Christine

by Стивен Кинг

  “You SHITTER! Fuck off, you miserable SHITTER! LEAVEMEALONE!”

  “You should have left my friend alone,” I tried to yell—but all that would come out was a tearing, wounded gasp.

  I hit it squarely in the rear end, and the gas tank ruptured as the back of the car accordioned inward and upward in a kind of metal mushroom. There was a yellow lick of fire. I shielded my face with my hands—but then it was gone. Christine sat there, a refugee from a demolition derby. Her engine ran choppily, missed, fired again, and then died.

  The place was silent except for the bass rumble of Petunia’s engine.

  Then Leigh was running across the floor, screaming my name over and over, crying. I was suddenly, stupidly aware that I was wearing her pink nylon scarf around the arm of my jacket.

  I looked down at it, and then the world greyed out again.

  I could feel her hands on me, and then there was nothing but darkness as I fainted.

  I came to about fifteen minutes later, my face wet and blessedly cool. Leigh was standing on Petunia’s driver’s side running board, mopping my face with a wet rag. I caught it in one hand, tried to suck it, and then spat. The rag tasted strongly of oil.

  “Dennis, don’t worry,” she said. “I ran out into the street… stopped a snowplough… scared the poor man out of ten years of his life, I think… all this blood… he said… an ambulance… he said he’d, you know… Dennis, are you all right?”

  “Do I look all right?” I whispered.

  “No,” she said, and burst into tears.

  “Then don’t”—I swallowed past a pain dry lump in my throat—“don’t ask stupid questions. I love you.”

  She hugged me clumsily.

  “He said he’d call the police, too,” she said.

  I barely heard her. My eyes had found the twisted, silent hulk that was Christine’s remains. And hulk was the right word; she hardly looked like a car at all anymore. But why hadn’t she burned? A hubcap lay off to one side like a dented silver tiddlywink.

  “How long since you stopped the plough?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Maybe five minutes. Then I got the rag and dipped it in that bucket over there. Dennis… thank God it’s over.”

  Punk! Punk! Punk!

  I was still looking at the hubcap.

  The dents were popping out of it.

  Abruptly it flicked up on its rim and rolled towards the car like a huge coin.

  Leigh saw it too. Her face froze. Her eyes widened and began to bulge. Her lips mouthed the word No but no sound came out.

  “Get in here with me,” I said in a low voice, as if it could hear us. How do I know? — perhaps it could. “Get in on the passenger side. You’re going to run the gas while I run the clutch with my right foot.”

  “No…” This time it was a hissing whisper. Her breath came in whining little gasps. “No… no…”

  The wreckage was quivering all over. It was the most eerie, most terrible thing I have ever seen in my life. It was quivering all over, quivering like an animal that is not… quite… dead. Metal tapped nervously against metal. Tie rods clicked jittery jazz rhythms against their connectors. As I watched, a bent cotter-pin lying on the floor straightened itself and did half a dozen cartwheels to land in the wreckage.

  “Get in,” I said.

  “Dennis, I can’t.” Her lips quivered helplessly. “I can’t… no more… that body… that was Arnie’s father. I can’t, no more, please—”

  “You have to,” I said.

  She looked at me, glanced affrightedly back at the obscenely quivering remains of that old whore LeBay and Arnie had shared, and then came around Petunia’s front end. A piece of chrome tumbled and scratched her leg deeply. She screamed and ran. She clambered up into the cab and pushed over beside me. “Wh-what do I do?”

  I hung halfway out of the cab, holding onto the roof, and pushed the clutch down with my right foot. Petunia’s engine was still running. “Just gun the gas and keep it gunned,” I said. “No matter what.”

  Steering with my right hand, holding on with my left, I let the clutch out and we rolled forward and smashed into the wreckage, smashing it, scattering it. And in my head I seemed to hear another scream of fury.

  Leigh clapped her hands to her head. “I can’t, Dennis! I can’t do it! It—it’s screaming!”

  “You’ve got to do it,” I said. Her foot had come off the gas and now I could hear the sirens in the night, rising and falling. I grabbed her shoulder and a sickening blast of pain ripped up my leg. “Leigh, nothing has changed. You’ve got to.”

  “It screamed at me!”

  “We’re running out of time and it still isn’t done. Just a little more.”

  “I’ll try,” she whispered, and stepped on the gas again.

