When he hung up he felt better than he had before he’d telephoned her. For a third of an hour, at least, he had been able to push thoughts of Roy Borden to the back of his mind.
He called Heather every day during the week that he was grounded, and they were never at a loss for words. He learned a great many things about her, and the more he learned the more he liked her. He hoped he was making an equally good impression on her, and he was impatient to see her again.
He expected Roy to show up at the door some afternoon, or at least to call and make a lot of threats; but the days passed uneventfully. He considered taking the initiative, just to see what would happen. Once or twice each day, he picked up the telephone, but he never got farther than dialing the first three digits of the Borden number. Then the shakes always took him, and he hung up.
He read half a dozen new paperbacks: science fiction, sword and sorcery, occult stories, stuff that was filled with monstrous villains, the sort of thing he liked the most. But there must have been something wrong with the plots or with the writers’ prose styles, because he didn’t get that familiar cold thrill from them.
He reread a few pieces that he had found hair-raising when he’d first encountered them a couple of years ago. He discovered that he still could appreciate the color and suspense of Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, but the terror that it had communicated to him so forcefully when he had first read it was no longer there. John Campbell’s Who Goes There? and Theodore Sturgeon’s scariest stories-It and The Professor’s Teddy-Bear among others-still pulsed with a rich vision of evil, but they no longer made him look over his shoulder while he turned the pages.
He had trouble sleeping. If he closed his eyes for more than a minute, he heard strange sounds: the furtive but insistent noises someone might make if he were trying to get into the bedroom through the locked door or window. Colin heard something in the attic, too, something heavy that kept dragging itself back and forth, as if it were looking for a weak spot in his bedroom ceiling. He thought about the things his mother had said with such scorn, and he told himself there was nothing in the attic; told himself that it was just his overactive imagination, but he continued to hear it nonetheless. After two bad nights, he surrendered to the fear and stayed up reading until dawn; then in the early light, he was able to sleep.
29
Wednesday morning, eight days after the events at Hermit Hobson’s junkyard, Colin was no longer restricted to quarters. He was reluctant to leave the house. He studied the surrounding grounds through all the first-floor windows; and although he could detect nothing out of the ordinary, his own front lawn seemed to him far more dangerous than any battlefield in any war there’d ever been, in spite of the lack of bursting bombs and whistling bullets.
— Roy wouldn’t try anything in broad daylight.
He’s crazy. How can you know what he’ll do?
— Go. Go on. Get out and do what you have to do.
If he’s waiting…
— You can’t hide here for the rest of your life.
He went to the library. As he cycled along the sunny streets, he looked repeatedly behind. He was fairly sure that Roy was not following him.
Though Colin slept only three hours the night before, he was waiting at the front doors of the library when Mrs. Larkin, the librarian, opened for business. He’d gone to the library twice a week since they’d moved to town, and Mrs. Larkin had quickly learned what he liked. When she saw him standing on the steps, she said, “We received the new Arthur C. Clarke novel last Friday.”
“That’s swell.”
“Well, I didn’t put it out on the shelf right away because I thought you’d be in the same day or Saturday at the latest.”
He followed her into the big, cool, stucco building, into the main room where their footsteps were smothered by the mammoth stacks of books, and where the air smelled of glue and yellowing paper.
“When you hadn’t showed up by Monday afternoon,” Mrs. Larkin said, “I felt I couldn’t hold the book any longer. And now, wouldn’t you just know it, someone checked it out a few minutes till five yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s all right,” Colin said. “Thanks a lot for thinking about me.”
Mrs. Larkin was a sweet-tempered, red-haired woman with too little brow, too much chin, too little bosom, and too much behind. Her glasses were as thick as Colin’s. She loved books and bookish people, and Colin liked her.
“I mainly came to use one of the microfilm readers,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry, but we don’t have any science fiction on microfilm.”
“I’m not interested in science fiction today. What I’d like to see is back issues of the Santa Leona News Register.”
“Whatever for?” She made a face, as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “Perhaps I’m being a traitor to my own hometown when I say this, but the News Register is just about the dullest reading you can find. Lots of stories about bake sales and church socials, and reports of City Council meetings where silly politicians argue for hours about whether or not they should fill the potholes on Broadway.”
“Well…I’m sort of looking ahead to starting school in September,” Colin said, wondering if that sounded as ridiculous to her as it did to him. “English composition always gives me a little bit of trouble, so I like to think ahead.”
“I can’t believe that anything in school gives you trouble,” Mrs. Larkin said.
“Anyway … I have this idea for an essay about summer in Santa Leona, not my summer but summer in general, and summer historically. I want to do some research.”
She smiled approvingly. “You’re an ambitious young man, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
She shook her head. “In all the years I’ve worked here, you’re the first boy who’s come in during summer vacation to prepare for next fall’s school assignments. I’d call that ambitious. I surely would. And it’s refreshing, too. You keep that attitude, and you’ll go a long way in this world.”
Colin was embarrassed because he did not deserve the praise and because he had lied to her. He felt his face turn red, and he suddenly realized that this was the first time he had blushed in a week, maybe longer than that, which was some kind of record for him.
He went to the microfilm alcove, and Mrs. Larkin brought spools of film that contained every page of the News Register for June, July, and August of last year, and for the same three months of the year before that. She showed him how to use the machine, watched over his shoulder until she was certain that he had no questions, then left him to his work.
Rose.
Something Rose.
Jim Rose?
Arthur Rose?
Michael Rose?
He remembered the last name by associating it with the flower, but he couldn’t quite recall what the boy’s first name had been.
Phil Pacino.
He remembered that one because it was like Al Pacino, the movie actor.
He decided to start with Phil. He lined up the spools of last summer’s newspapers.