Christine

by Steven King

  “Yes, they do. And you seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.”

  Arnie was shaking his head. “You need time to think this over, Leigh. You need—”

  “That is just what I don’t need!” she said with a fierceness she wouldn’t have believed she still had left in her. “I never had a supernatural experience in my life—I never even believed in stuff like that—but now I wonder just what’s going on and what’s happening to you. They looked like eyes, Arnie. And later … afterward … there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell.”

  He recoiled.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No. I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “You just jumped as if the devil had twisted your ear.”

  “You’re imagining things,” Arnie said hotly. “A lot of things.”

  “That smell was there. And there are other things as well. Sometimes your radio won’t get anything but that oldies station—”

  Another flicker in his eyes, and a slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth.

  “And sometimes when we’re making out it just stalls, as if it didn’t like it. As if the car didn’t like it, Arnie.”

  “You’re upset,” he said with ominous flatness.

  “Yes, I am upset,” she said, beginning to cry. “Aren’t you?” The tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. I think this is the end of it for us, Arnie—I loved you, but I think it’s over. I really think it is, and that makes me feel so sad, and so sorry. “Your relationship with your parents has turned into a … an armed camp, you’re running God knows what into New York and Vermont for that fat pig Will Darnell, and that car… that car…”

  She could not say anything more. Her voice dissolved. She dropped her packages and bent blindly to pick them up. Exhausted and weeping, she succeeded in doing little more than stirring them around. He bent to help her and she pushed at him roughly. “Leave them alone! I’ll get them!”

  He stood up, his face pale and set. His expression was one of wooden fury, but his eyes … oh, to Leigh his eyes seemed lost.

  “All right,” he said, and now his voice roughened with his own tears. “Good. Join up with the rest of them if you want. You just saddle up and ride right along with all those other shitters. Who gives a tin shit?” He drew in a shivering breath, and a single hurt sob escaped him before he could clap a gloved hand brutally over his mouth.

  He began to walk backward toward the car; he reached out blindly behind himself for the Plymouth and Christine was there. “Just as long as you know you’re crazy. Right out of your mind! So go on and play your games! I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you!”

  His voice rose to a thin scream, in devilish harmony with the wind:

  “I don’t need you so fuck off!”

  He rushed around to the driver’s side, his feet slid, and he grabbed for Christine. She was there and he didn’t fall. He got in, the engine revved, the headlights came on in a huge white glare, and the Fury pulled out, rear tires spinning up a fog of snow.

  Now the tears came fast and hard as she stood watching the taillights fade to round red periods and wink out as the car went around the corner. Her packages lay scattered at her feet.

  And then, suddenly, her mother was there, absurdly clothed in an open raincoat, green rubber boots, and her blue flannel nightgown.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Leigh sobbed.

  I almost choked to death, I smelled something that might have come from a freshly opened tomb, and I think … yes, I think that somehow that car is alive … more alive every day. I think it’s like some kind of horrible vampire, only it’s taking Arnie’s mind to feed itself. His mind and his spirit.

  “Nothing, nothing’s wrong, I had a fight with Arnie, that’s all. Help me pick up my things, would you?”

  They picked up Leigh’s parcels and went in. The door shut behind them and the night belonged to the wind and to the swiftly falling snow. By morning there would be better than eight inches.

  • • •

  Arnie cruised until sometime after midnight, and later had no memory of it. The snow had filled the streets; they were deserted and ghostly. It was not a night for the great American motor-car. Nevertheless, Christine moved through the deepening storm with surefooted ease, even without snow tires. Now and then the prehistoric shape of a snowplow loomed and was gone.

  The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL/CIO convention, a future of labor and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport; three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMs. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they got really dedicated. Fifties newscasts wow. That was

  (never heard anything like that before)

  a really neat idea. That was

  (totally insane)

  pretty neat.

  The weather promised more snow.

  Then music again: Bobby Darin singing “Splish-Splash,” Ernie K-Doe singing “Mother-in-Law,” the Kalin twins singing “When.” The wipers beat time.

  He looked to his right, and Roland D. LeBay was riding shotgun.

  Roland D. LeBay sat there in his green pants and a faded shirt of Army twill, looking out of dark eyesockets. A beetle sat, preening, within one.

  You have to make them pay, Roland D. LeBay said. You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.

  “Yes,” Arnie whispered. Christine hummed through the night, cutting the snow with fresh, sure tracks. “Yes, that’s a fact.” And the wipers nodded back and forth.

  35

  Now This Brief Interlude

  At Libertyville High, Coach Puffer had given way to Coach Jones, and football had given way to basketball. But nothing really changed: the LHS cagers didn’t do much better than the LHS gridiron warriors—the only bright spot was Lenny Barongg, a three-sport man whose major one was basketball. Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to have if he was going to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after.

