He stared, waiting.
Waited, staring.
The sun sank lower in the west, throwing the face of the ridge into shadow until he could no longer differentiate between trees and cliff and road.
Although he would have no trouble seeing the mailman's car descend if its lights were on, there was no way he'd be able to spot the car with its headlights off.
He had a gut feeling, however, that the mailman was still up there on top of the ridge and would be for some time.
What could he be doing? Doug opened the screen door quickly and sneaked inside the house before the bugs hovering near the porch light could follow.
Tritia was putting away the last of the dinner dishes and Billy was already upstairs.
'I'm going to cruise down to Circle K,' Doug announced.
Tritia closed the cupboard. 'What for?'
He had no lie handy, but his voice didn't falter as he made up an excuse on the spur of the moment. 'I just had a sudden urge for a candy bar. You want one?' She shook her head. There was a suspicious look on her face, but she said nothing.
'Big Hunk!' Billy called from upstairs.
'What if they don't have any?'
'Reese's!'
'Okay.' He turned back toward Tritia . 'Anything for you? Granola bar maybe?'
'No.' She was quiet for a moment and looked as though she was about to say something, but she remained silent.
'I'll be back in fifteen minutes or so.' Doug opened the screen door and stepped out, closing it behind him.
Tritia followed him onto the porch. 'Be careful,' she said quietly.
He turned to look at her. She knew something or sensed something. He could tell she was worried. He wanted to talk to her, to let her know what he was going to do, but somehow the words wouldn't come. He nodded, saying nothing, and walked down the steps to the Bronco.
He drove quickly, once he was out of eyesight and ear-shot of the house, eager to get over to the ridge, though he had the feeling the mailman wasn't going anywhere.
It was strange. The mailman had never, to Doug's knowledge, been seen shopping, buying gas, eating, or doing anything other than official postal work.
It was hard, in a town this small, to remain completely to oneself, to remain a mystery, and before this, he would have thought it impossible. Even if a person was pathologically antisocial, his neighbors would notice his comings and goings, his personal habits, and would report to their friends, who would report to their friends, and so on until the entire town was informed of his movements.
A small town was no place for an individual who craved anonymous privacy, no place for a recluse. But the mailman seemed to be pulling it off.
Now, however, he had the opportunity to see the mailman after hours.
And Doug had the feeling he was doing something other than postal work.
He swung onto the highway and sped through town, braking to thirty-five just before the speed trap next to the bank. He turned off on Oak and followed it to the Ridge Road, hands growing increasingly sweaty on the steering wheel.
There were no streetlights here and the road was dark. He slowed to a crawl as he reached the top of the ridge, not sure of what he would find, not wanting to give himself away.
The land at the top was fiat, tall grass and weeds punctuated by boulders of various sizes but without any significant foliage to hide behind. He cut the headlights and pulled to the side of the road, turning off the engine so as not to attract attention to himself. He was scared, but he had to go through with this. He rolled down the Bronco's window. The moon in the east was starting to rise, casting long shadows on theridgetop . The road, he knew, ended just a mile up ahead, and unless the mailman had left while Doug was driving over here, he was somewhere in between these two points.
Doug sat in the car for a few moments longer, gathering his courage, giving his eyes time to adjust to the gloom. There was a slight breeze blowing, a wispy, barely perceptible current of air that animated the blue-lit grass stalks and whispered sibilantly. Only . . . only there was another noise besides the wind whispers. A low faint murmur coming from somewhere up ahead, rising and falling with the tides of the breeze.
The mailman.
Goose bumps rippled down Doug's arms. Slowly, carefully, quietly, he opened the car door and got out, closing it softly. He began walking forward, keeping to the side of the road, grateful he was wearing dark clothes that would allow him to blend in with the night.
The ridge was not entirely flat, he saw now. It appeared so from a car, but walking, he noticed that a slight rise continued imperceptibly forward, the grade just enough to shield the center of the ridge from view.
The murmuring grew slightly louder.
Doug continued walking. His keys and change were jingling in his pants and he put his hand in his pocket to muffle the noise. The road curved slightly, the land leveling off, and he came to an abrupt stop, his heart thumping loudly in his chest. The mailman was about half a mile directly ahead of him, off the road, in the middle of the field. Even from here, he could see the lithe thin figure dancing madly amid the rocks and boulders, arms flailing with wild abandonment. He knew who it was without moving closer, but he wanted to be near enough to see everything, and he left the road, ducking through the grass, creeping forward, the fear a palpable presence in his body. Behind him, the moon was rising, full and bright, throwing the top of the ridge into phosphorescent relief, casting a soft light on the entire scene.
He moved silently forward. The sounds grew louder. The mailman was chanting something. At first it sounded like a foreign language, so strange and alien were its rhythms and cadences. But, listening closer as he approached, Doug realized that the words of the chant were English.
'Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail. . . .'
He was chanting the motto of the Postal Service.
The skin on the back of Doug's neck prickled, peach fuzz standing on end.
He crept behind a large irregularly shaped boulder and peeked out from behind its bulk. The mailman was leaping in the air, twirling joyfully, not following any steps or preplanned moves, dancing wildly and impulsively. This close, Doug could see that the mailman was dressed in his full postal uniform: shoes and pants, shirt and cap. Brass buttons glinted in the moonlight. Blue-blackness was reflected off the spit-shined shoes.
Doug's mouth was dry and cottony, his heart pounding so loudly that he was sure the mailman would be able to hear it. He had known there was something odd, something strange, something evil about the mailman. But he realized now that he was in far over his head. The mailman's dance was spontaneous and celebratory and could very well have had something to do with witchcraft orsatanism , but he had an intuitive feeling that the dance was related to something much worse, something much more primal and unfathomable, something he did not and perhaps could not understand.
The mailman stopped chanting and grinned crazily, perfect teeth seeming, to glow in the moonlight, staring raptly up at the sky as his legs moved in impossible steps, his arms mirroring each foot movement. He began to chant again. The Postal Service motto.
The mailman had been dancing for at least the five minutes that Doug had been watching, dancing at full throttle, using all of his strength and all of the energy at his disposal, but he showed no signs of tiring. Indeed, he did not even appear to be sweating.
Doug had no doubt that the mailman could keep this up until dawn.
He began backing away the way he had come, retreating behind the boulder, into thegrassFor a second, he thought he saw the mailman look directly at him and laugh, but then he was running, hurrying through the grass and down the road to the Bronco.
He turned around without flipping on his headlights and sped down the Ridge Road toward home.
He had forgotten all about Billy's Big Hunk and his supposed trip to Circle K, but neither Tritia nor Billy said
