I found my grandmother's Browning handgun on the dining room table when I went downstairs that night. She had long since gone to bed, as had her husband and my parents, so now the house was dark and quiet save the blue bars of moonlight spilling over furniture and the creak of wood settling. After checking to see that the gun was loaded, I went outside to Calhoun's pick-up truck; his keys hadn't been hard to snag, just a few sticky fingers on my end and a few loose ones on his. He and my mother were too fast asleep, having drunken their fair share of wine, to hear the truck start with its usual sputter.
I stuck the Browning on the dashboard, then peered out into the blue-black countryside for the way we'd come. Once I'd found it, I flicked on the headlights, switched the rig into gear, and followed the gravel road out as best I could. Upon reaching the main road, I drove down it as far as Marylou had described. Not a single car save my own lit up the darkness. This was typical on country roads, but all too disquieting given the ample population of Morningbird.
When the odometer clocked in a mile, I slowed down to read the landscape. It wasn't long before I caught the porch-light of a farm. Not wanting to awaken the owner of this farm or his family, I pulled off the road into a forested patch, then cut the engine. It ticked idly while I sat there, re-checking the handgun once more and wondering, again, whether this was the best course of action. But by now, you now how quickly my self-doubt rivets back to certainty, even if that certainty's unwarranted. That's what happened here. I stuffed the gun in my pocket, then went outside into the cool and formless night.
The Spinster house looked like it had been built by half-blind cripples. I could tell this from the one porch-light illuminating its front: the paint was a sickly death-white, the boards were split open in several places, and the whole house leaned out like an old man in a grocery store, to say nothing of the tilting weather vane or unrolled hose.
I made my way to the cornfield at the back of this house. A light breeze touched the stalks, and they leaned into each other in a low, rolling hush. Even with the moon as bright as it was that night, I couldn't see far across the field, and crop circles or not, the field itself only looked like a solitary and gently stirring mass. This made me consider that perhaps the whole effort really was a waste of time, since any visitors who came down would be nigh indiscernible--assuming, of course, they came down at all.
I made my way to the cornfield at the back of this house. A light breeze touched the stalks, and they leaned into each other in a low, rolling hush. Even with the moon as bright as it was that night, I couldn't see far across the field, and crop circles or not, the field itself only looked like a solitary and gently stirring mass. This made me consider that perhaps the whole effort really was a waste of time, since any visitors who came down would be nigh indiscernible--assuming, of course, they came down at all.
All the same, I was determined to wait out the night, knowing it would be my only chance since our family would leave in the morning. Figuring it was already one or two A.M., not long till the sighting-times my grandma mentioned, I decided to sit in a tire-swing nearby and overlook the field. As often happens to children who try to stay up late, despite the errant will of some of them, and despite their resistance to a thousand greater forces, the touch of sleep eventually took me.