Charles L. Grant - Oxrun Station 05 - Bloodwind

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The Wind
It grumbled and shrieked behind her, magnified by the quarry's throat. She turned, not wanting to turn, seeing the
pillar of snow rise above the quarry, seeing within it a creature of deep red still masked by the white.
A flare, then. An eye. The vague outline of a head turning like a beacon; turning, stopping, and she knew it had
seen her.
It bellowed.
She screamed.
1
The end of January, the middle of winter, and the silence they brought to Oxrun Station. There were greys
and there were blacks, and there were crusted harsh whites; colors sharp and accentuated that would have
been lost in the explosion of spring. Stormclouds gath-ered less arrogantly here than they did in late
summer, wisping instead of marching, creeping to an overcast like a slow congealing web. A wretched wan
sun sub-dued and fading, and dawn little more than a kitchen clock's whirring.
And the cold. There was always the cold. A whipcrack against the forehead, a razor along the cheek.
Exposed to it too long and there was a pressure at the temples that made your cheeks ache, a ratlike
insinuation wher-ever clothes were not clinging. It hardened the pave-ment to jolt the ankles, made brittle
the trees to slice at the sky; it intensified sounds to the point of distant screaming; it invigorated and
wearied, brought clarity and black ice, and settled in the eaves to make a house groan with age.
It burgeoned and surged, and it seeped through the windows without benefit of a wind to swirl over the
floor in serpentine draughts.
Pat felt them and shivered, scowling at the intrusion and pleased at the assistance in driving back sleep.
She sat slumped on the edge of her high-canopy bed and gripped the back of her neck as if it were
necessary to keep her head in place. Her lips were pursed, her breath a soft whistle. For a moment she
listened to the faint thud of rock music billowing up from below, could feel through the shag carpeting the
rippling vibrations against her bare soles. But only for a moment. When she felt she could move without
shattering like glass she grim-aced and shuddered, finally willed herself to stand. Swayed until she balanced,
and dropped her nightgown to the bed.
"God," she muttered, and pressed a knuckle to her eyes.
A gasping at the firestars, a deep breath for courage, and she walked gingerly into the bathroom, her
tongue trying to wipe the fuzz from her teeth. Again her hand snaked to the back of her neck, and she
smiled weakly at her reflection in the ceiling-high mirror, her bare hip pressed lightly against the
swirled-marble counter. A shake of her head. A tsking, and a finger aimed in mock admonition for the
excesses of the previous eve-ning, and the physical damage sullenly on view. It could have been worse, she
thought then, leaning closer and sighing. At least her hair was kept short—a quick brush with fingers or
bristles through the almost irides-cent black and she looked virtually normal.
Still closer, and she winced. Normal, that is, except for the eyes. They were of a dark and deep blue
when the light was clear and she was smiling, hard and obsidian shortly after sunset. The corners were
slightly pinched, the lids heavily lashed, and they gave her a pronounced Eurasian cast when she narrowed
them in anger.
Now they were bloodshot, light-sensitive and accusing.
All right, she thought with a conciliatory palm up-raised; all right, all right.
She retreated a few paces from the counter and set her hands on her hips. Not too shabby for thirty-nine
and terminally lazy, she decided, tucking her chin to her shoulder and winking at the reflection. A slight
bulging around the waist, a small protrusion at the belly, but nothing drastic like the sagging of her breasts or
extra lumpy padding around her slender thighs. She suspected she might be able to stand some exercise
now and again, and she definitely had to curtail her drinking. Before she knew it there'd be horrid red veins
lacing her pug nose, pouches would begin nesting at the crest of her high cheeks, and the once-cherubic
jawline would descend slowly to jowls. It was, in fact, precisely the way her mother looked now, and she
had no intention of following that course of decay.
Her mother had her father, but Pat knew she herself had no excuse. Not anymore.
Another sigh, mockingly drawn to a whimper of self-pity, and she turned on the shower, twisted back to
the mirror and launched into a punishing series of calis-thenics that had her skin glistening before five
minutes had passed. Her head complained, her stomach lurched, but she would not slow down until she had
achieved some sort of penance for last night's insanity. Not that she didn't deserve a night out once in a
while, she told herself twenty minutes later as she dressed. She did. She worked hard, damned hard, and
these occasional explosions of energy were very nearly the only releases she permitted herself, about the
only release one could get in a place like Oxrun Station in the middle of winter.
