Authors: Ramsey Campbell
"I can't see any ditch. I can't see any anything except what I've been seeing since it's beginning to look like forever."
"You want me not to be able to stop if we meet something coming."
"Who else is going to be along here at whatever time of night it is in this? They'd hardly be driving to Fenny Meadows, and there's nowhere else to drive."
Jill almost cites the motorway, except of course it's shut and in any case she has never seen anyone use this route to it. She still won't be told how to drive, especially by Connie. She's overwhelmed by an impulse to twist the wheel and ram the Nova through the hedge to speed across the field. "Fast enough for you?" she can already hear herself enquiring. Only reluctance to damage the car holds her back, and she isn't certain that it will if Connie antagonises her any more. She's daring her to add to her uninvited comments when Connie slaps herself on the forehead as if a mosquito has bitten it. She can hurt herself all she likes as far as Jill's concerned, but apparently the blow aimed to wake her brain up, because she says "We'll have to go back."
Jill lets the car carry them a good few yards before she bothers asking "Why's that?"
"Not now. When I've phoned about the shop and my car. I'll need to be with it when they come to fix the engine."
Jill refrains from treading hard on the accelerator to outdistance the proposal. "It can wait till you get home, surely."
"And how do you expect me to get back from there?"
Jill is expecting nothing to do with it, and if it were possible she would care even less, but says "Can't you get whoever you call to pick you up at home? Use your charm or be helpless. I'm sure you're good at one of those."
Connie turns her face towards her yet again, and Jill grows clammy with refusing to look at the wad of flesh Connie is poking at her. The wheel seems to prickle as she grips it so as not to lash out. She's hoping for both their sakes that she can dislodge Connie's gaze by saying "Anyway, I thought you'd want to go home first so you can catch up on your sleep."
After a pause Connie faces the suffocated glow they're following. "Maybe I won't be able to sleep for thinking. That's how I get sometimes."
"It's only a car, Connie. It won't be going anywhere."
"I suppose you think I'm acting as if it's my child."
"Well, since you ask—"
"I didn't, and I really will need to get back to it."
"Not in my car, I'm sorry. Not now we've come all this way."
"All what way? I keep feeling we've gone nowhere whatsoever."
As Jill begins to steer around the latest protracted bend, she blames Connie for giving her the senseless notion that all the curves of the lane are about to add up to a circle that will return the car to Fenny Meadows. She's convincing herself that some of them will cancel out the others when Connie murmurs "Did you say you wanted to hang onto your job?"
"I'd like to. I haven't got just myself to feed."
"Then maybe you'd better think of doing what I asked. I haven't stopped being a manager yet."
The yearning to drive off the road shivers like electricity through Jill. She's aware of nothing but her foot poised on the accelerator and her hands preparing to swing the wheel. She doesn't immediately register how Connie's tone changes, or her words. "Who's that? Is it Ross?"
Is she trying to divert Jill from her plan? Fog surges to cover where Connie was peering, but Jill doesn't believe there was anything to see except the bony black-clawed tangles of the hedge. Even when Connie leans towards the windscreen, this looks like an attempt to make Jill forget what was threatened, too late. Then the stretch of hedge resurfaces, twig after dripping twig, and Jill sees that a dim figure is indeed crouched in a hollow of it. "That isn't Ross," says Connie.
The edge of a headlamp beam finds the lowered head, which seems wet enough to have been rescued from drowning, and inflates it twice its size with shadow. The figure squirms as if to shake off the light and then lurches to its feet, blinking violently and yawning. If Jill hadn't recognised who it is by now she would know the yawn for Gavin's. He tears his right sleeve free of the hedge and stumbles in front of the car.
Jill wrenches at the handbrake while tramping on the brake pedal just in time not to overbalance him or worse. As he limps stiffly around the Nova she lowers her window. "Gavin, you nearly—"
"What time is it?" He leans one hand on the roof and knuckles his eyes redder still. "Is it over?"
"Have you finished working at the shop?"
That sounds like a revival of Connie's threat, but she keeps it quiet. "Don't stand there, Gavin," she says instead. "Get in."
