Twilight Eyes (43 page)

When the rain stopped, the puddles soon soaked into the earth, and the leaves dripped dry, and the blades of grass slowly rose from the humble posture into which the downpour had beaten them, but the sky did not clear; it hung low over the flat Florida coast. The eastward-oozing masses of dark clouds looked rotten, pustulant. The heavy air did not smell clean as it should have after a hard rain; an odd, musty odor clung to the humid day, as if the storm had blown some strange contaminant in from the Gulf.

Rya and I packed three suitcases and loaded them into our beige station wagon, the sides of which boasted metal panels painted to look like wood. Even in those days Detroit no longer produced genuine Woodies, which perhaps was an early sign of how thoroughly the age of quality and craftsmanship and authenticity was destined to give way to the age of shoddiness, haste, and clever imitation.

Solemnly—and sometimes tearfully—we said good-bye to Joel and Laura Tuck, to Gloria Neames, Red Morton, Bob Weyland, Madame Zena, Irma and Paulie Lorus, and other carnies, telling some that we were taking a brief pleasure trip, telling others the truth. They wished us well and tried to encourage us as best they could, but in the eyes of those who knew our true purpose, we saw doubt, fear, pity, and dismay. They did not think we would return—or that we would live long enough in Yontsdown to learn anything important about the goblins nesting there or to do any worthwhile damage to that enemy. The same thought was in all their minds, although none of them gave voice to it:
We will never see you again
.

At three o'clock, when we went to Slick Eddy's trailer in a far corner of Gibtown, he was waiting for us with all of the weapons, explosives, pentothal, and the other items I had ordered. The gear was stowed in several faded canvas sacks with drawstring tops, and we loaded them into the wagon as if we merely were handling bags full of dirty clothes and were on our way to a Laundromat.

Rya agreed to take the wheel for the first leg of the journey north. It was my responsibility to keep a good rock-and-roll station on the radio as the miles rolled past.

But before we had even pulled out of Slick Eddy's driveway, he leaned down and put his papyrus-crisp face in my open window. With an exhalation of cigarette-soured breath that left his throat to the accompaniment of a dry rattle, he said, “If you get tangled up with the law out there, and if they want to know where you got what you shouldn't have, then I expect you to act with carny honor and keep me out of it.”

“Of course,” Rya said sharply. She clearly did not like Slick Eddy. “Why insult us by even bringing it up? Do we look like a couple of sellout artists who'd throw our own people on the fire just to keep ourselves warm? We're stand-up types.”

“I think you are,” Slick Eddy said.

“Well, then,” she said, but she was not mollified.

Still squinting at us through the open window, Slick Eddy was not yet satisfied. He seemed to sense that Rya had indeed once been a betrayer of her own kind. And her reaction to his suspicion might have resulted less from her dislike of him than from the guilt that she had not yet entirely purged from herself.

Eddy said, “If things go right for you—wherever you're going and whatever you're up to—and if someday you need me to do more shopping for you, don't hesitate to call. But if things go wrong, I never want to see you again.”

“If things go wrong,” Rya said sharply, “you never
will
see us again.”

He blinked those burned-out amber eyes at her, blinked them at me, and I could have sworn I heard his lids moving up and down with a soft, metallic scraping sound like the rusted parts of a machine abrading one another. He let out a wheezy sigh, and I half expected dust to puff from between his scaly lips, but the only thing that washed over my face was another rancid wave of cigarette breath. At last he said, “Yeah. Yeah . . . I sort of suspect I never
will
see you again.”

As Rya backed the car out of the driveway, Slick Eddy Beckwurt watched us go.

“What's he look like to you?” she asked me.

“A desert rat,” I said.

“No.”

“No?”

She said, “Death.”

I stared at the receding figure of Slick Eddy.

Suddenly, perhaps because he regretted angering Rya and preferred to part on a better note, he broke into a smile and waved at us. That was the worst thing he could have done, for his lean and ascetic face, as dry as bones and as pale as grave worms, was not made for smiling. In his skeletal grin I saw neither friendship nor warmth nor pleasure of any kind but the unholy hunger of the Reaper.

With that macabre image as our last memorable glimpse of Gibtown, the drive east and north across Florida was somber, almost bleak. Not even the music of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Dixie Cups, or the Four Seasons could improve our mood. The mottled sky was like a roof of slate above, a weight that seemed to press down on the world and threatened to collapse upon us. We drove in and out of squalls. At times glittering silvery rain slashed the gray air yet did not brighten it, mirrored the roadway yet somehow made the pavement even blacker, streamed in molten rivulets along the macadam berm, or surged and foamed over the gutters and drainage ditches. When there was no rain, there was often a fine ashen mist bearding the cypress and pine, lending something of the look of British moors to the swampy Florida scrubland. After nightfall we encountered fog, dense in some places. We spoke little on that first part of our journey, as if afraid that anything we said would only further depress us. As a measure of the darkness of our mood, the Supremes' first hit record, “When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” which had reached the charts six weeks earlier and which was the very definition of “bouncy,” sounded not at all like an anthem to joy but like a dirge—and the other tunes on the radio fell on our ears with equally ominous effect.

We ate dinner in a drab roadside cafe, in a booth beside the bug-spattered, rain-dappled windows. Everything on the menu was either fried, deep-fried, or breaded and fried.

