Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  He sobbed in terror as the dashboard light flashed on. He glanced at it involuntarily and read the word HOT, black on red. With a breathless gasp, he jerked the transmission into low. Why hadn’t he done that right away! He looked ahead. The slope seemed endless. Already, he could hear a boiling throb inside the radiator. How much coolant was there left? Steam was clouding faster, hazing up the windshield. Reaching out, he twisted at a dashboard knob. The wipers started flicking back and forth in fan-shaped sweeps. There had to be enough coolant in the radiator to get him to the top. Then what? cried his mind. He couldn’t drive without coolant, even downhill. He glanced at the rearview mirror. The truck was falling behind. Mann snarled with maddened fury. If it weren’t for that goddamned hose, he’d be escaping now!

  The sudden lurching of the car snatched him back to terror. If he braked now, he could jump out, run and scrabble up that slope. Later, he might not have the time. He couldn’t make himself stop the car, though. As long as it kept on running, he felt bound to it, less vulnerable. God knows what would happen if he left it.

  Mann started up the slope with haunted eyes, trying not to see the red light on the edges of his vision. Yard by yard, his car was slowing down. Make it, make it, pleaded his mind, even though he thought that it was futile. The car was running more and more unevenly. The thumping percolation of its radiator filled his ears. Any moment now, the motor would be choked off and the car would shudder to a stop, leaving him a sitting target. No, he thought. He tried to blank his mind.

  He was almost to the top, but in the mirror he could see the truck drawing up on him. He jammed down on the pedal and the motor made a grinding noise. He groaned. It had to make the top! Please, God, help me! screamed his mind. The ridge was just ahead. Closer. Closer. Make it. “Make it.” The car was shuddering and clanking, slowing down—oil, smoke and steam gushing from beneath the hood. The windshield wipers swept from side to side. Mann’s head throbbed. Both his hands felt numb. His heartbeat pounded as he stared ahead. Make it, please, God, make it. Make it. Make it!

  Over! Mann’s lips opened in a cry of triumph as the car began descending. Hand shaking uncontrollably, he shoved the transmission into neutral and let the car go into a glide. The triumph strangled in his throat as he saw that there was nothing in sight but hills and more hills. Never mind! He was on a downgrade now, a long one. He passed a sign that read, TRUCKS USE LOW GEARS NEXT 12 MILES. Twelve miles! Something would come up. It had to.

  The car began to pick up speed. Mann glanced at the speedometer. Forty-seven miles an hour. The red light still burned. He’d save the motor for a long time, too, though; let it cool for twelve miles, if the truck was far enough behind.

  His speed increased. Fifty . . . 51. Mann watched the needle turning slowly toward the right. He glanced at the rearview mirror. The truck had not appeared yet. With a little luck, he might still get a good lead. Not as good as he might have if the motor hadn’t overheated but enough to work with. There had to be some place along the way to stop. The needle edged past 55 and started toward the 60 mark.

  Again, he looked at the rearview mirror, jolting as he saw that the truck had topped the ridge and was on its way down. He felt his lips begin to shake and crimped them together. His gaze jumped fitfully between the steam-obscured highway and the mirror. The truck was accelerating rapidly. Keller doubtless had the gas pedal floored. It wouldn’t be long before the truck caught up to him. Mann’s right hand twitched unconsciously toward the gearshift. Noticing, he jerked it back, grimacing, glanced at the speedometer. The car’s velocity had just passed 60. Not enough! He had to use the motor now! He reached out desperately.

  His right hand froze in midair as the motor stalled; then, shooting out the hand, he twisted the ignition key. The motor made a grinding noise but wouldn’t start. Mann glanced up, saw that he was almost on the shoulder, jerked the steering wheel around. Again, he turned the key, but there was no response. He looked up at the rearview mirror. The truck was gaining on him swiftly. He glanced at the speedometer. The car’s speed was fixed at 62. Mann felt himself crushed in a vise of panic. He stared ahead with haunted eyes.

  Then he saw it, several hundred yards ahead: an escape route for trucks with burned-out brakes. There was no alternative now. Either he took the turnout or his car would be rammed from behind. The truck was frighteningly close. He heard the high-pitched wailing of its motor. Unconsciously, he started easing to the right, then jerked the wheel back suddenly. He mustn’t give the move away! He had to wait until the last possible moment. Otherwise, Keller would follow him in.

