But tonight everything was different.
The sun was a bruise in the sky, its light a ghastly purple. The air was not air at all but a steaming, pine-scented soup through which the bike moved sluggishly. And the porcupine was no porcupine; it was a. . . thing, with a humpbacked body of flesh turned inside out and the bristled limbs of an insect. It had a bat's parchment ears and a jackal's cunning glare—and when it rolled its eyes to face him, it grinned, grinned with a demon's yellow teeth, the spaces impacted with gore.
It grinned and he knew it was death.
The deep-throated bray of the air horn punched through the back of his helmet. He could feel Kelly's hands on his hips, knew she had screamed, but the sound was eaten by the air horn, that awful clarion, shrieking slaughter from the guts of a rolling chrome juggernaut. Brutal summer heat shimmered over everything, seeping inside, dulling nerves that should have been ready, slackening muscles that should have been primed.
The back wheel bucked hard—and suddenly Kelly was airborne, swimming in the lavender air. Now the world was filled with that hideous animal bray, over-spreading everything in an atmosphere of solid, bellowing noise.
And when he turned, he faced the juggernaut, chrome teeth bared and glinting sunlight, hot breath reeking of road grease. Its jaws fell open and a sticky tarmac tongue drew him in, past rolling rubber hinges into a dark and profane clockwork, where the rattle of an eight-chambered heart joined the mind-splitting howl of the clarion. Here he was fractured and chewed, and his blood was tasted.
And when the thing shat him out, there was no pain at all.
Only nothing. . . nothing. . . nothing. . .
Peter opened his eyes, the horror of the dream exploding in the vise of suffocation. The wreath lay on his chest like a cinder block—but there was no wreath. The weight was death, that grotesque, raw-fleshed creature from the roadside. It straddled his chest, grinning as it sucked out his air.
He was dying.
In the drunkenness of asphyxia the room listed like a storm-lashed ship. His chin switch was there; he glimpsed its faint shine in the cold autumn moonlight. A touch, and help would be there. . . but he couldn't lift his head. It was an immovable weight with a hole in the middle, his futilely gasping mouth.
He couldn't breathe.
Peter's mind fell into a flat spin as panic tore through him. An invisible hand had him by the windpipe, leaving barely a pinhole through which to drag air. He tried to give voice to his plight, to scream through the sleeping corridors, but the effort only doubled the load on his chest.
The night-dark room grew darker still, death's shadow seeping in at its edges. . . and Peter thought of his mother. He wanted her here. The bitter contempt he'd nurtured for five long years lifted like a sprung blind, and now more than anything else he wanted her with him. She would save him. She had once before, when the croup got him so bad he nearly died. It had been exactly like this, except that then he'd been able to move, to stagger clasping his shut-down throat to her room to waken her. She'd scooped him up and lugged him into the bathroom, where she cranked on the hot water taps and flooded the room with steam.
There, honey. Breathe easy. Breathe easy, now.
"Mom?" Peter husked. "Mom, please. . .”
The panic was massive, outstripping the capacity of his mind to contain it. It widened like a tornado's dark eye. And as his head thrashed to and fro and his neck swelled with air hunger, a crude stake of truth sledged its way down through his heart.
These were his last moments.
And he would spend them in horror.
Sam's face floated up in his mind, full of admiration and love. And Kelly's, rapt in the almost painful ecstasy of their union.
And his mother's. . .
A sound like a rusty hinge reached Peter's ears. My last gasp, he realized. And even as the darkness yawned open and the panic soared, an intense feeling of peace suffused him. It began in the center of his chest and spread like a gentle fireglow. Warm and renewing, he embraced it, welcomed it. . .
And finally he begged it to bear him away.
Merciful blackness entombed him.
No thought. No panic. No fear.
Consciousness faded—then abruptly returned, with all the rudeness of a dipperful of water slung squarely in his face.
Suddenly his mind was alert, his awareness crystalline. . .
