by Dean Koontz
He held desperately to consciousness. If he fainted, he might never wake. He balanced on the edge of a swoon. Then hundreds of gray dots appeared in the blackness, expanded into elaborate matrices of light and shadow, until he could see the interior of the truck.
Pulling himself up in the seat as far as the crumpled roof would allow, he again almost passed out. Gingerly, he touched his bleeding scalp. The wound seeped rather than gushed, not a mortal laceration.
They were in the open once more. Rain hammered on the truck.
The battery wasn’t dead yet. Wipers still swept the windshield.
The Explorer gamely wallowed down the center of the river, which was broader than ever. Perhaps a hundred twenty feet wide. Brimming against its banks, within inches of spilling over. God knew how deep it might be. The water was calmer than it had been but moving fast.
Gazing worriedly at the liquid road ahead, Rocky made pitiful sounds of distress. He wasn’t bobbing his head, wasn’t delighted by their speed, as on the streets of Vegas. He didn’t seem to trust nature as much as he had trusted his master.
“Good old Mr. Rocky Dog,” Spencer said affectionately, and was unnerved to hear that his speech was slurred.
In spite of Rocky’s concern, Spencer couldn’t see any unusual dangers immediately ahead, nothing like the bridge. For a couple of miles the flow appeared to proceed unimpeded, until it vanished into rain, mist, and the iron-colored light of thunderhead-filtered sun.
Desert plains lay on both sides, bleak but not entirely barren. Mesquite bristled. Clumps of wiry grass. Outcroppings of gnarled rock also grew out of the plains. They were natural formations but achieved the strange geometry of ancient Druid structures.
A new pain blossomed in Spencer’s skull. Irresistible darkness flowered behind his eyes. He might have been out for a minute or an hour. He didn’t dream. He just went away into a timeless dark.
When he revived, cool air fluttered feebly across his brow, and cold rain spattered his face. The many liquid voices of the river grumbled, hissed, and chuckled louder than before.
He sat for a while, wondering why the sound was so much louder. His thoughts were muddled. Eventually, he realized that the side window had collapsed while he’d been unconscious. Gummy laces of highly fragmented tempered glass lay in his lap.
Water was ankle-deep on the floor. His feet were half numb with cold. He propped them on the brake pedal and flexed his toes in his saturated shoes. The Explorer was riding lower than when last he’d noticed. The water was only an inch below the bottom of the window. Though moving fast, the river was less turbulent, perhaps because it had broadened. If the arroyo narrowed or the terrain changed, the flow might become tempestuous again, lap inside, and sink them.
Spencer was barely clearheaded enough to know that he should be alarmed. Nevertheless, he could muster only a mild concern.
He should find a way to seal the dangerous gap where the window had been. But the problem seemed insurmountable. For one thing, he would have to move to accomplish it, and he didn’t want to move.
All he wanted to do was sleep. He was so tired. Exhausted.
His head lolled to the right against the headrest, and he saw the dog sitting on the passenger seat. “How you doin’, fur butt?” he asked thickly, as if he had been pouring down beer after beer.
Rocky glanced at him, then looked again at the river ahead.
“Don’t be afraid, pal. He wins if you’re afraid. Don’t let the bastard win. Can’t let him win. Got to find Valerie. Before he does. He’s out there. He’s forever…on the prowl….”
With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant rode through the glistening day, muttering feverishly, searching for something unknown, unknowable. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the crumpled roof of the truck.
Maybe he passed out again, maybe he only closed his eyes, but when his feet slipped off the brake pedal and splashed into water that was now halfway up his calves, Spencer lifted his throbbing head and saw that the windshield wipers had stopped. Dead battery.
The river was as fast as an express train. Some turbulence had returned. Muddy water licked at the sill of the broken window.
Inches beyond that gap, a dead rat floated on the surface of the flow, pacing the truck. Long and sleek. One unblinking, glassy eye fixed on Spencer. Lips skinned back from sharp teeth. The long, disgusting tail was as stiff as wire, strangely curled and kinked.
