Free Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Dale knew that Duane's Old Man often didn't return from his Saturday 'buying trips' until late Sunday night.
    "Hey, we're getting together at the Cave at nine-thirty. Mike's got something to tell us."
    "Who's 'we'?" Duane glanced down at his notebook. He'd been working on his character sketch since after breakfast. This particular piece had been in progress since April and the notebook was filled with scratch outs, substitutions, entire passages and pages X'ed out, notations scrawled in tiny margins. He knew that this exercise was going to be as far from perfect as all the rest.
    "You know," said Dale, "Mike and Kevin and Harlen and maybe Daysinger. I don't know. I just got the note in the paper a while ago."
    "How about Lawrence?" Duane looked out at the ocean of corn rising-almost knee-high now-on either side of the long gravel road to their house. His mother, when she was alive, had forbidden the planting of anything taller than beans in the front twenty acres. "It makes me feel too isolated when the corn gets tall," she'd told Uncle Art. "Too claustrophobic." So the Old Man had humored her and planted beans. But Duane couldn't remember a time when summer did not mean the slow secession of their farm home from the world around them. "Waist-high by the Fourth of July," went the old saying about corn, but usually the corn in this part of Illinois was shoulder-high to Duane by the Fourth of July. And beyond that point of the summer, it wasn't so much that the corn grew as the farmhouse shrank. Duane couldn't even see the county road at the end of the lane unless he went to the second floor to peer over the corn. And neither he nor his Old Man went up on the second floor anymore. "What about Lawrence?" said Dale. "Is he coming?" "Sure he's coming. You know he always hangs around with us."
    Duane smiled. "Just didn't want you to forget your little brother," he said.
    There was an exasperated noise on the line. "Look, Duane, are you coming or not?"
    Duane thought of the work he had to do around the farm that day. He'd be lucky to be finished by dark even if he started at once. "I'm pretty busy, Dale. You say you don't know what Mike has in mind?"
    "Well, I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with Old Central. Tubby Cooke missing. You know."
    Duane paused. "I'll be there. Nine-thirty, huh? If I start walking now, I should get there about then."
    "Jeez," said Dale, his voice tinny over the line,"haven't you got a bike yet?"
    "If God had meant for me to have a bike," said Duane, "I would have been born with Schwinn as my last name. See you there." He hung up before Dale could reply.
    Duane went downstairs to find his notebook with his word-sketch of Old Central in it, pulled on a cap with the word cat on it, and went out to call his dog. Witt came at once. The name was pronounced "Vit' and was short for Wittgenstein, a philosopher that the Old Man and Uncle Art argued over incessantly. The old collie was almost blind now and moved with the slow-motion painfulness of arthritis, but he sensed that Duane was going somewhere and approached with the hopeful tail-wagging that showed he was ready to join the expedition.
    "Uh-uh," said Duane, worried that the walk would be too much for his old friend in this heat. "You stay here today, Witt. Guard the spread. I'll be back by lunchtime."
    The collie's cataract-clouded eyes managed to look both hurt and imploring. Duane patted him, led him back to the barn, and made sure his water bowl was full. "Keep the burglars and corn monsters at bay, Witt."
    The collie surrendered with a canine sigh and settled onto the blanket on straw that served as his bed.
    The day was hot as Duane ambled down the lane toward County Six. He rolled up the sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt and thought about Old Central and about Henry James. Duane had just read The Turn of the Screw and now he thought about the estate called Bly, about James's subtle suggestion that a place could resonate with such evil