by Steve Harris
‘If you can get me where I want to go,’ Martin said, ‘I’ll publish everything you can damned well write. And that’s a promise.’
Apart from a star-shaped pattern of ash on the melted tarmac where Dawn’s manuscript had fallen and a few scraps of string from the bag it was in, there was no sign that anything untoward had happened.
‘One of those bolts hit the car,’ Martin said, inspecting the roof and finding nothing.
‘It didn’t hurt if it did,’ Dawn said. ‘The keys aren’t melted or anything.’ She opened the door and got inside.
Martin climbed into the other side of the tiny car and tried to make himself comfortable. ‘It smells of petrol,’ he said, envisaging an explosion when Dawn turned the ignition key.
‘I’ve just filled it. It always smells a bit after you top up the tank,’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t catch fire.’
Martin tensed as she turned the key, but the Fiat didn’t explode. All that happened was that the little two-cylinder engine started.
‘Dawn, there’s something I should explain,’ Martin began.
Dawn shook her head. ‘Don’t!’ she interrupted. ‘Don’t say anything because I keep thinking of ghosts and gods and a haunted house and I don’t want to know any more. I’ve had my warning. All that’s happened so far is I’ve lost a manuscript. I don’t want to lose anything else.’
Martin nodded and didn’t say anything else.
‘It doesn’t look as if the lightning strike had any effect on the car,’ Dawn said as they reached the car’s top cruising speed on the motorway - a speed which the Ferrari would have happily doubled in second gear.
It certainly didn’t make it go any faster, Martin thought. You could get out and run alongside if you wanted a bit of exercise. ‘Seems fine,’ he replied.
Dawn checked the wipers and lights and indicators and concluded that the Fiat (which she had christened Looby Lou, for God’s sake!) was unhurt. Those were her actual words: ‘Looby Lou didn’t get hurt by the look of it!’
Martin only hoped that Looby fucking Lou didn’t suddenly turn into Poison Percy or Asphyxiation Alec. Or Road-Death Reggie. He opened his window and took a deep breath of motorway air while he wondered what Peter Perfect had been trying to achieve back there at the service station.
Evidently he had not wanted to kill either of them, or to incapacitate the car. The burning of the manuscript had to be some kind of warped literary joke, and if there had been only one bolt of lightning, Martin would have left it at that. But there had been two.
And one of them struck the car! So what’s going on?
Martin didn’t discover what was going on until they had been travelling for more than half an hour. Then he realized. Peter Perfect didn’t do the same things in his story as Davy Rosenburg would have done. Rosenburg was pretty straight. He gave his characters a problem you couldn’t miss and let them deal with it. Peter Perfect was more like Stephen Byrne in that his characters had to figure out what the problem was before they could deal with it. Sometimes the problem was vague and difficult to discover and sometimes you didn’t spot it until it was too late.
And this, to Martin, looked like one of those times.
From this point, the nature of the problem took less than ten seconds to uncover. All he had to do was wonder what Peter Perfect wanted to do. That was easy: he wanted to prevent Martin getting to Bude in time to save Essenjay. Why had he struck the car? That was easy too. So it would break down on the motorway, miles from the nearest help.
Unfortunately Martin discovered this when the Fiat was less than fifty feet from an exit ramp.
Turn off!’ he shouted, too late. Take this junction! Here! Quick! Turn off!’
‘Can’t! No room!’ Dawn yelled.
If Martin had been driving, he would have thrown the car towards the queue on the ramp and a space would have magically opened to accept him, but Dawn either didn’t know this chicken-out trick or she didn’t want to try it. As it was, Martin had already forgotten the missed chance and was now wrestling with his seatbelt, trying to get the two buckle sections apart. When the seatbelt finally let him go, he twisted round in his seat, peered out of the car’s back window and saw exactly what he had expected to see.
The Fiat was leaving a trail. The thin black line of moisture coming from beneath the car and which Martin knew he would be able to follow all the way back to the service station if he cared to, was some - probably most by now - of the four star Dawn had just bought. Peter Perfect hadn’t fouled up at all. The lightning had achieved exactly what he had planned. It had punched a hole in the petrol tank.
That was why he’d smelled petrol. It wasn’t because Dawn had just filled the tank at all. It was because it was busily pouring out again.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dawn asked.
‘Petrol’s leaking. We’re leaving a nice trail of it behind us,’ he said, and wondered if some bright spark back at the service station was dropping a lit match on it. He could quite easily imagine a streak of fire hammering down the motorway after him like it would in a cartoon.