Then a strange sensation (I can feel I can feel it!) mantled his frame, a kind of. . . tug, as if his whole body had been mummy-wrapped in Scotch tape and the tape stripped away, all in a single brisk pull, producing a sensation more startling than painful.
It lightened him somehow, freed him. . .
There were footfalls in the hallway now, urgent, thudding footfalls, and a rolling clatter of equipment. They were coming to save him, Peter realized, and he delighted in the knowledge that they were too late. He wasn't breathing, wasn't even trying to breathe.
I'm dead you dumb bastards, you won't be turning my crushed-insect body five times a day or stuffing your fingers up my senseless ass anymore, 'cause I'm dead, dead, dead—
But if he was dead, why could he still see? And why was his mind more keenly alert than ever before, even when he'd enjoyed the peak of his health?
And why was the ceiling getting closer?
Floating? Am I floating?
The crash cart preceded a nurse and two interns into the room, all of them shouting commands. "Call a Code Blue. And find an anesthetist, stat! Somebody ventilate this guy. Holy shit, I think we're too late."
Damn straight you're too late, Peter thought with morbid glee. No research, no miracle was ever going to make him feel again, walk again, live again.
This was it. His only way out.
He watched them assemble beneath him, scrambling about his bed like children who'd just dropped their mother's favorite vase and were now caught up in the foolish hope that they could Krazy Glue it back together again. He watched them down there, amused and a little annoyed, wishing they'd just leave him alone.
One of the interns knelt on the bed and began to administer closed-chest massage. The other thrust a curved green airway into Peter's mouth, then began to squeeze oxygen into his lungs with an ambu bag. Now another nurse appeared, red-faced from running upstairs, and started fishing around in the crash cart, pulling open drawers, scrabbling for the utensils of rescue.
Then someone jerked the covers off Peter's body, and he saw himself, really saw himself, for the first time since he'd been able to just amble over to a mirror and check himself out at his leisure.
It was only then that the full impact of what was happening struck Peter Gardner. He was observing all of this from above, from the ceiling. He was floating, but not in his body, that misshapen mantis on the bed below. No. He was outside of his body now, just his mind, floating free. . .
And those bastards were trying to drag him back in.
No! he cried. But his mouth didn't open—couldn't open, with an airway jammed into it and an oxygen mask sealing it shut—and no sound issued forth. For a moment, this muteness brought back the old and bitter impotence of paralysis, only worse, because now he couldn't even speak.
Then he understood.
They couldn't hear him in this. . . state of being. They weren't even aware of his presence. He was a spirit now, a ghost. All of that Separate School catechismal mumbo jumbo had been true. He was dead and free of his body, and his would-be rescuers didn't know it yet.
Peter watched, awed at the clarity of detail.
Now the anesthetist darted into the room, slit-eyed and scowling, and Dr. Lowe thumped in behind him.
"How aggressive do you want to he?" the anesthetist said as he took over ventilating Peter's body.
"Bring him back," Lowe said implacably. "I want him back."
Some old quarrel passed between the two men like flint sparks in their eyes. Then the anesthetist removed the airway from Peter's mouth and slipped a laryngoscope blade into his throat. With the deftness of
years he inserted an endotracheal tube, inflated its air-sealing cuff, then attached it to the ambu bag in lieu of the mask. With quick, even strokes he inflated Peter's lungs.
And for an instant, Peter heard the man's thoughts—
You're a fucker, Lowe.
Peter saw him glance up at Lowe—who, while injecting drugs into Peter's I.V., was busily studying the oscilloscope tracing of his almost flat-line heartbeat—and saw the physical expression of that sentiment on his face. But his mouth had not moved, though the voice Peter heard had been as plain as if the words had been spoken aloud.
Now it came again.
Why don't you let the kid go?
"Adrenaline," Lowe commanded, his outthrust hand twitching impatiently. Then: Come on, Peter heard him say in another, more hollow voice. Hurry up, bitch! Give me the shit!
And something else? Had he heard something else? An echo of a distant, more urgent thought, weakly superimposed?
