Seize the Night Read Free Page A

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