The mailman was gone.
44
The morning dawned clear and cool and sunny, the first August merging of the disparate weather trends that would eventually crystallize into fall. Doug awoke early, showered, shaved, and went out to check the mailbox. He was gratified to find that it was empty.
By the time he'd walked back to the house, Tritia was up and making coffee. There was annoyance on her face as he said "Good morning" to her, and when he repeated the greeting, she refused to respond, unintelligibly grunting some sort of reply.
Doug turned on the television, and the familiar set of the NBC _News at Sunrise_ blinked into existence. There had been no problems with the electricity since the mailman left, and gas, water, and phone services had continued uninterrupted. Life, it seemed, was settling back into normalcy.
Billy was still asleep, but Tritia ordered Doug to wake him and make him come down for breakfast. She was making Spanishomelettes for each of them, using vegetables she had grown in the garden, and she refused to suspend her culinary efforts until Billy graciously decided that it was time for him to awaken. "Get him up now," she said.
They ate breakfast together, and Tritia announced that this morning they were going to go to the store and do some serious shopping. The cupboards were nearly bare, as were the refrigerator shelves, and she had a stack of coupons whose expiration dates had nearly arrived. She began making out a list of items they needed while Doug washed the dishes and Billy dried.
"Okay," she said finally. "Ready."
"I don't want to go," Billy said.
"You have to go."
"Why?"
Tritia looked at her son. He was mature for his age, intelligent, strong, but he had been forced to absorb far too much the past two months, had been expected to deal with things that most adults never had to deal with. She felt a strange sadness settle over her as she looked at his weary face. She hadalwaw wanted Billy to remain a child as long as possible and not grow up too fast.
Childhood was a magical special time and could only be experienced once. Yet at the same time, she did not believe in sheltering children from reality. Like it or not, they eventually had to live in the real world, and they could adjust to that world better if they were adequately prepared to deal with it.
This summer, however, had not been the real world. The horrific events of the past two months would not prepare Billy for things to come. Nothing like this would ever come again.
She stared at him, saw the pleading in his tired eyes. Her tone of voice softened. "Okay," she said. "You don't have to go."
Billy smiled, relieved, although there seemed to be something else in his eyes, something lurking just beyond the obvious emotions mirrored in his face.
This had probably scarred him more than she would ever know. "Thanks," he said.
"But," she warned, "you have to stay in the house. Keep all the doors locked and don't let anyone inside until we get back. Understand?"
He nodded.
"Okay." She looked over at Doug and saw his slight smile of approval. It never hurt to be careful.
Billy got dressed and stood on the porch as his parents got in the car and backed up the drive. "Lock the door," his dad called.
"I will."
He went back into the house and locked the door. His eyes were drawn to the piece ofplyboard still covering the broken window. He hoped the guy was going to come and fix the window soon. The board helped television viewing in the afternoon, virtually eliminating the glare from the sun, but it also made the house seem far too dark.
He didn't like darkness.
He wasn't sure what he was going to do today after his parents got back.
He thought of calling the twins, but then decided he really didn't want to see them. What he really wanted was to do something with Lane, but he was afraid to call his old friend. With the mailman gone and everything over, Lane might be back to normal. But then again, he might not, and Billy wasn't brave enough to find out.
Right now, he had to go to the bathroom, and he walked through the kitchen to the hall. He went into the bathroom, already unbuckling his belt. He froze.
An envelope was perched on the edge of the sink.
Another lay atop the closed lid of the toilet.
He wanted to scream, but he knew no one would hear him. His cries would only alert whoever the mailman? -- was out there.
Or in here.
He backed into his parents' bedroom. He saw one sealed letter on the dresser, another on the bed.
The house seemed suddenly much scarier, much more frightening. He walked slowly, silently toward the front room. The board over the window cut off an awful lot of light, he noticed, throwing nearly half of the room into darkness, creating pools and boxes of shadow within which a figure could hide. He saw a trail of envelopes leading upstairs to the loft, to his bedroom.
He carefully picked up the phone next to the TV. It was dead.
He heard a rustling noise upstairs.
He had to get out of here. But where could he go? There were not many homes nearby. He certainly couldn't stay at the Nelsons'. He couldn't go to Lane's house.
The Fort.
Yes, The Fort. He could go to The Fort and wait there until his parents came home. He and Lane had purposely built the structure sturdily in order to withstand outside attack, and he would be able to hide safely in there.
As quietly as possible, he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The boards creaked beneath his feet and he stood still, unmoving, listening for any reaction upstairs, ready to run at the slightest sound, but he heard nothing.
He had never realized before how noisy the porch really was, and it seemed like a squeaking creaking eternity before he reached the steps and hurried down.
Beneath his feet, the gravel crunched with thunderous volume, but he ignored it and ran as fast as he could down the path toward The Fort. He leapt over familiar rocks and logs, skirted known sticker bushes. With one leap and expert footwork, he was on top of the camouflaged structure's roof, and then he was dropping inside, closing and locking the trapdoor.
