cars, in culverts, and beneath the leafy canopies of ancient oaks.
According to Tibetan folklore, a secret sanctuary in the sacred
Himalayas is the home of all wind, from which every breeze and raging
storm throughout the world is born. If the night, too, has a special
home, our town is no doubt the place.
On the eleventh of April, as the night passed through Moonlight Bay on
its way westward, it took with it a five-year-old boy named Jimmy Wing.
Near midnight, I was on my bicycle, cruising the residential streets in
the lower hills not far from Ashdon College, where my murdered parents
had once been professors. Earlier, I had been to the beach, but although
there was no wind, the surf was mushy, the sloppy waves didn’t make it
worthwhile to suit up and float a board. Orson, a black Labrador mix,
trotted at my side.
Fur face and I were not looking for adventure, merely getting some fresh
air and satisfying our mutual need to be on the move. A restlessness of
the soul plagues both of us more nights than not.
Anyway, only a fool or a madman goes looking for adventure in
picturesque Moonlight Bay, which is simultaneously one of the quietest
and most dangerous communities on the planet. Here, if you stand in one
place long enough, a lifetime’s worth of adventure will find you.
Lilly Wing lives on a street shaded and scented by stone pines.
In the absence of lampposts, the trunks and twisted branches were as
black as char, except where moonlight pierced the feathery boughs and
silvered the rough bark.
I became aware of her when the beam of a flashlight swept back and forth
between the pine trunks. A quick pendulum of light arced across the
pavement ahead of me, and tree shadows jumped. She called her son’s
name, trying to shout but defeated by breathlessness and by a quiver of
panic that transformed Jimmy into a six-syllable word.
Because no traffic was in sight ahead of or behind us, Orson and I were
traveling the center of the pavement, kings of the road. We swung to the
curb.
As Lilly hurried between two pines and into the street, I said, “What’s
wrong, Badger? ” For twelve years, since we were sixteen, “Badger” has
been my affectionate nickname for her. In those days, her name was Lilly
Travis, and we were in love and believed that a future together was our
destiny.
Among our long list of shared enthusiasms and passions was a special
fondness for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, in which the
wise and courageous Badger was the stalwart defender of all the good
animals in the Wild Wood. “Any friend of mine walks where he likes in
this country, ” Badger had promised Mole, “or I’ll know the reason why!
” Likewise, those who shunned me because of my rare disability, those
who called me vampire because of my inherited lack of tolerance for more
than the dimmest light, those teenage psychopaths who plotted to torture
me with fists and flashlights, those who spoke maliciously of me behind
my back, as if I’d chosen to be born with xeroderma pigmentosumall had
found themselves answering to Lilly, whose face flushed and whose heart
raced with righteous anger at any exhibition of intolerance. As a young
boy, out of urgent necessity, I learned to fight, and by the time I met
Lilly, I was confident of my ability to defend myself, nevertheless, she
had insisted on coming to my aid as fiercely as the noble Badger ever
fought with claw and cudgel for his friend Mole.
Although slender, she is mighty. Only five feet four, she appears to
tower over any adversary. She is as formidable, fearless, and fierce as
she is graceful and good-hearted.
This night, however, her usual grace had deserted her, and fright had
tortured her bones into unnatural angles. When I spoke, she twitched
around to face me, and in her jeans and untucked flannel shirt, she
seemed to be a bristling scarecrow now magically animated, confused and
terrified to find itself suddenly alive, jerking at its supporting
cross.
The beam of her flashlight bathe my face, but she considerately directed