Free Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz Page A

Colin thought.
    For a moment his stomach seemed to be not a part of him but a separate entity alive within him, for it slipped and slid and twisted wetly back and forth, as if trying to crawl out of him.
    “I’ll tell you all about it when we get there,” Roy said. “Come on.”
    “Wait a minute,” Colin said nervously, stalling for time. “My glasses are dirty.”
    He took off his glasses, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and carefully polished the thick lenses. He could still see Roy fairly well, but everything farther than five feet was blurry.
    “Hurry up, Colin.”
    “Maybe we should wait for tomorrow.”
    “Is it going to take you that long to clean your goddamned glasses?”
    “I mean, in daylight we’ll be able to see more of the Kingman place.”
    “Seems to me it’s more fun to look at a haunted house at night.”
    “But you can’t see much at night.”
    Roy regarded him silently for a few seconds. Then: “Are you scared?”
    “Of what?”
    “Ghosts.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Sounds like it.”
    “Well ... it does seem kind of foolish to go poking around a place like that in the dark, in the dead of night, you know.”
    “No. I don’t know.”
    “I’m not talking about ghosts. I mean, one of us is bound to get hurt if we mess around in an old broken-down house in the middle of the night.”
    “You are scared.”
    “Like hell.”
    “Prove you’re not.”
    “Why should I prove anything?”
    “Want your blood brother to think you’re a coward ? ”
    Colin was silent. He fidgeted.
    “Come on!” Roy said.
    Roy mounted his bike and pedaled out of the deserted service station, heading north on Broadway. He did not glance back.
    Colin stood at the soda machine. Alone. He didn’t like being alone. Especially at night.
    Roy was a block away and still moving.
    “Damn!” Colin said. He shouted, “Wait for me,” and clambered onto his bicycle.

10

    They walked the bikes up the last steep block toward the dilapidated house that crouched above them. With each step, Colin’s trepidation grew.
    It sure looks haunted, he thought.
    The Kingman place was well within the Santa Leona city limits, yet it was separated from the rest of the town, as if everyone were afraid to build nearby. It stood on top of a hill and held dominion over five or six acres. At least half of that land had once been well-tended, formal gardens, but long ago it had gone badly to seed. The north leg of Hawk Drive dead-ended in a wide turnaround in front of the Kingman property; and the lampposts did not go all the way to the end of the street, so that the old mansion and its weed-choked grounds were shrouded in blackest shadows, highlighted only by the moon. On the lower two thirds of the hill, on both sides of the road, modem California-style ranch houses clung precariously to the slopes, waiting with amazing patience for a mudslide or the next shock wave from the San Andreas Fault. Only the Kingman place occupied the upper third of the hill, and it appeared to be waiting for something far more terrifying, something a great deal more malevolent than an earthquake.
    The house faced the center of town, which lay below it, and the sea, which was not visible at night, except in the negative as a vast expanse of lightlessness. The house was a huge, rambling wreck, ersatz Victorian, with too many fancy chimneys and too many gables, and with twice as much ginger-bread around the eaves and windows and railing as true Victorian demanded. Storms had ripped shingles from the roof. Some of the ornate trim was broken, and in a few spots it had fallen down altogether. Where shutters still survived, they often hung at a slant, by a single mounting. The white paint had been weathered away. The boards were silver-gray, bleached by the sun and the constant sea wind, waterstained. The front-porch steps sagged, and there were gaps in the railing. Half of the windows were haphazardly boarded shut, but the others were without