by Robert Maxxe
"Yes, Anne," Carrie answered, knowing she was near enough the street lamp to be recognizable. "I was . . . just on my way." An awkward attempt to sound at ease, defuse the moment.
"Alan, were you bothering Mrs. Foster?" The woman kept advancing toward her son. "What was all the shouting?"
The boy remained silent. But Carrie could see his body contracting, coiling up with tension as his mother came closer.
She stopped about ten feet away, so that the boy stood equidistant between the two women.
"Let's have it now, Alan," she demanded. "What were you doing?"
He said nothing. His body hunched down, wound tighter.
The woman's glance shifted. "Carrie . . .?"
Carrie took a second to consider. Should she risk getting into the whole mystery of the game? The other parents ought to be warned. But against what? She knew too well how it would sound without proof, a tangible idea of the danger. Something more than secret words, and the emotional problem of one boy.
"It . . . it was about Nick," she started improvising, anything to make a highly charged exchange between herself and the teenaged son of a friend seem reasonable, natural. "Alan wanted me to—"
To intervene in a misunderstanding, she would have said. But she didn't get the chance. Afraid she was leading up to the truth, Alan Pomfrey exploded.
"You can't understand," he screamed. "None of you. It's not bad. We have to do it. They're counting on us!" As he bawled out the last words, he threw his head back and stared at the dark sky.
Anne went forward. "What's wrong, Allie?" she asked gently.
"Tell us, Alan," Carrie urged.
His head snapped down. He looked at his mother, shied from the hand she extended, then turned to Carrie with a pleading look. For a moment she thought he might be about to yield.
Then he broke from them, dashing away from the house, across a sidewalk and into the street.
A car was coming along, some commuter racing to get home. Both women stood paralyzed as the headlights picked up the boy and the car braked hard. Alan Pomfrey glanced off the front fender as his mother screamed and began running. Dazed, the boy stayed by the car for a second. Then, seeing his mother coming for him, he went around the front of the car and, in a slightly lame run, continued away up the street.
Anne Pomfrey threw an anguished glance back at Carrie, a plea for illumination.
But Carrie was frozen in silence by the impossibility of saying anything that could help.
Anne Pomfrey turned away and ran off after her son, crying his name.
Carrie stood listening to the voice fade away down the street.
22
The house was empty when she returned from collecting Emily at her after-school gymnastics, and by dinnertime Nick still hadn't shown up. Carrie debated going to the arcade, but Emily had to be fed and Nick would have to come home sooner or later.
He was still out after she had put Emily to bed.
She went to the kitchen, made coffee, and didn't drink a drop. It wasn't just waiting for Nick that drove her up the wall. What did she do about Lon? She wanted his help, his support. But if she told him about the Pomfrey incident, she could predict his reaction: with so many kids interested in the game, he's say, there were bound to be some disturbed types who went overboard.
By nine o'clock Nick still wasn't home and she started making calls. To Jack Osgood, whom she persuaded to run across the street and check that Nick wasn't in the arcade. To parents of other children she'd identified as spacies—none of whom had seen Nick. Carrie also learned that among these other parents, there was little concern about their children's involvement with the arcade. "If it wasn't this," said one, summing up the general attitude, "it'd be something worse. At least this keeps 'em out of trouble."
When she rang out of people to call, she thought of getting a baby-sitter so she could go out and hunt for Nick. Then the phone rang.
Anne Pomfrey. In a voice pitched at the edge of hysteria she reported that there had been no sign of Alan. She had called his friends, been to the usual hangouts—the movie theater, Osgood's, the arcade. By any chance, was he at Carrie's . . .?
Carrie said she was sorry, she couldn't help, and mentioned that Nick was also out late. Had Anne seen him at the arcade? No? Then the boys might be together. . . .
Inevitably, Anne asked about the incident that had triggered Alan's disappearance. Carrie revived the sketchy account she'd begun earlier. A falling-out with Nick that Alan wanted help in patching up.