The sight of the rat alarmed Spencer as he had not been alarmed by the flood lapping at the windowsill. With the breathless, heart-pounding fear familiar from nightmares, he knew he would die if the rat washed into the truck, because it was not merely a rat. It was Death. It was a cry in the night and the hoot of an owl, a flashing blade and the smell of hot blood, it was the catacombs, it was the smell of lime and worse, it was the door out of boyhood innocence, the passageway to Hell, the room at the end of nowhere: It was all that in the cold flesh of one dead rodent. If it touched him, he’d scream until his lungs burst, and his last breath would be darkness.
If only he could find an object with which to reach through the window and shove the thing away without having to touch it directly. But he was too weak to search for anything that could serve as a prod. His hands lay in his lap, palms up, and even contracting his fingers into fists required more strength than he possessed.
Maybe more damage had been done than he had first realized, when the top of his head had hit the ceiling. He wondered if paralysis had begun to creep through him. If so, he wondered if it mattered.
Lightning scarred the sky. A bright reflection transformed the rat’s tenebrous eye into a flaring white orb that seemed to swivel in the socket to glare even more directly at Spencer.
He sensed that his fixation on the rat would draw it toward him, that his horrified gaze was a magnet to its iron-black eye. He looked away from it. Ahead. At the river.
Though he was sweating profusely, he was colder than ever. Even his scar was cold, not ablaze any longer. The coldest part of him. His skin was ice, but his scar was frozen steel.
Blinking away the rain as it slanted through the window, Spencer watched the river gain speed, racing toward the only interesting feature in an otherwise tedious landscape of gently declining plains.
North to south across the Mojave, vanishing in mist, a spine of rock jutted as high as twenty or thirty feet in some places, as low as three feet in others. Though it was a natural geological feature, the formation was weathered curiously, with wind-carved windows, and appeared to be the ruined ramparts of an immense fortification erected and destroyed in a warring age a thousand years prior to recorded history. Along some of the highest portions of the expanse were suggestions of crumbling and unevenly crenelated parapets. In places the wall was breached from top to bottom, as though an enemy army had battered into the fortress at those points.
Spencer concentrated on the fantasy of the ancient castle, superimposing it upon the escarpment of stone, to distract himself from the dead rat floating just beyond the broken window at his side.
In his mental confusion, he was not initially concerned that the river was carrying him toward those battlements. Gradually, however, he realized that the approaching encounter might be as devastating to the truck as had been the brutal game of pinball with the bridge. If the currents conveyed the Explorer through one of the sluiceways and along the river, the queer rock formations would be just interesting scenery. But if the truck clipped one of those natural gateposts…
The spine of rock traversed the arroyo but was breached in three places by the flow. The widest gap was fifty feet across and lay to the right, framed by the south shore and by a six-foot-wide, twenty-foot-high tower of dark stone that rose from the water. The narrowest passage, not even eight feet wide, lay in the center, between that first tower and another pile of rocks ten feet wide and twelve high. Between that pile and the left-hand shore, where the battlements soared again and ran unin
terrupted far to the north, lay the third passage, which must have been twenty to thirty feet across.
“Gonna make it.” He tried to reach out to the dog. Couldn’t.
With a hundred yards to go, the Explorer seemed to be drifting swiftly toward the southernmost and widest gateway.
Spencer wasn’t able to stop himself from glancing to the left. Through the missing window. At the rat. Floating. Closer than before. The stiff tail was mottled pink and black.
A memory scuttled through his mind: rats in a cramped place, hateful red eyes in the shadows, rats in the catacombs, down in the catacombs, and ahead lies the room at the end of nowhere.
With a quiver of revulsion, he looked forward. The windshield was blurred by rain. Nevertheless, he could see too much. Having closed within fifty yards of the point at which the river divided, the truck no longer sailed toward the widest passage. It angled left, toward the center gate, the most dangerous of the three.
The channel narrowed. The water accelerated.
“Hold on, pal. Hold on.”