She laughed, and buttoned the cream-and-fluff blouse, adjusted the loose tie around its open throat. She
was doing it again, and she did it every time—a stodgy, defensive rationalization for her partygoing simply
be-cause she lived in a village where affluence was an aftertaste of breathing the clean air. Where peace
was valued and quiet jealously maintained, and wasn't that exactly the reason she had come here in the first
place?
She hesitated in front of the vanity mirror, the bed reflected behind her and diminished somehow. On the
corner of the dresser was a silver-framed photograph of a young girl no older than eight, squinting at the
camera with a fearful smile on her lips.
The thought came unbidden, and unwanted, breaking through a resolve that had held for nearly five
years: she would have been sixteen today. She would have been in high school. She would have been able
to tell her friends that her mother was an artist and her father lived in California, and her grandparents had
this absolutely monstrous penthouse in New York City where they honest to god vegetated among furniture
so old you could smell the dust ingrained in the wood. She would have been. But she wasn't.
Pat set her left hand to her forehead, fingers gently rubbing. The sense of loss was not quite so sharp, but
neither had it faded; it persisted, like a scar that was every few years rediscovered with unpleasant
surprise.
Lauren would have been sixteen. But she wasn't. And Pat was thirty-nine and in a battle for her
professional life. And for a moment she felt sick. It was unfair her daughter should return on this day,
unfair and unkind and so damned unlike her. She loved the girl still, in dreams and in memory, but she was
eight years in her grave and it just wasn't fair.
The nausea passed. And the guilt that was its source. Her frown smoothed, and she touched the
photograph with a thumb that traced the child's face. All right, she told the image, but please, Lauren, stay
out of my way today, okay? Believe me, I'm going to need all the strength I can muster, and I really don't
think I can handle you now.
A laugh, rueful and short, and she headed for the kitchen not quite as eager as she'd primed herself to
be.
* * *
The apartment was half the second floor of an elegant three-story Victorian on Northland Avenue.
Above was a full attic used for storage, across the wide landing a retired couple named Evans. On the first
floor was the landlord, Lincoln Goldsmith, who lived so alone it was months before Pat even knew he was
there; and directly below her the residence of Kelly Hanson and Abbey Wagner, two women a decade and
a half younger than she, who worked over in Harley and lived in the Station because they liked the address,
not to mention the fact that it made an impression on job applications. And if it hadn't been for Kelly's
preference for blaring music in the morning, she knew she might as well be living alone for all the noise
there was. There were days— stormy days and days marked lonesome—when the si-lence was
maddening and she was tempted to scream; there were also times, however, and more often than not, when
she blessed every saint she could think of for the luck that had provided her with such a perfect place to
live.
The front room was thirty feet square, the ceilings high, with elaborate moldings. The streetside wall was
broken by a pair of tall, arched windows flanking nar-row French doors opening onto a roofless porch she
shared with the Evanses; in the back wall and set oppo-site each of the windows were doorways leading to
a common corridor dimly lighted and small, running the width of the apartment: in the left corner her
bedroom and bath, in the center the kitchen, on the right a second and far smaller bedroom she'd converted
to a studio. Spacious, almost grand, and she had debated for weeks before deciding to decorate it as simply
as she could with furniture of the house's era, not so much because she liked the embroidered upholstery
and deep-carved wood, but because it tended to keep the place from growing overwhelming. The floors
had been carpeted in solemn browns and golds, the white plaster reduced by judicious hangings of oils and
prints Romantic and Impressionist. Floral draperies and cream undercurtains tied back on occasion to let in
the light, to let in the dark.
And it was quiet. It was safe. Even on mornings when her head felt crammed with wool she imagined
herself a ghost drifting through the softly blurred glow, smoothing her edges and lending her mystery. Here,
nothing could touch her unless she gave it permission. It was safe. Safe. A world within a world where she
was the queen, and the fact that she had no consort didn't stir the guilt her parents still tried to ladle.
A slow shake of her head and she proceeded to make breakfast.
