Christine (50 page)

The first early morning of 1979 was deeply, clearly cold, the kind of cold that makes the moisture in your nose freeze in seconds. The snowbanks ringing the driveway glittered with billions of diamond crystals. And there sat Christine, her black windows cauled with frost. I stared at her.
The Mob,
Arnie had said.
The Southern Mob or the Colombians.
It sounded melodramatic but possible—no, more: it sounded plausible. But the Mob shot people, pushed them out of windows, strangled them. According to legend, Al Capone had disposed of one poor sucker with a lead-cored baseball bat. But to drive a car over some guy's snow-covered lawn and slam it through the side of his house and into his living room?

The Colombians, maybe. Arnie said the Colombians are crazy.
But
that
crazy? I didn't think so.

She glittered in the light from the house and the stars, and what if it
was
her? And what if she found out that Leigh and I had our suspicions? Worse yet, what if she found out that we had been fooling around?

“You need help on the steps, Dennis?” Arnie asked, startling me.

“No, I can handle the steps,” I said. “You might have to give me a hand on the path.” “No problem, man.”

I got down the kitchen steps sidesaddle, clutching the railing in one hand and my crutches in the other. On the path, I set them under me, got out a couple of steps, and then slipped. A dull thud of pain rumbled up my left leg, the one that still wasn't worth doodly-squat. Arnie grabbed me.

“Thanks,” I said, glad of a chance to sound shaky.

“No sweat.”

We got over to the car, and Arnie asked if I could get in by myself. I said I could. He left me and crossed around the front of Christine's hood. I got hold of the doorhandle with one gloved hand, and a hopeless feeling of dread and revulsion swept over me. It wasn't until then that I really began to believe it, deep inside, where a person lives. Because that doorhandle felt alive under my hand. It felt like some living beast that was asleep. The doorhandle didn't feel like chromed steel; dear Christ, it felt like
skin.
It seemed as if I could squeeze it and wake the beast up, roaring.

Beast?

Okay,
what
beast?

What was it? Some sort of
afreet?
An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of LeBay's lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber? I didn't know. All I knew was that I was scared, terrified. I didn't think I could go through with this.

“Hey, you okay?” Arnie asked. “Can you make it?”

“I can make it,” I said hoarsely, and jammed my thumb down on the button below the handle. I opened the door, turned my back on the seat, and let myself fall backward onto it, left leg extending stiffly. I got hold of my leg and swung it in. It was like moving a piece of furniture. My heart was triphammering in my chest. I pulled the door shut.

Arnie turned the key and the motor rumbled to life—as if the engine were hot instead of dead cold. And the smell assaulted me, seeming to come from everywhere, but most of all seeming to pour up from the upholstery: the sick, rich, rotten smell of death and decay.

• • •

I don't know how to tell you about that ride home, that three-mile ride that lasted no more than ten or twelve minutes, without sounding like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. There is no way to be objective about it; just sitting here and trying is enough to make me feel cold and hot at the same time, feverish and ill. There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination. But it wasn't drunkenness; if I can assure you of nothing else, I can assure you of that. Any mild high I retained from the beer evaporated immediately. What followed was a cold-sober tour of the country of the damned.

We went back in time, for one thing.

• • •

For a while Arnie wasn't driving at all; it was LeBay, rotting and stinking of the grave, half skeleton and half rotting, spongy flesh, greenly corroded buttons. Maggots squirmed their sluggish way up from his collar. I could hear a low buzzing sound and thought at first it was a short circuit in one of the dashboard lights. It was only later that I began to think it might have been the sound of flies hatching in his flesh. Of course it was wintertime, but—

At times, there seemed to be other people in the car with us. Once I glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw a wax dummy of a woman staring at me with the bright and sparkling eyes of a stuffed trophy. Her hair was done in a 50s pageboy style. Her cheeks appeared to have been wildly rouged, and I remembered that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to give the illusion of life and high color. Later, I glanced into the mirror again and seemed to see a little girl back there, her face blackened with strangulation, her eyes popping like those of some cruelly squeezed stuffed animal. I shut my eyes tight and when I opened them it was Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney in the rearview mirror. Crusted blood had dried on Buddy's mouth, chin, neck, and shirt. Richie was a roasted hulk—but his eyes were alive and aware.

Slowly, Buddy extended his arm. He was holding a bottle of Texas Driver in one blackened hand.

I closed my eyes once more. And after that, I didn't look into the rearview anymore.

I remember rock and roll on the radio: Dion and the Belmonts, Ernie K-Doe, the Royal Teens, Bobby Rydell (“Oh, Bobby, oh . . . everything's cool . . . we're glad you go to a swingin' school . . .”).

I remember that for a while red Styrofoam dice seemed to be hanging from the rearview mirror, then for a while there were baby shoes, and then there was neither one.

Most of all I remember seizing the idea that these things, like the smell of rotting flesh and mouldy upholstery, were only in my mind—that they were no more than the mirages that haunt the consciousness of an opium-eater.

I was like someone who is badly stoned and trying to make some kind of rational conversation with a straight person. Because Arnie and I
did
talk; I remember that, but not what we talked about. I held up my end. I kept my voice normal. I responded. And that ten or twelve minutes seemed to last hours.

I have told you that it is impossible to be objective about that ride; if there was a logical progression of events, it is lost to me now, blocked out. That journey through the cold black night really was like a trip on a boulevard through hell. I can't remember everything that happened, but I can remember more than I want to. We backed out of the driveway and into a mad funhouse world where all the creeps were real.

