Read Billy for Free Online Page A

back.
    Again he sang.
    And the bird sang back.
    He replied.
    The bird fell silent.
    Billy opened his eyes. Goose bumps covered his skin and his blood rushed with wonder. His first impulse was to wake Mom and Dad up and tell them, but that might be a mistake. He would almost certainly get a strict order to slide back between the sheets.
    There was no time for sleep now. He had to go down to the basement and play this recording into the computer, examine the exact nature of the notes that had gained response.
    Had he actually duplicated the bird's voice, or simply deceived the creature?
    As he slipped along the hall he heard the bird again. At the top of the stairs, he paused. Aside from the bird, the only sound was the ticking of the big clock in the living room.
    Quietly he went downstairs.

  
    5.
    
     
     

    Barton lifted the storm door, went halfway down the steps and pulled it closed behind him. Admirably soundless.
    He stood in careful silence, not even breathing. When he took a breath it was to test the odors in the room for what information they might impart. The air smelled of cool concrete, with a faint undertone of mildew. Ordinary basement smells, nothing to worry about.
    He was surprised at the intensity of his feelings. This was a luscious moment. It was also extraordinarily scary. Sometimes he thought he could best understand himself as a dark element of God sent to haunt the world.
    He padded into the center of the basement. He was hunting for the stairs with his penlight when he heard a distinct footfall above his head. It was faint, but very definitely there. He listened, but the sound did not repeat itself.
    An instant later he was appalled to find himself standing in a flood of light.
     
    Billy turned on the basement light from the pantry. He went down, his eyes on the Amiga. The quiet made the basement mildly creepy. It was a familiar sensation, and he would have ignored it except that it caused him to remember those legs he had seen earlier outside the window.
    Dad had been wearing khakis. None of Billy's friends wore gray slacks in the middle of summer vacation. Had it been an extremely subtle trick played by his sister, to get back at him for eating her sandwich? No, she wasn't that subtle, at least not  usually. There was, of course, the time last February she had taped the matchbox full of fruit flies from the bio lab inside his guitar. He'd noticed the change in tone, torn out the box and inadvertently released the tiny flies. He hadn't even noticed the bugs . . . until ten days later when their reproduction rate had caused his room to suddenly become a jungle hell. Given that he was owned by parents who did not believe in insecticide, getting rid of the flies had been a pretty major pain in the ass.
    Well, there certainly wasn't anybody out there at this hour, unless it was some kid. By ten-thirty you could hear the lights changing from one end of Lincoln to the other. Kids at slumber parties would sneak out in the nude at midnight and nobody would see them. Once, according to Jerry, he and Dick-the-Prick Davis and Fo-Fo Garr had met up with Cynthia Stales, Rebecca McClure and Sue Wolf on Endower Lane, and both groups were nude.
    Lying bastard.
    He sat down at his computer and flipped the switch. The opening screen came up, followed by his hard disk icons. He went into his birdsong files. He plugged his earphones into the small amplifier he used with the computer, and unhooked the speakers. Instantly he was lost in the wistful, perfect music of the bird.  

    Barton breathed carefully, with infinite softness. He lay under the boy's workbench, his elbows grinding into the hard concrete floor. The child's bare feet were not eighteen inches away from his face. It would have been so easy to just reach out and grab one of those sleek ankles. But the boy would scream the house down.
    Initially Barton had been so stunned by the light that his mind had gone blank. Fortunately instinct had