. He was like a puppy just developing the ability to see. The whole world began to change before him. So much looked surprisingly different. When he left the house in the morning to take his secret path to school, he had to travel more slowly because he began noticing things he had never noticed before, things that were right nearby. What he saw was the potential in them.

He would stop at the bottom of the back porch steps and look around the yard. There was a magical change that lasted only a few moments, but a change that, nevertheless, had a traumatic effect on him. All of the saplings were suddenly full-grown trees. More mature trees were older, fuller. Cleared spaces were covered with wild bushes and new saplings. The thin little forest between his house and the school looked more like a veritable jungle: branches filled with rich, green leaves, bushes wider and deeper, the heart of the woods thicker.

Then he would close his eyes and open them again to return his yard to its current state. Not believing what he now saw, he moved forward cautiously, expecting the magic to return at any moment. He couldn’t predict when it would happen.

One time while he was brushing his teeth after breakfast, another face appeared to him in the bathroom mirror. It was his face, but much older and fuller. There was gray in his light brown hair and even a tinge of gray in his unshaven beard. The sight frightened him and he stepped back, his heart beating madly. After a moment the image dissolved and his present face returned, the look of shock and surprise printed over it.

These flashes of the future continued to be both exciting and frightening. More and more often, David would stop paying attention in class. He was vaguely aware of the teacher’s voice droning on, but he would doodle on his notebook paper and feel himself drifting. It was almost as though he were disappearing. He would lift his head slowly and look about the room to see if any of his classmates were having a similar reaction. Some looked as though they were. But recently, he found that whenever he did this and concentrated on one student or another, things would happen.

Today, David lifted his head and looked at Bobby Ryan, a slim, light brown-haired boy, who was an only child, too. Bobby’s father worked for the lumber company. He was a big man with a Joe Palooka face. He had a heart with an arrow through it tattooed on his right forearm. But up to now, Bobby took after his mother more than he did his father. He had his mother’s slim frame and her diminutive features. In grade school, he had looked like a cherub. He had always been quiet, with friends like himself, introspective and withdrawn.

But David liked Bobby Ryan, and from time to time he had befriended him. Actually, Bobby was a year older than all the other boys in the class. His parents were transient, and he entered school nearly a year after he should have. However, he would be able to drive and buy alcoholic beverages before any of his classmates could. David knew that, like so many other older boys, Bobby would become popular then, even though the popularity might be short lived. He had seen it happen to other boys who were older than their classmates.

Bobby acknowledged his glance and nodded silently. Mr. Pepridge was going over something in science that he had gone over only two days ago. The sixty-five-year-old bald-headed science teacher was getting more and more forgetful, confusing students with their older brothers and sisters, students he had had before. Now, he often assigned the same homework twice. Once he gave them a test he had given them only a week before. No one said anything and everyone did exceedingly well.

David looked down. When he looked up and turned again to Bobby, he saw that Bobby had leaned back in his seat, letting his head fall to the side facing him. Slowly the sight before him began to change. Students seated behind and around him evaporated into thin air. The classroom faded away, and he no longer heard Mr. Pepridge’s voice at all.

The picture that now dominated was most horrible: Bobby Ryan’s head was resting on the back of a car seat and instead of a school desk around him, there was broken glass and twisted metal. His head and face were smashed, as if he had been thrown forward in his car seat and driven into the windshield. Blood streaked down from a tremendous gash in his forehead. The thin red lines ran over his cheeks and down the sides of his chin. His nose was a pulpy mess, and the white of his face bone showed through the ripped skin of his cheeks and nose.

The sight was so gruesome and shocking that David couldn’t prevent himself from releasing a groan of horror. Mr. Pepridge stopped his explanation, and the entire class turned David’s way. He had his hands over his eyes, and his face had paled considerably. Mr. Pepridge’s look of annoyance turned to a look of concern. He came around his desk to David.

“What is it?” he asked. “Are you in pain?”

David released his fingers gently, lowering his hands reluctantly, little by little. Mr. Pepridge’s look of confusion brought David back to reality. He turned toward Bobby Ryan and stared at the puzzled light-haired boy, whose face looked smooth and untouched. No one spoke. Everyone had been frightened by David’s outburst.

Now he felt somewhat embarrassed. The color returned to his cheeks quickly. He straightened up in his seat and stammered an explanation.

“I saw something…horrible.”

“What? What are you talking about, young man?”

David looked at his classmates, their faces still frozen in astonishment. Then he looked up at Mr. Pepridge. The teacher’s heavy eyebrows rose emphatically, creating deep creases in his dry, scaly forehead.

“Sorry,” David said. How could he explain it? They would all think he was crazy, Mr. Pepridge especially. He looked down quickly, hoping Mr. Pepridge would just move on and continue his redundant lecture. He didn’t.

“If this is some kind of a joke, I don’t find it a bit funny. We have some serious work to do here, and if you can’t sit and do it like the others, you’ll have to go see the principal. Is that clear?”

David nodded without looking up. He knew that Mr. Pepridge would stand there for a few moments to emphasize his statements until he felt he was in complete control of his classroom again. Then and only then would he move back to his desk. He would glare at him from time to time throughout the remainder of the class period. David sat as still as a statue, wishing that he could really disappear. He couldn’t help but catch the smiles on some of his friends’ faces, but did his best to ignore them.

When the bell rang to end the period, he couldn’t wait to get out of the room, but Mr. Pepridge surprised him. He called out his name and ordered him to remain. The others looked at him cautiously, some still smiling gleefully, others looking sympathetic as they left the class. He waited until the room emptied and then went to Mr. Pepridge’s desk.

The science teacher had his grade book opened. David anticipated the tact he would take. He could hear the words before they were said, and when they were finally said, they sounded more like echoes.

“Your attendance record is good; your grades are good. I don’t understand your behavior today. Why did you do that and disrupt my class?”

“I told you, Mr. Pepridge. I saw something horrible and forgot where I was for a moment.”

Mr. Pepridge stared up at him, exploring his face and searching for signs that would give him a satisfactory explanation. He saw only sincerity and that confused him. The boy didn’t look like he was trying to get away with something. Almost thirty-seven years of teaching experience had given him the ability to distinguish the cutups from the serious-minded students. He had always considered David one of the serious ones.

“What horrible thing did you see?”

David hesitated a moment and then he thought, maybe it’s time to tell someone else, someone other than his grandmother. Who better than a science teacher? Perhaps he could explain what was happening.

“A friend’s face, smashed. He was dead in his seat. Bleeding,” he added, punching out the word so dramatically it made Mr. Pepridge sit back.

“What?”

“It was just something that came to me, a picture. I didn’t mean to shout. Really. I couldn’t help it. It’s not the first time something like that happened. These pictures just come to me.”

Mr. Pepridge’s soft face twisted with confusion. His right eyebrow lifted as he pulled the corner of his mouth into his cheek. David had to look away.

“What kind of talk is this?”

“I’m telling you the truth, Mr. Pepridge.”

Mr. Pepridge stared at him for a long moment. The clamor of students passing in the hallways drifted in to them. The teacher shook his head.

“Look, David, you’ve got a good record up to now, so I’m going to overlook this, but if something like this happens again, I’ll certainly ask your mother to come to school. Understand?”

“Yes sir,” he said sadly.

“I mean it, we’ll call in your mother.”

“Yes sir,” he repeated. He knew instinctively that nothing like that would happen.

“All right,” Mr. Pepridge said and David turned to leave. “Wait a minute,” the teacher called out. “You’re not drinking any alcoholic beverages, are you?”

“No sir.”

“Because if you are, you’re not going to be able to hide it from people, especially from teachers who see you every day. I’m sure you heard about those two senior boys who were caught in the locker room yesterday.”

“That’s not it; it’s something else. I can’t explain it, but…”

“Uh-huh.” Mr. Pepridge stared at him analytically for a moment. “All right, if you move quickly, you can get to your next class without being late and without needing a late pass. If I have to give you a late pass, I’ll have to report all this to the principal.”

“Okay,” David said and shot out of his room. Mr. Pepridge had no vision, he thought. The teacher was locked in a room with no windows, only mirrors. He was sorry that he had attempted to confide in such a man.

However, he was glad that Mr. Pepridge had kept him after class. Since there was so little time now to get to his next class, he had no time to stop in the hall to talk and to answer questions his friends would have. He made it to math just before the late bell rang.

Tony Martin, who sat next to him, smiled widely.

“What the hell happened?” he asked leaning over, but before David could say a word, Mr. Rosenfield announced a surprise quiz.

David failed it. He couldn’t get his mind to function; he couldn’t remember the material or work out the problems. By the time the quiz was finished, he had barely scribbled out some guesses. Although the vision of Bobby Ryan’s battered face diminished, there was still enough of it vivid in his memory to keep him from paying attention to anything else.

After class, when his friends finally gathered around him for an explanation, he told them he had just gotten fed up with Mr. Pepridge’s monotone voice and he had to let it out. There was no way he could tell them what really had happened. They were surprised at his explanation, but they understood and accepted it. Tony and Rube even admired him for what he had done. Tony nicknamed him Tarzan because of the guttural sound he had made. It caught on and for the remainder of the school day, his friends and other students kidded him about it. He didn’t mind it; it took his attention away from the horrible images.

In fact, just toward the end of the final period of the day, during social studies class, he let out another sound deliberately when Mr. Kissen turned his back on the class to complete an outline on the blackboard. The class roared.

Mr. Kissen turned around angrily, but he had no idea who had made the sound. David was the last boy he would expect to have done it. Most everyone wore the same idiotic, innocent smile on his face. Mr. Kissen warned them to control such outbursts and then, feeling the need to enforce his warning, added an additional homework question to their assignment. There were groans, and when the bell rang, some of the students were bitching at David in the hallway.

When David left the school grounds, he felt like a hero. Some of the older boys had heard about his antics, too, and they congratulated him.

Plans were made to meet down by Rosenblatt’s drugstore to play some against-the-wall, so he hurried home to change his clothes and grab a glass of milk and a piece of whatever cake his grandmother had made. He envisioned a cinnamon bun, and his mouth watered in anticipation. He wasn’t disappointed.

After he changed his clothes, she sat and watched him gobble it down, telling him how bad it was for him to eat so quickly. She threatened to stop baking him things if he continued to do this. He nodded, pretending to take her advice.

David debated whether or not to tell her about the things that had been happening to him the last few days and about what had happened in Mr. Pepridge’s class, but he feared the possibility of her thinking him sick and keeping him at home. Before he could decide, however, the radio became filled with static and she went to fix it.

“See you later, Grandma,” he said and rushed out the front door before she could go through the list of various dangers to avoid in the village. He had them memorized anyway: Watch how you cross the street; stay away from the train tracks; don’t ride in anyone’s car without first asking his mother’s or her permission.

He laughed to himself and broke out into a run as he headed down Hassan’s Hill. His upper body seemed out of control as he lunged forward. He snapped his legs out as fast as he could to catch himself from crashing down into the macadam. Rejuvenated by his milk and cake and the horrible images of Bobby Ryan’s face dwindling even further, he went forward with tremendous energy. His muscles felt full of life and strength. He felt as though he could actually fly if he wanted to.

When he turned the corner at Chonin’s garage and headed down the main street of Centerville, he saw a pigeon drop from the movie house roof and swoop down to feast on some remnants of the spilled garbage can in the alley between Selznow’s grocery and the garage. As he watched the pigeon glide, he sensed the feeling of flight. It was as though he could put himself into the bird and ride along with it. The vicarious experience was the most exhilarating thing that occurred all day. It made him feel light and happy.

When he reached the pigeon, now strutting cautiously around the crumbs and tidbits, he stopped and looked directly into its face. It showed no fear, even though he was quite close to it. Usually, birds would burst into flight when someone came within striking distance.

But suddenly he saw himself the way the pigeon would see him. He saw his friendly, calm look. He saw how harmless he appeared. What got him was the angle: He was looking up at himself as though he were as low as the bird.

Finally, the sound of someone’s slamming the lid on a garbage can across the street shattered the moment and sent the pigeon lunging upward, climbing into the security of the wind. He watched it as it flew until it landed back on the movie house roof, but the vision he had seen when the bird was on the sidewalk was too enticing to forget. He stood there staring up at it, concentrating, willing himself to be on that roof.

When he closed his eyes, he could see an aerial view of the village. His friends were already playing against-the-wall at Rosenblatt’s drugstore. They looked tiny and moved like puppets. The entire village was toylike, reminding him of the cutout town he got when he mailed away the coupons on the back of the cereal box.

The vision urged him forward, but when he opened his eyes again, the pigeon was gone. He thought about it for a moment and then broke out into a run, taking long, graceful strides, moving over the sidewalk as though there were springs in his legs.

He paused only when he reached the bottom of the hill and saw the Closed Until Further Notice sign on the door of Mr. Hoffman’s bakery.

3

Bored and tired of their game, David and his friends all went into the drugstore for sodas. His mother had already left for home, so he had to pay for his. It always seemed dumb to him anyway: If his mother were there, he didn’t pay; when she left, he did. What did her leaving change? Certainly not his name or his relationship to her. But this was Mr. Rosenblatt’s way, and his mother said if they questioned it, he would make them pay when she was there, too.

Mr. Rosenblatt was always threatening to take out his soda fountain, but David’s mother told him that the soda fountain was a big money-maker. His friends were surprised when he revealed to them that a ten cent soda cost only a penny to make. The fountain ran the length of the store and was very low. When a customer was seated at the counter, the person serving towered over him.

Mr. Rosenblatt was a tall, thin druggist who wore thick-rimmed glasses and made a whistling sound between his teeth when he pronounced his s’s. He had his hair plastered down and brushed back with a part in the middle. Buzzy said it looked like Mr. Rosenblatt’s wife took an iron to it every morning.

Mr. Rosenblatt was in his late fifties. His wife Brenda was almost diametrically opposite in every way. When they were side by side, they presented a Mutt and Jeff appearance because she was barely five feet tall and very round with a bosom that seemed to take up half her body. She was jovial and pleasant at all times and was not above giving away candy and small toys to sick little children who accompanied their parents when they came in for a prescription.

The Rosenblatts had two sons, both of whom had moved away as soon as they could. Now one lived in the mythical California of glamor and movies, and the other was somewhere in Connecticut supposedly working in advertising. David barely remembered them, but once when Mrs. Rosenblatt showed him a picture of her older boy, he had a flashback that put him on a sled going down Datchwell’s Hill. He was holding onto a much older boy whom he now realized was Bernard Rosenblatt. From what Mrs. Rosenblatt had told him and from what he remembered himself, he realized he couldn’t have been more than three years old at the time, yet the memory that flashed before him when he looked at the picture of Bernard was as vivid as a memory from yesterday.

There was something about the way his mind stored words and pictures that intrigued him. Sometimes it was so organized and logical, it reminded him of a big file cabinet like the one in the school administration’s central office. But sometimes, more often than not now, words and pictures would appear for no logical reason—at least none that he could fathom at the moment. He did have one good discussion with Mr. Pepridge about the human brain, during which Mr. Pepridge told him scientists now believed people employed only a small percentage of their brain power.

Could that mean that some individuals employed a great deal more? Mr. Pepridge didn’t know, but he thought it was an interesting question. David would fall into deep thought about these things at a moment’s notice. He was like that now in the drugstore until Buzzy started blowing bubbles in his soda, and Mr. Rosenblatt reprimanded him for spilling some of it out on the counter.

While he and his friends were having their sodas, Peter Sills, a forty-year-old accountant, came in to get some medicine for Betty, his wife. She was an invalid; he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her, but the gossip in town, gossip David overheard during his mother’s card and Mah-jongg games, was that she was a hypochondriac, a spoiled person who wanted to be doted on and pampered. According to his mother’s friends, no one was friendly with her or had anything to do with her. They had no children and they lived in one of the village’s more expensive houses, a brick structure halfway up what the kids called Dead Man’s Hill, supposedly named that because of two fatal car accidents that occurred on the turn at the top.

David never understood the uneasy feelings he experienced whenever he was near Peter Sills. The man smiled enough; he was soft spoken and apparently not disliked by most people. Some pitied him because of his wife, and some thought he was too weak because he put up with her. He had a heavy build and dark, wavy hair usually swept up in a pompadour. His parents had owned what was now Dottie’s Luncheonette on the east side of the village. They had retired and moved to Florida.

Perhaps the reason he felt the way he did about Mr. Sills was because the Sills had no children. His mother told him Betty Sills was too selfish. She wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices, his mother added and sighed to indicate some of the sacrifices she had made for him.

David felt the chill move up his back when Mr. Sills walked past them toward the drug counter. He closed his eyes reflexively and for some reason envisioned the gutted deer he had seen hanging from the top of the garage door at Stanton’s Station last hunting season. It made no sense; Mr. Sills was not a hunter.

Mr. Rosenblatt glared at all of them before he left the soda fountain. Merle eyed the two cent marshmallow bars only inches from him, and David knew he would try to pocket a half dozen before Mr. Rosenblatt returned.

David didn’t mean to listen, but he heard parts of the conversation between Mr. Rosenblatt and Mr. Sills. Mr. Sills’s wife had some kind of kidney infection. She was laid up in bed, and he was having a hard time getting her to drink the amount of liquids the doctor ordered.

Merle leaned over the counter and began moving his right hand toward the marshmallows. Before he reached them however, David stopped him. He grabbed his wrist and pulled it back.

“What the hell—”

“Don’t do it. He’ll see.”

“Shit. How can he see? He’s back there with Mr. Sills.”

“He’ll see,” David repeated. He wasn’t sure why he should be so positive about it, but he was and his voice carried that definite assurance. The note of warning was strong enough to get Merle to hesitate. He sat back and looked toward the rear of the store again.

“Jeez,” Tony said looking directly behind him. “Look at that mirror.”

All the boys spun around on their stools and saw the large, oval mirror nearly hidden from view because of the height of the book rack and because of the angle they were at when they sat at the counter. The mirror had never been there before.

“He can see all over the store with that,” Buzzy said. “He would have seen Merle swipe the bars.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Tony said. Merle looked stunned. They left the drugstore quickly and gathered at the corner of the sidewalk.

“Did your mother tell you about the mirror?” Buzzy asked. David looked at his friends. They were all staring at him in expectation. He knew they wouldn’t understand if he said no, even though that was the truth. He couldn’t explain it.

“Yeah. I just remembered when Merle reached for the marshmallow bars.”

“Lucky you remembered,” Tony said.

David nodded and looked back toward the store.

Peter Sills came out and got into his car. As David watched, the light-blue station wagon seemed to darken until it turned black. Suddenly it looked more like a hearse. In fact, he thought he saw a coffin in the rear.

David looked at his friends quickly to see if anyone else had noticed, but obviously no one did. He put his hands over his eyes and then uncovered them. It was Mr. Sills’s light-blue car that was pulling away from the curb.

David’s deep confusion was broken when Buzzy punched Merle in the shoulder playfully and then ran off down Highland Avenue. Everyone set out after him and caught up with him at the lot between Datchwell’s Lumber Company and the Methodist church.

Years ago there had been a small two story house on the lot, but Mr. Datchwell had had it burned down and plowed out, intending to expand his lumber company. Bad times slowed his plans, and the lot was left empty. Occasionally, the boys held an impromptu stickball game there.

In one of his more vivid dreams, David found himself wandering about on the Datchwell lot until he came to what looked like an opened grave. He approached it slowly and when he looked in, there was the bottom half of the body of one of his friends. He woke up to find himself in a sweat. The sneakers and jeans were clues as to whom it was, but he blocked out any further effort at identification, refusing to acknowledge the gruesome death.

Even so, every time they went to the Datchwell lot, the image of that decapitated torso began to resurrect itself.

Tony and Merle wrestled Buzzy down on a high mound of dirt, pinning his arms and legs to the ground until he shouted, “Give.” They remained there on the mound. Tony took out a cigarette he had stolen from his father. They all watched as he smoothed it out and took out a book of matches. He lit it and passed it to Merle, who took a long drag and then gave it to Buzzy. Buzzy held it in the corner of his mouth dramatically, took a small drag and handed it to David, who was standing in front of them.

They watched him debate taking his drag. He never really enjoyed it, but it was one of those things he did to remain one of them. He wondered if anyone else didn’t like smoking, but was afraid to speak up. Just asking about it could draw jeers and insults. They would compare him to Robbie Kaplow, a mama’s boy, and then they would sing Robbie’s song, only they would substitute his name for Robbie’s: “Robbie cannot play hardball, softball yes, hardball no.”

Robbie Kaplow’s mother actually prohibited him from playing hardball and forced him to wear a handkerchief around his neck when he rode his bike, so his sweating wouldn’t cause him to get a chill.

David put the cigarette to his lips quickly and took his drag, but he couldn’t help grimacing. Buzzy had dampened the end considerably when he held it in his mouth.

“I like filter tips,” he said, handing the cigarette back to Tony. He really didn’t, but from the way they were looking up at him, he knew they expected something. “They’re better for you.”

“My father says that’s bullshit,” Tony said. He held the cigarette in his mouth and leaned back, bracing himself on his hands. “He says what’s the difference what you do? When your time comes, it comes,” he added, imitating his father’s bravado. Buzzy nodded and Merle stared out aimlessly. He sat up when he saw Ruben McCarthy and Carl Burns come out of Sara Gordon’s house. Sara was Rube’s girlfriend. She was a buxom sixteen-year-old with dark-brown hair and hazel-brown eyes. Although Rube had never said so, they all assumed he and Sara had gone all the way.

It gave Rube an aura of sophistication. He already commanded respect because of his size. He was the biggest boy in their class, at least forty pounds heavier and three inches taller than everyone else. Seniors kept clear of him.

Rube and Carl spotted them.

“What the hell you creeps up to?” Rube shouted. Tony gave him the finger. He was the only one of their crowd who could give Rube any lip, and that was solely because of Tony’s temper. Physically, he was no match for Rube; but Rube knew, as did anyone who knew Tony, that to get into a fight with him meant an all-out war. The opponent might come out victorious, but he would suffer, and it wouldn’t end until someone stopped it or Tony was rendered unconscious.

Rube laughed and then whispered something to Carl.

“How about King of the Hill?” he shouted. “Me and Carl will stand the four of you pricks.”

“You’re on,” Tony responded, committing everyone.

“Shit, we’re goin’ get our heads kicked in,” Buzzy said.

“Let’s go,” Tony said getting up quickly. He started off quickly, and the three of them followed reluctantly.

They headed for the traditional playground for King of the Hill, a game that had as its object the throwing, heaving, pushing, punching, kicking down the opponents as they attempted to take the high ground. What made this place particularly exciting was that the slope was located just above the train tracks. Since it was nearly five-fifteen, there was no doubt that a freight train would be coming through right in the middle of their game, and the person or persons who wanted an intermission while the train roared through would be labeled forever “a chicken shit.”

Rube and Carl were on the high ground by the time they got there. Tony started up the hill first, but when he reached up, Rube seized his wrist and successfully pulled him completely around, sending him head over heels down the hill. He stopped just before the gravel around the tracks.

“Shit,” Buzzy said. He and Merle started for Carl as David cautiously approached Rube. He thought if he could just seize Rube’s ankle—but when he went for it, Rube stepped back and he fell to his stomach. Rube seized his ankles instead and dragged him down the hill, streaking his shirt with grass stains. Buzzy and Merle succeeded in driving Carl down the hill, and then, Rube stood them off for a good two minutes before everyone gave up. They collapsed together on the slope and stared out vacantly at the quiet, little village as they caught their breaths.

Then Tony pointed out Diane Jones.

With animated faces everyone watched as the beautiful high school senior girl got out of Ted Davis’s car. Eyes widened, foreheads creased, and mouths opened in admiration. Ted Davis got out and joined her on the sidewalk.

The six-foot-three center of the Centerville varsity basketball team had made all-county in this, his final high school playing year. He had already been accepted to NYU, where he would continue to play basketball. He was broad shouldered and had symmetrically solid legs. David envied him for his looks. He was popular, intelligent, and confident. He and Diane made the perfect high school couple, gravitating toward one another almost as though it were a result of a community poll.

“I saw her in gym class today,” Carl said. “Those boobs went up and down, up and down. I caught the coach looking at her, too. When he saw I caught him, he turned red and went back into his office.”

“His face is always red,” Rube said.

“Maybe he’s always thinking about Diane Jones,” Tony said. Everyone laughed, David tentatively, cautiously.

“My brother says she ain’t so hot,” Buzzy said.

“That’s because she won’t give him the time of day,” Tony said.

“You think Ted and her do it?” Carl asked.

“No,” David said quickly. It just came out; he hadn’t intended to say it. They all turned to him because he sounded so definite.

“Why not?” Rube asked. “You know something we don’t?”

“I just don’t think so, that’s all.”

“Shit, sure they do,” Tony said. “I seen them making out once.”

“When?” David asked. His first thought was that Tony had been a Peeping Tom, too.

“I was coming home from Shirley’s house one night, and I cut across the parking lot at the A and P and there they were, parked way in the rear.”

“In a parking lot?” Merle asked.

“It was closed and it was dark. Perfect spot, asshole.”

“What did you do?” Carl asked.

“I snuck up on them.” He let a wide smile form on his face, knowing he had everyone’s complete attention.

“And what?” Carl asked.

“I took a quick peek in and saw he had his hands in her sweater.” He stopped, put a blade of grass in his mouth and looked away.

“That’s it?” Rube said when he didn’t go on.

“I didn’t hang around.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” David said.

“I seen her in her bra and panties once,” Buzzy said. They all turned to him, and David’s heart skipped a beat. What if they knew what he had seen?

“Bullshit,” Tony said, but he said it more out of envy than out of skepticism.

“No, honest. I…I peeked into her bedroom window,” he confessed. He wasn’t sure how his friends would take it. There was a long moment of silence while the fantasy played in everyone’s mind. Except David. He didn’t have to fantasize; he had only to remember, and Buzzy’s confession did much to stimulate that memory.

“No shit,” Carl said. “Why didn’t I ever think of doing that?”

“I wouldn’t want to be caught doing that,” David said. “It might get all over town, and your parents would—”

“So? We just don’t get caught,” Tony said. He tapped Buzzy on the shoulder. “About what time did you see her?”

“Nine, nine-thirty. I got the idea to do it from this book my brother was reading. It’s got great sex parts,” he added.

“Is that right?” Tony looked in Diane’s direction. “Who wants to try it tonight?”

“Not me,” David said.

“I’ll go,” Merle said. He smiled like a cherub and then brought his tongue out over his upper lips slowly.

“Me, too,” Carl said.

Buzzy didn’t know if he could get out again in the evening because his mother was pissed at him for failing another test.

“She has to go to the school tomorrow and miss some time at work,” he added.

Rube said he’d go just for kicks, and then Tony turned to David again.

“Maybe he’s got to get permission from his grandmother,” Carl said. David glared at him hatefully. What bothered him more than the kidding around was the fact that everyone knew his grandmother had more influence in his house than his mother had. That was intimate information; it shouldn’t be so obvious.

“Permission?” Merle asked. “What’dya mean?”

“Permission to go peepin’ at Diane’s house. Grandma,” Carl said, satirizing David, “can I go look at Diane Jones’s tits tonight?” Everyone but David laughed. He tightened his hands into fists.

“Fuck you, Burns,” he said. Carl was two inches taller and a good twenty pounds heavier. Even so, David wanted to lunge at him. He realized though that his friends wouldn’t understand the rage. Anger left people naked and vulnerable.

Diane and Ted had come out of the butcher shop. She was carrying a bag. David thought he would never let her do that if she were his girl. He would do everything for her, no matter how simple, no matter how small.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go for sure,” he said, almost under his breath.

“We’ll meet at Chonin’s at eight forty-five,” Tony said. “We ain’t waitin’ for nobody either,” he added looking at David. David pulled out some grass and tried to blow on a blade between his palms to make it sing. Instead of that, however, they heard the train whistle as it rounded the turn to head through the village.

“Here she comes,” Rube said.

The gate to stop traffic went down by the station. When David looked at Ted Davis and Diane again, he saw them walking slowly around the car, studying the street. From the way they were looking and acting, he knew something was wrong.

“All right,” Tony said standing up, “let’s rush across just before she gets here. No one goes until I say.”

All of them stood obediently, driven by the challenge of courage. David looked from face to face and saw the excitement in their eyes. Why was it so thrilling to taunt death? he wondered, and why was it that older people didn’t do it as much? Was it because they were closer to death and understood it was nothing to tease?

His heart started to pound in anticipation, just as everyone else’s did while they got set to play the spontaneous game of train-chicken. They dug their feet into the ground for a good forward thrust. David looked at Ted and Diane again. They were standing by the driver’s side of the car now. After a moment Ted went back into the butcher shop, and Diane waited by the car. David hoped she would look across the street and see them charging down the hill, challenging death.

When he looked back at the engine though, he saw something that glued his feet to the ground. The engineer was looking out of the window, and from the way the late afternoon sun whitened his skin and reflected off his glasses, his face looked like a skull.

The train whistle shrieked, and the engine bore down on the village. David could feel the very earth beneath him shake. Diane looked up from the street. Birds on store rooftops flew madly against the sky. Pedestrians stopped walking and stopped their conversations to turn toward the approaching train.

“Now!” Tony screamed, and everyone but David shot down the hill shouting at the top of their voices. The engine was only twenty feet from them. David didn’t move as it roared past. Between the cars he could see all of his friends congratulating each other and shouting back at him. It was a long freight train so they started away, leaving him on the other side. By the time the train was completely past him, the others were down to the center of town, crossing over and into the various directions of their homes.

Diane and Ted were still at his car. David walked down the slope slowly and crossed toward them. They didn’t notice his approach, but he heard Ted say, “I had it in my pocket. I’m almost sure of it.”

“What happened?” David asked. Diane smirked, but even that expression wasn’t ugly, he thought. She could never be ugly. Now that he was right beside her, he realized he was just about her height.

“Ted lost his car keys.”

“I thought I had them in my pocket. They’re not around the car and they’re not anywhere in the store. They can’t just disappear, can they?” he asked, his long arms out for emphasis.

“You looked in the car?”

“Sure,” he said. “What do you think?”

“Well, I’ve got to get this meat home,” Diane said. “My mother needs it for supper tonight.”

“I’ll have to call my father to bring me the other set of keys,” Ted said, his voice filled with defeat and frustration. “He’s going to be pissed.”

“Want me to help look?” David offered.

“We looked everywhere,” Diane said turning to him. Her smile was polite, but impersonal. “Thanks.”

He felt his heart sink with disappointment. She looked through him, not at him, when she spoke.

“Let him look. Who the hell cares if he looks?” Ted said. He reached into his pocket for some change and went to the pay phone on the corner.

“Sounds strange,” David said. “It’s gotta be here.”

“I don’t know. I can’t wait around all day,” she said. The dimple in her cheek flickered as she expressed some anger. Her eyes sparkled, and he thought of the tips of the flames on birthday candles.

He opened the car door and looked at the ignition lock. Then he touched it and thought about the key. For a moment he envisioned a basketball, and that confused him. She watched him with vague interest. He smiled at her and then, without looking anywhere for the key, he said, “It’s under the seat. He must’ve dropped it and kicked it there by accident.”

“Huh?” She watched him reach down and under and come up with the key. It was on a small chain that also held a gold-plated basketball charm. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

David shrugged and handed her the key.

“Thanks,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but she was already running toward the pay phone to tell Ted. He watched her for a moment, locked her smile of her gratitude in his vault of memories and started for home.

He had gone about half a block before he wondered, himself, how he knew that key was there. He just sensed it. No, he thought, saw it was more accurate. It appeared to him under the seat. Just luck, he thought, or logic. He was so deep in thought about it that he didn’t hear Ted and Diane pull up beside him. The window was rolled down on Diane’s side, and Ted leaned across her to call to him.

“Hey, thanks,” Ted said.

“Oh, sure.”

“Need a lift?” Diane asked. He thought about it, thought about riding in the same car with her.

“Sure, if it’s no problem.”

“No problem,” Ted said. “You saved my ass. My father wasn’t even home yet, and if he had to come down to get me and we found the key in the car afterward…I don’t even want to think about it. Get in, Superman.”

She opened the door and slid over to make more room for him in the front. Even so, his thighs touched hers, and his hand grazed her arm.

This close to her, she was even more beautiful to him. Everything about her conspired to make him a worshipper: the scents of her hair spray and her perfume; the warmth of her body; the electricity of her very life force. He felt himself tuning into her, dialing himself into her frequency the way he would find a radio station. All other sound, all other sight was driven away. His concentration was so intense that he thought they took similar breaths. Even their hearts beat in synchronization. He made her part of him and himself part of her.

He realized he was doing it again: imagining things so vividly that he lost track of what was real and what was not. In fact, he didn’t realize he was home when they arrived there.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Ted asked when he made no move to get out of the car.

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” he said looking at his house. He regretted its existence and wished they could ride forever in search of it. He shook off the fairy tale and got out of the vehicle.

“So long,” Diane said smiling at him. It was a different smile this time. The warmth in her face was so real and so sincere it was difficult to pull himself away from her. He wanted to run the tips of his fingers gently over the tiny freckles just below her eyes. She turned back to Ted. “I got to get this meat home,” she reminded him, and David came crashing back into reality.

Suddenly he wanted to warn her, to tell her about his friends planning to spy on her. No one should see her the way he saw her, he thought. It would take away from the special relationship he had conjured between them. He didn’t want to share that with anyone. And anyway, all of them out there, gaping at her, commenting, making jokes—it could turn her into something cheap and make the scene into a page from one of those girlie magazines kept on the high shelf in Chonin’s.

“So long,” he said. He couldn’t say anything else. The words wouldn’t come because no matter what he thought, they were still words of betrayal.

Feeling defeated, he stood on the road and watched them drive away. Suddenly something chilling went past him in the direction of the car. It moved like a shadow cast by a great cloud, but when he looked up, he saw that the sky was clear. By the time he looked after them again, they had made the turn at the bottom of the hill and were gone. He felt the need to run after them and shout out to warn them about something. But what?

He looked about frantically as though the answer had lingered behind and was loitering about his street, but there was nothing tangible, no hints, no sounds—nothing but the feeling. He had come to respect his feelings, to listen to them and to trust them. They came from somewhere deep inside him, perhaps from that portion of the brain unused by most people.

“I have a power,” he whispered to himself, really making the conclusion for the first time. Yet he realized it was a power he didn’t understand and certainly not yet a power he could control. He was like an undisciplined but wonderful racehorse thrusting himself with great speed and grace in every direction, just reveling in the strength and the knowledge that he had that strength.

Who would school him? Who would teach him the control and help him to make what he had into something useful? Could he do it himself? Teach himself self-discipline?

