And this was the end of all of it, quite naturally. This closed out the chapter. Unless, of course, there might be someone else, perhaps in some other place, who was working on the problem—and working alone because no one would believe him. It was, I told myself, entirely possible. And where I had finally failed, he might somehow succeed.
I knew, in the back of my mind, just how slim the chance of such a thing might be, but it was the only hope I had, and in a moment of fantasy I grabbed it close and held it and tried to make it true.
The car swung round a curve and did not quite make the curve, and ahead of us was a picket fence of trees. We were hurtling toward them, and the wheels came off the road. The car began to tilt, nose downward, as it took the dive.
Then, suddenly, there was no car and I was in the air alone, in the darkness without a car around me, flying toward the trees.
I had time for a single scream of terror before I hit the tree that seemed to come rushing at me through the dark.
I was cold. There was a cold wind blowing down my back and it was dark—so dark I couldn’t see a thing. There was a chill dampness underneath me and I was sore all over and there was a dismal sound, a strange keening coming from somewhere in the dark.
I tried to move, and when I moved I hurt, so I quit moving and just lay there, in the chill and dampness. I didn’t wonder who I was or where I was, for it didn’t make much difference. I was too tired and I hurt too much to care.
I lay there for a while and the sound and dampness went away and the darkness closed in on me, and then, after a long time, I was me again and it still was dark and even colder than it was before.
So I moved again, and again it hurt me, but when I moved I reached out my hand, with the fingers open reaching, seeking, grasping. And when the fingers closed, they closed on something that I recognized, something soft and pulpy that I squeezed inside my hand.
Moss and fallen leaves, I thought. I’d reached out into the darkness and my hand had grabbed moss and fallen leaves.
I lay quiet for a moment, letting where I was soak into me—for now I knew I was somewhere in the woods. The keening noise was the sound of wind blowing in the treetops, and the dampness underneath me was the dampness of woodland moss, and the smell was the smell of woods in autumn.
If it had not been for the cold and hurt, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad. For it was a pleasant place. And I hurt only when I moved. Maybe if I could suck the blackness inside of me again, it would be all right.
I tried, but the darkness wouldn’t come, and now I was beginning to remember about the car that had gone hurtling off the narrow curve and how the car had gone away and left me all alone, flying through the dark.
I am alive, I thought, aghast that I should be alive—remembering the tree that I had seen or sensed and that had seemed to come rushing out of the dark at me.
I opened up the fingers that had grabbed the moss and leaves and shook my hand to get rid of them. I put out both my hands to raise me up. I moved both my legs, pulling them beneath me. Both my arms and legs worked, so there was nothing broken, but my belly was a mass of soreness and there was a pain that went skittering through my chest.
So they had failed, after all, I thought—the Atwoods, the bowling balls, whatever one might call them. I was still alive, and I was free of them, and if I could reach a phone, there still was time to carry out my plan.
I tried to stand, but I couldn’t make it. I pushed myself to my feet and stood there for an instant while waves of pain washed over me. My nerve gave out and my knees folded and I slid to the ground and sat there, with my arms wrapped around me to hold in the pain that threatened to burst out.
I sat there for a long time and the edge of the hurt was dulled. It remained as a leaden lump of misery that settled somewhere in my middle.
Apparently I was on some sort of steep hillside and the road must lay above me. I had to reach the road, I knew, for if I could reach it, there would be a chance that someone would come along and find me. I had no idea how far it might be up to the road—how far I had been thrown before I hit the tree or how far I might have rolled or slid once I hit the ground.
I had to reach the road, and if I couldn’t walk there, I’d have to creep or crawl. I couldn’t see the road; I couldn’t see a thing. I existed in a world of utter darkness. There were no stars. There was no light at all.
I got to my hands and knees and started creeping up the hill. I couldn’t go far at a time. I seemed to have no strength. I didn’t seem to hurt as much as I had before, but I petered out.
It was slow going and hard going. I ran into a tree and had to creep around it. I got entangled in a clump of what I took to be blackberry bushes and had to crawl some distance along the hill before I could bypass them. I came to the moldering trunk of a fallen tree and managed to claw my way over it and keep going.
I wondered what the time might be and felt along my wrist to see if I still had my watch. I did. I cut my fingers on the broken crystal. I held it to my ear and it wasn’t ticking. Not that it would have done me any good if it had been, for I couldn’t see it.
From far off I heard a murmur, different than the moaning of the wind blowing through the treetops. I lay still and strained my ears to identify it. Then suddenly it was louder and unmistakably a car.
The noise served like a goad and I scrambled madly up the hillside, but the mad scrambling was only motion mostly. It did little to speed up my progress.
The noise increased, and to my left I saw the blur of light thrown by the oncoming machine. The light dipped and disappeared, then appeared again closer.
I began to yell—not words, just yelling to attract attention—but the car swept around the curve above me, and no one seemed to hear me, for it kept going on. For an instant the light and the rushing body of it filled the horizon above the hill, and then it was gone, and I was left alone, crawling up the slope.
I closed my mind to everything except getting up the slope. There would be, sometime, another car coming along the road, or the one that had passed would be coming back.
After a time it seemed to me a long time—I finally made it.
I sat on the shoulder of the road and rested, then carefully got on my feet. The hurt still was there, but it didn’t seem as bad as it had been before. I was able to stand up, not too solid on my feet, but still able to stay standing.
It was a long way I had come, I thought. A long way since that night when I had found a trap set before my door. And yet, thinking back on it, the time had not been long, perhaps no more than forty hours or so.
And in that time I had played a futile game of chess with the thing that had been the trap. This night the game was meant to end, for I should be dead. The aliens, undoubtedly, had intended that I should be killed and at this moment, more than likely, believed that I was dead.
But I wasn’t dead. I probably had a cracked rib or two, and my midriff had taken a beating as it had slammed into the tree, but I was up and standing and I wasn’t beaten yet.
In not too long there’d be another car. If I was lucky, there would be another car.
I was hit by a terrifying thought: What if the next car to come along this road should be another fashioned out of bowling balls?
I thought about it and it seemed unlikely. They only turned themselves into things for a certain purpose and it would not be reasonable to suppose they’d need a car again.
For they did not need a car to travel. They had their burrows for that. Through them they could travel from whatever place they were to anywhere on Earth and, more than possibly, from one place to another on the Earth. It was not too imaginative, I told myself, to envision the space occupied by Earth as laced and interlaced with a vast system of their burrows. Although I realized that “burrows” was, perhaps, not quite an accurate word.