Dean Koontz: The Voice of the Night

“Caught us doing what?”

“I’m not supposed to mess around with the trains.”

“Roy, I don’t want to get in trouble with your folks.”

“We won’t. Wait here.” Roy hurried into the living room. “Anyone home?”

Colin had been here on only two other occasions, and as before he was amazed at how spotless everything was. The kitchen gleamed. The floor was freshly scrubbed and waxed. The counters shone almost like mirrors. No dirty dishes waited to be washed; no overlooked crumbs marred the table; and there was not even a single vague stain in the sink. The utensils were not hung on wall racks; all pots and pans and spoons and ladles were secreted away in drawers and dust-free cupboards. Mrs. Borden apparently did not appreciate knickknacks, for there was not a single decorative plate or plaque or piece of needlepoint wisdom on the walls, no spice rack, no calendar, no clutter at all-and no sense that this was a place where real people cooked real food. The house looked as if Mrs. Borden spent all of her time performing an elaborate series of cleaning operations-first scraping, then scouring, then scrubbing, then washing, rinsing, polishing, buffing-much the same way that a cabinetmaker sanded a piece of wood, beginning with coarse sandpaper and working up gradually to the finest grain.

Colin’s own mother didn’t keep a dirty kitchen. Far from it. They had a cleaning woman. She came in twice a week to help keep things neat. But their place didn’t look like this.

According to Roy, Mrs. Borden refused to consider a cleaning woman. She didn’t think anyone else in the world would have standards as high as hers. She wasn’t satisfied with a neat house; she wanted it to be sterile.

Roy returned to the kitchen. “No one’s here. Let’s play with the trains awhile.”

“Where are they?”

“In the garage.”

“Whose are they?”

“The old man’s.”

“And you’re not supposed to touch them?”

“Screw him. He’ll never know.”

“I don’t want your folks mad at me.”

“For Christ’s sake, Colin, how are they ever going to find out?”

“Is this the secret?”

Roy had started to turn away. Now he looked back. “What secret?”

“You’ve got one. You’re almost ready to explode with it.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see … the way you act. You’ve been testing me to see if you can trust me with a secret.”

Roy shook his head. “You’re pretty smart.”

Colin shrugged, embarrassed.

“No, you really are. You’ve just about been reading my mind.”

“So you have been testing me.”

“Yeah.”

“That dumb stuff about the cat-”

“-was true.”

“Oh sure.”

“Better believe it.”

“You’re still testing me.”

“Maybe.”

“So there is a secret?”

“A big one.”

“The trains?”

“Nah. That’s just a tiny part of it.”

“So what’s the rest of it?”

Roy grinned.

Something in that grin, something strange in those bright blue eyes made Colin want to step back from the other boy. But he didn’t flinch.

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Roy said. “But only when I’m ready.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon.”

“You can trust me.”

“Only when I’m ready. Now come on. You’ll like the trains.”

Colin followed him across the kitchen and through a white door. Beyond, there were two short steps and then the garage-and the model railroad.

“Wow!”

“Isn’t it a popper?”

“Where’s your dad park the car?”

“Always in the driveway. No room in here.”

“When did he get all this stuff?”

“Started collecting when he was a kid,” Roy said. “He added to it every year. It’s worth more than fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Fifteen thousand! Who’d pay that much money for a bunch of toy trains?”

“People who should have lived in better times.”

Colin blinked. “Huh?”

“That’s what my old man says. He says people who like model railroads are people who were meant to live in a better, cleaner, nicer, more organized world than the one we’ve got today.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll be damned if I know. But that’s what he says. He can ramble on for an hour about how much better the world was back when there were trains but not airplanes. He can bore your ass off.”

The train set was on a waist-high platform that nearly filled the three-car garage. On three sides there was just enough room to walk. On the fourth side, which featured the master-control console, there were two stools, a narrow workbench, and a tool cabinet.

A brilliantly conceived, incredibly detailed miniature world had been constructed upon that platform. There were mountains and valleys, streams and rivers and lakes, meadows dotted with minuscule wildflowers, forests where timid deer peered out of the shadows between the trees, picture-postcard villages, farms, outposts, realistic little people engaged in a hundred chores, scale-model cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, neat houses with picket fences, four exquisitely rendered train stations-one Victorian-style, one Swiss, one Italian, one Spanish-and shops and churches and schools. Narrow-gauge railroad tracks ran everywhere-alongside the rivers, through the towns, across the valleys, around the sides of the mountains, across trestles and drawbridges, into and out of the stations, up and down and back and forth in graceful loops and straightaways and sharp turns and horseshoes and switchbacks.

Colin slowly circled the display, studying it with unconcealed awe. The illusion was not shattered by a close inspection. Even from a distance of only one inch the pine forests looked real ; each tree was superbly crafted. The houses were complete in every detail, even down to rain spouting, workable windows in some of them, walkways made from individual stones, and television antennae secured by fine guy wires. The automobiles were not merely toy cars. They were carefully crafted, tiny but otherwise exact, replicas of full-size vehicles; and except for those that were parked along the streets and in the driveways, they all boasted a driver, sometimes passengers as well, and occasionally a family dog or cat on the back seat.

“How much of this did your dad build himself?” Colin asked.

“Everything but the trains and a few of the model cars.”

“It’s fantastic.”

“It takes a whole week to make just one of those little houses, sometimes longer if it’s really something special. He spent months and months on each of those train stations.”

“How long ago did he finish it?”

“It isn’t finished,” Roy said. “It’ll never be finished-until he’s dead.”

“But it can’t possibly get bigger,” Colin said. “There isn’t any more room for it.”

“Not bigger, just better,” Roy said. His voice held a new note, a hardness, an iciness; his teeth were very nearly clenched tight, but he still smiled. “The old man keeps improving the layout. All he does when he comes home from work is tinker with this damned thing. I don’t think he even takes time to screw the old lady any more.”

That kind of talk embarrassed Colin, and he didn’t respond to it. He saw himself as being considerably less sophisticated than Roy, and he tried hard to change himself for the better in every way he was able; however, he simply could not learn to be comfortable with strong curse words and sex talk. The hot blush and the sudden thickness of tongue and throat were uncontrollable. He felt childish and stupid.

“He squirrels himself away in here every damn night,” Roy said, still using that new, cold voice. “He even eats supper in here sometimes. He’s a nut case just like she is.”