Nightlight (23 page)

This would be easy. His hands would have to touch them, and that would be no pleasure. The living were so disgusting in their warmth, simmering, quick.

The thought of touching one was nauseating. The crawlspace under the house was a good hiding place. The trees all around were good hiding places. But this was not the time to hide.

He could almost love the living, if only they were not so greasy with ignorance.

It was better to be dead than to be alive, especially if you were dead like this, supreme, and with a new life, a life the living could not dream of, that would last forever.

He would forgive these living creatures, but not now. Now they needed to be cast down, broken like a potter's vessel. He would show them how mistaken they were, with their quick emptiness.

How foolish were the living, with their many words. How they violated the silence with their chirps, and soiled the air with their laughter. The living fouled the dark with their naked light.

He would destroy them.

33

Randolph shook his head, water dribbling off his yellow rain cap. The jeep leaped in one place, and gears clanked as the jeep lurched backward and edged to one side.

“I'll get out and push,” called Ed, and Randolph nodded agreement.

Mary got out, too, gingerly avoiding a stone that pointed upward like a stone dagger. She watched from under the dome of her umbrella as Ed put his shoulder against the back of the jeep.

The rust eyes in the white jeep seemed to look back at her through the growing darkness. They stared, neither kind nor cruel, but indifferent to what happened to her or anyone she loved.

She wanted to stop whatever Len's life had become, and free him. She had a confused vision of what she hoped for: mental wards, she supposed, nurses in white dresses and white shoes, Len sitting in a lawn chair with a blanket over his lap watching squirrels. He would put on weight, and get a tan from sitting between trees with the sun on him, and he would learn to be human.

And she would learn to be human, too. She would confess everything to someone. Dr. Kirby, she supposed. A priest? She had never enjoyed religion, but perhaps a palsied clergyman with white hair, one of those withered heads that had heard everything. Could she ask herself to speak aloud what she had felt? It would take courage.

All the while she knew it was pointless. Len would never be the hearty father, bringing children by the hand across a sunny lawn. It would never happen. No earnest wife, no house behind trees, no career. He would remain what she had made him: a ghoul.

The jeep bounced over a huddle of rocks. Ed waved her along, but as she watched Randolph began shifting gears, then he put on the brake with a jerk. He twisted the steering wheel, released the brake, and looked back at them, wide-eyed.

The jeep tilted slowly sideways, toward a creekbed white with flood. The muck the wheels sank into was breaking away, a long, lazy crack like a fissure that might wend across the surface of a pudding. A spray of pebbles spat from behind the rear wheels, but the jeep merely whined, and went nowhere.

Randolph climbed over the side of the jeep, his face twisted with anguish. He stepped back from the crack just as a root snapped with a gut-deep pop. Like a hand slowly tilting, the shelf of mud slid down, and the jeep rode with it, making no sound in the thunder of water from the creek.

The bottom of the jeep exposed itself, a rust-black assembly of axles and joints. The jeep leaned against a tree with jagged, bare limbs, and went no further.

Randolph, his feet sinking into mud, covered his face.

“It'll be all right,” said Ed.

Randolph did not move.

“It'll be all right. It's not going anywhere, that tree will hold it.”

Randolph pointed, water droplets forming on his outstretched hand. “Look at that tree. That tree is pathetic. It's a dead tree!”

“It's dead, but it's still strong,” replied Ed. “You can't see a speck of rot on it.”

“There's no way it can hold the jeep.”

“You have to admit the tree has no rot on it, now don't you?”

“Rot! The tree's a skeleton. It's all that's holding my jeep!”

“That tree has been there a long time, dead and alive. A tree like that has a root system as deep as it is tall. You couldn't topple that tree with a bulldozer.”

Randolph held forth his hands in a gesture of surrender. He turned, but studied the ground, crushing a stone into the mud with his shoe. He shook his head. He would not meet Mary's eyes, but spoke to his shoes. “I have a feeling this is getting hopeless.”

“There's nothing hopeless,” said Ed.

