“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think she keeps it loaded. She could never shoot anyone. My father loves guns: ergo, my mother hates them. And so do I. I’m not going to borrow her gun to do something crazy like shoot your neighbor’s dog.”
“Well, we could kill it some other way.”
“What would we do-bite it?”
A night bird sang in the branches above them.
The sea breeze was cooler than it had been ten minutes ago.
Colin was tired of pushing the bike, but he sensed that Roy still had a lot to say and wanted to say it quietly, which he couldn’t do if they were riding.
Roy said, “We could tie the dog up and kill it with a pitchfork.”
“Jeez.”
“That would be a popper!”
“You’re making me sick.”
“Would you help me?”
“You don’t need my help.”
“But it would prove you’re not just a fair-weather friend.”
After a long while Colin said, “I suppose if it was really important to you, if you just had to do it or die, I could be there when you did it.”
“What do you mean by ‘be there’?”
“I mean… I guess I could watch.”
“What if I wanted you to do more than watch?”
“Like what?”
“What if I wanted you to take the pitchfork and stab the dog a few times yourself?”
“Sometimes you can be really weird, Roy.”
“Could you stab it?” Roy persisted.
“No.”
“I’ll bet you could.”
“I couldn’t ever kill anything.”
“But you could watch?”
“Well, if it would prove to you once and for all that I’m your friend and that I can be trusted…”
They entered the circle of light under a street lamp, and Roy stopped. He was grinning. “You’re getting better every day.”
“Oh?”
“You’re developing nicely,” Roy said.
“Am I?”
“Yesterday, you’d have said you couldn’t even watch a dog being killed. Today, you say you could watch but you couldn’t participate. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, you’ll tell me you could find it within yourself to pick up that pitchfork and make mincemeat of that damned dog.”
“No. Never.”
“And a week from now, you’ll finally admit that you’d enjoy killing something.”
“No. You’re wrong. This is stupid.”
“I’m right. You’re just like me.”
“And you’re no killer.”
“I am.”
“Not in a million years.”
“You don’t know me.”
“You’re Roy Borden.”
“I mean what’s inside me. You don’t know, but you’ll learn.”
“There’s no cat-and-dog killer inside you.”
“I’ve killed things bigger than a cat.”
“Like what?”
“Like people.”
“And then I suppose you moved on to even bigger things-like elephants.”
“No elephants. just people.”
“I guess with an elephant there’s problems disposing of the corpse.”
“Just people.”
Another night bird cried hollowly from its perch in a nearby tree, and in the distance two lonely dogs howled to each other.
“This is ridiculous,” Colin said.
“No, it’s true.”
“You’re trying to tell me you’ve killed people?”
“Twice.”
“Why not a hundred times?”
“Because it was only twice.”
“Next you’ll be saying you’re really an eight-legged, six-eyed creature from Mars disguised as a human being.”
“I was born in Santa Leona,” Roy said soberly. “We’ve always lived here, all my life. I’ve never been to Mars.”
“Roy, this is getting boring.”
“Oh, it’ll be anything but boring. Before the summer’s through, you and me together, we’re going to kill someone.”
Colin pretended to think about it. “The President of the United States maybe?”
“Just someone here in Santa Leona. It’ll be a real popper.”
“Roy, you might as well give up. I don’t believe a word of this, and I’m never going to believe it.”
“You will. Eventually you will.”
“No. It’s just a fairy tale, a game, a test of some sort that you’re putting me through. And I wish you’d tell me what I’m being tested for.”
Roy said nothing.
“Well, so far as I can see,” Colin said, “I’ve passed the test, whatever it is. I’ve proven to you that I can’t be fooled. I won’t fall for this dumb story of yours. You understand?”
Roy smiled and nodded. He glanced at his watch. “Hey, what do you want to do now? Want to go out to the Fairmont and see a movie?”
Colin was disconcerted by the sudden change of subject and Roy’s abruptly transformed attitude. “What’s the Fairmont?”
“The Fairmont Drive-in, of course. If we ride way the hell out on Ranch Road and then double back through the hills, we’ll come out on the slope above the Fairmont. We can sit up there and watch the movie for nothing.”
“But can you hear it?”
“No, but you don’t need to hear the kind of movies they play at the Fairmont.”
“What the hell do they play-silent films?”
Roy was amazed. “You mean you’ve lived here a whole month and you don’t know what the Fairmont is?”
“You’re making me feel retarded.”
“You really don’t know?”
“You said it was a drive-in.”
“It’s more than that,” Roy said. “Boy, are you in for a surprise!”
“I don’t like surprises.”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Roy climbed onto his bike and pedaled away. Colin followed, off the sidewalk and into the street, from lamppost to lamppost, through alternating patches of shadow and light, pumping his legs hard to keep up.
When they reached Ranch Road and headed southeast, away from town, there were no more street lamps, and they switched on their headlights. The last traces of the sun had disappeared from the westward edges of the high-flying clouds: Night had arrived. Chains of gentle, treeless, pitch-black hills rose on both sides, silhouetted against a gray-black sky. Now and then a car passed them, but most of the time they had the road to themselves.
Colin was not on good terms with darkness. He had never lost his childish fear of being alone at night, a weakness that sometimes dismayed his mother and never failed to infuriate his father. He always slept with a light on. And right now he stayed close to Roy, genuinely afraid that if he fell behind he would be in extreme danger; something hideous, something unhuman, something hiding in the impenetrable shadows of the roadside would reach out for him, seize him in ghastly claws as big as sickles, tear him from his seat, and devour him alive with a noisy crunching of bones and splattering of blood. Or worse. He was a devoted fan of horror movies and novels, not because they dealt with colorful myths and were crammed full of movement and excitement, but because, to his way of thinking, they explored a sobering reality that most adults refused to take seriously. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, decaying corpses that would not rest peacefully in their coffins, and a hundred other hellish creatures did exist. Intellectually he could dismiss them as mere beasts of fantasy, denizens of the imagination, but in his heart he knew the truth. They were out there. The undead. Lurking. Waiting. Concealed. Hungry. The night was a vast, dank cellar, home to that which crept and crawled and slithered. The night had ears and eyes. It had a horrible, scratchy old voice. If you listened closely, tuning out your doubt and keeping an open mind, you could hear the dreadful voice of the night. It whispered about graves and rotting flesh and demons and ghosts and swamp monsters. It spoke of unspeakable things.