"But you know the goddamn phone rang!" I insisted.
"Maybe a short circuit. Chuck, I'm telling you there was no one on the line."
***
Then Sunday. Three a.m. Cheyenne, Wyoming. Coming closer. But she couldn't be if she was dead.
***
The student newspaper at the University subscribes to all the other major student newspapers. Monday, Jean and I took the children with us and drove to its office. Friday's copy of the Berkeley campus newspaper had arrived. In desperation, I searched its pages. "There!" A two-inch item. Sudden student death. Samantha Perry. Tactfully, no cause was given.
Outside in the parking lot, Jean said, "Now do you believe she's dead?"
"Then tell me why I hear her voice! I've got to be crazy if I think I hear a corpse!"
"You're feeling guilty that she killed herself because of you. You shouldn't. There was nothing you could do to stop her. You've been losing too much sleep. Your imagination's taking over."
"You admit you heard the phone ring!"
"Yes, it's true. I can't explain that. If the phone's broken, we'll have it fixed. To put your mind at rest, we'll get a new, unlisted number."
I felt better. After several drinks, I even got some sleep.
***
But Monday night, again the phone rang. Three a.m. I jerked awake. Cringing, I insisted that Jean answer it. But she heard just the dial tone. I grabbed the phone. Of course, I heard Sam's voice.
"I'm almost there. I'll hurry. I'm in Omaha."
"This number isn't listed!"
"But you told me the new one. Your wife's the one who changed it. She's trying to keep us apart. I'll make her sorry. Darling, I can't wait to be with you."
I screamed. Jean jerked away from me.
"Sam, you've got to stop!" I shouted into the phone. "I spoke to Dr. Campbell!"
"No. He wouldn't dare. He wouldn't violate my trust."
"He told me you were dead!"
"I couldn't live without you. Soon we'll be together."
My shrieks woke the children. I was so hysterical that Jean had to call for an ambulance. Two attendants struggled to sedate me.
***
Omaha was one day's drive from where we live. Jean came to visit me in the hospital on Tuesday.
"Are you feeling better?" She frowned at the restraints that held me down.
"Please, you have to humor me," I said. "All right? Suspect I've gone crazy, but for God's sake, humor me. I can't prove what I'm thinking, but I know you're in danger. I am, too. You have to get the children and leave town. You have to hide somewhere. Tonight at three a.m., she'll reach the house."
Jean studied me with pity.
"Promise me!" I said.
Jean saw the anguish on my face and nodded.
"Maybe she won't try the house," I said. "She seems to know everything. She might know I'm in the hospital. She might come here. I have to get away. I'm not sure how, but later, when you're gone, I'll find a way to get out of these restraints."
Jean peered at me, distressed. Her voice sounded totally discouraged. "Chuck."
"I'll check the house. If you're still there, you'll make me more upset."
"I promise. I'll take Susan and Rebecca. We'll drive somewhere."
"I love you."
Jean began to cry. "I won't know where you are."
"If I survive this, I'll get word to you."
"But how?"
"The English department. I'll leave a message with the secretary."
Jean leaned down to kiss me, crying, certain I'd lost my mind.
***
I reached the house shortly after dark. As Jean had promised, she'd left with the children. I got in my sports car and raced to the Interstate.
***
A Chicago hotel where at three a.m. Sam phoned from Iowa City. She'd heard my voice. She said I'd told her where I was. She was hurt and angry. "Tell me why you're running."
***
I fled from Chicago in the middle of the night, driving until I absolutely had to rest. I checked in here at one a.m. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I can't sleep. I've got an awful feeling. Last night Sam repeated, "Soon you'll join me." In the desk, I found this stationery.
God, it's three a.m. I pray that I'll see the sun come up.
***
It's almost four. She didn't phone. I can't believe I escaped. I keep staring at the phone.
***
It's four. Dear Christ, I hear the ringing.