Spencer hoped to be carried sharply to the left, past the center gate, into the north passage. Twenty yards from the sluiceways, the lateral drift of the truck slowed. It would never reach the north gate. It was going to race through the center.
Fifteen yards. Ten.
Even to transit the center passage, they would need some luck. At the moment, they were rocketing toward the twenty-foot-high gatepost of solid rock on the right of that opening.
Maybe they would just graze the pillar or even slide by with a finger’s width to spare.
They were so close that Spencer could no longer see the base of the stone tower past the front of the Explorer. “Please, God.”
The bumper rammed the rock as though to cleave it. The impact was so great that Rocky slid onto the floor again. The right front fender tore loose, flew away. The hood buckled as if made of tinfoil. The windshield imploded, but instead of spraying Spencer, tempered glass cascaded over the dashboard in glutinous, prickly wads.
For an instant after the collision, the Explorer was at a dead stop in the water and at an angle to the direction of the flow. Then the raging current caught the side of the truck and began to push the back end around to the left.
Spencer opened his eyes and watched in disbelief as the Explorer turned crosswise to the flow. It could never pass sideways between the two masses of rock and through the center sluiceway. The gap was too narrow; the truck would wedge tight. Then the rampaging river would hammer the passenger side until it flooded the interior or maybe hurled a driftwood log through the open window at his head.
Shuddering, grinding, the front of the Explorer worked along the rock, deeper into the passage, and the back end continued to arc to the left. The river pushed hard on the passenger side, surging halfway up the windows. In turn, as the driver’s side of the truck was shoved fully around toward the narrow sluiceway, it created a small swell that rose over the windowsill. The back end slammed into the second gatepost, and water poured inside, onto Spencer, carrying the dead rodent, which had remained in the orbit of the truck.
The rat slipped greasily through his upturned palms and onto the seat between his legs. Its stiff tail trailed across his right hand.
The catacombs. The fiery eyes watching from the shadows. The room, the room, the room at the end of nowhere.
He tried to scream, but what he heard was a choked and broken sobbing, like that of a child terrified beyond endurance.
Possibly half paralyzed from the blow to his head, without a doubt paralyzed by fear, he still managed a spasmodic twitch of both hands, casting the rat off the seat. It splashed into a calf-deep pool of muddy water on the floor. Now it was out of sight. But not gone. Down there. Floating between his legs.
Don’t think about that.
He was as dizzy as if he had spent hours on a carousel, and a fun-house darkness was bleeding in at the edges of his vision.
He wasn’t sobbing anymore. He repeated the same two words, in a hoarse, agonized voice: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry….”
In his deepening delirium, he knew that he was not apologizing to the dog or to Valerie Keene, whom he would now never save, but to his mother for not having saved her, either. She had been dead for more than twenty-two years. He had been only eight years old when she’d died, too small to have saved her, too small then to feel such enormous guilt now, yet “I’m sorry” spilled from his lips.
The river industriously shoved the Explorer deeper into the sluiceway, although the truck was now entirely crosswise to the flow. Both front and rear bumpers scraped and rattled along the rock walls. The tortured Ford squealed, groaned, creaked: It was at most one inch shorter from back to front than the width of the water-smoothed gap through which it was struggling to be borne. The river wiggled it, wrenched it, alternately jammed and finessed it, crumpled it at each end to force it forward a foot, an inch, grudgingly forward.
Simultaneously, gradually, the tremendous power of the thwarted currents actually lifted the truck a foot. The dark water surged against the passenger side, no longer halfway up the windows on that flank but swirling at the base of them.
Rocky remained down in the half-flooded leg space, enduring.
When Spencer had quelled his dizziness with sheer willpower, he saw that the spine of rock bisecting the arroyo was not as thick as he had thought. From the entrance to the exit of the sluiceway, that corridor of stone would measure no more than twelve feet.
The jackhammering river pushed the Explorer nine feet into the passage, and then with a skreek of tearing metal and an ugly binding sound, the truck wedged tight. If it had made only three more feet, the Explorer would have flowed with the river once more, clear and free. So close.
