"Who's there!" Mr. McBride's voice was filled with phlegm and confusion, but it seemed to be just up the stairs.

"Who's down there, goddamn it?" Heavy footsteps moved overhead, going from the dining room to the short hall by the kitchen where the stairway was.

Dale looked across the long room, through the open doorway, at the glint of light from the small window on the far wall. He'd never make it to the window, much less through it. Mr. McBride had just awakened from his drunken sleep-he probably didn't even remember Dale's visit-and Dale would just be a dark shape scrambling in the basement. His back itched at the thought of buckshot blowing his spine out through the front of his body.

Footsteps in the hall. "I'm comin' down, goddamn you. I've got you."

Dale heard the shotgun being pumped again. The shell Mr. McBride had chambered earlier skittered across the floor above. Then footsteps on the top stairs.

Under the bed, thought Dale. No, it'd be the first place the man looked. He had about ten seconds before McBrkle reached the bottom of the stairs, turned into the room itself.

Dale remembered the way they screwed around sometimes with the empty console-radio shell in Mike's chickenhouse. The bootsteps were halfway down the stairs as he bounced over the bed, pulled the Atwater Kent away from the wall, crouched behind it, and pulled it back just as the heavy footsteps reached the bottom.

"I see you, goddamn it!" It was a fierce cry. "Think you're gonna get me the way you did my brother and my boy?"

Footsteps staggered into the center of the room. There was a clothesline hanging there and Dale could hear something striking it-the barrel of the shotgun perhaps-then the sound of the line being ripped down.

"Come out of there, goddamn you!"

The radio had its working parts there, but there was just room for Dale to curl up at the bottom of the console. He covered his face with his forearms, trying not to whimper but imagining the shotgun aimed at him from eight feet away. Dale had fired his father's pump-action 12-gauge and his own .410 over-and-under. He knew the flimsy wood wouldn't shelter him for a second. He would have cried out then . . .' called a surrender as if they were two kids playing hide-and-seek . . . but his voice would not work. He panted to keep from screaming.

"I see you!" cried the dead boy's father. But his footsteps receded into the other part of the basement. "Goddammit, I know somebody's down here. Come out now!"

He didn't see me. Something sharp, part of a pipe maybe, was digging into Dale's back. Electronic stuff scratched his bowed neck. There was some sort of shelf down here that cut into his shoulder. Dale was not about to move to get more comfortable.

The footsteps came back into the bedroom part of the basement. They moved slowly-stalking-to the far wall, across to the closet, back to the base of the stairs, then . . . stealthily ... up to the desk not three feet from where Dale crouched behind the Atwater Kent.

There was a sudden noise as Mr. McBride crouched, flung back the bedspread, and scraped the shotgun barrel under the bed. He stood up then, almost leaning on the radio, Dale knew; he could smell the man. Can he smell me?

For a long moment there was silence so deep that Dale was sure that the half-crazy father could hear his heart beating behind the radio shell. Then Dale heard something that almost made him cry aloud.

"Duanie?" came Mr. McBride's voice, no longer fierce, no longer threatening, only cracked and broken. "Duanie, is that you, son?"

Dale held his breath.

After an eternity, the heavy footsteps, heavier now, moved back to the staircase, paused, and went up the stairs. There was the sound of breaking glass in the dining room as bottles were thrown around. Footsteps. The kitchen door banged open and shut. A moment later there came the sound of a truck engine starting up from behind the house . . . We couldn't see it back there . . . and tires crunching gravel, turning down the drive.

Dale waited another four or five minutes, his back and neck aching wildly now, but making sure that the silence was real. Then he shoved the radio away from the wall and crawled out, massaging his arm where it had been pinched against the shelf or something.

He paused by the bed, still on all fours, then pulled the radio cabinet farther out. There was just enough light to see by.

Duane's spiral notebooks were stacked on the shelf, at least several dozen of them. Dale could see how easy it had been to lean over from the bed or desk and set them in place.

Dale tugged off his t-shirt, ripped and sweaty as it was, wrapped the notebooks in them, and went into the other room to climb out the window. He could've gone up the stairs and out through the kitchen with less scraping to his hide, but he wasn't sure that Mr. McBride had driven off.

Dale was heading for the place he'd left the others when half a dozen arms lurched out from the first row of corn and pulled him in. He tumbled into the cornstalks. A dirty hand covered his mouth.

"God," whispered Mike. "We'd just decided he'd killed you. Let him go, Harlen."

Jim Harlen removed his hand.

Dale spat and mopped blood from a cut lip. "Why'd you do that, shithead?"

Harlen glared at him but said nothing.

"You got 'em!" cried Lawrence, holding up the bundle of notebooks.

The boys started poring through them.

"Shit!" said Harlen.

"Hey," said Kevin. He looked quizzically at Dale. "Do you get this?"

Dale shook his head. The notebooks were filled with scrig-gles and scrawls, strange loops and dashes and curlicues. It was either some sort of impossible code or Martian.

"We're screwed," said Harlen. "Let's go home."

"Wait," said Mike. He was frowning at one of the small notebooks. Suddenly he grinned. "I know this."

"You can read it?" Lawrence's voice was awestruck.

"Uh-uh," said Mike, "I can't read it, but I know it."

Dale leaned closer. "You can figure out this code?"

"It isn't code," said Mike, grin still in place. "My stupid sister Peg took a course in this stuff. It's shorthand . . . you know, the sort of fast writing secretaries do?"

The boys whooped and hollered until Kevin suggested they get quiet. They set the notebooks in Lawrence's backpack as carefully as if they'd been new-gathered eggs, then ran in a commando crouch back to where they'd left their bikes.

Dale felt the sun burning his neck and arms, despite his tan, long before they got to Jubilee College Road. The distant water tower shimmered in the rising heat waves as if the entire town were an illusion, a mirage on the verge of disappearing.

They were halfway to town when the cloud of dust rose behind them, a truck closing rapidly.

Mike gestured and he and Harlen and Kev took one side, Dale and Lawrence the other. They crossed the ditch, dropped their bikes, and made ready to climb the fence into the fields.

The truck slowed, the dark cab shimmering badly in the heat from the road and its own engine. The driver stared curiously as he crept by. The truck stopped and backed up.

"What're you doing?" called Kevin's father from the high cab of the milk truck. The long trailer tank gleamed of polished steel, almost too bright to look at in the midday sun. "What are you guys up to?"

Kevin grinned, made a meaningless gesture toward town. "Just riding."

His father squinted at the boys perched on the fence wire like birds ready to take wing. "Get home quick," he said. "I need help cleaning out the tank, and your mother wanted you to weed the garden this afternoon."

"Yessir," said Kevin and gave a salute. His dad frowned and the long truck geared up, disappearing into its own dust.

They stood a minute on the road, holding their bikes awhile before remounting. Dale wondered if the others had wobbly legs.