Randolph shrugged.

“Look over there,” called Ed.

Randolph looked after a long moment, but Mary watched the back of his head. Randolph scurried across the rocks, and climbed into a yellow bulldozer. “We can pull the jeep out!” he cried.

“We don't have a chain,” called Ed. “Anyway, we're not here to rescue your car.”

The vertical exhaust pipe vomited bronze smoke, the lid that covered it dancing up and down. Randolph worked levers and studied the dials before him.

“I'll buy you a jeep, a new one. I'll buy you three of them. Anything you want,” gasped Mary, struggling up the tread of the machine. She nearly slipped, and Randolph held her arm. “I don't want a new jeep,” he began, but his words had little force.

“It'll be all right,” she said. “You won't regret any of this.”

“Ha,” he said, without humor.

“How much further up the road is the Parker place?” she asked.

Randolph shrugged. “A long way. The road's rotten at best. And I don't know about driving this. For one thing, it's against the law.”

“Don't worry yourself about that for a single minute,” Ed replied. “I'll take care of any ramifications completely.”

Randolph shrugged again. “It's very difficult for me to believe anybody, with my jeep lying there next to a flood, kept up by a dead branch.”

But he squeezed the release on the gear shift, and the engine rumbled, shaking them all. “You hang on to this side and I'll squeeze on over,” Ed groaned. “Too bad they made it for just one person.”

Mary clung to the back of the black, tattered seat, holding the umbrella over all of them, although it did very little good. The bulldozer was bright yellow except where mud lined its edges and corners. The glass over its jiggling needles was cracked, and the metal teeth of its tread gleamed through red earth.

The machine lurched with a clank. At first it seemed that they were rising slowly into the air. The stones beneath them dropped away as Randolph struggled with levers that seemed too small for such a machine, black rods with finger indentations that Randolph gripped with both hands.

They were not rising into the air, but clanking over a ridge of earth. They balanced over it, then fell forward, all of them gasping, then staggering as Randolph struggled around a boulder.

“Slow down!” cried Ed.

“I don't even know how to speed up,” said Randolph thoughtfully. “This is a very strange piece of equipment.”

A pale tree sprawled, half collapsed, before them. Randolph wrestled with the levers, then pressed a pedal with his foot, and leaned back as if to distance himself from what was about to happen. “Hang on,” he said, nearly inaudible.

They drove up the tree, and then stopped. The machine tilted to one side, then corrected itself, and slumped over to the other. Mary gripped the back of the seat until it hurt, and then with a bang the tree broke, and the bulldozer skidded down a long slope scattered with blue rocks.

The metal tread clanked over the stones, mud jiggling along it like dirt delivered by a conveyor belt. The machine surged up a slope, coughing and bellowing.

“This is a very peculiar vehicle,” said Randolph. “It handles in a very awkward way. You'd have to say it doesn't handle at all.”

They swayed and jiggled over the edge of a bank, and the bulldozer clattered across meager asphalt. “The road,” Ed called.

Mary gripped her umbrella. It was obviously a road, and it was obviously a very poor one. It caved away in some places, and water gushed across it in others. It was appalling that a road as badly maintained as this could be allowed to exist. Even where there was asphalt, there were holes eaten away, and the yellow underbed was exposed, stones packed together like discolored molars.

But what disturbed her most was the growing darkness. It gathered in culverts, where manzanita twisted against the wet earth. It filled the creekbed where boulders churned. It dissolved the road ahead of them.

“How much farther?” she called over the rumble of the engine.

“Quite a ways,” Ed said, as the bulldozer careened up an embankment to avoid a hole scooped out of the side of the road. “I'm afraid it'll be dark by the time we get there, but that probably won't make a whole lot of difference.”

A tree had fallen over the road, a huge pine with scales on its sides so that it resembled a gigantic snake. Randolph jerked the machine to a stop. “We can't give up now,” Mary breathed.

Randolph glanced at her, tilting his head up to measure her expression, perhaps, or remember who she was. “I'm not giving up,” he said, sounding bored. “It's not my machine. If we wreck this, you'll buy another one. But you better get off for a second.”

