moment. How could this be happening? Just as he was
set to get away! The slope ahead was long and gradual,
with many curves. He knew he couldn’t stop. Could he
Duel
223
U-tum unexpectedly and go back down? the sudden
thought occurred. He looked ahead. The highway was
too narrow, bound by hills on both sides. There wasn’t
room enough to make an uninterrupted turn and there
wasn’t time enough to ease around. If he tried that,
Keller would shift direction and hit him head-on. “Oh,
my God!” Mann murmured suddenly.
He was going to die.
He stared ahead with stricken eyes, his view increasingly obscured by steam. Abruptly, he recalled the afternoon he’d had the engine steam-cleaned at the local
car wash. The man who’d done it had suggested he
replace the water hoses, because steam-cleaning had a
tendency to make them crack. He’d nodded,, thinking
that he’d do it when he had more time. More time! The
phrase was like a dagger in his mind. He’d failed to
change the hoses and, for that failure, he was now about
to die.
He sobbed in terror as the dashboard light flashed on.
He glanced at it involuntarily and read the word h o t ,
black on red. With a breathless gasp, he jerked the
transmission into low. Why hadn’t he done that right
away! He looked ahead. The slope seemed endless.
Already, he could hear a boiling throb inside the radiator. How much coolant was there left? Steam was clouding faster, hazing up the windshield. Reaching out,
he twisted at a dashboard knob. The wipers started
flicking back and forth in fan-shaped sweeps. There had
to be enough coolant in the radiator to get him to the top.
Then what? cried his mind. He couldn’t drive without
coolant, even downhill. He glanced at the rearview
mirror. The truck was falling behind. Mann snarled with
maddened fury. I f it weren’t for that goddamned hose,
he’d be escaping now!
The sudden lurching of the car snatched him back to
terror. If he braked now, he could jump out, run and
scrabble up that slope. Later, he might not have the time.
He couldn’t make himself stop the car, though. As long
224
Richard M atheson
as it kept on running, he felt bound to it, less vulnerable.
God knows what would happen if he left it.
Mann started up the slope with haunted eyes, trying
not to see the red light on the edges of his vision. Yard by
yard, his car was slowing down. Make it, make it,
pleaded his mind, even though he thought that it was
futile. The car was running more and more unevenly.
The thumping percolation of its radiator filled his ears.
Any moment now, the motor would be choked off and
the car would shudder to a stop, leaving him a sitting
target. No, he thought. He tried to blank his mind.
He was almost to the top, but in the mirror he could
see the truck drawing up on him. He jammed down on
the pedal and the motor made a grinding noise. He
groaned. It had to make the top! Please, God, help me!
screamed his mind. The ridge was just ahead. Closer.
Closer. Make it. “Make it.” The car was shuddering and
clanking, slowing down— oil, smoke and steam gushing
from beneath the hood. The windshield wipers swept
from side to side. Mann’s head throbbed. Both his hands
felt numb. His heartbeat pounded as he stared ahead.
Make it, please, God, make it. Make it. Make it!
Over! Mann’s lips opened in a cry of triumph as the car
began descending. Hand shaking uncontrollably, he
shoved the transmission into neutral and let the car go
into a glide. The triumph strangled in his throat as he
saw that there was nothing in sight but hills and more
hills. Never mind! He was on a downgrade now, a long
one. He passed a sign that read, t r u c k s u se lo w g ea rs
n e x t 12 m il e s . Twelve miles! Something would come up.
It had to.
The car began to pick up speed. Mann glanced at the
speedometer. Forty-seven miles an hour. The red light
still burned. He’d save the motor for a long time, too,
though; let it cool for twelve miles, if the truck was far
enough behind.
His speed increased. Fifty . . . 5 1 . Mann watched the
needle turning slowly toward the right. He glanced at the
Duel
225
rearview mirror. The truck had not appeared yet. With a
little luck, he might still get a good lead. Not as good as
he might have if the motor hadn’t overheated but enough
to work with. There had to be some place along the way
to stop. The needle edged past 55 and started toward the
60 mark.
Again, he looked at the rearview mirror, jolting as he
saw that the truck had topped the ridge and was on its
way down. He felt his lips begin to shake and crimped
them together. His gaze jumped fitfully between the
steam-obscured highway and the mirror. The truck was
accelerating rapidly. Keller doubtless had the gas pedal
floored. It wouldn’t be long before the truck caught up to
him. Mann’s right hand twitched unconsciously toward
the gearshift. Noticing, he jerked it back, grimacing,
glanced at the speedometer. The car’s velocity had just
passed 60. Not enough! He had to use the motor now! He
reached out desperately.
His right hand froze in midair as the motor stalled;
then, shooting out the hand, he twisted the ignition key.
The motor made a grinding noise but wouldn’t start.