This was frustrating, but more than frustrating, it was frightening. Perhaps he had the power to walk into a room and know that somewhere in it there was danger, but until he could aim that power and locate the danger, the power only added to his ordinary fear. In fact, it made him more vulnerable to fear. He saw the danger and the death everywhere, just like he had seen it on the approaching train today.

But how could he live in a world in which everything was intensified? Would he burn up quickly? Was that what his grandmother was trying to tell him?

He was different, and for a while today, he thought the difference was something good. Look what he had done for Ted and Diane. Now, as he stood before his house looking after the cloud of darkness and Ted Davis’s car, he felt more alone than ever.

No one would understand him; no one would help him. All he could hope to do was try to ignore the visions and the feelings.

The cloud was gone. The mystery had made him uneasy, but that uneasiness was passing as he turned to his house and thought about the enticing aromas and flavors of the meal his grandmother had prepared.

He could do this—he could be like everyone else.

Couldn’t he?

The silence drove him into the sanctity of his home.

4

He hadn’t intended to meet his friends and go spying on Diane Jones, but he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Perhaps if he went along, he thought, he could prevent it somehow. He didn’t have much homework and, after supper, he did what little he had very quickly. No one checked on him. Roselyn Steiner, like most parents, didn’t show concern until the report cards came out, but he had already developed a sense of academic responsibility, which was another thing distinguishing him from most of his friends. Sometimes he felt they resented him because of it, but he couldn’t help it, just as he couldn’t prevent the other things that made him feel different.

His mother announced she was going to the movies with Fred Myers, a widower whom she had been seeing on and off over the last year and a half.

As far as David could tell, it was still a quite casual romance. Sometimes weeks went by without their doing anything together, and Fred rarely came to the house to spend any time with them. David didn’t mind him all that much. He was unassuming and pleasant, and he had brought him a few nice presents, including a powerful, multi-battery flashlight that threw a beam of light nearly all the way up the hill from his house.

Myers was the business manager for the Centerville Steam Laundry, the biggest non-resort business in the county. Rumor was that he had large stock holdings and could live comfortably off those earnings alone. David knew the women kidded his mother about the romance, but from the tone of their comments, he suspected some of them were jealous.

After his mother left, he went into his room. He knew his grandmother would fall asleep next to the radio, listening to a program of classical music.

He started to work with his erector set, but his fingers trembled when he tried putting the smaller screws and nuts together. He couldn’t fight off the image of Diane Jones inches away from him, her lips gently pulled back into a soft smile, her eyes bright and as excited as the eyes of a newborn baby seeing things for the first time. There was such a vibrancy about her, a healthy energy that revealed itself in the smoothness of her skin, the line of her neck, and the uplift of what had become her magical breasts.

He kept checking the time. When the hands of the clock pointed to eight-forty, he made the decision to sneak out and meet his friends at the corner. As he expected, his grandmother was asleep in her chair. He went to the back door quickly, opened it softly and slipped out into the night. Then he ran around the house and charged over the driveway and down the hill, still unsure as to what he would do when he met his friends.

He was in such a hurry that he didn’t see the automobile coming from Maple Avenue. He heard the car brakes squeak and jumped to the side instinctively. When he looked back, he saw Peter Sills bent over his steering wheel. The big man leaned back slowly and rolled down his window.

“That was pretty stupid.”

“Sorry,” David said. “I was in a hurry.”

Sills said nothing, but he stared at him so intently that David thought he was deciding whether or not to take some additional action. Finally, all he did was shake his head. When he started away, however, the illumination from the streetlights above played tricks with Sills’s face. It bleached out all color, and that reminded David of the skeleton face he had seen often in his nightmares. He watched Sills drive off before continuing on to meet his friends.

He found only Rube and Tony at the corner. They were sitting on the stoop in front of Selznow’s grocery. They were smoking Camels. Tony had stolen his father’s whole pack this time, getting more courageous about his thefts.

“Where’s Merle and Carl?” he asked.

“We’ll give it a couple more minutes and then go without them,” Tony said. No one expected Buzzy would get out. “What’s doin’?”

“Nothin’.”

“You wanna a cigarette?”

“No. My mother’s driving around here,” he added quickly and looked up and down the street to emphasize his anxiety.

“Your mother don’t think you smoke?” Rube asked. He looked sincerely interested.

“She smelled it on my clothes once and went crazy. I told her I was just around other people who were smoking, but I don’t think she believed me.”

“My mother stopped crying about it,” he said. “She told me I could smoke my head off, only don’t ask her for money to buy cigarettes.”

“What about your father?” David asked. He was always curious about the roles fathers played in his friends’ homes. From what he gathered, he sensed there were specific areas reserved for fathers to administer, and all the rest belonged to the mothers.

“He was smoking when he was eleven, so he don’t say nothing except keep your hands off my smokes. My brother smokes a pipe,” he added. Rube’s older brother, Stuart, had graduated from high school the year before and was working as an account clerk for the Sandburg Bottling Works. Stuart and Rube were so different from one another that they barely acknowledged each other. Whenever David was over Rube’s house, he got the impression Stuart was more like a boarder. Even so, David wished he had had an older brother.

David sat on the lower stoop and nodded with understanding after Rube explained. It always seemed to him that his friends were nicer to one another when there were fewer of them together. The pressure to impress one another wasn’t as strong, and they weren’t as afraid to say things about their family life.

“Rube kept winning on the pinball machine at Charley’s. We finally had to tilt it to leave,” Tony said.

“I heard his wife say they were going to change that one. Too many people win on it,” David said. He sat back and tried to act nonchalant, but he couldn’t slow down his heartbeat, and his voice revealed his quickened breathing.

Out there in the darkness within the glow of a window light, Diane Jones stood waiting unaware. Was she brushing her hair? Doing her nails? Reading? He could have called her and said in a disguised voice, “Keep your shades down tonight.” That would have put an end to it, but he didn’t do it. Why? Was it only because it would be betraying his friends, or did he really want to see her naked again?

The traffic was light, and there were few people in the street. David saw Gerry Porter come out of the movie theater and stand aimlessly in front of it. He seemed unable to decide whether he should go left or right.

“Looks like another big night out for Gerry,” Rube said. Tony laughed. Gerry Porter was a somewhat retarded thirty-year-old man who lived with his widow mother. He was often the butt of jokes.

“He probably left before the movie ended, thinking that it ended,” Tony said. He shook his head and flipped his cigarette butt into the street, nearly hitting a passing car.

“Maybe we should take him along with us,” Rube said. He was silent for a moment, and David looked up at him.

“You’re not serious?”

“I just wonder what he would do. You think he ever thinks about girls?”

“Just wacks off probably,” Tony said.

David looked at Gerry with new interest. What was it like to be that old and have the mind of a child? No matter how Gerry’s mother dressed him, he looked sloppy and disheveled a short while afterward. Now, he stood there with his dark-blue, short-sleeve shirt out of his pants, the shirt buttoned wrong so the sides were lopsided. His baggy pants hung loosely on his hips, the cuffs under heel half the time. As usual, his dark-brown hair, clipped unevenly by his mother while he sat restless in the pantry of their house, looked wild and disheveled, strands going straight up and out.

Gerry’s face had nothing much to recommend it either. His bushy, untrimmed eyebrows sat above his dull, deep-brown eyes like two fat caterpillars lethargically awaiting metamorphosis. He had a wide, but bony nose with large, dark nostrils, the inside rims of which hosted hairs that were clearly visible. As far as David was concerned, part of Gerry’s mental condition had to have something to do with dehydration because his lips were habitually dry and cracked. He had a nervous habit of pressing the back of his right hand up against them and running the hand along the edge of his emerging tongue until he reached his wrist. Then he would wipe his dampened wrist on the side of his pants and, moments later, start again.

His teeth were in remarkably good shape because his uncle was the only dentist in Centerville. Anyone who didn’t want to use him had to travel to South Fallsburg or Woodbourne. Gerry was always in need of a shave, and even when he did shave, he skipped over large portions of his face—especially right under his chin.

He wasn’t particularly intimidating in size, although his upper arms and shoulders were thick and strong from his part-time work at the K and W Food Market where he stocked groceries and carried in one hundred pound bags of sugar and heavy, glass quart bottle cases of soda and beer.

Tony couldn’t resist calling to him. Gerry liked talking to the younger boys in town, despite the way they teased and ridiculed him. The fact that he was the object of such attention apparently pleased him. He crossed over from the movie theater, and Tony commented about his dirty white basketball sneakers. He wore no socks, and there was a clear rim of dirt around his ankles.

“You didn’t like the picture, Gerry?” Tony asked him when he arrived.

“Saw it, saw it,” he said quickly. He looked from Rube to David and then scratched his head. “Posners went on vacation,” he said. “Going to be back Tuesday. The fish store’s closed,” he added.

David smiled. Despite Gerry’s mental handicap, nothing much took place in the village without his knowing about it. He loved delivering tidbits of information in headline style and then wait to see the reactions of his listeners.

“Yeah?” Rube said. No one was really interested in the Posners taking a vacation. “Hey Gerry, you ever have a girlfriend?” Rube asked. He shook his head quickly.

“You know what a girlfriend is, don’tcha?” Tony asked, but Gerry didn’t respond. He ran his hand over his mouth and wiped it on the side.

“You wanna see a naked girl?” Rube asked.

“Hey,” David said. “Don’t…”

“Don’t worry,” Rube said. “Do you, Gerry?”

Gerry stared at him for a moment and then reached into his pants pocket and came out with an uncovered stick of gum. He stuck it in his mouth and looked down the street.

“You scared of girls?” Tony asked him.

“I ain’t scared of girls,” he said, but he didn’t look at Tony when he answered. David sensed a real uneasiness in him. But more than that; for the first time in talking to Gerry he sensed a danger.

“Let’s get going,” David said. “We’ll miss it all.”

Rube looked at his watch and stood up. Tony did the same, and they started away from the stoop.

“Too bad,” Tony called back to Gerry. “You could have had something to wack off to.” He laughed, and they left the retarded man chewing his gum emphatically and staring after them. David looked back once before they turned the corner and saw Gerry was already gone. He directed his attention ahead.

“I hope we don’t get caught,” he said.

“If Buzzy didn’t get caught, we sure as hell won’t,” Tony said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rube said. “Let’s cut in behind Doc Furnoff’s. It’s shorter.”

“Good idea,” Tony said, and the three of them moved through the street and into the shadows. David felt as though they were entering another world. He looked back longingly at the lit streets and then hurried to catch up.

Doc Furnoff’s house was a big, two story white stucco building. Part of the bottom floor was devoted to his medical offices and examination rooms. There was a wide, cement patio right behind it and a small, fenced-in, in-ground pool. As far as David knew, Sammy Weisner and Lucy Datchwell were the only kids who had ever gone swimming in it. Being invited was equivalent to knighthood in the small village.

Light from the upstairs windows drew distinct silhouettes of the lawn furniture and fence and fruit trees recently planted. The reach of illumination ended before the small wooded area directly behind the residence. On the other side of the woods was a short dirt road that ran along the perimeter of the Jones’s property and emerged on Turtle Avenue. They could have gone through the village and then up Turtle, but Rube was right: This was a good shortcut. Besides, it was better not to be seen on Turtle Avenue, considering what they were about to do, David thought.

They moved quickly, but they were remarkably silent as they made their way through the woods. The earth was dark and soft within, carpeted with pine needles and maple, birch and hickory leaves. When they reached the middle of the wooded area, David looked back and saw that Doc Furnoff’s house was no longer clearly visible. The trees had cut it off, slamming a door of shadows and darkness behind him. Rube picked up speed, and they emerged from the woods a few minutes later, all three breathing heavily from the effort, the excitement, and the need to move undetected.

Rube stopped, and they all listened for a moment.

“Her bedroom’s on the left side,” Tony said. “The last two windows. Buzzy told me,” he added.

They were about to continue when David felt something cold move over his body. It was as if he had stepped into the Catskill winter for a moment. Without speaking, he reached out for Tony’s arm and seized him firmly at the elbow. His friend spun around quickly.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” David looked back into the shadows, but there was nothing discernible, no new shapes, no new sounds, nothing but the same darkness. Still, the ominous feeling lingered.

“So what the fuck—”

“You didn’t hear anything, did you?” he asked to cover up his unexplainable reaction.

“Bullshit,” Rube said after listening a moment. “Your overworked imagination’s at it again. Let’s go.”

They moved forward stealthily, crouching emphatically like movie Indians on the attack, keeping to the shadows cast by the moonlight over the row of hedges that served as a borderline between the house of Johnny Wilson, the postmaster, and Frank Jones. Diane’s father was an administrator in the Community General Hospital located in Monticello. He had an important, high-paying job. Her mother didn’t work, but she volunteered her time regularly at the hospital as one of the “pink ladies,” women who assisted in every nonmedical function possible. There was one other child in the family, a daughter Pamela, who was in the sixth grade.

David looked expectantly at the tree beside which he had initially stood to see Diane Jones topless that first night. It was still the best position. They would be safely hidden behind it, and their view was clear. But Tony had other ideas. He shocked David with his suggestion that they go right to the window.

“We’ll climb over the picket fence, crawl on the lawn, keep to the shadows, and stand up when we get to the house. This is too far away,” he said. David recalled that Tony wore glasses from time to time. He was supposed to be wearing them constantly, but he was too self-conscious.

“That’s really taking a chance,” David said. “If she sees us, she’ll know who we are.”

“She ain’t gonna see us,” Tony insisted. Rube agreed and he was outvoted.

“She’s not even in her room though,” David said. The light was on, and the shades were up enough to see completely into the room.

“If the light’s on, she’ll be there any minute, won’t she?” Tony said. “It’s about the time Buzzy said he saw her getting undressed.”

David recalled that it was about the time he had seen her, too. She was a creature of habit. Before there could be any more discussion, she appeared. She was in a bra and panties, and she moved to her bed. Tony moved quickly to the fence, crawled over it and hit the ground, immediately beginning a fast crawl over the lawn toward the house. Rube followed, and David, after some hesitation, started behind them.

“Rube and me will go to the left window. You go to the right,” Tony whispered. They could see her sitting on the bed, filing her fingernails. “Ready?”

David started to nod and then stopped, seizing Tony’s arm again. When Tony turned around, David didn’t see his face; he saw Buzzy’s. He didn’t know if it was because he was thinking of Buzzy, since it was he who had caused all this, or something else. Before he could react to the illusion, they heard a muffled scream come from the short, dirt road behind them. It pressed the three of them against a wall of ice.

Diane Jones heard it, too. She got off her bed and came to her window. The three of them went belly down, pressing their face against the grass, hoping the shadows draped them enough to remain undiscovered. Diane peered between the shades and the window and then stepped back to close the shades. They waited a moment before rising.

“What the hell was that?” Rube asked.

“Shit,” Tony said.

“Let’s get out of here,” David said. No one opposed him and they started back. When they got to the dirt road, the three of them stopped abruptly as though they had walked into an invisible wall. With their eyes used to the darkness, it was possible to make out the shape of a body faced down before them about a dozen or so feet down the road.

“Who the hell’s that?” Rube asked. No one spoke. They were clumped together, linked by their mutual fear.

Then David found his attention drawn to the shadows in the woods just to the right of the crumpled body. On the edge of the darkness was the silhouetted figure of what was obviously a man. It was most certainly not Carl or Merle.

David didn’t speak. He touched both his friends and drew their attention into the direction.

“Who is it?” Tony whispered.

David closed his eyes. He couldn’t see a face, but a deathly chill came over him. He couldn’t speak. Invisible fingers tightened around his neck. He began to gag and brought his hands to his throat.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Rube asked, his voice thin from the tension.

David sank to his knees. Neither Rube nor Tony moved to help him. Finally, David caught his breath and opened his eyes. When he looked up, he saw that the silhouetted figure was gone from the shadows.

“It’s okay,” he said getting to his feet.

“What was it?” Tony asked.

“I couldn’t breathe for a moment.”

“Choked on his own spit,” Rube said.

David didn’t disagree. He looked at the figure on the road. “Let’s see who that is. Whoever was standing in the shadows is gone,” he added. Rube and Tony looked, but didn’t move.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Tony said, taking a step backward. “We can go home over Turtle.”

“We gotta see who that is,” David insisted. He started ahead. Rube and Tony followed reluctantly. Just before he reached the body, David heard a groan. “It’s Buzzy,” he said. “It’s Buzzy.”

They all moved quickly to him. Buzzy turned over on his side when David knelt beside him.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Shit,” Buzzy said. He spit and then brought his hand to the back of his head. “I’m bleeding. Shit, my head’s spinning.”

“What happened?” Rube asked. He and Tony knelt beside David. Buzzy struggled to get into a sitting position.

“I was coming to join you guys. I snuck out of the house. Shit.”

“So, what happened?” Tony asked.

“Someone attacked him,” David replied.

“Came right out of the woods. I must’ve walked right into him,” Buzzy said. “Like he was just waiting there for me. Never saw him, never heard him.”

“He grabbed you around the neck,” David said.

“Yeah. I couldn’t breathe and then, when I broke free, he hit me behind the head with something. Felt like a tree trunk. I’m still dizzy as hell.”

“Didn’t you see who it was?” Tony asked.

“Naw. Didn’t have a chance. Whoever it was, he had strong hands, that’s for sure,” he added rubbing his neck.

“Help him up,” David said, and Tony and Rube stood Buzzy on his feet.

“We gotta get out of here,” Rube said, looking at the house. Diane Jones’s lights had been turned off. Buzzy groaned, and they started toward the woods.

“Not that way,” Buzzy said. “Shit, he might still be there.”

Tony and Rube contemplated the possibility. Then they turned to David. His calm, clear voice had promoted him to the position of leader.

“He’s right,” David said. “We’ll have to go back down Turtle.”

“Let’s move it either way,” Tony said. They started down the dirt road and came out on Turtle, but when they reached the front of the Jones’s house, Frank Jones was there.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked. He stepped out of the shadows to confront them.

Diane’s father was not a big man. He stood only five foot ten and weighed about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, but after what they had done, he might as well have been six foot ten and weighed two hundred and sixty-five pounds. They jumped back, speechless and afraid.

David was the one who came up with the story. He mixed truth and fiction well enough to sell Frank Jones on the fabrication.

“We were playing Ring-a-levio,” he said, “chasing after Buzzy here when someone attacked him in the woods.”

“What?” Frank Jones moved out quickly and saw that Buzzy was, indeed, hurt. When he took him into the illumination of his sidewalk porch light, they all saw how bad his head wound was. The blood was still trickling down the left side of his head. “Holy crap,” Frank Jones said. “What the hell hit him?”

“We don’t know, Mr. Jones. We were just taking him home.”

“We’d better bring him in the house,” Frank Jones said, “and call the police. We’ll try to stop this bleeding and get him over to the hospital. I’d better call his parents,” he added.

“No, that’s all right,” Buzzy said. “I wanna go home.” David realized he was still holding onto the slight hope he could sneak back into his house and cover up the wound.

“You’re not going anywhere like this, young man. You could very well have a concussion.” He took Buzzy under his left arm and started him toward the house. Rube and Tony hesitated behind David.

“I’m not going in there,” Rube whispered.

“Shit no,” Tony said.

“We gotta,” David said.

“Maybe she saw us,” Rube whispered.

“I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have bought my story so fast. Come on. We have to go through with it.” He couldn’t help being intrigued with the idea of going into Diane Jones’s house.

“Who the fuck hit Buzzy?” Tony asked the night sky. “Why didn’t the asshole stay home like he was supposed to?”

“What difference would that have made?” David said. “Whoever it was would have still been there, maybe to get one of us.”

Tony became pensive for a moment and looked back. The darkness looked thicker and more ominous than ever.

Reluctantly, he and Rube followed David into Diane Jones’s house.

After Mr. Jones took Buzzy into the bathroom to wash his head wound, he called the police and then Buzzy’s parents. David, Tony, and Rube could hear him talking to Buzzy’s mother. She couldn’t believe he was talking about the right boy, insisting Buzzy was in his room. Finally, Mr. Jones told her to go look. He smiled and shook his head when she did so. After she returned she said she would be right over. Mr. Jones went back into the bathroom to put a bandage on Buzzy’s head.

Diane’s mother and sister, Pamela, greeted the three of them in the living room where Mr. Jones had left them waiting. Even under these circumstances, David felt a romantic excitement about being in Diane’s house. What he saw gave him an intimate knowledge of her. He looked at everything with an intense curiosity: at the family pictures on the mantle above the white stone fireplace, the oil paintings on the walls, the glass ashtray and vase on the center table, all the knickknacks and accouterments that made up the personality of her home and her family. Everything that was here was part of her. Even the scent of the flowers and the house deodorants suggested her to him.

Diane’s mother was an attractive woman. It was easy to see from where Diane had inherited much of her beauty. They both had the same rich, dark-blond hair. Both had fair complexions, tiny freckles on their cheeks, dark-blue eyes, and soft, feminine mouths. From her father she had inherited the lean, high cheek-boned facial structure. Although David had observed Frank Jones only a few times, he felt Diane carried herself like him: confident, head up, good posture with firm shoulders.

Analyzing her in this manner, through her parents, made him wonder what exactly he had inherited from his father. Perhaps the differences that existed between his mother and him were directly related to those aspects of his father he had inherited. Did that mean his father was as moody and as lonely at times? Was this why his mother didn’t get along with him?

He vowed to pursue it until his mother or his grandmother told him the truth about the man who had left when David was only three years old. The only contact they had with him came from the checks he sent from Las Vegas. At times his mother seemed pleased by the fact that his father had lost any interest in the only child he had. It proved her right and validated her decision to rid them of such a self-centered person. She never failed to take advantage of every opportunity to say so.

But David felt uncomfortable with this evaluation of his father. It wasn’t possible to negate all the genetic influence with a divorce. If his father was so bad, then some of what made him bad was in David as well. Of course, his mother used his father as a kind of whip, often saying things like, “That’s just what your father would do,” or “That’s just what your father would say.”

David decided that because his father was such a mystery to him, he was at a great disadvantage. He had even come to believe that what made him different from his friends could be attributed to, in part, the absence of a father in his life.

David had to go through the story he had fabricated for Mr. Jones once again for Mrs. Jones and Pamela. He, Rube, and Tony sat on the couch facing the two of them. Rube and Tony stared ahead, wide eyed, listening as attentively as Mrs. Jones and Pamela. David found he was enjoying adding details: how they had run through the village, spotted Buzzy going into the woods, followed him, but deliberately kept a safe distance behind so they could surprise him, and then found him sprawled on the dirt road.

“Who would do such a thing?” Mrs. Jones asked when he was finished. She looked to Tony and Rube, but neither wanted to offer a syllable.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Jones.” David looked at Rube and Tony, and they both shrugged so quickly and so simultaneously they looked comical to David. He smiled at them and then turned back to Mrs. Jones. But his attention was quickly drawn to the doorway.

Diane stood there, a towel wrapped around her head. She wore a light-blue bathrobe and matching slippers. Her face was still flushed from the hot shower.

“What’s going on?”

Her mother started to explain, relating David’s story with remarkable accuracy, as though keeping to the insignificant details was critical. David simply stared at Diane.

“God. I thought I heard something before, but I thought it was a dog. Where’s Daddy?”

“Cleaning and treating Buzzy’s wound in the main bathroom.”

Main bathroom? David thought. How many bathrooms did they have in this house? A moment later Buzzy and Mr. Jones appeared. Buzzy’s head was wrapped neatly in a gauze bandage. In the well-lit room, he looked white and sickly.

“How do you feel?” Mrs. Jones asked. Knowing that his mother and father were about to arrive, Buzzy felt rather weak. He had retreated to the only defensive tactic left: play on their sympathy.

“Not so good.”

“He’s got to go to the hospital,” Frank Jones said. The doorbell rang. It was the police followed by Buzzy’s parents. It was apparent from the look on Buzzy’s father’s face that he had come to reprimand him severely, but Buzzy either did a good job of acting or actually was feeling terrible. It stopped his father and mother in their tracks, and they quickly agreed with Frank Jones’s suggestion to get him to the hospital emergency room. They thanked him and ushered Buzzy out quickly.

That left David, Rube, and Tony to face Charlie Williams, the village patrolman on duty. Charlie was only twenty-two years old. He had gone into the army straight out of high school and saw some action in Korea. He commanded respect more from the fact that he had seen actual combat than from the uniform he wore.

He was a six foot two inch, well-built man with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, with eyebrows so light colored they looked nonexistent. His muscular body and seasoned-soldier look compensated some for his baby face. David often heard him compared to Van Johnson, the movie actor, but he had a much deeper voice. High school girls were fond of him, but he had a girlfriend in the city and still lived with his parents.

Charlie’s family had moved into Centerville when Charlie was only five years old, so he was considered a homegrown boy. His father had been a bus driver up until last year when he retired on a disability due to his eyesight. They lived in a small, two story gingerbread on a road just outside of Centerville.

Charlie had rapidly become a good, small-town cop. He was familiar with most everyone in town, knew their families and their children. He attended the high school basketball games, spent time talking to the students, and patrolled his community with the kind of detailed knowledge that would permit him to distinguish a suspiciously lit store or a suspiciously parked car.

David grew nervous now that he realized he would be confronted by the actuality of a police report. It wasn’t going to be as easy to fabricate facts when he talked to Charlie Williams. And what if Charlie bore down on Rube, Tony, or Buzzy later on?

Charlie listened to Mr. Jones first and then looked at Mrs. Jones, Pamela, and Diane. He nodded and turned to the three of them. David sensed the suspicion in his eyes. It was as if Charlie wore two faces, the real one just below this mask put on to deal with people in an official capacity. On his real face there was a knowing smile.

Such an idea about people had come to him more vividly recently. Looking around him at the people in the village he had known all his life, he sensed the same two-faced personalities. He could see it in the way people spoke to one another, even when they spoke casually to one another. Smiles often covered up looks of disgust. This perception he had begun to recently enjoy was getting so much stronger so quickly that he felt like going up to some of these people and ripping off their masks.

“Why don’t you guys go out and get in the patrol car. We’ll talk about this down at the station,” Charlie said. To David it was obvious why he wanted to talk to them alone.

Rube and Tony looked terrified. Neither budged from the couch.

“We gotta get home soon, Charlie,” David said.

“That’s all right. Maggie Thomas is still there doing some clerical work. She’ll call everyone’s parents.”

“Shit,” Tony said under his breath.

“Let’s go,” David said. They got up. Diane touched his arm as he went past her and he stopped.

“I’m glad you didn’t get hurt,” she said. Her sincerity nearly brought him to tears. He wanted to blurt it all out: We weren’t playing a game; we were spying on you, watching you get undressed. I don’t deserve your concern.

But he said nothing and turned away quickly.

The three of them went outside and stood waiting by the police car.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” Rube asked.

“Just stick to the story,” David said. He looked back at the house, and then his attention was drawn to the shadows to his right. He stepped toward them.

“What is it?” Tony asked.

“It’s him,” he said.

“Who? The guy who hit Buzzy?” Both Rube and Tony came up beside him and looked.

“I don’t see nobody,” Tony said.

“Besides, the police is here,” Rube said. “He ain’t going to come after us now.”

David said nothing for a moment. The shadows lightened again, but he still felt that ominous chill.

“He’s not here for us,” David said, speaking like one under a hypnotic spell. His friends looked at each other and then at him. The way he was staring into the darkness unnerved them both.

“What do you mean?” Rube said, but before David could respond, Charlie emerged from the house and told them to get into the patrol car. They all got into the back seat, and Charlie got behind the wheel. He looked back at the three of them for a long, silent moment.

“I can’t wait to hear this story,” he said and started away.

David looked back through the rear window. He didn’t see anything specific; he could distinguish no one in the darkness and had nothing concrete to offer that would turn Charlie Williams around.

But he knew that something terrible was still there. As usual, his ability to perceive things beyond others left him frustrated. Only this time, it did much more; it left him sickly afraid, but not for himself.

He was afraid for Diane Jones.

5

The Centerville Police Station was located in the basement of the Centerville Town Hall, a building that went back to the original settlers of the community. In those days it served as a meeting hall and a church. After a fire in the mid-nineteenth century, it was rebuilt as a town hall, and the basement just naturally evolved into a police station. Recently, it had been redesigned and redecorated. Within it were a distinct holding room and a distinct examination room, as well as a chief’s office.

The Centerville Police Department consisted of only three full-time patrolmen year round, but in the summer, the town council added two additional part-time officers. Most of the year there was very little traffic to direct, and criminal activity was restricted to an occasional burglary, a brawl in one of the local taverns, vandalism, and reckless driving. For this quiet little Upstate New York community, murder, rape, and other capital crimes were still considered synonymous with urban areas.

In fact, the only murder that had occurred in this village had happened more than thirty years ago. It was the favorite Halloween story. Cornelius Harding killed his younger brother, Boris, and kept the murder secret for weeks before people realized that no one had seen or spoken to him. An investigation turned up a gruesome situation: Cornelius had bludgeoned Boris to death and was cutting his brother’s body up gradually and feeding the parts to the fire in the coal stove, taking some additional mad pleasure in the serialized cremation. Shortly afterward, Cornelius committed suicide in prison.

The Hardings had been living together for nearly fifteen years after their parents died. The house remained unoccupied for years afterward, until a family from the city bought it and redid much of it. Since they occupied it only during the summer months, it nevertheless remained the village’s haunted house. Boris’s spirit was forever imprisoned within its walls.

However, for most of the adults in town, time had turned what was once a gruesome and vicious murder into a relatively harmless fable. Fewer and fewer people remembered the Harding brothers, and details of the crime were confused and distorted. Apparently, no one was really ever sure of the motive for the murder. Stories ranged from an argument over a game of checkers to the final result of latent sibling rivalry.

It was a standard joke in town, understood by year-round residents, that if something unexplainable happened, it was to be blamed on the spirit of Boris Harding. It was the way Charlie Williams began his interrogation of the boys.

“So who hit Buzzy—Boris Harding?” he asked. He had taken the three of them into the chief’s office and sat down behind the desk. There were other chairs in the room, but no one else took a seat.

“We don’t know, Charlie. We weren’t there when he was attacked,” David said. Rube and Tony continued to let him be their spokesman.

“Bullshit. I know why you guys were there. You were looking in on Diane Jones. Now don’t give me no more bullshit,” he said sitting up quickly and pointing his right forefinger straight at David. “I want the truth, or Buzzy won’t be the only one going up to the hospital.”

For a moment no one said anything. Then David nodded. Charlie sat back in his chair. How did he know for sure what we were really doing there? David wondered.

“Buzzy was behind us, but we didn’t know he was coming,” David said without actually confessing to the accusation. “We heard him scream and then, when we went back, we found him on the dirt road. I saw someone in the shadows, but I couldn’t make out who it was. It was a man, though.”

“Aw, come on. You know it was just another one of you pricks on the prowl.”

“No, Charlie, honest, I…”

“Someone played a little too rough, right? You covering up for him?”

“No. We ain’t,” Rube said. “He’s telling you the truth.”

“Truth? You guys wouldn’t know the truth even if it popped out all over you like the chicken pox.” He thought for a moment. “I oughta call Frank Jones and tell him what was really going on,” he muttered, but David knew that he wouldn’t. He was just using the threat to pressure them. But why wouldn’t he tell Mr. Jones the truth? he wondered. Shouldn’t he?

“Buzzy wasn’t hit by any of us,” David said. “None of us would hit him that hard, Charlie, and you know it,” he added, sounding older, stronger, and unafraid. Charlie looked up sharply. He does know it, David thought, but he doesn’t want us to know. Why?

“Buzzy didn’t see anyone? He just got hit?”

“The guy grabbed him first,” Tony said and looked at David. “Show him.” Charlie waited for the demonstration. David clasped Tony’s throat with both his hands and tightened the fingers.

“Like that,” David said, letting go. “One of us wouldn’t have done this. It’s no game.”

Charlie stared at the three of them for a few moments. Then he sat up again.

“I’ll go to the hospital and talk to Buzzy myself. He better have the same story.”

“Well, he won’t. He’ll tell you what I first told you,” David said.

“I don’t mean that part. All right, I won’t have Maggie call your parents.” He looked down at his desk. “Go on home,” he said waving his hand at them as though he were driving away flies, “and keep away from the windows of the girls in this town, understand?” he added, looking up to give them his sternest expression.

“Yeah, sure,” Tony said. “Thanks,” he added. He and Rube started to back toward the doorway, but David didn’t move.

“Go on,” Charlie repeated, “before I change my mind.”

“Come on,” Rube said. David eyed Charlie for a moment. He sensed Charlie was hiding something he knew already. The face he wore now was more of a mask, but David didn’t know how to get him to say more to them. He followed Rube and Tony out of the station and into the street. The two of them broke into a run.

“Wait up,” he called and ran after them. They stopped near the train station.

“I’m going home,” Tony said.

“Me too,” Rube added.

“Wait a minute.”

“What for?” Tony said. “Shit, we’re lucky we got out of there without having our parents down. My father would break my neck.”

“If my father got called down, you wouldn’t see me for a couple of days,” Rube said.

“How did he know we had gone there to spy on Diane?” David asked. “Why was he so sure?”

“Maybe someone was caught there recently,” Tony said.

“Then why wouldn’t Mr. Jones have been more suspicious when he first saw us?”

“Who gives a shit? Charlie Williams ain’t tellin’ Mr. Jones about us so we’re not gonna get into trouble for it,” Rube said. “Forget about it.”

“But who hit Buzzy?” David asked insistently. Why weren’t his friends as concerned?

“You know who I think did it,” Tony said. He looked up the street as if to be sure no one could hear him. “I think it was Gerry Porter. I think the moron followed us and grabbed Buzzy. He’s a fucking maniac.”

“Gerry Porter?” David thought about it a moment.

“Yeah. We should have told Charlie about him,” Rube said. “Now I’m sorry I fooled around with him. He must’ve gotten excited and followed us.”

“But why would he attack Buzzy?”

“Maybe he thought Buzzy was after him,” Tony said. “Who knows?”

“Or maybe he thought Buzzy had spotted him,” Rube said.

“I don’t know,” David said. “Gerry Porter?”

“Well it ain’t our problem,” Tony said. “I’m going,” he repeated and started away.

“See ya,” Rube said and followed. David stood there watching them go up the street.

Just before he turned to start for home himself, he saw what looked to be a long, dark vehicle approaching on his left. It looked like a hearse. It paused at the tracks, and when it continued and went by him, he saw Peter Sills was driving it. He was glad the man didn’t seem to notice him. If he had, he might have stopped and bawled him out about the near accident they had had earlier. Maybe Charlie would learn about it and that would make for more problems.

Even so, he couldn’t help wondering about Sills. From time to time, the women who came to play cards at his house talked about Peter and Betty Sills. He heard them say that Peter Sills had assumed the role of homemaker, that he kept his house immaculate, and because he was so involved with the upkeep of the house and caring for his wife, he had few men friends. He wasn’t very active in any organization.

