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Back THE MAILMAN
Chapters (57)
  1. DEDICATION
  2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
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  57. 55

He wanted to scream, but he knew no one would hear him. His cries would only alert whoever—

the mailman?—was out there.

Or in here.

He backed into his parents’ bedroom. He saw one sealed letter on the dresser, another on the bed.

The house seemed suddenly much scarier, much more frightening. He walked slowly, silently toward the front room. The board over the window cut off an awful lot of light, he noticed, throwing nearly half of the room into darkness, creating pools and boxes of shadow within which a figure could hide. He saw a trail of envelopes leading upstairs to the loft, to his bedroom.

He carefully picked up the phone next to the TV. It was dead.

He heard a rustling noise upstairs.

He had to get out of here. But where could he go? There were not many homes nearby. He certainly couldn’t stay at the Nelsons’. He couldn’t go to Lane’s house.

The Fort.

Yes, The Fort. He could go to The Fort and wait there until his parents came home. He and Lane had purposely built the structure sturdily in order to withstand outside attack, and he would be able to hide safely in there.

As quietly as possible, he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The boards creaked beneath his feet and he stood still, unmoving, listening for any reaction upstairs, ready to run at the slightest sound, but he heard nothing.

He had never realized before how noisy the porch really was, and it seemed like a squeaking creaking eternity before he reached the steps and hurried down. Beneath his feet, the gravel crunched with thunderous volume, but he ignored it and ran as fast as he could down the path toward The Fort. He leapt over familiar rocks and logs, skirted known sticker bushes. With one leap and expert footwork, he was on top of the camouflaged structure’s roof, and then he was dropping inside, closing and locking the trapdoor.

He lay panting on the floor for a moment, trying to catch his breath, listening for any sounds that he had been followed, but the only noise he heard was the obnoxious cawing of a blue jay in a far-off tree.

He was safe.

He stood up, praying that his parents would come home soon. Praying that when they did come, he would be able to hear the noise of their car. He listened again for foreign sounds, alien noises, but the woods were clean.