There was a certain lipstick she had worn, and in that long-ago summer of 1934 it had tasted like fresh raspberries to a Will Darnell who was still quite slim and clear-eyed and ambitious and young. It had been a taste to make the left hand stray to the erect and enthusiastic root of the penis in the middle of the night… and even before Wanda Haskins consented, they had danced that sweet and special dance in Will Darnell’s dreams. In his narrow child’s bed that was too short for his growing legs, they had danced.
And, now thinking of this dance, Will ceased to think and began to dream and, ceasing to dream, began to dance again.
He awakened from a sleep that had never really deepened solidly some three hours later; he awoke to the sound of the big garage door rattling up and the inside light over the door—no fluorescent but a blaring 200-watt bulb—coming on.
Will tilted his chair down in a hurry. His shoes hit the mat under his desk (BARDAHL written across it in raised rubber letters), and it was the shock of pins and needles in his feet more than anything else that brought him awake.
Christine moved slowly across the garage towards stall twenty and slipped in.
Will, hardly convinced even now that he was awake, watched her with a curious lack of excitement which perhaps only belongs to those summoned directly from their dreams. He sat upright behind his desk, hamlike arms planted on his dirty, doodled-upon blotter, and watched her.
The engine raced once, twice. The bright new exhaust pipe shot blue smoke.
Then the motor shut down.
Will sat there, not moving.
His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom’s speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.
No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.
He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him… except maybe something like that was happening now.
He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say: The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming… what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontaneous, dream-oriented imagery…
Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins… but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.
And he had seen Cunningham’s ’58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had seen the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight-cylinder engine as it died.
Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.
He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white. The paint job was deep and clear and perfect, umarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.
The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.
Will touched the hood. It was warm.
He tried the driver’s side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new chrome—except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father’s basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.
He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The milometer read 52,107.8.
Suddenly the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past ACC to START. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.
Will’s heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the colour of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.
Christine’s engine turned off again.
No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.
Will found his aspirator, plunged it deep into his throat, depressed the trigger, and inhaled. Little by little, the feeling that a wheelbarrowful of cinderblocks was sitting on his chest dissipated. He sat down in the swivel chair and listened gratefully to the sane and expected creak of protest from its springs. He covered his face momentarily with his fat hands.
Nothing really inexplicable… until now.
He had seen it.
Nothing had been driving that car. It had come in empty, smelling of something like rotting turnips.
And even then, in spite of his dread, Will’s mind began to turn and he began wondering how he could put what he knew to his own advantage.
38
BREAKING CONNECTIONS
Well mister, I want a yellow convertible,
Four-door DeVille,
With a Continental spare and wire-chrome wheels.
I want power steering,
And power brakes;
I want a powerful motor with a jet offtake…
I want shortwave radio,
I want TV and a phone,
You know I gotta talk to my baby
When I’m ridin along.
The burned out wreck of Buddy Repperton’s Camaro was found late on Wednesday afternoon by a park ranger. An old lady who lived with her husband in the tiny town of Upper Squantic had called the ranger station on the lake side of the park. She was badly afflicted with arthritis, and sometimes she couldn’t sleep. Last night she thought she had seen flames coming from near the park’s south gate. At what time? She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn’t been but half over.
On Thursday, a newsphoto of the burned car appeared on the front page of the Libertyville Keystone under a headline which read: THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH AT SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK. A State Police source was quoted as saying “liquor had probably been a factor”—an officially opaque way of saying that the shattered remains of over half a dozen bottles of a juice-and-wine combination sold under the trade name Texas Driver had been found in the wreckage.
The news struck particularly hard at Libertyville High School; the young always have the greatest difficulty accepting unpleasant intelligence of their own mortality. Perhaps the holiday season made it that much harder.
Arnie Cunningham found himself terribly depressed by the news, Depressed and frightened. First Moochie; now Buddy, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. Bobby Stanton, a dipshit little freshman Arnie had never even heard of—what had a dipshit little kid like that been doing with the likes of Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney anyway? Didn’t he know that was like going into a den of tigers with nothing for protection but a squirt gun. He found it unaccountably hard to accept the grapevine version, which was simply that Buddy and his friends had gotten pretty well squiffed at the basketball game, and gone out cruising and drinking, and had come to a bad end.