From a Buick 8

  Ned screamed. His hands dropped suddenly, as if invisible ropes had been tied around his wrists and now someone below him was yanking on them. He started to sink in his seat, only the seat was no longer precisely there. It was vanishing, dissolving into that stormy bubble of rising violet light. I grabbed him under the arms, yanked, stumbled backward first one step and then two. Fighting the incredible traction of the force trying to pull me into the descending purple throat that had been the Buick's interior. I fell over backward with Ned on top of me. Gasoline soaked through the legs of my pants.

  "Pull us!" I screamed at Arky. I paddled with my feet, trying to slide away from the Buick and the light pouring out of it. My feet could find no good purchase. They kept slipping in the gasoline.

  Ned was yanked, pulled toward the open driver's door so hard he was almost torn out of my grip. At the same time I felt the rope tighten around my waist. We were tugged sharply backward as I resettled my grip around Ned's chest. He was still holding the gun, but as I watched his arm shot out straight in front of him and the gun flew from his hand. The throbbing purple light in the cabin of the car swallowed it up, and I thought I heard it fire twice more, all by itself, as it disappeared. At the same time the pull around us seemed to weaken a little. Maybe enough to make our escape if we went now, just exited stage left with no hesitation.

  "Pull!" I screamed at Arky.

  "Boss, I'm pullin as hard as I--"

  "Pull harder!"

  There was another furious yank, one that cut my breath off as Curtis's hangman's noose pulled tight around my mid-section. Then I was scrambling to my feet and stumbling backward at the same time with the boy still clasped in front of me. He was gasping, his eyes puffed shut like the eyes of a fighter who's had the worst of it for twelve rounds. I don't think he saw what happened next.

  The inside of the Buick was gone, cored out by purple light. Some unspeakable, unknowable conduit had opened. I was looking down an infected gullet and into another world. I might have frozen in place long enough for the suction to renew its hold on me and pull me in--to pull both of us in--but then Arky was screaming, high and shrill: "Help me, Steff! God's sake! Muckle on here and help me!" She must have done it, too, because a second or so later, Ned and I were yanked backward like a couple of well-hooked fish.

  I went down again and banged my head, aware that the pulse and the hum had merged, had turned into a howl that seemed to be drilling a hole in my brains. The Buick had begun flashing like a neon sign, and a flood of green-backed beetles came tumbling out of the blazing trunk. They struck the floor, scuttered, died. The suction took hold yet again, and we started moving back toward the Buick. It was like being caught in a hideously strong undertow. Back and forth, back and forth.

  "Help me!" I shouted in Ned's ear. "You have to help me or we're going in!" What I was thinking by that time was that we were probably going in whether he helped me or not.

  He was blind but not deaf and had decided he wanted to live. He put his sneakered feet down on the cement floor and shoved backward just as hard as he could, his skidding heels splashing up little flurries of spilled gasoline. At the same time, Arky and Stephanie Colucci gave the rope another hard tug. We shot backward almost five feet toward the door, but then the undertow grabbed hold again. I was able to wrap a bight of slack rope around Ned's chest, binding him to me for better or worse. Then we were off again, the Buick taking back all the ground we'd gained and more. It moved us slowly but with a terrible relentlessness. There was a breathless, claustrophobic pressure in my chest. Part of it was being wrapped in the rope. Part of it was the sense of being pinched and petted and jerked by a huge invisible hand. I didn't want to go into the place I'd seen, but if we got much closer to the car, I would. We both would. The closer we got, the more the force pulling us stacked up. Soon it would snap the yellow nylon rope. The two of us would fly away, still bound together. Into that sick purple throat we'd go and into whatever lay beyond it.

  "Last chance!" I screamed. "Pull on three! One . . . two . . . THREE!"

  Arky and Stephanie, standing shoulder to shoulder just outside the door, gave it all they had. Ned and I pushed with our feet. We flew backward, this time all the way to the door before that force seized us yet again, pulling as inexorably as a magnet pulls iron filings.

  I rolled over on my side. "Ned, the doorframe! Grab the doorframe!"

  He reached blindly out, extending his left arm fully. His hand groped.