  Just before he reached the escape route, Mann wrenched the steering wheel around. The car rear started breaking to the left, tires shrieking on the pavement. Mann steered with the skid, braking just enough to keep from losing all control. The rear tires grabbed and, at 60 miles an hour, the car shot up the dirt trail, tires slinging up a cloud of dust. Mann began to hit the brakes. The rear wheels sideslipped and the car slammed hard against the dirt bank to the right. Mann gasped as the car bounced off and started to fishtail with violent whipping motions, angling toward the trail edge. He drove his foot down on the brake pedal with all his might. The car rear skidded to the right and slammed against the bank again. Mann heard a grinding rend of metal and felt himself heaved downward suddenly, his neck snapped, as the car plowed to a violent halt.

  As in a dream, Mann turned to see the truck and trailer swerving off the highway. Paralyzed, he watched the massive vehicle hurtle toward him, staring at it with a blank detachment, knowing he was going to die but so stupefied by the sight of the looming truck that he couldn’t react. The gargantuan shape roared closer, blotting out the sky. Mann felt a strange sensation in his throat, unaware that he was screaming.

  Suddenly, the truck began to tilt. Mann stared at it in choked-off silence as it started tipping over like some ponderous beast toppling in slow motion. Before it reached his car, it vanished from his rear window.

  Hands palsied, Mann undid the safety belt and opened the door. Struggling from the car, he stumbled to the trail edge, staring downward. He was just in time to see the truck capsize like a foundering ship. The tanker followed, huge wheels spinning as it overturned.

  The storage tank on the truck exploded first, the violence of its detonation causing Mann to stagger back and sit down clumsily on the dirt. A second explosion roared below, its shock wave buffeting across him hotly, making his ears hurt. His glazed eyes saw a fiery column shoot up toward the sky in front of him, then another.

  Mann crawled slowly to the trail edge and peered down at the canyon. Enormous gouts of flame were towering upward, topped by thick, black, oily smoke. He couldn’t see the truck or trailer, only flames. He gaped at them in shock, all feeling drained from him.

  Then, unexpectedly, emotion came. Not dread, at first, and not regret; not the nausea that followed soon. It was a primeval tumult in his mind: the cry of some ancestral beast above the body of its vanquished foe.

  Edgar Pangborn

  Longtooth

  Edgar Pangborn was one of the most admired fantasy and science fiction writers of the 1950s–70s. He wrote two classic novels of the genre, A Mirror for Observers, winner of the International Fantasy Award (1954) and Davy (1954), and a number of highly regarded short stories, many of them set in the same future world as the latter novel. He also wrote historical fiction. His work is notable for its precise and polished prose style and for his ability to round characters, in a field where either talent is comparatively rare. His few horror stories were mostly cast in the science fiction mode, with the exception of “Longtooth,” his masterpiece. A monster story set in the Maine woods, it is an unusual piece of pastoral horror in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood, with perhaps an admixture of Theodore Sturgeon, a writer who admired Pangborn and to whom Pangborn was often compared. The mixture of horror of, and compassion for, the monster together with the suggestion of a scientific rationale places “Longtooth” firmly in the twentieth centur
y horror tradition.

  My word is good. How can I prove it? Born in Darkfield, wasn’t I? Stayed away thirty more years after college, but when I returned I was still Ben Dane, one of the Darkfield Danes, Judge Marcus Dane’s eldest. And they knew my word was good. My wife died and I sickened of all cities; then my bachelor brother Sam died, too, who’d lived all his life here in Darkfield, running his one-man law office over in Lohman—our nearest metropolis, pop. 6437. A fast coronary at fifty; I had loved him. Helen gone, then Sam—I wound up my unimportances and came home, inheriting Sam’s housekeeper Adelaide Simmons, her grim stability and celestial cooking. Nostalgia for Maine is a serious matter, late in life: I had to yield. I expected a gradual drift into my childless old age playing correspondence chess, translating a few of the classics. I thought I could take for granted the continued respect of my neighbors. I say my word is good.

