The car stood at the head of his turnaround driveway, little more than a ghost in the membranes of blowing snow. Its lights shone out in widening cones that at last disappeared into the storm. For a moment it seemed to Will that someone was behind the wheel, but he blinked again and saw that the car was empty. As empty as it had been when it returned to the garage that night.
Whonk. Whonk. Whonk-whonk.
Almost as if it were talking.
Will’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. He turned abruptly to the phone. The time had come to call Cunningham after all. Call him and tell him to bring his pet demon to heel.
He was halfway there when he heard the car’s engine scream. The sound was like the shriek of a woman who scents treachery. A moment later there was a heavy crunch.
Will went back to the window and was in time to see the car backing away from the high snowbank that fronted the end of his driveway. Its bonnet, sprayed with clods of snow, had crimped slightly. The engine revved again. The rear wheels spun in the powdery snow and then caught hold. The car leaped across the snowy road and struck the snowbank again. More snow exploded up and raftered away on the wind like cigar smoke blown in front of a fan.
Never do it, Will thought. And even if you get into the driveway, what then? You think I’m going to come out and play?
Wheezing more sharply than ever, he went back to the phone, looked up Cunningham’s home number, and started to dial it. His fingers jittered, he misdialled, swore, hit the cutoff buttons, started again.
Outside, Christine’s engine revved. A moment later there was a crunch as she hit the embankment for the third time. The wind wailed and snow struck — the big picture window like dry sand. Will licked his lips and tried to breathe slowly. But his throat was closing up; he could feel it.
The phone began to ring on the other end. Three times, Four.
Christine’s engine screamed. Then the heavy thud as she hit the snowbank the passing ploughs had piled up at both ends of Will’s semicircular driveway.
Six rings. Seven. Nobody home.
“Shit on it,” Will whispered, and slammed the phone back down. His face was pale, his nostrils flared wide, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire upwind. His cigar had gone out. He threw it on the carpet and groped in his bathrobe pocket as he hurried back to the window. His hand found the comforting shape of his aspirator, and his fingers curled around its pistol grip.
Headlights shone momentarily in his face, nearly blinding him, and Will raised his free hand to shield his eyes. Christine hit the snowbank again. Little by little she was bludgeoning her way through to the driveway. He watched her back up across the road and wished savagely for a plough to come along now and hit the damned thing broadside.
No plough came. Christine came again instead, engine howling, lights glaring across his snow-covered lawn. She struck the snowbanks pushing mounds of snow violently to either side. The front end canted up and for a moment Will thought she was going to come right over what was left of the frozen, hard-packed embankment. Then the rear wheels lost traction and spun frantically.
She backed up.
Will’s throat felt as if its bore was down to a pinhole. His lungs strained for air. He took the aspirator out and used it. The police. He ought to call the police. They could come. Cunningham’s ’58 couldn’t get him. He was safe in his house. He was—
Christine came again, accelerating across the road, and this time she hit the bank and came over it easily, front end at first tilting up, splashing the front of his house with light, then crashing back down. She was in the driveway. Yes, all right, but she could come no further, she… it…
Christine never slowed. Still accelerating, she crossed the semicircular driveway on a tangent, ploughed through the shallower, looser snow of the side yard, and roared directly at the picture window where Will Darnell stood looking out.
He staggered backward, gasping hard, and tripped over his own easy chair.
Christine hit the house. The picture window exploded, letting in the shrieking wind. Glass flew in deadly arrows, each of them reflecting Christine’s headlamps. Snow blew in and — danced over the rug in erratic corkscrews. The headlights momentarily illuminated the room with the unnatural glare of a television studio, and then she withdrew, her front bumper dragging, her hood popped up, her grille smashed into a chrome-dripping grin full of fangs.
Will was on his hands and knees, gagging harshly for breath, his chest heaving. He was vaguely aware that, had he not tripped over his chair and fallen down, he probably would have been cut to ribbons by flying glass. His robe had come undone and flapped behind him as he got to his feet. The wind streaming in the window picked up the TV Guide from the little table by his chair, and the magazine flew across the room to the foot of the stairs, pages riffling. Will got the telephone in both hands and dialled 0.
Christine reversed along her own tracks through the snow. She went all the way back to the flattened snowback at the entrance to the driveway. Then she came forward, accelerating rapidly, and as she came the bonnet immediately began to uncrimp, the grille to regenerate itself. She slammed into the side of the house below the picture window again. More glass flew; wood splintered and groaned and creaked. The big window’s low ledge cracked in two, and for a moment Christine’s windscreen, now cracked and milky, seemed to peer in like a giant alien eye.
“Police,” Will said to the operator. His voice was hardly there; it was all wheeze and whistle. His bathrobe flapped in the cold blizzard wind coming in through the shattered window. He saw that the wall below the window was nearly shattered. Broken chunks of lathing protruded like fractured bones. It couldn’t get in, could it? Could it?
“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to speak up,” the operator said. “We seem to have a very bad connection.”
Police, Will said, but this time it wasn’t even a whisper; only a hiss of air. Dear God, he was strangling, he was choking; his chest was a locked bank vault. Where was his aspirator?
“Sir?” the operator asked doubtfully.
There it was, on the floor. Will dropped the telephone and scrabbled for it.
Christine came again, roaring across the lawn and striking the side of the house. This time the entire wall gave way in a shrapnel-burst of glass and lathing, and incredibly, nightmarishly, Christine’s smashed and dented bonnet was in his living room, she was in, he could smell exhaust and hot engine.
Christine’s underworks caught on something, and she reversed back out of the ragged hole with a screech of pulling boards, her front end a gored ruin dusted with snow and plaster. But she would come again in a few seconds, and this time she might—just might—
Will grabbed his aspirator and ran blindly for the stairs.
He was only halfway up when the revving whine of her engine came again and he turned to watch, leaning on the railing more than grasping it.
The stairwell’s height lent a certain nightmare perspective. He watched Christine come across the snow-covered lawn, saw her bonnet fly up so that now her front end resembled the mouth of a huge red and white alligator. Then it snapped off altogether as she struck the house again, this time doing better than forty. She ripped away the last of the window frame and sprayed more splintered boards across his living room. Her headlights bounced upward, glaring, and then she was in, she was in his house, leaving a huge torn hole in the wall behind her with an electrical cable hanging out onto the rug like a black severed artery. Little clouds of blown-in fibreglass insulation danced on the cold wind like milkweed puffs.
Will screamed and couldn’t hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler silencer Arnie had put on her—one of the few things he really put on her, Will thought crazily—had hung up on the sill of the house, along with most of the exhaust pipe.