He fumbles open the rear door and takes some care over bending himself to fit the seat. Jill shuts her window well in advance of his slamming his door. "Have you been out here ever since you phoned?" She means this to express sympathy, but it sounds inanely obvious.
"Feels like longer. Were you looking for me?"
"Mostly for a phone. I don't suppose your mobile could have come alive again."
He fishes it out and holds it towards the faint glow through the windscreen. When he thumbs a key, it fails to light up. Indeed, for a moment it appears to turn as grey as their breaths are being rendered by the fog that followed him into the car. "Didn't think so," he yawns. "Wasn't the box any use?"
"Which box?" Connie's impatient to learn.
"I found one, don't ask me when. If I'd phoned I'd have had no change for the bus, and anyway there wasn't much reason to."
Jill's instincts deny this, but before she can grasp why, Connie demands "Whereabouts was it?"
"Somewhere along here. Didn't you pass it? I thought I've been heading for the main road."
Jill thinks hostility is making Connie look so dull she would call it brainless. "Don't say you drove us past a phone," Connie says.
"I won't. You'd more chance of noticing with less to do. There's bound to be phones on the main road when we get there. I've told you I won't go back."
That's meant to challenge Connie to repeat her threat in front of Gavin. Jill's frustrated when he interrupts the confrontation by asking "Why do you need a phone?"
"Woody's got himself stuck in his office," says Connie, "and Anyes has in the lift."
"You're making it sound like their fault," Jill objects.
"Well, it isn't. I'd say it's anyone's that lets them stay stuck any longer than they have to be, wouldn't you, Gavin?"
Jill would like to think his yawn indicates he's bored with the question. "We're phoning from the main road," she says, releasing the handbrake.
He has a yawn for her too. She doesn't know how many of those she can stand. She's tempted to increase her speed to outrun some of them, but the sluggishly retreating fog entangled in the hedges looks more ominous than ever. She searches her murky brain for some way to enliven him instead, and succeeds in dredging up the memory she was trying to retrieve before. "What were you going to tell me if we hadn't lost you, Gavin?"
"It doesn't seem like much now. Woody didn't think it was."
"But you did. You thought it was so important you rang us back. You'd seen something, you said."
"Just on some videos I took home. People fighting instead of what was meant to be on them."
"I'm with Woody," Connie says.
Rather than inform Connie she wishes she were, Jill asks Gavin "Why did you want us to know?"
"It seemed like there had to be something wrong. Two people that lived, I don't know, forty miles apart brought them back."
"I'll bet they were the same sort of tape, though," Connie says. "Do I win?"
"They were both concerts. So?"
"You check and see if they weren't released by the same company. It'll have been a glitch when they were copying the tapes."
Jill doesn't know whether she remains unpersuaded because she prefers not to agree with Connie. Gavin's faceless silhouette in the mirror has fallen silent. She's willing him to take issue with Connie when he sits forward. "This looks like it could be it."
The road is doubling back on the curve she has just negotiated. As the lit patch of fog extends itself more dimly through a gap in the left-hand hedge, Gavin says "The phone was down somewhere like that."
Connie lifts a hand towards Jill. "I see it. There it is."
Jill doesn't know if Connie is imperiously gesturing her to stop or even considering a grab at the handbrake. When she halts the car just ahead of the gap she enjoys imagining that the pedal underfoot is part of Connie. She narrows her eyes at the track leading away from the road. It's either bare churned earth or tarmac encrusted with mud, and the object in the fog to which it meanders could be a wide tree-trunk chopped off about seven feet from the ground. "I don't think so," she decides aloud. "Would you drive along anywhere like that in this?"
"If it got help to some people who need it," Connie retorts, "I certainly would."
Jill doubts it, and steers the car into the gap to clarify her objection. The blurred object by the track grows no clearer; indeed, the fog appears to be gathering around it, which may be why its outline seems less regular than a phone box ought to be. Jill lifts the headlamp beams to it, but this only blinds her with fog. She squeezes her eyes shut to find she's so tired that she begins to see images that Gavin's description must have put into her head, of people fighting savagely and sinking on if not into the earth. She gropes to dip the headlights and opens her eyes once they feel ready for use. Now the shape ahead reminds her of a totem pole, though of course she isn't seeing the rudiments of faces starting to materialise, one piled on top of the other. "I'm sorry," she says, "I'm not happy going any further."
