White vapour drifted from her exhaust; her engine throbbed and purred. The windscreen was a black blank.
Behind Buddy, the remains of the Camaro shot greasy flames at the sky. A razor-sharp wind fluttered and fanned them. Bobby Stanton sat in the inferno of the back seat, his head cocked, a grin locked onto his blackening features.
Playing with me, Buddy thought. Playing with me, that’s what it’s doing. Like a cat with a mouse.
“Please,” he croaked. The headlights were blinding, turning the blood dripping down his cheek and from the sides of his mouth to an insectile black. “Please… I… I’ll tell him I’m sorry… I’ll crawl to him on my fucking hands and knees if that’s what you want… only please… pl—
The engine screamed. Christine leaped at him like old doom from a dark age. Buddy howled and lunged aside again, and this time the bumper struck his shin and broke his other leg and threw him toward the embankment at the side of the park road. He hit and sprawled like a loose bag of grain.
Christine wheeled back toward him, but Buddy bad seen a chance, one thin chance. He began to scramble wildly up the embankment, digging into the snow with bare hands from which the feeling had already departed, digging with his feet, ignoring the tremendous clouts of pain from his shattered legs. Now his breath came in little screams as the headlights grew brighter and the engine louder; every clod of snow threw its own jagged black shadow and he could feel it, he could feel it behind him like some horrible man-eating tiger—
There was a crunch and jangle of metal, and Buddy cried out as one of his feet was driven into the snow by Christine’s bumper. He yanked it out of the snow, leaving his shoe wedged deep.
Lying, gibbering, crying, Buddy gained the top of the bank thrown up by some National Guard Motor Pool plough days ago, tottered on the edge of balance there, pinwheeled his arms, and barely kept from rolling back down.
He turned to face Christine, The Plymouth had reversed across the road and now came forward again, rear tyres spinning, digging at the snow. It crashed into the bank a foot below where Buddy was perched, making him sway and sending down a further avalanche of snow. The hit crimped her hood in further, but Buddy was not touched. She reversed again through a mist of churned-up snow, engine now seeming to howl with frustrated anger.
Buddy screamed in triumph and shook his middle finger at her. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” A spray of mixed blood and spittle flew from his lips. With each gasping breath, the pain seemed to sink deeper into his left side, numbing and paralyzing.
Christine roared forward and slammed into the embankment again.
This time a large section of the bank, loosened in the car’s first charge, came sliding down, burying Christine’s wrinkled, snarling snout, and Buddy almost came down with it. He saved himself only by skittering backward rapidly, sliding on his butt and pulling himself with hands that were clawed into the snow like bloody grappling hooks. His legs were in agony now, and he flopped over on his side, gasping like a beached fish.
Christine came again.
“Get outta here!” Buddy cried. “Get outta here, you crazy WHORE!”
She slammed into the embankment again, and this time enough snow fell to douse her hood to the windscreen. The wipers came on and began to arc back and forth, flicking melting snow away.
She reversed again, and Buddy saw that one more hit would sent him cascading down onto Christine’s hood with the snow. He let himself fall over backward and went rolling down the far side of the embankment, screaming each time his broken ribs bumped the ground. He came to rest in loose powder, staring up at black sky, the cold stars. His teeth began to click helplessly together. Shudders raced through his body.
Christine didn’t come again, but he could hear the soft mutter of her engine. Not coming, but waiting.
He glanced at the snowbank bulking against the sky. Beyond it, the glow of the burning Camaro had begun to wane a bit. How long had it been since the crash? He didn’t know. Would anyone see the fire and come to rescue him? He didn’t know that either.
Buddy became aware of two things simultaneously: that blood was flowing from his mouth—flowing at a frightening rate—and that he was very cold. He would freeze to death if someone didn’t come.
Frightened all over again, he struggled and thrashed his way into a sitting position. He was trying to decide if he could worm his way back up and watch the car—it was worse, not being able to see it—when he glanced up at the embankment again. His breath snagged and stopped.
