I don’t hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper…well, then I could almost hate you if I didn’t know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing.
Rather than rage against XP, I regard it as a blessing. My passage through life is unique.
For one thing, I have a singular familiarity with the night. I know the world between dusk and dawn as no one else can know it, for I am a brother to the owl and the bat and the badger. I am at home in the darkness. This can be a greater advantage than you might think.
Of course, no number of advantages can compensate for the fact that death before the age of consent is not uncommon for those with XP. Survival far into adulthood isn’t a reasonable expectation—at least not without progressive neurological disorders, such as tremors of the head and hands, hearing loss, slurred speech, even mental impairment.
Thus far I have tweaked Death’s cold nose without retribution. I’ve also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians have long predicted.
I am twenty-eight years old.
To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliché but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged enterprise.
But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than not, I’ll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the mail.
Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.
Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle of Jimmy Wing’s survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the bay.
In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was entirely exposed: a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs were twisted by nightmares.
In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to the other.
Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the levee.
Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated with each other for the entire length of the watercourse. The first declared that public access to the river was restricted and that anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned that high water at a storm’s peak could be so powerful and fast-moving that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.
In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the treacherous currents and the well-known tragic history of the Santa Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak—or even just a pair of water wings—is swept to his death every few years. In a single winter, not long ago, three drowned.
Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with tension, and a thin whine escaped him.
This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a dust ghost from the silt.
I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute might be Jimmy Wing’s last—if, indeed, he was still alive—I nudged Orson: “What is it?”
He didn’t acknowledge my question. Instead, he pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry farther up the arid river.
As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson’s mood. Although I possessed only an ordinary nose and mere human senses—but, to be fair to myself, a superior wardrobe and bank account—I could almost detect those same emanations.
Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his friend, his brother.
When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the bat, and to the badger, I was speaking figuratively. When I say I’m the brother of this dog, however, I mean to be taken more literally.
Studying the riverbed as it climbed and dwindled into the hills, I asked, “Something spooking you?”
Orson glanced up. In his ebony eyes floated twin reflections of the moon, which at first I mistook for me, but my face is neither that round nor that mysterious.
Nor that pale. I am not an albino. My skin is pigmented, and my complexion somewhat dusky even though the sun has rarely touched me.
Orson snorted, and I didn’t need to understand the language of dogs to interpret his precise meaning. The pooch was telling me that he was insulted by my suggestion that he could be so easily spooked.
Indeed, Orson is even more courageous than most of his kind. During the more than two and a half years that I’ve known him, from puppyhood to the present, I have seen him frightened of only one thing: monkeys.
“Monkeys?” I asked.
He chuffed, which I interpreted as no.
Not monkeys this time.
Not yet.
Orson trotted to a wide concrete access ramp that descended along the levee wall to the Santa Rosita. In June and July, dump trucks and excavators would use this route when maintenance crews removed a year’s worth of accumulated sediment and debris from below, restoring a flood-preventing depth to the dry watercourse before the next rainy season.
I followed the dog down to the riverbed. On the darkly mottled concrete slope, his black form was no more substantial than a shadow. On the faintly luminous silt, however, he appeared to be stone solid even as he drifted eastward like a homeward-bound spirit crossing a waterless Styx.
Because the most recent rainfall had occurred three weeks in the past, the floor of the channel wasn’t damp. It was still well compacted, however, and I was able to ride the bicycle without struggle.
At least as far as the pearly moonlight revealed, the bike tires made few discernible marks in the hard-packed silt, but a heavier vehicle had passed this way earlier, leaving clear tracks. Judging by the width and depth of the tread impressions, the tires were those of a van, a light truck, or a sports utility vehicle.
Flanked by twenty-foot-high concrete ramparts, I had no view of any of the town immediately around us. I could see only the faint angular lines of the houses on higher hills, huddled under trees or partially revealed by streetlamps. As we ascended the watercourse, the townscape ahead also fell away from sight beyond the levees, as though the night were a powerful solvent in which all the structures and citizens of Moonlight Bay were dissolving.
At irregular intervals, drainage culverts yawned in the levee walls, some only two or three feet in diameter, a few so large that a truck could have been driven into them. The tire tracks led past all those tributaries and continued up the riverbed, as straight as typed sentences on a sheet of paper, except where they curved around a punctuation of driftwood.
Although Orson’s attention remained focused ahead, I regarded the culverts with suspicion. During a cloudburst, torrents gushed out of them, carried from the streets and from the natural drainage swales high in the grassy eastern hills above town. Now, in fair weather, these storm drains were the subterranean lanes of a secret world, in which one might encounter exceptionally strange travelers. I half expected someone to rush at me from one of them.
I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment. Occasionally it has gotten me into trouble, but more than once it has saved my life.
Besides, having roamed all the storm drains large enough to accommodate a man my size, I’ve encountered a few peculiar tableaux. Oddities and enigmas. Sights to wring fright from even the driest rag of imagination.