  I changed into reverse. Petunia rolled back twenty feet. I clutched again, got first… and Leigh suddenly cried out. “Dennis, no! Don’t! Look!”

  The mother and the little girl, Veronica and Rita, were standing in front of the smashed and dented hulk of Christine, hand in hand, their faces solemn and sorrowing.

  “They’re not there,” I said. “And if they are, it’s time they went back”—more pain in my leg and the world went grey—“back to where they belong. Keep your foot on it.”

  I let out the clutch and Petunia rolled forward again, gaining speed. The two figures did not disappear as TV and movie ghosts do; they seemed to stream out in every direction, bright colours fading to wash pinks and blues… and then they were totally gone.

  We slammed into Christine again, spinning what was left of her around. Metal shrieked and tore.

  “Not there,” Leigh whispered. “Not really there. Okay. Okay, Dennis.”

  Her voice was coming from far down a dark hallway. I fetched up reverse and back we went. Then forward. We hit it; we hit it again. How many times? I don’t know. We just kept slamming into it, and every time we did, another jolt of pain would go up from my leg and things would get a little bit darker.

  At last I looked up blearily, and saw that the air outside the door seemed full of blood. But it wasn’t blood; it was a pulsing red light reflecting off the falling snow. People were rattling at the door out there.

  “Is it good enough?” Leigh asked me.

  I looked at Christine—only it wasn’t Christine anymore. It was a spread-out pile of twisted, gored metal, puffs of upholstery, and glittering broken glass.

  “Have to be,” I said. “Let them in, Leigh.”

  And while she went, I fainted again.

  Then there were a series of confused images; things that came into focus for a while and then faded or disappeared completely. I can remember a stretcher being rolled out of the back of an ambulance; I can remember its sides being folded up, and how the overhead fluorescents put cold highlights on its chrome; I can remember someone saying, “Cut it, you have to cut it off so we can at least look at it”; I can remember someone else—Leigh, I think—saying “Don’t hurt him, please, don’t hurt him if you can help it”; I can remember the roof of an ambulance… it had to be an ambulance because at the periphery of my vision were two suspended IV bottles; I can remember a cool swab of antiseptic and then the sting of a needle.

  After that, things became exceedingly weird. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that I was not dreaming—the pain proved that, if it proved nothing else—but all of it seemed like a dream. I was pretty well doped, and that was part of it… but shock was part of it too. No fake, Jake. My mother was there, crying, in a room that looked sickeningly like the hospital room in which I had spent the entire autumn. Then my father was there, and Leigh’s dad was with him, and their faces were both so tight and grim they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee as Franz Kafka might have written them. My father bent over me and said in a voice like thunder reverberating through cotton batting: “How did Michael get there, Dennis?” That’s what they really wanted to know: how Michael got there. Oh, I thought, oh my friends, I could tell you stories…

 
Then Mr Cabot was saying, “What did you get my daughter into, boy?” I seem to remember replying, “It’s not what I got her into, it’s what she got you out of,” which I still think was pretty witty under the circumstances, doped up the way I was and all.

  Elaine was there briefly, and she seemed to be holding a Yodel or a Twinkie or something mockingly out of my reach. Leigh was there, holding her filmy nylon scarf out and asking me to raise my arm so she could tie it on. But I couldn’t; my arm was like a lead bar.

  Then Arnie was there, and of course that had to be a dream.

  Thanks, man, he said, and I noticed with something like terror that the left lens of his glasses was shattered. His face was okay, but that broken lens… it scared me. Thanks. You did okay. I feel better now. I think things are going to be okay now.

  No sweat, Arnie, I said—or tried to say—but he was gone.

  It was the next day not the 20th, but Sunday, January 21st—that I started to come back a little. My left leg was in a cast up in its old familiar position again amid all the pulleys and weights. There was a man I had never seen before sitting to the left of my bed, reading a paperback John D. MacDonald story. He saw me looking at him and lowered his book.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, Dennis,” he said mildly, and deliberately marked his place in the book with a matchbook cover. He put the book in his lap and folded his hands over it.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked. He sure wasn’t Dr Arroway, who had taken care of me last time; this guy was twenty years younger and at least fifty pounds leaner. He looked tough.

