“Get in,” I said.
“Dennis, I can’t.” Her lips quivered helplessly. “I can’t… no more… that body… that was Arnie’s father. I can’t, no more, please—”
“You have to,” I said.
She looked at me, glanced affrightedly back at the obscenely quivering remains of that old whore LeBay and Arnie had shared, and then came around Petunia’s front end. A piece of chrome tumbled and scratched her leg deeply. She screamed and ran. She clambered up into the cab and pushed over beside me. “Wh-what do I do?”
I hung halfway out of the cab, holding onto the roof, and pushed the clutch down with my right foot. Petunia’s engine was still running. “Just gun the gas and keep it gunned,” I said. “No matter what.”
Steering with my right hand, holding on with my left, I let the clutch out and we rolled forward and smashed into the wreckage, smashing it, scattering it. And in my head I seemed to hear another scream of fury.
Leigh clapped her hands to her head. “I can’t, Dennis! I can’t do it! It—it’s screaming!”
“You’ve got to do it,” I said. Her foot had come off the gas and now I could hear the sirens in the night, rising and falling. I grabbed her shoulder and a sickening blast of pain ripped up my leg. “Leigh, nothing has changed. You’ve got to.”
“It screamed at me!”
“We’re running out of time and it still isn’t done. Just a little more.”
“I’ll try,” she whispered, and stepped on the gas again.
I changed into reverse. Petunia rolled back twenty feet. I clutched again, got first… and Leigh suddenly cried out. “Dennis, no! Don’t! Look!”
The mother and the little girl, Veronica and Rita, were standing in front of the smashed and dented hulk of Christine, hand in hand, their faces solemn and sorrowing.
“They’re not there,” I said. “And if they are, it’s time they went back”—more pain in my leg and the world went grey—“back to where they belong. Keep your foot on it.”
I let out the clutch and Petunia rolled forward again, gaining speed. The two figures did not disappear as TV and movie ghosts do; they seemed to stream out in every direction, bright colours fading to wash pinks and blues… and then they were totally gone.
We slammed into Christine again, spinning what was left of her around. Metal shrieked and tore.
“Not there,” Leigh whispered. “Not really there. Okay. Okay, Dennis.”
Her voice was coming from far down a dark hallway. I fetched up reverse and back we went. Then forward. We hit it; we hit it again. How many times? I don’t know. We just kept slamming into it, and every time we did, another jolt of pain would go up from my leg and things would get a little bit darker.
At last I looked up blearily, and saw that the air outside the door seemed full of blood. But it wasn’t blood; it was a pulsing red light reflecting off the falling snow. People were rattling at the door out there.
“Is it good enough?” Leigh asked me.
I looked at Christine—only it wasn’t Christine anymore. It was a spread-out pile of twisted, gored metal, puffs of upholstery, and glittering broken glass.
“Have to be,” I said. “Let them in, Leigh.”
And while she went, I fainted again.
Then there were a series of confused images; things that came into focus for a while and then faded or disappeared completely. I can remember a stretcher being rolled out of the back of an ambulance; I can remember its sides being folded up, and how the overhead fluorescents put cold highlights on its chrome; I can remember someone saying, “Cut it, you have to cut it off so we can at least look at it”; I can remember someone else—Leigh, I think—saying “Don’t hurt him, please, don’t hurt him if you can help it”; I can remember the roof of an ambulance… it had to be an ambulance because at the periphery of my vision were two suspended IV bottles; I can remember a cool swab of antiseptic and then the sting of a needle.
After that, things became exceedingly weird. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that I was not dreaming—the pain proved that, if it proved nothing else—but all of it seemed like a dream. I was pretty well doped, and that was part of it… but shock was part of it too. No fake, Jake. My mother was there, crying, in a room that looked sickeningly like the hospital room in which I had spent the entire autumn. Then my father was there, and Leigh’s dad was with him, and their faces were both so tight and grim they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee as Franz Kafka might have written them. My father bent over me and said in a voice like thunder reverberating through cotton batting: “How did Michael get there, Dennis?” That’s what they really wanted to know: how Michael got there. Oh, I thought, oh my friends, I could tell you stories…
Then Mr Cabot was saying, “What did you get my daughter into, boy?” I seem to remember replying, “It’s not what I got her into, it’s what she got you out of,” which I still think was pretty witty under the circumstances, doped up the way I was and all.
Elaine was there briefly, and she seemed to be holding a Yodel or a Twinkie or something mockingly out of my reach. Leigh was there, holding her filmy nylon scarf out and asking me to raise my arm so she could tie it on. But I couldn’t; my arm was like a lead bar.
Then Arnie was there, and of course that had to be a dream.
Thanks, man, he said, and I noticed with something like terror that the left lens of his glasses was shattered. His face was okay, but that broken lens… it scared me. Thanks. You did okay. I feel better now. I think things are going to be okay now.
No sweat, Arnie, I said—or tried to say—but he was gone.
It was the next day not the 20th, but Sunday, January 21st—that I started to come back a little. My left leg was in a cast up in its old familiar position again amid all the pulleys and weights. There was a man I had never seen before sitting to the left of my bed, reading a paperback John D. MacDonald story. He saw me looking at him and lowered his book.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Dennis,” he said mildly, and deliberately marked his place in the book with a matchbook cover. He put the book in his lap and folded his hands over it.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked. He sure wasn’t Dr Arroway, who had taken care of me last time; this guy was twenty years younger and at least fifty pounds leaner. He looked tough.
“State Police Inspector,” he said. “Richard Mercer is my name. Rick, if you like.” He held out his hand, and stretching awkwardly and carefully I touched it. I couldn’t really shake it. My head ached and I was thirsty.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t really mind talking to you, and I’ll answer all of your questions, but I’d like to see a doctor.” I swallowed. He looked at me, concerned, and I blurted out, “I need to know if I’m ever going to walk again.”
“If what that fellow Arroway says is the truth,” Mercer said, “You’ll be able to get around in four to six weeks. You didn’t break it again, Dennis. You severely strained it; that was what he said. It swelled up like a sausage. He also said you were lucky to get off so cheap.”
“What about Arnie?” I asked. “Arnie Cunningham? Do you know—”
His eyes flickered.
“What is it?” I asked. “What is it about Arnie?”
“Dennis,” he said, and then hesitated. “I don’t know if this is the time.”
“Please. Is Arnie… is he dead?”
Mercer sighed. “Yes, he’s dead. He and his mother had an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in the snow. If it was an accident.”