"Maybe Anyes isn't too happy right now either," Connie says.
"We don't know that, do we? Mad and Jake may have sent for help."
"And they may not have. All right, let's vote whether we drive to it or I've got to end up muddy. Gavin?"
"You want us to be democratic now, do you? It's not long since you were acting as if you were in charge." As Gavin's hand begins to waver in the mirror, Jill continues "No point in voting. We aren't driving, I am. It's my car. If you don't like it you can get out and walk, but don't expect me to hang around."
She's confused by the delight that her speech seems to intensify, because the glee doesn't feel like hers; it feels as if it's closing in. It confuses her so badly that she imagines she sees the tree-trunk or the object that resembles one twitching with eagerness. "It isn't even a phone box," she tells Connie. "Go and look for yourself if you can't see that."
"Will she wait while I do, Gavin? Could you make her, do you think?"
He disagrees with one or both of those, mostly with a yawn. They can give Jill all the arguments they like, but it's her car. She jerks it into reverse and swings it out of the gap, scraping the front offside wing on the hedge. As the headlamp beams veer away from the field, she seems to glimpse the object in the fog splitting like an amoeba and the topmost segment hopping or collapsing onto the earth. How tired must she be? Not too tired to drive, which she does in the midst of a frustrated silence like a lack of breath. Then Gavin yawns again, perhaps at the spectacle of yet more fog oozing backwards over the same wet black patch of road and dragging itself through the hedges. "Gavin," Connie almost shouts, "for the love of I won't say it will you stop that wretched yawning all the time."
For once Jill agrees with her, but has to grin when Connie yawns furiously. "You're doing it as well," Gavin points out.
Amusement hasn't finished tugging at Jill's lips when a yawn forces itself between them. "It's you," Connie retaliates. "We weren't till you came. Keep it to yourself, can you? We've enough problems without not being able to stop doing something."
"Tell me how I can help it, then."
Her answer is another enraged yawn, not the only reaction Jill thinks Connie is unable to control. Obviously when she complained of problems she meant Jill, but Gavin was hardly in the car before Connie turned on him. It seems not to matter whom she attacks as long as it's someone. A yawn that feels like a dismissal of the notion overcomes Jill, carrying with it the wish that she had failed to brake in time when he stumbled in front of the car. Suppose she asks him to walk ahead as people used to precede vehicles in fog? Still better, why doesn't she suggest that Connie keep him company? She wouldn't mean to run them over, but she's so exhausted that nobody could blame her if she lost control, if she forgot which pedal she had to push down hard—
It isn't just the childishness of the plan that snatches all her breath. It's the exultation that her thoughts seem to bring to the surface, a joy too vast and savage, surely, to be hers. "Can we all stop arguing till we get out of this?" she pleads. "I mean really try and stop."
"We might if you did," Connie says.
At least Jill made an effort to suppress her irrationality, but Connie sounds like a child in a schoolyard. Jill senses delight welling up again, drawn by her own contempt. They've all reverted to thinking and behaving like fractious children, her included—and then she sees more in the situation. She has observed it all too often, children fighting when another child relishes slyly turning them against each other. She opens her mouth to pass on the insight, but she already knows how Connie reacts to being included among the childish. She's about to let her thoughts subside into her dull mind when she senses they're being engulfed by more than her fatigue. The impression so resembles lurching awake from a dream that she gasps "I know why we mustn't fall out any more."
Gavin doesn't quite yawn, but barely pronounces "Why?"
"Think about it." Jill is doing so aloud, which seems to help. "We've all been arguing all night, haven't we? And before that too for I don't know how long at the shop. Something wants us at each other's throats. Why, you even saw people fighting on your tapes."
At once she's afraid that her last remark is one comment too many. At least Gavin isn't yawning. She glances away from the reflection of his silhouette she hopes is thoughtful. She's watching the road, though the dim ill-defined enclosure of fog has begun to make her feel helpless as an insect trapped under a glass, when Connie says "Well, I'll vote that's the silliest thing I've ever heard."