One of the truck drivers sitting on a stool at the counter was a goblin. Psychic images emanated from him, and with my Twilight Eyes I saw that he had often used his tanklike Mack truck to run unwary motorists off otherwise deserted stretches of Florida highway, ramming or forcing them into canals where they were trapped inside their cars and drowned, or into swamps where the stinking, gluey muck sucked them under. I also perceived that he would murder many more innocents in the nights to come, perhaps even tonight, though I did not sense that he posed any danger to Rya and me. I wanted to draw the knife from my boot, slip up behind him, and slit his throat. But mindful of the important mission ahead of us, I restrained myself.

Somewhere in Georgia we spent the night in a clapboard motel along the interstate, not because it was an appealing inn but because exhaustion abruptly seized us in a desolate and lonely place where no other accommodations could be found. The mattress was lumpy, and the worn-out bedsprings provided no support. Seconds after the lights were out, we could hear unthinkably large water bugs skittering across the cracked linoleum floor. We were too tired—and too frightened of the future?—to care. In a couple of minutes, after one sweet kiss, we were asleep.

Again I dreamed of a long, shadowy tunnel insufficiently lit by dim and widely spaced amber lamps. The ceiling was low. The walls were curiously rough, though I could not discern the material of which they were constructed. Again I woke shaking with terror, a scream caught in my throat. No matter how hard I tried, I could remember nothing that had happened in the nightmare, nothing to explain the frenzied hammering of my heart.

The radiant dial of my wristwatch revealed that it was three-ten in the morning. I had slept only two and a half hours, but I knew that I would get no more rest that night.

Beside me in the lightless room, still deep in slumber, Rya moaned and gasped and shuddered.

I wondered if she was now running along the same tenebrous tunnel that had been featured in my nightmare.

I recalled the other portentous dream we had shared last summer: the hillside graveyard, forested with tombstones. That one had been an omen. If we shared another nightmare, we could be certain that it, too, was a premonition of danger.

In the morning I would ask her what had been the cause of her groans and shivers in the night. With luck the source of her bad dream would be more prosaic than mine: the greasy food from the roadside diner.

Meanwhile I lay on my back in the blackness, listening to my own soft breathing, to Rya's dreamy murmurs and occasional thrashings, and to the continuous busy explorations of the many-legged water bugs.

Wednesday morning, March 18, we drove until we found a Stuckey's at an interchange. Over a reasonably good breakfast of bacon, eggs, grits, waffles, and coffee, I asked Rya about her dream.

“Last night?” she said, frowning as she soaked up some egg yolk with a wedge of toast. “I slept like a log. Didn't dream.”

“You dreamed,” I assured her.

“Really?”

“Continuously.”

“Don't remember.”

“You moaned a lot. Kicked at the sheets. Not just last night but the night before as well.”

She blinked, paused with the piece of toast halfway to her mouth. “Oh. I see. You mean . . . you woke up from your
own
nightmare and found me in the middle of one too?”

“That's right.”

“And you're wondering if...”

“If we're sharing the same dream again.” I told her about the strange tunnel, the weak and vaguely flickering lamps. “I wake up with a feeling of having been pursued by something.”

“By what?”

“Something . . . something . . . I don't know.”

“Well,” she said, “if I dreamed anything like that, I don't remember it.” She popped the bit of egg-soaked toast into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So we're both having bad dreams. It doesn't have to be . . . prophetic. Lord knows, we've got good reason not to sleep well. Tension. Anxiety. Considering where we're headed, we're bound to have bad dreams. Doesn't mean a thing.”

After breakfast we put in a long day on the road. We did not even stop for lunch but picked up some crackers and candy bars at a Mobile station when we stopped for gasoline.

Gradually we left the subtropical heat behind, but the weather improved. By the time we were halfway through South Carolina, the skies were cloudless.

Curiously—or not—the high blue day seemed, to me at least, no brighter than the storm-sullied afternoon during which we had departed the Gulf. A darkness waited in the pine forests that, for some distance, lined both sides of the highway, and the gloom seemed to be alive and observant, as if it were patiently waiting for an opportunity to rush forth, envelop us, and feed on our bones. Even where the hard, brassy glare of sunshine fell in full weight, I saw the shadows to come, saw the inevitability of nightfall. I was not in high spirits.

Late Wednesday night we stopped in Maryland at a better motel than the one in Georgia: a good bed, carpet on the floor, and no skittering water bugs.

We were even wearier than we had been the previous night, but we did not immediately seek sleep. Instead, somewhat to our surprise, we made love. Even more surprising: we were insatiable. It began with sweet, languorous flexings, with long and easy thrusts, with soft contractions and lazy expansions of the muscles, an almost slow-motion rising and falling and stroking, as of lovers in an art film, which had a sweetness and an odd shyness, as if we were joined for the very first time. But after a while we brought a passion and energy to the act that was unexpected and at first inexplicable in light of the long hours of driving that we had just endured. Rya's exquisite body had never felt more elegantly and sensuously sculpted, ripe and full, never warmer or more supple, never more silken—never more precious. The rhythm of her quickening breath, her small cries of pleasure, her sudden gasps and little moans, and the urgency with which her hands explored my body and then pulled me against her—those expressions of her growing excitement fed my own excitement. I began literally to shudder with pleasure, and each delicious shudder passed like an electric current from me to her. She climbed a stairway of climaxes toward breathless heights, and in spite of a powerful eruption that seemed to empty me of blood and bone marrow as well as semen, I did not experience the slightest loss of tumescence but remained with her, ascending toward a peak of erotic and emotional pleasure that I had never known.