A man was standing there.
Only it wasn’t a man at all; it was a corpse. A rotting corpse in green pants. It was shirtless, but a back brace splotched with grey mould was cinched around its blackening torso. White bone gleamed through the skin stretched across its face.
“That’s it for you, you shitter,” this starlit apparition whispered.
The last of Buddy’s control broke and he began to scream hysterically, his eyes bulging, his long hair seeming to puff into a grotesque helmet around his bloody, soot-smudged face as the root of each strand stiffened and stood on end. Blood poured from his mouth in freshets and drenched the collar of his parka; he tried to skid backward, hooking into the snow with his hands again and sliding his buttocks as the thing came toward him. It had no eyes. Its eyes were gone, eaten out of its face by God knew what squirming things. And he could smell it, oh God he could smell it and the smell was like rotting tomatoes, the smell was death.
The corpse of Roland D. LeBay held out its decayed hands to Buddy Repperton and grinned.
Buddy screamed. Buddy howled. And suddenly he stiffened, his lips forming an O of perfect finality, puckered as if he wished to kiss the horror shambling toward him. His hands scratched and scrabbled at the left side of his shredded parka above his heart, which had finally been punctured by the jagged stub of a splintered rib. He fell backward feet kicking groove in the snow, his final breath slipping out in a long white jet from his slack mouth… like auto exhaust.
On the embankment, the thing he had seen flickered and was gone. There were no tracks.
From the far side, Christine’s engine cranked up into an exhaust-crackling bellow of triumph that struck the frowning, snow-covered uplands of Squantic Hills and then echoed back.
On the far verge of Squantic Lake, some ten miles away as the crow flies, a young man who had gone out for a cross-country ski by starlight heard the sound and suddenly stopped, his hands on his poles and his head cocked.
Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he knew it was only a car somewhere on the other side—sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights—his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a sabre-toothed tiger.
The sound was not repeated and he went on his way.
DARNELL COGITATES
Baby, lemme ride in your automobile,
Hey, babe, lemme ride in your automobile!
Tell me, sweet baby,
Tell me: Just how do you feel?
— Chester Burnett
Will Darnell was at the garage until after midnight on the night Buddy Repperton and his friends met Christine in Squantic Hills. His emphysema had been particularly bad that day. When it got bad, he was afraid to lie down, although he was ordinarily a perfect bear for sleep.
The doctor told him it was not at all likely he would choke to death in his sleep, but as he got older and the emphysema slowly tightened its grip on his lungs, he feared it more and more. The fact that his fear was irrational didn’t change it in the least. Although he hadn’t been inside a church of any faith since he had been twelve years old—forty-nine years ago now! — he had been morbidly interested in the circumstances surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I ten weeks before. John Paul had died in bed and had been found there in the morning. Already stiffening probably. That was the part that haunted Will: Already stiffening, probably.
He pulled into the garage at half-past nine, driving his 1966 Chrysler Imperial—the last car he intended ever to own. At about the same time Buddy Repperton was noticing the twin sparks of distant headlights in his rearview mirror.
Will was worth better than two million dollars, but money didn’t give him much pleasure anymore, if indeed it ever had. The money didn’t even seem completely real anymore. Nothing did, except the emphysema. That was hideously real, and Will welcomed anything that took his mind off it.
The problem of Arnie Cunningham, now—that had taken his mind off his emphysema. He supposed that was why he had let Cunningham hang around the place when all of his strongest- instincts told him to get the kid out of the garage, he was in some way dangerous. Something was going on with Cunningham and his rebuilt ’58. Something very peculiar.
The kid wasn’t in tonight; he and the entire LHS chess club were in Philadelphia for three days at the Northern States Fall Tourney. Cunningham had laughed about that; he was much changed from the pimply, big-eyed kid that Buddy Repperton had jumped on, the kid Will had immediately (and erroneously) dismissed as a crybaby jellyfish and maybe a goddam queer in the bargain.
