Tales from the Nightside (2 page)

This is what Charles Grant does to earn his living, and because he does it well, I don’t think there’s any need for me to ramble on any longer, telling you how good he is or how lucky you are. Both are true, but enough is enough, already.

We re headed over to the nightside now, so grab on, people. Get ready to break out.

In a hellish sort of way, I think you’re going to enjoy yourself.

STEPHEN KING

Bangor, Maine

It was the wrong time of year and the wrong hour of the day. In sunlight, in spring, the tollbooths that stretched eight across the highway bounced back the clean sharp air of April as though they had just been painted. Green, and gold, with red lights, green lights, guiding into the lanes beyond the cars that jerked, that halted, that separated once through and vanished down the road.

In autumn, in the afternoon, the paint on the booths mellowed in tune with the trees that flanked the tarmac, and the air was brisk and brittle and filled with the cries of Canadian geese.

But it was November, past midnight, and Wes rubbed at his heavy arms encased in khaki as he waited for the next automobile to break from the darkness and feed him its toll.

The air was damp, the stars gone, birds gone, and there seemed nothing left alive on the road except him.

He'd taken the job, though hating the night shift when the electronics firm he'd managed folded in the dead wake of a dying space industry, and his engineering skills abruptly cheapened to less than a dime a dozen. For months he'd driven; from California to Florida to Houston and finally to a small apartment in Oxrun Station. For months he had filled with his precise small handwriting all the blanks and the boxes and the circles on applications, answered questions about his ambitions, and shook soft tanned hands that bade him wait by the telephone for that miraculous call. That never came.

"Wes?” It was a woman's voice, and he looked up and across the narrow space to the booth opposite. Terry was there, beckoning, and he shrugged.

"Can't," he said ruefully... "Pete's not out'here yet."

"Oh, come on! There's no one coming. We'll get him out of the office, okay?"

She was dark, less than half his weight, an Oxrun native and mother of six who needed the money as badly as he and worked the nights because the pay was twice as high. Normally she grinned constantly even when she was silent; but now her face, too much aged, was folded into a concerned frown that bothered him. She called him again, impatiently, and he nodded, pushed open the gate that penned him in, and lumbered down the single step to the gap between them. He glanced back up the road with an uncertain shudder, saw nothing, and hurried out of the November dark into the garish fluorescent glare of the highway-authority office building squatting green and gold between four large pines.

There were generally four on duty throughout the graveyard shift: two in the booths, to keep each other awake, and two inside who spelled the others several times an hour... to keep them all awake.

Pete Hawkins, Wes's relief, pushed past him through the door, a punch to his arm and a smile and a nod. Wes didn't speak to him. There was nothing to say. Hawkins had known him for less than a week, and since they'd never shared coffee, they never shared dreams.

Terry was already sitting at a long and low table, a paper cup in front of her, steaming grey.

Wes sat, rubbing gratefully at his stomach, scratching at his thick neck. He remembered a time, when he was reasonably thin, but with money tight only starches and the like were easy to come by.

"Wes, I've been had again."

"Again?” He couldn't believe Terry would allow herself to be cheated more than once a month. But twice? Twice in the past two days some jokers had driven through her lane and had given her fake coins in place of the real. And they weren't even imitations of quarters, but only the same size and texture. On their front a small stylized pyramid, on their backs various designs he hadn't understood.

"Wes, what am I going to do, huh? I can't keep putting in my own money this way. I need every penny I can get. You know that. Four dollars' worth in the last two weeks. You know how much I can do with four dollars and six kids?"

Wes nodded, and a strand of black hair dropped to his forehead. He pushed at it, waited with one hand poised until he was satisfied it would stay. "They must know when you're on, Ter," he said finally. "They must think you're a sucker—"

"I am, obviously."

"—so they'll keep at it until you tumble at the wrong time. Wrong time for them, I mean. Don't you ever look at the money first?"

