The Night Cyclist (3 page)

Was that where he lived, I wondered? The night cyclist?

Except—nobody could make that ride up the canyon. Any sane person would fork over the change for the bus. But this night cyclist, he hadn't had a pack, hadn't had a rack on his bike. If he did live up the hill, what was he even down here in the big wet for?

Exercise? Recreation?

That would be more like suicide, having to make that climb after bopping all around town in the dark. And, yeah, now that that was on the table: the
dark
. No light? Nothing reflective to him at all. Like he just wanted to whip past, be already gone by the time the smear he'd been even registered to anybody on the trail that late.

“What are you?” I said out loud, but the comforter muffled my voice.

Which was good.

There was a shadow stretched out through the open doorway of my bedroom.

My heart gorged up into my throat.

And then, like my heart was that loud, the head of that shadow, it cocked around in a way I knew. A way I remembered.

It was him.

My first response was to curl deeper into the safety of my comforter.

My next response, it was to ask him how he'd done that. How he'd sprinted uphill, away from me, a born sprinter. And on a relic of a bike at that.

Keeping the blanket around my shoulders, I stood, shushed over into the doorway, for some reason superstitious about stepping directly into his shadow. Like it was a well I could fall into? Like that blackness was going to leech up through the print of my bare feet?

I don't know. It was instinctual; it was automatic. It was polite. In magical places, you make all obeisance you might think proper.

He knew I was there, had probably clocked my approach from the exact instant I'd stopped breathing.

What he was holding, and considering, it was his clear glasses.

The reason he was considering them, it was that I'd put them on the plate Doreen had decreed the home for all glasses.

The reason he was
re
considering them, it was that right there in the bowl were mine. My daytime ones, polarized, iridescent, and my night ones, clear and sleek, the elastic tight and young. My clear ones were enough of an update on his that they were practically a reinvention.

He looked up to me, and his face, it was cut stone. Harsh, angular, pale. And those eyes. I'd been right, last time: The pupils or irises or whatever, they were blown out. There was hardly any white.

Of course he didn't need a headlight.

Creatures of the night, they get along just fine in the darkness.

There were no eyebrows, either.

“What happened to you?” I almost said.

And his thighs—if I hadn't seen him ride, I'd never have clocked him for a serious cyclist. A rider who can rabbit up the canyon even just a mile or two without breaking a sweat, his quads should be jodhpured out past what any denim could ever contain, with thick, veined calves to match. Like gorilla forearms.

His
legs though, they were slender, smooth. Probably pale as his face, pale as those wristlets of white between his gloves and sleeve, between the cuff of his tights and the crescent of his shoe-tops.

He must be corded like steel, and wound tight.

At which point, finally, I cased the front door.

It was shut, the deadbolt still twisted tight.

Meaning—yep. Right on cue, the drapes over the sliding glass door billowed in, then sighed back out onto the balcony.

The third-floor balcony.

“I know what you did to those kids in the creek,” I said. “Before they were in the creek, I mean.”

It was supposed to be what kept him from coming for me. Knowledge. Except, idiot that I am, I'd made sure he knew that the only place that knowledge lived, it was in my head. Dig that out, and he'd have nothing to worry about.

“You didn't have to,” I added. “They were never going to get that log moved.”

He just stared at me. Evaluating me, it felt like. How long had it been since anyone attempted conversation with him, I wonder now? If he had spoken, if he could, what would he have even said, after so long? Would he have asked why a die-hard cyclist was defending those who would do violence to cyclists?

Looking back, my guess is that he couldn't speak at all. Not without showing me his teeth.

“I didn't invite you in here,” I said to him, my bulk—with the comforter—filling the doorway.

To show how little threat I was, he turned away from me, studying his glasses again. Then raising them, to inhale their scent.

“I didn't wear them,” I said. “Not really.”

What he was smelling, it was my sweat on the band, from when they'd been around my neck. From when I'd been chasing him.

In a moment's association, then, I knew that that was how he'd found me here on the third floor of an apartment building miles away from the last place I'd seen him.

He'd picked my scent out of all the smells of the city. Out of all the thousands of other bodies out after dark. He'd known me through the rain.

I swallowed, the sound of it crashing in my ears.

He'd come here because I'd seen him. He'd come here because he
couldn't
be seen.

“You don't ride in the sun, do you,” I said. It wasn't really a question. I nodded down to the glasses he was still considering. “And the stores are only open in the daytime. So you can't—you can't update your gear.”

I could tell by the new stillness about him that he heard me, but he didn't look up.

“Take them,” I said.

Slowly, by labored degrees, he looked over to me.

“Mine,” I said. “Take them. You need them.”

Because it wasn't in him to leave evidence behind, he hooked his down over his neck like I'd worn them, then settled mine around his head, the continuous lens cocked up on his forehead. When he lowered them, the dents left from the elastic's pull didn't fill with red color.

But I'd known that wasn't going to happen.

“You're fast,” I said to him. “I used to be fast.”

He looked up to me for what I knew was the last time. I knew it was the last because there was a grin spreading across his face. No, not a grin. A sneer.

What he was saying was that
he
was fast. The fastest.

And he didn't need lungs.

And he slept—where he slept, it was probably burrowed into a hole somewhere up the canyon. Under a rock ledge, in a cave only him and the marmots and the chipmunks knew about, and whatever beetles and grubs can live in gaspy thin air, without the sun.

The moment his grin flashed into a smile, I saw the dirty yellow sharpness past his lips and I took an involuntary step back.

That was all it took to spook him.

He moved like quicksilver over the couch, past the rattan stools, and onto the balcony. I rushed over after him, to see him silently touching down, or swimming through the night air, but he was already gone.

