The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online

as though injected into an artery. But after a few minutes a dog started barking, and Crunchy came back, just a little faster than she’d gone.
    Stitch slipped the car into neutral and let it roll back onto the road before she started the motor. She drove about a quarter mile before she put the lights back on. I didn’t have any idea where we were anymore, but Stitch seemed to know her way around. There was a sort of static charge inside the car; it tingled like the moment before sex. I had an idea what we were looking for now, like maybe a house without a dog.
    We stopped again and Crunchy got out, and this time she didn’t come back for a bit. No one said anything, but after a while Stitch reached softly for the door handle and at that moment I felt some kind of pulse inside my head, like a thought from Crunchy had landed there, except I had the strange idea that maybe the thought had really come from D——, way back at the ranch. Like the phantom voice I sometimes barely used to hear was now ventriloquized by him.
    Laurel sat up silently, alert and keen. We were all barefoot. The asphalt of the driveway was still just faintly warm from the day.
    Fear, excitement, fear, just different words for the same thing. D—— had been rapping a lot lately about what fear could do for you. It was like we were all flying on big hits of fear as we filed in silence around the curve of the drive to the point where Crunchy waited, half hidden by a trellis, watching the stucco wall of the house all spangled ivory color in the starlight.
    A cat came out from under the sash of a cracked window. It dropped on all fours to the patio tiles and looked at us indifferently, then padded off around the corner of the house.
    Crunchy darted to the house wall, and crouched below the window. My mind caught on the quick electric stops and starts of her movement, light and crisp as a skink. She slithered up the wall and poured herself through the crack in the window the cat had come out of. There wasn’t any word for it but slither.
    In the next instant Creamy had done the same and I felt a pull to go after them, like they were two magnets pulling me along. I could definitely fit into the crack they’d taken, though Laurel, plumper and wider in the hips, might have had more trouble. A thought stopped me. Stitch’s empty hand was on my arm.
    A glass door slid open, farther down the wall, though I couldn’t see anyone behind it, just a slash of darkness, colorless. Beside the opening the heavy blackness of the glass seemed to spin whorls of oil-spill radiance in it, though maybe that was because I was stoned. We went crouching toward the gap, we slithered through. The interior was all Danish modern, glass and flat planes and staggered levels. We slithered about, keeping to the shadows and low to the floor. Crunchy and Creamy were the best at it. You couldn’t seem to see them at all till one of their heads came up and froze, like the probing head of a snake.
    Fear is a man’s best friend. I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat. My heart was beating like a kettle drum, like the heart of all the People beat in us and in me. Why couldn’t they hear that? I was wondering, except I didn’t know who they might be, until we’d all slithered into the bedroom one by one, following Crunchy and Creamy. Two Beautiful People were sleeping there, in the starlight pouring through another half-open glass door. A sheer white curtain quivered in the breeze. They slept naked in a tangle of expensive-looking sheets. The man’s mouth open, not quite snoring. The woman’s breasts looked marble in the light. She reminded me of Eerie, though she didn’t look like Eerie; it was just the same incredibly high standard of being beautiful.
    With the tiniest snick, Crunchy’s Buck knife opened, pricked upright in her boney hand. Fear. She’d wake them. Surely they would wake. The shadow of the knife lay on the woman’s navel. Crunchy’s dry tongue