(eng) Lev Grossman by Warp

Author:Warp [Warp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

FRIDAY, 5:30 A.M.

“This reminds me of some movie,” said Hollis.

His voice sounded weirdly loud in the silence.

“It’s like a lot of movies.”

“We should have talked about it more.”

Peters shrugged.

“What’s there to talk about, really?”

A thin layer of cloud was rolling in with the dawn. The half-light reduced the landscape around them to a composition of different shades of gray, the only color being the hint of gray-blue just above the horizon. Hollis yawned again and shivered. With the heater off, the air in the car was starting to get cold. He put his hands together and breathed into them. A pair of improbably long black skid marks stretched along the asphalt in front of them and curved away around the corner out of sight.

“All right,” said Peters. “You sit in the driver’s seat.”

He took the keys out of the ignition and dropped them jingling into Hollis’s lap.

“You can drive, if we have to leave in a hurry. Which I very much doubt will happen.”

“Look, why don’t I just come with you?”

Hollis opened the car door a crack, and the dome light came on.

“Whatever,” said Peters.

The door opened into a dark fir tree that was sopping wet with dew, and Hollis could feel the cold branches pressing against his back through the thickness of his overcoat. Peters climbed out on the other side.

“There’s really no point,” he said. “It’ll take like two minutes. There’s just more of a chance you’ll knock something over and set off a motion detector or something.”

“Do they have those?” said Hollis.

“They’re never on.”

He slammed the door and started walking away down the street, backwards.

“They’re probably just a pain in the ass. Look, do you want to come?”

“Sort of.”

“It’s just that there isn’t really any point.”

The street was so wide it could have been divided into four lanes, but the town had left it blank. The lawns on either side flowed into one another with no dividing lines, the property lines marked only by a hedge, or a row of trees, or a difference in the color or height of the grass.

“Well, lock the car, anyway.”

Hollis jogged around to the driver’s-side door and locked it, and together they walked up to the corner. As they turned onto the next street they could see only two houses. The first was a grand Victorian farmhouse with a two-tiered veranda, paired with an even larger barn. It had a folly gazebo on the land behind it, and farther back they could see a swimming pool with a high green chain-link fence around it.

They walked in the middle of the road. A crow cawed.

“Which one is it?” Hollis said.

Peters pointed to the house on the left, farther along. It was newer and even bigger than the farmhouse: colonial, three stories tall, painted white, with a row of classical columns along the front. It was set back a few hundred feet from the road, and from where Hollis was standing he could see that it had two wings that extended back as far again as it was wide.

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