Now that the truck was held fast, no longer protesting the grip of the rock, the rain was again the loudest sound in the day. It was more thunderous than before, although falling no harder. Maybe it only seemed louder because he was sick to death of it.
Rocky had scrambled onto the seat again, out of the water on the floor, dripping and miserable.
“I’m so sorry,” Spencer said.
Fending off despair and the insistent darkness that constricted his vision, incapable of meeting the dog’s trusting eyes, Spencer turned to the side window, to the river, which so recently he had feared and hated but which he now longed to embrace.
The river wasn’t there.
He thought he was hallucinating.
Far away, veiled by furies of rain, a range of desert mountains defined the horizon, and the highest elevations were lost in clouds. No river dwindled from him toward those distant peaks. In fact, nothing whatsoever seemed to lie between the truck and the mountains. The vista was like a painting in which the artist had left the foreground of the canvas entirely blank.
Then, almost dreamily, Spencer realized that he had not seen what was there to see. His perception had been hampered as much by his expectations as by his befuddled senses. The canvas wasn’t blank after all. Spencer needed only to alter his point of view, lower his gaze from his own plane, to see the thousand-foot chasm into which the river plunged.
The miles-long spine of weathered rock that he had thought marched across otherwise flat desert terrain was actually the irregular parapet of a perilous cliff. On his side, the sandy plain had eroded, over eons, to a somewhat lower level than the rock. On the other side was not another plain but a sheer face of stone, down which the river fell with a cataclysmic roar.
He had also wrongly assumed that the increased rumble of rain was imaginary. In fact, the greater roar was a trio of waterfalls, altogether more than one hundred feet across, crashing a hundred stories to the valley floor below.
Spencer couldn’t see the foaming cataracts, because the Explorer was suspended directly over them. He lacked the strength to pull himself against the door and lean out the window to look. With the flood pushing hard against the passenger side, as well as slipping under it and away
, the truck actually hung half in the narrowest of the three falls, prevented from being carried over the brink only by the jaws of the rock vise.
He wondered how in God’s name he was going to get out of the truck and out of the river alive. Then he rejected all consideration of the challenge. The fearfulness of it sapped what meager energy he still had. He must rest first, think later.
From where Spencer slumped in the driver’s seat, though he had no view of the river gone vertical, he could see the broad valley beneath him and the serpentine course of the water as it flowed horizontally again across the lower land. That long drop and the tilted panorama at the bottom caused a new attack of vertigo, and he turned away to avoid passing out.
Too late. The motion of a phantom carousel afflicted him, and the spinning view of rock and rain became a tight spiral of darkness into which he tumbled, around and around and down and away.
…and there in the night behind the barn, I’m still spooked by the swooping angel that was only an owl. Inexplicably, when the vision of my mother in celestial robes and wings proves to be a fantasy, I am overcome by another image of her: bloody, crumpled, naked, dead in a ditch, eighty miles from home, as she had been found six years before. I never actually saw her that way, not even in a newspaper photograph, only heard the scene described by a few kids in school, vicious little bastards. Yet, after the owl has vanished into the moonlight, I can’t retain the vision of an angel, though I try, and I can’t shed the gruesome mental picture of the battered corpse, although both images are products of my imagination and should be subject to my control.
Bare-chested and barefoot, I move farther behind the barn, which hasn’t been a real working barn for more than fifteen years. It’s a well-known place to me, part of my life since I can remember—yet tonight it seems different from the barn I’ve always known, changed in some way that I can’t define but that makes me uneasy.
It’s a strange night, stranger than I yet realize. And I’m a strange boy, full of questions I’ve never dared to ask myself, seeking answers in that July darkness when the answers are within me, if I would only look for them there. I am a strange boy who feels the warp in the wood of a life gone wrong, but who convinces himself that the warped line is really true and straight. I am a strange boy who keeps secrets from himself—and keeps them as well as the world keeps the secret of its meaning.