She laughed and shook her head. "You like people too much, Wes, and you trust them too far. Someone could hand you a boiler plate and you wouldn't know it until they were in Canada. Of course I look at them, but they're silvery and they weigh the same. Only when I got time to count and stack, then I notice. Damn, Wes, what am I going to do?"

You're going to get fired, he thought, when Pete finds out and tells the right people—for him—what's happening. And she must have sensed it because immediately her eyes filled with watery light.

"If Lou were still here, or Jess—"

"Or Mac or Dave," he finished. "But they're not, Terry. They're gone."

Over the past four weeks, as many workers had walked off their jobs. Wes, who had been on the booths for just over three months, had gaped in astonishment every time it happened. It was, invariably, in the middle of the shift, somewhere near three when the road was at its most still, its most invisible. The lights from the gas station a mile east were out, the goosenecked lamps overhanging the broad toll plaza had been reduced to one on either side, and all the toll lights were red save one green facing in either direction. One by one, tben the men had climbed out of their booths and into their cars. Backed them up, went through the lanes like ordinary commuter travelers or tourists, and vanished beyond the edge of the light.

Not a word to anyone, not a letter once they had gone.

And each one had passed to Terry one of the bogus coins."

"Listen, Terry," he said when the silence began to unnerve him, "tell you what I'll do. I'll switch booths with you, all right? And when one of them jerks tries anything on me. I'll..."

"Break their arms?"

"Sit on them," he said, and spread his arms to display his bulk.

She pushed at her hair, shaking her head but smiling in spite of herself, and Wes relaxed. It would have been a hell of a long night if he and Terry hadn't been able to call to each other from their respective stations. Jokes. Stories. About her kids, his jobs, complaints about traffic and the lack of it... anything at all to keep from turning on the portable radio. Radios were death in the middle of the night. The music was loud enough to keep him awake, but the jockeys kept telling him the time he didn't want to know until the sun broke over the horizon.

He supposed, he
knew
, it would have been cheaper just to keep the exact-change lane open, but there was always some idiot with a five-dollar bill... at four in the morning with a five-dollar bill.

His eyes would be stinging by then, because instead of sleeping when the sun came up he would write his resumes and make calls and once in a while take a sick day to drive out to an interview. He had done that yesterday, in fact, and finally there was a chance that he could kiss nickels and quarters and dimes good-bye forever. He had not mentioned it to Terry, though, because he didn't want to jinx it.

He waited, instead.

And walked with her back to the road.

A yellow van was waiting in his lane, honking his horn and shouting for attention. At first Wes thought the driver might be in trouble, but when he hurried to the island and tightroped to the gate, the booth was empty.

The driver was mad.

Wes apologized for the delay, received a curse for a tip, and the quarter was thrown against his chest as the van sped away.

"Terry," he called, "do you see Pete anywhere?"

Silence. Then, "No," her voice thin in the damp air.

It wasn’t the best damned job in the world, he thought as he strode angrily toward the parking lot behind the authority building, but damnit, whoever's doing it ought to do it right, for God's sake.

He heard Terry calling him, ignored her and rounded the back corner, and stopped. The lot was empty except for her station wagon and his sedan. Both of them were old, and both of them were alone.

Good God, he thought, walked back to the plaza and stared east, then west, shaking his head.

***

The following night there were two new takers and one, a young blond man with a wisp for a mustache, appealed to Wes instantly. During one break then, instead of going inside with Terry, he leaned against the booth and they talked, trading lies and histories until Wes learned that Joseph was a student looking to make ends and tuitions meet somewhere, it was hoped in the direction of a bank account

"You're crazy, you know that?" Wes said with a grin. "How you going to study and do your papers out here, huh? You'll be dead for your classes, you know. You won't be able to stay awake."

Joseph grinned, gap-toothed and pleasant. "I'll work it out, Wes, don't worry. As long as I don't get fired for being cheated—"

"Terry told you?"

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, I got one of them things just a few minutes ago, while you were getting coffee."