The kitchen, like the bathroom, was a concession to the times—copper and brown, a stainless-steel sink
and glittered Formica on the counters. Most of the beige-tiled floor was taken up by a large, round iron
table and four ice cream parlor chairs for which she had made green cushions during one autumn's stretch
of intense homemaker crafts. The cushions, though comfortable, were far too large, and at least once a
week she vowed to give it another try.
She sat facing the rear window, sipping at steaming and dark Earl Grey and nibbling on a piece of lightly
buttered raisin toast. She supposed she ought to prepare a more substantial meal for the day she had to
face, but there was always the college cafeteria in case she felt faint. She grinned, and wondered how she
had been able to survive this long without padding the walls and curling back to the womb. A simple
breakfast, nourish-ment and strength, and she wouldn't make the effort. God help her if that ever spilled
over into the way she worked.
Beyond the window she could see a half-dozen oaks filling the back yard. They were a startling black
against the overcast's grey, still layered in powdered white after a pre-dawn dusting. A cardinal clung to an
ice-coated twig, bouncing in the gentle breeze and eyeing the house as though considering it for a meal. She
winked at it, lifted her cup to it, and exaggerated a disappointed frown when it finally flew away, a blur of
red disturb-ingly like blood.
The fingers of her left hand drummed hard on the table.
Her left foot tapped the floor impatiently, arhythmically.
She buttered another slice, poured another cup of tea, and checked the oval clock on the wall for the fifth
time in five minutes. It was seventeen past eight, each min-ute beginning to slip by more rapidly than the
last.
"Damn," she said to the window, to the trees. "This is stupid, you know. This is really and truly godawful
stupid."
It was an admission at last that she did not want to go. She did not want to leave. And it wasn't the cold
or the drive or the facing of her students; it wasn't her new project or Greg Billings or even the obsequious
Ford Danvers. She just did not want to leave the tea and the toast and the memory of the cardinal. What
she did want to do was strip off her blouse, her green-and-black tartan skirt, unclasp her gold necklace, kick
off her mid-thigh boots, roll up her pantyhose and fall back into bed. And sleep. As long as she could.
Maybe until April when the green returned, and the robins, the flowers, the sharp tang of lawns newly
mowed. By then, if her luck held and no one came to find her, the meeting this afternoon would be over and
they would have forgotten all about her. Dean George Constable would bluster his pleasant way to oblivion
(with Ford Danvers slavering in his wake), the Trustees would have all died and been replaced with robots,
and she would be able to continue as she always had, this time without opposition.
The problem was, she wasn't at all tired. A little skittish from all that partying, but not at all tired.
Frightened. My god, she was frightened.
No, she decided in sudden panicked retreat; she was apprehensive, not frightened. The pressures she had
subjected herself to in her struggle for the new depart-ment's creation were finally reaching her now that
the judgement was at hand. And last night hadn't helped. It hadn't helped a bit.
This time it came as a question: frightened? Well, yes, just a little. Apart from the college and the
depart-ment and all she was attempting . . . yes. Unreason-ably, illogically, without any foundation beyond a
few too many drinks. Just a little. Because for a moment last night the world hadn't played by her rules.
Patrice, her father had said some years before, this nonsense of yours about rules and more rules
has got to stop.
Why? It works, doesn't it?
Because sooner or later you are not going to be able to live by your own rules, or force others to
follow them.
They do all right.
That's because the ones that don't you drop.
Not my problem, is it.
It is, Patrice. It is. One of these days something's going to happen again, something's going to
happen that doesn't play your game and you're not going to be able to drop it or run from it . . . you
know what I mean.
I got through the divorce, Father.
Yes, you did. I give you credit for that, much credit. But your luck won't hold, Patrice. Your luck
just is not going to hold.
Her station wagon was small, yet she knew when she left the party it wouldn't warm up before she
arrived home. The ride was less than a handful of blocks. She shivered then in the front seat, gloved hands
bouncing in spasms against the steering wheel, her slightly be-fogged mind swearing at the light snowfall
that had started just as she'd left the Chancellor Inn. There had been no wind when she'd switched on the
ignition, but it had been waiting for her after she'd turned the first corner. That's how it had felt. Waiting,
until she'd left the protection of her friends, was on the whitening streets alone. It had struck sharply,
suddenly, like a padded fist, and she cried out in shocked surprise. Leaned closer to the wheel and squinted
through the windshield.
