Christine полностью

The time spent working on her at Darnell’s was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the bodywork on the dented rear end, but he couldn’t remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood—covering the windscreen and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back—but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn’t remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness… feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered “I love you” before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell’s had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.

Maybe the windscreen was the worst.

He hadn’t bought a new windscreen for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented a lot more than it was if he’d bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn’t he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked CAR STUFF that he kept in his room. But he hadn’t found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather halfheartedly.

Dennis had said something—that the snarl of cracks had looked smaller, less serious. Then, that day at Hidden Hills, it had just been… well, gone. The windscreen had been clean and unflawed.

But when had it happened? How had it happened?

He didn’t know.

He finally fell asleep and dreamed unpleasantly, twisting the covers into a ball as the scud of clouds blew away and the autumnal stars shone coldly down.

It was a dream—she was sure, almost until the very end, that it must be a dream.

In the dream she awoke from a dream of Arnie, making love to Arnie not in the car but in a very cool blue room that was unfurnished except for a deep blue shag rug and a scatter of throw-pillows covered in a lighter blue satin… she awoke from this dream to her room in the small hours of Sunday morning.

She could hear a car outside. She went to the window and looked out and down.

Christine was standing at the kerb. She was running—Leigh could see exhaust raftering up from the pipes—but was empty. In the dream she thought that Arnie must be at the door, although there was no knock as yet. She ought to go down, and quickly. If her father woke up and found Arnie here at four in the morning, he would be furious.

But she didn’t move. She looked down at the car and thought how much she hated it—and feared it.

And it hated her, too.

Rivals, she thought, and the thought—in this dream—was not grim and hotly jealous but rather despairing and afraid. There it sat at the kerb, there it was—there she was—parked outside her house in the dead trench of morning, waiting for her. Waiting for Leigh. Come on down, honey. Come on. We’ll cruise, and we’ll talk about who needs him more, who cares for him more, and who will be better for him in the long run. Come on… you’re not scared, are you?

She was terrified.

It’s not fair, she’s older, she knows the tricks, she’ll beguile him—

“Get out,” Leigh whispered fiercely in the dream, and rapped softly on the glass with her knuckles. The glass felt cold to her touch; she could see the small, crescent-shaped marks her knuckles left in the frost. It was amazing how real some dreams could be.

But it had to be a dream. It had to be because the car heard her. The words were no more than out of her mouth when the wipers suddenly started up, flicking wet snow off the windscreen in somehow contemptuous swipes. And then it—or she—drew smoothly away from the kerb and was gone up the street—

With no one driving it.

She was sure of that… as sure as one can be of anything in a dream. The passenger window had been dusted with snow but was not opaque with it. She had been able to see inside, and there was no one behind the wheel. So of course it had to be a dream.

She drifted back to her bed (into which she had never brought a lover; like Arnie, she had never had a lover at all) thinking of a Christmas quite long ago—twelve, maybe even fourteen years ago. Surely she could have been no more than four at the time. She and her mother had been in one of the big. department stores in Boston, Filene’s maybe…

She put her head down on her pillow and fell asleep (in her dream) with her eyes open, looking at the faint gleam of early light in the window, and then—in dreams anything could happen—she saw the Filene’s toy department on the other side of the window: tinsel, glitter, lights.