In Laymon's Terms

He’d closed the car door, he was certain of it, and he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t closed it hard enough and the slope of the parking space had caused it to swing open, when he saw movement through the windshield. He stopped. In the faint illumination thrown by the car’s overhead light he saw a dark silhouetted figure rooting around in the back seat.

A hunchback.

His heart lurched in his ribcage. The hunchback pulled the passenger seat forward, carefully closed the car door and hobbled off, disappearing into the blackness of the alley.

Ron stood there dumbly, holding the ice chest, unsure of what to do.

The natural reaction would have been to yell at the man, to tell him to get the hell away from his car and house, to announce that he was calling the police.

But...

But Ron was not even sure that it was a man. Logic told him that the hunchback was merely a bum or a thief with a tragic deformity, but something about the figure’s movements and actions, and the way he’d slunk off into the shadows, made Ron uneasy, kindled a flicker of fear within him. The time of morning as well, the fact that the sun was not yet up, lent the entire situation a frightening, unreal air.

So he stood there for a few moments more, waiting to make sure that the figure was gone and not coming back, before stepping out into the alley and walking carefully over to the car.

He placed the ice chest on the ground and opened the passenger door, pulling the seat forward and looking into the back, where the hunchback had been rummaging.

He’d left Ron a present.

It was a dead dog. The animal had been placed on the floor of the back seat and inexpertly covered by Ron’s book bag. There was matted blood on the fur, but it was dried and the dog appeared to have been dead for some time. The animal was stiff, the legs folded in on themselves in an almost fetal position.

What was it? he wondered. Some sort of sacrifice?

No.

A trade.

His sack of oranges was gone.

He looked quickly up the alley, then down, half-expecting to see a lurching misshapen form carrying a sack of oranges pass through one of the pools of dim light thrown by the motion-activated security bulbs of various garages. But there was nothing. Only darkness, stillness.

He shivered, chilled by the irrationality of the entire situation.

But he pushed that feeling aside. He didn’t have time for it this morning. Any other day, he would have called his father, called his friends, called the police, gone through the step-by-step processes such an incident demanded. But he was on a schedule, he had things to do.

He went into the garage, found a pair of old work gloves and slipped them on. He was glad he’d awakened early, given himself some extra time. Grimacing, he reached into the car and picked up the dog’s body. It felt heavy in his hands, and this close he could smell a sweetly sick scent coming from the fur. He carried the animal’s corpse around the side of the garage and threw it in one of the garbage cans. After quickly spraying the car’s interior with Lysol and loading the ice chest, he headed off, driving with the windows open and the air conditioner on full blast in order to get rid of the lingering remnants of the smell.

He found her street easily enough, and although he counted down the addresses on the block he needn’t have bothered. While porch lights were lit at nearly every house, hers was the only one with interior lights on.

He pulled into the driveway behind a small Honda and got out of the car feeling oddly nervous—and not just because of what had happened. If before he had worried whether she would be up to his standards, now he was worried that he would not measure up to hers.

The front door of the house was opened before he was halfway up the walk, and a young slim blonde walked out. “You must be Ron,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’m Joanne.”

She was indeed very attractive. Out of his league, he would have said, but he sensed no disappointment in her eyes as she saw him for the first time, heard no falsity in her enthusiastic greeting.

“I just have a few things to pack into the car,” she told him. “An overnight bag and a few groceries. Did you bring an ice chest?”

“Yes,” he said, and she immediately frowned as his voice gave him away.

“What is it? What’s the matter? Oh God, you’re not coming.”

“No,” he reassured her. “Nothing like that.”

And he told her.

He described how he’d been carrying out the ice chest when he’d seen someone rooting around in the back seat of the car. The man disappeared into the shadows and Ron discovered that a dead dog had been substituted for the bag of oranges he’d intended to bring along as a gift for their hosts.

“Oranges?” Joanne looked at him, her eyes wide. “Was it a hunchback?” she whispered.

He felt an involuntary shiver of fear. Why was she asking this? Why would she know anything about it?

“Yes,” he told her.

She started shaking, crying. “Oh God. Oh God.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, God!”

He felt helpless, confused. “What do you want me to do?”