She and Ed dismounted. They shrank to the side of a redwood as Randolph clattered toward the tree and went nowhere. He backed the machine, and gunned it forward. Its teeth tore at the wood, but the tree rolled, staying in one place. Shreds of wood sprayed across the road, and the air was ripe with diesel exhaust and resin.

With a bound, the bulldozer rocked over the tree, and ripped the pavement on the other side. Mary struggled back to the bulldozer, surprised at the hand Randolph gave her, gripping her hard just above her wrist.

Then the machine rumbled forward, the sound of its engine louder as the darkness increased.

For a moment Mary had the vision of the three of them seated around a fire. Paul telling stories of famous chefs, while Len listened, making bright, appropriate comments, and the woman, whoever she was, knitted, or leafed through a magazine. They would burst in on them, and there would be embarrassment and laughter, and they would all have rum and something, hot water and lemon, if nothing else, and share a long evening together.

Randolph fumbled with switches, and headlights speared the dark. Crumbled pavement rattled toward them in the twin beams, and the edges of the road were cluttered with the branches of redwoods and the featherlike fronds of ferns.

Len would have used his stay in the woods to strengthen himself. He would have been hiking, and chopping wood. He would still be a wraith, but a stronger one, and one with a future. He would be surprised and pleased at her visit, because surely he still cared for her, surely there was still affection between them.

The bulldozer shrieked. Its metal teeth ground along the pavement, slipping, then biting. The machine rocked forward, and the headlights revealed a chasm, fresh and naked, fragments of broken asphalt scattered across red dirt. A white knot of water struggled at the bottom.

“How much farther?” she asked when she could speak.

“I don't know,” said Randolph.

“Hard to say, exactly,” Ed mused. “Tell you the truth, I've lost track of where exactly we are.”

“We are,” said Randolph, “as far as we can go.” He slung a foot up over the side of the machine, where rain pattered onto his pant-leg. “We have here an uncrossable canyon.”

Mary clawed down from the bulldozer, and stepped back from the dark cavern before them.

“It didn't used to be here, as far as I can remember,” said Randolph.

“Where are you going?” Ed called.

Mary half-fell into the chasm, skidded down the mud, and struggled across the gush of water. Her umbrella collapsed, its wire ribs protruding from the cloth. She hurled the umbrella into the white water, as she clambered slowly up the other bank.

Mud filled her shoes, and her stringy hair half-blinded her as she wrestled up the opposite edge, and turned, blinking in the headlights.

She ran on, until the light of the headlights grew dim, and the cries of her companions diminished and were lost in the steady rain. She ran gasping, only guessing that she could reach the cabin, wherever it was, believing that the darkness that captured her was a good sign, a promising omen, proof that nightmares do not have to come true.

34

The river roiled in the darkness, and the thunder of it shook her. She sank to the ground, and could not move.

The rain felt its way into her clothes, but she did not shrink from it. Her body was numb as she stared at the grinding water. She could not cross this river. It was too powerful, too wide.

She was beaten.

She had been foolish. And yet—she knew her son was in danger, and she knew Paul was in danger, too. She knew something terrible was happening.

She climbed to her feet, and stepped to the edge of the water. She wrenched a branch from the ground, and tossed it into the water. It vanished at once, then reappeared in the dark river, the black arm of a swimmer who was already lost.

The forest beyond the river was a black wall. She could do nothing but stare at it, and at last she turned away.

She found the road again. She returned slowly, aware that each step took her away from Len. Rain stroked her cheeks like the unwanted sympathy of neighbors, and she stiffened herself against it. She would be silent in her defeat. No one would know what a chasm had opened inside her.

Two lights caught her. Twin smears of light gleamed on the patchy surface of the road. The rumble of an engine grew loud, and a hand reached down for her.

“You're all wet,” said Ed.

“You made it,” she gasped.

“It wasn't all that difficult when it came down to it,” said Randolph.