  Sandy Galton suddenly blew town. One day he was there, the next he was gone. His mother, a forty-five-year-old wino who didn’t look a day over sixty, did not seem terribly concerned. Neither did his younger brother, who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High. A romantic rumor that he had cut out for Mexico made the rounds at Libertyville High. Another, less romantic, rumor also made the rounds: that Buddy Repperton had been on Sandy about something and he felt it would be safer to make himself scarce.

  The Christmas break approached and the school’s atmosphere grew restless and rather thundery, as it always did before a long vacation. The student body’s overall grade average took its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye “this burning classic of postwar adolescence”?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and homerooms, Christmas decorations were up.

  Leigh Cabot was not up. She flunked an exam for the first time in her high school career and got a D on an executive typing drill. She could not seem to study; she found her mind wandering back, again and again, to Christine—to the green dashboard instruments that had become hateful, gloating cat’s-eyes, watching her choke to death.

  But for most, the last week of school before the Christmas break was a m
ellow period when offenses which would have earned detention slips at other times of the year were excused, when hard-hearted teachers would sometimes actually throw a scale on an exam where everyone had done badly, when girls who had been bitter enemies made it up, and when boys who had scuffled repeatedly over real or imagined insults did the same. Perhaps more indicative of the mellow season than anything else was the fact that Miss Rat-Pack, the gorgon of Room 23 study hall, was seen to smile … not just once, but several times.

  In the hospital, Dennis Guilder was moderately up—he had swapped his bedfast traction casts for walking casts. Physical therapy was no longer the torture it had been. He swung through corridors that had been strung with tinsel and decorated with first-, second-, and third-grade Christmas pictures, his crutches thump-thumping along, sometimes in time to the carols spilling merrily from the overhead speakers.

  It was a caesura, a lull, an interlude, a period of quiet. During his seemingly endless walks up and down the hospital corridors, Dennis reflected that things could be worse—much, much worse.

  Before too long, they were.

  36

  Buddy and Christine

  On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54-48 in the Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.

  Buddy Repperton, however, was disappointed.

  Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.

  In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to have aged. Part of it was the beard. He looked less like Clint Eastwood and more like some hard-drinking young actor’s version of Captain Ahab. Buddy had been doing a lot of drinking these last few weeks. He had been having dreams so terrible he could barely remember them. He awoke sweaty and trembling, feeling he had barely escaped some awful doom that ran dark and quiet.

  The booze cut them off, though. Cut them right off at the fucking knees. Goddam right. Working nights and sleeping days, that’s all it was.

  He unrolled the window of his scuffed and dented Camaro, scooping in frigid air, and tossed out an empty bottle. He reached back over his shoulder and said, “Another Molotov cocktail, mess-sewer.”

  “Right on, Buddy,” Bobby Stanton said respectfully, and slapped another bottle of Texas Driver into Buddy’s hand. Buddy had treated them to a case of the stuff—enough to paralyze the entire Egyptian Navy, he said—after the game.

  He spun off the cap, steering momentarily with his elbows, and then gulped down half the bottle. He handed it to Richie and uttered a long, froggy belch. The Camaro’s headlights cut Route 46. running northeast as straight as a string through rural Pennsylvania. Snow-covered fields lay dreaming on either side of the road, twinkling in a billion points of light that mimed the stars in the black winter sky. He was headed—in a sort of casual, half-drunk way—for Squantic Hills. Another destination might take his fancy in the meantime, but if not, the Hills were a fine and private place to get high in peace.

  Richie passed the bottle back to Bobby again, who drank big even though he hated the taste of Texas Driver. He supposed that when he got a little drunker, he wouldn’t mind the taste at all. He might be hung over and puking tomorrow, but tomorrow was a thousand years away. Bobby was still excited just to be with them; he was only a freshman, and Buddy Repperton, with his near-mythic reputation for bigness and badness, was a figure he viewed with mixed fear and awe.

  “Fucking clowns,” Buddy said morosely. “What a bunch of fucking clowns. You call that a basketball game?”

  “All a bunch of retards,” Richie agreed. “Except for Barongg. Thirty-four points, not too tacky.”

  “I hate that fucking spade,” Buddy said, giving Richie a long, measuring, drunken look. “You taking up for that jungle bunny?”

  “No way, Buddy,” Richie said promptly.

  “Better not. I’ll Barongg him.”

  “Which do you want first?” Bobby asked abruptly from the back seat. “The good news or the bad news?”

  “Bad news first,” Buddy said. He was into his third bottle of Driver now and feeling no pain—only an aggrieved anger. He had forgotten—at least for the moment—that he had been expelled: he was concentrating only on the fact that the old school team that bunch of fucking retard assholes, had let him down. “Always bad news first.” The Camaro rolled northeast at sixty-five over two-lane tar that was like a swipe of black paint across a hilly white floor. The land had begun to rise slightly as they approached Squantic Hills.