The gauge still says the tank’s full,’ Dawn protested.
‘Well, it would say that, wouldn’t it?’ Martin countered.
‘We should get all the way to Bude before it runs out,’ Dawn said.
‘They sound like famous last words, if I ever heard any,’ Martin said.
He waited and the car didn’t cough and judder to a halt. He waited a little while longer and concluded that Peter Perfect was going to keep him guessing. ‘How far is it to the next junction?’ he asked.
‘About fifteen miles,’ Dawn replied.
‘Then I know exactly where we’ll run out,’ Martin said, ‘and it won’t be Bude. It’ll be half-way between the junction we just passed and the next one. And do you know what else?’
‘Nope.’
‘When this car dies, we’ll be about as far from a help phone as it’s possible to get. And when we walk to the nearest one it’ll be out of service. And so will the one after that. We’ll hope for a police car we can flag down but there won’t be one. We’ll get to the phone that works and ask for an AA van or something and then we’ll walk back to the car and sit on the bank and wait for two or three hours.’
‘On the bank?’
‘Yeah, on the bank because if there’s one thing I know about cars parked on a motorway hard shoulder it is this: they become magnets for large lorries. If we sit in the car something will crash into us and kill us. So we’ll sit on the bank and wait. Until it’s too late.’
‘For what?’
‘For me to be in Bude in time to save my girlfriend from Black Rock and the man inside it.’
Ten minutes later, when the Fiat was exactly half-way between the two motorway junctions, Martin’s predictions began to come true.
Dawn parked the Fiat on the hard shoulder, they got out and began to walk, knowing that the first telephone they got to wasn’t go
ing to work.
When they were five hundred yards away from the Fiat the ground seemed to shudder beneath their feet and way behind them, a long, low rumbling sound began.
Martin and Dawn glanced at one another and turned around.
The Fiat was gone.
Where it had stood was a very badly damaged articulated lorry. The truck had jack-knifed. Its trailer had swung across the road, blocking it, and its twisted cab was partially embedded in the bank that ran up from the hard shoulder.
The Fiat, presumably, was somewhere underneath it.
‘That’s Peter Perfect for you,’ Martin growled, staring back up the road. ‘Always full of surprises.’
25 - Looking for James
To a dialling tone. James had rung off.
On two occasions since she had moved into her flat in Bude, Sarah-Jane had booked alarm calls with Telecom. Both times she’d had to rise well before her usual waking-up hour in order to get to the airport.
On neither occasion had the ringing of the telephone awoken her. As Martin had quite rightly claimed, Sarah-Jane Dresden could sleep for her country.
The answering machine attached to her telephone allowed the telephone to ring four times before it cut in, played its message and invited the caller to leave a message of their own.
Four rings didn’t take very long to happen and even if she hadn’t been fast asleep in front of the television, it would have been hit and miss as to whether S’n’J got to the phone before the answering machine cut in. As it was, she didn’t hear the ringing at all. What finally penetrated the wall of sleep behind which she was sheltering, was the voice of James being broadcast from the machine as he left his message for her.
S’n’J’s eyes blinked open, she shook her head and listened, wondering whether the sound she could still hear was something to do with what she had been dreaming. A second later she was charging across the room towards the hall where the ansaphone was recording James’ voice.
‘… hope you get this message. I love you,’ she heard as she snatched the phone off the hook and began to babble.
‘Damn and blast!’ she said and slammed the phone back into its cradle. The answering machine’s light lit and flashed on and off, informing her that there was a message for her to hear.
It’ll be tampered with, she thought. When I play it back, he’ll have got to it.
But he might not have had time yet. James had only just finished making the call and if she played it back quickly, she might be able to listen to it before Peter Perfect had time to operate on it and leave another rendition of ‘Frosty the Snowman’.
She rolled the tape back then pressed play.
‘Drezy!’ James said. He sounded breathless and worried. ‘Where the hell are you? Surely you haven’t gone to work yet? What’s the time? Oh, it’s almost eleven so you probably have. Look, I need your help. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I broke my promise to you last night and acted like a story hero. I went over to Black Rock during the night and I got myself into a little trouble. I’m OK, but something’s happened to the car. I’ve managed to get as far as Widemouth Bay and now she’s gone out of commission. I’m parked in the car park by the beach, the battery’s flat, the engine won’t run and I need you to pick me up. You said you only had a small round today, so I’m hoping you’ll be back soon. Everything’s going to be all right, Drezy. I hope you get this message. I love you.’
