Christine Read online

  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?"

  "Yes," she whispered. "Dennis, will this work?"

  "It should, if she comes at all."

  "I won't see you until it's over."

  "I guess that's so."

  She leaned over, placed her left hand lightly on the side of my neck, and kissed my mouth. "Be careful, Dennis," she said. "But kill it. It's really not a she at all-just an it. Kill it."

  "I will," I said.

  She looked in my eyes and nodded. "Do it for Arnie," she said. "Set him free."

  I hugged her hard and she hugged me back. Then she slid across the seat. She hit her little handbag with her knee and it fell to the floor of the cab. She paused, head cocked, a startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. Then she smiled, bent over, picked it up, and began to rummage quickly through it.

  "Dennis," she said, "do you remember the Morte d'Arthur?"

  "A little." One of the classes Leigh and Arnie and I had all shared before my football injury was Fudgy Bowen's Classics of English Literature, and one of the first things we had been faced with in there was Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Why Leigh asked me this now was a mystery to me.

  She had found what she wanted. It was a filmy pink scarf, nylon, the sort of thing a girl wears over her head on a day when a misty sort of rain is falling. She tied it around the left forearm of my parka.

  "What the hell?" I asked, smiling a little.

  "Be my knight," she said, and smiled back--but her eyes were serious. "Be my knight, Dennis."

  I picked up the squeegee mop she had found in Will's bathroom and made a clumsy salute with it. "Sure," I said. "Just call me Sir O-Cedar."

  "Joke about it if you want," she said, "but don't really joke about it. Okay?"

  "All right," I said. "If it's what you want, I'll be your parfit goddam gentil knight."

  She laughed a little, and that was better.

  "Remember about that button, kiddo. Push it hard. We don't want that door to just burp once and stop on its track. No escapes, right?"

  "Right."

  She got out of Petunia, and I can close my eyes now and see her as she was then, in that clean and silent moment just before everything went terribly wrong--a tall, pretty girl with long blond hair the color of raw honey, slim hips, long legs, and those striking, Nordic cheekbones, now wearing a ski parka and faded Lee Riders, moving with a dancer's grace. I can still see it and I still dream about it, because of course while we were busy setting up Christine, she was busy setting us up-- that old and infinitely wise monster. Did we really think we could outsmart her so easily? I guess we did.

  My dreams are in terrible slow motion. I can see the softly lovely motion of her hips as she walks; I can hear the hollow click of her Frye boots on the oil-stained cement floor; I can even hear the soft, dry whish-whish of her parka's quilted inner lining brushing against her blouse. She's walking slowly and her head is up--now she is the animal, but no predator; she walks with the cautious grace of a zebra approaching a waterhole at dusk. It is the walk of an animal that scents danger. I try to scream to her through Petunia's windshield. Come back, Leigh, come back quick, you were right, you heard something, she's out there now, out there in the snow with her headlights off, crouched down, Leigh, come back!

  She stopped suddenly, her hands tensing into fists, and that was when sudden savage circles of light sprang to life in the snowy dark outside. They were like white eyes opening.

  Leigh froze, hideously exposed on the open floor. She was thirty feet inside the door and slightly to the right of center. She turned toward the headlights, and I could see the dazed, uncertain expression on her face.

  I was just as stunned, and that first vital moment passed unused. Then the headlights sprang forward and I could see the dark, low-slung shape of Christine behind them; I could hear the mounting, furious howl of her engine as she leaped toward us from across the street where she had been waiting all along--maybe even since before dark. Snow funnelled back from her roof and skirled across her windshield in filmy nets that were almost instantly melted by the defroster. She hit the tarmac leading up to the entrance, still gaining speed. Her engine was a V-8 scream of rage.

  "Leigh!" I screamed, and clawed for Petunia's ignition switch.

  Leigh broke t
o the right and ran for the wall-button. Christine roared inside as she reached it and pushed it. I heard the rattle-rumble of the overhead door descending on its track.

  Christine came in angling to the right, going for Leigh. She dug a great clout of dry wood and splinters from the wall. There was a metallic screech as part of her right bumper pulled loose--a sound like a drunk's scream of laughter. Sparks cascaded across the floor as she went into a long, slewing turn. She missed Leigh, but she wouldn't when she went back; Leigh was stuck in that right-hand corner with nowhere to hide. She might be able to make it outside, but I was terribly afraid that the door wasn't coming down fast enough to cut off Christine. The descending door might peel off her roof, but that wouldn't stop her, and I knew it.

  Petunia's engine bellowed and I dragged out the headlight button. Her brights came on, splashing over the closing door, and over Leigh. She was backed up against the wall, her eyes wide. Her parka took on a weird, almost electric blue color in the headlights, and my mind informed me with sickening and clinical accuracy that her blood would look purple.

  I saw her glance upward for a moment and then back down at Christine.

  The Fury's tires screamed violently as she leaped at Leigh. Smoke rose from the new black marks on the concrete. I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.

  At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in-the-box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.

  Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf almost nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tires and old baldies waiting to be recapped--in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders--what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine's snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tires tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.

  Leigh's head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tires laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.

  And what was I doing all this time, you wonder? It wasn't "all that time," that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia's clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.

  Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tire shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.

  I let the clutch out, and a cold part of my mind took over: Easy, man--if you pop the clutch and stall this fucker, she's dead.

  Petunia rolled. I revved the engine up to a bellow and let the clutch out all the way. Christine roared at Leigh again, her hood crimped almost double from her first hit, bright metal showing through the broken paint at the sharpest points of bend. It looked as if her hood and grille had grown shark's teeth.