"Falling-out?" Anne said. "Over what?"
Carrie hesitated a moment. "Spacescape," she said finally. As if giving a password that might provide access to someone else's secret fears.
"That arcade game?" Anne said. "God, they do get worked up about such damn nonsense at this age. Though in Alan's case I shouldn't be surprised. He's been so touchy lately, especially in situations where he feels let down by anyone he trusted. All backlash from Dave walking out on us, of course. But don't get me started on that bastard." She sighed pathetically. "Well, I guess it's time I called Harry Waggoner to report Alan missing."
Harry Waggoner was the town's chief of police. The notion that the boy might have been driven to do something extreme so depressed Carrie that she couldn't muster a good-bye before Anne hung up.
And what about Nick? Where was he?
The kitchen clock showed only nine forty-two. Not much more than half an hour past his curfew. Perhaps being with Dana had provoked Nick to test the limits of his independence.
By ten-fifteen she was beside herself. She went to her list of babysitters tacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen. But glancing at it, she realized they were all young. Like the spacies. And she remembered the pictures missing from her wallet—the warning.
At ten-thirty, Carrie had just decided to follow Anne's lead and report Nick missing when she heard the front door open and close. She rushed to the front hall, ready to pounce as he crept up the stairs. He was waiting for her, though, head down like a penitent at the gates of a retreat.
"I was about to call the police," she declared hotly. "Where in hell have you been?"
His head remained bowed.
"I demand to know! For God's sakes, Nick, what's happening to you?"
He just stood there shivering as her fury rose.
"Goddamn it, I won't have this disobedience. Tell me now, all of it!" She stepped forward to seize him, shake it out of him. But then she saw the water puddling around his feet and realized his sneakers were wet, his jeans soaking from the knees down. "Good Lord, what've you been doing?"
He looked up, eyes brimming. "I'm sorry," he said, and his teeth began to chatter.
Conflicting impulses warred within her. Get him warm and dry, or get the answers? "Right now, Nick, I don't give a damn for apologies. I just want to hear—"
"I had to," he broke in. "She got real upset, see, and ran down to the beach. In the dark, see? I had to go looking. I couldn't leave her down there alone with the tide coming in—"
"Dana, you mean?"
He gave a shivering nod.
"What was she running from?" Not the first runaway tonight, Carrie thought. All the kids were skittish. Was it a full moon?
"From me. She thought that the way it was between us . . . that it was, I don't know, getting too heavy."
So she had been with him this afternoon. And however far it had gone, in the aftermath came guilt. "You found her, I hope," Carrie said.
"Yeah. She took a cab home." Nick's teeth were clacking like castanets.
The Captain Bligh mood had gone out of her. "We've got a whole lot of talking to do, and I'll expect a lot of answers. Among other things," she added, softening him up for when the time came, "you're going to tell me what it means to be an ult"
Nick's lips trembled, a wrinkle appeared on the smooth young brow. He looked like a defendant facing a jury to appeal silently for mercy.
"But right now," Carrie said, "you'd better dry off and get und
er some warm blankets. On the double."
Halfway up, he turned back. "Will you tuck me in?"
It touched her, naturally. "I'll be up in a minute."
She went around turning out lights. She paused at the kitchen phone and thought of calling Lon to inquire about Dana. But it wouldn't stop there, and then they would argue.
When she entered Nick's room she saw that he had escaped into sleep. The reckoning would come tomorrow.
For the first time in years she took two sleeping pills before first getting into bed and trying to manage without them.
Next morning the only sign of Nick was an unfinished bowl of cornflakes on the kitchen table. Never mind, she told herself, he couldn't avoid her forever.
