In the Night Season (7 page)

But the line had clicked. Travis took the receiver from him and held it to his ear, then slowly replaced it in its cradle. “Shit.” He took the boy’s arm and pulled gently; they were heading back into the kitchen.

“What’re you gonna do now?” Jason asked.

“We’re gonna wait.”

In the kitchen, he made Jason sit at the table, then sat across from him. “How’d your neighbor get along with your daddy?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“He’s a family friend, right?”

“Not before…” Jason halted.

“But he comes over to check on you.”

“Yes. Every day. I don’t know where he is today.”

Travis folded his big hands on the surface, gazing at the boy with an expressionless calm, the scarred mouth an even line, the eyes almost lazily blinking at him and then simply staring. “How old are you?”

The boy told him.

Travis nodded. “That’s a nice time in a kid’s life. Just getting started on everything. Still a kid, and kind of figuring what’s out there. You know what’s out there, right?”

Jason said nothing.

“Yeah, a good time. I hope you appreciate what’s ahead. When I was eleven, I was running around Atlanta looking for a place to sleep.”

The boy shifted in the chair, staring at his own hands on the table before him.

“Hell, no need to feel bad for me. I was all right. I was up to it. My mother was a fancy lady. You know what a fancy lady is?”

Jason thought he knew, but he shook his head.

“Well, anyway. She didn’t have much time to do the mother bit, and so I was pretty much on my own from about six years on. Rough time, let me tell you, boy. That was rough. But I got used to it.”

“Where was your father?”

The slow dubious smile. “He was around.”

Jason watched him begin to daydream or remember, leaning back in the seat and staring at the ceiling.

“Last time I saw my mother she was in a hospital bed, thirty-five years old and looking like she was sixty. Somebody’d shoved one of those little pencil sharpeners down her throat. Can you imagine
such a thing? I mean it tore the hell out of her throat and esophagus. You know what that is—the esophagus?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then you know what I mean. I had an aunt drink some kind of acid once. They had to sew part of her intestines to her stomach.”

They were quiet. The boy watched him.

“You think I’m telling the truth?”

He nodded, believing he was expected to.

“Actually, all that stuff I just told you is kind of a lie. Matter of fact, my mother’s a saint. And my daddy died before I knew him. The whole world lives on lies anymore, though. So I like to do my part. I’d say eighty percent of what I say is a lie of one kind or another.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Jason said.

The other frowned at him. “You ain’t gonna play games with me, are you? I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“I have to go,” Jason said.

“Where’s the bathroom? Maybe I got to go, too.”

The boy led him down the hall, past the telephone, to the little cubicle under the stairs. It was windowless, but there was a square vent there, behind the hamper, which looked to be fastened with screws. The screws had long ago worn smooth the plaster of the wall surrounding it. This duct led around a sharp angle and through several sections of wall to a guest bedroom on the other end of the house. Jason had used this as a secret passageway when he was younger, playing his own games of spying; once he had crouched in the small metal- and dust-smelling space at the end of the duct and watched his own baby-sitter necking on the bed with her boyfriend, and there had been times, playing with school friends, when he had gone the other way, from the bedroom, and on into the bathroom to hide. His father had been intending for years to fix it, seal it off.

Now, Travis stood in the open door of the small bathroom and looked around. He stepped in and touched the wall, stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. “Man, I am one beautiful young dude.”

“I don’t feel good,” Jason said.

The other studied him a moment. “You must have to go bad.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“Oh, you’ve got
that
.” Travis looked at the room again. “Well, okay. But hurry. We’ve got to think about tonight. I promise you some excitement.”

“Yes, sir.”

He shook his head going out. “Sir. That is something. Sir.” He turned, holding onto the door, and surveyed the room once more. He glanced at the hamper and pulled the revolver out. “You ain’t got any hidden weapons or anything in here, right?”

“No, sir.” Jason held his stomach and bent over slightly. “Ohh.”

Travis walked over and opened the hamper, then upended it, pouring the dirty clothes out. He held the hamper up and moved the clothes with his boot. Then he looked at the vent for what seemed a terribly long time.

