least he wouldn’t have been able to feel he had somehow been taken advantage of, that she was… what was the old phrase? Damaged goods. Was he thinking that? She simply could not tell.
“Stu?” she said in a frightened voice.
“You didn’t tell anyone,” he repeated.
“I didn’t know how.” Her tears were close to the surface now.
“When are you due?”
“January,” she said, and the tears came.
He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn’t tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy.
Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her.
By the time they had finished, it was full dark.
Harold slipped away silently.
No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together.
He has agreed that I’d better keep the secret of my Lone Ranger as long as possible, hopefully until we are settled. If it’s to be Colorado, that’s okay with me. The way I feel tonight, the mountains of the moon would be okay with me. Do I sound like a dizzy schoolgirl? Well—if a lady can’t sound like a dizzy schoolgirl in her diary, where
But I must say one other thing before I drop the subject of the Lone Ranger. It has to do with my “maternal instinct.”
Otherwise, I must be quick. I need my sleep, no matter what dreams may come. We haven’t made it all the way across Indiana as quickly as we had hoped—a horrible clog of vehicles near the Elkhart interchange slowed us down. A good many of the vehicles were army. There were dead soldiers. Glen, Susan Stern, Dayna, and Stu took as much firepower as they could find—about 2 dozen rifles, some grenades, and—yes, folks, it’s true—a rocket launcher. As I write now, Harold and Stu are trying to figure out the rocket launcher, for which there are 17 or 18 rockets. Please God they don’t blow themselves up.
Speaking of Harold, I must tell you, dear diary, that he doesn’t SUSPECT A THING (sounds like a line from an old Bette Davis movie, doesn’t it). When we catch up with Mother Abigail’s party I suppose he will have to be told; it would not be fair to hide it any longer, come what may.
But today he was brighter & more cheerful than I have ever seen him. He grinned so much I thought his face would crack! He was the one who suggested Stu help him with that dangerous rocket launcher, and
But here they come back now. Will finish later.
Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief.
He stood looking down at her, listening to the chin of summer crickets.
He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack’s contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stiffed, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie’s close but extremely legible handwriting.
Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents—their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her life—the boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent… the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie’s diary and his flashlight.
As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out
At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day.
And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered.
He turned to that first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.
In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran’s pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no.
She didn’t wake.
He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars—
And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him.
The Eye beckoned him.
To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful.
“You know, Harold,” Frannie said later that evening, as the party began to break up, “I don’t think I’ve ever