  I will remember again that middle of March a few years ago, the snow skimming out of an afternoon sky as dirty as the bottom of an old aluminum pot. Harp Ryder’s back road had been plowed since the last snowfall; I supposed Bolt-Bucket could make the mile and a half in to his farm and out again before we got caught. Harp had asked me to get him a book if I was making a trip to Boston, any goddamn book that told about Eskimos, and I had one for him, De Poncins’s Kabloona. I saw the midget devils of white running crazy down a huge slope of wind, and recalled hearing at the Darkfield News Bureau, otherwise Cleve’s General Store, somebody mentioning a forecast of the worst blizzard in forty years. Joe Cleve, who won’t permit a radio in the store because it pesters his ulcers, inquired of his Grand Inquisitor who dwells ten yards behind your right shoulder: “Why’s it always got to be the worst in so-and-so many years, that going to help anybody?” The bureau was still analyzing this difficult inquiry when I left, with my cigarettes and as much as I could remember of Adelaide’s grocery list after leaving it on the dining table. It wasn’t yet three when I turned in on Harp’s back road, and a gust slammed at Bolt-Bucket like death with a shovel.

  I tried to win momentum for the rise to the high ground, swerved to avoid an idiot rabbit and hit instead a patch of snow-hidden melt-and-freeze, skidding to a full stop from which nothing would extract me but a tow.

  I was fifty-seven that year, my wind bad from too much smoking and my heart (I now know) no stronger than Sam’s. I quit cursing—gradually, to avoid sudden actions—and tucked Kabloona under my parka. I would walk the remaining mile to Ryder’s, stay just to leave the book, say hello, and phone for a tow; then, since Harp never owned a car and never would, I could walk back and meet the truck.

  If Leda Ryder knew how to drive, it didn’t matter much after she married Harp. They farmed it, back in there, in almost the manner of Harp’s ancestors of Jefferson’s time. Harp did keep his two hundred laying hens by methods that were considered modern before the poor wretches got condemned to batteries, but his other enterprises came closer to antiquity. In his big kitchen garden he let one small patch of weeds fool themselves for an inch or two, so he’d have it to work at; they survived nowhere else. A few cows, a team, four acres for market crops, and a small dog Droopy, whose grandmother had made it somehow with a dachshund. Droopy’s only menace in obese old age was a wheezing bark. The Ryders must have grown nearly all vital necessities except chewing tobacco and once in a while a new dress for Leda. Harp could snub the twentieth century, and I doubt if Leda was consulted about it in spite of his obsessive devotion for her. She was almost thirty years younger, and yes, he should not have married her. Other side up just as scratchy; she should not have married him, but she did.

  Harp was a dinosaur perhaps, but I grew up with him, he a year the younger. We swam, fished, helled around together. And when I returned to Darkfield growing old, he was one of the few who acted glad to see me, so far as you can trust what you read in a face like a granite promontory. Maybe twice a week Harp Ryder smiled.

  I pushed on up the ridge, and noticed a going-and-coming set of wide tire tracks already blurred with snow. That would be the egg truck I had passed a quarter hour since on the main road. Whenever the west wind at my back lulled, I could swing around and enjoy one of my favorite prospects of birch and hemlock lowland. From Ryder’s Ridge there’s no sign of Darkfield two miles southwest except one church spire. On clear days you glimpse Bald Mountain and his two big brothers, more than twenty miles west of us.

  The snow was thickening. It brought relief and pleasure to see the black shingles of Harp’s barn and the roof of his Cape Codder. Foreshortened, so that it looked snug against the barn; actually house and barn were connected by a two-story shed fifteen feet wide and forty feet long—woodshed below, hen loft above. The Ryders’ sunrise-facing bedroom window was set only three feet above the eaves of that shed roof. They truly went to bed with the chickens. I shouted, for Harp was about to close the big shed door. He held it for me. I ran, and the storm ran after me. The west wind was bouncing off the barn; eddies howled at us. The temperature had tumbled ten degrees since I left Darkfield. The thermometer by the shed door read fifteen degrees, and I knew I’d been a damn fool. As I helped Harp fight the shed door closed, I thought I heard Leda, crying.