For one thing, he had grown cynical.
He had told Will in the office yesterday afternoon over cigars (the boy had developed a taste for those as well; Will doubted if his parents knew) that he had missed so many chess club meetings that according to the by-laws, he was no longer a member. Slawson, the faculty advisor, knew it but was conveniently overlooking it until after the Northern States Tourney.
“I’ve missed more meetings than anyone, but I also happen to play better than anyone else, and the shitter knows—” Arnie winced and shoved both hands into the small of his back for a moment.
“You ought to get a doctor to look at that,” Will remarked.
Arnie winked, suddenly looking much older than nearly eighteen. “I don’t need anything but a good Christian fuck to stretch the vertebrae.”
“So you’re going to Philly?” Will had been disappointed, even though Cunningham had the off-time coming; it meant he would have to put Jimmy Sykes in charge for the next couple of nights, and Jimmy didn’t know his ass from ice cream.
“Sure. I’m not about to turn down three days of bright lights,” Arnie said. He saw Will’s sour face and had grinned. “Don’t worry, man. This close to Christmas, all your regulars are buying toys for the kiddies instead of spark plugs and carburettor kits. This place will be dead until next year, and you know it.”
That was certainly true enough, but he hadn’t needed a snotnose kid to point it out for him.
“You want to go to Albany for me after you get back?” Will had asked.
Arnie looked at him carefully. “When?”
“This weekend.”
“Saturday?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the deal?”
“You take my Chrysler to Albany that’s the fucking deal. Henry Buck was fourteen clean used cars he wants to get rid of. He says they’re clean. You go look at them. I’ll give you a blank cheque. If they look good, you make the deal. If they look hot, tell him to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
“And what do I fake with me?”
Will had looked at him for a long time. “Getting scared, Cunningham?”
“No.” Arnie crushed his cigar out half-smoked. He looked at Will defensively. “Maybe I just feel the odds getting a little longer each time I do it. Is it coke?”
“I’ll get Jimmy to do it,” Will said brusquely.
“Just tell me what it is.”
“Two hundred cartons of Winstons.”
“All right.”
“You sure? Just like that?”
Arnie had laughed. “It’ll be a break from chess.”
Will parked the Chrysler in the stall closest to his office, the one with MR DARNELL DO NOT BLOCK! painted inside the lines. He got out and slammed the door, puffing, labouring for breath. The emphysema was sitting on his chest, and tonight it seemed to have brought its brother. No, he just wasn’t going to lie down; no matter what that asshole doctor said.
Jimmy Sykes was apathetically wielding the big push broom. Jimmy was tall and gangling, twenty-five years old. His light mental retardation made him look perhaps eight years younger. He had started combing his hair back in a fifties-style ducktail, in imitation of Cunningham, whom Jimmy almost worshipped. Except for the low whssht, whssht of the broom’s bristles on the oil-stained concrete, the place was silent. And empty.
“Place is really jumpin tonight, Jimmy, huh?” Will wheezed.
Jimmy looked around. “No, sir, Mr Darnell, nobody been in since Mr Hatch came and got his Fairlane, and that was half an hour ago.”
“Just joking,” Will said, wishing again that Cunningham were here. You couldn’t talk to Jimmy except on a perfectly literal Dick-and-Jane level. Still, maybe he would invite him in for a cup of coffee with a slug of Courvoisier tipped in for good measure. Make it a threesome. Him, Jimmy, and the emphysema. Or maybe, since the emphysema had brought its brother tonight, you’d have to call it a foursome. “What do you say about—”
He broke off suddenly, noticing that stall twenty was empty. Christine was gone.
“Arnie come in?” he said.
“Arnie?” Jimmy repeated, blinkin stupidly.
“Arnie, Arnie Cunningham,” Will said impatiently. “How many Arnies do you know? His car’s gone.”
Jimmy looked around at stall twenty and frowned. “Oh. Yeah.”
Will smiled. “Hotshot got knocked out of his hotshot chess tournament, huh?”