Actually, no one particularly disliked him, even though David gathered from the way the women talked that they were critical of the way he tolerated his spoiled wife.

David remembered when he and his friends had been in the drugstore at the same time Peter Sills came for his wife’s medicine. Even now he felt sick at the memory of the gutted deer he had envisioned and the transformation of Mr. Sills’s car into a hearse right before his eyes.

Was Mr. Sills going to die? The knowledge saddened him, but there was nothing he could do.

He watched the car until it disappeared from view. As it had passed under the last few streetlights, he had seen that it wasn’t a hearse at all, but Mr. Sills’s own station wagon.

After a moment he started for home. With luck he thought he might get back into the house without his grandmother’s realizing he had gone. As he crossed the tracks and went up Main Street, he thought about Gerry Porter. Had he sensed something dangerous about the retarded man when they were talking to him or was that a product of his overworked imagination as well? Porter could have followed them, and he could have grabbed Buzzy. He was certainly strong enough to have done it. Maybe he would tell Charlie about him tomorrow.

And yet there was something more, something indistinct and gray that made him doubt the guilt of Gerry Porter. He couldn’t verbalize it, but he was sure it had something to do with Charlie’s being so positive they were Peeping Toms. And also, he didn’t believe Charlie when he acted skeptical about Buzzy’s being attacked by someone other than another kid. David sensed he knew it wasn’t another kid.

He looked back at the center of the village. The streets were nearly deserted. Only an occasional vehicle went by, and the only storefront lit was the front of Porkey’s Bar and Grill. Even that place looked dead tonight.

Despite the bright streetlights that illuminated the downtown area of the village, David sensed a cloud, an ominous darkness settling over everything. There’s a great evil here, he thought, and it’s not the spirit of Boris Harding. It’s not the evil born out of wild imaginations. It’s something quite real and quite common. Something here every day, but something few, if any, could realize.

Instinctively he knew that he would be able to recognize it. He had seen it first when they were at the Jones’s house, and he had sensed its remaining presence even when they were about to leave with Charlie Williams. Eventually, he would be able to point it out to others who could stop it.

He felt confident of this, but with this confidence came a new and even greater fear, for he realized that the evil one could know what he could do to him.

He spun around quickly as if the dark shadow in the forest had emerged on the street behind him and listened. There were no strange sounds and nothing changed. Then he saw someone ahead of him, up the street, walking in the opposite direction.

He sped up, practically going at a run, until he could make out the person clearly.

It was Gerry Porter, walking quickly and gesturing widely as he spoke to himself.

Or, to someone or something beside him in the night.

He didn’t get in trouble; his grandmother never knew he was gone, and his mother didn’t return until after he had gone to bed. No one knew anything in the morning, and he was able to eat his breakfast and go off to school without any questions asked.

The excitement started remarkably slowly at school. It wasn’t until the fourth period that most of David’s friends had found out why Buzzy wasn’t in school. Everyone assumed he was just playing hooky, as usual. But Diane Jones’s sister told some of her friends, who told some of theirs, and the story spread up the grade levels until the whole high school was alive with the tale.

Only Carl and Merle knew enough to challenge the fabricated story David had concocted. He, Rube, and Tony had to tell them the truth later on in the lunchroom.

“I was going to come,” Merle said, “but we had to visit my uncle in Middletown. Shit, I missed all the action.”

“I think I would have rather been with an uncle in Middletown,” David said, but no one believed him.

He had to remain after school for awhile to do some work in the library on his final social studies report. By the time he left the building, none of his friends were around, but Ted Davis and two of his buddies, Donald Westlake and Paul Shatsky, were standing by his car in front of the school talking. David looked over because he thought Diane might be with them, but she wasn’t. Even so, Ted spotted him and waved him over.

“Tell us about Buzzy,” he said. David went through the story, taking care to leave out any reference to Diane’s house. From the way he described the events, it could have occurred on the other side of town.

Westlake, a short, but very muscular kid, who was about the best high school wrestler Centerville ever had, said he thought it might have been one of the hobos who regularly ride the freight trains.

“One just might have gotten lost,” he said. “I come across a couple the other day, down past the feed mill. They were just sitting by the tracks guzzling cheap gin.”

“How would they get so far away from the tracks though?” Shatsky asked.

Ted agreed that it had to be someone else.

“Forget this bullshit,” he said suddenly. “I was telling the guys how you found my key the other day. Diane said you didn’t even look; you just knew it was there. How’d you do it?”

David blushed.

“I just guessed,” he said.

“Saved my ass,” Ted said. “You’re okay, Houdini.” He gave David a playful punch on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “we’re taking a ride up to Liberty to get a cold root beer at the new A and W. Westlake here wants to check out a couple of Liberty chicks. Wanna come along? I’ll buy you a root beer.”

For a moment David couldn’t respond. He looked at the three high school seniors, all three among the most popular boys at his school. They wanted him along? He didn’t know anyone else his age whom they would ask, except Rube, who occasionally went along with the older guys somewhere. Usually it was just to drink beer down at the lake or harass guys from another school. Rube was a good asset to have along for something like that. But what could David offer the older boys?

“Sure,” he said. He got into the back seat with Shatsky and they drove off.

“Maybe Boris Harding grabbed Buzzy last night,” Shatsky said, and that started a discussion of the old murder. David fanned the fantasy when he described how the dark, shadowy figure appeared and then disappeared in moments. It left them all quiet for a moment.

“You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?” Westlake asked turning around.

“I don’t know what to believe,” David said. He wondered if he should bring up Gerry Porter. Maybe these guys knew something more about him. “When I started home from the police station though, I saw Gerry Porter wandering the streets.”

“Porter?” Ted said. “Yeah, that’s a possibility. What do you think, Paul?”

Shatsky’s mother was very friendly with Mrs. Porter. She often visited his house and brought Gerry along.

“I don’t see it,” he said. “He’s harmless. You can’t even get the dumb bastard to defend himself when he should. People shit all over him, and he stands there smiling.”

“Maybe he’s planning behind that smile,” Westlake said.

“I doubt it,” Shatsky insisted.

“Maybe he thought he was in the game,” Ted said. “And he got carried away with it.” Everyone was quiet for a moment.

“Yeah, that’s possible,” Shatsky conceded. “Did you guys talk to him at all before you started playing?”

David hesitated, wondering if Gerry Porter was capable of remembering what they had discussed with him before they left him at Chonin’s.

“Yeah, but…no one mentioned a game.”

“He might have seen what you were doing and joined in,” Ted said. “What do you think, Paul?”

“Yeah,” Paul Shatsky said. “Real possibility. Maybe you oughta tell Charlie Williams,” he said to David.

When they got to the A and W in Liberty, they found a number of the Liberty High School students sitting around in their cars and at the outside picnic tables. Many of them knew Ted from the ball games. They got their root beers and stood around the car, drinking them and observing the action. Finally, Westlake pointed out the two girls he had found interesting. The girls had gotten their drinks and taken a corner table all by themselves.

“What’dya think?” Westlake said. “The tall one with the light-brown hair is perfect for you, Shatsky. I’ll take the shorter one with the big tits.”

Shatsky laughed nervously.

“Just go over and pick ’em up,” Ted said. He winked at David.

“Just like that, huh?”

“Trouble with you, Westlake, is you spend all of your time in a gym with other boys and not enough time sweating around girls,” Ted said.

“Why don’t you show us how it’s done?” Westlake said. Ted shook his head.

“I’ve got what I want in women. I’m not fucking things up just for you,” he said.

David admired him for his loyalty to Diane, but he was also jealous of that loyalty. He looked at the two Liberty girls, neither of whom could hold a candle to Diane. They had identical hairdos, both cut neatly at the nape of the neck with the strands brushed straight down and bangs cut just above the eyebrows. The shorter girl’s tight sweater blouse did emphasize her heavy bosom, the lines of her bra clearly outlined.

“There’s a comb under the table,” David said. “Maybe it belongs to one of them.”

“There you go,” Ted said. “The kid’s given you an opening line.”

“Oh yeah.” Westlake looked at David. “Your good luck charm,” he said, and David realized why Ted was so friendly. “He comes through again.” He patted David on the shoulder, and he and Shatsky headed for the table.

“Watch them make assholes out of themselves,” Ted said. Westlake, without saying anything first, crawled under the table to fetch the comb. The girls shrieked until he came up with it. Both shook their heads when he offered it.

Ted and he couldn’t hear the conversation, but it was clear to David that they weren’t making any headway. In fact, Shatsky took on a look of disgust pretty quickly. Westlake continued to press on, even though the girls were showing little interest.

“Let’s rescue the bastards,” Ted said. David followed him over to the table. “What’s the matter, Westlake? The old comb under the table routine didn’t work?” Westlake smirked, but the girls smiled. They had recognized Ted from his ball games. “Well, introduce us.”

Westlake grimaced. He hadn’t gotten as far as learning their names.

“This is Brenda and I’m Lois,” the shorter girl said quickly.

“Neither of them wants to own up to the comb,” Westlake said. The comb had become the only topic of conversation and had quickly lost its value. Westlake’s smirk widened with disgust, and he tossed the comb to David, silently saying, “So much for your idea.” David caught it in midair, his quick reflexive action drawing the girls’ attention to him.

“It’s Brenda’s,” he said. “But she didn’t drop it today; she dropped it yesterday.”

“Huh?” Brenda said. The tall girl looked at her friend. David could tell from her expression that she hadn’t wanted to claim the comb. She had been embarrassed by Westlake’s discovery. “Let me see that comb again.”

David handed it to her, and she studied it for a moment. Then she opened her pocketbook and looked inside.

“It is my comb,” she said and laughed.

“You saw her drop it yesterday?” Lois asked. The boys looked at David, and suddenly he realized he had no explanation for what he had done.

“No, I…just guessed,” he said. Ted’s eyes widened. “Lucky guess,” he added.

“Wait a minute,” Lois said turning back to Westlake. “You are a varsity wrestler for Centerville, aren’t you? I saw you wrestle this winter. You beat Carey Dreiser, didn’t you? I remember now,” she said.

“That’s right,” Westlake said. He came around the table and sat down beside her. Shatsky looked at Ted, who gestured for him to talk to the taller girl. After a few moments, Ted and David walked back to the car.

“What are we going to do?” David asked when Ted got in behind the wheel and started the engine.

“We’re going to leave them here. They’ll get a ride back. Maybe the girls will take them. Get in,” he said. David got into the front seat. He looked over to the table where Westlake and Shatsky sat. They saw they were being left, but they were making headway now and didn’t care.

Ted pulled out of the A and W lot and drove off.

“You didn’t just take another guess back there, did you, Champ?” Ted asked him as they rode through downtown Liberty. “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” David said. He looked at Ted Davis. There was no question that he admired him a great deal. In his mind Ted was a celebrity. He had gone to the ball games and watched him outscore taller and stronger boys. He had been at the Centerville-Monticello game when Ted won the game with a basket in the last five seconds, a one-handed set shot from at least twenty-five feet out. The victory meant Centerville would be in the division playoffs. It turned the gym crowd into a mob, and his teammates carried him off the court, people trying to reach him just to touch him.

And here he was now, riding alone in his car, talking to him as though they were lifelong buddies. More importantly for David now, Ted was the boy who was having the romantic relationship with Diane. He kissed her, spoke softly to her, touched her. He could call her, go to see her, be with her any time he wanted. If David could trade places with anyone, it would be Ted Davis.

For a short time, sitting in this car and talking with Ted, David felt what it must be like to have an older brother, someone in whom he could confide.

“Well, you’re doing something special. You can’t tell me you knew the girl back there and saw her drop her comb yesterday, right?”

“Right. I’ll tell you, but don’t laugh,” David said. Ted looked at him and nodded softly. They headed out of Liberty and started down Route 52 toward home. “As soon as that comb touched my hand, I saw a vision of that girl. I saw her at the table, and I saw the comb fall from her pocketbook. She probably didn’t put it in all the way or something, and it shook out.”

“What?” Ted smiled. “You saw a vision?”

“Yeah. And the same kind of thing happened when I went to look for your key. I touched the ignition and saw a picture of a basketball. That confused me, but then, I saw your keys with the little metal basketball on the chain under the seat.”

“And that’s why you didn’t even have to look first. Diane said it was creepy the way you just looked at her and told her where the key was without even looking. She said you sounded so positive.”

“Creepy? She said it was creepy?”

“Well…you know.” He shook his head. “Jesus, this is fantastic. You got some kind of power.”

“I don’t know what it is. Don’t call it a power,” he said. The word triggered off a fear in him, even though he couldn’t explain why. “It’s just good guessing, that’s all.”

“Not if you see things. Jesus, this is fantastic,” Ted repeated. David started to feel nervous.

“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” he said.

“Yeah, sure. I promise. I understand,” Ted said, but from the tone of his voice, David wasn’t confident about his promise. “But it’s going to be hard to keep it a secret long. Diane already feels something strange is going on,” he added.

“I don’t mind Diane knowing,” David said.

“Can you do this at anytime, anytime you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do something now,” Ted said.

“What?”

Ted thought for a moment.

“Okay,” he said. He took his left hand off the steering wheel and put it into his pants pocket. “I’ve got my fingers around a coin. What coin?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work?” Ted asked with disappointment. “You said you just get a vision, right?”

“I don’t know how or why it works. It just works sometimes.”

“You can’t tell me what coin I have?”

David closed his eyes and thought about it a moment. Then he shook his head.

“It’s just a guess…a nickel.”

“No, it’s a quarter,” Ted said. “Shit, I thought you could do it whenever you wanted.”

“I can’t,” David said. He looked out the side window, regretting the whole conversation now. It didn’t go the way he thought it would. Instead of Ted sympathizing with him and giving him the kind of brotherly advice that would come from an older, wiser brother, he was acting like a younger brother. In fact, David felt as though he were the older and wiser one.

“Yeah, well still it’s something,” Ted said. He smiled. “Especially what you did back there.”

David looked at him. He had been hoping to feel comfortable enough to tell him about the feeling of evil, the sense of ominous danger he experienced when Ted and Diane brought him home the other day, and the feeling he experienced at Diane’s house just before he, Rube, and Tony were driven away by Charlie Williams. He wanted to warn him about something, but because he didn’t know exactly what it was, and because of the way Ted was acting now, he decided against it.

Instead, he was quiet for most of the remaining trip home. Ted told him about a story he had read in the comic book, Tales of Terror.

“In it, this undertaker developed the power to know who was going to die before they died. He’d get their coffins ready, only one day, he sees his own death. You know what he did? He got his own coffin ready.”

David didn’t really respond. He only said he never read Tales of Terror.

“My grandmother won’t let me bring it into the house.”

Ted laughed.

“Hey,” he said, “does your mother know what you can do?”

“No.” He wasn’t really lying. She hadn’t believed him when he told her years ago, and he hadn’t told her anything since.

Ted pulled up to his house.

“I got an idea,” he said before David got out. “We’ll try a couple of tricks and see how you do. Maybe we could make something out of this.”

“I don’t know,” David said. “Like I told you…I can’t do it all the time.”

“Maybe we’ll figure out how to work around that. Maybe there’s some secret we’ve got to discover. This is great.”

“Don’t say anything,” David warned him.

“Leave it to me, buddy,” Ted said. He laughed. “Westlake and Shatsky owe you,” he added.

David watched him drive off. Ted was a disappointment after all. Worse than that, David sensed he wouldn’t be able to protect Diane. He didn’t have the vision. She was in more danger than he had thought. Somehow he had to get her to understand.

He turned around slowly, but when he lifted his head and looked at the house, his heart skipped a beat. Something was wrong; something was terribly, terribly wrong. The whole building looked depressed. Colors were suddenly dull. The windows were gray, yet it was still bright out with a relatively clear sky. There was no reason for that shadow to be cast so darkly over his front porch.

He rushed to the door and opened it quickly, charging down the corridor and into his house. Mrs. Novak was sitting in his kitchen. His grandmother’s old friend looked up at him with tear-filled eyes. She had been running her fingers through the sides of her hair, and the thin, gray strands stood out as though electrified.

“Grandma?”

“She’s at the hospital,” she said. “They took her in an ambulance. Your mother’s there.”

“What happened to her?”

“Heart attack,” she said.

He turned to run out, but realized that was foolish. Yet he didn’t want to remain in the house. He felt trapped. Why had he been off fooling around with the senior boys while his grandmother needed help? How come he didn’t know what was happening to her? Where were his so-called superpowers then? Not only couldn’t he call upon them when he wanted to, but they could betray him. He couldn’t trust them; he couldn’t trust himself.

Something within him was manipulating him in an evil way, toying with him. While he was off doing nonsensical things—impressing those Liberty High School girls—his grandmother was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I know?” he repeated. Mrs. Novak looked up at him in confusion. “I’ve got to go to her,” he said.

“Your mother wanted you to stay here. I’m making you supper.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to go to her. There’s not much time left,” he added in that tone of confidence that he was beginning to hate. He fought back the morbid images that threatened to rush over him.

“But how will you go?”

“I’ll hitchhike,” he said and rushed out of the house. He ran down the hill and turned the corner. He had to get to the Community General Hospital in Monticello. It was a good ten miles away; he couldn’t ride a bike there fast enough.

He stopped and looked down Main Street for a moment. The village looked deceptively peaceful and friendly, and for that, he hated it. Everyone should be coming to his aid. Storekeepers should be at their entrances, all wearing expressions of deep concern. Traffic should be moving in more funereal fashion. It was a sick irony that the world could go on while tragedy struck someone in the midst of it.

He ran up to the corner from where he and his friends often hitched rides to South Fallsburg and Monticello, and he stood there staring at the oncoming traffic. There wasn’t much of it this time of the day, and what there was didn’t look very promising. There wasn’t a car he recognized.

Then he closed his eyes and willed himself a ride. He willed with all his might.

“You owe me this,” he told himself; he told his magical powers. “You owe me this.”

He stuck his hand out with his eyes closed and when he opened them, a car had stopped. It was Peter Sills. For a moment he didn’t move toward the car. The big man looked out at him expectantly. Had he forgotten I was the boy who almost caused him to hit me with his car? David wondered.

David also hesitated because of the times the car had appeared to be a hearse. He was fighting back all the depressing thoughts as it was. He wondered if he could get into this car, even to go see his grandmother who was taken to the hospital. He couldn’t help the indecision.

“You looking for a ride or not?” Sills asked.

“Yes sir.” David opened the door and got in.

“Where you headed?” Sills asked as he started away.

“I’ve got to get up to the hospital. My grandmother was taken there.”

“Oh? You’re in luck. I’m going right by it.” Sills looked at him. “I know you. You’re Roselyn’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir.” Why didn’t he recognize me from the other night? David wondered. He certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.

“So her mother’s sick?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Sorry to hear it.”

“How’s Mrs. Sills feeling?” David asked politely.

“Why, do you boys talk about her?” Sills said sharply.

“Talk about her? No sir. I just heard some of my mother’s friends talking about her.”

“Yeah,” Sills said. “Well, she’s not feeling well.” He was quiet after that, so quiet that David had the eerie feeling he was riding in a hearse. He was afraid to look back for fear that there would be a coffin behind him. After awhile he sat as still as Mr. Sills. The heaviness made him more than anxious for the ride to end.

6

The Community General Hospital, the biggest one in the county, was located on a hill, up a side street just at the entrance to the village of Monticello. The hospital consisted of two very large, red-brick buildings. David had been here a few times before. He was here relatively recently when his mother had had gall bladder problems. He vaguely recalled being brought to it himself when he was very little. He had developed a high temperature, which they discovered was the result of a bad case of measles. He didn’t stay long, but the experience was significant enough to create a set of automatic reactions in him whenever he approached the place.

“This is it,” Peter Sills said. He didn’t look at David. “I oughta know,” he added.

“Thank you,” David said.

“I hope your grandmother feels better,” Sills said.

“Thank you,” David said. He got out of the car quickly and didn’t look back. He was afraid that if he did, the car would look like a hearse again. And he did not like to think about what that would portend for his grandmother.

When he started for the hospital, his heartbeat quickened; he broke out into a sweat and his chest tightened, making it difficult to take deep breaths. Nevertheless, he went swiftly to the front entrance—two big glass doors—entered and marched right up to the visitors’ desk. The sign right above it announced that children under twelve were prohibited, and children under sixteen unaccompanied by an adult were prohibited.

The woman behind the desk was a pink lady, one of the community women who had volunteered her time. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she took her position very seriously, nevertheless, and had even assumed the personality of a bureaucrat. She held the power to grant a visitor’s pass. He thought she was a woman about his mother’s age, although she had a much thinner, harder face with cold, brown eyes and a thin mouth with lips pressed tightly together. She had her dark-brown hair pulled so tightly into a bun at the back that her strands looked as though they were about to tear up from her scalp. She was reading a magazine and seemed not to notice him.

David paused before speaking to her and looked back at the security guard who stood by the elevators. When he turned back, the lady looked up.

“Yes?” There was no warmth in her voice.

“My grandmother was brought here. I’m supposed to meet my mother.”

“Who’s your grandmother?”

“Gussie Gelfand,” he said. The woman looked down at her list. Suddenly David thought that her pink outfit, which was really only a large apron over her own clothes, looked ridiculous. She was in a costume, dressed for some absurd performance. Her life consisted of going from one role to another. She had no true self, or the one she had was so small in terms of its responsibility and meaning to others that it was insignificant.

“I don’t see any Gussie Gelfand,” she said dryly.

“She was just brought here by ambulance.”

“Oh. That’s an emergency room admission. I haven’t got the information yet. What was wrong with her?”

“Heart attack,” David said. He couldn’t keep the tears from building up in his eyes, but they were quickly turning into tears of hate. Why was he wasting all this time talking to this woman while his grandmother needed him?

“Then she’d be on the fifth floor in CCU. You can’t see her anyway.”

“What?”

“They only take visitors five minutes before the hour. It will be about fifty minutes.”

“But, I gotta see her right away.”

“Why don’t you just wait here until your mother arrives.”

“My mother’s here, with her. I gotta see her,” he repeated.

“I’ll call up and get them to tell your mother you are here,” the pink lady said without smiling. She lifted the receiver as though it took great effort to do so. She spoke to someone for a few moments, then hung up. “They’ll locate her soon. Take a seat,” she said. She looked down at the magazine on her desk.

David stared at her for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked out of the hospital. He went around the ambulance entrance to the emergency room, moving both out of anger and fear. He was afraid he wouldn’t get to his grandmother in time.

The emergency room doors opened automatically, and he passed into the corridor. The security guard on this end was talking to a nurse and had his back to the doorway. David went quickly through a second door and into the first floor hallway. He followed the signs indicating stairway and took the stairs up to the fifth floor, running up the flights.

When he entered the fifth floor, he paused. The effort and excitement had done something to him. He wasn’t just sweating and tired. He felt as though he were glowing. His hands looked luminescent. He thought his feet would burn footprints into the floor as he went along.

The nurses and nurses’ aides who saw him ignored him. An elderly man seated by his room in a wheelchair out in the corridor looked up at him as he passed by, but said nothing. It was as if a rush of warm air had washed over the old man. Indeed, David felt invisible.

At the far end of the corridor were two doors labeled CCU. A sign on the outside of the left one indicated visitors could enter only five minutes before the hour and remain for five minutes. He hesitated and then opened the door.

How could he ever forget that moment? What he saw would live on in the world of nightmares. The images would dwell in darkness, emerging only when called forth by the voices of evil. No horror movie, no comic book tale of terror, no suspense story on the radio would ever compare.

Was this a hospital of the dead? Had he passed through some barrier between the real and the unreal? If he walked through this doorway, would he ever be able to return to the land of the living? What he confronted nearly made him shriek with horror.

Every bed within was inhabited by a different kind of corpse. Some resembled ghouls and vampires as they would have been drawn up in comics, but no drawing did justice to the morbid ugliness he witnessed.

To his right, a man tried to save himself from drowning in a pool of his own blood, only the blood was thicker and more like red mud. Every time his arms fell back into the pool and rose again, they lost some more of their flesh. The exposed bones gleamed. The man gasped, but his effort produced no sound. His mouth had become a deep, gaping dark hole, a tunnel leading down into a cavern that looked bottomless.

To his left was a woman who was clawing away the flesh of her own face as if she couldn’t wait to become a skeleton. Her body fell around the bed in red strips. She had already clawed away most of her upper body. He saw her exposed heart fluttering and shifting about like a fish out of water.

Directly ahead of him and to the right was another patient in the throes of death. His face was boiling, the bubbles building and bursting all over his cheeks and forehead. An ugly, dark-brown liquid emerged, flowing down his neck and dripping off his chin.

David covered his eyes with his hands, but he didn’t retreat. He took a few steps farther and uncovered his eyes. Although the horror dissolved, when he looked at the rear of the room, he saw his mother standing beside a coffin. He could see she was holding his grandmother’s hand.

He looked at the nurses’ station. The nurses seemed like mannequins, frozen in position, staring at heart monitors. None of them looked his way, nor did any of them look directly at the patients.

What could this be?

He continued toward the rear of CCU, until a nurse appeared from behind a curtain closed around a bed. She reached out and touched his shoulder. Her fingers felt like sticks of dry ice, burning cold. When he turned to her, she seemed to have no face—just an aseptic-looking white surface with two dark holes where there should be eyes. Her mouth appeared, but when she spoke, her upper and lower teeth were connected and simply stretched like chewing gum.

“Who are you here to see?” she asked, her voice so slow and so distorted it sounded like a record slowing down to the lowest speed on a phonograph.

“My grandmother.”

He didn’t wait for her response. He rushed forward to his mother’s side, but when he got there, the coffin had become a hospital bed. For a moment she didn’t realize he was there. He looked back and saw that all the ghoulish patients were normal again. They were just elderly people, hooked to machines that monitored their heartbeats.

He turned to his grandmother. She looked tired and older, older than he had ever seen her. She was on her back, and her eyes were closed. The oxygen mask was over her nose and mouth. Her right arm was at her sides, and his mother held her left hand in hers.

“Oh, David,” his mother said, finally realizing he was standing beside her. “How did you get here?”

“I hitched.”

“Poor Grandma,” she said, turning back.

“What happened?”

“I found her on the kitchen floor. She’s had a bad heart attack.” She looked at him, her tears streaming down her cheeks. “The doctor says it’s very bad.”

“I know,” he said. He stepped closer and gently took his grandmother’s hand from his mother. She smiled and ran her hand over his head.

“She loves you, David. She loves you so much.”

“She won’t die. I won’t let her die,” he said. “Don’t worry.” He looked up at his mother, and she saw that his eyes burned with determination. The look surprised her.

“We can’t help what will be, David,” she said. “We’ve got to be strong.”

“We can help,” he said. “We can.”

“Oh David, David.” She looked back at her mother and then shook her head. “Mrs. Novak was going to make you dinner.”

“I don’t want dinner. How can you think of eating now? I want Grandma to get better. She must get better,” he added and turned away from his mother. He pressed a little harder on his grandmother’s hand and closed his eyes. It was time to will her back to health. He could do it; his mother would see.

“We’ve got to go out, David. There are other patients here. We’ll come back later.”

“They don’t matter anymore,” he said. “They’re all dead.”

“Oh David. You mustn’t say such a thing. Come on. We’ll come back.”

“No, I can’t leave yet. You go.”

“They won’t let you stay here by yourself. Come on. We’ll go down to the cafeteria and have something to eat.”

“Eat!”

David’s mother stepped back as though he had slapped her. She felt the fire in his eyes. The nurse at the main desk came around and started for them. His mother anticipated her and met her halfway.

“It’s my son,” he heard his mother tell her. “He’s very close to my mother.”

“He can’t stay here much longer, Mrs. Steiner.”

“Just a few more minutes,” his mother pleaded. The nurse relented. “David,” his mother said coming up behind him. “You can only stay another minute.”

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll come out right behind you. I just need a minute,” he added, the tone of anger still strong. She shook her head and started out of CCU, shrugging to the nurse. She expected that it would have to be the nurse to drive him away from that bed.

But David turned and glared at her. The nurse looked at him and then went back to her desk. He smiled to himself. He could do it; he could save his grandmother and pull her from this graveyard. He actually saw himself looking down into her grave, willing the coffin to open, and reaching in to take her uplifted hands.

He pressed her hand to his lips and closed his eyes. Be well, he thought. Be well. He pushed all thoughts of death from his mind and dwelt only on happy scenes. He heard his grandmother singing one of her Hungarian melodies; he saw her smiling as she stood over him to watch him eat one of her home-baked cakes. In all these memories, she was alive and vibrant and happy. He would bring her back to that.

He opened his eyes and stared at her. Her eyelids fluttered and she turned his way. He saw the smile form on her face.

“Grandma. Don’t worry. I’ll make you better.”

“David.” Her voice was muffled in the mask. He leaned over the bed. “You can do nothing for me. Do for yourself,” she said.

“I’ll make you better Grandma,” he insisted and closed his eyes. He felt her fingers move slightly in his hand, and he opened his eyes again.

“My Gypsy eyes,” she said. He struggled to hear her. “You mustn’t think you can do too much,” she said. “And you must be afraid of what you can do. Promise me, David.”

“I promise, Grandma. Get better. You must get better.”

“Look at me, David. Look with your Gypsy eyes. Will I get better?”

“No!” he couldn’t help raising his voice. Her fingers in his hand turned to bones. He saw his grandmother become a skeleton right before his eyes. “Grandma!” he shouted. In moments two nurses were at his side.

“Come on now, son, you’ve got to leave. You’ve got to let your grandmother sleep,” the nurse on his right said. He didn’t look at her; he didn’t take his eyes off his grandmother. The nurse on his right began to press her fingers harder into his arm.

Reluctantly, he turned away from the bed. It wasn’t working; he couldn’t stop death after all.

“If you let her sleep, she might get better,” the other, younger nurse said.

“She’s nearly dead now,” he whispered. His cold, clear statement wiped the smile from her face quickly. She looked to her partner.

“Come on, son,” the older nurse said.

He started away, but before he reached the door, he turned and looked back. His grandmother’s bed was a coffin again, only now the lid had begun to lower over it. Without further hesitation, he rushed out of CCU.

His mother was waiting in the little waiting room outside. She stood up quickly.

“David!” He nearly ran past her. He stopped and joined her in the room. She put her arm around him. “I feel just as bad as you do, David, but there’s nothing more that we can do. We’ll go downstairs and at least drink something and then come back five minutes before the next hour, okay?”

“There’s no need to come back,” he said. “She’ll be dead before then.”

“Oh David. The doctor said you can’t tell about these things. She could struggle like that for days.” He looked at his mother hatefully and sat down on the light-brown, soft, vinyl chair to his right. She shook her head.

“David…”

“It’ll only be a few more minutes,” he said. “Can’t you wait?”

“But David, honey…”

She saw he wasn’t going to move. She shook her head, bit her lower lip gently, and looked out at some people going toward the elevator. Confused herself about what she should do, she walked to the window and looked down at the parking lot. But she didn’t stand there long. It was only a few more minutes before she heard her name called and turned to see the CCU head nurse who had appeared in the waiting room doorway.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said.

David’s mother looked at him and then began to cry. She rushed to his side and embraced him. He held her, but he did not cry.

He was angry. He could envision someone’s death before it happened, will a girl to turn her bare breasts toward him, find lost keys, identify the owner of a stupid little comb, sense danger for others, but he couldn’t help his grandmother when she needed him the most.

He couldn’t remember his maternal grandfather very well. He had died when David was only four. And his paternal grandparents lived in Akron, Ohio and had little to do with his mother and him since his father’s departure. For as long as he could remember, his grandmother had been the strength in his household. At times he thought his mother was as dependent upon her as he was. She was as distracted and flighty as a teenager. He couldn’t even imagine what it was going to be like in his house now.

He understood that to a much larger degree he would be in charge of himself. If he wanted a good breakfast, he would have to be up early enough to make it and to make his own sandwich if he wanted to take a lunch to school. He would have to learn to wash and iron his own clothing, clean and care for his room and, to some extent, care for portions of the house.

His grandmother could forgive him for leaving his clothing about; his grandmother could chase him and insist he eat a decent meal; his grandmother could straighten up any mess he made without so much as a mild chastisement, but she was no longer there, and he had no one to blame but himself for not doing the right things.

His mother did what he expected she would: She retreated into and welcomed the sympathy of friends who gathered around her in a council of self-pity. Her loss stimulated memories of their losses. Everyone had stories. He listened to them revel in the tales of woe. They came with sickening regularity during the period of mourning, bringing cakes and candy. The kitchen table was covered with dishes of sweets and boxes from bakeries. The women from the card and Mah-jongg games hovered about like flies, picking on this, pinching from that.

He ate none of it. Sweets had become more than distasteful at this time; they were sinful. He had begun a period of penitence. He despised himself for his failure to help his grandmother at her greatest time of need. He would do nothing to please the body that had so failed both of them.

He was kind only to someone like Mrs. Novak, someone who had been friends with his grandmother. To the other women and men who came, he was sullen and resentful. After their initial approach, they fled from him, fled especially from those wide eyes that reminded them of hot coals. There was an aura of heat about him. He looked like he had a fever; his face was flushed, and the palm of his hand felt like the outside of a hot water pipe. He made them feel guilty for being alive while his grandmother lay dead and buried.

Soon after the funeral, he was at that graveyard. It was a five mile bike ride up some steep hills, but he was glad that his body had to struggle; he welcomed the pain in his thighs, pressing down harder and faster when the aching began.

The first time he went, he stood at a good distance and stared at the grave marker for quite a while before edging up close to it. Once there, he said nothing. He stared at the letters and then left feeling numb. He had accomplished nothing. In fact, he had the strange idea that his grandmother wasn’t really buried there. Because he hadn’t felt her presence or heard her voice, he had difficulty believing that the graveyard was where her body and soul resided.

The next time he returned, he returned more out of curiosity than anything else. Would he sense her? He wouldn’t accept the idea that death meant the end of her. Something had to have remained behind; something strong enough to identify her.

He still felt her presence when he looked at her clothing in the closet and inhaled the scent of her body cremes and cologne. She was alive for him when he found strands of her hair still in the teeth of her comb in the bathroom. She smiled back at him in pictures, and in the rear of the lower shelf of the refrigerator, there was still a piece of the apple pie she had made the day before she died. He didn’t touch it, and his mother didn’t dare throw it out.

Why couldn’t he feel her presence as strongly at the graveyard where her remains had been placed? Was it because he had not come to terms with the reality of her death and refused to acknowledge the event?

She had never been away from him; she had never gone on a vacation or left to visit relatives. They had been separated for only parts of a day.

Finally, on the third day after her death, the reality of it settled in. He awoke in the morning, thinking, and then praying that what had happened had only been one of his vivid dreams. Why wasn’t that possible? His dreams had been confused with reality more and more lately. Besides, if his grandmother was really going to die, he would have foreseen it. It made no sense that he was able to foresee Mr. Hoffman’s death, but not his grandmother’s.