  A swift confused impression. The wind was exploring new ranges of passion, the big door squawked, and Harp was asking: “Ca’ break down?” I do still think I heard Leda wail. If so, it ended as we got the door latched and Harp drew a newly fitted two-by-four bar across it. I couldn’t understand that: the old latch was surely proof against any wind short of a hurricane.

  “Bolt-Bucket never breaks down. Ought to get one, Harp—lots of company. All she did was go in the ditch.”

  “You might see her again come spring.” His hens were scratching overhead, not yet scared by the storm. Harp’s eyes were small gray glitters of trouble. “Ben, you figure a man’s getting old at fifty-six?”

  “No.” My bones (getting old) ached for the warmth of his kitchen-dining-living-everything room, not for sad philosophy. “Use your phone, okay?”

  “If the wires ain’t down,” he said, not moving, a man beaten on by other storms. “Them loafers didn’t cut none of the overhang branches all summer. I told ’em of course, I told ’em how it would be . . . I meant, Ben, old enough to get dumb fancies?” My face may have told him I thought he was brooding about himself with a young wife. He frowned, annoyed that I hadn’t taken his meaning. “I meant, seeing things. Things that can’t be so, but—”

  “We can all do some of that at any age, Harp.”

  That remark was a stupid brushoff, a stone for bread, because I was cold, impatient, wanted in. Harp had always a tense one-way sensitivity. His face chilled. “Well, come in, warm up. Leda ain’t feeling too good. Getting a cold or something.”

  When she came downstairs and made me welcome, her eyes were reddened. I don’t think the wind made that noise. Droopy waddled from her basket behind the stove to snuff my feet and give me my usual low passing mark.

  Leda never had it easy there, young and passionate with scant mental resources. She was twenty-eight that year, looking tall because she carried her firm body handsomely. Some of the sullenness in her big mouth and lucid gray eyes was sexual challenge, some pure discontent. I liked Leda; her nature was not one for animosity or meanness. Before her marriage the Darkfield News Bureau used to declare with its customary scrupulous fairness that Leda had been covered by every goddamn thing in pants within thirty miles. For once the bureau may have spoken a grain of truth in the malice, for Leda did have the smoldering power that draws men without word or gesture. After her abrupt marriage to Harp—Sam told me all this; I wasn’t living in Darkfield then and hadn’t met her—the garbage-gossip went hastily underground: enraging Harp Ryder was never healthy.

  The phone wires weren’t down, yet. While I waited for the garage to answer, Harp said, “Ben, I can’t let you walk back in that. Stay over, huh?”

  I didn’t want to. It meant extra work and inconvenience for Leda, and I was ancient enough to
crave my known safe burrow. But I felt Harp wanted me to stay for his own sake. I asked Jim Short at the garage to go ahead with Bolt-Bucket if I wasn’t there to meet him. Jim roared: “Know what it’s doing right now?”

  “Little spit of snow, looks like.”

  “Jesus!” He covered the mouthpiece imperfectly. I heard his enthusiastic voice ring through cold-iron echoes: “Hey, old Ben’s got that thing into the ditch again! Ain’t that something . . . ? Listen, Ben, I can’t make no promises. Got both tow trucks out already. You better stop over and praise the Lord you got that far.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t much of a ditch.”

  Leda fed us coffee. She kept glancing toward the landing at the foot of the stairs where a night-darkness already prevailed. A closed-in stairway slanted down at a never-used front door; beyond that landing was the other ground floor room-parlor, spare, guestroom—where I would sleep. I don’t know what Leda expected to encounter in that shadow. Once when a chunk of firewood made an odd noise in the range, her lips clamped shut on a scream.

  The coffee warmed me. By that time the weather left no loophole for argument. Not yet 3:30, but west and north were lost in furious black. Through the hissing white flood I could just see the front of the barn forty feet away. “Nobody’s going no place into that,” Harp said. His little house shuddered, enforcing the words. “Leda, you don’t look too brisk. Get you some rest.”

  “I better see to the spare room for Ben.”

  Neither spoke with much tenderness, but it glowed openly in him when she turned her back. Then some other need bent his granite face out of its normal seams. His whole gaunt body leaning forward tried to help him talk. “You wouldn’t figure me for a man’d go off his rocker?” he asked.