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 tire 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
center 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 tires 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.
From beneath the floor came the increasing mutter of supports splintering and
bowing. Christine paused in the middle of the room for a moment, as if
listening. Two of her tires were flat; a third had come half off the wheel. The
left side of the car was punched inward, scraped clean of paint in great bald
patches.
Suddenly her gearshift dropped into reverse. Her engine screamed, and she
rocketed back across the room and out of the ragged hole in the side of Will
Darnell's house, her rear end dropping down several inches and into the
snow. The tires spun, found some purchase, and pulled her out. She backed
limpingly toward the road, her engine chopping and missing now, blue smoke
hazing the air around her, oil dripping and spraying.
At the road, she turned back toward Libertyville. The gearshift lever dropped
into DRIVE, but at first the damaged transmission wouldn't catch; when it did
she rolled slowly away from the house. Behind her, from Will's house, a
broad bar of light shone out onto the churned up snow in a shape that was not
at all like the neat rectangle of light thrown up by a window. The shape of the
light on the snow was senseless and strange.
She moved slowly, lurching from side to side on her flats like a very old
drunk making her way up an alley. Snow fell thickly, driven into slanting
lines by the wind.
One of her headlights, shattered in her last destructive, trampling charge,
flickered and came on.
One of the tires began to reinflate, then the other.
The clouds of stinking oil-smoke began to diminish.
The engine's chopping, uncertain note smoothed out.
The missing bonnet began to reappear, from the windscreen end down,
looking weirdly like a scarf or cardigan being knitted by invisible needles;
the raw metal drew itself out of nothing, gleamed steel-grey, and then
darkened to red as if filling with blood.
The cracks in the windscreen began to run in reverse, leaving unflawed
smoothness behind themselves.
The other headlights came on, one after the other; now she moved with swift
surety through the stormy night, behind the cutting edge of her confident
brights.
Her odometer spun smoothly backward.
Forty-five minutes later she sat in the darkness of the late Will Darnell's Do-
It-Yourself Garage, in stall twenty. The wind howled and moaned in the ranks
of the wrecks out back, rusting hulks that perhaps held their own ghosts and
their own baleful memories as powdery snow swirled across the ripped and
tattered seats, their balding floor carpets.
Her engine ticked slowly, cooling.