“Oh, did he?” Jimmy asked. “Jeez, that’s too bad, huh?”
Will restrained an urge to grab Jimmy and give him a shake and a wallop. He would not get angry; that only made it harder to breathe, and he would end up having to shoot his lungs full of the horrible-tasting stuff from his aspirator. “Well, what did he say, Jimmy? What did he say when you saw him?” But Will knew suddenly and surely that Jimmy hadn’t seen Arnie.
Jimmy finally understood what Will was driving at. “Oh, I didn’t see him. Just saw Christine go out the door, you know. Boy, that’s some pretty car, ain’t it? He fixed it up like magic.”
“Yes,” Will said. “Like magic.” It was a word that had occurred to him in connection with Christine before. He suddenly changed his mind about inviting Jimmy in for coffee and brandy. Still looking at stall twenty, he said, “You can go home now, Jimmy.”
“Aw, jeez, Mr Darnell, you said I could have six hours tonight. That ain’t over until ten.”
“I’ll punch you out at ten.
Jimmy’s muddy eyes brightened at this unexpected, almost unheard-of largesse. “Really?”
“Yeah, really, really. Make like a tree and leave, Jimmy, okay?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said, thinking that for the first time in the five or six years he had worked for Will (he had trouble remembering which it was, although his mother kept track of it, the same as she kept track of all his tax papers), the old grouch had gotten the Christmas spirit. Just like in that movie about the three ghosts. Summoning up his own Christmas spirit, Jimmy cried: “That’s a big ten-four, good buddy!”
Will winced and lumbered into his office. He turned on the Mr Coffee and sat down behind his desk, watching as Jimmy put away his broom, turned out most of the overhead fluorescents, and got his heavy coat.
Will leaned back and thought.
It was, after all, his brains that had kept him alive all these years, alive and one step ahead; he had never been handsome, he had been fat all of his adult life, and his health had always been terrible. A childhood bout of scarlet fever one spring had been followed by a mild case of polio; he had been left with a right arm that operated at only about seventy per cent capacity. As a young man he had endured a plague of boils. When Will was forty-three his doctor had discovered a large, spongy growth under one arm. It had turned out to be non-malignant, but the removal surgery had kept him on his back most of one summer, and as a result he had developed bedsores. A year later he had almost died of double pneumonia. Now it was incipient diabetes and emphysema. But his brains had always been fine and dandy, and his brains had kept him one step ahead.
So he leaned back and thought about Arnie. He supposed one of the things that had favourably impressed him about Cunningham after he had stood up to Repperton that day was a certain similarity to the long-ago teenaged Will Darnell. Of course, Cunningham wasn’t sickly, but he had been pimply, disliked, a loner. Those things had all been true of the young Will Darnell.
Cunningham had brains, too.
Brains and that car. That strange car.
“Good night, Mr Darnell,” Jimmy called. He stood by the door for a moment, and then added uncertainly, “Merry Christmas.”
Will raised his hand in a wave. Jimmy left. Will heaved his bulk out of his chair, got the bottle of Courvoisier out of the filing cabinet, and set it down next to the Mr Coffee. Then he sat down again. A rough chronology was ticking through his mind.
August: Cunningham brings in an old wreck of a ’58 Plymouth and parks it in stall twenty. It looks familiar, and it should. It’s Rollie LeBay’s Plymouth. And Arnie doesn’t know it—he has no need to know—but once upon a time Rollie LeBay also made an occasional run to Albany or Burlington or Portsmouth for Will Darnell… only in those dim dead days, Will had a ’54 Cadillac. Different transport cars, same false-bottom boot with the hidden compartment for fireworks, cigarettes, booze, and pot. In those days Will had never heard of cocaine. He supposed no one but jazz musicians in New York had.