Because the sun rises inevitably every day, my night life must be conducted within the town limits, to ensure that I’m always close to the safely darkened rooms of my house when dawn draws near. Considering that our community has a population of twelve thousand and a student population, at Ashdon College, of an additional three thousand, it offers a reasonably large board for a game of life; it can’t fairly be called a jerkwater burg. Nevertheless, by the time I was sixteen, I knew every inch of Moonlight Bay better than I knew the territory inside my own head. Consequently, to fend off boredom, I am always seeking new perspectives on the slice of the world to which XP confines me; for a while I was intrigued by the view from below, touring the storm drains as if I were the Phantom prowling the realms beneath the Paris Opera House, though I lacked his cape, cloche hat, scars, and insanity.
Recently, I’ve preferred to keep to the surface. Like everyone born into this world, I’ll take up permanent residence underground soon enough.
Now, after we passed another culvert without being assaulted, Orson suddenly picked up his pace. The trail had gotten hot.
As the riverbed rose toward the east, it gradually grew narrower, until it was only forty feet wide where it passed under Highway 1. This tunnel was more than a hundred feet long, and although faint silvery moonlight glimmered at the farther end, the way ahead was dauntingly dark.
Apparently, Orson’s reliable nose didn’t detect any danger. He wasn’t growling.
On the other hand, he didn’t sprint confidently into the gloom, either. He stood at the entrance, his tail still, his ears pricked, alert.
For years I have traveled the night with only a modest amount of cash for the infrequent purchases I make, a small flashlight for those rare instances when darkness might be more of an enemy than a friend, and a compact cell phone clipped to my belt. Recently, I’d added one other item to my standard kit: a 9-millimeter Glock pistol.
Under my jacket, the Glock hung in a supple shoulder holster. I didn’t need to touch the gun to know that it was there; the weight of it was like a tumor growing on my ribs. Nevertheless, I slipped one hand under the coat and pressed my fingertips against the grip of the pistol as a superstitious person might touch a talisman.
In addition to the black leather jacket, I was dressed in black Rockports, black socks, black jeans, and a black long-sleeve cotton pullover. The black-on-black is not because I style myself after vampires, priests, ninja assassins, or Hollywood celebrities. In this town, at night, wisdom requires you to be well armed but also to blend with the shadows, calling as little attention to yourself as possible.
Leaving the Glock in the holster, still straddling my bike but with both feet on the ground, I unclipped the small flashlight from the handlebars. My bicycle doesn’t have a headlamp. I have lived so many years in the night and in rooms lit mostly by candles that my dark-adapted eyes don’t often need assistance.
The beam penetrated perhaps thirty feet into the concrete tunnel, which had straight walls but an arched ceiling. No threat lurked in the first section of that passage.
Orson ventured inside.
Before following the dog, I listened to the traffic roaring south and north on Highway 1, far above. To me, as always, this sound was simultaneously thrilling and melancholy.
I’ve never driven a car and probably never will. Even if I protected my hands with gloves and my face with a mask, the ceaseless oncoming headlights would pose a danger to my eyes. Besides, I couldn’t go any significant distance north or south along the coast and still return home before sunrise.
Relishing the drone of the traffic, I peered up the broad concrete buttress in which the river tunnel was set. At the top of this long incline, headlights flared off the steel guardrails that defined the shoulder of the highway, but I couldn’t see the passing vehicles.
What I did see—or thought I saw—from the corner of my eye, was someone crouched up there, to the south of me, a figure not quite as black as the night around him, fitfully backlit by the passing traffic. He was on the buttress cap just this side of the guardrails, barely visible yet with an aura as menacing as a gargoyle at the corner of a cathedral parapet.
When I turned my head for a better look, the lights from a dense cluster of speeding cars and trucks caused shadows to leap like an immense flock of ravens taking flight in a lightning storm. Among those swooping phantoms, an apparently more solid figure raced diagonally downward, moving away from me and from the buttress, south along the grassy embankment.
In but a flicker of time, he was beyond the reach of the strobing headlights, lost in the deeper darkness and also blocked from view by the levee walls that towered twenty feet above me. He might be circling back to the edge of the channel, intending to enter the riverbed behind me.
Or he might not be interested in me at all. Though it would be comforting to think that galaxies revolve around me, I am not the center of the universe.
In fact, this mysterious figure might not even exist. I’d gotten such a brief glimpse of it that I couldn’t be absolutely certain it was more than an illusion.
Again I reached under my coat and touched the Glock.
Orson had padded so far into the passageway beneath Highway 1 that he was almost beyond the reach of my flashlight.
After glancing at the channel behind me and seeing no stalker, I followed the dog. Instead of riding my bike, I walked beside it, guiding it with my left hand.
I didn’t like having my right hand—my gun hand—occupied with the flashlight. Besides, the light made me easy to follow and easy to target.
Although the riverbed was dry, the walls of the tunnel gave off a not unpleasant damp odor, and the cool air was scented with a trace of lime from the concrete.
From the roadbed high above, the rumble-hum of passing cars and trucks translated all the way down through layers of steel, concrete, and earth, echoing across the vault overhead. Repeatedly, in spite of the screening thrum of the traffic, I thought I heard someone stealthily approaching. Each time I swung toward the sound, the flashlight revealed only the smooth concrete walls and the deserted river behind me.