Finally I've realized. Sam killed herself at one. In Iowa, the time zone difference made it three. But I'm in Pennsylvania. In the east. A different time zone. One o'clock in California would be four o'clock, not three, in Pennsylvania.
Now.
The ringing persists. But I've realized something else. This hotel's unusual, designed to seem like a home.
The ringing?
God help me, it isn't the phone. It's the doorbell.
As I mentioned in my note for "But at My Back I Always Hear," there is something about the flat, wide, open spaces of the Midwest that can cause fright as much as awe. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I thought I knew how bad a thunderstorm could be. But no weather there prepared me for the terror of an Iowa thunderstorm. As a character in this story points out, some Iowa storms can be seven miles high. When the weather forecasters announce a thunderstorm warning, you pay attention. Green skies. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds. Look out. One summer, lightning struck my house three times. In the middle of the night, while I lay in bed awake, feeling thunder shake the windows, I decided to write a story about it. "The Storm" was included in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories for 1984.
The Storm
« ^ »
Gail saw it first. She came from the Howard Johnsons toward the heat haze in the parking lot where our son, Jeff, and I were hefting luggage into our station wagon. Actually, Jeff supervised. He gave me his excited ten-year-old advice about the best place for this suitcase and that knapsack. Grinning at his sun-bleached hair and nut-brown freckled face, I told him I could never have done the job without him.
It was eight a.m., Tuesday, August second, but even that early, the thermometer outside our motel unit had risen to eighty-five. The humidity was thick and smothering. Just from my slight exertion with the luggage, I'd sweated through my shirt and jeans, wishing I'd thought to put on shorts. To the east, the sun blazed, white and swollen, the sky an oppressive chalky blue. This would be one day when the station wagon's air conditioning wouldn't be just a comfort but a necessity.
My hands were sweat-slick as I shut the hatch. Jeff nodded, satisfied with my work, then grinned beyond me. Turning, I saw Gail coming toward us. When she left the brown parched grass, her brow creased as her sandals touched the heat-softened asphalt parking lot.
"All set?" she asked.
Her smooth white shorts and cool blue top emphasized her tan. She looked trim and lithe and wonderful. I'm not sure how she did it, but she seemed completely unaffected by the heat. Her hair was soft and golden. Her subtle trace of makeup made the day seem somehow cooler.
"Ready. Thanks to Jeff," I told her.
Jeff grinned up proudly.
"Well, I paid the bill. I gave them back the key," Gail said. "Let's go." She paused. "Except…"
"What's wrong?"
"Those clouds." She pointed past my shoulder.
I turned and frowned. In contrast to the blinding eastern sky, thick black clouds seethed on the western horizon. They roiled and churned. In the distance, lightning flickered like a string of flashbulbs, thunder rumbling hollowly.
"Now where the hell did that come from?" I said. "It wasn't there before I packed the car."
Gail squinted toward the thunderheads. "You think we should wait till it passes?"
"It isn't close." I shrugged.
"But it's coming fast." Gail bit her lip. "And it looks bad."
Jeff grabbed my hand. I glanced at his worried face.
"It's just a storm, son."
br /> Jeff surprised me, though. I'd misjudged what worried him.
"I want to go back home," he said. "I don't want to wait. I miss my friends. Please, can't we leave?"
I nodded. "I'm on your side. Two votes out of three, Gail. If you're really scared, though…"
"No. I…" Gail drew a breath and shook her head. "I'm being silly. It's just the thunder. You know how storms bother me." She ruffled Jeff's hair. "But I won't make us wait. I'm homesick, too."
We'd spent the past two weeks in Colorado, fishing, camping, touring ghost towns. The vacation had been perfect. But as eagerly as we'd gone, we were just as eager to be heading back. Last night, we'd stopped here in North Platte, a small quiet town off Interstate 80, halfway through Nebraska. Now, today, we hoped we could reach home in Iowa City by nightfall.
"Let's get moving then," I said. "It's probably a local storm. We'll drive ahead of it. We'll never see a drop of rain."