But the silence coming from the kitchen confirmed it. She wasn’t in there preparing his breakfast, and his mother, as usual, was not yet awake. He sat up and stared at the opened doorway, willing her to step into it. But nothing happened. Recent recollections, including the horror of the CCU, soon rushed in to fill the vacuum. All the morbid memories flowed freely, flooding him with the reality.

He got out of bed quickly and dressed. He permitted himself a glass of orange juice, only as an obligation to his body machine, not as something desired because of the taste or the pleasure. And then, before his mother could come out of her room, he rushed out the back door, mounted his bicycle, and rode the five miles to the cemetery.

The graveyard looked different so early in the morning. It was as if he had surprised the tombstones and monuments. The weaker sun, just rising over the east ridge, created longer, deeper shadows. But the shadows that he saw looked as if they emerged out of the stones rather than cast by them. It was what he saw within those shadows that gave him pause.

Each one seemed to take the shape of the person buried below. It reminded him of the time he had wondered whether his shadow and the shadows of others were the reality and his body and the bodies of others were the illusion.

As the earth turned and the sun moved up in the sky, the shadows contracted, but the forms within them hardened. Spirits were being born right before his eyes. Their longevity would be short, basically only until the sun was high enough to drive the shadows back into the stones.

He hurried over to his grandmother’s grave. The shadow had taken her shape, even though there was no face to be seen. He stepped into that shadow and closed his eyes. Suddenly he felt as if he were sinking into the earth. The ground had become like jello. It wobbled and parted, but he dared not open his eyes. He knew that the moment he did so, he would return it all to the way it was, but he kept his eyes closed because he knew he could do that anytime he wanted.

He sank lower and lower until he reached his grandmother’s coffin, only the lid was open and she was reaching up for him. She would embrace him. He saw she would take him down into the coffin with her, but he didn’t want to go to her.

Her face was not the face of the grandmother he knew; it was the face of the grandmother who died. She was chalk white with pale pink lips. The pupils in her eyes had lost their shape and looked like punctured egg yolks, the blue liquid thinning out in the white. Her beautiful, soft white hair had been turned into something more akin to thin wire, the roots of which were blue like the tips of the flames in the gas stove.

He halted his descent and she smiled.

“Go back, Gypsy eyes,” she whispered. “Go back to the living, but remember, you mustn’t think you can do too much, and you mustn’t be afraid of what you can do. Promise me. Promise me. Promise me…” Her voice trailed off.

“I promise!” he shouted and opened his eyes.

As he expected, he was standing on top of her grave, and the shadows were nothing more than shadows.

It was then that the tears really began. It was then that he felt the truth of her death. It was then that he admitted to the reality of his own existence, an existence without her. Ironically, he felt stronger for it, and when he pedaled his bike home, he peddled with determination, speed, and strength.

His mother was up, but she didn’t ask him where he had gone. She sensed it. She prepared a breakfast that wasn’t all that bad, and she told him that he should go back to school.

“You are coming to the end of the year, after all, and it’s bad to miss these days. Grandma wouldn’t want that, David. You know she wouldn’t.”

He nodded. Yes, he would go back. It made no sense to sulk in his room anymore.

Some of his friends were sympathetic and concerned; some were a bit distant, not sure about how to act with a person in bereavement. All of his teachers offered condolences. In a school as small as his was, most everyone knew everything that happened. He tried to make it easier for everyone, tried to behave as though nothing had happened, but his own voice betrayed him, and his laugh was nothing like his real laugh.

Nevertheless, he got through the day all right. It was when he left the school and started toward home that he became depressed again. He expected there would be mourners in his house, people there to comfort his mother.

But as he crossed the lawn toward his home, he heard his name called and turned to see Ted and Diane coming out of the side entrance.

“Where you going so fast?” Ted said as they approached him. “We saw you in the thirties corridor and tried to catch up.”

“Gotta get home,” he said. Diane came right up to him and took his hand.

“I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother, David.”

For a moment, looking into her eyes, seeing the warmth and the sincerity, nearly brought him to tears. He swallowed hard and nodded. She’s so beautiful, he thought and wondered if it were sinful to think about her beauty while talking about his dead grandmother.

“You gotta get right back into things, David,” Ted said. “It doesn’t do any good to think about it constantly. I know how I was when I lost my grandparents.”

Once again, David felt this need to share feelings and experiences with an older boy. Did Ted feel anything like what he felt? Could they go somewhere, just the two of them, and talk about it?

“He’s right,” Diane said.

“I know.”

“Why don’t you come along? We’re going for a soda at Chonin’s.”

For a moment he was speechless. Go along? With them? He and Ted and Diane?

“Sure, David. Come along,” she said smiling. She threaded her arm through his and pulled him close to her. His body tingled with excitement.

“Okay,” he said.

“That’s the Superman we know,” Ted said. He and Diane laughed, and he got the first hint of something unpleasant. They started toward Ted’s car, which was parked at the front of the school. Off to the right and down the sidewalk, he saw Merle and Carl involved in a box ball game. Suddenly it looked so childish to him to be doing that kind of thing.

He got in beside Diane, just the way he had that first time they gave him a lift, and Ted started the engine. David put his books on his lap and folded his hands over them. Diane reached back and placed her right arm on the seat, just behind him. If he leaned his head back far enough, he would feel her arm. Her breast grazed his left arm, sending an electric warmth through his body and instantly reviving the memory of her standing by her window. He closed and opened his eyes quickly. As they pulled away from the sidewalk and down the street, Carl and Merle stopped their game and looked.

“I was telling Diane about what you did for Westlake and Shatsky,” Ted said.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Diane said quickly. He shrugged, but didn’t look at her. He was afraid that if he did, she would see everything in his face. How could she not? He felt it so strongly, especially this close to her. “How do you do these things?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “They just happen sometimes. I can’t always do it,” he added, shooting a quick glance at Ted. Ted turned the car into a driveway, stopped, backed out, and headed for Chonin’s.

“Even so,” Diane said. “I think what you can do is fantastic. Have you tried anything else? When else have you been able to do it?” she asked quickly. He saw how interested in it she was, and that pleased him.

“Last week, Mr. Rosenfield said he was going to give us a test on one of four kinds of math problems we had learned, and I knew which one it was going to be before we got the test.”

“How?” Diane asked. “I mean, what did you do exactly?”

“I opened the textbook and put my hand on each chapter, closing my eyes as I did it. And it just came to me, so I just studied that one.”

“And that was it?” Ted asked. David nodded. “Jesus.”

“You’ve got some talent, David,” Diane said. “It’s wonderful to have something so special.” He felt his face warm. All he could do was shrug.

They pulled in front of Chonin’s and got out. As long as David could remember, Chonin’s had been something of a hangout for the high school kids, especially during the week. It was a big confectionery store, stocked with toys on shelves all along the walls, candy in cases and in bags hanging on racks, sundries and soda fountain. Every available space was used. The soda fountain wasn’t as long as Rosenblatt’s, but it was thicker and higher. Chonin’s was also the bus depot, so it was always busy, especially during the summer months when tourists from New York City came up to the Catskills to spend time in the hotels and bungalow colonies.

The soda fountain was to the left of the entrance. There were three empty stools at the far right corner. They went directly to it, and Diane sat between him and Ted. Ted said he was treating and insisted David order an ice cream soda. They all had root beer floats.

“I saw Buzzy’s neck,” Diane said, “right after he returned to school. He’s lucky he’s alive.”

“He said he had to have a dozen stitches in his head, too,” Ted added.

“I know,” David said. He didn’t want to talk about it for obvious reasons, but they thought it was because the event still frightened him.

“No clues as to who did it yet,” Ted said. “All Buzzy could remember was the guy was taller. I asked him if he thought it could be Gerry Porter. He said Charlie Williams asked him the same thing.”

“Did he?” David looked up with interest.

“Yeah, but he couldn’t say.”

“Every time I see Gerry Porter now, I get the creeps,” Diane said.

“He’s not necessarily the one,” David said.

“I know, but he always gave me the creeps anyway. Look at him,” she said.

“I don’t think he’s the one,” David said suddenly, with a great deal more assurance.

“How do you know? You know something? Sense something?” Ted asked.

“Naw, it’s just a…” He stopped and Ted started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Diane asked.

“That’s the way he explains all the things he can do,” Ted said. “Just a good guess.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe that’s all it really is,” David said.

They all turned around when Westlake called to them. He had come in with Charlie Burger. Charlie had graduated high school last year and started working as a full-time mechanic and grease monkey at Skip’s garage, which was located just out of Centerville.

Charlie had been a good athlete in high school, although he never played on any of the varsity teams. He stood six foot two and had long arms with thick forearms from working part-time as a mechanic most of his teenage life. He had been one of those students who did just enough to get by. Left on his own just about all of the time, he developed an earthy independence, smoked openly when he was only thirteen, hung around with upperclassmen, went with girls in other schools, and drove a car at night even before he had a license. He was forever talking about enlisting in the army, but now, especially with the Korean War still on, he wasn’t as enthusiastic about it.

David couldn’t remember a recent time when Charlie looked clean. Even when he got relatively dressed up, there was a gray, greasy hue about his face and neck. There was often some stubborn paint or oil stain on his fingers, and his fingernails were always dirty.

David noted that some girls didn’t seem to mind that, though. In fact, they acted as if it turned them on. Apparently for them, the dirty, weathered look gave Charlie an older, more experienced appearance. Although he was only nineteen, going out with him was like going out with an older man. He supported himself and now had his own apartment over Finkleman’s delicatessen.

“Hey, you’re with Wonderboy,” Westlake said. Charlie laughed, and they came up behind Ted, Diane, and him. David grimaced and directed his attention solely to his soda.

“You shouldn’t make fun of the guy who made it possible for you to take out the girl of your dreams, Westlake,” Ted said. Westlake wilted some and laughed nervously.

“I was telling Charlie about it,” he said.

“I got a comb in my back pocket,” Charlie said. “Found it yesterday in front of the garage.”

“Ugh,” Diane said. “And you use it?”

“Good comb,” he said taking it out. “Maybe little David here can tell us whose it is,” he added and laughed. He went down to the other end of the counter to talk to some people. Westlake pulled up alongside of Ted.

“Charlie ain’t a believer,” Westlake said.

“Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll show him a thing or two, huh, David?” Ted said.

“I don’t know,” David said looking up quickly.

“Oh yes, David,” Diane said. “Do something.”

“I can’t do anything,” he responded, but the look of disappointment in her face softened his tone. “I mean, I don’t know what to do.”

“I got an idea,” Ted said. “Just leave it to me.”

“Wait a minute,” David said.

“Oh let’s try,” Diane said. She touched his hand and he nodded.

“All right, but I can’t promise anything.”

“Just try, that’s all,” she said smiling. “What else can anyone ask for?”

They watched as Ted went to the other end of the counter to talk to Charlie Burger. Apparently, what he said amused and interested him, because he followed Ted back.

“All right, here’s the story: Charlie’s got ten dollars on him and I’ve got ten. Charlie’s going out of the store. He’s going to hide the ten he’s got somewhere on him. David’s gonna have one guess as to where it is. If he guesses it, he and I share the ten. If he doesn’t, I give Charlie my ten.”

“Wait a minute,” David said.

“It’s all right. I know you can do it, kid,” Ted said.

“But I don’t feel right risking your ten dollars.”

“If Ted’s willing to do it,” Diane said. Her face flushed with excitement. He looked at her a moment and wondered what it would be like to kiss the little freckles under her eyes gently. She took his forearm and squeezed it. “Do it for me,” she whispered.

“All right,” he said. “But I’ve got to touch the ten first.”

“Huh?” Charlie looked at Ted and Westlake.

“That’s not an unreasonable request, Charlie,” Ted said. “Getting scared?”

“Scared? Of what? Shit,” he said and held his ten dollar bill out. David took it into his hand slowly and held it there a moment, closing his eyes. “I don’t believe this shit,” Charlie said.

“Shh,” Ted said. “He’s concentrating.”

“He’s pulling your dick. That’s what he’s doin’. Gimme my ten back,” Charlie said. David opened his eyes and handed it to him. Charlie checked the bill and then looked at Ted Davis. “I go out, hide it, and then come back in, right?”

“You got it.”

“And he gets only one guess?”

“Right again.”

“Get your ten ready, sucker,” Charlie said and walked out of the store.

David took a deep breath and turned back to the counter. None of them noticed his nervousness.

“If I know that idiot, he’ll hide it in his shoe,” Westlake said.

“It won’t matter where he hides it,” Ted said.

“You really think he can do this?”

“He can do it,” Diane said. She touched his shoulder. “You can do it, can’t you, David?”

“All I said was, I would try.”

“Damn,” Westlake said. “Kiss your ten good-bye, Davis.”

“Looks like Charlie brought a cheering section along,” Ted said. They all looked at the front door as Charlie returned. Shirley Dorfman was right beside him. Shirley was only a junior in high school, but she sometimes went out with men nearly twice her age. She wasn’t very attractive, but she was big breasted and loose. Everyone knew for sure about one abortion, but there was talk of at least two more. She had a chubby face, dark-brown hair, and dull-brown eyes. Lately, she had been hanging around Skip’s garage.

Shirley wore a thin, white cotton cardigan sweater. The bra beneath it was so stiff it produced two sharp tips that pressed out emphatically. She wore a rust-brown shirt, which looked a size too tight, and brown loafers. Next to Charlie, she looked as if she were less than five feet tall. Actually, she was only five foot two. David had noticed the wideness in her hips before. Rube told him that came from being pregnant and getting laid so much. He wondered if that were so. Afterward, perhaps, he would ask Ted. He didn’t think Ted would laugh at the question and make him feel foolish for asking.

“Okay,” Charlie said. “One guess.” He stood before David, and Shirley came up beside him. She smiled widely and looked from Westlake to Ted to Diane.

David said nothing. He stared at Charlie Burger a moment and then looked at Ted and Diane. They were gaping at him in expectation. Westlake was shaking his head.

David closed his eyes and thought about the ten dollar bill. He ran his left forefinger along the inside of his right palm where he had held the money, and then he looked at Charlie again.

“Well?” Charlie said. “Come on. I got plans for Davis’s ten.” He laughed and put his arm around Shirley Dorfman.

“What do you say, David?” Diane asked softly.

“He doesn’t have it on him,” David said.

“What?” Charlie Burger’s smile faded slowly.

“What are you saying, David?” Ted asked. He stepped up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. David looked at Charlie and Shirley.

“He didn’t hide it on him.”

“Where did he hide it?” Ted asked. “Go on, tell him if you know.”

“He gave it to Shirley and she put it…put it in her bra,” David said.

“Holy shit,” Shirley said. “He saw. He was lookin’ at us.”

“He never left this spot,” Ted said. “Burger, you bastard. You were supposed to hide it on you.”

“Christ. How’d he do that?”

“It’s in her bra?” Diane said. “It’s there?”

“He saw,” Shirley repeated.

“How the hell did he see?” Charlie snapped. He took his arm off her and stepped away as if she were contaminated. “You went into the alley to do it, didn’t ya?”

“I’ll take the ten,” Ted said, holding out his hand. “I mean, David and I will take it,” he added. Shirley looked at Charlie.

“Give it to him, for Christsakes,” he said. He shook his head and went back to the other end of the counter. Shirley turned her back, reached into her sweater, and came out with the ten dollar bill. She placed it in Ted’s hand gingerly.

“Feels kind of hot,” he said. Westlake laughed.

“I saw it, but I still don’t believe it,” Westlake said.

“Why not? You saw what he did in Liberty, didn’t you?” Ted said. “I’ll get two fives, David,” he said and went to the counter to have it changed.

David said nothing. He was looking down at the floor because he was struggling with conflicting feelings. In one sense he was proud of his success; he hadn’t been confident of succeeding at all. But in another sense, he felt guilty again. If, indeed, he had a power, why couldn’t he apply it to things that really mattered, like helping his grandmother? Her last words echoed in his mind: “You mustn’t think you can do too much.”

It was all so confusing, but he didn’t have a chance to wallow in confusion long. Diane touched his hand and brought his eyes up to confront her. Her eyes were filled with admiration. He could see the excitement had built within her.

“That was wonderful, David,” she said, and she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

He couldn’t wait to do something else to please and excite her, and his desire to do so was so strong that he could no longer hear the rest of his grandmother’s dying admonition: “You must be afraid of what you can do.”

7

The senior boys spread the news of David’s accomplishments quickly, and the result was more attention and more flattery than he ever dreamed he would experience. The adulation came at a good time because it distracted him from missing his grandmother.

Ted Davis began to behave like a manager, booking performances. Usually Diane would accompany them, always smiling at David, holding his hand, hugging him, urging him to do even more.

Sometimes Ted used a deck of cards and David, after bets had been made, proved he could guess what a card, kept facedown, was four out of five times. A few times, he was unable to do it. Something broke his concentration or he was bored. Almost always his failures occurred when Diane wasn’t around.

Having someone hide money on his body and then having David guess where it was remained the favorite trick. In one week he and Ted made fifty dollars, which they shared. After a while it became difficult, if not impossible, to get anyone to bet. They had to go outside the school community, traveling about to find former graduates and other people Ted knew who worked in the area.

David didn’t tell his mother anything about this, even though he’d started to feel better about his mother. She had quickly assumed most of the responsibilities and functions his grandmother had performed. She got up early enough in the morning to prepare him breakfast and a bag lunch, if he wanted that. She looked after his clothes regularly and maintained the house with far more attention to cleanliness and order than David thought her capable.

He sensed that his mother filled her own emptiness and eased her own sorrow by doing things the way his grandmother had done them. Just as it had been with his grandmother, nothing was ever clean enough. A rug could never be vacuumed sufficiently; furniture never polished too much. After work in the drugstore and on her days off, she was scrubbing fixtures in the bathroom, washing the kitchen floor, or straightening out closets and drawers.

Because of the intensity with which she attacked the house and took on the responsibilities, she was oblivious to the subtle but definite changes taking place in David. She didn’t notice his new sophisticated look, the attention he gave to his appearance. His clothing, his hair, even his fingernails became critical. He wouldn’t leave the house for school in the morning if he wasn’t coordinated and if the cowlick in the back of his head wasn’t plastered down neatly. He was late for school a few times because of all this.

His school work began to suffer as academics took a back seat to his friends, especially since he was friendly with new and older students. He spoke to his old buddies, but he no longer had the time or interest to do the things they did. Playing against the wall or King of the Hill was juvenile, unless the competition included a monetary bet. That was what the older boys taught him and that was what he came to believe.

His old friends resented him, partly because they were jealous of his relationships with the older boys, and partly because of his new arrogance. Almost every day after school he went off in a car with Ted Davis or Westlake. In the school corridors between classes, he gravitated to the juniors and seniors, either to listen to their conversations or do some trick to amuse them, like reading minds.

He couldn’t do it with anywhere near the accuracy he pretended he could, but because he was able to seize on some common thought and guess the correct numbers or colors someone thought about, they began to accept anything he said as gospel. If he didn’t like someone, he found he could strike at him or her by pretending to reveal an embarrassing thought. Consequently, more and more of the upperclassmen began to cater to him and ingratiate themselves with him so he wouldn’t make them look foolish in front of everyone.

No one could threaten him as long as he moved about the school under the unwritten, but nevertheless clear protection of seniors like Ted Davis and Westlake. Although he was still very much infatuated with Diane Jones, the attention of older girls like Shirley Dorfman, Pamela Sue Brody, and Marsha Goodman interested and excited him. None of them were as beautiful as Diane, but they were all sexually sophisticated, appealing to his imagination and his ego.

One result of his developing relationships with older kids was that he was invited to their open-house parties on weekends. None of his previous friends had been invited before, and none attended these parties now, not even Rube. At first he was invited to provide some entertainment. He did simple things like find something that had been hidden in the house or the pea under the shell game.

After a while the novelty began to wear off and although he was still brought along, he was asked less and less to perform. However, the aura of magic and mystery remained around him, and that was enough to attract and maintain female interest. At first all they would do was toy with him: talk to him, flirt harmlessly with him, and dance with him. They were always brushing his hair or folding the collars on his shirts.

But at Marsha Goodman’s open house one Friday night, Pamela Sue Brody went further. He could see that she and some other girls had been discussing him before he arrived. After he entered the house, he saw them smile and giggle and whisper, and he sensed that something was going to happen.

Ted and Diane hadn’t arrived yet; David had come with Westlake. From the way Westlake was behaving, David suspected that he was in on it, too.

Marsha’s parents would be away until the following afternoon. She and her friends had brought out her father’s alcohol supply, and the six packs of beer some of the boys had brought along were set aside for the harder stuff. He was given half a glass of straight rye. He hated the taste and the way it burned as it flowed down his throat, but the girls were around him, and it was difficult to put it aside.

In fact Marsha said, “It probably takes a great deal more booze to get a guy with your mental powers drunk.” He thought that might be so, although he couldn’t say for sure, having hardly drunk any whiskey.

Marsha had a nice house. It was a long, brick ranch with four bedrooms and a finished basement playroom. The party began in the playroom, but as the evening wore on and the lights became dimmer, couples began to wander off to claim their places upstairs.

Unbeknownst to David, one bedroom had been reserved: Marsha’s parents’ bedroom. He was still nursing the last third of his drink when Ted and Diane arrived. They said hello, then went off to dance in the shadows to the slow music. He watched them enviously for awhile, the warmth of the whiskey no longer distasteful or unpleasant. Instead, he felt a comfortable glow.

It was at that point that Pamela made her move. She asked him to dance; she made him hold her closer and began to kiss him on the neck, pressing her breasts firmly against him.

Pamela was only an inch or two taller than he was. She was supposed to be a senior, but she had failed three subjects last year and was still classified as a junior. She had a narrow face, the most interesting aspect of which was her hazel-brown, deep-set eyes, but her nose was too long and her mouth too wide, ruining the symmetry. She had a slim torso, but her hips were somewhat wide, exaggerating the uplift of her rear. This was emphasized whenever she wore jeans.

This evening she wore a light-blue, V-neck sweater blouse and a tight, dark-blue skirt. Her necklace plunged deeply into her cleavage. The strands of her dark-brown hair lay neatly over her shoulders.

As David danced with her, she began to take more and more of a lead, pressing him this way and that, cupping him behind the head and pulling him forward, even awkwardly at times. The girls behind them were hysterical, but he didn’t see that. He was having trouble keeping himself steady. His head began to spin.

“It’s so hot in here,” she said, “and so crowded. Let’s go upstairs.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s go upstairs. I want you to tell my fortune.”

“I don’t tell fortunes,” he said. What did she mean by go upstairs? he wondered.

“That’s all right. I’ll tell yours.”

“Huh?”

“Stop saying huh. You sound like Clarence Stanley.” She turned, looked at her friends, and then took him by the hand and led him up the stairs to Marsha’s parents’ bedroom. The alcohol had rushed to his brain, but instead of making him giddy and high, it left him somewhat lethargic and confused. Before he realized what was happening, Pamela had him in the bedroom and on the bed.

He stared at her stupidly, his eyes blinking.

“When you kiss someone,” she said, “do you feel something special?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about that person? Does she?”

“Huh?”

“Oh shit,” she said and brought her lips to his so quickly she nearly pushed him over on his back. “Don’t you like me?”

“Like you? Sure.”

“Good. Now tell me what you feel when I kiss you.” She did it again. “Well?”

“Um…” It was so hard to think. Here he was, in a bedroom with a girl three years older than he, a girl Diane’s age. “It’s like…falling.”

“Falling? Falling from what?”

“From an airplane,” he said, even though he had never been in one.

“My God. Just falling?” She thought for a moment. “Yes, I’ve felt that way sometimes.” She studied him a moment and then kissed him again. He had his eyes opened and saw that she had shut hers tightly. She held the kiss so long, he nearly lost his breath. “I felt it,” she said. “Come on. You can do more.”

“Do more?”

“See more, feel more, know more,” she responded quickly, punching out her words angrily. He didn’t know what to say; he wasn’t sure what she wanted.

Impatient, she took his left hand and placed it on her breast. She held her hand over his as if she thought he would pull away. His eyes widened in surprise and she laughed.

“The girls think you can tell who’s done it and who hasn’t,” she said.

“Done it?”

“Fucked,” she said, pressing her upper teeth over the outside of her lower lip at the start of her pronunciation of the word.

“Oh.”

“You don’t know who’s done it and who hasn’t, do you? Not really. You can’t tell that.”

“I didn’t say I could.” He looked at his hand on her breast as if it were no longer a part of him, and he wanted to see what it would do. Then he looked up at her. “I didn’t say I couldn’t either,” he added.

“What do you think about me?”

“I don’t know enough,” he said. From where did the words come? He was amazed at his own forwardness. She smiled and nodded. Then she backed away. He thought that was going to be it, but she stood up and in one quick motion, drew her sweater blouse up and over her head. She dropped it on the bed and reached back to unfasten her bra. As she slid the garment down her arms, her breasts relaxed. He was surprised at how quickly they lost shape. Her bosom was not nearly as firm as Diane’s.

“Now you know more,” she said and sat beside him again. When she kissed him this time, he put his hand on her bare breast himself and caught her nipple between his forefinger and index finger. She moaned, and the sound of it increased his excitement so quickly he thought he would lose all control.

“Tell me what you see; tell me what you feel,” she demanded as she kissed him harder and longer, trailing her lips over his cheeks and down his neck. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her fingers down his chest. Then she shifted to the right so she could comfortably bring her hand down farther until she reached his crotch.

The shock of a girl grabbing him there nearly threw him into a retreat. He wanted to bolt for the door, but her grip softened and warmed. She was making small circular motions with her palm. He was drawn to it as his blood rose to the surface.

“Tell me more,” she whispered again. “More, more…”

“I…” She pressed her tongue into his mouth. He closed his eyes. Her fingers had moved up to the top button on his pants. He felt her undo it.

“Yes?” she said. “Yes?”

The sexual excitement and the whiskey churned his thoughts. Images began to spin. He could barely make out shapes or faces. Colors merged into rainbows. Faces liquefied. He opened his eyes and looked into hers. Her hand was in and under his underwear. He felt the tips of his fingers reach down. He was sinking, but sinking into her. Sex magnetized them. They were merging. It was almost as if—yes, he could see himself through her eyes. He looked as if he were growing, expanding with every beat, every pulsation. Now, he was absorbing her. She was sinking into him.

Was she still talking? He heard voices, one of which was hers, but she wasn’t talking exactly—she was screaming. He closed his eyes. Naked, she was squatting in a bathroom somewhere and there was blood, a thin pool of it around her feet. In her hands was a straightened hanger.

The screaming continued. It was too ugly; it was too terrible. He could stand it no longer. He opened his eyes and discovered that it was he who was screaming.

Still bare breasted, Pamela sat back from him, a look of shock and surprise on her face.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t tell me that hurt? I haven’t seen a boy yet who didn’t love it.”

“Huh?”

“Oh shit with your huh.” She stepped off the bed.

He looked down at himself and saw that his pants had been undone and his fly zipped all the way down. She put on her bra and reached for her sweater.

“So much for magical sex,” she said. “Everyone’s going to be disappointed.”

“Everyone’s what?”

“What did you think? I had the hots for you?”

“What do you mean?” He sat up and closed his pants. He was beginning to feel nauseous.

“Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.” She looked at him curiously for a moment. “Why did you scream? Were you afraid or something?”

“No. I…” This was some kind of experiment, he realized and recalled how the girls looked when he first entered Marsha’s house. Even Westlake probably knew about this, he thought. Who knew who else was in on it? A group of them could be waiting right outside the door for the story. “I saw something…something terrible,” he said.

“Yeah? And what was that? My hand on your cock?”

“No. It was you in a bathroom, bleeding to death,” he said. Her mouth dropped.

“You’re lying.”

“It’s what I saw. You were squatting on the floor, and there was blood all around you. In your hand—”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s a lie. You got scared; that’s all. It’s the first time a girl ever touched you. You’re lying,” she repeated. He shook his head. “What bathroom? Where?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t recognize it. Maybe it was your house. You looked older, though.”

“I hate you,” she said. “You’re cruel.” She turned quickly and went to the door. Then she looked back at him. “You’re lying, you bastard,” she said and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

He sat up in the bed and rubbed his face. Why did he drink so much whiskey? The nausea wasn’t lessening, and his head continued to spin. He had to lie back again and close his eyes. Almost as soon as he did so, he fell asleep.

He wasn’t sure how long he was there before Ted came. He had to shake him to wake him.

“Hey, what the hell happened to you?”

He looked past him and saw Diane standing in the doorway. He sat up slowly and wiped his face, remembering. Then he looked to see if there was anyone else standing behind her. It didn’t look like there was.

“I guess I had too much to drink,” he said.

“You scared the shit out of Pamela. She’s telling all kinds of stories about you downstairs. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

“He doesn’t belong here, Ted. He shouldn’t be brought to these parties. He’s too young,” Diane said. He heard it, heard it clearly, and it struck him like a blow behind the neck. It had the effect of sobering him somewhat. He looked about the bedroom, remembering it all, even the horrible visions.

“Come on,” Ted urged. “You’ve got to get out in the air.”

He let Ted lead him out of the bedroom and to the front door of the house. When he stepped outside, the cool air did relieve him somewhat. He saw that Diane hadn’t followed. Maybe she didn’t want anything else to do with him anymore.

“I’ll take you home,” Ted said.

“No, that’s all right,” he said. “I’ll walk.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“All right,” Ted said. “The walk is probably what you need, buddy. See you.”

“Yeah, see you,” he said and started away. He turned back after a few steps, but the door was already closed.

Marsha Goodman’s house was a mile and a half from Centerville. There was no streetlights this far out so he had to walk through the pitch-black night. An occasional passing vehicle lit the road ahead of him, but as long as he remained on the macadam, there was no real difficulty. He had walked alone in the evening on dark country roads before. Of course, tonight was different. He was still feeling the effects of the alcohol, and he was upset.

However, none of this could explain the sudden cold feeling he felt at the base of his neck. It started down his back, sliding along his spinal column like an icicle melting in the bright, late winter sun. He shivered, hugged himself, and then spun around.

Someone was there in the darkness, watching him. He could feel him, even though he couldn’t see him. His heart started to pound, and the cold chill turned quickly into a hot flash. He peered into the darkness, straining to distinguish shapes and figures. Who was it? What did he want? Had one or more of the kids followed him out of the house for a joke? It would be just like them to do something like this, he thought. The ridicule he had already suffered didn’t satisfy them. They were all high on booze.

He saw a shadow move against the inky background and sensed a familiarity. He knew this shadowy figure; it was the same shadowy figure that had been in the woods at Diane Jones’s house. Whoever had attacked Buzzy was standing out there, waiting, watching.

For a few moments, he couldn’t move. His feet were frozen to the pavement, as if the icicle he had first felt on his spine had settled under the soles of his shoes, binding him to the road. Indeed, he felt like someone who had stepped on thin ice and was now sinking into the water, the intense cold making it impossible for him to struggle against his drowning.

Who was he? What did he want?

The shadowy figure merged into the background and moved closer to the house. David realized the dark evil wasn’t after him. Whoever the dark figure was, he was waiting for someone else to come out of that house. Someone else was in danger.

He looked down the road toward the village and home. It would be easy for him to break into a run and make it to the perimeter of illumination cast by the first streetlight. But he couldn’t just flee to save his own skin. Besides, it wasn’t his skin the evil was after.

He turned back to the house, clinging to the heart of the darkness as he scurried along the shoulder of the road. He watched for the shadowy evil, but he saw nothing and was able to make it back to the front door safely. He looked back once and then went in.

The music downstairs had changed. Now it was loud and fast, and the voices of the kids sounded more frenzied and louder as well. There was a lot more shouting, a lot more laughing. He realized all or most of them had done considerable drinking by now and were probably feeling the effects. He paused at the doorway to the basement because Carrie Dickens and Bob Sacks emerged from one of the bedrooms behind him. When Carrie saw him standing there, she straightened her skirt and ran the palms of her hands down the sides of her blouse. He couldn’t help staring.

“What are you looking at?” Sacks asked belligerently as they went past him and down the stairs to the basement. A moment later he followed them, but he stopped on the stairway as soon as he reached the step low enough to give him full view of the basement and the crowd within. No one noticed him or paid any attention to him.

He stared at them all, moving his eyes over each of them to see if he sensed anyone in particular danger, but they all looked the same. Finally, Ted, who was standing by the refreshment table in the rear with Diane, turned from the boys he was talking to and looked his way.

“Hey!” he called. David didn’t respond. “Hey,” he repeated, raising his voice and tapping Diane on the shoulder. He pointed to David. She turned, too, looking impatient about his reappearance.

Ted went to the phonograph and lifted the arm off the record. There was a loud groan from those who were dancing. Ted raised both his hands, palms out, and pumped the air a few times. Then he pointed to David. Everyone looked with curiosity. Some of the girls giggled, and there were more groans and complaints.

“Quit for a minute, will ya,” Ted said. “What’s up, David? Why did you come back?”

“There’s someone out there,” he said. He said it slowly, dryly, in a so matter-of-fact tone that no one responded for a few moments.

“Is it the boogeyman?” Peter Carson asked. Everyone laughed.

“Yes,” David said, but because he didn’t crack a smile, everyone stopped laughing. “And he’s just waiting for someone. I don’t know who he is waiting for, but he’s waiting.”

“Jesus. What an imagination,” Marsha Goodman said. “You better stick to your tricks,” she added. There was general agreement and some more laughter.

“It’s past your bedtime,” Pamela said stepping forward. “That’s why you’re having all these dreams.”

“Not wet dreams,” someone quipped, and there was more laughter.

David didn’t budge.

“He’s out there. Waiting,” he said.

“Oh Jesus. Take him home,” Marsha said turning to Ted. “He’s your pet.”

Ted looked at Diane and then up at David.

“Shit,” he said. He and Diane started across the floor. Someone put the phonograph arm back on the record, and the dancing and conversation resumed, even louder than before. “Let’s go,” Ted said starting up the stairs.

“He’s out there,” David repeated.

“Yeah, yeah. Go on,” Ted said, waving him forward. Diane stopped behind them at the top of the stairs.

“Maybe I’ll just wait here for you. It won’t take you that long,” she said. Ted nodded, annoyed. He put his hands on David’s shoulders and headed him toward the front door.

“You shouldn’t leave her here,” David said when they stepped out of the house.

“Maybe this thing is getting to your head, David. It was fun at first, but I don’t know now.”

David studied the shadows in front of the house and across the road, but he no longer sensed the same danger. Ted looked in the directions he was studying.

“I don’t see anything or anyone, David.”

“He’s not there now, but he was.”