(Oh, Christ, I need a—)
But now the syringe of adrenaline was in Lowe's hand, the fine needle longer than any Peter had ever seen, and Lowe was aiming it at Peter's chest, puncturing the skin between his ribs, sucking back a crimson eruption of heart's blood before plungering the entire payload into his ventricle.
"We've got a rhythm," the anesthetist said, the flatness of his tone barely disguising his disappointment.
Way to go, Lowe. Another vegetable for your patch.
Peter felt another tug now, this one more abrupt than the first one had been, a hair-pulling, scalping kind of tug that jerked him forcefully downward.
Did that mean he was leaving this life?
Or coming back in to it. . . ?
That long-ago dream of plummeting to earth from the stratosphere recurred as his essence dropped suddenly downward. He resisted that pull with the entire force of his will. . . but the effort was useless. He met his body with the distorting force of a cannon blast. His last conscious perception was a voice.
Or perhaps a thought. . .
I hope you're proud, Lowe. I hope you're proud.
THIRTEEN
The temptation to ask him inside was great. Almost overpowering. It was for that simple reason—the temptation, its unreasoning sweetness—that she resisted. After all, she hardly knew him. They'd met only a month ago, at Chevies, a fifties disco in the east end of town. Marti had introduced them. "Kelly, this is Will Chatam. He works at Nickel Ridge." Good old Marti, still trying after all these years to matchmake Kelly into wedlock. This had been her third date with Will. Dinner and a movie. Nice.
Now she accepted his kiss, which was bashful and dry, shifted on the seat of his mint condition—as he seldom failed to pridefully point out to her—'53 Buick Super, and let herself out into the cool September night.
"Can I see you tomorrow?" Will asked shyly.
Kelly shook her head, suspending the motion when she saw the look of disappointment on his face. Quickly, she added, "Can we make it Friday?" and Will's expression brightened, the boyish grin Kelly had fallen for four weeks ago splitting it almost in two. "It's early in the term," she explained, "and I've got a new dance class to prepare for. Gotta pick out the music, sort out routines. . .” She shrugged.
"Friday's great," Will said sincerely. He keyed the ignition. "Dinner and a flick?"
Kelly formed a circle with forefinger and thumb, then started up the walk. . . but as Will thunked the Buick into gear, she found herself on the verge of running back out to him and blurting, "Come on in, won't you? I don't want to spend another night alone in this house."
She let the words die in her throat. Plunging headlong into this thing would be a certain mistake. Since Peter, she'd done exactly that on two occasions, and both times she'd ended up regretful. Better to wait.
For what? that tempted voice objected. Until your hair turns white? Until God swoops down in a flaming chariot and says, "Okay, Peter. Walk"?
Will U-turned in the gravel turnabout in front of the house. Then, waving, he crept up the washboard hill. Wrapped in her own arms, Kelly watched him go, ignoring that final weak nudge which bade her give chase. She was a big girl now; she could sleep alone.
When there was nothing left but the receding purr of the Buick's eight cylinders, she turned her face skyward and gazed into the deepening night.
Stars like pinpoints wheeled high in the cosmic mystery, preparing to shift with the seasons. A restless breeze chattered in the trees, picking off leaves and stacking them into drifts against the house. A full moon twinkled like a distant headlight, and on the island far out on Ramsey Lake, gulls grumbled plaintively in their slumber.
Standing in the yard, letting the crisp September breeze frisk her body, Kelly recalled a proverb her grandfather had been fond of quoting—"Whatever goes around comes around"—and was struck by its aptness to the cycles of her life. The last place she'd anticipated ending up after Kingston was back here in Sudbury. Somewhere during the middle of that five-year stint, which had been tough but mostly enjoyable, Kelly had vowed to return home only for the obligatory seasonal visits. It wasn't that she no longer cared for her folks or for the friends she had made and stayed in touch with over the years. It was just that a part of her had died here, a large part, and it seemed both pointless and somehow morbid to return to the site of its burial. An almost blind doctrine of forward motion had ruled her in the south—her blurb in the graduate yearbook dubbed her the faculty's all-time workaholic—and unlike Marti, who had more or less cruised through the academia, Kelly had had her pick of at least a dozen prestigious high schools in the province, even a few choice spots outside the province. She hadn't even applied to the schools in Sudbury.
