third time. The wind wailed and snow struck — the big picture window like dry sand. Will licked his lips and tried to breathe slowly. But his throat was closing up; he could feel it.
The phone began to ring on the other end. Three times, Four.
Christine’s engine screamed. Then the heavy thud as she hit the snowbank the passing ploughs had piled up at both ends of Will’s semicircular driveway.
Six rings. Seven. Nobody some.
“Shit on it,” Will whispered, and slammed the phone back down. His face was pale, his nostrils flared wide, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire upwind. His cigar had gone out. He threw it on the carpet and groped in his bathrobe pocket as he hurried back to the window. His hand found the comforting shape of his aspirator, and his fingers curled around its pistol grip.
Headlights shone momentarily in his face, nearly blinding him, and Will raised his free hand to shield his eyes. Christine hit the snowbank again. Little by little she was bludgeoning her way through to the driveway. He watched her back up across the road and wished savagely for a plough to come along now and hit the damned thing broadside.
No plough came. Christine came again instead, engine howling, lights glaring across his snow-covered lawn. She struck the snowbanks pushing mounds of snow violently to either side. The front end canted up and for a moment Will thought she was going to come right over what was left of the frozen, hard-packed embankment. Then the rear wheels lost traction and spun frantically.
She backed up.
Will’s throat felt as if its bore was down to a pinhole. His lungs strained for air. He took the aspirator out and used it. The police. He ought to call the police. They could come. Cunningham’s ’58 couldn’t get him. He was safe in his house. He was—
Christine came again, accelerating across the road, and this time she hit the bank and came over it easily, front end at first tilting up, splashing the front of his house with light, then crashing back down. She was in the driveway. Yes, all right, but she could come no further, she… it…
Christine never slowed. Still accelerating, she crossed the semicircular driveway on a tangent, ploughed through the shallower, looser snow of the side yard, and roared directly at the picture window where Will Darnell stood looking out.
He staggered backward, gasping hard, and tripped over his own easy chair.
Christine hit the house. The picture window exploded, letting in the shrieking wind. Glass flew in deadly arrows, each of them reflecting Christine’s headlamps. Snow blew in and — danced over the rug in erratic corkscrews. The headlights momentarily illuminated the room with the unnatural glare of a television studio, and then she withdrew, her front bumper dragging, her hood popped up, her grille smashed into a chrome-dripping grin full of fangs.
Will was on his hands and knees, gagging harshly for breath, his chest heaving. He was vaguely aware that, had he not tripped over his chair and fallen down, he probably would have been cut to ribbons by flying glass. His robe had come undone and flapped behind him as he got to his feet. The wind streaming in the window picked up the TV Guide from the little table by his chair, and the magazine flew across the room to the foot of the stairs, pages riffling. Will got the telephone in both hands and dialled 0.
Christine reversed along her own tracks through the snow. She went all the way back to the flattened snowback at the entrance to the driveway. Then she came forward, accelerating rapidly, and as she came the bonnet immediately began to uncrimp, the grille to regenerate itself. She slammed into the side of the house below the picture window again. More glass flew; wood splintered and groaned and creaked. The big window’s low ledge cracked in two, and for a moment Christine’s windscreen, now cracked and milky, seemed to peer in like a giant alien eye.
“Police,” Will said to the operator. His voice was hardly there; it was all wheeze and whistle. His bathrobe flapped in the cold blizzard wind coming in through the shattered window. He saw that the wall below the window was nearly shattered. Broken chunks of lathing protruded like fractured bones. It couldn’t get in, could it? Could it?
“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to speak up,'the operator said. “We seem to have a very bad connection.”
Police, Will said, but this time it wasn’t even a whisper; only a hiss of air. Dear God, he was strangling, he was choking; his chest was a locked bank vault. Where was his aspirator?
“Sir?” the operator asked doubtfully.
There it was, on the floor. Will dropped the telephone and scrabbled for it.
Christine came again, roaring across the lawn and striking the side of the house. This time the entire wall gave way in a shrapnel-burst of glass and lathing, and incredibly, nightmarishly, Christine’s smashed and dented bonnet was in his living room, she was in, he could smell exhaust and hot engine.
Christine’s underworks caught on something, and she reversed back out of the ragged hole with a screech of pulling boards, her front end a gored ruin dusted with snow and plaster. But she would come again in a few seconds, and this time she might—just might—
Will grabbed his aspirator and ran blindly for the stairs.
He was only halfway up when the revving whine of her engine came again and he turned to watch, leaning on the railing more than grasping it.
The stairwell’s height lent a certain nightmare perspective. He watched Christine come across the snow- covered lawn, saw her bonnet fly up so that now her front end resembled the mouth of a huge red and white alligator. Then it snapped off altogether as she struck the house again, this time doing better than forty. She ripped away the last of the window frame and sprayed more splintered boards across his living room. Her headlights bounced upward, glaring, and then she was in, she was in his house, leaving a huge torn hole in the wall behind her with an electrical cable hanging out onto the rug like a black severed artery. Little clouds of blown- in fibreglass insulation danced on the cold wind like milkweed puffs.
Will screamed and couldn’t hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler silencer Arnie had put on her—one of the few things he really put on her, Will thought crazily—had hung up on the sill of the house, along with most of the exhaust pipe.
“The Fury roared across the living room, knocking Will’s La-Z-Boy armchair onto its side, where it lay like a dead pony. The floor under Christine creaked uneasily and a part of Will’s mind screamed: Yes! Break! Break! Spill the goddam thing into the cellar! Let’s see it climb out of there! And this image was replaced with the image of a tiger in a pit that had been dug and them camouflaged by wily natives.
But the floor held—at least for the time being, it held.
Christine roared across the living room at him. Behind, she left a zig-zag pattern of snowy tyre prints on the rug. She slammed into the stairs. Will was thrown back against the wall. His aspirator fell out of his hand and tumbled end over end all the way to the bottom.
Christine reversed across the room, floorboards groaning underneath. Her rear end struck the Sony TV, and the picture tube imploded. She roared forward again and struck the side of the stairs again, shattering lath and gouging out plaster. Will could feel the entire structure grow wobbly under him. There was an awful sensation of lean. For a moment Christine was directly beneath him; he could look down into the oily gut of her engine compartment, could feel the heat of her V-8 mill. She reversed again, and Will scrambled up the stairs, heaving for air, clawing at the fat sausage of his throat, eyes bulging.
He reached the top an instant before Christine hit the wall again, turning the centre of the stairs into a jumbled wreck. A long splinter of wood fell into her engine. The fan chewed it up and spat out coarse-grained sawdust and smaller splinters. The entire house smelled of gas and exhaust. Will’s ears rang with the heavy thunder of that merciless engine.
She backed up again. Now her tyres had chewed ragged trenches in the carpet. Down the hall, Will thought. Attic. Attic’ll be safe. Yes, the at… oh God… oh God… oh my GOD—
The final pain came with sharp, spiking suddenness. It was as if his heart had been punctured with an icicle. His left arm locked with pain. Still there was no breath; his chest heaved uselessly. He staggered backward. One foot danced out over nothingness, and then he fell back down the stairs in two great bone-snapping barrel rolls, legs flying over his head, arms waving, blue bathrobe sailing and flapping.
He landed in a heap at the bottom and Christine pounced upon him: struck him, reversed, struck him again, snapped off the heavy newel post at the foot of the stairs like a twig, reversed, struck him again.