“Yeah. Okay. Let’s go. I’ll take you home. No telling what you would get into if I let you walk.”

“I can walk,” David said. “You better stay here with her.”

“She’s not going to go anywhere without me, and she’ll just get pissed off if I don’t take you, so come on.”

Reluctantly, David walked to Ted’s car. He paused once again to study the darkness around the house.

Nothing.

“Come on,” Ted said. “I want to get back, not baby-sit all night.” David got in and they started toward town.

“I’m telling the truth,” David said. He regretted the whine in his voice.

“Maybe you oughta stop coming to these parties, David. These kids are too old for you.”

“It’s got nothing to do with it. I was on my way to town when I felt him watching me, so I turned around and saw the shadow. It was the same shadow that attacked Buzzy.”

“A shadow can’t attack someone, David. It’s got to be a person.”

“I know, but…” He wondered if he should try to explain his theory about shadows and reality. Would Ted understand? “Maybe shadows are the real thing,” he began.

Ted made the turn into town and stepped on the accelerator. “What the hell are you talking about now?”

“Shadows may be more than shadows. How do we know they’re not?”

“Oh man. Look. I think we’ll lay off the tricks for a while, kid.”

“No, I’m serious. Didn’t you ever think about it?”

“Not recently, no, but later tonight I’ll see if I can strike up a conversation with my shadow,” he added and laughed. David felt the heat rush to his face.

“I thought I could talk to you,” he said.

“Sure, you can talk. Only talk sense.” Ted turned up his hill and brought the car to a quick stop in front of David’s house. “Here you are. Get a good night’s sleep. And put your shadow to sleep, too,” he said. “He needs a rest.”

“Thanks a lot,” David said and got out quickly. Ted peeled out, spinning the gravel up against the fence. David stormed into his house, waking his mother, who had fallen asleep in his grandmother’s chair. The radio was still on even though the radio station signed off, and there was only static. Once she realized what had happened, she sat up quickly.

“Look how late it is. Where were you?”

“At a party,” he said and started for his room. She rose out of the chair to follow him.

“Wait a minute, David.” He turned around and could see from the way her nose moved that she had caught the scent of whiskey. “Where the hell were you?”

“I told you. At a party.”

“What party?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I want to know.”

“Marsha Goodman’s house.”

“Marsha Goodman?” She thought for a moment. “Isn’t she a senior?”

“So what?”

“What are you doing with the seniors?”

“Playing spin the bottle,” he said and laughed. Her face reddened.

“You’ve been drinking whiskey. I smell it. My God.” She brought her hands to the base of her throat. The pained expression on her face reminded him of his grandmother and made him feel guilty for being a wise guy.

“I gotta go to sleep,” he said.

“This is what you’ve been doing? Staying out late these nights, hanging around with older kids, and drinking whiskey. You’re taking after your father.”

“What do you mean?” He stepped toward her. “He was a drunk?”

She didn’t respond. She just kept nodding as though everything she had suspected was now confirmed.

“I don’t want you going to any more of these parties,” she said. “Do you hear me?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not. They think I’m a joke. They think I made it up about the shadows,” he said. He was just babbling now; he felt lonely and sad again. His grandmother’s absence made the air stifling and heavy. It was as if a dark, gray cloud had entered the house. Even though he was only a short distance from his mother, she looked out of focus. He was looking at her through gauze.

“What shadows? What are you talking about?” He didn’t respond. “You’re drunk. Go to sleep.”

He nodded and looked to his right. Then he turned completely around and looked behind him and then to his left.

“What is it now?”

“I’m looking for my shadow,” he said. “He’s got to sleep, too.” The shocked look on her face made him laugh. He laughed again and again until his laughter began to turn into crying. The tears flowed down his cheeks. She went to him and pulled him to her, embracing him tightly.

“Oh David, poor David.”

It felt good to have her hold him. He closed his eyes and pressed his face against her warm body. Finally, she led him to his bedroom, still holding him against her. He got undressed and crawled into bed. She brought the blanket up to his chin and tucked him in, just the way his grandmother used to do it. She stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. She even hummed a few bars of one of the Hungarian melodies his grandmother used to hum. He closed his eyes and then he heard her leave the room, closing the door gently behind her.

Almost immediately he envisioned himself on the dark road just outside Marsha Goodman’s house. Only this time he saw himself running. He was in a panic. He turned when car headlights washed over him, and he saw that the approaching vehicle was a hearse. He squatted back in the darkness and watched it go by. It was Mr. Sills again, but now the back of the hearse was opened and as it went past, David saw a deer laid out like a person in a coffin. The animal was frozen. There was actual frost on its hooves and nose.

He fell asleep with that image on his mind.

8

The more David thought about what had happened to him at Marsha Goodman’s party, the more indignant he felt. He was embarrassed by what had occurred, especially when he was with Pamela Sue, but he was also angry and disappointed in the way Ted had treated him that night. He decided to avoid the upperclassmen, which was a good thing since they began to avoid him as well. For days afterward, he knew he was being made fun of.

A group of junior and senior girls would be talking in the halls at school. When he appeared, just the sight of him set them giggling. He knew they were still laughing at him for returning to the house to warn them that night. Also, he imagined Pamela had related the tale of the episode in the bedroom, elaborating on it. It was her way of getting even with him for the vision he had described, the vision that had frightened her.

Ted was aloof toward him. The day after the party Ted asked him if he had suffered a hangover. When he told him he had, Ted shook his head and said, “You better wait a couple of years before you do that again, Houdini.”

His face flushed and his heart began pounding as he watched Ted walk on to join Westlake and his other friends.

In the days ahead they didn’t ask David to join them; he no longer took rides with them after school. Their amusing themselves with him had ended, and now that it had, he realized how much they had taken advantage of him. He felt abused and even ashamed, especially because of the secret things he had told Ted. He had trusted someone and exposed a very intimate part of himself.

It wasn’t long before Ted shared those things with his friends. One day Westlake asked him if he was afraid of his shadow, and Shatsky told him he saw the shadow of a werewolf in his backyard. David tried to ignore them.

Even Diane seemed standoffish. She still smiled at him when he looked at her, but he read the smile differently. She was no longer looking at him with admiration and respect; she smiled at him the way she would smile at a child. This angered him the most.

He felt even worse when he tried turning back to his old buddies. Having neglected and ignored them in favor of the older students, they were understandably bitter. If he asked them what they were doing, they would respond, “Why? You feel like slumming today?”

For a while he found himself totally alone. He felt like a leper. He watched his old friends ride by on their bikes or go off together, and he wondered what he could do to win back their confidence and friendship.

One thing he stopped doing was performing any mental tricks. He told everyone who asked about it that it had all been a joke, something planned and contrived by the senior boys. The aura that had been built around him quickly dissipated and he was relegated back to the ranks of just another teenager. He accepted that willingly, eagerly. His powers had only brought him unhappiness, despite the money he and Ted had won and the excitement of being with the older boys.

Slowly his friends began to take him back. He suffered his penance. He lost his arrogance and gladly accepted whatever they offered, be it a quick game of against-the-wall or box ball or a bike ride to the nearby hamlet of Mountaindale and back.

The school year was speeding to its end. Final exams were only a week away. There wasn’t much time to waste. He had a New York State Regents exam to take in math and a great deal of studying and catching up to do in all his subjects. He couldn’t prevent his mother from seeing the poor showing he had made in the final quarter while he was romancing the juniors and seniors, but he could make up for it by doing well on his final exams and boosting his final averages in all his subjects.

He had fallen back into an organized pattern of existence, scheduling his time and putting the adventures of the past few weeks behind him.

Then one night, Diane called.

At first he didn’t recognize her voice. He thought it might be one of those senior girls who enjoyed making fun of him. The phone call was just another one of their games. He was about to hang up when she identified herself.

“Diane?”

“Yes, David. Have you forgotten what I sound like so quickly?”

“No, I just thought…no, I haven’t forgotten it.”

“You’re not angry at me, are you? I didn’t have anything to do with those girls who made fun of you at the party.”

“I know,” he said, not wanting her to know how much she had hurt him.

“Because you know I like you, and I still think you have a wonderful talent, despite what some of the other kids might say and think. I know better, don’t I? I know it’s not a trick, even though it is a form of magic.”

“A form of magic?” Funny, he thought. He had never considered it to be magic. He had always felt it to be something spiritual. Magic implied illusions, things that eventually could be explained, like the way Houdini got out of handcuffs.

“Yes, but a wonderful form of magic,” she added. Why was she being so flattering? he wondered. “Anyway, I wanted to know if you had time to help me.”

“Help you? How?”

“I haven’t been doing so well in social studies, and I need it to graduate. Actually, I’m just passing. If I fail this final…and you know, Mr. Kissen…he wouldn’t hesitate to fail me, even if it meant I wouldn’t graduate. He failed Lucy Templeton last year, and she had to go to summer school to graduate in August.”

“Yeah,” he said. She was right about Mr. Kissen. “So what can I do? I haven’t had that subject yet.”

“I remembered what you told me about how you studied for that math test…how you knew exactly what Mr. Rosenfield was going to ask and studied all the right things.”

“Oh?”

“I borrowed Arthur Griff’s mounds of notes. He’s exempt from the test because he has an average over ninety-five, but it’s so much to study. I’ll never get it done, and I’ll probably study all the wrong things.”

“I don’t know what I can do. It’s not the same thing.”

“You could do something, David. I just know you can. Won’t you try?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to try.”

“Come over here and look at the notes and do what you did…you know, put your hand on some of them and…and maybe you’ll know if that’s going to be on the test.”

“But what if I’m wrong?”

“So? What difference will it make? It’s just hit and miss for me right now.” She paused and he didn’t say anything. “I sorta thought you’d want to,” she added in a much softer tone of voice.

The warmer note revived his erotic memories of her. She wanted him over her house; he would be close to her again. Despite all that had happened, for him she remained the quintessential girl, the one against whom he would measure all girls, perhaps even the one he would eventually marry.

But he was afraid of resurrecting his powers. It had been weeks since he had had any terrible visions or dreams. He thought it was possible that all that was past him. It was almost as if he had recuperated from some illness. Yet here she was suggesting he do some of the same things that brought about the early symptoms.

“When do you want me to do this?” he asked. He couldn’t get himself to say no outright, but he hoped to stall until he found the strength to resist.

“What about right now?”

“Right now?”

“It’s not too late and we could get a start. There’s only four more days until the test.”

“Right now?” he repeated. He was trying to drive home the significance of what she was suggesting. “What about Ted?” he asked. There was no obvious reason to ask about him, but he could think of nothing else to say.

“Ted?”

“Yeah, I mean…can’t he help you?”

“No. Don’t you remember? Ted’s not taking sociology; he’s taking economics.”

“Oh?”

“Are you coming or not?” she asked. He heard the impatience slipping into her voice. He looked about the kitchen for a moment as though the spirit of his grandmother was present and could lend him support. His mother was in the living room doing one of her crossword puzzles and listening to the radio. Since he had stopped hanging around with the older kids and had begun to spend more time at home working on his schoolwork, a quiet truce had settled between them.

“All right,” he said, “but I can’t promise anything.”

“I know. Thanks. See you soon,” she added and hung up. He stood there with the receiver in his hand, feeling like he had just made a pact with the devil.

His mother heard him go to the front door.

“David? Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m just going to study with someone.”

“With who?” He heard her get up and turn the radio volume down.

“One of the kids in my class,” he responded quickly. Before she could pursue it any further, he went out the door.

He hadn’t been going out at night for close to a week. Right after supper, he started on his own schoolwork, only taking breaks to listen to an occasional radio show. The studying made him tired early, but he was grateful for that because he fell asleep soon after going to bed. It helped him avoid thinking and remembering.

However, the moment he stepped out, the night welcomed him like an old friend. There was nearly a clear sky and the half moon, tinted somewhat red, and the streetlights so illuminated his surroundings that he felt it was a lot earlier than it really was. He thought the deeper shadows were driven back, kept closer to the buildings and trees.

But when he turned up Diane Jones’s road, he thought the shadows had grown longer and began moving out boldly. He had the feeling he was entering their territory, crossing over dangerous borders again. He looked back. The street behind him did look darker and more narrow. Despite the moonlight and despite the streetlights, the darkness here was enveloping him. It was more powerful. Soon he would be swallowed up completely. He rushed on to her house.

Almost before he took his finger off the button for the doorbell, she was opening the door. She was wearing a pair of tight, light-blue shorts and a dark-blue, short-sleeve blouse made of material so thin that he could clearly see her bosom outlined within it. She had brushed her hair back and pinned it up with pearl-white barrettes. Although she wore no rouge or lipstick, her face was rosy and her lips wet pink. Her little freckles were never brighter.

“Hi,” she said. He saw her sister poke her head out from the doorway of her own room and then retreat disinterested. “Come on in,” she added when he didn’t move.

He looked about, expecting her parents to appear, but he sensed from the silence that they weren’t home. The lights were dim in the living room.

“No one’s home but me and my sister. Come on. I have everything in my room,” she said.

“Your room?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled.

To be in that room, the room that he had once imagined himself in while she was preparing for a shower, to actually be in it alone with her, intensified his excitement. He thought she could see it in his face because her eyes sparkled with amusement.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he repeated.

“You’ll do something,” she said and as if to encourage him, she took his hand to lead him to her room. “Aren’t you doing this for yourself with your own subjects?” she asked at her doorway.

“No. I kinda stopped doing these things.”

“Why? Oh, because what happened at Marsha’s. Don’t let that stuff bother you. Those kids don’t understand. They’re so immature,” she added. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her why then did she act so embarrassed when he returned to the house to warn them. Why didn’t she come to his aid? But he couldn’t be that hard, not now, not standing right beside her and looking into those soft blue eyes.

“I thought you were bored with it by now, too,” he said.

“Me? Never, silly. How can I be bored with the wonderful things you’ve done,” she said, widening her eyes for emphasis and encouragement. He felt he was being manipulated, but he couldn’t help being flattered by it. What difference did it make if she were sincere or not when she stroked him like this? And who knew? Maybe he could do something magical for her.

However, the moment he entered her room, he felt dizzy. He closed his eyes to steady himself, but instead, he saw himself walking into and out of mirrors, threading his way about by merging with his image in the glass and then emerging from it, only to enter another reflection. What was real and what was illusion? Was he actually in this room standing beside her? Or was this another one of his vivid dreams? Any moment he’d wake up in his own room.

He opened his eyes and looked at the materials she had laid out on her bed. Then his gaze went to the windows. The shades were up again, but because of the bright lights in the room, the windowpanes were dark. They were turned into mirrors. He seemed to see himself looking in at himself.

“Everything’s there,” she said, pointing to the pile of notes and the books on her bed. “It’s chronologically arranged, too. Arthur kept great notes.”

“Then why don’t you just study them?”

“All that?” She grimaced. “I haven’t been keeping up. Half of it is like new stuff to me.”

He smiled and shook his head. Then he walked over to the bed and gingerly sat down on it. When the palm of his right hand touched the bedspread, he envisioned her under the covers, sleeping only in her panties. She touched his shoulder.

“Try something. Anything,” she said and went to close her door.

“All right.” He reached for the first pile of notes and brought it to him, setting it on his lap. She stood back as though there could be some kind of danger when he first began. He saw the look of hope and wonder in her face. It made her appear younger, more like a little girl dazzled by a magician who could pull a rabbit out of his hat. However, he really had no idea what to do.

What he did do was put both his hands, palm down, on the small pile of papers and close his eyes. He thought about the material and her test. He even thought about Mr. Kissen, but nothing came to him; nothing replaced the image of her face. It was as if he could see through his closed eyelids. He couldn’t get her eyes out of his.

He wanted to pretend. He wanted to please her in some way, but, not being that familiar with the subject, he didn’t even know what to make up. He couldn’t tell her what chapters to avoid, what subject headings on which to concentrate. He didn’t know vocabulary, identifications, concepts. There was no way to lie.

“Well?” she asked when he opened his eyes. He shook his head.

“I didn’t get anything.”

“Try again. Are you doing everything you did when you helped yourself?”

“Yeah, but…I knew something about the subject.”

She smirked and folded her arms just under her breasts.

“Are you sure you weren’t just telling us a story?”

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t lying about it. But this is different. I’ll try again,” he added. He didn’t want to displease her.

He spread the sheets out more and touched individual pages. Then he held one or two up against his face. He put one up against his forehead. He tried to concentrate on Mr. Kissen, but again, all he could really see was her face, her eyes, her lips. He looked at her and shrugged.

“Oh dammit,” she said. She gathered the pile he had been touching and threw it on top of the rest of the material.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not something I can control all the time.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice dripping with cold skepticism. “Shit,” she added. “I guess I gotta go through all this.”

“I’ll help do that if you want.”

“What good is that? I can read myself.”

The anger and frustration brightened the redness that had been in her cheeks and neck. So excited, she looked even more beautiful to him. He wanted to trace the lines of her neck down to the base of her throat where the warm, soft-looking skin disappeared beneath the thin cotton blouse. He recalled that first night when he had stumbled upon her dressing in front of her vanity mirror.

He looked at that mirror quickly and wondered fleetingly if images are captured by mirrors, just the way a camera captures an image on film. If he looked at the mirror hard enough, could he bring out the image of her naked before the glass again? Indeed it seemed he could, for that was what he now saw.

However, the revived picture took him out of the room. He saw it from the perspective of a Peeping Tom. He was out there again, spying on her, delighting in the vision. The windows that had first looked like mirrors when he entered her room were turned back to mere glass.

Suddenly, he wasn’t seeing just her in the room. He saw himself with her. There was something cold about the sight. It wasn’t coming from his perspective, yet it wasn’t like looking through a camera or at a movie screen on which were projected images taken by someone else; it was as if he had become someone else. The realization hit him like a sharp blow to the face. She saw the radical change in his expression.

“What’s the matter?”

He spun around quickly on the bed.

“Put out the lights,” he whispered.

“Huh?”

“Quick. Just put out the lights.”

“David?”

“Do it,” he demanded. She went to the switch and snapped it. The moment she did so, he got up and went to the window. For a long moment, he said nothing. He simply stared out at the darkness.

“What the hell is going on?”

“He’s out there,” he said, still whispering.

“What?” She came up behind him and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”

“He’s out there, again.”

“Who’s out there?”

There was a darker, thicker shadow, but she couldn’t distinguish it.

“I don’t see anything,” she repeated.

“He’s there,” David insisted.

“Sure.”

She went back to the light switch and turned the lights back on, converting the windows into mirrors. He continued to press his face to the glass. Then he stepped back to pull the shades all the way down.

“Just leave it,” she said. “There’s no one there.”

“He’s out there,” David said.

She shook her head. “Who? Who’s out there?”

“I’m not sure exactly who it is, but he’s dangerous. Really dangerous.”

She brought her hands to her hips, took on a knowing expression and nodded her head slowly.

“I know what you’re doing. You’re doing what you did to Pamela Sue when you disappointed her at Marsha’s house, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You’re making something up just to frighten me and get me to think you’re doing something for me.”

“You don’t believe that, do you? There is someone out there, someone who attacked Buzzy. He’s been spying on you, watching you get undressed, watching you sit by that vanity table brushing your hair, sitting there in your bra and panties…” He stopped when her face reflected some shock.

“How do you know I do that?”

“It’s what…what he sees,” he said.

“He sees? Or what you see?”

“No,” he said, but he couldn’t deny what was printed indelibly on the surface of his eyes. Even now she was moving, bare breasted, toward the window to look out at him the way she had that first night. It wasn’t something he could pretend never happened.

“That’s what you boys were doing here that night when Buzzy got hurt, huh? Then you made up that story about someone attacking Buzzy. He probably just tripped and fell down. Maybe he fell out of a tree.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“You can’t deny why you and your friends were out there.”

“You’re missing the point,” he said. “There’s someone very dangerous out there.”

“Sure. Buzzy or one of your other sick friends.”

“No.”

“What did you do, call them up to tell them you were coming over here? Did you think something would happen between us and they could watch? Was this going to be another one of your magic tricks?”

He blushed. Part of what she said was certainly his fantasy.

“You’re all wrong. Listen to me.” He turned back to the window and closed his eyes, fighting to get some more concrete information. He had to impress her with an understanding of how serious this was, yet the picture he got was still not clear. All that came to him was a dark form, but a large dark form. At least he was sure of one thing. “Whoever’s out there is not a kid. He’s dangerous,” he repeated. He didn’t know what else he should say. The important vision hadn’t come. He pressed on, concentrating, searching through the darkness in his own mind. He pinched his head between his thumb and forefinger.

“Stop it!” she said. “You’re just trying to frighten me. I think you better leave. I’m sorry I asked you to come over. This was a mistake.”

For a moment he just stood there looking at her. He looked back at the windows one more time and then started out of her room. She followed him to the front door.

“I’m really disappointed in you, David, making up something like that.” He heard the hope in her voice. She wanted him to confess and ease her fear.

“I’m not lying. There’s someone out there, someone who wants more than to just look at you. Don’t go out alone,” he warned. Her eyes blazed.

“Get out of here, David. And if you tell such a story to anyone else, I’ll tell Ted. I mean it.”

“I don’t care if you tell him. I’ll tell him myself,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he added and left.

He was saddened by the harsh sound of the door closing swiftly behind him. For a few moments he stood at the front of her house listening to the night. Then he walked to the side and looked into the shadows. Whoever had been there was gone, but he knew in his heart, with the same certainty that he knew the night would turn to morning, that the evil shadow would return and return again and again until it got what it wanted.

He shuddered to think what that was.

9

He had intended to go right home from Diane’s house. All that had happened had left him shaky and afraid, but when he left her house and started down her street, there wasn’t any sense of relief. Instead of leaving the danger and the evil behind him, he had the distinct impression he was being watched. He stopped along the way a few times to study the shadows and listen. The longer he looked, the more the moonlight played tricks on him.

Shadows took new shapes and seemed to slide across the road behind him. Tree branches nodded in the breeze, confirming danger. Everything was part of it; everything conspired against him. Even the houses looked as if they anticipated something terrifying would soon occur. Dimly lit windows looked like half-opened eyes. Were people peering out at him from behind their closed blinds and shades? It reminded him of something; he struggled to remember, and then it came to him: This was the way people were looking out of their windows when he had that dream about Mr. Hoffman in the coffin.

The vivid recollection sent him into a frenzy, and he started again down the road, moving quickly and trying not to look back or to the sides. Was it his imagination that when he began to walk again, the echo of his footsteps on the macadam became amplified? It made him walk faster until he broke into a trot.

Before he was off Diane’s avenue, he felt the evil presence leave him. Perhaps it had only wanted to be sure he was going. Could the evil have returned to her house?

The confusion and turmoil within him prevented him from reaching any satisfying conclusions. He couldn’t close his eyes and see anything; he wasn’t in tune with the sounds of the night. Perhaps he had been wrong to neglect his visions. Now, when he felt he needed them the most, they weren’t there. He couldn’t raise an image. The future was as unknown to him as it was to anyone.

Ironically, what he thought would make him happy put him into more of a panic. He couldn’t just go home and go back to what he had been doing; it would be impossible for him to fall asleep later as well. He had to do something. But what? He was afraid to go back to her house. If she saw him out there now, she would simply believe that he was there to be a Peeping Tom. It would confirm her suspicions, and he would only get into trouble. The real danger would continue to be ignored.

He certainly couldn’t bring any of his friends back there with him. That would be just as bad. And they wouldn’t come anyway, especially after what had happened to Buzzy.

No, there was only one thing to do, he thought. He turned at the corner of Main Street and headed for the police station. The village looked even quieter than usual, but he thought it was deceptively so. There was a ringing in his ears. Something explosive was about to happen. He broke into a hard run, chased by the demons in his own imagination.

He could see that the patrol car was parked in front. He hoped Charlie was on duty. He realized that he would be easier to talk to than Louis Nesselwitz, one of the other permanent policemen. Charlie was younger; Charlie would understand, he thought.

Charlie was there and when he saw David enter the station, he sat back almost as if he had expected him. There was no one else present. David tried to catch his breath as he walked farther in. He pressed his right hand into his side to force back the pain caused by his frantic run.

“What did you do, run down here to confess?” he asked smiling. David didn’t smile. He shook his head and approached the desk.

“I was just up at Diane Jones’s house. Helping her with some school stuff,” he added quickly.

“So?”

“Whoever hurt Buzzy was out there again.”

“Oh yeah.” Charlie sat forward. “You saw him? What did he look like?”

“I didn’t exactly see him,” David said.

“Then how do you know he was there? You heard him?”

“No, I didn’t hear him.”

“What the hell is this?” Charlie sat back again. “You didn’t see him and you didn’t hear him, but you know he was there?” He squinted skeptically, drawing his forehead into dark crevices.

“I…I sensed his shadow when I looked out her window, but I couldn’t make out any details.”

“Sensed or saw?”

“Sensed. Look, Charlie, I can’t explain everything, but you’ve got to believe me. I know whoever is out there wants to hurt her.”

“Oh yeah.” Charlie’s eyes widened, and he lifted his head as though he wanted to catch something revealing in David’s words. “How do you know this?”

“I just know it. I know stuff other people don’t know.”

“Oh? Well, that explains it.” Charlie slapped his hands together and sat up straighter. “I’ll just call for an all points bulletin and get the National Guard out. And when they ask me why, I’ll say, David just knows what everyone else doesn’t. Shit. What, are some of your friends peepin’ around again? Are you trying to cover for ’em? Is that why you’re here with this bullshit story?”

“No, it’s not that, Charlie. It’s definitely not that.” David studied the young policeman for a moment. “And you know it, too,” he added, screwing his face into an intense and determined look. Charlie’s smile began to fade. David stared at him until the thought was born and quickly converted into words. “Other girls…other women have complained about being watched, right?”

“What about it? You guys know something more?”

“It’s not kids,” David repeated. He continued to study the policeman’s face. He wasn’t able to hide the truth from David by keeping what he knew behind a false face any longer. The mask was quickly falling away. “You know it’s not kids. Someone saw someone more clearly, huh?” David concluded.

Charlie didn’t respond. He leaned forward and tapped a pencil on the desk for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he sat back again, only he sat straighter, looking more official, putting on the formal police face.

“How long ago did you…sense…this guy at Diane’s?”

“Fifteen minutes or so.”

“Was he there when you left?”

“Not when I left the house, but I thought I was being followed.”

“You heard him?”

“No.”

“Well what the hell is this…feelings, sensing…thinking. Either you see someone or you don’t; either you hear him or you don’t.”

“I don’t know how I can do it, Charlie, but sometimes I can see things without actually seeing them.”

“Jesus. What’dya do, go to a Disney film lately?”

“No. I’m not imagining this stuff. You’ve got to believe me.” David put both of his hands on the policeman’s desk and leaned in at him. This time it was Charlie who studied the expressions. He nodded, impressed with David’s sincerity.

“All right, all right.” He got up and came around the desk. “Come on. We’ll take a ride up to Diane’s house and you’ll sense and feel and think,” he said. He reached for his hat and directed David out of the station. “Get in the patrol car,” he said after he closed the station door. David did so. “So you see things others can’t see, huh?” Charlie said as he started the engine and backed the patrol car onto the street.

“Yes,” David said weakly. Now that he was in the police car and they were actually going, he felt a little more intimidated.

“When I was in Korea,” Charlie said, “there was this guy who told me he was going to die and two days later, he got shot through the neck while on patrol.”

“Really? Then you see that sometimes people can do these things,” David added quickly.

“But half the outfit thought they were going to die, so it wasn’t any wonder,” Charlie said dryly.

“I dreamt about Mr. Hoffman’s death before it happened,” David said. He thought it was essential now that he convince Charlie he could do it.

“Is that so? Hoffman the baker?”

“Yes. In this dream I was walking through the village, and I came upon a coffin. He was in it. The next day, he died.” David waited for Charlie’s reaction. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he looked at him.

“You’re fulla shit, ain’tcha kid?”

“No, Charlie, I’m telling the truth.”

“Yeah? Well, who else have you dreamt about dying?”

“No one recently, but…there’s something trying to take shape in my mind, and it has to do with Diane Jones.”

“I’ll bet I know what it is, kid…a hard-on.”

“What?”

“Look, I don’t blame you going up there to peek in on her. She’s a knockout, but if you’re setting me up as some kind of joke, I’ll hang your ass up in the middle of the village.”

“I’m not, Charlie. Honest.”

“We’ll see.” He pulled up in front of Diane Jones’s house. “So where did you sense this guy?”

“Down the road a bit, just in the shadows of the trees.”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie reached into his glove compartment and came out with a flashlight. “Come on. We’ll check it out together. What did Diane say about this when you told her?” he asked after they got out of the patrol car.

“She didn’t believe me,” David said.

“I see. So she didn’t see, sense, think or feel anyone then?”

“No, but…”

“Quiet. Let’s surprise him,” he said, and they walked along the side of the house. The lights were on in Diane’s room, but the shades were still drawn down the way he had left them. Charlie directed the beam of his flashlight into the shadows and followed the road. David stayed back. When Charlie was almost directly across from Diane’s bedroom, he paused and directed his light at the ground. Then he knelt down. A few moments later, he stood up, washed the woods and the road ahead with his light, and then returned to David.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” David looked back and then got into the car.

“I didn’t think he was still there,” he said. Charlie didn’t reply. He started the patrol car, turned around, and drove back into the village, but instead of returning to the station, he made the turn on Main Street and drove David to his house.

“Go on home, David.”

“I’m not lying,” David said before getting out.

“I know,” Charlie said. “I saw some tracks back there. Whoever it was has big feet. I think I know who it was. Go on. Thanks,” he added.

David was impressed with Charlie’s new serious tone. He got out of the car and watched Charlie head up toward Turtle Avenue. He knew where he was going. He watched until the patrol car disappeared, and then he started for his front door. Before he reached it, a new thought came to him like something he had forgotten for a long time but just remembered. He actually said, “Oh,” and turned around, spinning like someone who had been touched on the shoulder.

Charlie was making a mistake. It wasn’t Gerry Porter; it was definitely not Gerry Porter.

It was someone far more dangerous.

That night the terrible vision came. He half expected it would, and when he got into bed, he got into bed reluctantly. He wasn’t slipping in under the covers; he was lying down in his own coffin. Tonight, he was rooming with death. The darkness that enveloped him was animated. It slid down the roof of his house and oozed over the outside walls, covering the windows, pulsating around the pane and the frame, looking for avenues through which it could enter and get to him.

His grandmother was gone; there was no one to cry to for help and comfort. If he called to his mother and she came, she would be more terrified than he was. She wouldn’t understand any of it.

He was alone in the unwelcomed darkness and at the mercy of the power. It could draw from any and all of the vast inventory of horrible images and scenes that had appeared to him at one time or another. He was terrified to close his eyes.

For as long as he could, he lay there staring into the darkness. But even keeping his eyes opened did not guarantee any relief. The reoccurring image of the dark shadow outside Diane Jones’s window moved across the ceiling of his room, sliding slowly through the blackness like an egg broken against a blackboard. When it reached bottom, it merely began at the top again. He had to close his eyes to escape from that.

Sleep came quickly, overpowering him, driving back and locking away all conscious thoughts. Moments later he felt himself slipping and falling down a long, rubbery tunnel, the walls of which were sticky wet with dark-red blood. He tried to end the descent, but when he reached out to grasp the walls of the tunnel, his fingers sunk into them as though they were made of decomposing flesh.

He opened his mouth and exerted a great effort to scream, but no sounds emerged. The scream was being directed inward and echoed down the caverns of his own mind instead. Finally, his descent ended. He emerged from what was the entrance of this terrible tunnel, but he came forth like some creature born of it. The opening widened and stretched, pressing him out until he found himself standing alone in the darkness on Diane Jones’s street.

It was ominous. He looked back toward the entrance of the tunnel, actually wanting to return to it rather than face what the night had to offer. But the tunnel was gone. There was no escape from the vision that was about to begin. He trembled, embracing himself, but when he did so, his arms went through his body. He could grasp on to nothing.

Inevitably came the sound of her footsteps. She was carrying her books and walking up the street toward her home. It was a very warm evening. She was dressed only in that light-blue cotton blouse and those tight shorts. Her sandals slapped the pavement, the sounds amplified the same way his were when he fled from the shadows closing in around him. The patter punctuated the night. He put his hands over his ears because to him it had become a terrific pounding. But that brought him no relief; his ears came through his hands.

Soon she was only a dozen feet or so away. He waited anxiously, fearfully looking about, watching, searching, but the darkness never looked so thick. The blackness had solidified into charcoal and cinder-block walls, walls that were pressing in and blocking out any route of escape, walls that drove them both forward toward the evil shadow that he knew was waiting.

She was at his side now. He raised his hand to seize her by the arm and hold her back, but his fingers, as if they were made of air, went through her, and she didn’t hear him pronounce her name. Nor did she hear his scream. He was beside her, but he was beside her just the way he was when he imagined himself in her room the night he watched her get ready for the shower. He had been happy and excited by his invisibility then; now he was frustrated and terrified by it.

He continued to call and reach out, but to no avail. All he could do was follow along and be a witness. He looked back longingly. He didn’t want to be a witness to this, but there was no way out. When he returned to retreat, he found he couldn’t go forward. It was like walking into a wall. He could only move in her direction, and he couldn’t stand still because the wall behind him kept pressing him forward. It was his destiny to know; he could do nothing to prevent it.

She made the turn toward her house. The patter of her footsteps had grown softer, more like it would really be. And then he saw the shadow move. It came out of the darkness on her left. He rushed toward it, but unlike the other darkness around him, he couldn’t get close to this. Something kept him back.

He shouted and tore at the air, but she didn’t turn around; she couldn’t be warned. The shadow took more distinct shape; it was clearly a man. In his hands he carried some small cloth bag. Suddenly, he moved up behind her and dropped the cloth bag over her head, pulling the strings that closed it around her neck and tying them quickly.

She dropped her books and reached up to prevent it, but he grabbed her wrists and jerked her arms back roughly. David reached out to help her, but he seemed to be farther away than he thought whenever he did anything to interfere. The shadowy figure twisted her arms until she went to her knees. Then he forced her up and pushed her off the road, to the left and into the woods.

She was crying now. David could hear that, but all he could do was follow them through the forest. The spot for this attack had been planned; there was a clear enough path to take. It led deeper and deeper into the forest until it brought them to a clearing. Here, he forced her to her knees again. A thin cord, fishline, was wrapped around her wrists, and then she was thrown to the ground where she sobbed and pleaded.

David watched as the dark shadowy figure took off her shorts and her panties. He watched as he tore away her blouse and pulled up her bra. He didn’t want to watch, but when he tried to turn his head away, he found that he couldn’t. He was able to put his hands over his eyes, but they didn’t block out the horrible scene being played out before him. Instead, when he closed his eyes and covered them, the scene was projected onto the inside of his lids. He couldn’t prevent himself from witnessing the gruesome scene, so he lowered his hands and watched.