  "To your right, kid!" Steff screamed. "Your right!"

  He found the doorjamb and gripped. Behind us there was another monstrous purple flash from the Buick, and I could feel the pull of the thing ratchet up another notch. It was like some hideous new gravity. The rope around my chest had turned into a steel band and I couldn't get a single inch of fresh breath. I could feel my eyes bulging and my teeth throbbing in their gums. My guts felt all in a plug at the base of my throat. The pulse was filling up my brain, burning out conscious thought. I began slipping toward the Buick again, the heels of my shoes skidding on the cement. In another moment I would be sliding, and a moment after that I'd be flying, like a bird sucked into a jet turbine engine. Arid when I went the boy would go with me, likely with splinters of the doorjamb sticking out from under his fingernails. He would have to come with me. My metaphor about chains had become literal reality.

  "Sandy, grab my hand!"

  I craned my neck to look and wasn't exactly surprised to see Huddie Royer--and behind him, Eddie. They'd come back. It had taken them a little longer than it had taken Arky, but they'd come. And not because Steff had radioed them a Code D, either; they'd been in their personals, and radio communications out of our barracks were FUBAR, for the time being, anyway. No, they had just . . . come.

  Huddie was kneeling in the doorway, holding on with one hand to keep from being sucked in. His hair didn't move around his head and his shirt didn't ripple, but he swayed back and forth like a man in a high wind just the same. Eddie was behind him, crouching, looking over Huddie's left shoulder. Probably holding on to Huddie's belt, although I couldn't see that. Huddie's free hand was held out to me, and I seized it like a drowning man. I felt like a drowning man.

  "Now pull, goddammit," Huddie growled at Arky and Eddie and Steff Colucci. The Buick's purple light was flashing in his eyes. "Pull your guts out."

  They might not have gone quite that far, but they pulled hard and we tumbled out the door like a cork coming out of a bottle, landing in a pigpile with Huddie on the bottom. Ned was panting, his face turned sideways against my neck, the skin of his cheek and forehead burning against me like embers. I could feel the wetness of his tears.

  "Ow, Sarge, Christ, get your elbow outta my nose!" Huddie yelled in a muffled, furious voice.

  "Shut the door!" Steff cried. "Hurry, before something bad gets out!"

  There was nothing but a few harmless bugs with green backs, but she was right, just the same. Because the light was bad enough. That flashing, stuttery purple light.

  We were still tangled together on the pavement, arms pinned by knees, feet caught under torsos, Eddie now somehow tangled in the rope as well as Ned, yelling at Arky that it was around his neck, it was choking him, and Steff kneeling beside him, trying to get her fingers under one of the bright yellow loops while Ned gasped and flailed against me. There was no one to shut the door but it did slam shut and I craned my head at an angle only raw panic would permit, suddenly sure it was one of them, it had come through unseen and now it was out and maybe wanting a little payback for the one that had been slaughtered all those years ago. And I saw it, a shadow against the shed's white-painted side. Then it shifted and the shadow's owner came forward and I could see the curves of a woman's breast and hip in the dim light.

  "Halfway home and I get this feeling," Shirley said in an unsteady voice. "This really bad feeling. I decided the cats could wait a little longer. Stop thrashing, Ned, you're making everything worse."

  Ned stilled at once. She bent down
and with a single deft gesture freed Eddie from the loop around his neck. "There, ya baby," she said, and then her legs gave out. Shirley Pasternak sprawled on the hottop and began to cry.

  We got Ned into the barracks and flushed his eyes in the kitchen. The skin around them was puffed and red, the whites badly bloodshot, but he said his vision was basically okay. When Huddie held up two fingers, that was what the kid reported. Ditto four.

  "I'm sorry," he said in a thick, clogged voice. "I don't know why I did that. I mean, I do, I meant to, but not now . . . not tonight--"

  "Shhh," Shirley said. She cupped more water from the tap and bathed his eyes with it. "Don't talk."

  But he wouldn't be stopped. "I meant to go home. To think about it, just like I said." His swelled, horribly bloodshot eyes peered at me, then they were gone as Shirley brought up another palm filled with warm water. "Next thing I knew I was back here again, and all I can remember thinking is "I've got to do it tonight, I've got to finish it once and for all." Then . . ."