The snow blurred, streaks instead of flakes. Her eyes began watering in an effort to clear her vision, and
her ears filled with a faint, curiously deep rumbling—the sound of a slow-moving locomotive entering the
far end of a long black tunnel. The windshield wipers sounded like gunshots, the engine began whining as if
stuck in the wrong gear. The wind strengthened, buffeting the station wagon and nearly shoving her into the
curb.
There were obscenities now, directed at the drinking she'd done more than the storm. It was confusing
her. The lingering taste of the liquor, the snow, the wind— and she felt her breathing quicken and grow
shallow, tearing away somewhat at the webs that befuddled her.
Another block, and she was sure someone was fol-lowing her. Her gaze flickered to the rear-view
mirror, but she saw only the white stained red by the taillights. Beyond that there was black. If it was a car
its headlamps were out; if it was someone walking behind her in the street he was too distant for seeing.
But she was being followed. She would have sworn it. She could feel it. The presence of something other
than herself on the road, other than herself and a good deal larger.
Then the flakes had gained a direction, a spinning right to left, and she screamed to herself she'd been
caught in a tornado. She'd almost flung open the door to escape, had braked sharply instead and cracked
her forehead against her hands fisted around the wheel. Like a slap for hysteria the dull stinging had calmed
her, and she'd driven the rest of the way home at a slow walking pace.
The wind died when she reached her own block.
The snowfall eased.
She had sat trembling in the driveway for nearly an hour, convincing herself it was a freak wind-surge
un-derscored by the drinks. Nothing more. No one was there. Nothing was there. Yet she sat trembling in
the driveway for nearly an hour and watched the street and the sidewalk, waiting for someone, or
something, to pass.
Suddenly her cup rattled harshly in its saucer, and she pulled her hand away to bury it in her lap.
The faucet began dripping; the refrigerator coughed on.
She looked at the window and prayed for a blizzard.
"Pat!" she said then, very nearly yelling, and slammed a palm on the table. The cup and saucer jumped,
the butter dish skittered, the plate that held her toast almost flipped over the edge. She turned her hand over
and stared dumbly at the reddening skin. A moment, and she decided that as of now she was a teetotaler in
the heroic mold of ancient Carrie Nation. It was that, or she would have to believe that Oxrun Station was
beset by midwinter tornados and she was the abrupt subject of covert surveillance.
And she wished her nerves were as convinced as her brain.
2
A BLUR of red and a darker shadow behind it. Pat looked to the window and saw the cardinal back on its
perch, a blue jay on a thicker branch closer to the trunk. Neither of the birds remained there very long; the
cardi-nal fled first, the jay a moment later. But it was enough to quell the unsettled surging that had begun in
her stomach.
A finger to her lips, across her cheek and through her hair, and she reached blindly for her purse and the
first cigarette of the day. A few seconds' fumbling and she laughed aloud, relief and abashment giving her a
case of gently lingering giggles. The purse, she remembered, was on the butler's table beside the front door,
and the thought of getting up, walking all the way out there and all the way back, stayed her for the present.
And that, she thought with smug self-satisfaction, was precisely the idea. The longer she delayed that initial
coughing spasm, the less time she had to finish her two packs a day. By March she hoped to be whittled
down to one. By April, a half. That she might eventually quit al-together was a fantasy she kept deftly at
bay—this slow and easy method of cutting down at least managed to entertain no uncommon illusions. And
it was certainly more effective than the time she had attempted an abrupt withdrawal, without any preparation but
a quickly reached resolution. That had been an unmitigated disaster, not only for herself but for her students as
well. Their work had suffered measurably under the onslaught of her fierce critiques, and they had only
regained their sanity and their progress when one of them—she'd never learned who, though she suspected
either Ollie or Ben—had left a new pack of English Chesterfields on her office desk one morning. The
wrapping was undone, a cigarette halfway out, and a lighter stood beside it waiting to be used.
It had been the most succulent tobacco she had ever tasted in her life. And when she had returned to the
class not one of them had been smiling.