I should have expected nothing less.

*   *   *

Three nights later, the waters receded from the bike path.

I hadn't been riding to and from work.

Doreen had called, actually. Just to talk.

I told her to swing by the restaurant soon, that I'd make her favorite, like old times. Her breath hitched a bit over that.

Four years, that's a long time. For me too.

“And you need to be careful,” she said, when we were both signing off awkwardly—awkward because we'd been saying the same thing at the end of every call for so long. What were we supposed to say now?

“Careful?” I said.

“Those two kids who died,” she said.

“They weren't riding,” I told her.

“Just be careful.”

I promised her I would and we somehow broke the connection.

It was my night off.

What she'd said, though. It was a challenge, wasn't it?

You only have to be careful when you think something can really happen to you. When you're twenty, twenty-five, nothing in the world can touch you.

To prove that still applied to me, I unclamped my bike from the rack, checked the tire pressure front and back, then nodded to myself about this, trucked us downstairs, to the sidewalk that led to the path that ran alongside the creek, up the canyon if I followed that far.

It was one, two in the morning. Late enough that the hand-in-hand lovers would be bedded down someplace secret. Late enough that all the smokers who'd promised they'd quit weren't out for one last drag.

Just me and the creatures of the night.

My headlight only stabbed fifteen, twenty feet into the darkness.

To show I could, that I still had those legs, I pumped hard for the black space of the mountains. I knew better than to try to make the whole climb. But even a little would prove something.

I made it the same two miles, not pushing hard, just steady climbing, before I wheeled around, rode gravity back to town.

Two homeless men, tuned to nature better than the usual baby stroller crowd, stepped away from each other to let me slip between them at thirty miles per hour. I nodded thanks, but it's always an empty gesture. You're going too fast for it to register, and you can't ever check back to see if they even saw your gratitude.

Empty gestures are what make the world go round, though.

I swooped under two, three bridges, pedaling though I didn't really need to. There was still silt on the concrete. It crunched under my tires like sugar granules.

“Careful,” I said again, to myself. Just retasting the word. Mining into it for what Doreen had really been trying to get across.

I looked down, shut my eyes—I was on a straightaway, the one that tunneled through the next quarter mile or so of trees—watching my top tube coast back and forth instead of doing the first thing Coach always said: keeping my eyes on the line I was taking.

My headlight was what saved me from myself.

A piece of driftwood, obviously dragged up onto the path.

Doing it without thinking—it was years too late to stop—I bunny hopped the wood. When you're clipped in and your bike goes eleven pounds, you can do this.

I came down with both tires at once, like's proper if you want to keep control, and had to skid immediately, as clearing the
next
chunk of driftwood would only land me on a third piece. This wasn't just a symbolic attempt to sabotage the trail. This was set up to hurt any rider who came at it with a head of speed.

I didn't wipe out, though. It was close, but I knew to cantilever out, ahead, and keep hold of the bike so it didn't crash into me, send us both spinning into the darkness. It was a once-in-fifty tries dismount, but I landed it.

Breathing hard from the close call, all the profanity I knew welling up in me, I looked back at what almost was, what should have been if I hadn't just cashed in all my luck for the next ten years, and then I directed my headlight ahead, into the turn, to what other obstacles awaited.

The night cyclists's white face looked back to me.

His white face and his red mouth and chin. His deep black eyes.

I flinched, but then realized why he wasn't already at my throat: He was impaled on the seat post of his own bike. He was impaled just like I would be, if I hadn't reeled all my speed in. But my speed, it had probably only been half of his.

I could see what had happened, too. Like me, he'd bunny hopped over the initial chunk of driftwood but, going faster, his hop had carried him farther, into the next strategically placed driftwood. It had been too much to recover from. He'd probably fallen over sideways, slapped the concrete of the trail hard, but he was going fast enough that instead of splatting into a skid, he bounced, he cartwheeled. And his bike was right there with him, coming apart at its welds, components spinning up into the night sky.

Specifically, his seat.

Only, the clamp hadn't let go. The seatpost, it had snapped. A carbon-fiber seatpost, it would have splintered, would be showing thread. An old-style aluminum post like he was running, though, it'll snap off up near the saddle, leave a ragged tube, a hollow spear.

The night cyclist had hit the tree with his back, hard, and an instant later his bike's seatpost, still extending from the bike itself, had jammed through his sternum.

The blood around that wound, it was black, even at this distance. Not red like the blood at his mouth.

I adjusted the strap across my chest, only just then realized I had my knives with me.

They were clean, like always, but I could tell from the flare of his nostrils that he knew what I was wearing. That this was just one more insult the night had for him. One more stupid thing between him and wherever he was going.

His lips thinned, his teeth baring, but before he could complete his display, he whipped his head over to the left.

I looked too. Nothing. No sound.

And then there was.

Not voices, but brush and branches, parting.

At first I thought it was the two dead boys from the creek, risen. But one of them had shaped sideburns this time, the other a shaved head. Different college kids. What they were carrying was a double-bit axe and a camp hatchet, one of those kinds with a textured hammer on the back side.

And then I realized exactly where we were: at that bend in the creek. It's why I'd thought they were the dead boys, risen.

These were their friends, then. The other night, they'd tried to muscle that big log up onto the trail.
This
night, they'd come back with proper tools. To finish the job the night cyclist had interrupted. And to avenge their fallen comrades, as they probably saw it.

When one of them dragged a flashlight up to the night cyclist, I saw that his chin and mouth, their redness wasn't from himself.

That Double-Bit and Hatchet were still standing, that meant that, a few minutes ago, they'd been three.

I finally tracked down to the night cyclist's feet, and there was the body that had to be there. The boy who had stepped too close, to taunt.