  Except he didn't know what had happened then; the rest was all a blur to him. He didn't come right out and say that, but he didn't need to. I didn't even have to see it in his bloodshot bewildered eyes. I had seen him, sitting behind the Roadmaster's steering wheel with the gas can in his lap, looking pale and stoned and lost.

  "It took hold of you," I said. "It's always had some kind of pull, it's just never had anyone to use it on the way it could on you. When it called you, though, the rest of us heard, too. In our own ways. In any case, it's not your fault, Ned. If there's fault, it's mine."

  He straightened up from the sink, groped, took hold of my forearms. His face was dripping and his hair was plastered to his forehead. In truth he looked rather funny. Like a slapstick baptism.

  Steff, who'd been watching the shed from the back door of the barracks, came over to us. "It's dying down again. Already."

  I nodded. "It missed its chance. Maybe its last chance."

  "To do mischief," Ned said. "That's what it wanted. I heard it in my head. Or, I don't know, maybe I just made that part up."

  "If you did," I said, "then I did, too. But there might have been more to tonight than just mischief."

  Before I could say any more, Huddie came out of the bathroom with a first-aid kit. He set it down on the counter, opened it, and took out ajar of salve. "Put this all around your eyes, Ned. If some gets in them, don't worry. You won't hardly notice."

  We stood there, watching him put the salve around his eyes in circles that gleamed under the kitchen fluorescents. When he was done, Shirley asked him if it was any better. He nodded.

  "Then come outside again," I said. "There's one other thing I need to tell you. I would have earlier, but the truth is I never thought of it except in passing until I actually saw you sitting in that goddam car. The shock must have kicked it loose."

  Shirley looked at me with her brow furrowed. She'd never been a mother but it was a mother's sternness I saw on her face right then. "Not tonight," she said. "Can't you see this boy has had enough? One of you needs to take him home and make up some sort of story for his mother--she always believed Curtis's, I expect she'll believe one of yours if you can manage to stay together on the details--and then get him into bed."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't think this can wait," I said.

  She looked hard into my face and must have seen that I at least thought I was telling the truth, and so we all went back out to the smokers" bench, and as we watched the dying fireworks from the shed--the second show of the night, although there wasn't much to this one, at least not now--I told Ned one more story of the old days. I saw this one as you might see a scene from a play, two characters on a mostly bare stage, two characters beneath a single bright stagelight, two men sitting

  THEN: Curtis

  Two men sitting on the smokers" bench by the light of a summer sun and one will soon be dead--when it comes to our human lives there's a noose at the end of every chain and Curtis Wilcox has nearly . reached his. Lunch will be his last meal and neither of them knows it. This condemned man watches the other man light a cigarette and wishes he could have one himself but he's quit the habit. The cost of them is bad, Michelle was always ragging on him about that, but mostly it's wanting to see his children grow up. He wants to see their graduations, he wants to see the color of their children's hair. He has retirement plans as well, he and Michelle have talked them over a lot, the Winnebago that will take them out west where they may finally settle, but he will be retiring sootier than that, and alone. As for smoking, he never had to give up the pleasure at all but a man can't know that. Meanwhile the summer sun is pleasant. Later on the day will be hot, a hot day to die on, but now it's pleasant, and the thing across the way is quiet. It is quiet now for longer and longer stretches. The lightquakes, when they come, are milder. It is winding down, that's what the condemned State Trooper thinks. But Curtis can still sometimes feel its heartbeat and its quiet call and knows it will bear watching. This is his job; he has repudiated any chance of promotion in order to do it. It was his partner the Buick 8 got but in a way, he realizes, it got all of Curtis Wilcox it ever had to. He never locked himself in its trunk, as Huddie Royer once almost did in 1988, and it never ate him alive as it probably ate Brian Lippy, but it got him just the same. It's always close to his thoughts. He hears its whisper the way a fisherman sleeping in his house hears the whisper of the sea even in his sleep. And a whisper is a voice, and a thing with a voice can--

  He turns to Sandy Dearborn and asks "Does it think? Does it watch, think, wait for its chances?"

