He stapled one of his arrows to a tree half a mile up the gravel road, then two more to indicate the turn between the concrete posts where he had cut the chain. He uprooted the "No Trespassing" sign and threw it into a bush. He put up his last arrow pointing straight ahead where the road looped back to form a Y. Then he drove back to East Anglia, parked on the street in front of the carnival, and waited. Only a few people were on the midway; the white lights of the Ferris wheel were revolving lonely in the darkness.
At midnight he heard the loudspeakers announcing that the carnival was over; half an hour later he saw the workmen swarming over the rides and booths, disassembling them to be loaded into trucks. About three o'clock he saw the caravan forming up. Three semis marked in the carnival's purple and orange pulled out first, then three cars with house trailers, then the semi with the yellow cab, the one that was Gene Anderson's. Cooley started his engine, turned a corner to get off the main street, and headed for the secondary road. He believed he had time enough to get where he was going ahead of the caravan, because it would take a while for them all to get onto the state highway, but he kept the speedometer at seventy and hurtled over the winding road behind the beams of his headlights.
Larry Scanlon unlocked the cab, swung himself up, and closed the door. He took a sip of the Coke he was carrying and set it down in the snack box. The yellow tag was hanging from the mirror, the signal they used to let Larry know that the giant was back in the trailer. He removed it and tossed it into the glove compartment. He had spent the last three hours helping to take down and load the loop-the-loop. A shower would have been good, but he would just get sweaty again, unloading and setting up in Elvis. The house trailer ahead of him was just pulling out; he started the engine, turned on the headlights and followed.
Once they were on the highway there was nothing to do but follow the taillights of the driver ahead. He finished the Coke and lit a cigarette. This was part of what he liked about carnival life -- pulling out of town in the dead of night, heading for somewhere else, being awake and moving when the rest of the world was asleep. Back in Cleveland, the kids he had gone to school with were probably pounding their ears, with alarm clocks beside them to wake them for one more day at their boring jobs; or else they were in Viet Nam getting their butts shot off.
The four-lane was almost deserted at this time of night. Every now and then, when the road curved just enough but not too much, he could see the lights of the caravan strung out in the darkness, but most of the time his view was blocked by the house trailer ahead. After about three-quarters of an hour he saw the trailer's turn signals flash three times. He flicked the lever, passing the signal along, and reduced his speed.
The caravan turned off the highway onto a feeder road that led to a two-lane rising and dipping through the hills. There were so many sharp curves now that he frequently lost sight of the trailer ahead and the car behind him. As he came around one curve, he saw a moving light, and hit the brake. Someone was standing on the shoulder, swinging a flashlight with a red rim, and he saw that the flash was pointing up a steep gravel road. As he slowed to make the turn, he glimpsed the figure in the headlights; it was a short, heavy-set man, but his hat brim shadowed his face and Larry couldn't see who it was.
The semi had lurched a little as he made the turnoff and shifted down. After a minute the intercom hissed and crackled. "Larry?"
"Yeah, Mr. Kimberley. I wake you up?"
"Guess so. Where are we, anyway?"
"Beats me. There was a guy back there with a flashlight, so I turned off."
"With a flashlight? That's funny."
"Yeah." There was nothing in sight in the gravel road ahead, and nothing behind but the cloud of dust they were making. "This doesn't look right," Larry said. "Oh, wait a minute -- " The headlights lit up a tree on his right; a red arrow was stapled to the trunk of the tree. "There's an arrow."
Headlights came up behind. "Guess it's all right," Larry said. "Here comes somebody behind us." The lights kept coming, drew up, and swung out to pass. In the dust cloud as it pulled ahead, Larry could tell only that it was a brown station wagon, not hauling anything, just a car.~
"What about the guy with the light, could you tell who it was?"
"No."
The pale road unwound before them out of the darkness. The taillights of the car that had passed were nowhere to be seen, and there was still no one behind them. "There's another arrow," said Larry, with relief. On a tree ahead, two red arrows marked a turn. Larry swung the wheel. "Maybe this'll take us back to the highway."
Ahead, tall shapes were looming against the sky. The road made a Y; another red arrow showed him which way to go. The other road ran past a cluster of tall buildings with skeletal stairways going up and down; beyond them were black mounds, taller than the buildings. "Coal," said Larry. "This can't be right. Oh, hell." In the headlights, he could see that the road curved into a loop -- it was going to lead them back to the Y again. He stopped the truck. "This is a mine or something," he said. "I don't get it. Some kind of a joke?"
"I'm coming up," the giant's voice said. The hiss from the intercom stopped.
In the side mirror, he saw the trailer door open. The giant came out, wearing his brown and white robe. He walked past the cab, crossed in the glare of the headlights, and after a moment rapped on the window. Larry leaned over to unlock the door for him, and he climbed in, ducking under the ceiling of the cab. He rummaged in the glove compartment, pulled out a road map, and spread it between them in the glow of the dome light.
Larry studied it a moment. "Here's the state road," he said. "This must be where we turned off, and then here's where we went north again on the two-lane. This road doesn't even show on the map." He looked up. "What do you think?"
"All we can do is go back the way we came, and just head for Elvis. We'll get there late."
"Yeah. Well -- " Larry put the truck into gear and drove around the curve of the loop. Where the road straightened again, it led under the bulk of a tall structure on posts that straddled the road. "What's that?" the giant asked.
"A hopper. Where they load coal, I guess." As they drove under it, something white flashed toward them, a leaping figure, arms waving. Larry hit the brakes; the engine died. He had just time to see that the pale figure was a dummy, a scarecrow with a face, jerking and swinging in front of the windshield. Then the cab shook to an insane roar; the figure was gone behind a tumbling stream of darkness that cascaded past the windshield.
"Back up!" the giant said sharply.
The roar continued, like nothing Larry had ever heard. His arms were trembling, and he couldn't feel the gearshift lever. He got it into neutral somehow, turned on the engine, then shifted into reverse. When he let out the clutch, nothing seemed to happen. The cab rocked a little, but the roar continued and the dark cascade kept on falling.
"You're just spinning the wheels," the giant shouted in his ear. "Try forward. Hurry up!"
Larry slammed the gearshift lever into first. It was a moment before he realized that he had killed the engine again. He felt dizzy, and it was hard to focus his eyes: he was trembling all over. He got the engine started, let the clutch out and stepped on the gas. Nothing happened, except that the cab shuddered and slewed a little.
"Oh, God!" said Larry. His voice was stifled inside his head by the unending, maddening roar. He jammed the gas pedal down, again and again. The idiot lights went on; he had killed the engine once more. He reached for the start button, but the giant's hand covered his. "Don't," said the voice in his ear. "The exhaust stacks must be covered by now. Leave it off."