by Стивен Кинг
“Sure,” he said. “Leigh, is it about Arnie?”
“No,” she said, clutching the telephone so tightly that her hand felt numb. She had to struggle with her voice. “No—not Arnie. I want to talk to you about Christine.”
42
THE STORM BREAKS
Well she’s a hot-steppin hemi with a four on the floor,
She’s a Roadrunner engine in a ’32 Ford,
Yeah, late at night when I’m dead on the line,
I swear I think of your pretty face when I let her wind.
Well look over yonder, see those city lights?
Come on, little darlin, go ramroddin tonight.
— Bruce Springsteen
By five o’clock that evening the storm had blanketed Pennsylvania; it screamed across the state from border to border its howling throat full of snow. There was no final Christmas Eve rush, and most of the weary and shell-shocked clerks and salespeople were grateful to mother nature in spite of the missed overtime. There would, they told each other over Christmas Eve drinks in front of freshly kindled fires, be plenty of that when returns started on Tuesday.
Mother nature didn’t seem all that motherly that evening as early dusk gave way to full dark and then to blizzardy night. She was a pagan, fearsome old witch that night, a harridan on the wind, and Christmas meant nothing to her; she ripped down Chamber of Commerce tinsel and sent it gusting high into the black sky, she blew the large nativity scene in front of the police station into a snowbank where the sheep, the goats, the Holy Mother and Child were not found until a late January thaw uncovered them. And as a final spit in the eye of the holiday season, she tipped over the forty-foot tree that had stood in front of the Libertyville Municipal Building And sent it through a big window and into the town Tax Assessor’s office. A good place for it, many said later.
By seven o’clock the ploughs had begun to fall behind. A Trailways bus bulled its way up Main Street at quarter past seven, a short line of cars dogging its silvery rump like puppies behind their mother, and then the street was empty except for a few slant-parked cars that had already been buried to the bumpers by the passing ploughs. By morning, most of them would be buried entirely. At the intersection of Main Street and Basin Drive, a stop-and-go light that directed no one at all twisted and danced from its power cable in the wind. There was a sudden electrical fizzing noise and the light went dark. Two or three passengers from the last city bus of the day were crossing the street at the time; they glanced up and then hurried on.
By eight o’clock, when Mr and Mrs Cabot finally arrived home (to Leigh’s great but unspoken relief), the local radio stations were broadcasting a plea from the Pennsylvania State Police for everyone to stay off the roads.
By nine o’clock, as Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham, equipped with hot rum punches (Uncle Steve’s avowed Speciality of the Season), were gathering around the television with Uncle Steve and Aunt Vicky to watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol, a forty-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike had been closed by drifting snow. By midnight almost all of it would be closed.
By nine-thirty, when Christine’s headlights suddenly came on in Will Darnell’s deserted garage, cutting a bright arc through the interior blackness, Libertyville had totally shut down, except for the occasional cruising ploughs.
In the silent garage, Christine’s engine gunned and fell off.
Gunned and fell off.
In the empty front seat, the gearstick lever dropped down into DRIVE.
Christine began to move.
The electric eye gadget clipped to the driver’s sun-visor hummed briefly. Its low sound was lost in the howl of the wind. But the door heard; it rattled upward obediently on its tracks. Snow blew in and swirled gustily.
Christine passed outside, wraithlike in the snow. She turned right and moved down the street, her tyres cutting through the deep snow cleanly and firmly, with no spin, skid, or hesitation.
A turnblinker came on—one amber, winking eye in the snow. She turned left, toward JFK Drive.
Don Vandenberg sat behind the desk inside the office of his father’s gas station. Both his feet and his pecker were up. He was reading one of his father’s fuckbooks, a deeply incisive and thought-provoking tome titled Swap-Around Pammie. Pammie had gotten it from just about everyone but the milkman and the dog, and the milkman was coming up the drive and the dog was lying at her feet when the bell dinged, signalling a customer.
