Christine (58 page)

“Come on, get in,” I said.

“Dennis, are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

She went around to the passenger side and got in. I slammed my own door, depressed Petunia's clutch with the broom-handle, and geared into first. I had the clutch halfway out and Petunia was just starting to roll forward when the broom-handle slipped off the clutch again. The septic tanker ran inside Darnell's Garage with a series of neck-snapping jerks, and when I slammed my right foot down on the brake, the truck stalled. We were mostly inside.

“Leigh, I've got to have something with a wider foot,” I said. “This broom-handle don't cut it.”

“I'll see what there is.”

She got out and began to walk around the edge of the garage floor, hunting. I stared around.
Creepy,
Leigh had said, and she was right. The only cars left were four or five old soldiers so gravely wounded that no one had cared enough to claim them. All the rest of the slant spaces with their numbers stencilled in white paint were empty. I glanced at stall twenty and then glanced away.

The overhead tire racks were likewise nearly empty. A few baldies remained, heeled over against one another like giant doughnuts blackened in a fire, but that was all. One of the two lifts was partially up, with a wheel-rim caught beneath it. The front-end alignment chart on the right-hand wall glimmered faintly red and white, the two headlight targets like bloodshot eyes. And shadows, shadows everywhere. Overhead, big box-shaped heaters pointed their louvers this way and that, roosting up there like weird bats.

It seemed very much like a death-place.

Leigh had used another of Jimmy's keys to open Will's office. I could see her moving back and forth in there through the window. Will had used to look out at his customers . . . those working joes who had to keep their cars running so they could blah-blah-blah. She flipped some switches, and the overhead fluorescents came on in snow-cold ranks. So the electric company hadn't cut off the juice. I'd have to have her turn the lights off again—we couldn't afford to risk attracting attention—but at least we could have some heat.

She opened another door and disappeared temporarily from view. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty now.

She came back, and I saw that she was holding an O-Cedar mop, the kind with the wide yellow sponge along the foot.

“Would this be any good?”

“Only perfect,” I said. “Get in, kiddo. We're in business.” She climbed up once more, and I pushed the clutch down with the mop. “Lots better,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the bathroom,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“Bad in there?”

“Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there's a whole pile of mouldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.”

So that was what Darnell left behind him, I thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars. I felt cold again, and thought that if I had my way, I'd see this place bulldozed flat and pasted over with hottop. I could not shake the feeling that it was an unmarked grave of a sort—the place where LeBay and Christine had killed my friend's mind and taken over his life.

“I can't wait to get out of here,” Leigh said, looking around nervously.

“Really? I kind of like it. I was thinking of moving in.” I caressed her shoulder and looked deeply into her eyes. “We could start a family,” I breathed.

She held up a fist. “Want me to start a nosebleed?”

“No, that's all right. For what it's worth, I can't wait to get out of here, either.” I drove Petunia the rest of the way inside. I found that I could run the clutch pretty well using the O-Cedar mop . . . in first gear, at least. The handle had a tendency to bend, and I would have preferred something thicker, but it would have to do unless we could find something better in the meantime.

“We've got to turn off the lights again,” I said, killing the engine. “The wrong people might see them.”

She got out and turned them off while I swung Petunia in a wide circle and then carefully backed it up until the rear end almost touched the window between the garage and Darnell's office. Now the big truck's snout was pointing directly back at the open overhead door through which we had entered.

With the lights off, the shadows descended again. The light coming in through the open door was weak, muted by the snow, white and without strength. It spread on the oil-stained, cracked concrete like a pie-wedge and simply died halfway across the floor.

“I'm cold, Dennis,” Leigh called from Darnell's office. “He's got the switches for the heat marked. Can I turn them on?”

“Go ahead,” I called back.

A moment later the garage whispered with the sound of the blowers. I leaned back against the seat, gently running my hands over my left leg. The material of my jeans was stretched smoothly over the thigh, tight and without a wrinkle. The sonofabitch was swelling. And it hurt. Christ, did it hurt.

Leigh came back and climbed up beside me. She told me again how terrible I looked, and for some reason my mind cross-patched and I thought of the afternoon Arnie had brought Christine down here, of the be-bop queen's husband yelling for Arnie to get that hunk of junk out from in front of his house, and of Arnie telling me the guy was a regular Robert Deadford. How we had gotten the giggles. I closed my eyes against the sting of tears.

• • •

With nothing to do but wait, time slowed down. It was quarter of two, then two o
'clock. Outside, the snow had thickened a little, but not much. Leigh got out of the truck and pushed the button that trundled the door back down. That made it even darker inside.

She came back, climbed up, and said, “There's a funny gadget on the side of the door—see it? It looks just like the electronic garage door-opener we used to have when we lived in Weston.”

I sat up suddenly. Stared at it. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What's the matter?”

“That's just what it is. A garage door-opener. And there's one of the transmitter gadgets on Christine. Arnie mentioned that to me Thanksgiving night. You've got to break it, Leigh. Use the handle of that push broom.”

So she got down again, picked up the broom-handle, and stood below the electric eye gadget, looking up and bashing at it with the handle. She looked like a woman trying to kill a bug near the ceiling. At last she was rewarded with a crunch of plastic and tinkle of glass.

She came back slowly, tossing the broom-handle aside, and got up beside me. “Dennis, don't you think it's time you told me exactly what you've got in mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, and pointed at the closed overhead door. Five square windows in a line three-quarters of the way up its height let in minimal light through dirty glass. “When it gets dark you plan to open that door again, don't you?”

I nodded. The door itself was wood, but it was braced with hinged steel strips, like the inner gate of an old-time elevator. I'd let her in, but once the door was shut, Christine wouldn't be able to bash her way back out again. I hoped. It made me cold to think how close we'd come to overlooking the electronic door-opener.

