worth every broken bone he was going to get.
Worth it, in spades.
So why the hell, he thought then, couldn't he get the same courage up to ask Tracey out?
The smile widened. Well ... maybe he could. Maybe he really could. And then maybe he could walk over to Don's and find out what the hell was wrong with the guy's head.
Don heard his mother drive up, heard the front door close, heard muffled voices in the kitchen. The telephone rang. Someone answered. He shifted to lie on his back, hands behind his head. He sniffed, made himself shudder, and heard footsteps outside his door. A soft knocking. The door opened.
'Darling,' Joyce said, 'are you all right?'
She was beautiful, her hair unbound and flowing over her shoulders, a brightly colored blouse unbuttoned at the throat, a skirt not quite matching and not quite snug around her hips.
He nodded, but only once.
She gave him a tentative smile and sat at the foot of the bed. 'It's been rough. I guess, huh?'
He nodded.
She laid a sympathetic hand on his leg and rubbed it absently, looking around the room at the empty shelves, the neat desk. She said nothing about the poster. 'It isn't easy, I know. You know someone, and they have to ... to die like that. It isn't easy, believe me.'
He knew she meant Sam, and while Sam was his brother, he was only a kid.
Mandy wasn't really his friend, but she was seventeen and he knew her better than he'd ever known his little brother.
Joyce cleared her throat, and her smile was sad, then brave, then gone altogether.
He watched her, and felt sand in his throat. 'Mom,' he said before he could think and stop himself, 'there's something I have to tell you.
Over at the school this afternoon I saw
'In a minute, dear, please,' she interrupted in the way she had that told him she wasn't listening at all. 'That was Tracey Quintero on the phone before.' She patted his knee, rose, and went to the door.
'What?' He sat up, hands splayed to the sides to give him balance.
'Tracey? Why didn't you tell me?'
'Well, dear, this is kind of hard for you to understand, but she needs someone to talk to, and I think it best she talk to her parents first, don't you?'
'What?' he said, so softly she didn't hear him.
'Grown-ups, they have experience, and they know, most of the time, how someone your age is feeling, like about ... well, like something like this.' The smile returned, briefly. 'I think, right now, Mr. Quintero will help her more than her friends.'
He dropped back again. 'What did you tell her?'
'I told her you were sleeping. That you were disturbed by what had happened, and you were sleeping.'
'Thanks,' he said tonelessly.
Joyce winked at him and left, closing the door behind her.
The room filled with a silence that breathed, in and out, over the beating of his heart, the muffled creak of the bedsprings, the voices that slipped uninvited under the door.
What, he thought to the afterimage of his mother, do you know about what I need, huh? What the hell do you know about Tracey? Jesus, you didn't even know she was Spanish, for god's sake.
'Oh, hell,' he moaned, 'oh hell, oh hell.'
And the hell with them, then. He had given them a chance to help him be a hero, and maybe save some kid's life, but they didn't care. They didn't care at all. One thought he was an asshole who dumped shit on people's porches, and the other thought he didn't know how to help his own friends feel better.
They looked at him and they saw baby Sam.
The hell with them then.
He closed his eyes and felt the nugget still buried in his chest. Warm, red, and every inch of it his.
If they didn't want to help him, if they didn't trust him, then he would do it on his own. He was the one who knew what the Howler looked like; he was the one who could put the killer behind bars for the rest of his life; he was the one who knew it all, and they could all go to hell for all he cared.
How, something asked him then, do you know he's the Howler?
For the space of a heartbeat he blinked in confusion, and for the space of a long breath he didn't know the answer.
Then his eyes narrowed, and his breathing came easy, and it didn't bother him at all when he thought: birds of a feather.
Because in a way it was true. That creep under the bleachers worked under his own rules, and Don had written some new rules of his own. He couldn't speak them aloud, but he knew them just the same-they were written on that nugget, in red, just waiting.
He rolled onto his side, head propped on one hand.
He looked at the poster, and a sigh changed to a whimper. He was on his feet, across the room, gripping the edge of the desk and staring through a fall of perspiration from his brow.
The black horse was gone.
The static scratches had vanished, but the stallion was gone.
He touched the paper, traced the boles of the trees, the swirl of the fog, ran his palm over it, pressed his forehead to it, lifted a corner to check behind it.
The road was empty.
It was gone.
A panicked step took him halfway to the door, but he heard movement outside and ran to the window. The yard was dark and fringed by moonlight, and in the middle of the grass was a shadow. At first he thought it was Chris, coming the back way to see him for some unknown reason; then he squinted and pressed his palms to the pane and felt the glass. It wasn't-it was the same visitor he had seen last week when he'd run, the one who had watched him from the tunnel in the stadium wall.
Unformed. Black. And watching him as surely as if it had a perfect set of eyes.
A drop of ice touched his nape;
His head whipped around and he looked at the poster.
The horse was still gone.
When he looked back, the shadow was gone too.
Suddenly, inexplicably weeping, he backed away from the window, from the poster, and fell onto the bed. He tried to swallow, and couldn't; he tried to call for help, and couldn't; he tried to tell himself that he wasn't crazy, not really crazy, but posters didn't change and black ghosts didn't walk across his backyard at night.
'Help,' he whispered. 'Somebody. Help.'
SIX
Birds of a feather.
He waited until well past eleven, until he was positive the boards in the hallway wouldn't betray him. Then he dressed in his black denims and crept downstairs, took a flashlight from the hall closet and left the house by the back door.
The night had turned winter cold, and his breath gusted greyly from his lips, wafted back into his eyes. He stood with his hand on the metal knob until his vision adjusted, then moved in a low crouch toward the middle of the yard, the rod of white light bleaching the grass. He searched for depressions, disturbances, something dropped by whoever had been there before, whoever had been watching him through his window. He criss-crossed the yard twice and found nothing, did it twice again and decided to try the front, where the moonlight and the streetlamps would give him some aid.
Going back inside was out of the question.
He wanted desperately to convince himself that he hadn't gone crazy. He wanted to find tangible evidence of a prowler- maybe Brian and Tar up to another prank they were going to blame on him-which he could then show to his parents, to prove he hadn't lost his mind when he told them about the poster.