Fighting off the urge to pick up her keys and hammer down to Widemouth Bay, S’n’J rolled back the tape and played it again because the Girl Guide part of her told her it needed checking out.
James sounded like James. His voice was his voice, not the voice of someone pretending to be him. His speech patterns were right. The content of his message was right.
But something is wrong.
She rolled back the tape again.
This time parts of it were blanked and her current least-favourite tune was stuck on the end of it. She listened to a few bars of ‘Frosty’ and turned off the machine defiantly, thinking, You were’nt quite quick enough this time, Mr Perfect, were you!
She picked up her car keys, checked on Janie, who was still snoring gently, then she hesitated. If she went out she would be leaving Janie on her own.
The question was: did it matter?
It mattered if Billy-Joe was out there somewhere watching and waiting. But logic said that Billy-Joe was finished off. S’n’J didn’t particularly like the idea of leaving Janie, but she liked the idea of leaving James where he was even less. She left Janie and closed the bedroom door. Widemouth Bay was not a long haul. She could easily get there, and back with James, in twenty minutes.
Less if possible. So quit stalling. That call from James had to be real. If it wasn’t, Peter Perfect wouldn’t have had any reason to ruin the tape, would he?
‘Unless it was a double bluff,’ she said aloud.
But she didn’t think it was. When you got down to it, you sometimes had to trust your instincts. And on this occasion she was pretty sure her instincts were right. It was James on the phone.
It wasn’t until she was approaching Widemouth Bay that she realized what had been bothering her. Then her heart began to sink. James was a competent mechanic. And he worked at a garage. Admittedly it was a tyre and exhaust centre, but it was full of his buddies who had cars of their own and mechanical knowledge. Surely he would have got someone from there to pick him up. Or maybe even tow him home. Why call her?
‘It’ll be Peter Perfect in the car park waiting for me,’ she murmured. ‘Not James.’
And another thing, her Girl Guide voice chipped in, do you remember telling him how many calls you had to do today?
Now she thought of it, she didn’t recall telling him what her Friday round involved. It was too late now anyway; she was almost there.
The road that skirted the bay was long and open and gently curved and S’n’J could see the beach car park as she approached it. Six or seven empty cars were parked there.
‘Shit!’ she said as she drove into the car park. She wasn’t even sure what kind of car James drove. She fancied it was a big American thing, but there wasn’t one of those here.
Neither was there a Porsche, so Peter Perfect evidently wasn’t present either.
S’n’J got out and toured the parked cars, keeping well away from the doors and peering in through the back windows for any sign that one of them belonged to James.
There were no clues.
She looked down on the beach. The tide was out. There were three people down there, two of them walking dogs and another, right down at the water’s edge, skimming stones.
None of them could be mistaken for James.
Go home right now! her inner voice suddenly demanded. It wasn’t James’s voice at all, it was Peter Perfect mimicking him. It was a trick to get you out of the house. That’s why you got to listen to the whole message. He blocked the words after you conv
inced yourself that it was James on the tape. It was a double bluff. You fell for it because you wanted it to be a message from James.
S’n’J ran back to her car.
You haven’t been gone long, she told herself as she did a gravel churning about-turn across the car park. And what about Martin? He should be there by now. He’ll have turned up in time to stop anything happening to Janie.
She hit the main road, did a skidding left turn and floored the accelerator, realizing she did not believe this and feeling very much at Peter Perfect’s mercy.
‘But,’ she told herself, braking for a bend, ‘if it was that easy for him he would have already taken you and done whatever he wanted with you. It’s been…’
She tailed off. It might have been weeks since she’d found the first manuscript sample beneath her bed, but it was only two days ago that she’d read it and somehow pressed its start button. And forty-eight hours had not yet passed since she’d made that first phone call to Janie. It was less than twenty-four since she’d decided to visit the location of Black Rock and had really got things moving. A lot had happened since yesterday morning.
Peter Perfect could in no way be described as a slow worker.
It’s almost as if it’s been happening for …
S’n’J cut the thought off, but not quickly enough. She had been going to tell herself that it was almost as if it had been happening for ever, but that thought would indicate that she was looking back with the mind of Snowdrop, not with her own. The line between fact and fiction was getting completely blurred.
And what happens when that line no longer exists? she asked herself. Will you remember ever having been Drezy? Or will you always have been Dropsy? Will you cease to exist in this universe and appear only as a book character?
