Free Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz

respect for my mother, just as if she were your mother.”
    Roy put his empty bottle in the rack beside the soda machine. He cleared his throat and spat on the pavement. “Hell, I don’t even respect my own mother. The bitch. She’s a real bitch. And why should I treat your old lady like some sort of goddess when you don’t have any respect for her?”
    “Who says I don’t?”
    “I say you don’t.”
    “You think you can read minds or something?”
    “Didn’t you tell me that your old lady always spent more time with her girlfriends than she did with you? Was she ever around when you needed her?”
    “Everyone has friends,” Colin said weakly.
    “Did you have friends before you met me?”
    Colin shrugged. “I’ve always had my hobbies.”
    “And didn’t you tell me that when she was married to your old man, she left him once a month—”
    “Not that often.”
    “—just walked out for a few days at a time, even for a week or more?”
    “That was because he beat her,” Colin said.
    “Did she take you with her when she left?”
    Colin finished his grape soda.
    “Did she take you with her?” Roy asked again.
    “Not usually.”
    “She left you there with him.”
    “He’s my father, after all.”
    “He sounds dangerous to me,” Roy said.
    “He never touched me. Just her.”
    “But he might have hurt you.”
    “But he didn’t.”
    “She couldn’t know for sure what he’d do when she left you with him.”
    “It worked out okay. That’s all that matters.”
    “And now all her time’s taken up with this art gallery,” Roy said. “She works every day and most evenings.”
    “She’s building a future for herself and for me.”
    Roy made a sour face. “Is that her excuse? Is that what she tells you?”
    “It’s true, I guess.”
    “How touching. Building a future. Poor, hard-working Weezy Jacobs. It breaks my heart, Colin. It really does. Shit. More nights than not, she’s out with someone like Thomberg—”
    “That’s business.”
    “—and she still doesn’t have time for you.”
    “So what?”
    “So you should stop worrying about getting home,” Roy said. “Nobody gives a damn if you’re home or not. Nobody cares. So let’s have some fun.”
    Colin put his empty bottle in the rack. “What’ll we do?”
    “Let’s see ... I know. The Kingman place. You’ll like the Kingman place. You been there yet?”
    “What’s the Kingman place?” Colin asked.
    “It’s one of the oldest houses in town.”
    “I’m not much interested in landmarks.”
    “It’s that big house at the end of Hawk Drive.”
    “The spooky old place on top of the hill?”
    “Yeah. Nobody’s lived there for twenty years.”
    “What’s so interesting about an abandoned house?”
    Roy leaned close and cackled like a fiend, twisted his face grotesquely, rolled his eyes, and whispered dramatically: “It’s haunted!”
    “What’s the joke?”
    “No joke. They say it’s haunted.”
    “Who says?”
    “Everyone.” Roy rolled his eyes again and tried to imitate Boris Karloff. “People have seen exceedingly strange things at the Kingman place.”
    “Such as?”
    “Not now,” Roy said, dropping the Karloff voice. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get there.”
    As Roy lifted his bicycle away from the wall, Colin said, “Wait a minute. I think you’re serious. You mean this house is really haunted?”
    “I guess it depends on whether or not you believe in that sort of thing.”
    “People have seen ghosts there?”
    “People say they’ve seen and heard all kinds of crazy things at that house ever since the Kingman family died up there.”
    “Died?”
    “They were killed.”
    “The whole family?”
    “All seven of them.”
    “When was this?”
    “Twenty years ago.”
    “Who did it?”
    “The father.”
    “Mr. Kingman?”
    “He went crazy one night and chopped up everyone while they were sleeping.”
    Colin swallowed hard. “Chopped them up?”
    “With an ax.”
    Axes again!