With Emily, Carrie started out on the drive to school. Coming to the STOP sign at the end of Shoreview Drive, she noticed a policeman taking some orange rubber cones from the trunk of a police cruiser and setting them in a line across Beach Road. The day was overcast and a strong wind was blowing; evidently there had been storm warnings. The road down to the beach often became flooded and hazardous in bad weather, so the police generally closed it. Then, as she took the left toward town, Carrie noticed a second maroon-and-white Millport police car standing farther along toward the beach. It seemed wasteful to send two cars on the road detail, but she thought no more of it. She dropped Emily at school and went on to the store.
Under the dark winter sky Elm Street looked bleak and deserted. The gloomy morning instilled a sense of foreboding, heightened the malaise that had gripped her since the encounter with Anne's son. Carrie wondered about Alan, where and when he had finally turned up last night, and gave herself a reminder to call Anne sometime that morning.
Patrick was fully occupied when she arrived, grinding up the store's special blend of coffee beans and sealing the grounds into bags with the "Treats" label. He gave her the most muted greeting, no smile, just a brief dour glance. The weather had brought him down, too, Carrie thought; the first real rotten winter's day.
She went back to the office, hung up her coat, and sat down. Patrick had already left the mail stacked on her desk. She opened a few envelopes. A bill from a supplier. A mail order for the store's tomato chutney from a summer resident. An invitation to speak at a seminar on women in business to be held in March. She shoved the rest away unopened. She felt totally detached from all the everyday concerns that had occupied her happily for years.
Nothing mattered except to solve the mystery of the arcade.
Voices drifted back from the front of the store, Patrick waiting on the first customer of the day.
". . . awful," a woman was saying, "just terrible."
"Terrible," Patrick agreed. "Makes you feel like crying."
Was it the weather they were clucking about?
"Times like this," the customer said, "you want to go home and lock the door and say, 'What's it all for?' "
Pretty extreme reaction to the weather, Carrie thought. Curious to see who's plaint it was, and thinking it might help her own mood to play jolly storekeeper, Carrie rose to go out front.
"Always worst when it's someone young, too, isn't it?" Patrick was saying as Carrie left the office.
She felt it more than heard it. Like a blade thrust into her, ripped across her middle. For some reason her head was suddenly full of the image of the policeman blocking off the road to the beach with orange rubber cones.
"A lovely boy, used to come into the library a lot."
The customer was Myra Lampkin. Patrick was just handing over her daily purchase of a bottle of organic apple juice.
"Who are you talking about?" Carrie cried as she propelled herself toward them. "What's happened?"
"Oh Jesus," Patrick said. "The way you looked when you came in —I thought you already knew—"
"Knew what?" Carrie shouted.
Myra answered. "The Pomfrey boy, Alan . . . they found him on the beach early this morning."
"Found him?" Carrie echoed, praying she had misread the ambiguity.
"Drowned," Patrick said quietly. "I was sure you knew. Local radio news had it by eight this morning . . ."
Carrie felt dizzy, weak in the knees. She reeled around and took a few shaky steps, catching herself against a shelf of Tiptree jams. Her hand brushed one of the jars and it toppled onto the floor and shattered.
Myra rushed to support her. Patrick grabbed a bottle of Perrier out of a cold chest and brought it over.
Carrie sipped at it. "How?" she murmured.
Myra recounted the brief radio report. The police had located the body around four in the morning. Preliminary investigation suggested the boy had probably meant to spend the night on the beach, but had fallen asleep at a point where the tide rushed in with a heavy undertow. An accident. Either the water had failed to wake him, or he wasn't able to save himself once his clothes were wet.
Or had it been deliberate? Carrie thought of yesterday evening, how despondent the boy had seemed over being torped. It could hardly have helped that she'd threatened to expose him as a kind of informer.
Myra and Patrick were still hovering. Carrie felt as if she would suffocate. "Okay, I'm okay. Just let me sit down for a while." Patrick offered to accompany her to the office, but she waved him off.
Slumped in the chair at her desk, she could no longer avoid the half-formed thought that had been chased from her mind by the first wave of shock. It came back now in sharper focus. The memory that had really knocked the stuffing out of her: Nick, standing in half-wet jeans, water puddling at his feet.