Late August: Repperton and Cunningham get into it, and Darnell kicks Repperton out. He’s tired of Repperton, the constant braggadocio, the cock-of-the-walk manner. He’s hurting custom, and while he’ll make all the runs into New York and New England that Will wants, he’s careless, and carelessness is dangerous. He has a tendency to exceed the double-nickel speed limit, he’s gotten speeding tickets. All it would take is one nosy cop to put them all in court. Darnell isn’t afraid of going to jail—not in Libertyville but it would look bad. There was a time when he didn’t care much how things looked, but he’s older now.
Will got up, poured coffee, and tipped in a capful of brandy. He paused, thought it over, and tipped in a second capful. He sat down, took a cigar out of his breast pocket, looked at it, and lit it. Fuck you, emphysema. Take this.
Fragrant smoke rising around him, good hot coffee laced with brandy before him, Darnell stared out into his shadowy, silent garage and thought some more.
September: The kid asks him to jump an inspection sticker and loan him a dealer plate so he can take his girl to a football game. Darnell does it—hell, there was a day when he used to sell inspection stickers for seven dollars and never even look at the car it was going on. Besides, the kid’s car is looking good. A little rough, maybe, and it’s still more than a little noisy, but all in all, pretty damn good. He’s going a real job of restoration.
And that’s pretty damn strange, isn’t it, when you consider that no one has ever seen him really work on it.
Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tyres. The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him working on the car’s exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled the ’58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury’s bod, which had an advanced case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.
Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once. Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.
“That’s one hell of a lot of night work,” Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden chill that not even the brandy-laced coffee could dispel, A lot of night work, yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling around.
“I guess he does the big stuff at night,” Jimmy had said, with all the guileless faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn’t believe in either Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn’t believe that Arnie had restored Christine at night, either.
Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like poolballs looking for a pocket in which to come to rest.
He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark, after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy in the front end. But the kid couldn’t lie for shit. No one ever checked out a shimmy at five miles an hour.
That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the junkets, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.
Then there was the Plymouth’s milometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely fast rate. He told Will that he figured the milometer turned back five miles or so for every actual mile travelled. Will had been frankly amazed. He had heard of setting milometers back in the used-car business, and he had done a good bit of it himself (along with stuffing transmissions full of sawdust to stifle their death whines and pouring boxes of oatmeal into terminally ill radiators to temporarily plug their leaks), but he had never seen one that ran backward spontaneously. He would have thought it impossible. Arnie had just smiled a funny little smile and called it a glitch.
It was a glitch, all right, Will thought. One hell of a glitch.
The two thoughts clicked lazily off each other and rolled in different directions.
Boy, that’s some pretty car, isn’t it? He fixed it up like magic.
Will didn’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, but he was perfectly willing to acknowledge that there were strange things in the world. A practical man recognized that and put it to use if he could. A friend of Will’s who lived in Los Angeles claimed he had seen the ghost of his wife before the big quake of ’67, and Will had no particular reason to doubt the claim (although he would have doubted it completely if the friend had had anything to gain). Quent Youngerman, another friend, had claimed to have seen his father, long dead, standing at the foot of his hospital bed after Quent, a steel-worker, had taken a terrible fall from the fourth floor of a building under construction down on Wood Street.
Will had heard such stories off and on all his life, as most people undoubtedly did. And as most thinking people probably did, he put them in a kind of open file, neither believing nor disbelieving, unless the teller was an obvious crank. He put them in that open file because no one knew where people came from when they were born and no one knew where people went when they died, and not all the Unitarian ministers and born-again Jesus-shouters and Popes and Scientologists in the world could convince Will otherwise. Just because some people went crazy on the subject didn’t mean they knew anything. He put stuff like that in that open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him.
Except maybe something like that was happening now.
November: Repperton and his good buddies beat the living shit out of Cunningham’s car at the airport. When it comes in on the tow-truck, it looks like the Green Giant shat all over it. Darnell looks at it and thinks, It’s never gonna run again. That’s all; it’s never gonna run another foot.
At the end of the month the Welch kid gets killed on JFK Drive.