“Ohh,” Jason said. “Come
on
, man.”

Travis set the hamper back in its place. “All right, all right. Let her rip, kiddo.” He made a little saluting motion, putting the barrel of the pistol to his forehead. Then he closed the door. Jason put the hook in its little slot.

“What was that?”

“It’s just the hook.”

“You don’t think I’m gonna want to come in when you get going on your business, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay. So unlock the door.”

He flicked the hook up. Then made another moaning sound.

“Sounds bad,” Travis said, from the other side.

“It’s bad,” the boy said. He flushed the toilet and moved the hamper aside.

“Finished already?”

“No,” he said and groaned. He waited a moment and then flushed the toilet once more and got himself down to the level of the vent. He was simply going to have to go ahead and take the chance that Travis would open the door on him. He pulled the metal screen off.

“You okay in there?”

“I’m okay.” He groaned, and waited and then groaned again.

“Man, sounds bad.”

“Come on,” Jason said. “I can’t do it with you listening in on me.”

“I’m just standing here, kid.”

Abruptly, he was sick. He got to the edge of the toilet and gagged, then spit.

“Oh, hell,” came the voice from the other side of the door. “I hope you ain’t got some damn bug or something.”

“Leave me alone,” Jason said. He reached up and flushed the toilet, then worked frantically to get his sneakers off, so many laces, so many useless laces for style, and how he hated them for it now. Finally, he was free and he crawled into the vent, feet first, pulling the sneakers after him. It had been a couple of years. His hips were tight in the opening. He turned his body slightly and slipped deeper in. Beyond the opening, the duct widened a little. He took a breath and pushed back, but there wasn’t anything to use as leverage.

“Finished yet?”

“I’m gonna be a little while,” Jason said, realizing that the straining in his voice was precisely what he needed. He was half in and half out of the vent now, and he heard something working at the door. The door was going to open. “I’m sick,” he said and made another gagging sound.

“Tell you what,” Travis said. “I just put a chair against the door. Let me know when you want out—or if you need anything.”

“Yes—yes, sir.”

“I hope you ain’t got some virus. I can’t afford to get no virus.”

“No, sir.”

“But then I didn’t kiss you, right?”

Jason faked a cough, supporting himself on one hand and trying to push backward into the vent.

“Just bang on the door when you want me. I’m gonna take a look at the house.”

“Yes, sir.” He waited. And then he began furiously to scramble backward into the vent. He discovered that if he put his legs on top of one another, forcing his ankles together, and kept his body at the angle of the diagonal corners, he could use his outstretched free hand to push off the seams in the top of the duct and make himself
slide along. When he got to the turn, he had enough room to bring that hand down to his side and scoot farther, until he had come into the wider space near the bedroom. Here, he could maneuver, so that he was on his back, and gradually he worked his way to the dim square of gray light, the vent in the guest bedroom, which was an L-connection, the vertical part of it running all the way to the top floor of the house. In that space, he would be able to get himself to a crouch. He inched along, holding his breath like a swimmer, and when the furnace kicked on, he tried to move faster, gulping the air that rushed through from the other side of the building. Here was the vent for the guest bedroom, and he had got himself out of the smaller duct and soundlessly into a crouch.

And he saw that Travis was there, sitting on the edge of the bed looking at a photograph in a frame. Travis was almost near enough to touch.

Somehow Jason kept back the gasp that rose in his throat.

Travis held the photograph to the light from the hall, then put it down on the bed and lay back, sighing. The light fell across the floor, to the bed, and his boots, the scuffed, scraped soles, one with a place wearing thin, showing the paper-thin layer of leather beneath. For a long time nothing moved. The furnace stopped; the house was terribly quiet now. Jason held his breath. A spasm had started in the muscles of his back, as though his body would make a commotion on its own. He suffered the pain along his shoulder blades, the searing strip of it across his hips. The other breathed slow, almost laboring, the first rattle of a nasal something, like snoring. Was he going to sleep? He might stay there an hour, two hours, until Jason’s mother returned. The boy withheld a nearly overwhelming need to cry out, for the pain.

