Dean Koontz - The Voice of the Night

At eleven o‘clock Sunday morning, Roy arrived with his swimsuit wrapped in a towel. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s at the gallery.”

“On Sunday?”

“Seven days a week.”

“I thought I’d get to see her in a bikini.”

“ ‘Fraid not.”

The house was what the real-estate people called “prime lease property.” Among other things, it had a sunken living room with a huge stone fireplace, three large bathrooms, a gourmet kitchen, and a forty-foot pool. Since they’d moved in, they’d used the living room less than two hours a week, for they’d had no company; they hadn’t entertained overnight guests and had no reason to use the third bath; and of all the fancy equipment in the kitchen, they’d used nothing but the refrigerator and two burners on the stove. Only the pool was worth the rent.

Colin and Roy raced the length of the pool, played with inner tubes and inflated plastic rafts, made a game of retrieving coins from the bottom, splashed, splattered, and finally dragged themselves out onto the concrete apron to bake in the sun.

It was the first time Colin had been swimming with Roy, the first time he had gotten a look at him without a shirt-and the first time that he had seen the horrible marks that disfigured Roy’s back. Jagged bands of scar tissue slanted from the boy’s right shoulder to his left hip. Colin tried to count them-six, seven, eight, perhaps as many as ten. It was difficult to be sure, for they melted together at a couple of points. Where there was healthy skin between the ugly lines, it was well tanned, but the raised scars did not take the sun; they were pale and shiny-smooth in some places, pale and puckered in others.

• “What happened to you?” Colin asked.

“Huh?”

“What happened to your back?”

“Nothing.”

“What about those scars?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You weren’t bom that way.”

“Just an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Were you in a car wreck or something?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

Roy glared at him. “I said I don’t want to fucking talk about the fucking scars!”

“Okay. Sure. Forget it.”

“I don’t have to give you any reason either.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Well, you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Roy sighed. “So am I.”

Roy got up and walked to the far end of the pool. He stood there for a while, his back to Colin, staring at the ground.

Feeling stupid and awkward, Colin quickly slid into the pool, as if he wanted to hide in the cool water. He swam hard, trying to work off a sudden overcharge of nervous energy.

Five minutes later, when Colin climbed out of the pool again, Roy was still at the comer of the concrete apron, but now he was hunkered down. He was poking at something in the grass.

“What’d you find?” Colin asked.

Roy was so intent on whatever he was doing that he did not hear the question.

Colin went to him and squatted beside him.

“Ants,” Roy said.

At the edge of the concrete lay a teacup-size mound of powdery earth. Tiny red ants were scurrying around and over it.

Grinning broadly, Roy mashed the insects into the concrete. A dozen. Two dozen. As he killed them other ants came out of the hill and raced into his shadow, as if they had abruptly realized that their destiny was not mindless labor in the hive but sacrificial death under the hands of a monster god a million times their size.

Roy paused now and then to look at the greasy, rust-colored remains that stained his fingers. “No bones,” he said. “They squash into nothing, into just a little drop of juice, ‘cause they don’t have any bones.”

Colin watched.

After Roy had smashed a great many ants and had kicked apart their hill, he and Colin played water polo with a blue-and-green beach ball. Roy won.

By three o‘clock they were tired of the pool. They changed out of their swimsuits and sat in the kitchen, eating chocolate-chip cookies and drinking lemonade.

Colin drained his glass, chewed on a sliver of ice, and said, “Do you trust me?”

“Sure.”

“Did I pass the test?”

“We’re blood brothers, aren’t we?”

“Then tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“You know. The big secret.”

“I already told you,” Roy said.

“You did?”

“I told you Friday night, after we left the Pit, before we went out to the Fairmont to see that porno flick.”

Colin shook his head. “If you told me, I didn’t hear.”

“You heard, but you didn’t want to.”

“What kind of double-talk is that?”

Roy shrugged. He rattled the ice in his glass.

“Tell me again,” Colin said. “This time I want to hear.”

“I kill people.”

“Jeez. That’s really your big secret?”

“Seemed like a hell of a secret to me.”

“But it’s not true.”

“Am I your blood brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Do blood brothers lie to each other?”

“They’re not supposed to,” Colin admitted. “Okay. If you killed people, they must have had names. What were their names?”

“Stephen Rose and Philip Pacino.”

“Who were they?”

“Just two kids.”

“Friends?”

“They could have been if they’d wanted.”

“Why’d you kill ‘em?”

“They refused to be blood brothers with me. After that I couldn’t trust them.”

“You mean you’d have killed me if I hadn’t wanted to be blood brothers?”

“Maybe.”

“Bullshit.”

“If it makes you happy to think so.”

“Where’d you kill them?”

“Right here in Santa Leona.”

“When?”

“I got Phil last summer, the first day of August, the day after his birthday, and I nailed Steve Rose the summer before that.”

“How?”

Roy smiled dreamily and closed his eyes, as if he were reliving it in his mind. “I pushed Steve off the cliff at Sandman’s Cove. He hit the rocks at the bottom. You should have seen him bounce. When they brought him up the next day, he was such a mess that even his old man couldn’t make a positive ID.”

“What about the other one-Phil Pacino?”

“We were at his house, building a model airplane,” Roy said. “His parents weren’t home. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Nobody knew I’d gone there. It was a perfect opportunity, so I squirted lighter fluid on his head and lit him.”

“Jeez.”

“As soon as I could see for sure that he was dead, I got the hell out of there. The whole house burned down. It was a real popper. A couple of days later, the fire marshal decided that Phil had started it by playing with matches.”

“You sure tell a good story,” Colin said.

Roy opened his eyes but didn’t speak.

Colin took their plates and glasses to the sink, washed them, and stacked them in the rack. As he worked he said, “You know, Roy, with your imagination, maybe you ought to write horror stories when you grow up. You’d make a bundle at it.”

Roy made no move to help with the clean-up. “You mean you still think I’m playing some sort of game with you?”

“Well, you make up a couple of names-”

“Steve Rose and Phil Pacino were real people. You can check on that easy enough. Just go to the library and look through the back issues of the News Register. You can read all about how they died.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“Maybe you should.”

“But even if this Steve Rose did fall off the cliff at Sandman’s Cove, and even if Phil Pacino burned to death in his own home-it wouldn’t prove anything. Not a thing. Both of them could have been accidents.”