Mann glanced up, saw that he was almost on the
shoulder, jerked the steering wheel around. Again, he
turned the key, but there was no response. He looked up
at the rearview mirror. The truck was gaining on him
swiftly. He glanced at the speedometer. The car’s speed
was fixed at 62. Mann felt himself crushed in a vise of
panic. He stared ahead with haunted eyes.
Then he saw it, several hundred yards ahead: an escape
route for trucks with bumed-out brakes. There was no
alternative now. Either he took the turnout or his car
would be rammed from behind. The truck was frighteningly close. He heard the high-pitched wailing of its motor. Unconsciously, he started easing to the right,
then jerked the wheel back suddenly. He mustn’t give the
move away! He had to wait until the last possible
moment. Otherwise, Keller would follow him in.
Just before he reached the escape route, Mann
226
Richard M atheson
wrenched the steering wheel around. The car rear started
breaking to the left, tires shrieking on the pavement.
Mann steered with the skid, braking just enough to keep
from losing all control. The rear tires grabbed and, at 60
miles an hour, the car shot up the dirt trail, tires slinging
up a cloud of dust. Mann began to hit the brakes. The
rear wheels sideslipped and the car slammed hard
against the dirt bank to the right. Mann ga
sped as the car
bounced off and started to fishtail with violent whipping
motions, angling toward the trail edge. He drove his foot
down on the brake pedal with all his might. The car rear
skidded to the right and slammed against the bank again.
Mann heard a grinding rend of metal and felt himself
heaved downward suddenly, his neck snapped, as the car
plowed to a violent halt.
As in a dream, Mann turned to see the truck and
trailer swerving off the highway. Paralyzed, he watched
the massive vehicle hurtle toward him, staring at it with
a blank detachment, knowing he was going to die but so
stupefied by the sight of the looming truck that he
couldn’t react. The gargantuan shape roared closer,
blotting out the sky. Mann felt a strange sensation in his
throat, unaware that he was screaming.
Suddenly, the truck began to tilt. Mann stared at it in
choked-off silence as it started tipping over like some
ponderous beast toppling in slow motion. Before it
reached his car, it vanished from his rear window.
Hands palsied, Mann undid the safety belt and opened
the door. Struggling from the car, he stumbled to the trail
edge, staring downward. He was just in time to see the
truck capsize like a foundering ship. The tanker followed, huge wheels spinning as it overturned.
The storage tank on the truck exploded first, the
violence of its detonation causing Mann to stagger back
and sit down clumsily on the dirt. A second explosion
roared below, its shock wave buffeting across him hotly,
making his ears hurt. His glazed eyes saw a fiery column
shoot up toward the sky in front of him, then another.
Duel
227
Mann crawled slowly to the trail edge and peered
down at the canyon. Enormous gouts of flame were
towering upward, topped by thick, black, oily smoke. He
couldn’t see the truck or trailer, only flames. He gaped at
them in shock, all feeling drained from him.
Then, unexpectedly, emotion came. Not dread, at
first, and not regret; not the nausea that followed soon. It
was a primeval tumult in his mind: the cry of some
ancestral beast above the body of its vanquished foe.
Edgar Pangbom (1909-1976)
Longtooth
Edgar Pangbom was one o f th e most adm ired fantasy and
science fiction w riters of the 1950s-70s. H e w rote tw o
classic novels o f the genre, A Mirror for Observers, winner
o f the International Fantasy Award (1 9 5 4 ) and Davy
(1 9 5 4 ), and a num ber of highly regarded short stories,
many o f them set in the sam e future world as the latter
novel. H e also w rote historical fiction. His w ork is notable
fo r its precise and polished prose style and for his ability to
round characters, in a field w here either talent is comparatively rare. His few horror stories w ere mostly cast in the science fiction m ode, with the exception o f “ Longtooth,”
his m asterpiece. A monster story set in the M aine woods, it
is an unusual piece of pastoral horror in the tradition of
Algernon Blackwood, with perhaps an adm ixture o f Theodore Sturgeon, a w riter who adm ired Pangbom and to whom Pangborn was often com pared. The m ixture of
horror of, and compassion for, the m onster together with
the suggestion o f a scientific rationale places “ Longtooth"
firm ly in the tw entieth century horror tradition.
My word is good. How can I prove it? Bom in
Darkfield, wasn’t I? Stayed away thirty more years
after college, but when I returned I was still Ben Dane,
one of the Darkfield Danes, Judge Marcus Dane’s eldest.