Don looked up impatiently. He had called his father at six, four hours ago, and asked him if he shouldn’t close the station down—there wouldn’t be enough business tonight to pay for the electricity it took to light up the sign. His father, sitting home warm and toasty and safely shitfaced, had told him to keep it open until midnight. If there ever was a Scrooge, Don had thought resentfully as he slammed the phone back down, his old man was it.
The simple fact was, he didn’t like being alone at night anymore. Once, and not so long ago at that, he would have had plenty of company. Buddy would have been here, and Buddy was a magnet, drawing the others with his booze, his occasional gram of coke, but most of all with the simple force of his personality. But now they were gone. All gone.
Except sometimes it seemed to Don that they weren’t. Sometimes it seemed to him (when he was alone, as he was tonight) that he might look up and see them sitting there—Richie Trelawney on one side, Moochie Welch on the other, and Buddy between them with a bottle of Texas Driver in his hand and a joint cocked behind his ear. Horribly white, all three of them, like vampires, their eyes as glazed as the eyes of dead fish. And Buddy would hold out the bottle and whisper, Catch yourself a drink, asshole—pretty soon you’ll be dead, like us.
These fantasies were sometimes real enough to leave him with his mouth dry and his hands shaking.
And the reason why wasn’t lost on Don. They never should have trashed old Cuntface’s car that night. Every single one of the guys in on that little prank had died horrible deaths. All of them, that was, except for him and Sandy Galton, and Sandy had gotten in that old, broken-down Mustang of his and taken off somewhere. On these long night shifts, Don often thought he would like to do the same.
Outside, the customer beeped his horn.
Don slammed the book down on the desk next to the greasy credit-card machine and struggled into his parka, peering out at the car and wondering who would be crazy enough to be out in a shitstorm like this one. In the blowing snow, it was impossible to tell anything about either the car or the customer; he could make out nothing for sure but the headlights and the shape of the body, which was too long for a new ear.
Someday, he thought, drawing on his gloves and bidding a reluctant farewell to his hard-on, his father would put in self-service pumps and all this shit would end. If people were crazy enough to be out on a night like this, they should have to pump their own gas.
The door almost ripped itself out of his hand. He held onto it so it wouldn’t slam back into the cinderblock side of the building and maybe shatter the glass; he almost went down on his ass for his pains. In spite of the steady hooting of the wind (which he had been trying not to hear), he had totally misjudged the force of the storm. The very depth of the snow—better than eight inches—helped to keep him on his feet. That fucking car must be on snowshoes, he thought resentfully. Guy gives me a credit-card I’m gonna fuse his spine.
He waded through the snow, approaching the first set of islands. The fuckstick had parked at the far set. Naturally. Don tried to glance up once, but the wind threw snow into his face in a stinging sheet and he lowered his head quickly, letting the top of the parka’s hood take the brunt of it.
He crossed in front of the car, bathed for a moment in the bright but heatless glow of its dual headlights. He struggled and floundered around to the driver’s side. The pump island’s fluorescents made the car into a garish white-over-purple burgundy shade. His cheeks were already numb. If this guy wants a dollar’s worth and asks me to check the oil, I’m telling
him to cram it, he thought, and raised his head into the sting of the snow as the window went down.
“Can I h—” he began, and the h-sound of help you became a high, hissing, strengthless scream: hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhh—
Leaning out of the window, less than six inches from his own face, was a rotting corpse. Its eyes were wide, empty sockets, its mummified lips were drawn back from a few yellowed, leaning teeth. One hand lay whitely on the steering wheel. The other, clicking horridly, reached out to touch him.
Don floundered backward, his heart a runaway engine in his chest, his terror a monstrous hot rock in his throat. The dead thing beckoned him, grinning, and the car’s engine suddenly screamed, piling up revs.
“Fill it up,” the corpse whispered, and in spite of his shock and horror, Don saw it was wearing the tattered and moss-slimed remains of an Army uniform. “Fill it up, you shitter.” Skull-teeth grinned in the fluorescent light. Far back in that mouth a bit of gold twinkled.