  Dearborn--the old hands still call him the New Sarge behind his back--doesn't need to ask what his friend is talking about. When it comes to the thing in Shed B they are of one mind, all of them, and sometimes Curtis thinks it calls even to those who have transferred out of D or quit the PSP altogether for some other, safer job; he thinks sometimes that it has marked them all like the Amish in their black clothes and black buggies are marked, or the way the priest dirties your forehead on Ash Wednesday, or like roadgang convicts linked together and digging a ditch of endless length.

  "I'm almost sure not," the New Sarge says.

  "Still, it saved its biggest horror show for a time when this place was almost completely deserted," says the man who quit cigarettes so he could watch his children grow up and bear him grandchildren. "As if it knew. As if it could think. And watch. And wait."

  The New Sarge laughs--a sound of amusement which contains just the thinnest rind of contempt. "You're gaga on the subject, Curt, Next you'll be telling me it sent out a ray or something to make that Norco tanker crash into the schoolbus that day."

  Trooper Wilcox has set his coffee aside on the bench so he can take off his big hat--his Stetson. He begins turning it over and over in his hands, an old habit of his. Kitty-corner from where they sit, Dicky-Duck Eliot pulls up to the gas pump and begins filling D-12, something they will not be able to do much longer. He spots them on the bench and waves. They give him a little of the old right-back-atcha, but the man with the hat-- the gray Trooper's Stetson that will finish its tour of duty in the weeds with the soda cans and fast-food wrappers--keeps his gaze mostly on the New Sarge. His eyes are asking if they can rule that out, if they can rule anything out.

  The Sarge, irritated by this, says: "Why don't we just finish it off, then? Finish it off and have done? Tow it into the back field, pour gasoline into her until it runs out the windows, then just light 'er up?"

  Curtis looks at him with an evenness that can't quite hide his shock. "That might be the most dangerous thing we could do with it," he says. "It might even be what it wants us to do. What it was sent to provoke. How many kids have lost fingers because they found something in the weeds they didn't know was a blastingcap and pounded it with a rock?"

  "Tins isn't the same."

  "How do you know it's not? How do you know?"

  And the New Sarge, who will later think, It should have been me whose hat wound up lying blood
-bolted on the side of the road, can say nothing. It seems almost profane to disagree with him, and besides, who knows? He could be right. Kids do blow off their fingers with blastingcaps or kill their little brothers with guns they find in their parents" bureau drawers or burn down the house with some old sparklight they found out in the garage. Because they don't know what they're playing with.

  "Suppose," says the man twirling his Stetson between his hands, "that the 8 is a kind of valve. Like the one in a scuba diver's regulator. Sometimes it breathes in and sometimes it breathes out, giving or receiving according to the will of the user. But what it does it always limited by the valve."

  "Yes, but--"

  "Or think of it. another way. Suppose it breathes like a man lying on the bottom of a swamp and using a hollow reed to sip air with so he won't be seen."

  "All right, but--"

  "Either way, everything comes in or goes out in small breaths, they must be small breaths, because the channel through which they pass is small. Maybe the thing using the valve or the reed has put itself into a kind of suspended state, like sleep or hypnosis, so it can survive on so little breath. And then suppose some misguided fool comes along and throws enough dynamite into the swamp to drain it and make the reed unnecessary. Or, if you're thinking in terms of a valve, blows it clean off. Would you want to risk that? Risk giving it all the goddam air it needs?"

  "No," the New Sarge says in a small voice.

  Curtis says: "Once Buck Flanders and Andy Colucci made up their minds to do that very thing."

  "The hell you say!"

  "The hell I don't," Curtis returns evenly. "Andy said if a couple of State Troopers couldn't get away with a little vehicular arson, they ought to turn in their badges. They even had a plan. They were going to blame it on the paint and the thinner out there in the hutch. Spontaneous combustion, poof, all gone. And besides, Buck said, who'd send for the Fire Marshal in the first place? It's just an old shed with some old beater of a Buick inside it, for Christ's sake."