The shadow man pressed himself down on her. Her shriek was so sharp it seemed to slice through the night, but she could do nothing to defend herself. He had his hands around her neck now, squeezing hard to prevent her from screaming. David could hear her choking; he saw her resistance dwindle. The shadowy figure moved itself on and over her like some thick, black snake. It writhed and turned and twisted itself about her legs and torso until finally, it was satiated.

When it rose and stepped back, she lay there motionless, her sobbing subdued. But the shadow wasn’t subdued. David sensed that it had thrown itself into some kind of panic, now that it understood what it had done. It moved about nervously, looking for a path of escape and then returning to her crumpled body.

Diane struggled to get to her knees, and that struggle upset the shadow even more. He was threatened by it, threatened by her mere existence now. David tried to get her to stop, tried to get her to wait, but she was making headway. In a moment she would be standing.

The dark figure did not wait. It found a thick branch nearby and seized it like a club. David screamed again and again, hoping to warn her, but he sounded muffled even to himself now. The shadowy figure brought the club down hard, striking her on the neck and the head, swinging it over and over, beating her down again and then continuing the onslaught long after her body had become still. The cloth bag was torn off her head.

Finally, exhausted, the dark figure stopped swinging the club and dropped it at its side. For a long moment, it simply contemplated what it had done. Then it gathered her clothing, placed them on her stomach, took hold of her ankles and began dragging her across the clearing. Reluctantly, David followed.

They reached a small pond. Here the dark figure wrapped the fishline around her torso, tying her clothing against her. He found some heavy fieldstones and lay them over her chest and stomach. Satisfied, he seized her under the arms and, unconcerned about getting himself wet, carefully dragged her into the water where she slowly sank. Then he came out of the water, found some additional stones and brought them back to the spot, dropping them into the water and over the dead body.

All the while David watched, subdued and exhausted from his frustration. The figure never seemed to notice or care. When he was satisfied with the bizarre burial, he started away from the pond. It actually came toward David. He felt new panic and tried to hide, but he was frozen in position. With great difficulty, he turned his head away so as not to be seen when the figure crossed only a few feet from him. The moment he did so, however, David experienced a familiar feeling. He knew this shadow; it had done something to frighten him before.

But all he had was that knowledge, and it was not definite enough to identify the shadow. He could see nothing of its face as it moved by and then merged with the surrounding darkness. In moments it was gone and he was alone.

He went to the edge of the pond and looked into the inky, blue-black water. The surface of the water began to ripple. The ripples grew stronger, longer, wider. He leaned in toward the spot in which he knew her body to be. The area became illuminated as though it were under spotlight and suddenly, she sat up, breaking out of the water. Only she wasn’t alive. She was a corpse that was already long into decomposing.

Her beautiful ice-blue eyes had melted and were running down her caked and pockmarked cheeks, cheeks that looked more like sponges, the blue liquid seeping into the holes. Two blackened and deepened eye sockets looked out at him. Her lower lip and chin had peeled away and dangled from the bone. When her teeth parted, he saw what he thought was her tongue moving from side to side until it came out of her mouth and turned into a small fish.

He screamed and tried to back away, but he was falling forward, falling into that pond that was draining quickly and revealing a bed composed of maggots, thousands and thousands of them waiting for his body to sink. He clawed the air and screamed again and again until—

His mother was shaking him roughly, and he opened his eyes. She had put the light on in his room and was standing by his bed. He realized it was very late because she was dressed in her nightgown and looked like she had been awakened out of deep sleep. Her hair was down around her face, and her eyes were heavy and dark.

“David, my God. What is it? Why are you screaming like this?”

He looked about, seeing the familiar surroundings. His mother ran her hand along the top of his head in amazement. His hair was caked with sweat, and beneath the covers he was almost as wet as he would be had he fallen into a pond.

“I…I had a bad dream.”

“I’ll say. Look at you. You must have been dreaming for quite a while. You better go wash your face and then put on another pair of pajamas. What was such a terrible dream?” she asked. He looked up at her and debated whether or not he should tell her. But he realized he couldn’t without telling her all of it, and that would take some time. She was too confused and tired to understand anyway, he thought.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You don’t remember? Maybe it was something you ate. Did you eat something before you went to bed?”

“I just had some milk and cookies.”

“Well…” She thought about it a moment. It was a convenient explanation. “Don’t do that anymore. Don’t eat just before going to sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Go wash up,” she said, and he got out of bed. She shook her head in amazement when she saw how damp he was. His pajamas stuck to his legs and back. Then, as he started out of the room, she stopped him.

“What?”

“Where were you tonight?”

“Why?”

“Look at your feet,” she said, and he looked down. His ankles and feet were smeared as though he had run through a muddy puddle of water barefoot. He just stared. “So? Where were you?”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“Is that all you can say? It’s two o’clock in the morning. You wake up screaming, soaked to the skin, your feet dirty, and you don’t remember?”

He didn’t answer. He walked on to the bathroom to wash his face and feet and change into a dry pair of pajamas.

In the morning he was up before she was and had gotten his own juice and cereal before she came out of her bedroom. She looked groggy and sleepy and moved lethargically into the kitchen, her eyes half closed. He was fully awake, sitting there and reading the offers advertised on the back of his cereal box when she appeared. For a moment she studied him as if he were a mirage. Then she ran her hands through her hair and rubbed her face vigorously.

“Did I dream it or did you wake up screaming last night?”

“You dreamt it,” he kidded. She shook her head.

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it,” he added and scooped the remaining cereal and milk into his mouth quickly. Then he got up, put the dishes into the sink, and went into his room to get his books.

“What a night; what a night,” he heard her mumble, but before she could ask him any more questions, he was at the back door.

“See you later,” he called and rushed out.

He was early for school and slumped on a bench in front to watch as the kids who lived too far away to walk arrived on the school buses. He saw Mr. Sills drive by, and this time the accountant slowed down when he spotted him. David was going to wave hello. After all, the man had been kind enough to give him a ride when he had to hitch to the hospital. But he didn’t wave. He started to raise his arm and stopped in midair.

Perhaps it was the way the sunlight hit Mr. Sills’s face. Whatever the reason, his face bleached out into the terrifying skeleton face again. Only this time his hair was frozen, the strands draped over his forehead and temples like tiny icicles. David looked away quickly.

Rube and Buzzy showed up a few minutes later. He was grateful for their excited conversation. He was listening to them when he saw Ted Davis drive up and park his car. Diane was with him. For a moment he could only stare at her. The visions from the night before seemed more real. This seemed like the dream.

He followed his friends into the building and went to his locker. He was standing there, exchanging and selecting books and notebooks when he felt Ted come up behind him.

“Diane told me about last night,” Ted said when he turned around. David started to explain, but the big senior boy put his hand up like a traffic cop. “I don’t wanna hear any more of your bullshit. I’m telling you now and I’m telling you simply and clearly…stay away from her and especially from her house. You’re a fuckin’ weirdo.”

David was stunned. Ted glared at him a moment and then walked off before he could reply. What could he say anyway? he thought. Was he going to tell him about his dream? Should he tell him about Charlie Williams and what Charlie discovered? He knew that Ted wouldn’t listen. It was no use.

David went on to his classes, desperately trying to concentrate on what went on, for in each class the teacher was preparing the class for the final exam, offering an outline for review and suggesting what to stress when studying for the test. Students who had been goofing off all quarter looked intent and frightened. Cramming would be the order of the day, and because of the way he had been working this final quarter, cramming had to be his method as well.

Just before the lunch period ended, Merle joined him, Buzzy, Rube, and Carl to tell them he had heard Paul Shatsky tell some of his senior friends that Gerry Porter had been picked up and taken to the police station last night.

“Shatsky’s mother found out from Mrs. Porter that the police think Gerry’s been peeking in on girls all over town.”

“That’s who probably hit Buzzy, right Buz?” Rube said.

“Yeah. It was him,” Buzzy said.

“How can you say that? You didn’t see him, and you couldn’t identify him the night you were attacked,” David said.

“Now that I think about it though—”

“I don’t believe you,” David said.

“What are you, Gerry Porter’s protector or somethin’?” Carl asked. “He’s an idiot. Everyone knows he’s an idiot.”

“I don’t think he would hurt anyone,” David insisted. His friends all looked at him as if he were crazy. “I know he’s not too bright, but why would he grab Buzzy?”

“Because he was afraid of being caught looking at Diane Jones,” Rube said. He turned to everyone. All agreed that was obvious.

David was about to tell them of his visit with Diane Jones the night before and what he had sensed. He was even going to tell them about his dream, but the bell for afternoon classes rang, and they got into other topics as they made their way back to their classrooms.

After school he watched Diane and Ted get into Ted’s car. More than ever now, he was fascinated by her. In a bizarre way it was like seeing a movie star in real life. She did play the lead in his most vivid and dramatic dreams. He seemed to have a need to confirm she was still alive, that her skin was still as soft and beautiful and her eyes were still as dazzling. He wanted so much to hear her voice, but he wouldn’t chance approaching her with Ted around. He would have to wait to warn her about his dream. He hoped that she wouldn’t disregard it.

Just before dinner he took a break from his studying and walked down to Chonin’s to get a candy bar. It was going to be his way of rewarding himself later on for the good studying he would do after supper. When he reached the corner, he saw Gerry Porter making his way home from work at the K and W Market. He was plodding along in his usual manner, staring down at his feet as if he were trying to make sure he was doing it right. David looked around, saw that none of his friends were in the vicinity, and crossed to intercept Porter.

“Hey Gerry,” he said. The big, slow-witted man stopped and looked up. He was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and the shirt was streaked with dirt and dust from lifting soda cases and other heavy items. “Finished work?”

“Yeah,” Gerry said. “I got a couple extra packs of gum. Samples,” he said and dug into his pocket to demonstrate.

“Great.”

“Murray says it’s going to be a big day tomorrow. We’re redoing the storage room.”

“Is that right?”

He stared at David a moment, blinking.

“Mrs. Zorankin broke her hip,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Fell down the stairs and broke her hip. Her son found her lying there this morning.”

“Really?”

“Broke her hip,” he repeated. “I gotta tell my mother.”

“Yeah, sure. Say, weren’t you in the police station last night?”

“Charlie Williams, he came to the house and says, take a ride with him in the police car. So my mother doesn’t want me to, but I went anyway.”

“Were you home all night or did you go for a walk?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I was home. I didn’t look at any girls. Mrs. Zorankin broke her hip,” he said. He started off again.

“Hey Gerry,” David walked after him. “You were out last night. You go out at night sometimes. There’s someone else out there, someone else walking in and out of the woods and up and down the roads; someone who keeps to the shadows, right? A man, not a kid, right? You’ve seen him,” David added emphatically. Gerry looked at him, his eyes blinking. For a moment David didn’t think he would respond.

“I seen him,” he finally said, his voice remarkably softer.

“Did you tell Charlie?”

“Charlie didn’t ask. He just told me not to go near any houses and look in the windows. I don’t look in windows.”

“Who was it? Who did you see?” David drove his questions at him aggressively. He reached out, but hesitated just short of taking hold of Gerry’s left arm.

Gerry didn’t reply. David could see fear come into his face. David knew that Gerry didn’t understand many things, but David could see that he understood the danger around the man he had seen. He was afraid of him.

Whoever it was must have confronted Gerry Porter and Gerry Porter must have seen and felt the aura of death around him, David thought. Maybe it wasn’t a man; maybe it was the dark shadow of the visions. Maybe Gerry Porter had seen something that wasn’t human and had no way of expressing it. In any case he wasn’t going to describe or identify him now. That was for sure.

“I gotta go home,” he said, “and tell my mother about Mrs. Zorankin.”

Before David could respond, Gerry started off, walking a lot faster than he had been. David watched him a moment and then turned around quickly and looked toward the village.

Somewhere, from a window, from a car, or even from an alley, someone was watching him. His name was on the tip of his tongue, but something was preventing him from realizing it. Why? When would he be able to do it?

There was no answer; only the unnatural silence which permitted him to hear the pounding of his own heart.

10

It was difficult, if not impossible, for David to study after supper. His mother had a dinner date with Fred Myers, after which they were going to a show at the Wonder Bar in Old Falls, a hamlet about three miles away. The Wonder Bar was the closest thing to a nightclub in the area. He had heard about the show because it consisted of female impersonators. Some of the older-looking seniors had been able to get in to see it, and they told their friends that it was funny. But what was unbelievable even to them was the comedienne whose jokes were very raunchy.

David couldn’t imagine his mother, or Fred Myers, for that matter, going to such a show. When he asked her about it, she only said, “We’ve got to see what they’re all talking about. If we don’t like it, we’ll leave. Don’t wait up.”

She made him his supper, and right afterward, he went into his room to try to study. She called to him when Fred arrived, and he shouted his good-bye. But when the house grew terribly quiet, his thoughts wandered; he was unable to keep his eyes on the pages of notes or the textbook pages.

It was a very warm night. The sky was overcast so the moon and the stars were hidden, making the darkness deeper and blacker. He sat by his desk and stared out his window, and then he got up and went to it as though something called to him. He was possessed by the mysteries inherent in the birth of shadows. It was impossible to ignore them.

Of course, his thoughts went to Diane Jones. Would she do what he had dreamt? Would she go walking alone at night on her street? Since he would be unable to concentrate on his work anyway, he couldn’t resist going out and up to her avenue. He felt that if she did come out, he could protect her. After all, for what other reason had the dream come to him?

Of course, his grandmother’s dying admonition returned: “You mustn’t think you can do too much, and you must be afraid of what you can do.”

Perhaps he was thinking he could do more than he could, and that arrogance, as his grandmother had suggested, was dangerous. But what was the point of being clairvoyant if he couldn’t use his foresight to help those he cared for and loved? Warning or no warning, he belonged on that avenue; Diane needed him. Being honest with himself, he had to admit that he liked the idea of her needing him. He wanted to be her hero, her protector.

The moment he stepped outside he experienced a deep feeling of dread. It made his legs heavy, his walk down the sidewalk in front of his house and to the street cumbersome. He deliberately remained within the illumination of streetlights, rushing to pass through the darkness that lay between the large circles of light that were thrown over his road and the other streets in the village. He felt protected by light. None of the shadows that lingered under the trees and around the houses could get to him as long as he remained within the illumination that seemed to burn away the darkness.

The lit storefronts, the bright pole lights in front of the bank, the neon marquee at the movies, car headlights, all of it was welcomed. They were his allies in the battle against the evil that hovered and waited somewhere in the night. Nevertheless, he felt the need to move quickly through the village and get to Diane’s avenue as soon as possible.

Almost as soon as he reached it, however, he stopped and pulled back into the shadows, for he saw Ted Davis’s car coming down the street, and he had no idea what Ted would do if he caught him on her avenue. When the car went by, he saw that Diane was sitting in the front with him. He watched it turn left at Main Street and head up toward Highland Avenue where he knew her close friend, Nancy Wilson, lived. Most likely she intended to study with her, he thought. Plenty of students were teaming up to study, since there were only days left before finals.

He breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wasn’t walking over there by herself. Ted was taking her. David hoped his warning had gotten through to her, or maybe they all realized the dangers now that Charlie Williams had taken some action, even if that action was only to pick up and question Gerry Porter.

He looked back down her street. He had a feeling of déjà vu, and not because he had been on this street before, but because it looked like it had when it appeared in his terrible dream. He wasn’t going any farther. There was no point to it now, although he did sense that he wasn’t alone. He stood there searching the darkness, looking for what was now that familiar shadow of evil that haunted him, even in his dreams. It was out there; he felt certain.

He walked back to Main Street and turned to go home, but he wasn’t a dozen yards before he heard his name. Merle came out of the luncheonette.

“What are you doing?”

“Just went for a walk,” he told him. “Had to get out for a while. The studying got to me,” he added. There was no point in telling Merle the truth, he thought.

“I haven’t done any studying yet.”

“What are you hoping for, a miracle?”

“Shit, I’ll get by. Always do.” He looked back at the center of town. “Saw your friend a while ago.”

“Friend? What friend?”

“Gerry Porter. He came in and watched me play the pinball machine for twenty minutes. Then he left as if someone put a stick up his ass.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. He must have told me five times about Mrs. Zorankin breaking her hip. Maybe he went to look in on Diane Jones,” he added, smiling licentiously.

David didn’t say anything. He looked back at the center of town, too, and then started away.

“See ya,” he said. “I gotta go study.”

“Jesus, a regular honor society student,” Merle said. He was still standing in front of the luncheonette when David reached the top of the hill and looked back. Then David hurried home because he did feel guilty about not studying.

He tired himself out going over his English and social studies notes. Twice he fell asleep at his desk. Finally, he went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and then got himself into bed. He left the hall light on for his mother and left the rest of the house in darkness.

She came home later than she usually did, especially on a weekday night. He was surprised because he knew she had trouble enough getting up in the morning for work. It was close to two in the morning when he heard the door open and close and he heard her in the kitchen. She was making so much noise he thought she might be drunk. That struck him as potentially a funny sight, so he struggled out of bed and went to his bedroom door to peer out at her.

Fred Myers was seated at the kitchen table, and his mother was making coffee. Two o’clock in the morning, she was making coffee? He stepped out.

“What’s going on?” he asked, wiping his eyes.

“Oh David. We didn’t want to wake you,” she said. She just stood there looking at him. He looked at Fred, but Fred didn’t break into his usual warm smile.

“Something wrong? How was the show?”

“Oh the show. Forget the show.” She shook her head. “There’s a terrible uproar in the village. We would have been home an hour ago, but we stopped to help. The state police are here, and there are policemen from the other hamlets as well.”

“What happened?”

“Diane Jones…that beautiful girl…she’s missing. Her parents are frantic. There are people searching the village, looking in every alley.”

For a moment David couldn’t respond. Had he really gotten up and out of bed? Was this really happening or was this part of his vivid dreaming? His mother fumbled the coffee cups, but caught them before they shattered on the floor. This was no dream.

“What happened?” he repeated. “How could she be missing?” He had seen her with Ted. This was some mistake.

“She went studying at her friend’s, and she left there about ten o’clock, but she never got home.”

“What do you mean, she left there? Didn’t her boyfriend take her home? Ted Davis, he drove her. I was in town. I saw them go by.”

“What where you doing in town?”

“I was in town; I was in town,” he repeated impatiently. “I saw them.”

“He drove her there, but he didn’t wait for her. She walked home, but she never arrived. Fred’s friendly with her father,” she added as a way of explaining how she knew all the details.

David turned to him. Fred shook his head.

“Hated to leave him down there. They’re just driving up and down the streets, going around the backs of houses. A bunch of us went down the tracks a ways,” he said, “but we found nothing but a couple of hobos waiting for the next freight.”

“They even started looking in the garbage bins, especially the ones by the K and W Market,” his mother said. Then she bit down on her lower lip and shook her head. Strands of her salt and pepper hair had broken free of the barrettes and hung down along her ears and the sides of her face.

“Why especially the K and W Market?” he asked, anticipating the answer.

“That’s where Gerald Porter works,” Fred said.

“What about Gerald Porter?”

“They think he might have done something to her,” his mother said.

“No. They’re wrong. Gerald Porter did nothing.”

“How can you be so sure, David?” His mother smiled at him as though he were an idiot. She didn’t wait for his response. “Oh, it’s so late. You better go to sleep, honey.”

“Sleep? No, I can’t go to sleep. I know what happened to her. I’ve got to go down there.”

“What?” His mother looked at Fred, who shrugged. “How would you know anything?”

“I dreamt it. That’s what I dreamt last night; that’s why I screamed. Dammit, I thought she was safe. I thought it was all right.” He pounded his thigh with his right fist, but he did it so hard that his mother winced.

“What are you talking about? He’s having another dream,” she said to Fred.

“Oh, God,” David said. “Grandma.”

“Grandma? David, you’re not making sense. Go to sleep. I’m sorry we woke you. Go ahead.”

He looked at his mother as though she were crazy. There was no point talking to her. He went back into his room and closed the door behind him. For a few moments he stood in the darkness. Then he went to the window and looked out at the night.

It got her, he thought. And it’s still out there. He had been wrong to assume she would be safe. He should have remained out there, waiting for her. What kind of protector had he been? His stupidity negated all the power of the dream. Not only had he betrayed her, but he had betrayed his own visions.

He put on the night lamp on his small table and went to his dresser to get out his underwear, socks, and shirt. He would get dressed quickly and go down to the police station. He would talk to Charlie Williams and get him to go with him into the woods. He would lead him to the pond.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t be in it. Hopefully, what he had dreamt was just a dream. But he was filled with a sick feeling that made him move slowly, reluctantly, just the way someone who knew the inevitable, horrible truth would move.

He wasn’t anxious to discover what he already knew.

His mother and Fred Myers looked shocked when he stepped out of his bedroom again, this time fully dressed. She was just pouring the coffee and nearly spilled it. Without saying a word, he started through the kitchen.

“What are you doing? Where are you going this time of the night?” his mother asked.

“I’ve got to see Charlie Williams. I’ve got to show him…what I dreamt.”

“Show him what you dreamt? Are you crazy? Get back into your bed. He’s crazy,” she said to Fred.

“David, it is late,” Fred said softly. “You can tell him about your dream tomorrow.”

“But I know what happened,” he said. Fred stared at him, a half smile on his face. David looked to his mother. “Listen to me,” he said. “Sometimes I can see things before they happen. I don’t know why or how, but I can. It’s something I told you about a long time ago, but you didn’t believe me. Only Grandma believed me. She knew what I could do.”

“Do you hear what he’s saying?” his mother asked Fred. “Maybe I’m dreaming.”

“I hear him. David, what gave you the idea you could do such things?”

“I have done them. I dreamt about Mr. Hoffman dying the night before he died. I even told Grandma. I’ve been able to do other things, too. I haven’t time to explain it all,” he said, impatient with their skeptical and amazed expressions. “They’ll never find her without my help. I’ve got to go down there,” he added and turn to leave.

“He’s gone crazy. The boy’s gone crazy.”

“Wait, David. Hold on,” Fred said. He looked at Roselyn. “All right. I’ll tell you what. I’ll drive you down to the police station.”

“What?” his mother said. “Fred, what are you talking about? Look at the time.”

“He’s going to go anyway,” Fred said.

“No he’s not,” his mother said. “He’s not making a laughing stock out of me. David, you get back into your room this minute, do you hear me? This minute.”

“I gotta go, Ma.”

“If you set foot out of this house and do what you’re saying you want to do, you won’t go out a single night this summer. Do you hear? I mean it, not a single night.” She waved her right forefinger threateningly. More strands of her hair had broken free, and she had a wild look: Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was turned up emphatically at the corners.

“I gotta go,” he repeated and walked out the door, but before he reached the front gate, Fred was out after him.

“I’ll drive you,” he said, “and take you back. At least let’s do that for her.”

“Okay,” David said. He got into Fred’s car, and Fred started it up. “I know this sounds crazy, Fred,” he said, “but I gotta do it.”

“It sounds crazy all right,” Fred said, but he turned and smiled. David liked him. If he had a father living with them, he would like him to be this easy going, he decided.

When they reached the center of town, David saw what his mother had been talking about. There were three state police vehicles and at least a half dozen local police cars from the other hamlets. Some local volunteer firemen were out as well. A small group of men were gathered in front of the station. A number of them carried flashlights. Fred pulled up alongside one of the state police vehicles.

“Thanks,” David said, but now that he was down here and saw all this activity, he wondered how he would get these men to understand what he wanted them to do. He looked desperately for Charlie Williams. When he couldn’t spot him outside, he hoped he was in the station.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” Fred asked.

“No, that’s all right.”

David started out of the car. He closed the car door and headed slowly for the police station entrance. When he opened the door and stepped in, he confronted three state policemen, Mrs. Jones, Patrolman Louis Nesselwitz, and Gerry Porter and his mother, who sat beside him on the bench. Charlie wasn’t there.

“What do you want?” Louis Nesselwitz asked.

“I’m…looking for Charlie Williams.”

“Kinda late, son, isn’t it?” the state policeman nearest him asked.

“Yes sir. I need Charlie Williams.”

“Charlie’s out looking for Mrs. Jones’s daughter,” Louis said. “What the hell are you doing up so late? Your mother know you’re out?”

“I need to see Charlie,” David replied.

Mrs. Jones approached him.

“Why, David? Does it have something to do with Diane? Does it have something to do with what happened before?”

“What happened before?” the state policeman asked. He came up beside Mrs. Jones.

“One of the boys was attacked by someone right near our house.”

“Gerry had nothing to do with that,” Mrs. Porter said. “Charlie knows. You know, too, right, David?”

“Yes,” David said.

“How come nobody said anything about all this?” the state policeman asked Louis. Nesselwitz didn’t reply. David saw this as an opportunity.

“Charlie Williams investigated it,” he said. “That’s why I gotta see him.”

“Maybe you had better tell us anything you want to tell Charlie,” the state policeman said. He looked more annoyed.

“Only Charlie’s going to understand,” David said, even though he had doubts Charlie would.

“Take him to see Charlie,” Mrs. Jones said. From the tone of her voice, David sensed she was on the border of complete hysteria. The state policeman saw that, too.

“Charlie and your husband went up your avenue, right?” the state policeman said. Mrs. Jones nodded to confirm. She looked as if she said one more word, she would be driven into uncontrollable sobbing. “All right, son. Let’s go.”

“Maybe I should come along,” Mrs. Jones said. David looked up, terrified at that idea. The state policeman understood.

“You’d better remain here in case there is other information, Mrs. Jones. We’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” she said. She sat down again sadly.

When David and the state policeman stepped out of the police station, Fred got out of his car.

“David?”

“It’s all right, Fred. I’m going to find Charlie Williams.”

“Who’s that?” the state policeman asked.

“My mother’s boyfriend. He brought me down here.”

“Maybe I should come along,” Fred said.

“Come along, join the party,” the state policeman said. He directed them to his patrol car. David and Fred got into the front seat, and the state policeman started the car and backed out. Everyone turned to look as they drove off. “You know something about what might have happened to this girl, son?”

“I think so,” David said.

“Didn’t he tell you his idea?” Fred asked.

“No sir. He wants to speak only with Charlie Williams.”

“I’ll tell Charlie first,” David said. He looked at Fred fearfully, knowing that if Fred mentioned the dream, the state policeman might stop and turn around.

No one said any more. They turned up Diane’s avenue and rode about halfway before Charlie’s patrol car was visible alongside the road. About a dozen yards down from it, he and Mr. Jones were standing with two volunteer firemen. They pulled up behind Charlie’s car and got out. Everyone started for them.

David’s heart began beating so hard he wasn’t sure he would be able to tell them anything. All these men would be skeptical about everything he would say. How could he get them to understand something he didn’t fully understand himself?

“David?” Mr. Jones said first. “What are you doing here?”

“He thinks he knows something,” the state policeman said, “but he won’t talk to anyone but Charlie.”

“David, don’t you understand how worried we all are?” Mr. Jones said.

“Yes sir. That’s why I came out.”

“Okay, David,” Charlie said, “what do you know?”

All the men surrounded him now: The state policeman was on his left, Fred was standing right behind him, Charlie and Mr. Jones were directly in front of him, and the volunteer firemen were at their sides. He felt as if his voice would betray him—he would start to speak, but no sounds would emerge. He was that frightened.

“Remember the other night,” he began, “when I told you about my dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“You know, about Mr. Hoffman…”

“Oh. Yeah, so?”

David looked at Mr. Jones. The intensity in Diane’s father’s face chilled him.

“I had one about Diane. I had it last night.”

“Huh?” the state policeman said. He looked at Charlie Williams. Mr. Jones grimaced. Fred said nothing. He put his hand on David’s shoulder. “He asked us to bring him up here to talk about a dream?” the state policeman asked Fred.

“I couldn’t stop him from going out to the station,” he said quickly.

“What are you talking about, David? Don’t you know how serious all this is?” Mr. Jones asked.

“I do. That’s why I had to come.”

“For what? To tell us you had a dream?” the state policeman said. “What’s with this kid? Is this a joke?”

“Charlie, remember what I told you,” David repeated. He wanted to direct himself to Charlie and ignore everyone else for the moment. Charlie looked at the others who waited expectantly.

“Naw, it’s not a joke. The kid’s got delusions,” Charlie said. “He thinks he can see things happening before they do. He can sense them,” Charlie said in a tone of ridicule. “Look, David—”

“I was right the other night, wasn’t I? I was right.”

“What other night?” Mr. Jones asked.

“He was up at your house, studying with your daughter,” Charlie began.

“He was?”

“And he came down to the station to tell me he sensed someone there, watching the house. He thought it was the same guy who attacked the other kid. Finally, I went up there to satisfy him. That’s when I found those footprints and went up to see Gerry Porter.”

“It’s not Gerry Porter,” David insisted.

“Now how the hell do you know that? You admitted you didn’t see him, and the footprints are about Gerry’s size.”

“It’s not Gerry Porter,” David repeated.

“Jesus,” Charlie said.

“All right, all right,” the state policeman said. “Look, we’re wasting time here.”

“No,” David said. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

“What exactly did you dream, David?” Mr. Jones asked. He stepped forward when he saw that David didn’t want to reply. Then he straightened up and repeated the question, holding himself like a man preparing to be struck in the face.

“I dreamt she was attacked coming home from studying.”

“Who attacked her?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t make that out in my dream.”

“Where? On this road?”

“Just around the turn there,” David said.

“I don’t think we should go on with this,” Charlie Williams said. Frank Jones ignored him.

“What happened after that?” he asked.

“Hey, this kid’s—”

“What happened after that?” Mr. Jones repeated.

“He forced her into the woods and…and did things to her.”

“Oh God.”

“Easy, Mr. Jones. The kid’s talking about a dream,” Charlie said. He looked to the others for reinforcement, but no one said anything. All eyes were on David because of the manner in which he spoke: he didn’t flinch, he didn’t avoid their eyes, and his voice was characterized by a tone of certainty that impressed them.

“I think I know where he took her into the woods,” David said.

“Get this kid out of here,” Charlie said, turning to the state policeman.

“No,” Mr. Jones said. “David, can you show us?”

“Yes sir.”

“Before you do. How did the dream end?”

David hesitated.

“You might as well tell him the rest of it, kid. You’ve destroyed him with what you said already,” Charlie said.

“He beat her with a thick branch and…and he dragged her body to the pond.”

“In your dream?” the state policeman said.

“Yes sir.”

“How old are you, kid?”

“Almost fifteen.”

“You’re not going to listen to this, are you?” Charlie asked.

“What’s the difference now?” Mr. Jones said. “We’ve been going around in circles anyway. Go on, David. Show us what you dreamt,” he said, his voice devoid of feeling. He looked like a man whose senses and emotions had been sucked out of his body. All that remained was a hollow shell.

David started down the street.

“Jesus,” Charlie said. “I don’t—”

“Let’s just get it over with,” Mr. Jones said. David didn’t look back. As he walked, their presence, their voices, their footsteps faded anyway. He was moving into his own world, reentering the dream. He shuddered and almost stopped before he reached that point on the road at which the shadow had forced Diane into the woods. The image of that bag being dropped over her head flashed before him. He saw her books drop and then he thought—her books—what happened to her books? The shadow had obviously come back out this way and discovered them.

“Get some light over here,” the state policeman ordered, and the volunteer firemen turned their high beams on, directing them into the forest ahead of David. One man came up beside him. He knew him. It was Gary Stackhouse, a plumber who had served as fire chief in the past.

David pulled back some brush and stepped into the forest. Of course, the path was there. The flashlight drove back the shadows, holding them at bay. David moved down the path, recalling the way Diane was forced to walk, hearing her sobbing, seeing her arms twisted back. When they reached the clearing, he stopped, and all the men gathered around him.

“It happened here,” he said looking down at the matted grass. The state policeman stepped forward.

“Give me that light,” he demanded and brought the beam closer. He washed the ground with it and moved it to the right, stopping when the light uncovered Diane’s crumpled panties. David imagined they had slipped off her body after the shadowy figure had tied it and the rest of her clothing to her before dragging her to the pond.

The moment the state policeman’s light hit the panties, all the lights were turned on the garment.

“Oh God, no,” Mr. Jones said. Charlie Williams stepped forward and picked up the panties.

“Jesus,” he said.

“What else did you dream, kid?” Gary Stackhouse asked, obviously impressed.

“You heard the rest of what he said,” Fred responded. He was beside David again, his hand on his shoulder.

Everyone’s attention went to the pond. The group walked slowly to it. The state policeman squatted down close to it and commented about the marks in the dirt. They all looked into the inky water and then brought their lights to it. At first no one saw anything, and then the image of Diane’s body, seemingly magnified by the liquid, came into view.

Frank Jones screamed, brought his hands to his ears as though to block out the sound of his own pain, and then fell to his knees.

David spun around, broke free of the group, and ran back through the woods, down the dark path and onto the road, fleeing from the truth of his vision and the power he had, almost as much as he was fleeing from the sight of Diane’s corpse—strands of her beautiful hair floating upward, straining to break free and reach the air. Of course, he thought that when they brought her body up, it would be the way he had seen it in his dream.

He shot out onto the road and ran and ran and ran, down to the end of her avenue and into the village proper. He kept running until he reached his own street.

Fred found him squatting under a streetlight, well illuminated and unable to stop himself from crying. He was hysterical and thought that his tears were drops of blood. When Fred tried to lead him away from the streetlight to home, he screamed.

Never in his life was he more afraid of the darkness. Finally, Fred had to get his mother, and together, they brought him back into the house.

He would close his eyes only if she left the light on in his room and sat by his side until he fell asleep.

11

David slept late into the morning. His mother didn’t have the heart to wake him for school. She called Mr. Rosenblatt down at the drugstore and told him she would be late for work. She knew what had happened. The story of the rape and murder of Diane Jones had quickly woven its way in and out of most every store and home in the village. What wasn’t clearly explained was David’s role. People knew he had led the police to the scene of the crime, but how and why he was able to do that wasn’t understood.

David’s mother had to finally wake him when Donald Sacks, the county district attorney, Charlie Williams, and a man from that state bureau of criminal investigation, Lt. Brad Comfort, came to the door.

Donald Sacks was a fifty-two-year-old, six foot five inch man with a Lincolnesque, almost gaunt appearance. He had been elected to the office of district attorney six straight times, mainly because of his wry sense of humor, his witty mind, and his down-to-earth manner of politics. He had an uncanny memory for faces and names, and was highly visible in the hamlets and villages of the county throughout the year, and not just during the campaign periods. He had met David’s mother a few times in Rosenblatt’s drugstore and remembered her name was Roselyn.