“Catch yourself a drink, asshole,” another voice whispered hoarsely, and Buddy Repperton leaned forward in the back seat, extending a bottle of Texas Driver toward Don. Worms spilled and squirmed through his grin. Beetles crawled in what remained of his hair. “I think you must need one.”
Don shrieked, the sound bulletins up and out of him. He whirled away, running through the snow in great leaping cartoon steps; he shrieked again as the car’s engine screamed V-8 power; he looked back over his shoulder and saw that it was Christine standing by the pumps, Arnie’s Christine, now moving, churning snow up behind her rear tyres, and the things he had seen were gone—that was even worse, somehow. The things were gone. The car was moving on its own.
He had turned toward the street, and now he climbed up over the snowbank thrown up by the passing ploughs and down the other side. Here the wind had swept the pavement clear of everything except an occasional blister of ice. Don skidded on one of these. His feet went out from under him. He landed on his back with a thump.
A moment later the street was flooded with white light. Don rolled over and looked up, eyes straining wildly in their sockets, in time to see the huge white circles of Christine’s headlights as she slammed through the snowbank and bore down on him like a locomotive.
Like Gaul, all of Libertyville Heights was divided into three parts. The semicircle closest to town on the low shoal of hills that had been known as Liberty Lookout until the mid-nineteenth century (a Bicentennial Plaque on the corner of Rogers and Tacklin streets so reminded) was the town’s only real poor section. It was an unhappy warren of apartments and wooden-frame buildings. Rope clotheslines spanned scruffy back yards which were, in more temperate seasons, littered with kids and Fisher-Price toys—in too many cases, both kids and toys had been badly battered. This neighbourhood, once middle-class, had been growing tackier ever since the war jobs had dried up in 1945. The decline moved slowly at first, then began to gain speed in the ’60s and early ’70s. Now the worst yet had come, although nobody would come right out and say it, at least not in public, where he or she could be quoted. Now the blacks were moving in. It was said in private, in the better parts of town, over barbecues and drinks: the blacks, God help us, the blacks are discovering Libertyville. The area had even gained its own name—not Liberty Lookout but the Low Heights. It was a name many found chillingly ghetto-ish. The editor of the Keystone had been quietly informed by several of his biggest advertisers that to use that phrase in print, thus legitimizing it, would make them very unhappy. The editor, whose mother had raised no fools, never did so.
Heights Avenue split off from Basin Drive in Libertyville proper and then began to rise. It cut cleanly through the middle of the Low Heights and then left them behind. The road then climbed through a greenbelt and into a residential area. This section of town was known simply as the Heights. All this might seem confusing to you—Heights this and Heights-that—but Libertyville residents knew what they were talking about. When you said the Low Heights, you meant poverty, genteel or otherwise. When you left off the adjective “Low”, you meant poverty’s direct opposite. Here were fine old homes, most of them set tastefully back from the road, some of the finest behind thick yew hedges. Libertyville’s movers and shakers lived here—the newspaper publisher, four doctors, the rich and dotty granddaughter of the man who had invented the rapid-fire ejection system for automatic pistols. Most of the rest were lawyers.
Beyond this area of respectable small-town wealth, Heights Avenue passed through a wooded area that was really too thick to be called a greenbelt; the woods lined both sides of the road for more than three miles. At the highest point of the Heights, Stanson Road branched off to the left, dead-ending at the Embankment, overlooking the town and the Libertyville Drive-In.
On the other side of this low mountain (but also known as the Heights), was a fairly old middle-class neighbourhood where houses forty and fifty years old were slowly mellowing. As this area began to thin out into countryside, Heights Avenue became County Road No.2.
At ten-thirty on that Christmas Eve, a 1958 two-tone Plymouth moved up Heights Avenue, its lights cutting through the snow-choked, raving dark. Long-time natives of the Heights would have said that nothing—except maybe a four-wheel-drive—could have gotten up Heights Avenue that night, but Christine moved along at a steady thirty miles an hour, headlights probing, wipers moving rhythmically back and forth, totally empty within. Its fresh tracks where alone, and in places they were almost a foot deep. The steady wind filled them in quickly. Now and again her front bumper and hood would explode through the ridged back of a snowdrift, nosing the powder aside easily.