Dears. They were, most of them, dears. They called her Doc with affection, formed and reformed
groups around her latest work, her latest exhibitions (depending on tastes, depending on grades), though her
only cavil might be their singularly unenthusiastic support for her campaign. She would have thought the
creation of a Fine Arts Department devoted entirely to the visual arts would have made them rapturous—in
the manner of students who were getting their own way at last. But not them. Or, rather, not all of them.
Ollie, Ben, and Harriet, in particular, had somehow decided that she would be chosen to chair this new
entity, which in turn would leave them in the hands of someone else.
Silly. They were dears, but they were silly. On all counts.
A prickling, then, at the back of her neck, and she turned her chair around slowly. There was a thick,
dark pine shelf attached to the wall beside the door. On it was a statuette just under a foot high—a grizzly
half-risen, its great head cocked to one side, massive paws up to strike, its mouth open to reveal gleaming
pin-needle teeth. Its name was Homer, the first satisfactory piece she had completed after arriving in
Oxrun. A talisman he was, something to be patted wearily before bedtime, to be caressed cheerfully in the
morning. Its doppleganger in flesh she had met at dusk in Montana, eight years ago on a trip she had made
to cleanse the divorce from her dreams and her child's funeral from her nightmares.
The creature had stood there watching her from the other side of a stream given color by October's early
foliage. She had been too terrified to scream, too weak to run, and the grunts it had issued while it paced
the grassy bank nailed her to the ground. Then it had reared in a single swift movement, and she had been
positive it could have reached across the narrow band of water and swiped off her head with no trouble at
all. But it had only watched her and had tested the cold air and had gestured as if were batting at insects.
For a full five minutes before it had dropped to all fours and had lum-bered into the woodland. She had not
moved. She could hear it grunting for what seemed like hours, hear the thrashing of underbrush, hear its
paws thunder the earth.
She thought she had died, and had somehow been reprieved.
Now the grizzly was reduced to a gleaming grey-white marble she had quarried herself, back in the hills
that coddled the Station on three of its sides. The gleam came not from polishing; it was a quality of stone
she had not seen in any other, and it gave the bear a translucence that at times gave it movement, when the
lighting was right and she wasn't quite looking. And in its reduction—with eyes deliberately left blank in the
ancient manner—it had become a partner, a friend, and a stubbornly silent confidant.
"All right," she told it. "All right, so I'm stalling. Sue me."
Homer simply stood there, testing the air.
Another check of the clock, eight thirty-five and sweeping—and when the telephone rang she nearly
dropped her cup. God, she thought as she scraped back the chair, get hold, woman, get hold. She plucked
the receiver from its wall cradle and sat again, her right hand curling the cord once around her wrist.
The voice was decidedly masculine: "Was it as good for you as it was for me?"
She couldn't help it; she laughed. "Good morning, Greg."
"Sorry to call so early, Pat, but I wanted to be sure you were ready for battle. After last night, I'm
sur-prised you can still breathe without a machine."
"I can breathe just fine, thank you very much." Her smile began to drift, one corner turning down. "I'm
not so positive about the battle, though." She thought of telling him about the ride home, thought of what he
would say and discarded the notion.
"Sounds like a good dose of the nerves, huh?"
She nodded, stuck her tongue out at Homer, then blinked and grunted.
"Well, welcome to the club, Dr. Shavers. But listen, I was thinking, see, and the meeting's not until
four-thirty, so why don't you and I have lunch or something? Maybe we can get Stephen and Janice to go
with us. I mean, we could plan strategy in case the Trustees have shafted us. Like, we could create a
minor diversion, like slitting Danvers' throat. That would really throw Constable off his stride, don't you
think?"
"I don't know, Greg. Don't you think that's a little drastic?"
"Who for? Danvers? Hell, he'd never notice until he figured out he couldn't lick the dean's shoes
anymore."
She laughed again, gratefully and loudly. She knew it wasn't all that funny, knew that poor Danvers
wasn't really as bad as they liked to pretend. But apprehension spurred her (and a cold finger of the wind
that had pursued her last night), and it was some time before she was able to control herself long enough to
thank her colleague for the release and ring off, still chuckling and just as aware as he that she hadn't
answered his invitation. He tried too hard sometimes, Gregory Bill-ings did, but somehow he always
managed to sense when she needed being silly, needed a willing target for her occasional undirected
bitterness, needed to be alone. And it bothered her quite a lot lately that she was often incapable of
reciprocating in kind.