• • •

We went back in time, I have said, but did we? The present-day streets of Libertyville were still there, but they were like a thin overlay of film—it was as if the Libertyville of the late 1970s had been drawn on Saran Wrap and laid over a time that was somehow more real, and I could feel that time reaching its dead hands out toward us, trying to catch us and draw us in forever. Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad's Jewelry Store and the Strand Theater, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street—gathered here and there in clumps where New Year
's Eve parties were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s . . . or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. A '57 Dodge Lancer four-door hardtop. Ford Fairlanes with their distinctive taillights, each like a big colon lying on its side. Pontiacs in which the grille had not yet been split. Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel.

“Yeah, this year is going to be better,” Arnie said. I glanced over at him. He raised his beer-can to his lips, and before it got there his face had turned to LeBay's, a rotting figure from a horror comic. The fingers that held the beer were only bones. I swear to you, they were only bones, and the pants lay nearly flat against the seat, as if there was nothing inside them except broomsticks.

“Is it?” I said, breathing the car's foul and choking miasma as shallowly as possible and trying not to choke,

“It is,” LeBay said, only now he was Arnie again, and as we paused at a stop sign, I saw a '77 Camaro go ripping past. “All I ask is that you stand by me a little, Dennis. Don't let my mother drag you into this shit. Things are going to turn out.” He was LeBay again, grinning fleshlessly and eternally at the idea of things turning out. I felt my brains beginning to totter. Surely I would scream soon.

I dropped my eyes from that terrible half-face and saw what Leigh had seen: dashboard instruments that weren't instruments at all, but luminescent green eyes bulging out at me.

• • •

At some point the nightmare ended. We pulled up at the curb in an area of town I didn
't even recognize, an area I would have sworn I had never seen before. Tract houses stood dark everywhere, some of them three-quarters finished, some no more than frames. Halfway down the block, lit by Christine's hi-beams, was a sign which read:

MAPLEWAY ESTATES

LIBERTYVILLE REALTORS SOLE SELLING AGENTS

A Good Place to Raise
YOUR
Family

Think About It!

“Well, here you go,” Arnie said. “Can you make it up the walk yourself, man?”

I looked doubtfully around at this deserted, snow-covered development and then nodded. Better here, on crutches, alone, than in that terrible car. I felt a large plastic smile on my face. “Sure. Thanks.”

“Negative perspiration,” Arnie said. He finished his beer and LeBay tossed it into a litter bag. “Another dead soldier.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Happy New Year, Arnie.” I fumbled for the doorhandle and opened it. I wondered if I could get out, if my trembling arms would support the crutches.

LeBay was looking at me, grinning. “Just stay on my side, Dennis,” he said. “You know what happens to shitters who don't.”

“Yes,” I whispered. I knew, all right.

I got my crutches out and heaved myself up onto them, careless of any ice that might be underneath. They held me. And once out, the world underwent a swimming, twisting change. Lights came on—but of course, they had been there all along. My family had moved into Mapleway Estates in June of 1959, the year before I was born. We still lived here, but the area had stopped being known as Mapleway Estates by 1963 or '64 at the latest.

Out of the car, I was looking at my own house on my own perfectly normal street—just another part of Libertyville, Pa. I looked back at Arnie, half-expecting to see LeBay again, taxi-driver from hell with his benighted cargo of the long-dead.

But it was only Arnie, wearing his high school jacket with his name sewn over the left breast, Arnie looking too pale and too alone, Arnie with a can of beer propped against his crotch.

“Good night, man.”

“Good night,” I said. “Be careful going home. You don't want to get picked up.”

“I won't,” he said. “You take care, Dennis.”

“I will.”

I shut the door. My horror had changed to a deep and terrible sorrow—it was as if he had been buried. Buried alive. I watched Christine pull away from the curb and head off down the street. I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Then I started up the walk to the house. The walk was clear. My dad had scattered most of a ten-pound bag of Halite over it with me in mind.

I was three-quarters of the way to the door when a grayness seemed to drift over me like smoke and I had to stop and put my head down and try to hold onto myself. I could faint out here, I thought dimly, and then freeze to death on my own front walk where once Arnie and I had played hopscotch and jacks and statue-tag.

At last, little by little, the grayness started to clear. I felt an arm around my waist. It was Dad, in his bathrobe and slippers.

“Dennis, are you okay?”

Was I okay? I had been driven home by a corpse.

“Yea,” I said. “Got a little dizzy. Let's get in. You'll freeze your butt off.”

He walked up the steps with me, his arm still circling my waist. I was glad to have it.

“Is Mom still up?” I asked.

“No—she saw the New Year in, and then she and Ellie went to bed. Are you drunk, Dennis?”

“No.”

“You don't look good,” he said, slamming the door behind us.

I uttered a crazy little shriek of laughter, and things went gray again . . . but only briefly this time. When I came back, he was looking at me with tight concern.

“What happened over there?”

“Dad—”

“Dennis, you talk to me!”

“Dad, I can't.”

“What
is
it with him? What's wrong with him, Dennis?”

I only shook my head, and it wasn't just the craziness of it, or fear for myself. Now I was afraid for all of them—my dad, my mom, Elaine, Leigh's folks. Coldly and sanely afraid.

Just stay on my side, Dennis. You know what happens to shitters who don't.

Had I really heard that?

Or had it been in my mind only?

My father was still looking at me.

“I
can't.”

“All right,” he said. “For now. I guess. But I need to know one thing, Dennis, and I want you to tell me. Do you have any reason to believe that Arnie was involved some way with Darnell's death, and the deaths of those boys?”

I thought of LeBay's rotting, grinning face, the flat pants poked up by something that could only have been bones.