Beyond the hard-packed barnyard earth lies a recently mown lawn. A concrete birdbath. Beds of roses. An abandoned bicycle on its side. A grape arbor is entwined with vines, clothed with leaves, hung with fruit.
Through the tunnel of the arbor, and then across more grass, he approaches the farmhouse. At the back porch, brick steps lead up to a weathered plank floor. He creaks and scrapes to the door, which opens for him.
He hesitates on the threshold, troubled by both the risk that he’s taking and the crime he’s intending to commit. His mother has raised him with strong values; but if he’s to survive this night, he will have to steal.
Furthermore, he is reluctant to put these people — whoever they may be — at risk. If the killers track him to this place while he’s still inside, they won’t spare anyone. They have no mercy, and they dare not leave witnesses.
Yet if he doesn’t seek help here, he’ll have to visit the next farmhouse, or the one after the next. He is exhausted, afraid, still lost, and in need of a plan. He’s got to stop running long enough to think.
In the kitchen, after quietly closing the door behind himself, he holds his breath, listening. The house is silent. Evidently, his small noises haven’t awakened anyone.
Cupboard to cupboard, drawer to drawer, he searches until he discovers candles and matches, which he considers but discards. At last, a flashlight.
He needs several items, and a quick but cautious tour of the lower floor convinces him that he will have to go upstairs to find those necessities.
At the foot of the steps, he’s paralyzed by dread. Perhaps the killers are already here. Upstairs. Waiting in the dark, waiting for him to find them. Surprise.
Ridiculous. They aren’t the type to play games. They’re vicious and efficient. If they were here now, he’d already be dead.
He feels small, weak, alone, doomed. He feels foolish, too, for continuing to hesitate even when reason tells him that he has nothing to fear other than getting caught by the people who live here.
Finally, he starts up toward the second floor. The stairs softly protest. As he ascends, he stays close to the wall, where the treads are less noisy.
At the top is a short hallway. Four doors.
The first door opens on a bathroom. The second lends to a bedroom; hooding the flashlight to dim and more tightly focus the beam, he enters.
A man and a woman lie in the bed, sleeping soundly. They snore in counterpoint: he an oboe with a split reed; she a whistling flute.
On a dresser, in a small decorative tray: coins and a man’s wallet. In the wallet, the boy finds one ten-dollar bill, two fives, four ones.
These are not rich people, and he feels guilty about taking their money. One day, if he lives long enough, he will return to this house and repay his debt.
He wants the coins, too, but he doesn’t touch them. In his nervousness, he’s likely to jingle or drop them, rousing the farmer and his wife.
The man grumbles, turns on his side… but doesn’t wake.
Retreating quickly and silently from the bedroom, the boy sees movement in the hall, a pair of shining eyes, a flash of teeth in the hooded beam of light. He almost cries out in alarm.
A dog. Black and white. Shaggy.
He has a way with dogs, and this one is no exception. It nuzzles him and then, panting happily, leads him along the hallway to another door that stands ajar.
Perhaps the dog came from this room. Now it glances back at its new friend, grins, wags its tail, and slips across the threshold as flu-idly as a supernatural familiar ready to assist with some magical enterprise.
Affixed to the door is a stainless-steel plaque with laser-cut letters:
STARSHIP COMMAND CENTER, CAPTAIN CURTIS HAMMOND.
Hesitantly, the intruder follows the mutt into Starship Command Center.
This is a boy’s room, papered with large monster-movie posters. Display shelves are cluttered with collections of science-fiction action figures and models of ornate but improbable spaceships. In one corner a life-size plastic model of a human skeleton hangs from a metal stand, grinning as if death is great fun.
Perhaps signifying the beginning of a shift in the obsessions of the resident, a single poster of Britney Spears also adorns one wall. With her deep cleavage, bared belly, and aggressive sparkling smile, she’s powerfully intriguing but also nearly as scary as any of the snarling, carnivorous antagonists of the horror films.
The young intruder looks away from the pop star, confused by his feelings, surprised that he possesses the capacity for any emotions other than fear and grief, considering the ordeal he has so recently endured.
Under the Britney Spears poster, in a tangle of sheets, sprawled facedown in bed, his head turned to one side, lies Curtis Hammond, commander of this vessel, who sleeps on, unaware that the sanctity of his starship bridge has been violated. He might be eleven or even twelve, but he’s somewhat small for his age, about the size of the night visitor who stands over him.
Curtis Hammond is a source of bitter envy, not because he has found peace in sleep, but because he is not orphaned, is not alone. For a moment, the young intruder’s envy curdles into a hatred so thick and poisonous that he feels compelled to lash out, to hammer the dreaming boy and diminish this intolerable pain by sharing it.
Although trembling with the pressure of his misplaced rage, he doesn’t vent it, but leaves Curtis untouched. The hatred subsides as quickly as it flourished, and the grief that was briefly drowned by this fierce animosity now reappears like a gray winter beach from beneath an ebbing tide.
On the nightstand, in front of a clock radio, lie several coins and a used Band-Aid with a blot of dried blood on the gauze pad. This isn’t much blood, but the intruder has recently seen so much violence that he shudders. He does not touch the coins.
Accompanied by dog snuffles and a flurry of fur, the motherless boy moves stealthily to the closet. The door is ajar. He opens it wider. With the flashlight beam, he shops for clothes.
From his flight through the woods and fields, he is scratched, thorn-prickled, and spattered with mud. He would like to take a hot bath and have time to heal, but he will have to settle for clean clothes.
The dog watches, head cocked, looking every bit as puzzled as it ought to be.
Throughout the theft of shirt, jeans, socks, and shoes, Curtis Hammond sleeps as soundly as though a spell has been cast upon him. Were he a genuine starship captain, his crew might fall prey to brain-eating aliens or his vessel might spiral into the gravitational vortex of a black hole while he dreamed of Britney Spears.
Not a brain-eating alien but feeling as though he himself is in the thrall of black-hole gravity, the intruder returns quietly Jo the open bedroom door, the dog remaining by his side.
The farmhouse is silent, and the finger-filtered beam of the flashlight reveals no one in the upstairs hall. Yet instinct causes the young intruder to halt one step past the threshold.
Something isn’t right, the silence too deep. Perhaps Curtis’s parents have awakened.
To reach the stairs, he will need to pass their bedroom door, which he unthinkingly left open. If the farmer and his wife have been roused from sleep, they will probably remember that their door was closed when they retired for the night.
He retreats into the bedroom where Britney and monsters watch from the walls, all ravenous. Switches off the flashlight. Holds his breath.
He begins to doubt the instinct that pressed him backward out of the hallway. Then he realizes that the dog’s swishing tail, which had been softly lashing his legs, has suddenly gone still. The animal has also stopped panting.
Dim gray rectangles float in the dark: curtained windows. He crosses the room toward them, struggling to recall the placement of furniture, hoping to avoid raising a clatter.
After he puts down the extinguished flashlight, as he pulls the curtains aside, plastic rings scrape and click softly along a brass rod, as though the hanging skeleton, animated by sorcery, is flexing its bony fingers in the gloom.
Curtis Hammond mutters, wrestles briefly with his sheets, but doesn’t wake.
A thumb-turn lock frees the window. Gingerly, the intruder raises the lower sash. He slips out of the house, onto the front-porch roof, and glances back.
The dog looms at the open window, forepaws on the sill, as if it will abandon its master in favor of this new friend and a night of adventure.
