Free Summer of Night by Dan Simmons Page A

that it provided 'ghosts' to haunt the children Miles and Flora.
    The Old Man was an alcoholic and a failure, but he was also a thoughtful atheist and dedicated rationalist, and he had raised his son that way. As early as Duane could remember, he had viewed the universe as a complex mechanism following sensible laws: laws that were only partially and poorly understood by the feeble intellects of humankind, but laws nonetheless.
    He flipped his notebook open and found the passage about Old Central."… a sense of… foreboding? Evil? Too melodramatic. A sense of awareness…" Duane sighed, ripped the page out, and stuck it in the pocket of his corduroy pants.
    He reached County Six and turned south. Sunlight blazed off the white gravel of the road and burned against Duane's exposed forearms. Behind him, in the fields on either side of the lane to his home, insects rustled and stirred in the growing corn.
    Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Jim Harlen rode to the Cave together. "Why do we have to meet so damn far away?" grumbled Harlen. His bike was smaller than the others', a seventeen-incher, and he had to pedal twice as hard to keep up.
    They rode past O'Rourke's house under its large shade trees, north toward the water tower, then east on the wide gravel road, Kevin and Dale and Lawrence in the hard-packed left rut, Harlen on the right. There was no traffic, no wind, and no sound except for their breathing and the crunch of gravel under their tires. It was almost a mile to County Six. In the fields beyond and to the northeast of the junction, hills and heavy timber began. If they had stayed on the road from the water tower, they would have run into the hilly country between Elm Haven and the almost abandoned town called Jubilee College. County Six continued south for a mile and a half, connecting to Highway 151 A, the Hard Road that ran through Elm Haven, but that shortcut was little more than dirt ruts through fields and was impassable during most of the winter and spring.
    They turned north, passed the Black Tree Tavern, and roared down the first steep hill, almost standing on their brake pedals. The trees arched over the narrow road here, dappling it in deep shadow. The first time Dale had heard "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' when Mrs. Grossaint, their fourth-grade teacher, had read it to the class, he had pictured this place with a covered bridge at the bottom.
    There was no covered bridge, only rotting wooden railings on either side of the gravel road. The kids slid to a stop at the bottom and walked their bikes down a narrow trail through the weeds on the west side of the road. The weeds were waist-high or taller here, and covered with dust from cars that had passed. Barbed-wire fences separated the dark woods from the thick foliage along the roadside. They stowed their bikes under shrubs, making sure they were invisible from the road, and then followed the trail farther down, into the coolness of the creekside.
    At the bottom, the trail was almost invisible as it led under the tall weeds and short trees, winding along the narrow stream. Dale led the others into the Cave.
    It wasn't a cave. Not exactly. For some reason the county had laid a precast-cement culvert under the road here, rather than use the thirty-inch corrugated steel pipes found everywhere else. Perhaps they had expected spring floods; perhaps they had a cement culvert they hadn't known what to do with. For whatever reason, the thing was huge-six feet across-and there was a fourteen-inch groove in the base of it that let the stream trickle through so that the kids could recline on the curved base of the culvert and stretch their legs out without getting wet. It was cool in the Cave on the hottest of days, the entrances were almost covered over with vines and weeds, and the sound of cars passing on the roadbed ten feet above them just made the hiding place seem that much more concealed.
    Beyond the far end of the Cave, a small drainage pond had formed. It was only