Gail tried to smile. "I hope."
Jeff hummed as we got in the station wagon. I steered toward the Interstate, went up the eastbound ramp, and set the cruise control for the speed limit of fifty-five. Ahead, the morning sun glared through the windshield. After I tugged down the visors, I turned on the air conditioner, then the radio. The local weatherman said hot and hazy.
"Hear that?" I said. "He didn't mention a storm. No need to worry. Those are only heat clouds."
***
I was wrong. From time to time, I checked the rearview mirror, and the clouds loomed thicker, blacker, closer, seething toward us down the Interstate. Ahead, the sun kept blazing fiercely. Jeff wiped his sweaty face. I set the air conditioner for DESERT, but it didn't seem to help.
"Jeff, reach in the ice chest. Grab us each a Coke."
He grinned. But I suddenly felt uneasy, realizing too late that he'd have to turn to open the chest in the rear compartment.
"Gosh," he murmured, staring back, awestruck.
"What's the matter?" Gail swung around before I could stop her. "Oh, my God, the clouds."
They were angry midnight chasing us. Lightning flashed. Thunder jolted.
"They still haven't reached us," I said. "If you want, I'll try outrunning them."
"Do something."
I switched off the cruise control and sped to sixty, then sixty-five. The strain of squinting toward the white-hot sky ahead of us gave me a piercing headache. I put on my sunglasses.
But all at once I didn't need them. Abruptly the clouds caught up to us. The sky went totally black. We drove in roiling darkness.
"Seventy. I'm doing seventy," I said. "But the clouds are moving faster."
"Almost a hurricane," Gail said. "That isn't possible. Not in Nebraska."
"I'm scared," Jeff said.
He wasn't the only one. Lightning blinded me, stabbing to the right and left of us. Thunder shook the car. Then the air became an eerie, dirty shade of green, and I started thinking about tornadoes.
"Find a place to stop!" Gail shouted.
But there wasn't one. We'd already passed the exit for the next town, Kearny. I searched for a roadside park, but a sign said REST STOP, THIRTY MILES. I couldn't just pull off the highway. On the shoulder, if the rain obscured another driver's vision, we could all be hit and killed. No choice. I had to keep driving.
"At least it isn't raining," I said.
The clouds unloaded. No preliminary sprinkle. Massive raindrops burst around us, gusting, roaring, pelting.
"I can't see!" I flicked the windshield wipers to their highest setting. They flapped in sharp, staccato, triple time. I peered through murky, undulating, wind swept waves of water, struggling for a clear view of the highway.
I was going too fast. When I braked, the station wagon fishtailed. We skidded on the slippery pavement. I couldn't breathe. The tires gripped. I felt the jolt. Then the car was in control.
I slowed to forty, but the rain heaved with such force against the windshield I still couldn't see.
"Pull your seatbelts tight."
***
Although I never found that rest stop, I got lucky when a flash of lightning showed a sign, the exit for a town called Grand Island. Shaking from tension, I eased down the off ramp. At the bottom, across from me, a Best Western motel was shrouded with rain. We left a wake through the flooded parking lot and stopped under the motel's canopy. My hands were stiff from clenching the steering wheel. My shoulders ached. My eyes felt swollen, raw.
Gail and Jeff got out, rain gusting under the canopy as they ran inside. I had to move the car to park it in the lot. I locked the doors, but although I sprinted, I was drenched and chilled when I reached the motel's entrance.
Inside, a small group stared past me toward the storm — two clerks, two waitresses, a cleaning lady. I trembled.
"Mister, use this towel," the cleaning lady said. She took one from a pile on her cart.
I thanked her, wiping my dripping face and soggy hair.
"See any accidents?" a waitress asked.
With the towel around my neck, I shook my head no.
"A storm this sudden, there ought to be accidents," the waitress said as if doubting me.
I frowned when she said sudden. "You mean it's just starting here?"