December: A State Police detective comes sucking around. Junkins. He comes sucking around one day and talks to Cunningham; then he comes sucking around on a day when Cunningham isn’t here and wants to know how come the kid is lying about how much damage Repperton and his dogturd friends (of whom the late and unlamented Peter “Moochie” Welch was one) did to Cunningham’s Plymouth. Why you talking to me? Darnell asks him, wheezing and coughing through a cloud of cigar smoke, Talk to him, it’s his fucking Plymouth, not mine. I just run this place so working joes can keep their cars running and keep putting food on the tables for their families.
Junkins listens patiently to this rap. He knows Will Darnell is doing a hell of a lot more than just running a do-it-yourself garage and a junkyard, but Darnell knows he knows, so that’s okay.
Junkins lights a cigarette and says, I’m talking to you because I already talked to the kid and he won’t tell me. For a little while there I thought he wanted to tell me; I got the feeling he’s scared green about something. Then he tightened up and wouldn’t tell me squat.
Darnell says, If you think Arnie ran down that Welch kid, say so.
Junkins says, I don’t. His parents say he was home asleep, and it doesn’t feel like they’re lying to cover up for him. But Welch was one of the guys that trashed his car, we’re pretty sure of that, and I’m positive he’s lying about how bad they trashed it and I don’t know why and it’s driving me crazy.
Too bad, Darnell says with no sympathy at all.
Junkins asks, How bad was it, Mr Darnell? You tell me.
And Darnell tells his first and only lie during the interview with Junkins: I really didn’t notice.
He noticed, all right, and he knows why Arnie is lying about it, trying to minimize it, and this cop would know why too, if it wasn’t so obvious he was walking all over it instead of seeing it. Cunningham is lying because the damage was horrible, the damage was much worse than this state gumshoe can imagine, those hoods didn’t just beat up on Cunningham’s ’58, they killed it. Cunningham is lying because, although nobody saw him do much of anything during the week after the tow-truck brought Christine back to stall twenty, the car was basically as good as new—even better than it had been before.
Cunningham lied to the cop because the truth was incredible.
“Incredible,” Darnell said out loud, and drank the rest of his coffee. He looked down at the telephone, reached for it, and then drew his hand back. He had a call to make, but it might be better to finish thinking this through first—have all his ducks in a row.
He himself was the only one (other than Cunningham himself) who could appreciate the incredibility of what had happened: the car’s complete and total exoneration. Jimmy was too soft in the attic, and the other guys were in and out, not regular custom at all. Still, there had been comments about what a fantastic job Cunningham had done; a lot of the guys who had been doing repairs on their rolling iron during that week in November had used the word incredible, and several of them had looked uneasy. Johnny Pomberton, who bought and sold used trucks, had been trying to get an old dumpster he’d picked up in running shape that week. Johnny knew cars and trucks better than anyone else in Libertyville, maybe anyone else in all of Pennsylvania. He told Will frankly and flat-out that he couldn’t believe it. It’s like voodoo, Johnny Pomberton had said, and then uttered a laugh without much humour. Will only sat there looking politely interested, and after a second or two the old man shook his head and went away.
Sitting in his office and looking out at the garage, eerily silent in the slack time that came every year in the weeks before Christmas, Will thought (not for the first time) that most people would accept anything they saw it happen right before their very eyes. In a very real sense there was no supernatural, no abnormal; what happened, happened, and that was the end.
Jimmy Sykes: Like magic.
Junkins: He’s lying about it, but I’ll be goddamned if I know why.
Will pulled open his desk drawer, denting his paunch, and found his note-minder book for 1978. He paged through it and found his own scrawled entry: Cunningham. Chess Tourney. Philly Sheraton Dec. 11–13.
He called Directory Assistance, got the number of the hotel, and made the call. He was not too surprised to feel his heartbeat shifting into a higher gear as the phone rang and the desk clerk picked it up.
Like magic.
“Hello, Philadelphia-Sheraton.
“Hello,” Will said, “You have a chess tournament put up there, I th—”
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