Open the door at dusk, yes. Let Christine in, yes. Close the door again. Then I would use Petunia to batter her to death.

“Okay,” she said, “that's the trap. But once she—it—comes in, how are you going to get that door shut again to keep her in? Maybe there's a button in Darnell's office that does it, but I didn't see it.”

“So far as I know, there isn't one,” I said. “So you're going to be standing over there by the button that shuts the door.” I pointed. The manual button was located on the right side of the door, about two feet below the ruins of the electric door-opener box. “You'll be against the wall, out of sight. When Christine comes in—always assuming she does—you're going to push the button that starts the door coming down and then step outside in a hurry. The door comes down. And, bam! The trap's shut.”

Her face set. “On you as well as her. In the words of the immortal Wordsworth, that sucks.”

“That's Coleridge, not Wordsworth. There's no other way to do it, Leigh. If you're still inside when that door comes down, Christine is going to run you down. Even if there was a button in Darnell's office—well, you saw in the paper what happened to the side of his house.”

Her face was stubborn. “Park over by the switch. And when she comes in, I'll reach out the window and hit the button and lower the door.”

“If I park there, I'll be in sight. And if this tank is in sight, she won't come in.”

“I don't like it!” she burst out. “I don't like leaving you alone! It's like you tricked me!”

In a way, that's just what I had done, and for whatever it's worth, I would not do it the same way now—but I was going on eighteen then, and there's no male chauvinist pig like an eighteen-year-old male chauvinist pig. I put an arm around her shoulders. She resisted stiffly for a moment and then came to me. “There's just no other way,” I said. “If it wasn't for my leg, or if you could drive a standard shift—” I shrugged.

“I'm scared for you, Dennis. I want to help.”

“You'll be helping plenty. You're the one that's really in danger, Leigh—you'll be outside, on the floor, when she comes in. I'm just going to sit up here in the cab and beat that bitch back into component parts.”

“I only hope it works that way,” she said, and put her head on my chest. I touched her hair.

So we waited.

In my mind's eye I could see Arnie coming out of the main building at LHS, books under his arm. I could see Regina waiting for him there in the Cunninghams' compact wagon, radiant with happiness. Arnie smiling remotely and submitting to her embrace. Arnie, you've made the right decision . . . you don't know how relieved, how
happy,
your father and I are. Yes, Mom. Do you want to drive, honey? No, you drive. Mom. That's okay.

The two of them setting off for Penn State through the light snow, Regina driving, Arnie sitting in the shotgun seat with his hands folded stiffly in his lap, his face pale and unsmiling and clear of acne.

And back in the student parking lot at LHS, Christine sitting silently in the driveway. Waiting for the snow to thicken. Waiting for dark.

At three-thirty or so, Leigh went back through Darnell's office to use the bathroom, and while she was gone I dry-swallowed two more Darvon. My leg was a steady, leaden agony.

Shortly after that, I lost coherent track of time. The dope had me fuddled, I guess. The whole thing began to seem dreamlike: the deepening shadows, the white light coming in through the windows slowly changing to an ashy gray, the drone of the overhead heaters.

I think that Leigh and I made love .. . not in the ordinary way, not with my leg the way it was, but some kind of sweet substitute. I seem to remember her breath steepening in my ear until she was nearly panting; I seem to remember her whispering for me to be careful, to please be careful, that she had lost Arnie and could not bear to lose me too. I seem to remember an explosion of pleasure that made the pain disappear in a brief but total way that not all the Darvon in the world could manage . . . but brief was the right word. It was all too brief. And then I think I dozed.

The next thing I remember for sure was Leigh shaking me fully awake and whispering my name over and over in my ear.

“Huh? What?” I was spaced out and my leg was full of a glassy pain, simply waiting to explode. There was an ache in my temples, and my eyes felt too big for their sockets. I blinked around at Leigh like a large stupid owl.

“It's dark,” she said. “I thought I heard something.”

I blinked again and saw that she looked drawn and frightened. Then I glanced toward the door and saw that it was standing wide open.

“How the hell did that—”

“Me,” she said, “I opened it.”

“Cripes!” I said, straightening up a little and wincing at the pain in my leg. “That wasn't too smart, Leigh. If she had come—”

“She didn't,” Leigh said. “It started to get dark, that's all, and to snow harder. So I got out and opened the door and then I came back here. I kept thinking you'd wake up in a minute . . . you were mumbling . . . and I kept thinking, ‘I'll wait until it's really dark, I'll just wait until it's really dark,' and then I saw I was fooling myself, because it's been dark for almost half an hour now and I was only thinking I could still see some light. Because I wanted to see it, I guess. And . . . just now . . . I thought I heard something.”

Her lips began to tremble and she pressed them tightly together.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was quarter to six. If everything had gone right, my parents and sister would be together with Michael and Leigh's folks now. I looked through Petunia's windshield at the square of snow-shot darkness where the garage entrance was. I could hear the wind shrieking. A thin creeper of snow had already blown in onto the cement.

“You just heard the wind,” I said uneasily. “It's walking and talking out there.”

“Maybe. But—”

I nodded reluctantly. I didn't want her to leave the safety of Petunia's high cab, but if she didn't go now, maybe she never would. I wouldn't let her, and she would let me not let her. And then, when and if Christine came, all she would have to do would be to reverse back out of Darnell's.

And wait for a more opportune time.

“Okay,” I said. “But remember . . . stand back in that little niche to the right of the door. If she comes, she may just stand outside for a while.”
Scenting the air like an animal,
I thought. “Don't get scared, don't move. Don't let her freak you into giving yourself away. Just be cool and wait until she comes in. Then push that button and get the hell out. Do you understand?”