Everything hurt.

If Travis was asleep, it might be possible to push out of the vent and sneak away. But the vent would make a noise—some noise, anyhow. There was nothing to do but remain absolutely still, even as the muscles of his back tightened and quivered and sent a stabbing sensation up into his neck. It was dusty here, and when the
furnace came on again, the dust stirred. He had not remembered that it had stirred so much dust before, and he realized dimly that it was his own passage through this metal space that had caused the motes to lift, where they could be pushed and agitated by the currents of warm air. He breathed, carefully, slowly, through his nose, beginning to worry about sneezing. Any second now, he would have to sneeze, or cough. Putting his hands over his mouth, he moved back into the vent, until his foot made a small thud. He froze. The sound seemed to travel out from where he was, an alarm, louder than he could bear. But Travis hadn’t moved from the bed, an elongated shape extending from the two boot soles. Perhaps five minutes went by, and Jason remained still, his hands tight over his mouth.

Finally, Travis sat up, stretched, then stood. He looked at the vent screen, right through it, it seemed, the muddy eyes fixed on the hot, metal-smelling space behind it, at the crouched shape there. But then his gaze wandered to the window, and he took the two steps to reach it, moving the blinds aside. The furnace stopped again. Travis was whistling low, his tongue between his teeth. He opened a drawer, rooted in it, then closed it and opened another. He looked in the closet. The closet was mostly empty, but there were boxes of clothes on the shelf. He moved the boxes, as if wanting to see what they weighed. He went through everything; rooting, pulling clothes from the bureau, picking through the papers and envelopes in the drawers of the writing desk. At last, he walked out of the room. Jason moved to the screen and listened. The whistling sounded from the stairs. He pushed on the screen, and it came loose with a small hollow metal squeak. He was out, in the room, looking at the imprint of mussed blanket where the other had been on the bed. He heard the weight of him, moving around on the floor above: his mother’s bedroom. With as much stealth as he could muster, he hurriedly pulled his sneakers on, tied them, his fingers refusing to function, bumbling everything. He could hear his own desperate effort, and Travis was everywhere now and nowhere. When the boy held his breath, he could hear nothing at all.

He stepped to the window, opened it soundlessly, slowly, and climbed out, dropping to the ground, crouching along the wall, edging out of the square of light from the windows. When he crossed into the line of darkness, he began to run, almost blindly, headlong into the frozen field, away from the tall, lighted house.

W
HEN HE HAD SOME DISTANCE, HE
slowed, listened, looking around himself. There was a chilly breeze, a clicking in the branches of the pines that lined the far end of the field, toward the road. The air smelled of dead leaves, and, from somewhere, car exhaust. He headed across the back lawn, fearful of the sound of his passage through the tall grass: he wanted to hear everything, to be certain Travis wasn’t chasing him. When he got to the fence he turned and looked at the house, waited a moment in the racket of his own hard breathing. He saw a shadow moving across the upstairs window. The shadow paused there, and the boy dropped to the base of the fence, lying flat along the dip in the cold ground. He could see the shape in the window moving, saw the hands go up to the face to blot out light. It was only a moment, and Jason lay absolutely still. The ground was damp here, beginning to solidify. He felt himself taking hold, thinking clearly about the dark, how any movement might make him visible. When the silhouette in the window went out of sight, he got to his feet, scrambled over the fence and ran on, to the edge of the creek, the little muddy branch of Steel Run, between his mother’s property and Mr. Bishop’s farm. The trickle of muddy water had crystallized. On the other side, up the
small embankment, he turned to look at the house again. The lights were on. It looked like any other house, the warm, inviting windows and the porch. He would get Mr. Bishop to call the police.