Christine passed the Stanson Road turnoff and the Embankment, where Arnie and Leigh had once trysted. She reached the top of Liberty Heights and headed down the far side, at first through black woods cut only by the white ribbon that marked the road, then past the suburban houses with their cosy living-room lights and, in some cases, their cheery trim of Christmas lights. In one of these houses, a young man who had just finished playing Santa and who was having a drink with his wife to celebrate, happened to glance out and see headlights passing by. He pointed it out to her.
“If that guy came over the Heights tonight,” this young man said with a grin, “he must have had the devil riding shotgun.”
“Never mind that,” she said. “Now that the kids are taken care of, what do I get from Santa?
He grinned. “We’ll think of something.”
Farther down the road, almost at the point where the Heights ceased being the Heights, Will Darnell sat in the living room of the simple two-storey frame house he had owned for thirty years. He was wearing a bald and fading blue terrycloth robe over his pyjama bottoms, his huge sack of stomach pushing out like a swollen moon. He was watching the final conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge to the side of Goodness and Generosity, but not really seeing it. His mind was once more sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that grew steadily more fascinating: Arnie, Welch, Repperton, Christine. Will had aged a decade in the week or so since the bust. He had told that cop Mercer that he would be back doing business at the same old stand in two weeks, but in his heart he wondered. It seemed that lately his throat was always slimy from the taste of that goddam aspirator.
Arnie, Welch Repperton… Christine.
“Boy!” Scrooge hailed down from his window, a caricature of the Christmas Spirit in his nightgown and cap. “Is the prize turkey still in the butcher’s window?”
“Wot?” the boy asked. “The one as big as I am?”
“Yes, yes,” Scrooge answered, giggling wildly. It was as if the three spirits had, instead of saving him, driven him mad. “The one as big as you are!”
Arnie, Welch, Repperton… LeBay?
Sometimes he thought it was not the bust that had tired him out and made him feel so constantly beaten and afraid. That it was not even the fact that they had busted his pet accountant or that the Federal tax people were in on it and were obviously loaded for bear this time. The tax people wer
en’t the reason that he had begun scanning the street before going out mornings; the State Attorney General’s Office didn’t have anything to do with the sudden glances he had begun throwing back over his shoulder when he was driving home nights from the garage.
He had gone over what he had seen that night—or what he thought he had seen—again and again, trying to convince himself that it was absolutely not real… or that it absolutely was. For the first time in years he found himself doubting his own senses. And as the event receded into the past, it became easier to believe he had fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing.
He hadn’t seen Arnie since the bust, or tried to call him on the telephone. At first he had thought to use his knowledge about Christine as a lever to keep Arnie’s mouth shut if the kid weakened and took a notion to talk—God knew the kid could go a long way toward sending him to jail if he cooperated with the cops. It wasn’t until after the police had landed everywhere that Will realized how much the kid knew, and he had had a few panicky moments of self-appraisal (something else that was upsetting because it was so foreign to his nature): had all of them known that much? Repperton, and all the hoody Repperton clones stretching back over the years? Could he actually have been so stupid?
No, he decided. It was only Cunningham. Because Cunningham was different. He seemed to understand things almost intuitively. He wasn’t all brag and booze and bullshit. In a queer way, Will felt almost fatherly toward the boy—not that he would have hesitated to cut the kid loose if it started to look as if he was going to rock the boat. And not that I’d hesitate now, he assured himself.
On the TV, a scratchy black-and-white Scrooge was with the Cratchets. The film was almost over. The whole bunch of them looked like loonies, and that was the truth, but Scrooge was definitely the worst. The look of mad joy in his eye was not so different from the last look in the eye of a man Will had known twenty years before, a fellow named Everett Dingle who had gone home from the garage one afternoon and murdered his entire family.