Immediately the receiver left her hand, however, she patted Homer's head and walked to the front door,
where her fawn overcoat was waiting in the cane rack against the wall. Though her first studio class did
not begin until ten, Greg's call had served to magnify the apartment's silence, and her suddenly unpleasant
soli-tude. She was giving herself too much time to think, to worry, and she had no intention of assuming the
role of the instrument of her own defeat. She had worked too long and too hard for this day, had yielded the
feast possible number of compromises for it all to be wasted just because she didn't have the nerve to
leave her own home.
"Darling," her mother had asked just three weeks ago, at the end of her last visit, "I don't understand
what you're trying to prove. Don't you realize you're jeopardizing your position at the college with what
you're doing?"
Pat hadn't answered. Mother and Father entrenched in their penthouse museum hadn't even understood
why she had chosen to come to the Station; how could she expect them to understand her now?
Once the coat was on and buttoned, she grabbed a tasseled white woolen cap and pulled it down over
her ears, down to her eyebrows, flung a six-foot white muffler cavalierly around her neck, and drew
leather-palmed gloves over her long fingers. The door closed behind her, and she tested the lock—more
often than not she didn't bother to use it. A bad habit, perhaps, but she had never felt other than safe in the
Station.
It was done. She was out. There was no turning back.
She stood on the front porch and allowed the damp cold to attack her, pulling stiffly at her cheeks and
nose, stinging her chin, slipping beneath her skirt to tighten her calves and thighs.
Her blouse turned to ice.
She tucked her purse under one arm and shoved her hands into her pockets.
Like most of Oxrun Station this side of the huge park, Northland Avenue was lined with homes ranging
from gingerbread Victorians to stately Dutch Colonials, all of them considerably bulky, all of them
maintained in scrupulous repair. The lawns were broad, the trees ancient and massive, the inhabitants with
few excep-tions well enough off not to worry about the direction the rest of the country was taking. A
self-contained street in a self-contained community that carried its wealth like a topcoat well worn.
She inhaled slowly, deeply, the last of the evening's punishment driven to hiding by the chill, the last
rem-nant of her scare made ludicrous by daylight. Behind her the house loomed quietly, the bay windows on
either side primly white-curtained and reflecting the pale new sun in each of the square panes. Two blocks
to her right the street dead-ended at the fencing of the town's cemetery; two blocks west the traffic on
Main-land Road was easing as commuters gave way to those just passing by. Directly across Northland,
old man Stillworth was sweeping snow from his walk, puffing whitebreath like smoke and grumbling loudly
at his broom about New England's insane weather. The block's children were already in school, but their
spirits re-mained hovering around abandoned sleds on porch steps, in snowmen guardians behind hedges, in
a stray red mitten propped atop an evergreen shrub. The steady clanking of a snowplow several streets
over. The frigid call of a bird. The brittle slam of a door.
Nothing had changed during the night, then. It was definitely safe to leave. The ritual she'd inaugurated
the day she'd moved in was completed in the space of a few familiar seconds.
She took the steps cautiously, one hand out for bal-ance while the other held her purse. Goldsmith had
already cleared the inlaid stone-block walk to the pave-ment, had already overspread patches of ice with
lumps of salt. She shuddered when she estimated the hour he must have risen in order to do it before the
others had left for work, and she decided the man should be struck a special medal. Not that he would
accept it, even in. jest and good humor. He was very much the recluse, keeping to his own rooms most of
the day as far as she could determine, shambling out only when there were repairs to be done, grass to be
mowed, the back garden to be weeded.
He was indeed amazing—just like her performance the night before.
She had been at the Chancellor Inn with Greg, Ste-phen DiSelleone and Janice Reaster. It was Janice's
twenty-ninth birthday, and the intention had been to have a quiet celebration while Janice—who was a
lec-turer and art historian—bemoaned her imminent plunge into the infamous thirties. Within an hour after
they'd ordered, however, as more of the faculty had wandered in with spouses and dates, the party had
blossomed to a boisterous two dozen. DiSelleone took to the piano, Janice to her quavering voice, and what
had once been a grand farmhouse trembled for hours.