  I hit Christine three-quarters of the way toward the front and she slid around, one of her tires pulling off the rim. The '58 slammed into a litter of old bumper jacks and junk parts in one corner; there was a booming crash as she struck the wall, and then the hot sound of her engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off. The entire left front end was bashed in--but she was still running.

  I slammed on Petunia's brake with my right foot and barely managed to avoid crushing Leigh myself. Petunia's engine stalled. Now the only sound in the garage was Christine's screaming engine.

  "Leigh!" I screamed over it. "Leigh, run!"

  She looked over at me groggily, and now I could see sticky braids of blood in her hair--it was as purple as I had expected. She let go of the struts, landed on her feet, staggered, and went to one knee.

  Christine came for her. Leigh got up, took two wobbling steps, and got on her blind side, behind Petunia. Christine swerved and struck the truck's front end. I was thrown roughly to the right. Pain roared through my left leg.

  "Get up!" I screamed at Leigh, trying to lean even farther over and open the door. "Get up!"

  Christine backed off, and when she came again she cut hard to the right and went out of my line of vision, around the back of Petunia. I caught just a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror bolted outside the driver's side window. Then I could only hear the scream of her tires.

  Barely conscious, Leigh simply wandered off, holding both hands laced to the back of her head. Blood trickled through her fingers. She walked in front of Petunia's grille toward me and then just stopped.

  I didn't have to see in order to know what was going to happen next. Christine would reverse again, back to my side, and then crush her against the wall.

  Desperately, I shoved the clutch in with the mop and keyed the engine again. It turned over, coughed, stalled. I could smell gasoline in the air, heavy and rich. I had flooded the engine.

  Christine reappeared in the rearview mirror. She came at Leigh, who managed to stumble backward just out of reach. Christine slammed nose-on into the wall with crunching force. The passenger door popped open and the horror was complete; the hand not clutching the mop-handle went to my mouth and I screamed through it.

  Sitting on the passenger side like a grotesque, life-sized doll was

  Michael Cunningham. His head, lolling limply on the stalk of his neck, snapped over to one side as Christine reversed to make another try at Leigh, and I saw his face had the high, rosy color of carbon monoxide poisoning. He hadn't taken my advice. Christine had gone to the Cunninghams' house first, as I had vaguely suspected she might. Michael came home from school and there she was, standing in the driveway, his son's restored 1958 Plymouth. He had gone to it, and somehow Christine had. . . had gotten him. Had he maybe gotten in just to sit behind the wheel for a moment, as I had that day in LeBay's garage? He might have. Just to see what vibrations he could pick up. If so, he must have picked up some terrible vibes indeed during his last few minutes on earth. Had Christine started herself up? Driven herself into the garage? Maybe. Maybe. And had Michael discovered that he could neither turn off the madly revving engine or get out of the car? Had he maybe turned his head and perhaps seen the true guiding spirit of Arnie's '58 Fury, lounging in the shotgun seat, and fainted in terror?

  It didn't matter now. Leigh was all that mattered.

  She had seen, too. Her screams, high, despairing, and shrill, floated in the exhaust-stinking air like hysterically bright balloons. But it had, at least, cut through her daze.

  She turned and ran for Will Darnell's office, blood splattering behind her in dime-sized drops as she went. Blood was soaking into the collar of her parka--too much blood.

  Christine backed up, laying rubber and leaving a scatter of glass behind. As she pulled around in a tight circle to go after Leigh, centrifugal force pulled the passenger door shut again--but not before I saw Michael's head loll back the other way.

  Christine held still for a moment, her nose pointed toward Leigh, her engine revving. Perhaps LeBay was savoring the instant before the kill. If so, I'm glad, because if Christine had gone for her right away, she would have been killed then. But as it was, I had an instant of time. I turned the key again, babbling something aloud--a prayer, I guess--and this time Petunia's engine coughed into life. I let the clutch out and stepped down on the accelerator as Christine leaped forward again. This time I struck her right side. There was a shrill scream of tearing metal as Petunia's bumper punched through her mudguard. Christine heeled over and smashed agains
t the wall. Glass broke. Her engine raced and raved. Behind the wheel, LeBay turned toward me, grinning with hate.

  Petunia stalled again.

  I rattled off a string of every curse I knew as I grabbed for the key again. If not for my goddam leg, if not for the fall I'd taken in the snow, this would be over now; it would just be a matter of cornering her and smashing her to pieces against the cinderblock.

  But even as I cranked Petunia's engine, keeping my foot off the gas to keep from stalling her again, Christine began to reverse with an ear-splitting squeal of metal. She backed out from between Petunia's grille and the wall, leaving a twisted chunk of her red body behind, baring her right front tire.

  I got Petunia going and found reverse. Christine had backed all the way down to the far end of the garage. All her headlights were out. Her windshield was smashed into a galaxy of cracks. The bent hood seemed to sneer.

  Her radio was blasting. I could hear Ricky Nelson singing "Waitin in School."

  I stared around for Leigh and saw her in Will's office, looking out into the garage. Her blond hair was matted with blood. More blood ran down the left side of her face and soaked into her jacket. Bleeding too damn much, I thought incoherently. Bleeding too damn much, even for a head wound.

  Her eyes widened and she pointed past me, her lips moving soundlessly behind the glass.

  Christine came roaring straight up the empty floor, gaining speed.

  And the hood was uncrimping, straightening out and down to cover the motor cavity again. Two of the headlights flickered, then came back strong. The mudguard and the right-hand side of her body--I only caught a glimpse, but I swear it's true--they were . . . reknitting themselves, red metal appearing from nowhere and slipping down in smooth automotive curves to cover the right front tire and the right side of the engine compartment again. The cracks in the windshield were running inward and disappearing. And the tire that had been pulled off its rim looked as good as new.

  It all looks as good as new, I thought. God help us.