He held out his palm and Wes picked at the coin clumsily, finally grabbing it and holding it close to his face. There was the pyramid, and on the opposite face... an odd representation of what looked to be some kind of bird. A hawk, he thought, or maybe an eagle.

"Osiris," Joseph said.

"What?"

That's Osiris there, I think. The head, I mean."

"You're kidding," Wes said. "You mean, folks are dumping Egyptian coins on us?"

He couldn't wait to tell Terry. Not that it would do her much shrugged and had turned to step down from the ledge when a station wagon pulled up and a hand stuck out. He couldn't move. It was Terry. He saw her through the windshield and she was... not exactly crying, not exactly happy. Her lips fought to give him a smile, but as soon as Joseph had taken her toll, her hand snapped back to the steering wheel and he had to press tight against the booth to keep from being knocked off the island when she floored the accelerator and raced west toward the hills.

"Goddamn," Joseph said. "She stuck me! Do you believe it? Terry... He held out his hand. The coin was there.

In the glove compartment, Wes remembered suddenly; when they had arrived simultaneously at the parking lot and he'd hurried over to greet her and help her from the wagon, she'd been fumbling in the glove compartment, had snatched back her hand as though it had been burned. She'd slid out quickly, grabbing his arm, but not before he saw the silver glitter lying on top of a folded worn map.

"Joe, cover for me," he said quickly, and without waiting for an answer, raced for his car, put it in gear, and spewed gravel and dust in his haste to get on the highway.

West of the toll plaza the road ran straight for nearly two miles, then began a sinuous curve that climbed up the sides of two consecutive mountains. At the end of the level stretch was an exit, closed now for repairs and barricaded heavily, the shoulders flush against massive boulders that would prevent a car of any size from squeezing around it. Because of the land and the trees, then, he knew there wouldn't be any way for Terry to leave the road for the next twenty-two miles. Foolish, he thought, as the speedometer climbed from fifty to sixty, sixty-five to seventy. What the hell is she running away from?

His headlights punched weak holes in the blackness, and it seemed less like he was driving, more like he was floating through air that thickened the faster he went.

He glanced down at the odometer and frowned when he realized it wasn't registering the miles he was traveling. Damn, he thought; another expense.

He looked up, suddenly wrenched at the wheel and slammed on the brakes, the car skewing to one side, the smell of burning rubber already sharp in his nostrils. When he stopped, he was shaking and he laid his forehead against the cool plastic of the wheel until his stomach calmed and his arms stopped trembling.

Then he slid out of the car.

Directly ahead of him was a soft wavering light that stretched across the road from forest to forest. It wasn't the sun, he was facing west, and it wasn't a fire because he could smell nothing but the rubber, felt no heat as he approached it. It was... just a light, that illuminated nothing.

He wiped his hands nervously against his shirt, telling himself he was too tired to think straight, too anxious about the possible new job to think anything through. But he walked cautiously forward until, with a step, he was in the light. In it, not beyond it. And stretched for what seemed like miles in every direction were lines of automobiles. Abandoned. Rusting. He reached out to touch one, pulled his hand back when his legs began to feel weak.

Tired, that's all.

The land was sloped down and away from him, and in the middle distance was a broad blue-white river. He could see on the near bank a small group of people straggling onto a rivercraft whose bow and stern were arched high and bent down toward the center of the deck; like a double-sting scorpion, he thought. In the middle of the deck was a tiny cabin. The people, their faces dimmed by the suffusion of the light, bent and entered until they were all inside. Then, from a shadow on the bank came a tall man who stepped up the gangway, pulled it to after him, and reached out for a pole attached to a rudder. As he did so he looked up... and Wes blinked, turned abruptly, and ran.

The man's head was not human. It was black. It was a dog.

Suddenly the light was behind him and he was in his car, racing the engine and skidding into a U-turn. A cloud of deep black fear settled over him until, with a check in his rearview mirror, he realized that the light was gone. There was nothing behind him but the road. And it wasn't until he had stopped his sedan in the parking lot that he realized the car he'd almost touched on that congregated slope had been a station wagon, had been Terry's.