Charlie introduced him and Lieutenant Comfort, who was a five foot ten inch, stout man with a short, but thick neck. He had a round face with large facial features: blue-gray eyes with pupils that looked as big as marbles, a nose with wide nostrils, and a mouth with so heavy a bottom lip it looked habitually swollen. He wrapped his large right hand around David’s mother’s, surprising her with the intensity of pressure in the greeting. Lieutenant Comfort was a man who wanted to make an impression.

“I called the school,” Charlie said, “and the principal told me David hadn’t come in.”

“I couldn’t wake him,” Roselyn said. “He was up so late.”

“Sure. That’s understandable,” Donald Sacks said. “After a night like he had, he’s probably sleeping like a snake in winter. But, I’m sure you realize, Roselyn, that we have to talk with him.”

“Of course. I’ll get him up. Why don’t you all come into the kitchen, and I’ll make some coffee.”

“Oh, no need for that,” Sacks said.

“It’s no problem. I was about to make a fresh pot for myself anyway to keep myself awake. What a horror,” she added. “I didn’t sleep an hour.”

“Few of us did,” Charlie said.

“Please, come in and sit down,” she said and led them into the kitchen. They sat around the table, and she went in to wake David.

His sleep had been remarkably void of dreams, or if there had been any, they weren’t vivid and dramatic enough to linger in his consciousness when he awoke. He was groggy and confused for a few moments, but then all of the events of the night before came rushing back at him when his mother told him the police and the district attorney were here to talk to him.

He sat up in bed and watched her get out his underwear, socks, pants, and shirt. She chose the garments as though she were preparing him for a party or a major school event.

“I’ll make you some breakfast,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ve got to eat something. I’ll make a soft-boiled egg and some toast,” she insisted and left. He felt like he was still in a daze while he put on his clothing.

When he was finished, he came out, and the three men looked up at him as though they had been waiting for hours. Charlie Williams had a tired, disinterested look on his face. Donald Sacks smiled, but Lieutenant Comfort studied him as though he could be a suspect himself.

It suddenly occurred to David that he could be. The thought of his being under suspicion for such a heinous crime frightened him. How could he prove that what he had known, he had known through the wonder of his dreams and clairvoyance?

“What’dya say, David?” Charlie said. At this moment David was grateful for Charlie’s informality. He found relief in confronting a familiar face.

“Hello,” he said.

Everyone was introduced, and David sat at the table. The way the three men had arranged themselves, he was facing them all directly and did feel like someone who had been brought into the police station for questioning. Only Donald Sacks looked relaxed. He slumped some in the chair, his long legs having to be turned outward from the table. David’s mother went to make the coffee, but kept her attention glued to the discussion at the table.

“David,” Sacks began, “we all heard about the way you led the search party to the…the scene of the crime last night, but Lieutenant Comfort and I would like to hear it from the horse’s mouth. You know what that means, don’tcha, son?”

“Yes.” He eyed Charlie, whose initial expression of nonchalance had turned to skepticism again.

“Just start at the beginning,” Sacks said.

David nodded and leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table.

“I don’t know exactly when it started, but when I was much younger, I could sometimes see things happening before they did.”

“Who’s they, son?” Sacks asked.

“I meant the things. I could see the things happen before they happened.”

“You mean like you could see the future?”

“Yes sir.”

“I know a lot of weather forecasters who’d like to meet you. So you thought you could see the future?” he repeated, speaking much more slowly, as though to confirm that what had been said was really meant.

“Yes sir.”

“When you were much younger, huh?” Sacks said. He smiled, but Lieutenant Comfort didn’t break expression. Charlie pressed his lips together so hard it inflated his cheeks.

“Yes sir. Then I started having dreams. Sometimes the dreams were about people. One time I dreamt about Mr. Hoffman.”

“Mr. Hoffman?”

“He was a baker in town,” Charlie explained. “David claims he dreamt about his death the night before it happened.”

“That so? Did you know about your son’s abilities, Roselyn?” Donald Sacks asked. David’s mother shook her head, her eyes wide with fear.

“No, he never really told me all this.”

“Never told your mother you could do these things,” Lieutenant Comfort asked quickly. It was more like he pounced.

“He was closer to his grandmother,” Roselyn said. She smiled and shrugged. “I had a bad marriage and then went to work and left him with her most of the time. She passed away just recently.”

“So you told your grandmother?” Comfort said.

“Yes.”

“Anybody else?”

“He told me,” Charlie said.

“Let the boy answer for himself,” Comfort said with a definite tone of chastisement. Charlie blanched. “Anybody else besides Charlie?”

“I told Ted Davis.”

“Ted Davis?”

“That’s Diane’s boyfriend,” David said. “He and I used to do things together.”

“What things?”

“Tricks, I suppose. I could guess where people hid things, guess cards before they were shown, things like that. We won some money. I found a lost key for him once,” David added. The memory of that scene seemed so distant now, almost as if the event had occurred in another life. He couldn’t help visualizing Diane, seeing her expression of amazement when he brought the key out from under the front seat of Ted’s car. He could almost smell the scent of her hair as he recalled sitting beside her in the car that first afternoon.

“Ever tell any other adults?” Donald Sacks asked.

“Not really,” David said.

“Uh-huh. So tell us again how you came to know what happened to Diane Jones and exactly where it happened,” Lieutenant Comfort demanded.

“She wanted me to help her study the other night.”

“You help her? I thought she was a senior,” Comfort said, directing himself to Charlie.

“Yes, she was,” Charlie said.

“So why would she want you to help her?” Comfort asked. David saw how intently they all watched him whenever the state investigator asked a question. It was obvious that his questions were going to be the hard and important ones.

“I once told her about the way I studied for a test,” David said. And then he explained the magical way he located all the material that would be on the math exam. “She wanted me to do the same thing for her,” he concluded. For a moment none of the three men said anything. They all gazed at him as though he had escaped from some terror film. He could almost hear them ask, “Is this kid for real?”

“That was the night you thought you saw someone watching Diane’s house?” Sacks asked.

“Yes. I didn’t see him exactly…” He looked at Charlie. “I sensed him out there, and I saw the shadow.”

“Shadow?”

“The same shadow that was in the dream,” he said, and then he described the dream. He even added the grotesque appearance of Diane’s corpse at the end. His mother moaned and held her stomach.

“My God,” she said. The three men looked at her. She was pouring their coffee.

“This is the first time you heard this?” Lieutenant Comfort asked.

“Thank God, yes,” she said.

“David,” Donald Sacks began, softening his voice even more, “are you certain you didn’t witness this crime. Maybe you saw it and think you dreamt it. It was horrible enough to want to avoid remembering.”

“No sir. I dreamt it.”

“Was your boy home all last night?” Lieutenant Comfort asked David’s mother as she brought them each a cup of coffee. She looked at David.

“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I went out for awhile because I wanted to be sure Diane didn’t go walking on her road alone.”

No one said anything for a moment. The three men sipped their coffee, and David’s mother checked on his eggs.

“You were on her road last night?” Sacks asked.

“Yes.”

“Anyone see you there or see you leave the road?” Comfort asked.

“I met a friend of mine on my way home. Merle.”

“Merle?”

“Merle Zalsky,” Charlie said. “I know him.” Comfort nodded, obviously asking Charlie to make note of the name.

“What time did he come in, Mrs. Steiner?” Lieutenant Comfort asked.

“I don’t know,” Roselyn said. “I…I was out and by the time I came in, he was asleep. We made a lot of noise and woke him and then after we told him what happened, he said he had to go into town to tell the police what he knew.”

Everyone was quiet again for a moment.

“You can’t tell us any more about this…shadow, David?” Donald Sacks asked. He just shook his head.

“How come you’re so sure it’s not this Gerry Porter?” Lieutenant Comfort asked.

“He’s not dangerous,” David said. “Not really.” He was about to add that he believed Gerry had confronted the shadow, but he felt guilty about submitting him to this kind of questioning. He knew they wouldn’t understand his reluctance to say anything, and they could only consider that a form of cover-up.

“How come you’re so sure?” Comfort pursued.

“I…I can sense it,” David said.

David’s mother brought his eggs and toast to the table.

“Are you going into school today?” Comfort asked.

“He should,” Roselyn said. “It’s only a couple of days to tests.”

David looked at the clock. He realized he could still make most of his classes.

“Yeah, I’ll go.”

“After school, come down to the station,” Comfort said.

“Why?” Roselyn asked.

“I want him to take us back to the scene of the crime. Sometimes, people remember things when they look at something twice.”

“But he never really looked at it,” she said. “He had a dream. It was only a dream,” she repeated.

No one responded. The three men thanked her for the coffee and then left.

David expected the reactions he got when he went to school. He sensed them as he walked toward the building. It was as if he were walking against a giant balloon, pressing his way forward against slight, but nevertheless, new and real resistance. Something was trying to hold him back, either to protect him from what would be or to keep him away because he was no longer wanted.

It was very warm, more like an August day. The air was heavy, and when he reached the side door and entered the building, there was no relief. In fact, it was harder to breathe inside. He felt as though he had entered a trap. Was it from the high humidity or was it all a product of his own imagination? By the time he went to the general office and got his late pass and then went to his math class, his face was bright red. That, plus all that had happened, drew everyone’s attention to him.

His classmates were unable to turn away; they were mesmerized by his presence, by his mere existence. He did nothing to encourage it. He took his seat as quickly as he could, opened his notebook, and listened attentively to Mr. Rosenfield’s description of the main areas of curriculum the final exam would cover. Throughout it all, he felt everyone’s eyes on him.

Mr. Rosenfield tried to ignore what was happening, but before the period ended, he realized he could have just as well been talking to an empty room. No one was hearing his words any longer. Frustrated, he stopped talking a good five minutes before the period ended and told the class to look through their notes. He said he was available for questions. No one asked any. David had something he wanted to ask, but he was afraid of what his voice would sound like. He felt more like a new student than a lifelong resident, and had a new student’s timidity.

When the bell rang to end the period, he got up hopefully. His friends all turned away as if they were embarrassed to know him. No one smiled; no one offered a word. In fact, the class made its exit in a funerallike silence, everyone moving slowly, quietly. There wasn’t the usual scraping of chair legs over the floor and an explosion of chatter. And everyone left orderly too, the way teachers dream of students leaving a room. The terrible events had turned everyone into adults and stolen away the nonchalance of childhood.

David was one of the last to leave. When he looked at Mr. Rosenfield, Mr. Rosenfield became busy with papers on his desk. Even his teachers weren’t going to break the ice. He looked down, rather than at anyone in particular, and started out. When he entered the hallway, things first looked as if they would go back to normal. There was the usual noise and confusion. Students were yelling to each other and moving up and down the middle instead of staying to the right. He welcomed the normal bedlam.

But it didn’t last. As soon as the other students saw him, noise in the hall dropped. People were whispering instead of talking and gaping at him as though he were a new breed of teenager just imported.

He was on his way to English, traveling to the thirties corridor which was one flight up. He crossed the main lobby and started up the stairs, but before he reached the second step, he heard his name and turned to face Ted Davis, Westlake, Shatsky, and a few other senior boys. The sound of his name brought everything to a halt. Students stopped moving on the stairways and through the hall and lobby. Even the office help paused in what they were doing and looked his way.

David was surprised that Ted had come to school, but then again he imagined Ted needed the comfort of his friends. It was terrible to be alone in mourning. He knew that from his period of bereavement after his grandmother’s death. Ted was pale and without his characteristic neat appearance. His hair was disheveled, his shirt was out of his pants, and the sleeves were unbuttoned. One sleeve was partly rolled up, one was not. He looked as if he had been pulling on his clothes.

His eyes were bloodshot, and he had a wild look about him. It was a look that reminded David of the inebriated hobos he occasionally came upon down by the tracks. Their facial muscles were so relaxed they looked unconscious with their eyes open. They had a hard time controlling the movement in their mouths, and their foreheads were deeply creased from the effort to keep their eyelids from shutting. Despite their weakened and confused state, or perhaps because of it, David was always frightened by them. He recognized that they were no longer in charge of themselves; they had lost authority over their limbs, their words, and their expressions. Something released in the whiskey possessed them, or, and he often thought this was more probably the case, something in the whiskey released the spirit asleep in them.

Diane’s gruesome death and the weight of his own sorrow had released something dormant in Ted Davis as well. David sensed that it was dangerous and evil. It had quickly overpowered any of his softer emotions and had driven back any and all rational thought. Ted stood before him more like a puppet. David could almost see the strings dangling in the air, controlled by a malicious and ruthless spirit eager to show its power. Instinctively, David took another step back, moving up the steps, and held onto the railing.

Ted started toward him, his friends moving with and beside him like a linked clump, all of one thought, all of one brain and muscle. They wore the same mask of anger and distrust. They looked like the citizens from the country of bad dreams: eyes wide, mouths tight, bodies as firm as fingers locked in a fist. Every one of them was distorted by his effort to not only feel what Ted felt, but to feel it as intensely.

“You wanna tell us how come you knew so much?” Ted said. He had two books and a notebook clamped in his right hand and held away from his body. He held both his arms out and down, his neck taut, the skin under his chin straining. For a moment David said nothing. He looked from one to the other and then back at Ted.

“I had a dream about it,” David responded, his voice barely above a whisper.

“A dream? You had another dream? Another magical dream?” Ted raised his voice so dramatically on the third phrase that it created a ripple of comments throughout the crowd of students now gathering in the lobby.

“I told it all to the police,” David said. He searched the mass of faces, looking for an expression of sympathy, but all looked either frightened or angry.

“He told it all to the police,” Ted repeated. “You’re fulla shit,” Ted said. “You didn’t tell it all. You didn’t tell it all,” he repeated and started up the stairs.

“What’s going on out here?” Mr. Gotman called from the entrance to his office. The principal, Mr. Gotman, was a tall, muscular man who commanded respect and administered discipline simply on the basis of his mere physical presence. Everyone knew that he had played football in college. He was rarely challenged. He came forward quickly. “Everyone get moving to class. Let’s go. Get moving,” he commanded. Ted stopped inches from David on the stairway and glared down at him. Students started moving away as Mr. Gotman came toward them.

David saw the fire and the pain in Ted Davis’s eyes, but he didn’t hate him for it. Oddly enough, at this moment he felt understanding. He believed that only he and Ted could feel the sorrow this deeply.

“I didn’t do anything to hurt her. I tried to help her,” he whispered.

“Davis, what’s going on here?” Mr. Gotman said. He was right beside them. Ted didn’t reply. He continued to stare down at David, but David didn’t look away. He found that he wanted to look directly into Ted’s eyes; he found that he wanted to face the anger and hate and turn it back. He could actually feel the struggle going on; it was like an arm wrestle: his power, his concentration against the power and the concentration of the evil spirit. Perhaps it was the same evil spirit that drove the shadow to attack and kill Diane Jones.

He didn’t retreat and after a long, heavy moment, he felt Ted ease off. He felt himself winning the struggle. The spirit slipped back, choosing not to face him directly. It did not surrender; it merely opted for a different time and a different way.

“Davis,” Mr. Gotman repeated. Ted turned to him and then rushed back down the stairs to his awaiting clump of friends. Without a word, they all started across the lobby to their next class. Mr. Gotman looked at David. “Go on to class,” he said, “and stay away from him.”

David said nothing. He moved up the stairs quickly, the students in front of him parting and moving back as though they were afraid he might touch them and somehow contaminate them. He didn’t look at them; he didn’t care anymore. It had been a mistake to come to school today, he thought. He should have listened to his instincts.

The students behaved the same way in all his remaining classes. Those who spoke to him, spoke perfunctorily, quickly, avoiding his eyes. He realized that what his buddies were afraid of was being associated with any suspicions laid at his feet. After all, Rube, Tony, and he had gone to look in at Diane Jones when she was undressing in her bedroom. The two of them had a look of doom about them as if they anticipated being called in at any moment and charged with being Peeping Toms. Was that like being considered an accomplice to a crime? He could almost hear them ask the question.

He didn’t force himself upon anyone. If Ted didn’t understand and believe him, who would? Ted had seen some of the things he could do, even though most of that was discounted as mere trickery now. He had confided in Ted, but now it seemed that Ted hated him for what he could do. Would it have been better not to tell the police about his dreams? Would it have been better not to have led them to the path and the clearing and the pond? They would all be still looking today, and Diane’s parents wouldn’t know the truth, would continue to hope that their daughter was alive.

Was this what his grandmother meant when she warned him to beware of what he could do? No one is really more disliked than a good fortune teller, for the fortune teller knows things about people that they don’t really want to know about themselves, he thought. Instinctively David understood that people despised those who brought bad news, even though they didn’t cause it. They were forever associated with it. Diane Jones’s mother and father would never again look at him without remembering his words and the pain those words brought. And he could never look at them without thinking about it either. Wasn’t it easier, wasn’t it safer to not speak, to keep the dreams and the images trapped in his own mind?

But could he do that even if he wanted to? That kind of knowledge built up a pressure. Revealing the information brought him relief. He realized that this was why his grandmother was so sad for him, why she wanted to avoid talking about it. She knew the heavy weight he would carry and that what some people would consider a blessing was really a burden.

He did not move quickly to leave the building the way he and his friends usually did when school ended. No one had invited him to join in anything afterward, and anyway, he had to go back to the police station to talk to that state investigator. He wasn’t anxious to do that. He didn’t like the man, and he didn’t want to do what he had suggested: go back to the scene of the crime, the scene of his terrible dream. But he had no choice.

When he came out of the building, he saw small groups of students gathered here and there. Most of them were upperclassmen. His appearance stopped their conversations. He felt their eyes on him as he walked down the sidewalk. He had half expected another confrontation with Ted, but he wasn’t around. Neither were his close friends. He imagined they had gotten him to leave, thinking it was only added pain and agony for Ted to talk to him.

Perhaps it was. He was fatalistic about it all now. What could he do to make Ted understand? He walked on slowly, his head down, ignoring some of the comments deliberately stated loud enough for him to hear. He heard the words, “flaky, queer, perverted.” Did they really think he had something to do with the death of Diane Jones?

He didn’t run from them. He moved more like someone in a daze and looked up only when it came time to cross a street. When he reached the other side, he started to walk faster, stopping automatically at Stanton’s garage. For a long moment, he didn’t know why he had stopped. He looked about in confusion.

Two of the four Stanton brothers were working on a vehicle parked in front of the garage. They had the hood up and the car jacked up on the left side. The vehicle looked familiar. The Stantons didn’t notice him standing there and staring at them. After a moment he realized what was familiar about the car. It was Peter Sills’s vehicle.

He closed his eyes because the ringing began, and he ran the palm of his right hand over his forehead and down over his face.

When he opened his eyes again, it was like he was looking at a sepia-tinted photograph. Late spring was gone; it was fall, and there were no vehicles parked in front of the garage. The big garage door was down, but dangling in front of it were two bucks with long, red incisions down the center of their stomachs. They stared out at him with eyes frozen in fear. He felt accused merely because he was a member of the species that hunted and killed them for sport. And like the time when he actually did see them hanging there, he ran from the scene, pursued by the confused faces of the animals seeking an answer to the question why.

He had no answers for them; he could only leave them dangling there, trophies in rigor mortis.

When he was a good block and a half from the garage and nearly halfway to the police station, he stopped running. He caught his breath and looked back and around him to see if he had attracted any attention with his frantic flight from a memory and a vision. The pedestrians whom he saw didn’t appear to have taken notice of him. He was grateful for that. But then he wondered why that particular memory had come.

He had had it before and relatively recently. The violent image seemed out of place then, but now he realized it had had something to do with the shadow of death.

The shadow was starting to turn toward him, the darkness peeling back off its face. Soon, soon, he would know exactly who it was. He was confident of that, but it wasn’t something he would tell anyone just yet, least of all the state investigator who was obviously skeptical of everything he said.

He went on, afraid but determined.

12

Charlie Williams and Lieutenant Comfort were the only ones waiting for him when he arrived at the police station. Charlie was sitting behind the desk, and Comfort was seated in a chair to the right. Neither of them got right up to get started when he walked in. Instead, they both sat there looking at him almost as casually as they would had he come in to register his bike.

David was surprised by this lack of intensity and excitement. What had happened to Diane Jones was spectacular, not only in the history of this small community, but in the history of the township and county, for the occurrence of capital crimes in that semirural area in those times was rare. True, the local newspaper, a weekly, didn’t have the sophistication nor the staff to pursue a criminal case as did the urban dailies, and the local radio station depended entirely on news being brought to it, yet David still anticipated a crowd of people at the station, phones ringing, and maybe even a New York reporter already on the scene. Instead, he found deceptive peace and quiet. It was almost as if he had not only dreamt the murder, but all that had followed as well.

The moment Lieutenant Comfort began to speak, however, David sensed that the tone of nonchalance was a technique intended to catch a suspect off guard.

“So,” Comfort began, “how was your day at school?”

“Not very good,” David replied. He looked at Charlie and Charlie nodded in understanding.

“Take a seat, David,” Comfort said, indicating the chair directly across from him. It had been pulled away from the desk, about equally distant from Charlie and from Lieutenant Comfort. David imagined they had placed it just so, anticipating his arrival. “We’ll get started in a few minutes,” Comfort said. He almost smiled.

David looked down at the chair as if it could somehow entrap him. He was aware that his demeanor and his movements made him seem suspicious, but he didn’t know how he should be acting. He sat down firmly, pressing his spine straight up against the back of the chair. For a few seconds, Comfort just stared at him. Charlie Williams played with a pen on his desk.

“David,” he said sitting back, “where exactly did you have this dream?”

“Where?”

“Yeah, where?”

“Home, in my house.”

“You were in bed?”

“Sure.” He looked at Charlie, but Charlie didn’t change expression. He had been schooled in how to behave. David could almost hear Comfort teach the lesson. “Where else?”

“That’s what I wanted to know. People daydream, right?”

“It wasn’t a daydream.”

“Well, people dream after they wake up. They might be sitting around somewhere and might be bored, and they start to dream. Couldn’t that have happened to you?”

“It didn’t. Not this dream.”

“It does happen to you though, right? You do daydream?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe the dream happened while you were on Diane Jones’s road. You’ve been up there at night before, haven’t you? And I don’t mean to help Diane Jones with her schoolwork.”

David blanched and nodded.

“You and your friends were doing some snooping around. Harmless excitement. I can understand that. But it’s hard with a lot of guys…they’re fooling around…one of your friends got hurt one night…you guys almost got caught…so you started going up there by yourself, isn’t that right?”

“No,” David said, but Comfort didn’t appear to have heard him.

“Maybe this one night you stopped along the way because Diane was walking up the road and—”

“No,” David said quickly. “It happened in my home, while I was sleeping.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t have to answer so quickly, David. I know this is hard, but you’ve got to give everything a little more thought, okay?” Comfort said, still maintaining that pleasant, soft tone of voice.

“I don’t have to think about that.”

“I see. David,” Comfort said leaning forward, “I had a case recently that concerned a little boy who unfortunately witnessed his father beating his mother to death. You can imagine how hard it was for that boy to talk about what happened. So, you know what he did—he talked about it as though it was a bad dream. He didn’t want to believe it really happened,” Comfort concluded, raising his arms.

He’s made this all up, David thought, but he didn’t reveal his thought. He nodded to go along with it.

“I didn’t see it happen,” he said. “I dreamt it.”

Comfort just stared at him.

“David,” he said, his voice getting sterner now, “we’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to bring in all kinds of experts, and we’re going to find evidence that’s going to lead us to the killer, one way or another. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Good,” David said.

“All right,” Comfort said after a long pause. He stood up. “Let’s go see if returning to the scene helps jar your memory any.” Charlie got up and David started out. “We’ll go in my car,” Comfort said and directed David to the unmarked police vehicle. He got into the back seat, and Charlie got into the front. No one spoke any more until they reached Diane’s avenue and pulled up at the entrance to the path. David noted that some markers had been left there, and the bushes on the side of the road were well trampled down.

“Wait a minute,” Comfort said after he had pressed down on his door lever. “Where does your dream start? Does it start right here or in there?”

“It starts on the road. She’s coming up the road, carrying her books and—”

“Carrying her books?”

“Yes.”

“We didn’t find any books last night or this morning.”

“She was coming back from a friend’s house. They were studying,” David said. It was more like he was reciting it.

“All right. Go on.”

“The shadow, the man, came out of the woods.”

“Where? Here?”

“No, back a ways.”

“Take us to the spot,” Comfort said and they all got out.

David walked back a dozen yards and stared at the forest until he was sure of the exact spot. Then he walked toward it, parting some of the brush at the side of the road.

“He came out of here,” he said. Comfort looked at Charlie, and the two of them moved through the brush to the first row of trees.

“There are recent tracks here,” Charlie said after kneeling down close to the earth. “A big foot size.” He looked up at the state investigator. “Like I found back at her house.”

“Shit,” Comfort said. “Look, kid, who the fuck was in here?” He came back to the road quickly. He looked like he was going to attack him. “Who the hell did you see?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know…yet.”

“What’dya mean, yet?”

“It may come to me slowly,” he said. “Maybe in another dream.”

“What? Jesus. Now you listen to me. No one can dream what’s going to happen to someone else. You can have a feeling about it, maybe, but you can’t dream it with such detail. You had to have seen this…you know who it was. Why are you covering up? Did you have something to do with it? Did you bait this girl? Maybe you met her at her girlfriend’s house and told her you would walk her home so she would feel safe, and then things got out of hand, right? Whoever it was who was in this with you went too far, right?”

“No,” he said, amazed at the idea. “I swear, no.”

Comfort still looked as if he were going to strike him. David could see the frustration building in him. His thick neck seemed to widen, and his face became puffy.

“Go back to the path,” he commanded. David walked down to it and started in, with Comfort and Charlie right behind him. “Describe it all again,” Comfort said. “As we go.”

“He dragged her through here, twisting her arm,” David began. Tears were forming in his eyes, and his voice was shaky. “She was sobbing, but she didn’t scream; she was too afraid.”

“How do you know she was too afraid?”

“I felt her pain, her fear.”

“You felt it, huh? But you weren’t really here. You felt it in a dream,” Comfort said. David ignored him.

When they reached the clearing, David stopped the narrative. Lieutenant Comfort came up beside him and squeezed his upper arm, a little harder than David expected. It stung, but he didn’t complain or rub it.

“Keep talking, kid.”

He started to describe the rape. His heart began beating madly, and he felt weak and dizzy. His voice cracked and faded; his throat was drying up quickly.

“Fishline, fishline, how’d you know it was fishline?” Comfort asked. All his questions were fast and punchy now.

“I don’t know. It just came to me.”

“Just came to you. Do you fish a lot?”

“No. Hardly ever.”

“But you knew it was fishline?”

“Yes.”

“This other guy, your friend, he fishes a lot?”

“There was no friend. I’m telling you the truth. I wasn’t here with anyone; it was a dream.”

“Uh-huh. Where did he beat her? Right here? He was swinging the branch and striking her right here?” David nodded. “Show me. Show me how he swung it.”

David stepped forward, but he couldn’t recreate the actual beating. He couldn’t lift his arms. In his mind she was there. The vision was so vivid; it was too real. He saw blow after blow, and he saw the cloth bag tear. He saw the shadow reach out, pull it from her head, and beat down on her.

He put his hands over his eyes and groaned.

“What is it, kid? Talk.”

“I can’t stand it; I can’t stand seeing it.”

“You did see it then, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but in my dream. It was just so real when I saw it that I can’t forget it.”

“So how come you forgot the killer? Who’s the man? Who’s the man?” Comfort demanded. “Is he a friend? It’s a friend, right? An older boy, a bigger boy.” Lieutenant Comfort looked at Charlie and then back at David. “Was it this Gerry Porter?”

“No!” David covered his face with his hands.

The shadow was turning; some of the darkness was going. He could see the side of his face. Why was he turning? He threw the torn cloth bag to the right. It got caught on a branch and then fell.

David spun around.

“What is it, kid?” Comfort asked.

David looked up at him. It was obvious the policeman was expecting him to confess to something. The fool, he thought; the fool.

“I don’t know,” he said. He wasn’t going to lead him to the torn bag. He didn’t want him to have it. He would label it and hold it for forensics, but it wouldn’t be any help to them. It could only be a help to him, David thought. Besides, anything new that he added to the story now only confirmed the suspicions the state policeman had. He would simply use it as more evidence that David was lying about the dream. “I don’t know anything else,” he added. “I told you all I know.”

“From a dream?”

“Yes.”

“You still insist this is all from a dream?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you, kid. I think you know that I am going to get to the truth and when I do—”

“I’m telling you the truth,” David insisted. Comfort said nothing. David looked at Charlie, but Charlie looked as skeptical as Lieutenant Comfort. David looked about the clearing again. It had become such a hateful place.

“Go on home, kid,” Comfort said. “If your memory gets a little better, come see us. I hope it gets better before we come see you, understand?”

“I’m not lying,” David said. He glared back at him this time.

“Right, but when I prove you are, I’m going see that they get you into adult court.”

David saw no point in continuing his denials. He looked at the pond and then started down the path. On the way, he gazed to the right and saw the torn cloth bag under a bush, but again, he resisted saying anything about it. Instead, he walked out of the woods and started for home. He was breathing heavily and fighting back the tears.

A few moments later, Comfort and Charlie drove by. Neither looked at him. He watched the car make the turn at the end of the avenue and disappear. As soon as it had, he stopped and waited a moment. Then he turned around and ran back to the bushes, making his way quickly down the path until he reached the cloth bag.

For a moment all he could do was look at it. Inside were small blood stains and some strands of her hair. Finally he reached down and took it into his hands. It felt hot to his touch. He crumpled it into as small a ball as he could and stuck it in his shirt.

He rushed out of the woods again and ran down the road to home, feeling as if he carried something wild and dangerous against his skin. For him the torn bag was pulsating and alive. He believed he couldn’t hold onto it too long, for through it, the shadow of death would reach him. It was both the doorway into and the doorway out of the darkness.

He would have to open it, for in doing so, he would come face to face with the killer. He knew this as surely as he knew his own name, and the knowledge terrified him. But it was something he had to do.

He didn’t want to bring the torn cloth bag inside; it was like bringing death into his house. He was also afraid that his mother might see it and want to know what it was. If he told her, she would go wild. She was hysterical enough as it was. He hurried to the back of his house and hid it behind a bush. Then he went inside, surprised that his mother was already home from work, since she had gone in late.

“I couldn’t work,” she told him when he asked her why she was home so early. “I tried, but it was very difficult facing people. People are talking about you, you know. The whole town knows the story. You can imagine,” she said and then punctuated it with a short laugh. “Look who I’m saying can imagine. Mr. Imagination himself. So, my fortune teller, you want to explain?”

“There’s nothing to explain, Mom. I told the truth. It’s exactly what happened.”

“You really dreamt all this?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve had other dreams?” He nodded. “How was it that Grandma never mentioned them to me? How come?”

“She didn’t want to talk about them. She wouldn’t even talk about them with me.”

“Is that so?” She thought for a moment. “Why, it reminded her of something from the Old Country?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably,” he added. His mother looked very sad and very tired. She sat down at the table and rested her head against her propped-up right hand.

“There were many things she wouldn’t tell me, too, and many questions she refused to answer. She had terrible times when she was a child, terrible. I never told you, David,” she said looking up, “but your grandmother had a brother who was murdered, gruesomely.”

“When?” He went to the table and sat down beside her.

“When she was about fourteen. He was only nineteen. It happened in their little village in Hungary.”

“One of those pogroms?”

“No.” She looked up at him. “He was murdered by his own people.”

“People? More than one person killed him?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know much. She was very stingy with that story, a detail here, a detail there. One night he was jumped in the street and butchered. The next day no one knew anything. No one cooperated with any investigation. They never found out who did it. Shortly afterward, my grandfather sent for her and my grandmother, and they came to this country.”

“Why wouldn’t the people in her village cooperate? What else did she tell you about it?”

“I told you, not much.”

“There must have been something, some hint, something…”

“All I ever remember her saying or being willing to say was he knew something about everybody, and what he knew, they didn’t want anyone to know. I guess he was a snoop. She said he thought he could do too much. I don’t know what she meant by that, and she ran away from explaining. I thought it was a painful memory for her, so I didn’t push it.”

“She said he thought he could do too much?”

“Something like that. Oh, and she had a nickname for him. Whenever she said it, it brought tears to her eyes, and she stopped talking about him immediately. She called him—”

“Gypsy eyes,” David said quickly. It was more like a loud whisper. So this was why his grandmother was afraid for him. She knew because she had seen it in her brother, and she had seen what had happened to him. Her dying admonition was more significant now: “You must be afraid of what you can do.”

His mother’s eyes widened with surprise.

“You know? She told you about him?”

“No,” he said.

“Then how did you know that?”

“It’s what she called me just before she died,” he said. His mother stared at him a moment.

“She probably got confused…near death, people get confused.” He didn’t say anything. His mother sat back in her chair. “I don’t like all this, David. How could you lead them right to the place and show them everything from a dream?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what made you think you dreamt the truth?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “It’s just the way it is.”

“That’s an answer?”

“I don’t know any other answer,” he said. She shook her head.

“People are talking…stories…they all think you had something to do with this terrible thing.”

“I didn’t.”

“What are we going to do?” she asked, her lips quivering. He felt as if he were the adult and she were the child. “Even Fred…wonders,” she said. “He told me how you showed them everything exactly.”

“It’ll be all right,” he said.

“It’ll be all right?”

“Yes. The killer will be found, and it will be all right.” He got up from the table. “I’ve got to go do some studying now.” His tone of assurance seemed to help her. She took a deep breath and nodded.

“I’ve got a chicken in the oven.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to be hungry.” She smiled.

“I know you couldn’t do anything to hurt someone like that, David. And if you knew who did such a thing, you would tell, right? Even if it was a friend. A friend,” she said. “How could such a person be a friend? You would tell, right?”

“Of course.”

“I knew it. I just want everyone else to know it.”

“They’ll know it. It’ll be all right,” he repeated and went into his room.

He really did try to study. He actually had come to welcome the pressure of having final exams in two days. It was the only way he could take his mind off the horrible events. He was grateful now for having such powerful concentration. Once he put his mind to something, he was able to fight off all distractions. He went at it so intently, he didn’t realize how long he was studying. When she called him to dinner, he discovered he had been working for nearly two hours straight.

“I have a card game at Tillie Green’s house tonight, but I think I’ll call and cancel,” she said as she served him his supper.

“No,” David said. “That’s the worst thing you can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you start to hide at home, you’re going to have them talking more. Go face them down. Don’t let them make up stories about us.”

She stared at him a moment and then smiled.

“You know, you look so much older, so much more mature. I hadn’t noticed until now, but you’ve grown a few inches and filled out. It’s like it happened overnight.” He shrugged, but he did feel older. “You’re growing up so fast. No wonder your grandmother was so proud of you. You know,” she said holding her serving spoon like a baton, “I think you’re right.” She nodded her head and straightened her posture. “Who are those women to make me hide? They probably expect me to cancel. Well, I think I’ll show them. You’ll be all right if I go?”