Nick had been on the beach last night. Had been at the place where another boy—another spacie—had died.
Abruptly, Carrie sprang up and grabbed her coat. She would go straight to school and get the truth from Nick. Take him home and spank it out of him if she had to.
But then she stopped herself. Was there nothing else to do but give Nick a third degree, force him to defend himself against her charges of—?
God! What was she thinking? That Nick could be somehow . . . responsible? That to protect the secret of the game one spacie had been "silenced" gangland-style by the others—including Nick?
It was monstrous, unpardonable of her even to conceive such a notion. Didn't she owe her son a loyal belief in his basic decency?
Yet she couldn't sit by and do nothing. She had to penetrate the secret of the game. As long as she was lost in the mystery, never seeing any light, she was like a wanderer in the bewitched evil forest of some fairy tale. The shadows could only get longer and darker as she went deeper, the nightmare demons more fantastic.
But perhaps before confronting Nick, she could make one more try to find Peale. Find "Pace's."
Find the reason.
23
Thirty feet high, made of weatherproof polished brass, the giant trademark stood like a towering modern sculpture on the sloping lawn in front of a low modern factory building.
***
Carrie spotted the shining icon of industry from the expressway as she was approaching the outskirts of Meadowdale. It saved her the trouble of asking directions. She took the next exit and wended her way back on side roads until she came to a long span of chain-link fence with a gate entry marked by a small sign: INTELLITRONICS, INC. Turning in at the gate, she stopped the car at a barrier watched over by a uniformed guard in a booth.
"Carrie Foster . . . to see Mr. Evans," she replied when the guard asked her name and the reason for her visit.
The guard picked up a phone and relayed the information. There was a wait. Evidently some checking had to be done since Carrie's name wasn't already recorded on an appointments list. Perhaps she should have called ahead, Carrie thought; Lon might not even be here—or might be too busy to see her. Yet if she had contacted him first, she was sure he would only have tried to placate her, put her off.
And she needed him now.
Though that was only half the reason she'd driven straight over. She also needed to assure herself about this place, to
witness his work. Indeed to be certain there really was an Intellitronics Incorporated, and that it wasn't somehow linked to the arcade.
The wait stretched to two minutes. The guard made no effort to lighten the delay with polite conversation. Carrie observed that his uniform included a brigade belt with an attached holster containing a revolver. Intimidating. Though at the same time she was encouraged to see some human security, rather than just computer-controlled hardware.
At last the guard put down the phone. Abruptly, he grabbed up a Polaroid camera and snapped Carrie's picture. Then he wrote her name on a pass, stapled the instant picture to it, and slipped the document into a plastic envelope suspended from a long loop of pink string. He gave her the pass, told her to wear it around her neck until she handed it back on the way out, and then threw a switch inside the booth that lifted the barrier.
Proceeding up the long curving driveway to the main building, Carrie wondered about the tight security. Perhaps it was normal these days. She had seen reports in the news about industrial espionage in the computer business, Japanese companies paying millions to buy trade secrets from American executives, or valuable computer parts being hijacked and stolen. Hadn't Lon said, too, that Intellitronics did some defense contracting?
The building on a knoll at the end of the drive was a squat rectangle, faced in smooth white stone with windows of bronzed glass set in unbroken horizontal strips at each of the two stories. She left the car in a parking area near the entrance, and entered the reception lobby, where a prim young woman stood murmuring to a receptionist seated at a high counter. The young woman broke off talking as soon as Carrie entered. Introducing herself as "Mr. Evans' secretary," she led Carrie through a stainless-steel door that opened when a button was pressed by the girl behind the counter. They went down a long corridor with doors to the left opening into carpeted offices that faced out to the front lawn. To the right a continuous glass partition gave a view onto the sprawling factory floor. Carrie paused to ogle the maze of conveyors and workbenches where half-assembled equipment flowed between automated machinery and clusters of live workers. Then the secretary tapped Carrie impatiently and they moved on.