Free Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card

screaming and was tearing grass out of the neighbor's lawn.
    "No, Robbie. You were too scared that a motorcycle might come by. You had this thing about motorcycles.
    You used to dream that they were coming to get you and eat you. So you never went into the street because that's where the Motorman was."
    In the meantime, DeAnne was down on her hands and knees, trying to see anything at all in the storm drain.
    It was too dark.
    "I can't see anything," DeAnne said. "I'm sorry, Robbie. I wish you hadn't brought the ball on this walk."
    "You mean you aren't going to reach in and hunt for it?"
    "Robbie, no, I'm not," said DeAnne. "I can't see in there. Anything could be down in that hole."
    Suddenly he looked terrified. "Like what?"
    "I meant that I just don't know what's in there and I'm not going to go reaching around for it. For all we know it's eight feet down, or the ball might have already rolled halfway to Hickey's Chapel Road." She gathered up Elizabeth and took Robbie's hand and they walked on toward the street where the Cowpers lived.
    "Stevie said this was a bad place."
    "Stevie said what?"
    "A bad place," said Robbie, enunciating clearly, as if his mother were deaf.
    What could Stevie have meant by saying such a thing to Robbie? Did he mean the house? The neighborhood? School? Steuben?
    Robbie looked over his shoulder again toward the drain. "Do you think that someday they'll find my ball down there?"
    "Since the ball isn't biodegradable, it will probably still be there for the Second Coming."
    Robbie was still trying to extract meaning from that last statement when they got to the second corner.
    DeAnne stopped there and counted down five houses on the right. The Cowpers' was a one-story brick house with a station wagon in the driveway, with two kids climbing all over the top of it. DeAnne would never let her kids climb on the car. They could fall off. They could damage something. The hood of the wagon was up, and as she watched, she saw Jenny emerge from the hood, where apparently she had been fixing something in the car. Jenny stretched her back, looked around, and saw DeAnne. She waved the grey doughnut-shaped thing she was holding. DeAnne waved back.
    Jenny yelled something, but DeAnne couldn't hear her, and it embarrassed her to have somebody yelling to her on the street. So she waved aga in, as if to say yes to whatever Jenny said-which was probably something like, See you at six, or, Nice weather we're having-and then turned and herded her little flock back toward home.
    "Kitty!" shouted Elizabeth right in DeAnne's ear. "Kitty! Kitty!"
    A jet-black kitten scurried across the road just as a car came speeding by. The cat dodged out of the way; the car made no effort to slow down or stop. DeAnne's fears about the dangers of the street in front of their house were all confirmed.
    "Wow," said Robbie. "We almost had a kitty pizza."
    Another Step- ism.
    The cat headed straight for the storm drain and disappeared.
    "Mom!" screamed Robbie. "The yucky hole got him!"
    Robbie ran a few dozen steps toward the hole. Then he realized that he was not in the protection of his mother and started to run back. But he could not bring himself to leave the kitty, and so he stood there beating his fists against his hips, demanding that his mother hurry, hurry!
    "Honey, the kitty probably goes down into that hole all the time and plays there."
    But Robbie wasn't hearing anything she had to say. "The snake got him, Mom! You got to save him, you got to!"
    Of course Robbie would imagine a snake down there. Step had taken them to a science museum and they had watched a snake eating a mouse. Robbie couldn't let go of the memory. Snakes had replaced the Motorman.
    She knelt by him and put her arm around him to calm him. "Robbie, I promise you, there is no snake down there. Whenever it rains here, the water all rushes down into that drain, and if there were any snakes living down there they would have been washed out to the ocean years