And wait for a more opportune time.
“Okay,” I said. “But remember… stand back in that little niche to the right of the door. If she comes, she may just stand outside for a while.” Scenting the air like an animal, I thought. “Don’t get scared, don’t move. Don’t let her freak you into giving yourself away. Just be cool and wait until she comes in. Then push that button and get the hell out. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Dennis, will this work?”
“It should, if she comes at all.”
“I won’t see you until it’s over.”
“I guess that’s so.”
She leaned over, placed her left hand tightly on the side of my neck, and kissed my mouth. “Be careful, Dennis,” she said, “But kill it. It’s really not a she at all—just an it. Kill it.”
“I will,” I said.
She looked in my eyes and nodded. “Do it for Arnie,” she said. “Set him free.”
I hugged her hard and she hugged me back. Then she slid across the seat. She hit her little handbag with her knee and it fell to the floor of the cab. She paused, head cocked, a startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. Then she smiled, bent over, picked it up, and began to rummage quickly through it.
“Dennis,” she said, “do you remember the Morte d’arthur?”
“A little.” One of the classes Leigh and Arnie and I had all shared before my football injury was Fudgy Bowen’s Classics of English Literature, and one of the first things we had been faced with in there was Malory’s Morte d’arthur. Why Leigh asked me this now was a mystery to me.
She had found what she wanted. It was a filmy pink scarf, nylon, the sort of thing a girl wears over her head on a day when a misty sort of rain is falling. She tied it around the left forearm of my parka.
“What the hell?” I asked, smiling a little.
“Be my knight,” she said, and smiled back—but her eyes were serious. “Be my knight, Dennis.”
I picked up the squeegee mop she had found in Will’s bathroom and made a clumsy salute with it. “Sure,” I said. “Just call me Sir O-Cedar.”
“Joke about it if you want,” she said, “but don’t really joke about it. Okay?”
“All right,” I said. “If it’s what you want, I’ll be your parfit goddam gentil knight.”
She laughed a little, and that was better.
“Remember about that button kiddo. Push it hard. We don’t want that door to just burp once and stop on its track. No escapes, right?”
“Right.”
She got out of Petunia, and I can close my eyes now and see her as she was then, in that clean and silent moment just before everything went terribly wrong—a tall, pretty girl with long blond hair the colour of raw honey, slim hips, long legs, and those striking, Nordic cheekbones, now wearing a ski-parka and faded Lee Riders, moving with a dancer’s grace. I can still see it and I still dream about it, because of course while we were busy setting up Christine, she was busy setting us up—that old and infinitely wise monster. Did we really think we could outsmart her so easily? I guess we did.
My dreams are in terrible slow motion. I can see the softly lovely motion of her hips as she walks; I can hear the hollow click of her Frye boots on the oil-stained cement floor; I can ever hear the soft, dry whish-whish of her parka’s quilted inner lining brushing against her blouse. She’s walking slowly and her head is up—now she is the animal, but no predator; she walks with the cautious grace of a zebra approaching a waterhole at dusk. It is the walk of an animal that scents danger. I try to scream to her through Petunia’s windscreen. Come back, Leigh, come back quick, you were right, you heard something, she’s out there now, out there in the snow with her headlights off, crouched down, Leigh, come back!
She stopped suddenly, her hands tensing into fists, and that was when sudden savage circles of light sprang to life in the snowy dark outside. They were like white eyes opening.
Leigh froze, hideously exposed on the open floor. She was thirty feet inside the door and slightly to the right of centre. She turned toward the headlights, and I could see the dazed, uncertain expression on her face.
I was just as stunned, and that first vital moment passed unused. Then the headlights sprang forward and I could see the dark, low-slung shape of Christine behind them; I could hear the mounting, furious howl of her engine as she leaped toward us from across the street where she had been waiting all along—maybe even since before dark. Snow tunnelled back from her roof and skirted across her windscreen in filmy nets that were almost instantly melted by the defroster. She hit the tarmac leading up to the entrance, still gaining speed. Her engine was a V-8 scream of rage.
“Leigh!” I screamed, and clawed for Petunia’s ignition switch.
Leigh broke to the right and ran for the wall-button. Christine roared inside as she reached it and pushed it. I heard the rattle-rumble of the overhead door descending on its track.
Christine came in angling to the right, going for Leigh. She dug a great clout of dry wood and splinters from the wall. There was a metallic screech as part of her right bumper pulled loose—a sound like a drunk’s scream of laughter. Sparks cascaded across the floor as she went into a long, slewing turn. She missed Leigh, but she wouldn’t when she went back; Leigh was stuck in that right-hand corner with nowhere to hide. She might be able to make it outside, but I was terribly afraid that the door wasn’t coming down fast enough to cut off Christine. The descending door might peel off her roof, but that wouldn’t stop her and I knew it.
Petunia’s engine bellowed and I dragged out the headlight button. Her brights came on, splashing over the closing door, and over Leigh. She was backed up against the wall, her eyes wide. Her parka took on a weird, almost electric blue colour in the headlights, and my mind informed me with sickening and clinical accuracy that her blood would look purple.
I saw her glance upward for a moment and then back down at Christine.
The Fury’s tyres screamed violently as she leaped at Leigh. Smoke rose from the new black marks on the concrete, and I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.
At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in-the-box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.
Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf about nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tyres and old baldies waiting to be recapped—in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders—what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine’s snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tyres tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.
Leigh’s head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tyres laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.
And what was I doing “all this time,” you wonder? It wasn’t all that time, that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia’s clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.
Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tyre shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.