an odd sensation, one that made him close his eyes, and open them again slowly to bring it back into proper focus.
Slower then, the bike on the verge of wobbling.
It was much like his own street-homes dating back to the Depression and beyond to the turn of the century, all wood and brick and weather-smooth stone, with small front yards and old oaks at the curbside, the sidewalks uneven and the street itself in deep shadow, where the leaves still on their branches muffled the streetlights' glare.
And several cars parked at the curbs.
Nothing at all out of the ordinary, and ordinarily he would have ridden right on. But tonight there was something different, something he couldn't see, something he thought he could feel. It seemed familiar enough-Tar Boston lived halfway down, in a green Cape Cod with white shutters and no porch-and yet it wasn't the same.
Slower still, as if someone were behind him, pulling a cord and drawing it beneath the tires.
He closed one eye, opened it, and gripped the handlebars a bit tighter.
The cars.
It was the cars.
No matter what color they were, they were dark-gleaming dark, waiting dark. The facets of their headlamps glowing faintly like spidereyes caught by the moon, and the windshields pocked with the onset of frost.
Their sides reflected black; their tops reflected the shadows of dying trees. They were giant cats from the jungle somehow transformed, and all the more menacing for it.
Finally he stopped in the middle of the street and watched them, licked quickly at his lips and imagined them waiting here just for him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. A stable of cars. No. An army of cars. Patiently waiting for the order to kill.
His mouth worked at the start of a smile while he nodded to them all and told them his name.
From somewhere down the block, just past the middle, an engine rumbled softly.
Metal creaked.
A chassis rocked slowly back and forth in place.
He bit at his lower lip; he was scaring himself.
A headlamp winked.
Tires crackled as if they were frozen to the blacktop.
Jesus, he thought, and wiped a palm over his mouth.
The engine died.
Metal stopped shifting.
There was only the faint hiss of late downtown traffic.
He pushed off again and barely made the far corner without swerving off the road, then headed rapidly back up the boulevard toward home. A bus grumbled past him, exhaust clouding his face. He coughed and slowed again, watched as the amber lights strung along its roofline vanished when the street shrank into the dark that hung below the lighted sky above the next town.
Jesus, he thought again, and made himself shudder. He knew it was only heat escaping from the engines, released from the metal frames, that someone had only been warmning up a motor in a garage. That's all it was. Yet he made himself think of something else, like what it was like to live in a place where the cities and towns weren't slambang against each other, like they were here, all the way to New York.
Spooky, he decided.
All that open space, or all those trees-spooky as hell, and anyway, Ashford wasn't all that bad of a place.
He turned into his block again, saw the station wagon in the driveway, and pulled up behind it. After wiping his hands on his jeans, he walked the bike through the open garage door. There was no room inside for the car-too many garden tools and cartons and a thousand odds and ends that somehow always managed to be carted out here when there was no place immediate anyone could think of to put them. Like an attic with its house buried a mile below the ground.
He hesitated, and wiped his hands again as a sliver of tension worked its way across his back. Then he opened the door and stepped into the kitchen.
'I thought,' his mother said, 'you'd been kidnapped, for heaven's sake.'
II
The light was bright; he squinted to adjust.
She was standing at the sink with one hip cocked, rinsing out a cup while the percolator bubbled noisily on the counter beside her. Her hair was dark and long, reaching almost to the middle of her back, and when she pulled it together with a vivid satin ribbon the way it was now, she looked almost young enough to be one of her own students. Especially when she smiled and her large eyes grew wide. Which she did when he walked up and kissed her cheek, shucked his jacket, and draped it over the back of a chair.
He was going to tell her about the cars, changed his mind when she looked away, back to her cleaning.
'I was riding.'
'Good for you,' she declared, glowering at a stain that would not leave the cup. 'Fresh air is very good for you. It flushes out the dead cells in the blood, but I guess you already know that from biology or something.'
'Right.'
A glance into the half-filled refrigerator and he pulled out a can of soda.
'But that gassy junk, dear, is bad for you,' she said, setting the cup down and rinsing out another. There was a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, soaking in hot soapy water. Maybe tomorrow she would get around to washing them all. 'It's not good to drink that stuff before you go to bed. It lies there in your stomach not doing anything but making you burp and giving you nightmares.'
'Am I going to bed?'
She tsked at him and pursed her lips. 'Donald, it is now'-she checked the sunflower-shaped clock over the stove-'forty-seven minutes past ten o'clock. Exactly. You have school tomorrow. I have school tomorrow. And I'm tired.'
The percolator buzzed at her and she pulled out the plug.
'You didn't have to wait up for me if you're that tired, you know, Mom.'
She dried the cups and poured the coffee, everything perfectly timed. 'I didn't. Your father's been on the phone since we walked in the door. By the way,' she added as he headed for the living room, 'I saw that Chris playing the piano tonight. She's really quite pretty, you know it? Are you going to take her to the do?'
'I don't know,' he said, still walking away. 'Maybe.'
'What?'
'Maybe!' he called back, and under his breath: 'On a cold day in hell, lady.'
Chris Snowden was the new girl on the block, and in this case it was literal. She and her family had moved in three doors down in the middle of last August. Her hair was such a pale blonde it was nearly white, her skin looked so soft you could lose your fingers in it if you tried to touch it, and, Brian Pratt's crudeness aside, she had a figure he had seen only in the movies. She was, at first glance, a laughable stereotype-cheerleader, brainless, and the football team captain's personal choice for a consort. Which she had been for a while, while everyone nodded, then-professed shock and puzzlement when she started dating the president of the student council. She didn't need the grades, so he wasn't doing her homework, and she didn't need the ride to school, because it was only five blocks away and she walked every morning-except when it rained and she drove her own car, a dark red convertible whose top was always up. Then just last week it was known she was on her own again, and those who decided such things decided she was only sleeping around.
Don puffed his cheeks, blew out, and sighed.
Chris's father was a doctor in some prestigious hospital in New York, and if Don's mother had her way, he would be taking her to every event of the town's century-plus birthday- the Ashford Day picnic, party, dance, concert, football game, whatever. A full week of celebration. But even if he wanted to, he knew he didn't have a chance.
Just as he reached the front hall and was about to turn right into the living room, he heard his father's voice and changed his mind.