He lay panting on the floor for a moment, trying to catch his breath, listening for any sounds that he had been followed, but the only noise he heard was the obnoxious cawing of a blue jay in a far-off tree.
He was safe.
He stood up, praying that his parents would come home soon. Praying that when they did come, he would be able to hear the noise of their car. He listened again for foreign sounds, alien noises, but the woods were clean.
He looked around the Big Room. The Fort seemed different with Lane gone, abandoned. The other time he had come in here without Lane, it had felt strange, but it had still been _their_ Fort. Now he wasn't sure whose it was. The structure was in the green belt by his house, but the materials had come from Lane's father and they had done all the work in tandem. He walked slowly through the room like a stranger, touching objects which had once been familiar to him but from which he now felt impossibly distanced. Everything seemed weird, as though it had once been his but was his no longer.
He supposed this was what a house must feel like to people who got a divorce.
Every so often, he stopped in his tracks, unmoving, listening to hear if there were any sounds outside, but always there was nothing.
He walked into the HQ, looking down at the pile of magazines on the floor.
Even the _Playboys_ no longer seemed as though they belonged to him, although they did not seem as though they belonged to Lane either. They were caught in some timeless netherworld in-between, ownerless. He picked one up. The page opened to the spread of "Women in Uniform," and he saw the naked body of the female postal carrier.
"BillyAlbin ."
He stopped moving, holding his breath, trying not to make any sound. His heart was trip-hammering wildly.
"BillyAlbin ."
The mailman was just outside The Fort. He had tracked him somehow and had found him. Billy was too ter
rified to move. He tried to exhale silently, unable to hold his breath any longer, but the noise sounded like a hurricane in the silence. Outside, the feet stopped moving.
"Billy."
He did not move.
"Billy."
Now the voice came from the other side, although he had heard no scuffling feet, no rustling leaves, no sound of any kind.
"Billy."
The voice came again, a low insistent whispering. He wanted to scream, to cry out, but he dared not. The mailman obviously knew he was here, but Billy did not want to confirm his presence. Maybe if he pretended that he wasn't here, if he just laid low and waited it out, the mailman would go away.
"Billy."
No. He wasn't going to go away.
Billy stood stock-still, only his mind moving, his brain trying desperately to think of something he could do. There was only one entrance to The Fort, no way to get out without the mailman seeing him. He and Lane had often talked about making an escape hatch, an emergency exit, building an escape tunnel under the dirt, but they never had. Now, he considered his choices. Or his choice. He had only one, really. If he could make it up to the roof, through the trapdoor, without the mailman seeing or hearing him "Billy."
-- he could jump and haul ass to safety.
Tiptoeing carefully, lightly, quietly, he stepped into the Big Room.
"Billy."
The voice was closer this time. Extremely close. Billy looked up.
The mailman stared down at him through the open trapdoor, grinning. There was corruption in that smile, a twisted cruelty in the hard blue eyes.
"Want to have a good time?" the mailman asked.
Billy backed into the HQ. He glanced down at the stack of _Playboys_ as he retreated, but they were not _Playboys_. They were _Playgirls_.
"Billy," the mailman said again.
Panicked now, he began kicking at the back wall of the HQ, trying to knock off one of the boards so he could crawl through and out. He kicked with all of his might, putting the strength of desperation behind each kick, but they had built The Fort well -- too well -- and the boards would not budge.
He heard the mailman drop through the trapdoor to the floor of the Big Room behind him.
"I brought you a present, Billy," the mailman said.
"Help!" Billy screamed at the top of his lungs. He kicked furiously at the wall. "Mom! Dad!"
"Want to have a good time?" the mailman asked.
Billy turned around and saw over his shoulder the mailman smiling, holding forth his present.
When Billy was not home when they came back from the store and had still not returned an hour later, Tritia began to panic. She had Doug call Mike at the police station, who promised to comb the town, starting with the post office, and she began calling all of Billy's friends. She dialed theChapmans ' number and Lane answered the phone.
"Hello," Tritia said. "This is Mrs.Albin . Is Billy there?"
"No." Lane's voice sounded at once cold and suggestive, not unlike that of the mailman, and the fear grew within her.
"Have you seen him at all today?"
"No." Lane paused. "But I've seen you."
There was a click as the connection was broken.
Tritia hung up the phone. What the hell did that mean? She didn't know, and she didn't think she wanted to know. She started to dial the twins, when she heard Doug come in through the back door.
"He's not under the house or by the clothesline," he said. He was trying to keep the worry out of his voice, but he was not having much luck. "His bike's still here. I'm going to start looking in the back, around the green belt."
"Okay," she agreed. "I'll keep calling."
Doug walked out the front door.
God, she prayed silently, let him be all right.
Doug walked across the length of their property, venturing into the green belts on both sides, searching under every bush, looking up in every tree, calling his son's name. "Billy! Billy!"
Lizards scuttled out of his way, frightened by the noise. Quail flew frantically up from their herbaceous hideaways.
"Billy!"
He continued pressing toward the hill in back of their house until he saw the camouflaged exterior of The Fort before him. "Billy!" he called.
There was no answer.