A skinny clerk stepped past me to the window. "Not too long before you came. A minute maybe. I looked out this window, and the sky was bright. I knelt to tie my shoe. When I stood up, the clouds were here — as black as night. I don't know where they came from all of a sudden, but I never saw it rain so hard so fast."
"But — " I shivered, puzzled. "The storm hit us back near Kearny. We've been driving in it for an hour."
"You were on the edge of it, I guess," the clerk said, spellbound by the devastation outside. "It followed you."
My cold wet shirt clung to me, but I felt a deeper chill.
"Looks like we've got other customers," the second clerk said, pointing out the window.
Other cars splashed through the torrent in the parking lot.
"Yeah, we'll be busy, that's for sure," the clerk said. He switched on the lights, but they didn't dispel the outside gloom.
The wind howled.
I glanced around the lobby, suddenly noticing that Gail and Jeff weren't in sight. "My wife and son."
"They're in the restaurant," the second waitress said, smiling to reassure me. "Through that arch. They ordered coffee for you. Hot and strong."
"I need it. Thanks."
Dripping travelers stumbled in.
***
We waited an hour. Although the coffee was as hot as promised, it didn't warm me. In the air conditioning, my soggy clothes stuck to the chilly chrome-and-plastic seat. A bone-deep freezing numbness made me sneeze.
"You need dry clothes," Gail said. "You'll catch pneumonia."
I'd hoped the storm would stop before I went out for the clothes. But even in the restaurant, I felt the thunder rumble. I couldn't wait. My muscles cramped from shivering. "I'll get a suitcase." I stood.
"Dad, be careful." Jeff looked worried.
Smiling, I leaned down and kissed him. "Son, I promise."
Near the restaurant's exit, one of the waitresses I'd talked to came over. "You want to hear a joke?"
I didn't, but I nodded politely.
"On the radio," she said. "The local weatherman. He claims it's hot and clear."
I shook my head, confused.
"The storm." She laughed. "He doesn't know it's raining. All his instruments, his radar and his charts, he hasn't brains enough to look outside and see what kind of day it is. If anything, the rain got worse." She laughed again. "The biggest joke — that dummy's my husband."
I laughed to be agreeable and went to the lobby.
It was crowded. More rain-drenched travelers pushed in, cursing the weather. They tugged at dripping clothes and bunched before the motel's counter, wanting rooms.
I squeezed past them, stopping at the big glass door, squinting out at the wildest rain I'd ever seen. Above the exclamation
s of the crowd, I heard the shriek of the wind.
My hand reached for the door.
It hesitated. I really didn't want to go out.
The skinny desk clerk suddenly stood next to me. "It could be you're not interested," he said.
I frowned, surprised.
"We're renting rooms so fast we'll soon be all full up," he said. "But fair is fair. You got here first. I saved a room. In case you plan on staying."
"I appreciate it. But we're leaving soon."
"You'd better take another look."
I did. Lightning split a tree. The window shook from thunder.
A steaming bath, I thought. A sizzling steak. Warm blankets while my clothes get dry.
"I changed my mind. We'll take that room."
***
All night, thunder shook the building. Even with the drapes shut, I saw brilliant streaks of lightning. I slept fitfully, waking with a headache. Six a.m., it was still raining.
On the radio, the weatherman sounded puzzled. As the lightning's static garbled what he said, I learned that Grand Island was suffering the worst storm in its history. Streets were flooded, sewers blocked, basements overflowing. An emergency had been declared, the damage in the millions. But the cause of the storm seemed inexplicable. The weather pattern made no sense. The front was tiny, localized, and stationary. Half a mile outside Grand Island — north and south, east and west — the sky was cloudless.
That last statement was all I needed to know. We quickly dressed and went downstairs to eat. We checked out shortly after seven.
"Driving in this rain?" The desk clerk shook his head. He had the tact not to tell me I was crazy.
"Listen to the radio," I answered. "Half a mile away, the sky is clear."