Full Dark, No Stars

“We were going to barricade ourselves in the science wing. We’d chain the doors shut, kil some people—mostly teachers, but also some of the guys we didn’t like—and then stampede the rest of the

kids outside through the fire door at the far end of the hal . Wel … most of the kids. We were going to keep the girls who snooted us as hostages. We planned— BD planned—to do al of this before the cops could get there, right? He drew maps, and he kept a list of the steps we’d have to take in his geometry notebook. I think there were maybe twenty steps in al , starting with ‘Pul fire alarms to create confusion.’” He chuckled. “And after we had the place locked down…”

He gave her a slightly shamefaced smile, but she thought what he was mostly ashamed of was how stupid the plan had been in the first place.

“Wel , you can probably guess. Couple of teenage boys, hormones so high we got horny when the wind blew. We were going to tel those girls that if they’d, you know, fuck us real good, we’d let them

go. If they didn’t, we’d have to kil them. And they’d fuck, al right.”

He nodded slowly.

“They’d fuck to live. BD was right about that.”

He was lost in his story. His eyes were hazy with (grotesque but true) nostalgia. For what? The crazy dreams of youth? She was afraid that might actual y be it.

“We didn’t plan to kil ourselves like those heavy-metal dumbbel s in Colorado, either. No way. There was a basement under the science wing, and Brian said there was a tunnel down there. He said it

went from the supply room to the old fire station on the other side of Route 119. Brian said that when the high school was just a K-through-eight grammar school back in the fifties, there was a park over there, and the little kids used to play in it at recess. The tunnel was so they could get to the park without having to cross the road.”

Bob laughed, making her jump.

“I took his word for al that, but it turned out he was ful of shit. I went down there the next fal to look for myself. The supply room was there, ful of paper and stinking of that mimeograph juice they used to use, but if there was a tunnel, I never found it, and even back then I was very thorough. I don’t know if he was lying to both of us or just to himself, I only know there was no tunnel. We would have been trapped upstairs, and who knows, we might have kil ed ourselves after al . You never know what a fourteen-year-old’s going to do, do you? They rol around like unexploded bombs.”

You’re not unexploded anymore, she thought. Are you, Bob?

“We probably would have chickened out, anyway. But maybe not. Maybe we would have tried to go through with it. BD got me al excited, talking about how we were going to feel them up first, then

make them take off each other’s clothes…” He looked at her earnestly. “Yes, I know how it sounds, just boys’ jack-off fantasies, but those girls real y were snoots. You tried to talk to them, they’d laugh and walk away. Then stand in the corner of the caff, the bunch of them, looking us over and laughing some more. So you real y couldn’t blame us, could you?”

He looked at his fingers, drumming restlessly on his suit-pants where they stretched tight over his thighs, then back up at Darcy.

“The thing you have to understand—that you real y have to see—is how persuasive Brian was. He was lots worse than me. He real y was crazy. Plus it was a time when the whole country was rioting, don’t forget, and that was part of it, too.”

I doubt it, she thought.

The amazing thing was how he made it sound almost normal, as if every adolescent boy’s sexual fantasies involved rape and murder. Probably he believed that, just as he had believed in Brian

Delahanty’s mythical escape tunnel. Or had he? How could she know? She was, after al , listening to the recol ections of a lunatic. It was just hard to believe that—stil !—because the madman was Bob.

Her Bob.

“Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “it never happened. That was the summer Brian ran into the road and got kil ed. There was a reception at his house after the funeral, and his mother said I could go up to

his room and take something, if I wanted. As a souvenir, you know. And I did want to! You bet I did! I took his geometry notebook, so nobody would go leafing through it and come across his plans for The Great Castle Rock Shoot-Out and Fuck Party. That’s what he cal ed it, you know.”

Bob laughed rueful y.

“If I was a religious fel a, I’d say God saved me from myself. And who knows if there isn’t Something… some Fate… that has its own plan for us.”

“And this Fate’s plan for you was for you to torture and kil women?” Darcy asked. She couldn’t help herself.

He looked at her reproachful y. “They were snoots,” he said, and raised a teacherly finger. “Also, it wasn’t me. It was Beadie who did that stuff—and I say did for a reason, Darce. I say did instead of does because al of that’s behind me now.”