The field rose to a crest and then dipped down into tall, skinny pines. Jason knew the path through. He ran now, and here was the Bishop farmhouse, a looming darker shape against the darkening sky, dotted with lighted windows and adorned by a bright, outward shining beam over the back porch. He bolted into the wide pool of the light and up the steps to the door. “Mr. Bishop,” he said, banging on the glass. He peered in and could see the dining room and on through to the living room with its fireplace. The lights were on over the mantel—two electric candles. “Mr. Bishop,” the boy called. He turned to look at the driveway; there was the truck. “Mr. Bishop?” He hit the door several times, and at last he tried the knob. It was locked. He waited a moment, hearing the wind move in the bare branches of the trees. Above him, the lights in the upper hallway were burning. He stepped out into the yard and looked up.

Music was coming from somewhere. He went stumbling around to the side of the house. “Mr. Bishop,” he shouted, coming up onto the porch. When he hit this door, it swung open; it had been sitting ajar.

“Mr. Bishop?”

Nothing.

In another room, some far part of the house, the music played. He stepped in and went along the downstairs hall. “Mr. Bishop.” In the living room there was a half-glass of beer. He went through to the kitchen and up the stairs toward the sound of the music.

“Mr. Bishop?”

One room was empty—a bed, a nightstand; an open closet door; a cedar chest. He crept along the hall to the second doorway. Here was the music—horns and piano, the crackling sound of a needle on a record. The music stopped, the arm was lifted, and it made a little protesting noise, moving, then settling again, so that the music had started once more, through the same crackle and hiss.

“Mr. Bishop?” Jason said, not wanting to startle him, and wor
ried, in spite of the feeling of urgency and panic, about having come so far into his house. “Sir?”

He saw Mr. Bishop’s bent knees before he saw the rest of him.

Edward Bishop lay on the floor, next to a small love seat or couch; he was on his stomach with his hands tied behind his back, then strapped to his ankles. Something else ran from under his nose to the knots at his feet, thin rope, drawn tight, pulling his head back. Jason saw something dark surrounding the dark figure there on the wood floor, and an instant later, in the terrible quiet of knowing that the eyes were not looking at anything—though they were open—the boy understood, with a tremendous shock to his mind, that the darkness surrounding Mr. Bishop in that wide shadow-outline of his body was blood.

He stepped back and then fell down in the frame of the door. The music was playing, the needle crackling. For a second there wasn’t any other sound, save his own sobbing, and now he was up, trying to run, stumbling and scrabbling toward the stairs. He had gone halfway down when the thought occurred to him that Travis might be in the house, would surely have discovered that he had got out, and would know to come here. The part of him that had been calculating things took hold again, and he stopped. He was on the landing of the stairs, wiping his eyes, trying to be quiet, and he backed against the wall, listening, not breathing, though his lungs were stinging with the need for air. He looked back up the stairs at the bright bulb burning in the hallway, then reached for the telephone on the little antique table. The line was dead. Either Travis had cut it before, or he was in the house now.

The boy pulled the phone from the wall and ran back up the stairs and knocked the bulb out, bringing the dark down on himself. He waited, listening. No sound except the song playing, and the low sobs he couldn’t control. He went to the lamp on the table and reached in and quickly took that bulb, then stopped to listen again. From some reserve of volition he did not know he possessed, he found the presence of mind to do this through the whole upstairs of the house, still pausing, breathless and crying. He had removed every light, and Travis had not come.

There was still the downstairs—the kitchen. And his thinking had not been as clear as he’d felt it to be: there were knives in the kitchen; there were guns in the house, surely: Mr. Bishop talked about hunting. Hadn’t he? It occurred to the boy that he had never come over here, never seen the inside of the man’s house, never really listened to him. Hadn’t he talked about hunting? There must be a rifle or shotgun somewhere. Jason stood crying, in the dark of the upstairs, trying to decide. Finally he drew the courage to go to the windows and look out at the lawn below, the near part of which was still bathed in light. Above the far roof of his mother’s house, a full moon shone through a hole in the clouds. It limned the branches of the pines, which were like tall, watchful presences, and it shone on the fallow field that spanned the distance between. Nothing moved. He thought he saw a light go off in his mother’s house. He couldn’t be sure, couldn’t trust it.

