Beth huddled into the passenger seat. Matt asked her to fasten her seat belt. The roads were slick with sheet ice, and it was easy to imagine his little import sliding into a ditch.
Beth strapped herself in and gazed through the window at dark suburban houses.
He signalled a left turn on Marina, crossing town to Beth’s house, but she touched his arm: “No, keep going… I don’t live there anymore.”
He frowned but crossed the intersection. “Moved out from your family?”
“It never was much of a family, Dr. Wheeler. Mainly just my dad, and he’s—you know. Changed.”
“I guess it’s hard to talk to him.”
“It used to be hard. Now he wants to talk—but it’s worse, in a way. I think part of the deal is that if you want to live forever you have to understand what a shit you were in real life. He figures he kicked me around too much, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He wants to apologize or make it better somehow.”
“You don’t want that?”
She shook her head fiercely. “I’m not ready for that. Christ, no. It’s hard even being around him since he changed. He even looks different now. You remember how big he used to be? Now he’s almost skinny. None of his clothes fit. He looks—” She chose a word. “Empty.”
She used the nail of her right index finger to draw an oval in the fog on the passenger window. She gave it eyes, eyelashes, a pursed mouth. A self-portrait, Matt thought. “So I’m staying at the Crown Motel. The one by the waterfront, past the ferry dock.”
Matt turned right at the next intersection, toward a blankness of fog and rain, the ocean. “You could have done better than a motel. Look at Tom Kindle.”
“The room is big enough. It has a kitchenette, so I can cook. I get along.”
The rain turned icy again, clattering against the roof of the car. Matt eased past the sign that said CROWN MOTOR INN, the car fishtailing on a slick of ice. He realized he hadn’t seen a single other vehicle during this drive from Tom Kindle’s house-—no traffic of any kind.
A light was burning in Beth’s room. She left it on, she said, so she could find the door at night. “It gets lonely in this big parking lot.” She cocked her head at him. “You want to see the place?”
“The roads aren’t getting any better, Beth.”
“You could walk me to the door, at least.”
He agreed… though it seemed somehow careless to leave the dry enclosure of the car.
Beth had appropriated a ground-floor room. The number on the door was 112. The door wasn’t locked. It opened into yellow light. “Just take a look,” Beth said. “Tell me it’s a nice place. God, it would be nice to have somebody tell me that.”
He stepped inside. The room was hot; the thermostat was turned up. She had decorated this ordinary suite with cheap art prints—pastel water-colors, kittens and farmhouses. A quilt, obviously homemade, had been thrown across the bed. She followed his look. “It’s the only thing I took with me when I left home. I slept under this quilt since I was little. My grandmother made it.” She sat on the bed and stroked the quilt with one hand. “Do I have to call you Dr. Wheeler? Everybody at the party called you Matt.”
“You can call me Matt.”
“Matt… you can stay here tonight if you want.”
Some part of him had expected the offer. Some part of him was surprised, even shocked.
“Because of the weather,” Beth said. “The weather being so shitty and all.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “I hardly see Joey anymore. He just plays with that fucking radio over at Kindle’s. It wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, Joey’s hardly a prize—but he was the only person who ever… I mean, he used to say I was pretty.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “Nobody else ever said that.”
She slid out of the shirt. Her skin was perfect, blemishless, flushed pink. Her breasts were small, the nipples almost childlike. There was a line of freckles across her breastbone. Why couldn’t he say anything? He felt as if his mouth had been disconnected from his body. He was mute.
WORTHLESS, said the small blue letters on her shoulder.
“I’m twenty years old,” Beth said. “I guess you’ve seen me naked since I was ten. You never said if you thought I was pretty. I guess doctors don’t say things like that. Matt. Matthew. Matt—do you think I’m pretty?”
“Beth, I can’t stay here.”
She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, then sat back on the bed. She frowned. Then she folded her hands in her lap in a gesture that was oddly shy. “I don’t know why I do this shit.” She looked imploringly at him. “It’s hard being alone all the time. The town is empty. It’s not just that no one comes out on the street—I think people are actually missing. And I don’t know what happened to them. And I lie here and I think about that and it’s just so fucking scary. Sad and scary. And I would like not to be alone. But you can’t stay?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is it as easy as that?”
“It’s not easy.”
It wasn’t. She was twenty years younger than Matt… but he wasn’t old, and she wasn’t a child, and the sight of her was deeply arousing. He hadn’t shared his bed with anyone since that August night with Annie Gates. And Beth was right about the town, Matt thought: It was empty, and it was scary, and the touch of another human being would be a powerful magic on a bitter winter night.
But she was vulnerable and too needy, and it was an act that might have unforeseen consequences.
She managed a small, embarrassed smile. “Telling the truth?” She looked him over, perhaps noticed the obvious bulge in his blue jeans. “I guess you’re telling the truth. You want to stay but you think if you stay it might be… dangerous? Can I use that word?”
He managed a nod.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m dangerous.” She stretched out across the bed in a motion that was both sensual and weary. “Maybe I had too much to drink.…”
“Maybe we all did.”
“Or maybe I’m a round-heeled little cunt. As my daddy used to say.”
He drove home on ice, through ice, a night all ice and darkness.
The house was dark when he arrived. The baseboard heaters stuttered and creaked. Rachel wasn’t home.
He hoped she was sleeping in a warm place this Christmas Eve.
But it wasn’t Christmas Eve anymore, Matt realized; it had been December 25 since midnight, since before he left the party. It was Christmas morning.
By Christmas noon, most of the ice had melted from the streets. Matt drove to the City Hall Turnaround and confronted the Helper a second time.
He wore his winter coat and a scarf Celeste had knitted for him in a time so remote it seemed like prehistory. Blades of grass, stiff with frost, crackled under his feet.
He stood close to the Helper—close enough to touch it. Rachel had said the thing could speak; but where was its mouth? Could it see him? Did it have eyes? Did it know he was here?
He supposed it did.
He began by cursing it. He called it a fucking intruder, a monster, a stony heartless motherfucking monument to all the needless cruelty that had been visited on the Earth.
He had to restrain himself from striking it, because he sensed its invulnerability, knew how easy it would be to beat his hands bloody on that unyielding surface.
He cursed it until there was nothing left in him but speechless hatred.
The silence, after that, was almost shocking.
He waited until his voice came back—he had worn it raw.
“Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you know. Tell me what we have to do to survive.”
He took a quick step backward—surprised in spite of himself—when the Helper opened its eyes, or what seemed to be eyes, twin patches of sleeker blackness on the black orb of its head, weirdly mobile, like two slick dots of oil.