She had drunk too much, flirted too often, had eased her car from the parking lot just after midnight so
incredibly slowly she hadn't believed she was really driving. It hadn't been a long ride—one block north to
Steuben, right one block to Northland, and a time-frozen skid as she wrenched the station wagon left.
The snow. And the wind. And someone . . .
A clumsy U-turn to remind her of her condition, and a near-collision with Stillworth's tin garbage can to
send her further into panic.
Amazing she had not slammed into a tree.
Amazing she'd been able to get into the driveway at all, much less manage it so the car was facing back
out toward the street.
God takes care of little children and idiots, she thought as she walked, and was halfway up the drive
when something about the car struck her as being wrong. It was small, squared, all of a dove grey with a
chrome luggage rack on top. And it was clean. Perfectly clean. She looked over her shoulder and saw only
the tracks of her boots in the light dusting that covered the blacktop. There were no tire marks, no bird
tracks, no indication of any kind that anything mechanical or otherwise had come back here since the end of
the flurry. Kelly and Abbey, she realized, must have parked their cars at the curb instead of in the garage,
though she did not recall seeing it when she'd come home last night. And Lin-coln had evidently decided a
good wind would do his work for him before the next fall broke from the clouds.
She shook her head once and sharply, dispelling an image of a giant picking up the station wagon and
carrying it safely back here. That was foolish. She had driven it here herself. And it had been snowing; it
had been windy, and she had sat here watching it while she'd tried to rein her nerves.
So it must have been the wind that had erased the car's tracks. That only made sense. Nevertheless, the
unsettling sensation prodded her into walking around the vehicle slowly, checking the tires, brushing stray
flakes from the edges of the window . . . and stopped when she saw the dent in the passenger door.
"God . . . damn!" She crouched and traced the con-cavity with a finger. The surface hadn't been
cracked, nor were there any signs of whatever it was she'd struck: no pieces of bark, no chips of chrome or
paint, just a shallow indentation centered and oval. She straight-ened and jammed her hands on her hips. "I
don't believe it. My god, I don't believe it."
She kicked at the door with the side of her foot and boxed an ear with an open palm. Then she stalked
back to the driver's door and yanked it open, slid in with a scowl. It took her several moments before she
could insert the key and fire the engine. Another full minute before her hands stopped trembling in rage. It
certainly wasn't the first time she'd drunk too much at a party, but she had never before been so befuddled
that she'd endangered herself to the point of having an accident without even knowing it.
She thought of the wind, of the grumbling, of the snow.
Her anger turned to Greg—why had he permitted her to drive home in her condition? She didn't recall
him emptying his glass so terribly often. So why the hell hadn't he stopped her? Why hadn't he at least gone
with her, or forced her to walk home, or filled her with black coffee before letting her out?
She held her breath, her cheeks puffed and her fin-gers strangling the beveled steering wheel.
Her eyes closed tightly and she directed herself to review the drive home, from the moment she had
backed cautiously onto Chancellor Avenue to the moment she had backed into the driveway. And her eyes
snapped open as she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek— she could not remember. Somewhere
during the drive she had struck something hard enough to damage her car. But she could not remember it.
Unless it was . . . the garbage can. Instead of narrowly missing it, she must have sideswiped it. She must
have. But the memory of the impact was just not there.
Her shoulders slumped as a slithering cold not born of the winter or the snow made its way into her
stomach and curled there, aching. It was the pressure, of course. Bucking the system and fighting her
memories and battling her parents and fending off Greg—it was the pressure, just the pressure that had
lashed down her caution and allowed her all that drink.
And the consequence of that was a kind of selective amnesia induced by the liquor, and made firm by
guilt. She did not want to remember having the accident because it was stupid and it was embarrassing and
it underscored something that might possibly become a problem.
With no desire to remember . . . she didn't.
"Yes," she whispered, and grinned her relief. "God, what a fool!"
摘要：

TheWindItgrumbledandshriekedbehindher,magnifiedbythequarry'sthroat.Sheturned,notwantingtoturn,seeingthepillarofsnowriseabovethequarry,seeingwithinitacreatureofdeepredstillmaskedbythewhite.Aflare,then.Aneye.Thevagueoutlineofaheadturninglikeabeacon;turning,stopping,andsheknewithadseenher.Itbellowed.Sh...

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