moon which had just barely cleared the trees. It was white instead
of orange now, and as bright as a polished bone.
Instead of panicking me further, the fall
cleared my head. I didn't know what I'd seen, but it couldn't have
been what I thought I'd seen; that kind of stuff might work
in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but it wasn't the stuff
of real life. Yes, okay, good, a voice whispered
in my head. And if you just walk out of here now, you can go
on believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest of your
life.
"Fuck that," I said, and got up. The seat
of my jeans was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It wasn't
exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking George Staub's final
resting place, but it wasn't as hard as I'd expected, either. The
wind sighed through the trees, still rising, signaling a change
in the weather. Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches rubbed
together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I bent over the tombstone
and read:
GEORGE
STAUB
JANUARY 19,1977- OCTOBER 12, 1998 Well Begun, Too Soon Done.
I
stood there, leaning down with my hands planted just above my knees,
not aware of how fast my heart had been beating until it started
to slow down. A nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was
it any wonder that I'd misread what was beneath the name and dates?
Even without being tired and under stress, I might have read it
wrong--moonlight was a notorious misleader. Case closed.
Except I knew what I'd read: Fun
Is Fun and Done Is Done.
My ma was dead.
"Fuck that," I repeated, and turned away.
As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around
my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching
motor. A car was coming.
I hurried back through the opening in the
rock wall, snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the approaching
car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out my thumb just as they
struck me, momentarily blinding me. I knew the guy was going to
stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can
just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking
will tell you that it happens.
The car passed me, brake lights flaring,
and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall
dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack
banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one
of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor
rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that
maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due
. . . but that wasn't my problem.
I swung the door open and slid inside.
As I put my backpack between my feet, an odor struck me, something
almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. "Thank you," I said. "Thanks
a lot."
The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded
jeans and a black tee shirt with the arms cut off. His skin was
tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep was ringed with a
blue barbwire tattoo. He was wearing a green John Deere cap turned
around backwards. There was a button pinned near the round collar
of his tee shirt, but I couldn't read it from my angle. "Not a problem,"
he said. "You headed up the city?"
"Yes," I said. In this part of the world
"up the city" meant Lewiston, the only city of any size north of
Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree air
fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. That was what I’d
smelled. It sure wasn’t my night as far as odors went; first
pee and now artificial pine. Still, it was a ride. I should have
been relieved. And as the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road,
the big engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell
myself I was relieved.
“What’s going on for you in the
city?” the driver asked. I put him at about my age, some townie
who maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn or maybe
worked in one of the few remaining textile mills in the area. He’d
probably fixed up this Mustang in his spare time, because that was
what townie kids did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up
their cars. Or their motorcycles.
“My brother’s getting married.
I’m going to be his best man.” I told this lie with absolutely
no premeditation. I didn’t want him to know about my mother,
although I didn’t know why. Something was wrong here. I didn’t
know what it was or why I should think such a thing in the first
place, but I knew. I was positive. “The rehearsal’s tomorrow.
Plus a stag party tomorrow night.”
“Yeah? That right?” He turned
to look at me, wideset eyes and handsome face, full lips smiling
slightly, the eyes unbelieving.
“Yeah,” I said.
I was afraid. Just like that I was afraid
again. Something was wrong, had maybe started being wrong when the
old geezer in the Dodge had invited me to wish on the infected moon
instead of on a star. Or maybe from the moment I’d picked up
the telephone and listened to Mrs. McCurdy saying she had some bad
news for me, but ’twasn’t s’bad as it could’ve
been.
“Well that’s good,” said
the young man in the turned- around cap. “A brother getting
married, man, that’s good. What’s your name?”
I wasn’t just afraid, I was terrified.
Everything was wrong, everything, and I didn’t know
why or how it could possibly have happened so fast. I did know one
thing, however: I wanted the driver of the Mustang to know my name
no more than I wanted him to know my business in Lewiston. Not that
I’d be getting to Lewiston. I was suddenly sure that I would
never see Lewiston again. It was like knowing the car was going
to stop. And there was the smell, I knew something about that, as
well. It wasn’t the air freshener; it was something beneath
the air freshener.
“Hector,” I said, giving him
my roommate’s name. “Hector Passmore, that’s me.”
It came out of my dry mouth smooth and calm, and that was good.
Something inside me insisted that I must not let the driver of the
Mustang know that I sensed something wrong. It was my only chance.
He turned toward me a little, and I could
read his button: I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE,
LACONIA. I knew the place; had been there, although not for
a long time.
I could also see a heavy black line which
circled his throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper
arm, only the line around the driver's throat wasn't a tattoo. Dozens
of black marks crossed it vertically. They were the stitches put
in by whoever had put his head back on his body.
"Nice to meet you, Hector," he said. "I'm
George Staub."
My hand seemed to float out like a hand
in a dream. I wish that it had been a dream, but it wasn't; it had
all the sharp edges of reality. The smell on top was pine. The smell
underneath was some chemical, probably formaldehyde. I was riding
with a dead man.
The
Mustang rushed along Ridge Road at sixty miles an hour, chasing
its high beams under the light of a polished button moon. To either
side, the trees crowding the road danced and writhed in the wind.
George Staub smiled at me with his empty eyes, then let go of my
hand and returned his attention to the road. In high school I'd
read Dracula, and now a line from it recurred, clanging in
my head like a cracked bell: The dead drive fast. Can't let him know I know. This
also clanged in my head. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. Can't
let him know, can't let him, can't. I wondered where the old
man was now. Safe at his brother's? Or had the old man been in on
it all along? Was he maybe right behind us, driving along in his
old Dodge, hunched over the wheel and snapping at his truss? Was
he dead, too? Probably not. The dead drive fast, according to Bram
Stoker, but the old man had never gone a tick over forty- five.
I felt demented laughter bubbling in the back of my throat and held
it down. If I laughed he'd know. And he mustn't know, because that
was my only hope.
"There's nothing like a wedding," he said.
"Yeah," I said, "everyone should do it
at least twice."
My hands had settled on each other and
were squeezing. I could feel the nails digging the backs of them
