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Helen walked around and got in on the driver's side. It was cold in the garage. The engine purred,
headlights came on, a garage door rolled itself up ahead of them, and now somewhere an alarm bell was
ringing stridently.
"Now they're going to wonder what's going on," Helen said, a certain satisfaction in her voice. The
Subaru leaped into the night.
* * *
She drove Pat in a direction that must have taken them away from the center of town, for the roads
remained up-and-down-hill gravel. You might have thought you were already way out in the remote
countryside, except there were so many mailboxes along the road, and gravel driveways curving away
from the road uphill and down. There must be a fair number of houses tucked just out of sight. In the
dark it was hard to tell.
Gradually the driveways and mailboxes thinned out, then finally ceased to appear at all. They were really
getting out into the boondocks now.
"Where we going?" Pat asked, beginning to get curious.
Helen didn't answer right away. "There's something I think I want to show you," she said at last.
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A lot of road was going by in the lonely headlights. Traffic, that had never been heavy, had thinned out
now to nothing. Pat wondered, and couldn't tell for sure, whether or not they might be driving in some
great circle, and it was all a hoax, a joke on him.
"Sometimes," he said, to be making talk, "I feel like I been on the road a hundred years."
"Don't talk like that. I feel that way too much myself."
"You?" He sighed. "Actually you've just tried it once, right? With Annie to Chicago? And now you're
home again."
Helen turned on the car radio. Rock music came in. But then almost at once the music began to fade, as
if they were far and getting farther from the station. At last she said: "Yeah. Just that once."
"And that's where I met you. Right?"
"No." Now her voice was remote, and there was something in it that frightened Pat. "I told you where
we met. It's no good just trying to forget what has happened, Pat. You can't change things that way. You
met Annie and me both that first night in Phoenix. Uncle Del was giving a party that's what he liked to
call it, anyway. You were invited. I mean Gliddon brought you in, along with a few other road-kids that
he collected somewhere. He's good at collecting. And he likes that kind of party too."
"Helen? Maybe you could just take me back somewhere near the center of town, and let me off. I'll do
okay getting a ride from there."
"But you got stoned so early you probably really don't remember anything. Dear Uncle Del and his
parties. And that one was especially bad because someone got killed. And did you know, we were all in
a movie that night? You're such a movie freak, I bet you remember that much anyway if you tried hard."
Pat had an inward feeling, terrible and indescribable, that he got usually when a bout of mental illness
was about to strike. But he knew what was going on. No way he was going to be lucky enough to get
out of that.
"Or most of us were in a movie, anyway," Helen amended, turning off suddenly onto an almost invisible
side road. "On some of us it wouldn't take," she added obscurely. The car jounced violently. The road,
or track, was badly rutted here and obviously little used. A branch dragged across the windshield. Then
the bottom of the car scraped hard on a rock or graveled hump projecting up between the ruts. Helen
drove on as if she hadn't noticed the noise. Apparently no serious damage had been inflicted.
"Was Annie in the movie?"
Helen didn't answer.
"Come on, Helen, tell me. Annie isn't really dead, I know that much. I got this feeling about her, you
know?"
"She's dead!" Helen snapped at him, in a new and abrupt voice. She turned her eyes from the road to
look at Pat, long enough so he wished she'd turn back and watch where they were going. Again low
branches of some kind clawed at the windshield, and the car rocked in and out of ruts. So far the
four-wheel-drive was pulling it through. Helen had to turn back to watch her steering. Angrily she said:
"How can I help you when you keep on saying crazy things like that?"
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"Sorry, I . . ."
A sign came unexpectedly into the headlights. It had been crudely improvised long ago, long enough that
the wood and the white paint were weather-worn, the message barely legible. It said, simply enough:
BRIDGE OUT.
"Helen, you sure you know where we're going?"
Helen rounded one more curve, and then slowed down some more. Not for a sign, though. The
headlights had now fallen upon what at first appeared to be a wreck an old car slewed diagonally
across what was left of the road, as if it had stalled in some attempt to back out or turn around. Standing
near it and squinting back into the Subaru's headlights were a pair of young people, a dark-bearded man
and a brown-haired girl. Pat knew another moment of spurious recognition; but this girl was obviously
too big and sturdy to be Annie. The man with her was bigger still; both were dressed casually but well.
"Shall we stop?" Helen asked abstractedly, as if she were conversing with herself. Actually there hardly
seemed to be a choice, given the blocked and narrow road. A moment later they had come to a halt, a
few feet from the stalled car. The man on foot, trying to shade his eyes with one hand, approached the
Subaru warily on the driver's side. But before he reached it the girl, her eyes now freed of the headlights'
glare, was looking in through the window that Pat had just rolled down. She looked at Pat, and at the
young girl driving, and relaxed.
Helen was saying nothing, so Pat spoke. "Can we give you guys a lift somewhere?"
"Sure," said the girl. "I'm Judy Southerland, this is Bill Bird. We got stuck."
The young man, also somewhat relaxed now, was looking in at Helen, who had finally rolled her window
down. "We'd really appreciate it," he said with feeling. "I guess it was kind of crazy, our trying to get
through here, especially at night. Where are you guys headed?"
"Just riding." Helen sounded cool and remote. "I'm Helen, this is Pat. Actually there was something I
wanted to show him, out this way. You want to come along?"
The young man called Bill was silent, as if he didn't quite understand. Pat could hear a nightbird
somewhere. The thin moon was down by now. He could see about a million stars, but not a man-made
light in sight other than the one pair of headlights.
"Sure we will," said the girl called Judy. "Or I will, anyway." She looked over the top of the car at Bill,
and something passed between them.
He shrugged. "Okay." And he moved to open the Subaru's back door.
"No," said Helen, surprising them all. "From here we walk."
"Walk?" All three of them said it.
"It isn't far. Come on." And she turned off the car's lights and engine and got out. She seemed to Pat to
be perfectly calm and serious. She moved to the uphill side of the road and paused, evidently waiting for
the others to follow.
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Pat and the others exchanged puzzled looks, as well as they could by starlight, then he moved to Helen
and the other two followed. In single file they began to climb.
The ground was rough and pathless, but Helen moved as if she knew her way. Pat looked down at her
feet and realized with a chill that they were still bare. Shehad to be crazy . . . he didn't know whether he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]