But on the very day that the first of the acceptances came rolling in, Kelly got a phone call from her old alma mater, from the principal, no less. Old stony-face Laughren had retired the previous year and had been replaced by a young-sounding woman named Cole. Ms. Cole—"Call me Nickie"—had gotten wind of Kelly through the academic grapevine. And like Kelly, the progressive new principal had a special interest in gymnastics and modern dance, two areas of endeavor which, regretfully, had fallen into disfavor with the members of the Regional Board, dinosaurs all. It was Ms. Cole's intention to recruit a teacher who could revive these flagging specialties and let the brass say what they would. Miss Gambling, the crotchety old broad who'd held the job for the past hundred years (or so it seemed to Kelly, who could recall her own mother telling her horror stories about "that wicked old gym teacher at Laurentian High"), had suffered a mild stroke while proctoring a midterm exam, and until a full-time replacement could be found, the job had fallen into the floundering hands of the substitutes, most of whom couldn't do a push-up or a pirouette if their lives depended on it.
Was Kelly interested?
A huge and bellowed no had risen to her lips. . . but something had stifled it. Afterward she had tried to convince herself it was the deal the principal was offering—the money was standard, but the academic freedom she'd be allowed would take her years to achieve under normal circumstances, and might never materialize at all.
But it had been more than the enticing deal, something she'd been unable—or had simply refused—to acknowledge at the time.
Standing here now, cocooned in the night and suddenly cold to the marrow, the reason she'd returned to Sudbury poked her in the heart like an intrusive finger—and that reason was quite simply that she'd had no choice in the matter. Free will had not been a factor. Some force—call it fate, for want of a better word—had drawn her back with the insistence of a giant's outreaching hand. It had been a summons from a higher court. . . and she would die here.
Disturbed at the turn of her thoughts—and a little afraid—Kelly started inside. As she mounted the path to the winterized cottage she rented, something crunched stealthily across the gravel behind her. Her heart was on its way up to her throat when a dog's cool muzzle pressed itself into her palm.
"Chainsaw!" Kelly scolded, her dark contemplati
ons forgotten. "How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that?" She dropped to one knee and scratched the shepherd's thick ruff. The dog lapped happily at her wrist, its big tail thrashing the hedge. "You want to see a grown woman pee in her pants?"
The dog belonged to Kelly's landlord, a mostly absent accountant named Haas who owned the sprawling, Tudor-style home cresting the hill leading down to the cottage. Chainsaw wasn't the dog's real name, but that was what Kelly liked to call him. It had to do with his bark, which had frightened the daylights out of her until she'd been forced to confront the big lunkhead one late night in July, coming home from a walk.
The big dog panting at her heels, Kelly recalled that night with an unpleasant shiver. She'd come scuffing up the lane the two homes shared, absorbed in the gloom of her thoughts, when suddenly the shepherd had released a volley of barks. Kelly froze, her throat half shut, her ears tuned to the tread of the dog's thick paws as it bounded toward her, the scrape and whip of its chain as it stretched to full length—
Hold, oh, Jesus hold!
But it hadn't held, and the big dog had come charging across the yard, a twenty-foot length of chain snaking angrily through the gravel behind it. Kelly had braced herself for the killing leap—
And suddenly this big goofy pup had its forepaws propped against her chest, not driving her down to rip out her throat but lapping at her face until she'd begun to giggle through her terrified tears. From that night on, she and Chainsaw had been the best of pals. Haas had even complained to her once that the dog no longer answered to its proper name, which was plainly, boringly, Herman.
"'Night, big fella," Kelly said as she let herself into the house.
Once inside, she glanced back and saw the poor mutt gawking lonesomely in through the sidelight. As she turned away, Peter's face flashed briefly in her mind, like a single subliminal frame in a low-budget horror flick, and she remembered how alone he'd looked the last time she'd seen him—
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