“No problem. I got all this studying to do anyway.”

“You’ll call me at Tillie’s if you need me?”

“Of course. Go. Don’t worry about it,” he said. It didn’t take much more encouragement. After dinner she went into her room and changed her clothes. He was reading at the kitchen table when she emerged again, ready to go to her game.

“You’re positive?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m positive.”

He waited a good ten minutes after she left, just to be sure she had really gone and not changed her mind halfway there. When he was confident she had, he closed his book, got up from the table and went out the back door.

Night had fallen, but with the moon still full and the sky relatively clear, everything was well silhouetted. Even so, the stillness made it all look ominous. There was no breeze. The trees looked painted against the inky backdrop. It was as if a hush had come over the world in anticipation of what he was about to do.

He hesitated on the top step and listened. He couldn’t remember when it had been so quiet before. He scanned the darkness, looking for a thicker, darker shadow. Was he out there, waiting? Had he honed in on the torn cloth bag, found it, and decided to wait for the one person who could peel away the shadows and reveal him?

Satisfied he was alone, David made his way down the back stairs and went directly to the bush where he had hidden the torn cloth bag. He didn’t know how it would help, only that it would. So much of what he was doing, he did instinctively, directed by a consciousness that he now realized had been passed down to him through the genes.

The cloth bag was a tangible link with the shadow of death. It had belonged to the killer. Something of him was still on it, and David, like some kind of bloodhound, now held it in his hands and tried to identify him through it. He brought it closer to his face, not to smell it, but to fully sense it. He met the challenge with all his concentration.

With his eyes closed, he held it up before him and first envisioned again how the killer had used it. As the images began, he felt light and had the impression he was rising out of his own body. He saw the bag being pulled down over Diane Jones’s head, but he noticed that in this vision he was closer to her. In fact, the shadowy figure wasn’t between him and Diane.

It was as if his fingers were pulling the strings tightly around her neck. It was as if he grabbed her arm and twisted it. He was pushing her toward the forest; he was directing her toward the clearing. He wrapped her hands together with the fishline and pushed her to the ground.

It took him only another moment to realize what was happening, but it was too late to retreat. Because of the bag, because of what he was able to do with it, he had entered the world of the shadow and now saw the world as he saw it. But even more than that, he was merging with the shadow; he was assuming his point of view and, in effect, he was becoming the killer.

He struggled against the loss of his separate identity, but something much stronger was pulling him. He was slipping further and further out of himself. At one point in the vision, he turned and saw himself, an empty shell, waiting in the darkness behind them.

He tried to return; he wanted to escape, but he had gone too far. He could see only what the shadow wanted to see, hear what the shadow heard, and do only what the shadow did.

The rape of Diane Jones was ugly. He felt the sexual pleasure as a weapon. Pleasure came only from inflicting pain. But in the middle of it all, he envisioned a new face within the cloth bag, and a new body appeared. At first it was like a double exposure, but then, Diane’s face and body dissolved and the new woman was there.

The new face was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t make out details about her because she appeared encased in ice. He could see she was older and not nearly as beautiful. He understood that in the shadow’s mind, he was attacking this woman, tormenting and venting his rage on her. This was who the shadow really saw. Diane was some kind of surrogate.

Afterward, when he struck out with the thick branch, he was striking at the other woman. Then he had ripped the torn cloth bag from Diane Jones’s face, but David still couldn’t see who it was because of the ice around her. He could barely make out the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Nevertheless, the vision, especially because it was seen and committed from the shadow’s viewpoint, was terribly painful for David. He continued his struggle to escape, but the shadow was magnetic, and he was unable to open his eyes or release his hold on the torn cloth bag, either of which would have permitted him to return to himself. It was just like what used to happen when he had those terrible visions early in his life, the ones that would play on the insides of his eyelids. He would be unable to open his eyes and stop them until they were over.

He tried to resist, but he had to drag the body to the pond. His fingers grew numb from grasping the ice and cold flesh. After the body sank, he, too, dropped the heavy rocks over it to keep it down. He stood at the side of the water, staring down into the liquid grave. When it was over, he walked back through the path and, through the shadow’s eyes, actually saw himself hiding in the shadows and watching. Did that mean that the shadow knew he was there?

He stepped back onto the avenue, but he was still moving and seeing things as the killer. For some reason, he couldn’t get warm. It seemed he was out in the middle of the winter. He gathered up her schoolbooks that had been dropped to the pavement and walked quickly down the avenue, keeping to the side of the road. When he reached the village proper, he paused. There was little traffic and not a pedestrian to be seen.

He crossed the tracks and made a left turn, walking quickly in an attempt to keep himself from freezing, still carried along by the killer, still seeing things through his eyes. Indeed the village did look different; it was the village of his nightmares with its darkened windows and peering faces. It was an unfriendly place. Most every door looked locked. It made him feel like an enemy who had conquered the village and was not welcome in its streets.

But who was he? In whose body had he transported himself? Through whose eyes did he see the world and why was it such a cold, winter world?

The answer came when he made the turn at Maple Avenue and hurried up the street until he reached the bottom of Dead Man’s Hill.

So this was why the footprints were big and easily confused with Gerry Porter’s footprints, and this was why Charlie Williams knew that whoever was spying on and haunting girls and women in town was not a kid.

The killer was the man who had always made him feel uneasy, the man who had been driving the illusionary hearse, the man who had triggered the memory of the gutted deer before, the man with the invalid wife: Peter Sills.

His struggle to return to himself became more intense. He didn’t want to go any farther because he could see what awaited in Peter Sills’s house. But he was at the door, turning the handle and walking in.

Vaguely, at first, he could hear himself screaming. It sounded like a distant echo coming from the bottom of the inside of a giant body. Gradually his voice grew louder as it came up the legs and reached the waist. He was screaming at the top of his voice when it reached the chest, and when the mouth finally reached the head, he opened his eyes.

He was still screaming. With the torn cloth bag still in his hands, he was actually standing in the entranceway of Peter Sills’s brick house, shivering.

And the front door was closed behind him.

13

He understood immediately that this was no longer an illusion. He imagined that what he had done was to travel like a somnambulist walking in a dream. While he had been envisioning the reenactment of the crime, he had left his house and come here. But hadn’t anyone noticed him going through town, clinging to this torn cloth bag, his eyes opened but not seeing? Perhaps people had spoken to him, but because he ignored them, they ignored him. In any case, no one had stopped him. He was here.

It wasn’t a terribly long walk from his house to Dead Man’s Hill and the Sills’s house, but he felt physically exhausted. His legs ached as if he had been running for miles. His body must have been tense all the way, perhaps trying to resist what was occurring. Whatever had happened had demanded great energy. He felt he could lie down and sleep forever.

Except for the hall light, the house was dark. It was also cold, terribly cold. He had never been in it before, but just from hearing the gossip about the Sills, he knew that this was a three bedroom house and one of the few brick structures in the community. The women who talked about the house said it was wasted. What good was the large living room, beautiful dining room, and the large kitchen with all the up-to-date appliances? Betty Sills never had any one over for dinner; she was always too sick to do anything like that; and the Sills never had a house party.

David wanted to turn and run out of the house, but he couldn’t do it. He felt drawn to what awaited him down the long corridor that led deeper into the house. The anticipation both fascinated and terrified him. He was attracted to it the same way people were tempted to look at a corpse in a coffin or slow down to gape at the site of a car accident. And yet he sensed no immediate danger. Peter Sills was not at home. He was out there somewhere in the night, moving in his guise as the shadow of death. Confident of his safety, David started forward.

The house was fully carpeted. The carpet in the hallway was thick and soft. His footsteps were practically silent. Indeed he felt like a ghost gliding as quietly as his shadow moving along the wall beside him, accompanying him, even comforting him.

There wasn’t another sound in the house. He looked through a doorway that led to the dining room and the kitchen. Both rooms were totally dark, but the little light that came from the hallway fixture made the top of the dining room table glisten like ice. He paused. The breeze that came through the opened dining room window lifted the curtain away from the sill silently, making it seem as if some small ghost had slipped in behind it.

He looked down the hallway at the remaining doors, but he knew which way he had to go. Now that he was closer to it, it loomed before him threateningly. There was still time to turn back, to rush out of the house and run through the village to home. He could see himself doing it, his feet slapping the pavement, his eyes wide with excitement, his arms swinging back and forth with his great effort to flee from—from what was to be discovered.

Did he have to actually go in to see? He knew what was there; he had known it for awhile now. Still, he had to confirm it. The visions and the images were not enough. In the end dreams had to be justified. They demanded it. He didn’t want the dreams; he didn’t ask for the visions, but they had come and he was here.

He went through the dining room door, moving gracefully forward through the darkness, avoiding tables and chairs, guided by a sonarlike power. He still held the torn cloth bag, which by now had become something magical. It had served him like a beacon lighting the way through his mad nightmares and visions. It had brought him here, and he had the notion that without it in his possession, he could never leave or return to his normal life.

He paused at the doorway of the kitchen. The door was closed. He looked back through the darkness to the hallway, listened for a moment, and then put his hand on the kitchen doorknob. It felt very cold, so cold he imagined his fingers sticking to it the way they would stick to dry ice. He turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.

For a moment he just stood there acclimating himself to the darkness. Then he felt along the wall to his right until he found the light switch. The ceiling fixture was so strong and bright, it seemed to explode above him. He looked at the table and chairs, the wall stove and range, the counter and the refrigerator whose motor hummed smoothly. Everything was clean and organized. All the metal looked polished. The tabletop sparkled. Even the linoleum floor looked recently scrubbed. In fact, the room looked frozen in time, untouched and unused for years, but maintained like some room in a museum.

He turned to the right and, with an inevitable sense of doom, went to the large, walk-in pantry. He opened the door and reached up to pull the string which would turn on the ceiling fixture. As soon as he did so, he put his hand on the top of the long freezer, which was immediately to the left of the entranceway. He knew the moment had come.

His mother was always talking about their getting a freezer like this. It would make things so much easier in the summer time, she said. They could stock up on all the foods they needed and not have to go shopping when all the tourists were here crowding the stores. They could just go to Selznow’s to buy the daily necessities. But such a freezer was very expensive. Few people could afford to buy one. They were found mostly in stores.

Did he really have to pull back the lever and lift the lid? His powerful imagination permitted him to see through it, yet he held the lid open and looked down and in. Even though he knew what was there, he wasn’t prepared for the gruesome reality.

There lay Betty Sills in her coffin of ice, naked and wrapped in a clear plastic bag. The puncture in her chest still looked fresh, and the streak of iced blood that ran down from her breasts over her diaphragm and down her stomach looked exactly like the incision made in the gutted deer that hung from the top of Stanton’s garage. Except for the knife wound and the streak of blood, her body was unblemished, but she looked up at him with deer’s eyes, frozen in the same fear and the same question, why.

This was the face and the body he had seen in his recent illusion and reenactment of the murder of Diane Jones. Now he understood the reason for it. Peter Sills had been striking at his wife again and again and again when he attacked Diane.

David continued to stare at her, fascinated by the way she had been captured at the moment of death and held there by the arctic air. A part of him wanted to close the lid quickly and shut away the horrible sight, but his arm seemed unable to bend, and his hand seemed already frozen to the lid.

He didn’t step back and away to let the lid slam shut until that now familiar dark shadow fell over him, and he looked up to see Peter Sills in the pantry doorway. His body filled it; there was no way out.

David had always been afraid to look directly at this man, and so when he looked up at him now, unable to look away, it was like looking at him for the first time. He seemed aged beyond his years; his face was drawn and haggard. The lines in his forehead and around his mouth were as deeply cut as the wrinkles in the skin of an elderly man.

His dark, wavy hair was disheveled and hung about his temples and forehead like it would had he just come in from pouring rain. Indeed, his face had a wet shine to it; he was in a deep sweat.

The wetness around his lips made them look thicker. David thought about masks again, only this time, the face he was looking at already had been unmasked. This was reality; this was who Peter Sills really was.

He was the man with dark, brooding eyes, the man whose face revealed great inner turmoil and pain. The creases in his skin came from the grimace. His forehead protruded because of the agony behind it.

He clenched his teeth and pressed his head outward, lifting his chin and straining the skin over his throat so that his Adam’s apple became emphatic. His upper back rose and his neck sank. He appeared like a hawk about to pounce. Within his light, short-sleeved shirt, his shoulders looked round and muscular. He lifted his arms in one motion as if they had no independent movement. His hands were tightened into large fists, both pointed in his direction. But he didn’t come at David right away.

“You’re the one who was there,” he said. “You were at her house, standing by the tree, looking in at her. Peeping Tom, violator,” he added accusingly. The words were spit at him.

David couldn’t talk; he couldn’t respond.

“Then you brought your friends to gape at her, didn’t you? I put an end to that, though. I put an end to that.”

“You killed her,” David said. It took all the strength he could muster to utter the words.

Sills blinked quickly, and David saw that his posture softened. He wasn’t looking directly at him anymore, either. It was eerie.

“I had to kill her. She wouldn’t let me go out; she wouldn’t let me do anything. And when I did go out, she kept accusing me. I didn’t do anything. I only looked. But she’s okay,” he added, a wry smile coming over his face. “She’s not much different from what she was. I take her out and bring her food and her medicine, and she lies around reading her magazines and listening to her radio and complaining just like always.

“I couldn’t stop her complaining,” he added, his smile softening. “She was born complaining. Her mother said the doctor didn’t have to slap her behind to get her to cry. She was crying as they were bringing her out of her mother’s womb. She’s always crying about one thing or another.

“It was always too hot for her. No matter what I did, it was too hot. I turned the heat down; I opened the windows; I brought her ice water, but no, it’s too hot.

“Now it’s not too hot. She’s comfortable. She’s better off. You see, it’s not so bad,” he said, and then he stopped abruptly, realizing to whom he was talking. David took a step back.

“But why did you come here and disturb her? Now you’ve set her off…bitching. Can’t you hear her? For Christsakes, why did you come here? Why can’t you leave us alone? You go around peeping in on everyone, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“No,” David said. “You do. And the police know it, too. They know it’s not just kids.”

Peter Sills didn’t respond. He stared at David for a moment, and then he stepped back and closed the pantry door. A moment later he opened the door again, only this time he held a long bread knife in his hand.

Any confidence David had, he had because he hadn’t foreseen his own death. There had been no visions of this. Of course, it occurred to him that such personal foreknowledge might be beyond him. Surely it had been beyond his grandmother’s brother, otherwise why did he permit his own murder to take place? He knew that people didn’t want their sins exposed, and eventually they would do anything to stop it. Why did he go out and endanger himself?

Once, when he was discussing dreams with his friends, everyone admitted having had a dream in which he was in some kind of danger, but everyone described waking up just at the fatal moment, whether it be falling from a great height or being hit by a car, whatever. The conclusion was that no one could actually see himself die.

Perhaps that was what had happened now, he thought. His mind wouldn’t let him envision his own death; it was a way of protecting itself from the ultimate horror. But how could he protect himself from it now that he was really here and the danger really confronted him?

Before Peter Sills took another step toward him, David held up the torn cloth bag as though it would serve him as some kind of shield. Indeed, when Peter Sills saw it, his gaze seemed locked on it.

Sills’s hesitation gave David an idea. He knew he had turned to the bizarre to confront the bizarre. At that moment it seemed to be a logical and intelligent move.

He threw open the freezer lid again. The action caught Peter Sills by surprise, and he actually stepped away. His dark, brooding eyes widened with shock as David came up close to the freezer and held the bag over it.

“He didn’t just kill her,” he began. “He put this over her head,” he said. “And then he forced her into the woods and raped her. He raped her.”

“No.” Peter Sills shook his head and looked at the freezer.

“Then he beat her and beat her until he killed her. After that, he dragged her body to the nearby pond and weighed her down with rocks.”

“No.” Peter Sills started toward him again, but David reached in, took hold of Betty Sills’s dead, but frozen hand under the plastic cover and pulled with all his might. The iced corpse was lifted just enough for the head to appear above the top of the compartment.

“He’s lying!” Peter Sills screamed, but then, instead of fleeing from what David hoped he saw as an angry and accusing wife, he raised the knife above his head.

Before he brought it down, however, Lieutenant Comfort was behind him, seizing his arm with one hand and grabbing him in a choke-throat hold with his other arm. The state investigator pulled Peter Sills back out of the pantry. In the kitchen, Charlie Williams helped him subdue Sills and get the knife out of his hand. Then they put his hands behind him, put handcuffs on them, and left him sobbing on the kitchen floor.

“Lucky for you, kid, that we followed you up here,” Lieutenant Comfort said, squatting beside Sills. David stood in the pantry doorway and looked down at the insane man. He felt as cold as the woman in the freezer.

“It was the lieutenant’s idea to follow you,” Charlie said. It seemed important to him to give the state investigator the credit. David said nothing.

“Why did you come to this guy’s house anyway?” Comfort said standing.

“He’s the killer,” David said.

“You knew that all the time?”

“No.” He looked at Charlie. “Yes.”

“Huh?”

“I knew it, but I didn’t know I knew it,” David said.

“Still on this wacky stuff, huh? Still with the dreams?”

“It’s what brought me here,” David said.

“Right. We followed you to this house, saw you go in and then saw him follow. Why did you go in this pantry? Did he chase you?” Comfort asked. David shook his head. Then he stepped back, clearly indicating they should enter.

“Jesus,” Charlie said.

“How long has she been in here?” Comfort asked.

“I don’t know,” David said. “But I think for some time.” Sills was still sobbing gently and pressing his face against the floor. “He’s the man who’s been spying on other women,” David told Charlie. Charlie nodded. “And he’s the one who attacked Buzzy that night.”

David started out of the kitchen.

“Wait a minute, kid,” Comfort said. He came out to him. “I still don’t understand how you knew all this.”

David looked up at him and then down at Sills, who had become quieter. He looked like he was falling asleep.

“If you look in the garage in the far right corner, you’ll find Diane Jones’s schoolbooks in a box,” he said. Then he looked at Charlie. “I’m tired; I gotta go home.”

Neither of the policemen stopped him from continuing his exit, but when he reached the kitchen doorway, he paused. He was still holding onto the torn cloth bag.

“This was what he put over her head before he attacked her,” David told them and left it on the counter. “It brought me here,” he said.

He walked home slowly. He was so tired he wondered if he would make it. The fatigue and the events made him numb. He imagined that, once again, he looked like a sleepwalker. The thought made him laugh. What if the same people who had seen him come from his home like this, now saw him going back? They’d think he was sleepwalking all over town. He laughed again, nearly hysterical with exhaustion.

He walked down through the center of town, crossed the tracks, passed the luncheonette, and walked up the hill. He paused at Chonin’s, looked back at the quiet village, and then turned and went up the street to his house. He entered through the back door.

After he went to the bathroom and washed, he got undressed and slipped into bed. Almost immediately, he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamt, of course, but these dreams were pleasant and quiet ones, more like happy memories. His grandmother was in all of them.

He had forgotten the time he and she had gone for a walk in the woods. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. And they discovered the nest of baby robins. Surprisingly, the mother had built the nest on a low bush, so it was easy for them to look into it. The baby birds looked ready to leave.

“Who teaches them to fly, Grandma?”

“They just know how.”

“How can you just know?”

“It’s instinctive, part of what they are,” she said. “Some things don’t have to be learned. They’re with you when you’re born.”

“People too? They have things with them when they’re born?”

“Yes,” she said. “But not flying.”

“I wish I just knew how to fly,” he said. His grandmother laughed.

“Then you would leave the nest,” she said. “And you would be so in love with the sky, you wouldn’t want to come back down.”

He looked up. She was right. If he knew how to fly, he wouldn’t come back down.

In his mind’s eye, he envisioned it. His grandmother was looking up at him, and she was becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until he could barely make her out below. His heart ached. He didn’t want to leave her, but oh how the blue sky called to him. He had to go on; he had to glide in the wind.

By late in the morning, everyone in the village knew who the killer of Diane Jones was and knew something about how he had been caught. The story reached the school community and spread rapidly through the entire student body, faculty, and administration. But no one could ask David any questions because he hadn’t gone to school. He slept late into the morning, and his mother didn’t wake him. When he did wake up, they decided he should stay home. He could study for his exams better at home. There would be too much distraction in school.

Lieutenant Comfort and Charlie Williams came to ask him a few more questions in the afternoon, but they didn’t stay long. His mother didn’t go to work. Fred Myers came by and looked in on him. There were a number of telephone calls. He saw that his mother enjoyed telling people about what he had done.

To them, David was a hero who had figured out through some evidence exactly who the killer was and led the police to him. The only magic that was involved was the magic of someone that young doing something this significant.

Both David and his mother agreed to leave it that way. When he went to school the next day to start his exams, he noticed the change in the way the other students viewed him now. Now, he was truly heroic. He felt uncomfortable, cast in this role.

It amazed him that he was able to go at his exams with such concentration. He was confident afterward that he had done well, too. When the bell rang to end the last test of the day, he got up and walked out of the school building exhilarated. His friends were all around him, everyone talking at once, asking questions about Peter Sills, the frozen wife, the attempt on his life. So many of the details had become distorted. He had to laugh.

He told them what he knew and what had happened. Whenever he spoke, everyone grew silent. It saddened him, for all this excitement and this new respect he was being given stemmed from the death of Diane Jones. If she hadn’t been attacked, none of this would have come about. He would rather have her back, walking through the village, her hair shining, her eyes gleaming, her beautiful smile warming him, haunting with the promise of his approaching manhood.

But she was gone, destroyed by something evil and ugly. And nothing would ever again be the same for David.

His friends wanted him to join them for a soda at Rosenblatt’s, but he thought it would be better for him to go home.

“Your mother’s working there today,” Merle reminded him. “You can get a soda for free.”

“Afterward, we’ll play King of the Hill,” Rube said. “David and I will stand the whole lot of you.”

David smiled. They were all waiting for his response.

“All right,” he said. “I just want to run home and change. I’ll meet you all down there.”

He didn’t. Instead, when he came out of his house after changing his clothes, he saw Ted Davis waiting in his car. David opened the door and got inside.

“I didn’t go to her house yet,” Ted said. “I just can’t get myself to do it.”

“Neither could I,” David said.

“I don’t know how you helped the police find the killer, but I’m glad that you did.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore how I did it.”

“I’m sorry I was so—”

“You don’t have to say anything about that. I know how it looked.”

“Jesus,” Ted said. There were tears coming out of his eyes now, tears coming from the big senior’s eyes.

“She was beautiful,” David said. “I was jealous of you.”

Ted nodded. They shook hands.

“Tomorrow, I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go to the funeral together,” Ted said.

After that he couldn’t go down to the village and meet his friends. There was no way he could go back to box ball and King of the Hill as if nothing had ever happened.

It was a big funeral. Most of the student body was there, as were most of the teachers and all of the administrators. There were a great many of the people who worked with Frank Jones at the hospital, too. Gerry Porter was there, standing with his mother at the rear. He was kicking a stone back and forth between his feet while the hymns were sung.

David and Ted stood with the family. Neither of them cried; they were too busy comforting everyone else. After it was over, he and Ted remained the longest. They watched the coffin lowered into the grave.

“Hey, Houdini,” Ted said. “What do you think death really is? You probably know something more than everyone else about it.”

“I think it’s like flying,” he said.

“Flying?”

“Yeah, you just glide and glide and glide against the sky, and it doesn’t bother you that you can’t come back because you love the feeling of being up there so much. After a while you even forget what it was like to be down here.”

“And you forget everyone else?”

“Until they join you and when each one you love joins you, it makes you fly higher.”

Ted laughed.

“You’re a weirdo, all right.”

“I know.”

They watched the grave diggers for a few more moments, and then they left. Ted drove him home. His mother had gone back to work. When he got into the house, he did something he hadn’t done before. He went to his grandmother’s things and looked through her old photographs until he found the one he knew to be her dead brother. He was still looking and thinking about him when his mother returned.

“I had forgotten about the old picture. She never took it out in front of me or you.”

“We look a little alike, don’t we?”

“A little. So,” she said, wanting to get away from morbid subjects, “did you hear about the Levines getting a television set? They invited us over to look at it.”

“Really?”

“Mr. Rosenblatt says his son wrote and told him in less than two years, television will be so much bigger than radio, nearly every home in America will have one. Isn’t it amazing, seeing someone far away talk and do things?”

“Yes,” he said. It was amazing.

“Fred’s coming over tonight. For dinner,” she said.

“Oh?”

“David, you do like Fred, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Because—”

“He asked you to marry him.”

“There you go again, telling me things before I tell them to you.”

He laughed.

Was it a good thing or a bad thing to be Gypsy eyes? Perhaps if he listened to his grandmother’s dying warnings and lived according to them, it could be a good thing.

Epilogue

David stepped out of the limousine and lifted the cape so the bottom of it wouldn’t dip into any of the puddles on the street and sidewalk in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater. Actually, he had grown to like the cape, even though it took a great deal of convincing on his manager’s part to get him to wear it for his appearances.

“You’ve got an image to uphold, whether you like it or not, David; and the cape helps.”

He didn’t see the need for any gimmicks. Why wasn’t the real thing enough to impress them?

“It is. No question,” his manager said, “but we want to sell you as much as we want to sell what you do.”

In the end he relented because he knew that his manager was right, and it was a sacrifice he was willing to make. He had made quite a number of them along the way, and wearing the cape, the now famous dark-black suit, and white gloves, signing autographs, responding to the demands of fans who wanted to know whether they should change jobs, get married, have children, move to another city, even play the lottery, all of it was relatively minor sacrifices compared to what he had gained in return.

It bothered him that ninety percent of what he did was now show, but it also amused him that the audiences wanted the show; they wanted the costume and the music and the words of mystery, even though all of that had little or nothing to do with what he could do.

The stage door attendant held the door open for him, and he hurried into the theater. He had cut it a little close, and the New York City traffic did its part to cut it even closer. Fortunately, he had done his own makeup.

The assistant director, a short and rather plump twenty-five-year-old woman, was at the sound stage door. She looked down at her clipboard as though her dialogue were written on it and then looked up at him.

“Mr. Steiner, we were getting a little worried about you. Merv’s already announced your appearance.”

“That’s okay. If I wasn’t going to be able to make it, I would have known it, and I would have called you,” he said, his increasingly identifiable wry smile punctuating his response. How he enjoyed putting people on like this. The young woman’s eyes widened with understanding.

“Of course,” she said. She looked up at him in awe. Before he was eighteen years old, he had grown to six foot three; obviously, he took after his father’s side of the family. He hadn’t realized his father was well over six feet until they met during one of his shows at the Palace in Las Vegas. But that was years ago. His father hadn’t kept in contact with him as he had promised, but David knew that he wouldn’t. He didn’t even tell his mother and Fred that he had met his old man. He could hear his mother’s response even without telling her. “Sure, now that you’re making big money and you’ve become famous, he wants to know you and remind you he’s your father.”

He didn’t laugh when he thought of what she would say; she would be right.

“How much longer before I go on?” he asked the assistant director. Once again, she referred to her clipboard.

“There’s five more minutes of this and then a commercial break and then Merv will introduce you.”

“Thank you.”

“You can wait in the green room,” she said. “Please, follow me. All of the remainder of the show will be you,” she added.

“Well, we have a lot to talk about,” he kidded, but she didn’t understand his humor. Instead, she nodded understandingly.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No thank you.”

“I caught you on Carson the other night. How could you tell which woman was the divorcee with three children? That was amazing.”

“It was in her eyes,” he said. He moved closer to the assistant director and looked intensely into her eyes. She blinked nervously. “You would be surprised at how much people reveal of themselves in their eyes. Of course, reveal only to me, I mean.”

“Of course,” she said, bringing her hand to the base of her throat. She could barely talk. It was like being under a spell. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends what it was like to meet him and be alone with him. She would tell them about the aura around him and the way his eyes penetrated her very soul. “I felt naked,” she would say. “All my inner thoughts and secret feelings were exposed.”

When it was time, he walked onto the sound stage and took his seat beside Merv’s big desk. They shook hands and quickly reviewed how he would proceed. The director signaled the end of the commercial, and the center camera lit and moved in for a close-up of Merv.

“Well, here we are, approaching New Year’s Eve, 1986,” he began, “and the future has got to be on everyone’s mind. Well, the future is never on anyone’s mind more than it’s on the mind of my next guest. You all know him as one of the most amazing men of our time.”

Camera number one lit, and the director called for a two shot as Merv reached across the desk to shake David’s hand.

“Thank you,” David said.

“I don’t want to ask you how you’ve been,” Merv asked. “How will you be?” he quipped. The audience laughed.

“For better or for worse, I can’t really predict things for myself,” David said.

“Remarkable. Well, as you know, the audience has contributed a number of questions concerning the future: politics, entertainment, international affairs, morality. All of them are on these index cards,” Merv said and picked up the deck. He shuffled them as though they were playing cards. “All right, the first question has to deal with…”

“Politics,” David said before Merv could continue.

Camera two lit and sent a close-up of Merv into the director’s monitor.

“That’s amazing! How did you know that? How do you do these things?”

Camera one lit and picked up a close-up of David.

He smiled and looked into the camera as if he could see through it and into the homes of each and every one of Merv’s viewers.

Many of those who watched actually felt that he could. Their hearts beat a little faster as they waited to hear his predictions.

More from Andrew Neiderman

After Life

Once she was blind, now she can see.

A car accident claims Jessie’s vision, leaving the young woman in the dark, struggling to piece her life back together. One year later, she has made progress, and Jessie and her husband, Lee, move to the peaceful village of Gardner Town. Once there, though, Jessie's blindness heightens her awareness of the strange and terrible things going on in the community. Only Jessie can hear the beckoning voices from the cemetery. Only Jessie thinks there's something terribly wrong with her husband's new boss.

And then a local woman makes a chilling, desperate request: "When your husband dies, don't let them bring him back."

This masterful novel of suspense gives readers chills with each page, and the final chapters will be read without blinking.

Child's Play

They were four perfect little children. Alex had taught them well. They helped with the house, set the table for meals, and went straight upstairs after dinner to do their homework. They did as they were told—that is, as Alex told.

Sharon didn't miss the glances that passed between her husband and the foster children. From the day they arrived, they had looked up to Alex, worshiped him. Why, it even seemed they were beginning to act like Alex—right down to the icy sarcasm, the terrifying smile, the evil gleam in their eyes when they looked at her.

Oh yes, they'd do anything to please Alex. Anything at all...

Deadly Verdict

In this dizzying novel of speculative fiction, the legal system is picked apart for all the fault lines upon which justice quakes. Imagine a system wherein a pool of professional jurors are trained to judge evidence objectively. It’s clean, it’s fair, it’s infallible. But when a professional jury foreman goes missing, the FBI puts agents Holland Byron and new recruit Wyatt Ert on the case.

Soon other jurors go missing and turn up dead—as do their wives and husbands. Is the entire program under attack or is it just guilty defendants exacting their revenge? The shocking discoveries Holland and Wyatt make about the new legal system turn a sci-fi detective story into a challenge on the nature of man and the pursuit of good and evil in an increasingly impersonal world.

Duplicates

A person’s true identity is never the truth.

Bob and Marion endured the worst tragedies of their life after their son, Joey disappeared while on a camping trip with his uncle, Marion’s brother. The heartbreak of losing their son has strained at their marriage and broken their hearts. Horror and hope go cheek-by-jowl, though, when Marion sees her supposedly missing brother in New York City. He denies her story, even denies his own identity, but Marion knows that it is him, and that he has the information she and her husband have yearned for since the more horrific day of their lives.

Questioning her sanity, but still insisting that the man she encounters is truly her brother, Marion undertakes her own investigation.

Guardian Angel

The search for Mr. Right turns into a nightmare.

Megan Lester had a miserable separation. She questions whether she’ll ever be able to love again. But she does vow to give it a try, and on Megan Lester's first night back on the singles scene, she surveys the landscape at available men. But a pushy guy at the bar just won't leave her alone, and his aggressiveness goes from annoying to dangerous in the blink of an eye.

Then Steve Wallace steps in and saves her. From that night on, Steve always seems to be right there whenever Megan needs help, or someone to lean on. He’s even there when she doesn’t realize it. Watching. Steve has decided that Megan is his perfect woman, and he will stop at nothing—even kidnapping Megan's young daughter—to make Megan part of his perfect family.

Perfect Little Angels

A picture perfect town holds a chilling secret.

Justine Freeman and her parents move to Elysian Fields to start anew, and the picturesque town seems the perfect place to do so. In fact, their new neighborhood seems too good to be true. Their neighbors are all polite and helpful, and the streets are eerily clean. Even the teenagers of Elysian Field are perfect. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they are polite to their elders to a fault.

But Justine is a more typical teenager, and while the new girl in town hasn’t yet learned how to behave like the teenagers of Elysian Fields, she will. Because in Elysian Fields, there are so many ways—horribly effective ways—to turn disobedient children into Perfect Little Angels.

Teacher's Pet

Mr. Lucy is just the kind of teacher the children of Centreville needed. He’s sharp, understanding, always ready to help out. A man like that inspires respect in his students. And he gets great results; it was really quite astonishing when the children brought home straight-A report cards. All the parents were so proud. It was even more astonishing to see how they began to resemble Mr. Lucy. And act like Mr. Lucy. And kill like Mr. Lucy...

The Maddening

Stacey Oberman made the worst mistake of her life when she followed the garage mechanic's advice and turned off the main highway. When her car breaks down in a rainstorm, she and her five-year-old daughter seek refuse in a nearby farmhouse—and she and her daughter become "playmates" in a violent whirlpool of unrelenting terror.

The Magic Bullet

Dr. Allan Parker may have found the Magic Bullet the world has been waiting for all these years—the cure for cancer in the blood of fifteen-year-old Taylor Petersen. But there's only so much blood in Taylor's body, and so many desperate people.

One of the most desperate is Frankie Vico, a mobster who faces the death sentence of inoperable, terminal cancer for which there is no reprieve. And with time running out, he's learned of one last hope. Now he'll stop at nothing, including kidnapping and murder, to get his hands on Taylor's precious blood. Caught in a deadly chase with only Dr. Parker to help him, Taylor will have to fight to save his own life...and millions of others.

The Solomon Organization

Scott Lester's bitter divorce includes accusations of adultery, alcoholism, and worse—and they're all true. To keep from losing his five-year-old daughter forever, he turns to the Solomon Organization, a secret society sympathetic to the plight of men in Scott's situation. They are on his side. They will help him. And they don't even want his money—they only want what is best for his little girl.

And what they decide is best is the worst thing Scott Lester can imagine...

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Table of Contents

- Sight Unseen
- Copyright
- Preface
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- Epilogue
- More from Andrew Neiderman
- Connect with Diversion Books