In the next instant, he heard movement downstairs.

Had the floor creaked? He was standing near the doorway of the third bedroom, in the dark, looking at the light at the head of the stairs. Something changed, the light altered, or it was his own eyes. In the next room, the music played over the dreadful quiet figure on the floor in its border of blood.

Jason moved into the room, certain that he was not alone, that Travis had followed him here. The clear part of his mind saw Travis moving carefully up the stairs, but there was nothing. Nothing came, and the music stopped, the record arm lifted and moved, dropped down on the beginning of the record. Travis would not expect him to remain with the body, would not think he would actually hide here.

He was certain now that he had heard movement on the stairs.

He worked his way under the love seat, next to the body. Mr. Bishop’s face was only inches away, a darker blotch in the darkness, so awfully still. The eyes looked beyond everything; they were visible, terrifyingly inanimate in the form of the face. From where he was under the love seat, and because of the upper part of Mr. Bishop’s body, he could see only the bottom part of the door frame. He watched it, hearing more sounds. Something was moving in the
house, he was certain of it. He saw a shadow glide up from the base of the wall, and his heart jumped in its small space under the bones of his chest.

A cat strode into the room, tail up. A big gray Tom. One of the wild litter. Mr. Bishop had talked about. It must have wandered into the open side door downstairs. The boy gasped at the sight of it, too startled to scream, then gave forth a sob of relief, and found himself having to suppress a wild laugh, like a part of his crying. The cat made a little leap onto the love seat, then leapt back down, to Mr. Bishop’s back. It moved its head to his ear, as if to whisper something to the dead man. Jason crawled out of the space, and the cat turned to stare at him. In the doorway, he looked up and down the hall. The cat mewed behind him, and the rest of the house was quiet.

He went stealthily to the head of the stairs, taking hold inside, receiving again the sensation of thinking clearly, with a kind of icy calculation that surprised him: Travis could not afford to be patient about everything because the boy’s mother was coming home. Travis would come here. Now. And the thing to do was get out of the house, get as far down the road as possible, toward help.

Except that there was his mother to think about.

He must head her off. He would have to get around to the other end of the field, across the area where Travis would be approaching. He would have to make his way out to the road, where he could try to stop her. Where he could flag someone, anyone, down.

At the bottom of the stairs, he made his way along the wall into the kitchen, keeping below the level of the windows. The only sound in the house was the insane brightness of the music, the record playing. In the kitchen he opened drawers in the counter, searching for a knife. Something to use as a weapon. The first drawer was filled with pornographic playing cards and pencils. The second had old bills and mail and a screwdriver. He gripped the screwdriver and edged to the other side of the room, hurrying, wanting to run, get out and disappear into the darkness. The drawer next to the sink was filled with knives, and he picked one, setting the screwdriver down. He stepped to the back door, breathed a moment, tightly gripped the knife, and moved the bordering curtain aside.

Travis was standing there with his back to the door, looking off toward the field.

The boy ducked back below the level of the window and saw the knob on the door begin to move. It turned one way and caught, then turned the other. The boy backed along the base of the wall, under the table and down a small stairwell, where a plywood door opened onto a dark, earth-smelling basement. He crouched against the door, trying not to scream, the scream rising under his heart. Somewhere and at some point he had dropped the knife. There was no thinking now—only the reaction, cringing against the thin plywood in that dim little cavelike enclosure and watching the pane break in the back door.

The big hand reached in and opened the door. And there was Travis, looking cool and calm and perfectly unemotional. He went on, into the living room, to the hallway and the stairs up. “Bags?” he said. “Goddammit. Bags.”

The heavy, booted feet were just above Jason, creaking in the beams of the stairwell. He stepped up into the kitchen and out the open door, across the wooden stoop and down into the soft ground, where he fell. He was lying in the pool of light, and he rolled out of it, into the freezing, dead grass near the cellar window. There, in the dark, he came to his feet and hurled himself close to the house, toward the truck, then under the truck, and on, out into the gravel road, running.