He stared at The Fort, and there seemed to him something ominous about it.
He had never before thought of the wooden structure as anything more threatening than a children's playhouse, but as he looked at it now, it seemed low and dark and claustrophobically closed, and he realized that the feeling he got from it was uncomfortably close to the feeling he had had when he'd looked at the house in which Ellen Ronda had been killed.
He took a tentative step forward. "Billy?"
He pressed his ear to the wooden wall. From inside The Fort, he could hear a low steady whimpering. "Billy!" he cried. He looked frantically for a weak point in the structure where he could pull off a board and get inside, but the makeshift building was remarkably well-constructed, with no protruding panels or obvious weak points. Desperate, he grabbed hold of the roof and tried to pull himself up. He was horrendously out of shape, and even a partial pull-up caused him to grunt and strain with the effort. A sliver slid into his palm, and his right ring finger pressed painfully against the bent head of a crooked nail, but with the aid of his feet kicking against the side wall for support, he managed to reach the roof and roll on top of the clubhouse.
Nearby, he saw the square open trapdoor that led down into The Fort. He peered in but could see nothing; he quickly dropped through the opening, landing hard. The whimpering was louder now, and he whirled around. "Billy?"
His son was crouched in a dark corner of the room in a modified fetal position, knees drawn up to his chin. His shut was ripped and tattered, covered with grease and dirt. His face was blank.
He was wearing no pants.
"Billy," Doug cried, rushing forward. He was screaming and crying all at once and he fell to the ground, hugging his son. Within him the rage and fear and pain had coalesced into one horrible all-consuming feeling of hatred, and tears flowed down his cheeks as he gripped Billy tightly.
"No," Billy was saying softly. "No. No. No. No . . ."
Doug moved back, still holding his son. Through his tears, he looked into Billy's face. The boy's eyes were wide and scared and staring.
"No. No. No. No . . ."
On the dirt next to him was a soiled wedding dress.
And a pair of bloody underwear.
And several postmarked packages and envelopes.
A bolt of emotional pain wrenched Doug's midsection, so sharp it was physical.
Billy's faraway gaze focused on him for a moment. "I won't wear it!" he screamed. "You can't make me." His entire body shook.
Doug pulled him close. He realized for the first time that his son's skin was warm, feverish. He pulled himself together, forcing himself to act logically, though the bitter hatred that flowed through his veins rebelled against all rationality. He stood and was about to pick up Billy when he noticed the corner of an envelope protruding from underneath one of the folds of the soiled dress. He reached down and grabbed it, saw his name on the front, tore it open. There were only five words and an exclamation point on the otherwise blank page:
I like your wife too!
"No!" Doug screamed, a loud primal denial directed to no one who could hear. "No," Billy repeated. "No. No. No. No. No . . ."
Doug picked up his son without thinking and with adrenaline strength pushed him up through the opening. He guided the limp body away from the hole, then lifted himself up. His muscles were aching, his tortured insides on fire, but he forced himself to move across the roof. He had to get home to Tritia .
Tritia hung up the phone, palms sweaty, the fear feverishly alive within her. She walked into the kitchen to get herself a glass of water, and it was then that she saw the envelope on the counter next to the microwave. Frowning, she picked it up. She could not r
emember seeing it on the counter before. She certainly hadn't checked the mailbox today, and she was pretty sure neither Doug nor Billy had either. She looked at the front of the envelope. It was addressed to her, but there was no return address.
It's starting again, she thought. And Billy's missing. But she refused to let herself think that way. She tore open the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper inside.
I'm in the bedroom.
The words jumped out at her, hitting her with the impact of a blunt cudgel. He was back. It hadn't ended.
He was back and he was after her.
Fumblingly, she opened the top drawer nearest the sink. She drew out a carving knife and gripped it tightly, holding it before her as she walked slowly down the hall toward the bedroom, prepared to lash out at any sign of movement.
She knew that it was stupid and foolhardy to try to take on the mailman by herself -- she should run to a neighbor's house, call the police -- but he had pushed too far. She had reached her limit and she was damned if she was going to let him terrorize her anymore.
If he was here, she would kill him.
She would slit his fucking throat.
He was not in the bedroom. Knife in front of her, poised to stab, she checked the closet, looked under the bed. Nothing. She poked her head in the bathroom. All clear. She knew he was neither in the kitchen nor in the living room because she had been in both.
That left the loft.
She thought she heard a footstep creak upstairs.
Run, a part of her brain -- the intelligent part of her brain -- was telling her. Get out of here now. But she gripped the knife tighter and headed through the kitchen, through the living room, to the stairway. It was day, but the loft's small lone window was not able to illuminate the entire room, and the top of the stairs was in shadow.
She crept upward as quietly as possible, fingers white on the knife handle. She was almost to the top of the stairs and was bending over to keep her head below the level of the floor so he would not be able to see her approach, when her foot landed on a loose board. The stair groaned. She froze, not daring to breathe, but there was no sound from the loft. Holding the knife before her, she dashed up the last five steps, ready to lash out.
The Mailman Page 27