and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—
She loved him.
Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would…
One who would love her for herself alone, that voice inside whispered.
“Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.
Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and
(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)
But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that… that…
(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton—the late Clarence “Buddy” Repperton—and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)
The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.
He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.
He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell’s, and after the place was empty he had put Christine’s transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tyres, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandonded hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he bad pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the milometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tyres, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—
He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay’s keys.
He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine’s steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.
It had been a miracle.
He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tyres were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to re-assemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds, The dents began to pop back out.
He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the milometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.
What could be so horrible about that?
“Nothing,” a voice said.
He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double- breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat—it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you’d not want to fool with.
“Start her up,” LeBay said. “Get the heater going and let’s motorvate.”
“Sure,” Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tyres crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired—negated. Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.
“Let’s have us some music,” the voice beside him said.
Arnie turned on the radio. Dion was singing” Donna the Prima Donna”.
“You going to eat that pizza, or what?” The voice seemed to be changing somehow.
“Sure,” Arnie said. “You want apiece?”
Leering: “I never say no to a piece of anything.” Arnie opened the pizza box with one hand and pulled a piece free. “Here you g—”
His eyes widened. The slice of pizza began to tremble, the long threads of cheese dangling down beginning to sway like the strands of a spiderweb broken by the wind.
It wasn’t LeBay sitting there anymore.
It was him.
It was Arnie Cunningham at roughly age fifty, not as old as LeBay had been when he and Dennis first met him on that August day, not that old, but getting there, friends and neighbours, getting there. His older self was wearing a slightly yellowed T-shirt and dirty, oil-smeared bluejeans. The glasses were hornrims, taped at one bow. The hair was cut short and receding. The grey eyes were muddy and bloodshot. The mouth had taken all the tucks of sour loneliness. Because this—this thing, apparition, whatever it was—it was alone. He felt that.
Alone except for Christine.
This version of himself and Roland D. LeBay could have been son and father: the resemblance was that great.
“You going to drive? Or are you going to stare at me?” this thing asked, and it suddenly began to age before Arnie’s stunned eyes. The iron-coloured hair went white, the T-shirt rippled and thinned, the body beneath twisted with age. The wrinkles raced across the face and then sank in like lines of acid. The eyes sank into their sockets and the corneas yellowed. Now only the nose thrust forward, and it was the face of some ancient carrion-eater, but still his face, oh, yes, still his.
“See anything green?” this sept—no, this octogenarian “Arnie Cunningham croaked, as its body twisted and writhed and withered on Christine’s red seat. “See anything green? See anything green? See anything—” The voice cracked and rose and whined into a shrill, senile treble, and now the skin broke open in sores and surface tumours and behind the glasses milky cataracts covered both eyes like shades being pulled down. It was rotting before his very eyes and the smell of it was what he had smelled in Christine before, what Leigh had smelled, only it was worse now, it was the high, gassy, gagging smell of high-speed decay, the smell of his own death, and Arnie began to whine as Little Richard came on the radio singing “Tutti Frutti,” and now the thing’s hair was failing out in gossamer white drifts and its collarbones poked through the shiny, stretched skin above the T-shirt’s sagging round collar, they poked through like grotesque white pencils. Its lips were shrivelling away from the final surviving teeth that leaned this way and that like tombstones, it was him, it was dead, and yet it lived—like Christine, it lived,
“See anything green?” it gibbered. “See anything green?”
Arnie began to scream.
39
