It was his, and it was him.
A smile, just barely.
He shifted to the edge of the bed, let his feet touch the floor, let his hands grip the mattress.
He switched on the light over the headboard and turned away from the bulb until his eyes adjusted. Eagerly he leaned forward, ready to explain to his friend what he thought had just happened.
But he couldn't.
He could only open his mouth in a scream that was never more than silent.
The poster was still there, taped over his desk.
The forest, the road, the darkening sky.
The poster was there.
But someone had tried to destroy the black horse. It was streaked, barely visible, as if a knife or a pen had attempted to scrape the picture off and leave only the background.
FIVE
Sunday's dawn never showed the sun; there was rain instead, a driving downpour that filled the gutters swiftly and washed driveways into black rivers. Leaves dropped sodden into the streets and onto the pavement, the Ashford Day medallions on the boulevard lampposts were twisted on their wires in the wind that followed. The park was deserted. A handful of pedestrians ran from shop doorway to shop doorway, heading for the bakeries and their hot cross buns, their dinner cakes and breakfast rolls. Cars hissed. Buses sprayed the shoulders. Headlamps were weak in the not-quite-daylight.
And when the downpour was over, the drizzle remained. Colder somehow, more touched with gloom. It prevented the puddles from holding clear reflections, prevented the windows from seeing clearly outside; the wind was gone, but collars were kept up and umbrellas stayed unfurled, and when a church bell tolled on the far side of town, it sounded like a buoy heralding the fog.
In Don's room the light was grey but he didn't notice it at all. He sat against the wall, on his bed, and stared at the poster, eyes puffed and bloodshot, hands palsied at his sides. He wore only his shorts, and his chest barely moved.
His mother had checked on him shortly after breakfast, and he had stared at her until she had backed out and closed the door.
His father hadn't come to see him at all.
He didn't mind.
He was working on a new set of Rules.
The telephone rang.
Tracey bolted from the couch and raced for the kitchen, but by the time she got there her mother had already answered. An aunt, by the sound of it, and she waited until she knew it would be one of those long, Sunday conversations that mixed with the aromas of Sunday dinner and the quiet of Sunday afternoons, when the house was ordered peaceful, a fiat from her father.
Later, she thought; I'll call Don later.
Brian was worried about the size of his neck. Several times before he left the house he checked himself in the hall mirror to see if it was getting too bulky, too thick. He didn't want to end up like Tar or Fleet, with necks sticking out to the ends of their shoulders, looking like goofballs and sounding like they had cotton shoved halfway down their throats. He wanted to look as normal as possible. A thick neck meant you were dim-witted and stupid to those assholes out there, and he wasn't kidding himself-once his professional career on the field was over he would have to make it in a real job, and you don't get real jobs if you look stupid, or bloated, or like your face had been stomped on by a herd of elephants.
Now he adjusted the rearview mirror and pulled at the top of the sweater, just to be sure nothing had changed in the past five minutes.
'Jesus Christ!' Tar yelled, cringing back in his seat. 'Will you for Christ's sake look where you're going?'
A bus horn blared. Brian yanked the wheel hard to the right, back to the left, and grinned as the car held on the rain-slick blacktop. 'No sweat.'
'No sweat, fuck you, pal,' Tar said. He wriggled lower until he could prop his knees up on the dashboard, his head barely rising above the edge of the door.
'Chicken?' Brian asked with a grin.
'Careful.'
He laughed, shook his head, and swerved off the boulevard onto a street that took a sudden plunge down halfway along the block. They were headed for the flat below the school, and after checking his neck once again, Brian glanced into the backseat to make sure they had everything.
'I still think,' Tar muttered, 'we should've made Fleet come, y'know?
Hell, it was practically his stupid idea in the first place.'
Brian shrugged. He didn't give a damn. Fleet Robinson had sort of dropped out anyway, ever since he picked up Amanda Adler and got into her pants. Not, he thought with a palm rubbing over his chest, that he wouldn't mind it either. She wasn't all that bad, considering she didn't have much in the tits-and-ass department. He guessed Fleet was into something different, like that ass-long pony tail of hers. Maybe she whips him with it or something. He grinned. Maybe she does.
Tar was right though. The creep oughta be here, with them, driving into a place that looked like God forgot to clean up. The houses were ancient and falling apart; there was silt over everything now that it had rained, from the factories whose smokestacks rose glumly above the trees. You could hardly tell it was the same town, and he wondered why all the girls who came from down here had the best bodies.
'Jesus, what a dump,' Tar said, his chin hard on his chest. His hair was short, dark, cropped high over his ears; his face was pale in the late afternoon's dim light. He sniffed, and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and rolled the window down to let out the smoke.
Brian hated smoke.
Another right, and Brian slowed to not much faster than a brisk walk.
Since they'd left the boulevard they hadn't seen a single car or a single person. Early dinner for the rubes, he thought. He snapped his fingers, and Tar groaned as he unfolded himself, reached into the backseat and pulled the two plastic garbage bags to the front. He stuffed them carefully into the well between his legs, and rolled the window down a bit more. Despite the ties that held the bags closed, he could still smell the crap, and he wiped his hands on his jeans.
'Beautiful,' Brian said.
'Fleet oughta be here.'
'Jesus, will you give it a rest, Boston? He ain't, and that's that, and besides, he'll regret it when he sees the look on the Tube's face tomorrow morning.'
Tar considered it and decided Brian was right. As usual. Even when he was wrong.
A left, a right, and Brian pulled to the curb on a deserted street, the homes here in considerably better shape than the ones they had passed.
They were still old, and still looked as if their owners made less than a buck an hour, but the tiny lawns were well kept, the houses clean and painted, and no rusted hulks cluttered the road.
Water dripped from the leaves onto the roof, loudly.
Brian rubbed his hands together and leaned over the steering wheel to peer through the windshield. 'There,' he said, pointing. 'The green one, two in from the corner.'
Tar followed the finger's direction and nodded. Then he checked the neighborhood again. 'What the hell is he doing living down here, man?
The way he talks you think he lived in fucking Scarsdale or something.' He peered at the nearest house.
'Maybe we got the wrong address.'
'No,' Brian said, though he'd been thinking the same thing. 'He probably lives in the same house he was born in. Too fucking lazy to move out.'
'Maybe he's got a secret lab in the cellar, where he experiments on women.'
'The Tube? You gotta be kidding. If you were a girl, would you want that thing on top of you?'
Tar shuddered, and laughed, and took a deep breath. 'Y'know, our ass is doomed if we get caught.'
