Christine (55 page)

"Leigh," Dennis said, happily pleased.

The phone in her hand felt cold. "Dennis, can I come over and talk to you?"

"Today?" he asked, surprised.

Confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. The ham in the oven. She had to turn the oven off at five. Her parents would be home. It was Christmas Eve. The snow. And… and she didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight. Out walking on the sidewalks, when anything might come looming out of the snow. Anything at all. Not tonight, that was the worst. She didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight.

"Leigh?"

"Not tonight," she said. "I'm house-sitting for my folks.

They're at a cocktail party."

"Yeah, mine too," Dennis said, amused. "My sister and I are playing Parcheesi. She cheats."

Faintly: "I do not!"

At another time it might have been funny. It wasn't now.

After Christmas. Maybe on Tuesday. The twenty-sixth. Would that be all right?"

"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 gearshift 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 tires 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 tires, 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 neighborhood, 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.