Seize the Night - Страница 2

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

“That’s not around here.”

“All over the country. Every few months. Groups of little kids burned alive. Why not here?”

“Because it isn’t,” I said. “It’s something else.”

She swung away from the window and raked the yard with the flashlight beam, as though she hoped to discover her tousle-haired, pajama-clad son among the fallen leaves and the curled strips of papery bark that littered the grass under a row of tall eucalyptus trees.

Catching a troubling scent, Orson issued a low growl and backed away from the planting bed. He peered up at the windowsill, sniffed the air, put his nose to the ground again, and headed tentatively toward the rear of the house.

“He’s got something,” I said.

Lilly turned. “Got what?”

“A trail.”

When he reached the backyard, Orson broke into a trot.

“Badger,” I said, “don’t tell them Orson and I were here.”

A weight of fear pressed her voice thinner than a whisper: “Don’t tell who?”

“The police.”

“Why?”

“I’ll be back. I’ll explain. I swear I’ll find Jimmy. I swear I will.”

I could keep the first two promises. The third, however, was something less meaningful than wishful thinking and was intended only to provide a little hope with which she might keep herself glued together.

In fact, as I hurried after my strange dog, pushing the bicycle at my side, I already believed that Jimmy Wing was lost forever. The most I expected to find at the end of the trail was the boy’s dead body and, with luck, the man who had murdered him.

2

When I reached the rear of Lilly’s house, I couldn’t see Orson. He was so coaly black that even the light of a full moon was not sufficient to reveal him.

From off to the right came a soft woof, then another, and I followed his call.

At the end of the backyard was a freestanding garage that could be entered by car only from the alley beyond. A brick walkway led alongside the garage to a wooden gate, where Orson stood on his hind legs, pawing at the latch.

For a fact, this dog is radically smarter than ordinary mutts. Sometimes I suspect that he is also considerably smarter than I am.

If I didn’t have the advantage of hands, no doubt I would be the one eating from a dish on the floor. He would have control of the most comfortable easy chair and the remote control for the television.

Demonstrating my single claim to superiority, I disengaged the bolt latch with a flourish and pushed open the creaking gate.

A series of garages, storage sheds, and backyard fences lay along this flank of the alley. On the farther side, the cracked and runneled blacktop gave way to a narrow dirt shoulder, which in turn led to a line of massive eucalyptuses and a weedy verge that sloped into a canyon.

Lilly’s house is on the edge of town, and no one lives in the canyon behind her place. The wild grass and scattered scrub oaks on the descending slopes provide homes for hawks, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, field mice, and snakes.

Following his formidable nose, Orson urgently investigated the weeds along the edge of the canyon, padding north and then south, softly whining and grumbling to himself.

I stood at the brink, between two trees, peering down into a darkness that not even the fat moon could dispel. No flashlight moved in those depths. If Jimmy had been carried into that gloom, the kidnapper must have uncanny night vision.

With a yelp, Orson abruptly abandoned his search along the canyon rim and returned to the center of the alleyway. He moved in a circle, as though he might start chasing his tail, but his head was raised and he was excitedly sniffing spoor.

To him, the air is a rich stew of scents. Every dog has a sense of smell thousands of times more powerful than yours or mine.

The medicinal pungency of the eucalyptus trees was the only aroma that I could detect. Drawn by another and more suspicious scent, as if he were but a bit of iron pulled inexorably toward a powerful magnet, Orson raced north along the alley.

Maybe Jimmy Wing was still alive.

It’s my nature to believe in miracles. So why not believe in this one?

I climbed on my bike and pedaled after the dog. He was swift and certain, and to match his pace, I really had to make the drive chain hum.

In block after block, only a few widely spaced security lamps glowed at the back of the residential properties that we passed. By habit I steered away from those radiant pools, along the darker side of the alleyway, even though I could have sailed through each patch of lamplight in less than a second or two, without significant risk to my health.

Xeroderma pigmentosum — XP for those who aren’t able to tie their tongues in knots — is an inherited genetic disorder that I share with an exclusive club of only one thousand other Americans. One of us per 250,000 citizens. XP renders me highly vulnerable to skin and eye cancers caused by exposure to any ultraviolet radiation. Sunshine. Incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The shining, idiot face of a television screen.

If I dared to spend just half an hour in summer sun, I would burn severely, though a single searing wouldn’t kill me. The true horror of XP, however, is that even minor exposure to ultraviolet radiation shortens my life, because the effect is cumulative. Years of imperceptible injuries accrete until they manifest as visible lesions, malignancies. Six hundred minutes of exposure, spread one by one over an entire year, will have the same ultimate effect as ten continuous hours on a beach in brightest July. The luminosity of a streetlamp is less dangerous to me than the full ferocity of the sun, but it’s not entirely safe.

Nothing is.

You, with your properly functioning genes, are able routinely to repair the injury to your skin and eyes that you unknowingly suffer every day. Your body, unlike mine, continuously produces enzymes that strip out the damaged segments of nucleotide strands in your cells, replacing them with undamaged DNA.

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don’t hate you. I don’t resent you for the freedom that you take for granted — although I do envy you.

I don’t hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper…well, then I could almost hate you if I didn’t know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing.

Rather than rage against XP, I regard it as a blessing. My passage through life is unique.

For one thing, I have a singular familiarity with the night. I know the world between dusk and dawn as no one else can know it, for I am a brother to the owl and the bat and the badger. I am at home in the darkness. This can be a greater advantage than you might think.

Of course, no number of advantages can compensate for the fact that death before the age of consent is not uncommon for those with XP. Survival far into adulthood isn’t a reasonable expectation — at least not without progressive neurological disorders, such as tremors of the head and hands, hearing loss, slurred speech, even mental impairment.

Thus far I have tweaked Death’s cold nose without retribution. I’ve also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians have long predicted.

I am twenty-eight years old.

To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliché but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged enterprise.

But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than not, I’ll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the mail.

Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.

Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle of Jimmy Wing’s survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the bay.

In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was entirely exposed: a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs were twisted by nightmares.

In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to the other.