Longtooth
229
And they knew my word was good. My wife died and I
sickened of all cities; then my bachelor brother Sam
died, too, who’d lived all his life here in Darkfield,
running his one-man law office over in Lohman—our
nearest metropolis, pop. 6437. A fast coronary at fifty; I
had loved him. Helen gone, then Sam— I wound up my
unimportances and came home, inheriting Sam’s housekeeper Adelaide Simmons, her grim stability and celestial cooking. Nostalgia for Maine is a serious matter, late in life: I had to yield. I expected a gradual drift into my
childless old age playing correspondence chess, translating a few of the classics. I thought I could take for granted the continued respect of my neighbors. I say my
word is good.
I will remember again that middle of March a few
years ago, the snow skimming out of an afternoon sky as
dirty as the bottom of an old aluminum pot. Harp
Ryder’s back road had been plowed since the last snowfall; I supposed Bolt-Bucket could make the mile and a half in to his farm and out again before we got caught.
Harp had asked me to get him a book if I was making a
trip to Boston, any goddamn book that told about
Eskimos, and I had one for him, De Poncins’s Kabloona.
I saw the midget devils of white running crazy down a
huge slope of wind, and recalled hearing at the Darkfield
News Bureau, otherwise Cleve’s General Store, somebody mentioning a forecast of the worst blizzard in forty years. Joe Cleve, who won’t permit a radio in the store
because it pesters his ulcers, inquired of his Grand
Inquisitor who dwells ten yards behind your right shoulder: “Why’s it always got to be the worst in so-and-so many years, that going to help anybody?” The bureau
was still analyzing this difficult inquiry when I left, with
my cigarettes and as much as I could remember of
Adelaide’s grocery list after leaving it on the dining table.
It wasn’t yet three when I turned in on Harp’s back road,
and a gust slammed at Bolt-Bucket like death with a
shovel.
230
Edgar Pangbom
I tried to win momentum for the rise to the high
ground, swerved to avoid an idiot rabbit and hit instead
a patch of snow-hidden melt-and-freeze, skidding to a
full stop from which nothing would extract me but a tow.
I was fifty-seven that year, my wind bad from too
much smoking and my heart (I now know) no stronger
than Sam’s. I quit cursing—gradually, to avoid sudden
actions— and tucked Kabloona under my parka. I would
walk the remaining mile to Ryder’s, stay just to leave the
book, say hello, and phone for a tow; then, since Harp
never owned a car and never would, I could walk back
and meet the truck.
If Leda Ryder knew how to drive, it didn’t matter
much after she married Harp. They farmed it, back in
there, in almost the manner of Harp’s ancestors of
Jefferson’s time. Harp did keep his two hundred laying
hens by methods that were considered modem before
the poor wretches got condemned to batteries, but his
other enterprises came closer to antiquity. In his big
kitchen garden he let one small patch of weeds fool
themselves for an inch or two, so he’d have it to work at;
they survived nowhere else. A few cows, a team, four
acres for market crops, and a small dog Droopy, whose
grandmother had made it somehow with a dachshund.
Droopy’s o
nly menace in obese old age was a wheezing
bark. The Ryders must have grown nearly all vital
necessities except chewing tobacco and once in a while a
new dress for Leda. Harp could snub the twentieth
century, and I doubt if Leda was consulted about it in
spite of his obsessive devotion for her. She was almost
thirty years younger, and yes, he should not have married her. Other side up just as scratchy; she should not have married him, but she did.
Harp was a dinosaur perhaps, but I grew up with him,
he a year the younger. We swam, fished, helled around
together. And when I returned to Darkfield growing old,
he was one of the few who acted glad to see me, so far as
Longtooth
231
you can trust what you read in a face like a granite
promontory. Maybe twice a week Harp Ryder smiled.
I pushed on up the ridge, and noticed a going-and-
coming set of wide tire tracks already blurred with snow.
That would be the egg truck I had passed a quarter hour
since on the main road. Whenever the west wind at my
back lulled, I could swing around and enjoy one of my
favorite prospects of birch and hemlock lowland. From
Ryder’s Ridge there’s no sign of Darkfield two miles
southwest except one church spire. On clear days you
glimpse Bald Mountain and his two big brothers, more
than twenty miles west of us.
The snow was thickening. It brought relief and pleasure to see the black shingles of Harp’s bam and the roof of his Cape Codder. Foreshortened, so that it looked
snug against the bam; actually house and bam were
connected by a two-story shed fifteen feet wide and forty
feet long— woodshed below, hen loft above. The Ryders’
sunrise-facing bedroom window was set only three feet
above the eaves of that shed roof. They truly went to bed
with the chickens. I shouted, for Harp was about to close
the big shed door. He held it for me. I ran, and the storm
ran after me. The west wind was bouncing off the bam;
eddies howled at us. The temperature had tumbled ten
degrees since I left Darkfield. The thermometer by the
shed door read fifteen degrees, and I knew I’d been a
damn fool. As I helped Harp fight the shed door closed, I
thought I heard Leda, crying.
A swift confused impression. The wind was exploring
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 28
