As quietly as possible, he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The boards creaked beneath his feet and he stood still, unmoving, listening for any reaction upstairs, ready to run at the slightest sound, but he heard nothing.
He had never realized before how noisy the porch really was, and it seemed like a squeaking creaking eternity before he reached the steps and hurried down.
Beneath his feet, the gravel crunched with thunderous volume, but he ignored it and ran as fast as he could down the path toward The Fort. He leapt over familiar rocks and logs, skirted known sticker bushes. With one leap and expert footwork, he was on top of the camouflaged structure's roof, and then he was dropping inside, closing and locking the trapdoor.
He lay panting on the floor for a moment, trying to catch his breath, listening for any sounds that he had been followed, but the only noise he heard was the obnoxious cawing of a blue jay in a far-off tree.
He was safe.
He stood up, praying that his parents would come home soon. Praying that when they did come, he would be able to hear the noise of their car. He listened again for foreign sounds, alien noises, but the woods were clean.
He looked around the Big Room. The Fort seemed different with Lane gone, abandoned. The other time he had come in here without Lane, it had felt strange, but it had still been _their_ Fort. Now he wasn't sure whose it was. The structure was in the green belt by his house, but the materials had come from Lane's father and they had done all the work in tandem. He walked slowly through the room like a stranger, touching objects which had once been familiar to him but from which he now felt impossibly distanced. Everything seemed weird, as though it had once been his but was his no longer.
He supposed this was what a house must feel like to people who got a divorce.
Every so often, he stopped in his tracks, unmoving, listening to hear if there were any sounds outside, but always there was nothing.
He walked into the HQ, looking down at the pile of magazines on the floor.
Even the _Playboys_ no longer seemed as though they belonged to him, although they did not seem as though they belonged to Lane either. They were caught in some timeless netherworld in-between, ownerless. He picked one up. The page opened to the spread of "Women in Uniform," and he saw the naked body of the female postal carrier.
"BillyAlbin ."
He stopped moving, holding his breath, trying not to make any sound. His heart was trip-hammering wildly.
"BillyAlbin ."
The mailman was just outside The Fort. He had tracked him somehow and had found him. Billy was too terrified to move. He tried to exhale silently, unable to hold his breath any longer, but the noise sounded like a hurricane in the silence. Outside, the feet stopped moving.
"Billy."
He did not move.
"Billy."
Now the voice came from the other side, although he had heard no scuffling feet, no rustling leaves, no sound of any kind.
"Billy."
The voice came again, a low insistent whispering. He wanted to scream, to cry out, but he dared not. The mailman obviously knew he was here, but Billy did not want to confirm his presence. Maybe if he pretended that he wasn't here, if he just laid low and waited it out, the mailman would go away.
"Billy."
No. He wasn't going to go away.
Billy stood stock-still, only his mind moving, his brain trying desperately to think of something he could do. There was only one entrance to The Fort, no way to get out without the mailman seeing him. He and Lane had often talked about making an escape hatch, an emergency exit, building an escape tunnel under the dirt, but they never had. Now, he considered his choices. Or his choice. He had only one, really. If he could make it up to the roof, through the trapdoor, without the mailman seeing or hearing him "Billy."
-- he could jump and haul ass to safety.
Tiptoeing carefully, lightly, quietly, he stepped into the Big Room.
"Billy."
The voice was closer this time. Extremely close. Billy looked up.
The mailman stared down at him through the open trapdoor, grinning. There was corruption in that smile, a twisted cruelty in the hard blue eyes.
"Want to have a good time?" the mailman asked.
Billy backed into the HQ. He glanced down at the stack of _Playboys_ as he retreated, but they were not _Playboys_. They were _Playgirls_.
"Billy," the mailman said again.
Panicked now, he began kicking at the back wall of the HQ, trying to knock off one of the boards so he could crawl through and out. He kicked with all of his might, putting the strength of desperation behind each kick, but they had built The Fort well -- too well -- and the boards would not budge.
He heard the mailman drop through the trapdoor to the floor of the Big Room behind him.
"I brought you a present, Billy," the mailman said.
"Help!" Billy screamed at the top of his lungs. He kicked furiously at the wall. "Mom! Dad!"
"Want to have a good time?" the mailman asked.
Billy turned around and saw over his shoulder the mailman smiling, holding forth his present.
When Billy was not home when they came back from the store and had still not returned an hour later, Tritia began to panic. She had Doug call Mike at the police station, who promised to comb the town, starting with the post office, and she began calling all of Billy's friends. She dialed theChapmans ' number and Lane answered the phone.
"Hello," Tritia said. "This is Mrs.Albin . Is Billy there?"
"No." Lane's voice sounded at once cold and suggestive, not unlike that of the mailman, and the fear grew within her.
"Have you seen him at all today?"
"No." Lane paused. "But I've seen you."
There was a click as the connection was broken.
Tritia hung up the phone. What the hell did that mean? She didn't know, and she didn't think she wanted to know. She started to dial the twins, when she heard Doug come in through the back door.
"He's not under the house or by the clothesline," he said. He was trying to keep the worry out of his voice, but he was not having much luck. "His bike's still here. I'm going to start looking in the back, around the green belt."
"Okay," she agreed. "I'll keep calling."
Doug walked out the front door.
God, she prayed silently, let him be all right.
Doug walked across the length of their property, venturing into the green belts on both sides, searching under every bush, looking up in every tree, calling his son's name. "Billy! Billy!"
Lizards scuttled out of his way, frightened by the noise. Quail flew frantically up from their herbaceous hideaways.
"Billy!"
He continued pressing toward the hill in back of their house until he saw the camouflaged exterior of The Fort before him. "Billy!" he called.
There was no answer.
He stared at The Fort, and there seemed to him something ominous about it.
He had never before thought of the wooden structure as anything more threatening than a children's playhouse, but as he looked at it now, it seemed low and dark and claustrophobically closed, and he realized that the feeling he got from it was uncomfortably close to the feeling he had had when he'd looked at the house in which Ellen Ronda had been killed.
He took a tentative step forward. "Billy?"
He pressed his ear to the wooden wall. From inside The Fort, he could hear a low steady whimpering. "Billy!" he cried. He looked frantically for a weak point in the structure where he could pull off a board and get inside, but the makeshift building was remarkably well-constructed, with no protruding panels or obvious weak points. Desperate, he grabbed hold of the roof and tried to pull himself up. He was horrendously out of shape, and even a partial pull-up caused him to grunt and strain with the effort. A sliver slid into his palm, and his right ring finger pressed painfully against the bent head of a crooked nail, but with the aid of his feet kicking against the side wall for support, he managed to reach the roof and roll on top of the clubhouse.