  “Well, the bad news is that a million Martians just landed in New York,” Bobby said. “Now you wanna hear the good news?”

  “There is no good news.” Buddy said in a low, morose, grieving voice. Richie would have liked to tell the kid you didn’t try to cheer Buddy up when he was in a mood like this: that only made it worse. The thing to do was to let it run its course.

  Buddy had been this way ever since Moochie Welch, that little four-eyed panhandling dork, got run down by some psycho on JFK Drive.

  “The good news is that they eat niggers and piss gasoline,” Bobby said and roared with laughter. He laughed for quite a while before he realized he was laughing alone. Then he shut up quickly. He glanced up and saw Buddy’s bloodshot eyes looking at him over the uppermost tendrils of his beard, and that red, ferrety gaze floating in the rearview mirror gave him an unpleasant thrill of fear. It occurred to Bobby Stanton that he might have shut up a minute or two too late.

  Behind them, distant, perhaps as much as three miles back, headlights twinkled like insignificant yellow sparks in the night.

  “You think that’s funny?” Buddy asked. “You tell a fucking racist joke like that and you think it’s funny? You’re a fucking bigot, you know that?”

  Bobby’s mouth dropped open. “But you said—”

  “I said I didn’t like Barongg. In general I think spades are as good as white people.”

  Buddy considered.

  “Well, almost as good.”

  “But—”

  “You want to watch out or you’ll be walking home,” Buddy snarled. “With a rupture. Then you can write I HATE NIGGERS all over your fuckin truss.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said in a small, scared voice. He felt as if he had reached up to turn on a light and had got a whopper of an electric shock. “Sorry.”

  “Give me that bottle and shut your head.”

  Bobby handed the Driver up front with alacrity. His hand was shaking.

  Buddy killed the bottle. They passed a sign which read SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK 3 MI. The lake at the center of the state park was a popular beach area in the summertime, but the park was closed from November to April. The road which wound through the park to Squantic Lake was kept plowed for periodic National Guard maneuvers and winter Explorer Scouts camping trips, however, and Buddy had discovered a side entrance which went around the main gate and then joined the park road. Buddy liked to go into the silent, wintry state park and cruise and drink.

  Behind them, the distant twin sparks had grown to circles—dual headlights about a mile back.

  “Hand me up another Molotov cocktail, you fucking racist pig.”

  Bobby handed up a fresh bottle of Driver, remaining prudently silent.

  Buddy drank deeply, belched, and then handed the bottle across to Richie.

  “No thanks, man.”

  “You drink it, or you may find yourself getting an enema with it.”

  “Sure, okay,” Richie said, wishing mightily that he had stayed home tonight. He drank.

  The Camaro sped along, its headlights cutting the night.

  Buddy glanced into the rearview and saw the other car. It was now coming up fast.
He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was doing sixty-five. The car behind them had to be doing close to seventy. Buddy felt something—a curious kind of doubling back to the dreams he could not quite remember. A cold finger seemed to press lightly against his heart.

  Ahead, the road branched in two, Route 46 continuing east toward New Stanton, the other road bearing north toward Squantic Hills State Park. A large orange sign advised: CLOSED WINTER MONTHS.

  Barely slowing, Buddy dragged left and shot up the hill. The approach road to the park was not so well-plowed, and overarching trees had kept the warm afternoon sun from melting off the snowpack. The Camaro slid a little before grabbing the road again. In the back seat, Bobby Stanton made a low, uneasy sound.

  Buddy looked up in the rearview, expecting to see the other car shoot by along 46—after all, there was nothing up this road but a dead end as far as most drivers were concerned—but instead it took the turn even faster than Buddy had and pounded along after them, now less than a quarter of a mile behind. Its headlights were four glowing white circles that washed the Camaro’s interior.

  Bobby and Richie turned around to look.

  “What the fuck?” Richie muttered.

  But Buddy knew. Suddenly he knew. It was the car that had run down Moochie. Oh yes it was. The psycho who had greased Moochie was behind the wheel of that car, and now he was after Buddy.

  He stepped down on the go, and the Camaro started to fly. The speedometer needle crept up to seventy and then gradually heeled over toward eighty. Trees blurred past, dark sketches in the night. The lights behind them did not fall back; the truth was that they were still gaining. The duals had merged into two great white eyes.

  “Man, you want to slow down,” Richie said. He grabbed for his seatbelt, actively scared now. “If we roll at this speed—”

  Buddy didn’t answer. He hunched over the wheel, alternating glances at the road ahead with glances shot into the rearview mirror, where those lights grew and grew.