She reached out a hand and grabbed my arm.
“There was the car,” she said.
“Take it easy, gal,” I told her. “Take it very easy. All that is behind us. What worries me is what is up ahead.”
“You were afraid to go out to the car,” she said. “You thought you were a coward. It worried you—that fear. And yet it saved your life.”
The Dog said from the back seat: “It might- interest you that there is a car behind us.”
She nodded, “If we could take his boat and get out in the lake.”
“They’d turn into a Loch Ness monster.”
I looked into the rear-vision mirror and the Dog was right. There was a car behind us. It was a one-eyed car.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing,” I said. I slowed down and made a left-hand turn. The car behind us also made the turn. I made another left and then a right and so did the other car.
“Might be the police,” said Joy.
“With just one light?” I asked. “And if it were, they’d have the siren and the red light going the speed we were hitting back there.”
I made a few more turns. I got on a boulevard and opened up and the car behind us matched our speed.
“What do we do now?” I asked. “I had intended to go back to the university and up to Stirling’s lab. We need to talk with him. But we can’t do it now.”
“How’s the gas?” asked Joy. “Better than a half a tank.” “The cabin,” Joy said. “You mean Stirling’s cabin?”
“Maybe not. Maybe they have never heard of the Loch Ness monster.”
“Then into some other aquatic monster from some other world.”
“But we can’t stay in the city, Parker. Stay here and the police will get into the act.”
“Maybe,” I told her, “that would be the best thing that could happen.”
But I knew it wasn’t. The police would haul us in and we’d lose a lot of time and we could talk from now till doomsday and they’d not believe a word we said about the bowling balls. And I shivered to think of what would happen if they found a talking dog. They’d figure I was a ventriloquist and was playing tricks on them and they’d be really sore.
I switched over a half a dozen blocks or so until I hit a highway leading north and out of town. If I had to head for anywhere, maybe Stirling’s cabin was as good as any.
There wasn’t any traffic, just a truck every now and then, and I really opened up. The needle hit eighty-five and hung there. I could have pushed it harder, but I Was afraid to do it. There were some tricky curves up ahead and I had a hard time remembering exactly where they were.
“Still following?” I asked.
“Still following,” said the Dog, “but they have fallen off. They are not so near.”
I knew then that we weren’t going to shake them. We could build up some distance on them, but they would still be there. Unless they missed us at the turnoff for the cabin they’d come piling in behind us—no more than two or three minutes behind us. And I couldn’t be sure we could duck them at the turnoff.
If I was going to shake them, there was going to have to be another way to do it.
The character of the land was changing now. We had left behind us the flat agricultural area and were entering the humpy sand hills covered by evergreens and dotted with small lakes. And it was just beyond, if my memory were not wrong, that the road began to curve—several miles of wicked curves that snaked in and out between the jagged hillocks and the swamps and lakes that lay between them.
“How far are they behind us?” I asked.
“A mile or so,” said Joy.
“Listen.”
“I am listening.”
“I’ll stop the car when we hit the curves ahead I’ll get out. You take the wheel. drive on for a ways, then stop and wait. Then you hear me shoot, come back.”
“You’re crazy,” she told me angrily. “You can’t tangle with them. You don’t know what they’ll do.”
“We’re even, then,” I said. “They don’t know what I’ll do.”
“But you alone—”
“Not me alone,” I told her. “I have old Betsy there. She’ll drop a moose. She’ll stop a charging grizzly.”
We hit the first of the curve and ground around it. I had hit it too fast and I had to fight the wheel while the tires screamed in shrill protest.
Then we hit the second, still too fast, and finally the third. I put on the brakes, hard, and the car skidded to a halt, half slewed across the road. I grabbed the rifle and, opening the door, slid out.
“All yours,” I said to Joy.
She didn’t argue or protest. She didn’t say a word. She had made her protest and I had brushed it off and that was the end of it. She was an all-right gal.
She slid underneath the wheel. I stepped to one side and the car gunned off. The taillights winked around the curve and I was alone.
The quiet was frightening. There was fl sound except the faint rustling of the few remaining leaves in an aspen tree that stood among the pines and the ghostly sighing of the pines themselves. The hills loomed jagged black against the paler sky. And there was the smell of wilderness and the feel of autumn.
The gun felt gummy and I rubbed my hand along it. It was greasy, sticky greasy. And it had a smell—the shaving lotion smell I first had smelled that morning.
This morning, I thought—good God, had it only been this morning! I tried to track it back and it was a thousand years ago. It could not have been this morning.
I moved a bit off the road and stood on the shoulder. I rubbed my hand along the rifle stock, trying to rub off the gummy grease. But it would not wipe off. My palm slid over it.
In a few more seconds a car would come around that curve, probably traveling fast. And when I fired, the shooting would be fast and almost by instinct, for I’d be shooting in the dark.
And what, I wondered, if it should turn out to be a regular car, a normal, human car carrying law—abiding humans? What if it were not following us at all, but by some odd happenstance had simply taken the same route that I had taken in attempting to escape it?
I thought about it and the sweat broke out of my armpits and trickled hotly down y ribs.
But it couldn’t be, I told myself. I had done a lot of turning and a lot of twisting, and none of that turning and that twisting bad made any sense at all. And yet the one-eyed car had followed us on every twist and turn.
The road curved to the top of one of the hillocks, then curled along its side. When the car came around the curve it would be silhouetted for a moment against the paler sky, and it was in that instant that I had to shoot.
I half raised the gun and I found my hands were trembling, and that was the worst thing that could happen. I lowered the gun again and fought to get control, to stop the trembling, but it was no use.
I made another try. I raised the gun again and, even as I did the car came around the curve, and in that single instant I saw the thing that stopped the trembling, that froze me in my tracks and turned me Steady as a rock.
I fired and worked the bolt and fired again and worked the bolt once more but did not shoot the third time, for there Was no need. The car had left the road and Was tumbling down the hillside, crashing through the thickets, banging into trees. And as it rolled the light from the single headlight still miraculously burning, swept across the sky like a probing searchlight.
Then the light was gone and the silence closed in once again. There was no further sound of something crashing down the hill.
I lowered the rifle and released the bolt and eased it back in place with the trigger held.
I let out the breath that I had been holding and took another one, a deep breath.
For it had been no human car; there’d not been humans in it.
When it had come around the curve, in that fleeting second when I could see the outline of it, I had seen that the single light had been not on either side but positioned directly in the center of the windshield.