  “State Police Inspector,” he said. “Richard Mercer is my name. Rick, if you like.” He held out his hand, and stretching awkwardly and carefully I touched it. I couldn’t really shake it. My head ached and I was thirsty.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t really mind talking to you, and I’ll answer all of your questions, but I’d like to see a doctor.” I swallowed. He looked at me, concerned, and I blurted out, “I need to know if I’m ever going to walk again.”

  “If what that fellow Arroway says is the truth,” Mercer said, “You’ll be able to get around in four to six weeks. You didn’t break it again, Dennis. You severely strained it; that was what he said. It swelled up like a sausage. He also said you were lucky to get off so cheap.”

  “What about Arnie?” I asked. “Arnie Cunningham? Do you know—”

  His eyes flickered.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What is it about Arnie?”

  “Dennis,” he said, and then hesitated. “I don’t know if this is the time.”

  “Please. Is Arnie… is he dead?”

  Mercer sighed. “Yes, he’s dead. He and his mother had an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in the snow. If it was an accident.”

  I tried to talk and couldn’t. I motioned for the pitcher of water on the bedtable, thinking how dismal it was to be in a hospital room and know exactly where everything was. Mercer poured me a glass and put the straw with the elbow-bend in it. I drank, and it got a little bit better. My throat, that is. Nothing else seemed better at all.

  “What do you mean, if it was an accident?”

  Mercer said, “It was Friday evening, and the snow just wasn’t that heavy. The turnpike classification was two bare and wet, reduced visibility, use appropriate caution. We guess, from the force of impact, that they weren’t doing much more than forty-five. The car veered across the median and struck a semi. It was Mrs Cunningham’s Volvo wagon. It exploded.”

  I closed my eyes. “Regina?”

  “Also DOA. For whatever it’s worth, they probably didn’t—”

  “—suffer,” I finished. “Bullshit. They suffered plenty.” I felt tears and choked them back. Mercer said nothing. “All three of them,” I muttered. “Oh Jesus Christ, all three.”

  “The driver of the truck broke his arm. That was the worst of it for him. He said that there were three people in the car, Dennis.”

  “Three!”

  “Yes. And he said they appeared to be struggling.” Mercer looked at me frankly. “We’re going on the theory that they picked up a bad-news hitchhiker who escaped after the accident and before the troopers arrived.”

  But that was ridiculous, if you knew Regina Cunningham, I thought. She would no more pick up a hitchhiker than she would wear slacks to a faculty tea. The things you did and those you never did were firmly set in Regina Cunningham’s mind. As if in cement, you could say.

  It had been LeBay. He couldn’t be both places at once, that was the thing. And at the end, when he saw how things were going in Darnell’s Garage, he had abandoned Christine and had tried to go back to Arnie. What had happened then was anyone’s guess. But I thought then—and do now—that Arnie fought him… and earned at least a draw.

  “Dead,” I said, and now the tears did come. I was too weak and low to stop them. I hadn’t been able to keep him from getting killed, after all. Not the last time, not when it really mattered. Others, maybe, but not Arnie.

  “Tell me what happened,” Mercer said. He put his book on the bedtable and leaned forward. “Tell me everything you know, Dennis, from first to last.”

  “What has Leigh said?” I asked. “And how is she?”

  “She spent Friday night here under observation, Mercer told me. “She had a concussion and a scalp laceration that took a dozen stitches to close. No marks on her face. Lucky. She’s a very pretty girl.”

  “She’s more than that,” I said. “She’s beautiful.”

  “She won’t say anything,” Mercer said, and a reluctant grin—of admiration, I think—slanted his face to the left. “Not to me, not to her father. He is, shall we say, in a state of high pissoff about the whole thing. She says it’s your business what to tell and when to tell.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Because, she says, you’re the one who ended it.”

  I didn’t do such a great job,” I muttered. I was still trying to cope with the idea that Arnie could possibly be dead. It was impossible, wasn’t it? We had gone to Camp Winnesko in Vermont together when we were twelve, and I got homesick and told him I was going to call and tell my parents they had to come get me. Arnie said if I did, he’d tell everybody at school that the reason I came home early was that they caught me eating boogers in my bunk after lights out and expelled me. We climbed the tree in my back yard to the very top fork and carved our initials there. He used to sleep over at my house and we’d stay up late watching Shock Theatre, crouched together on the sofa under an old quilt. We ate all those clandestine Wonder Bread sandwiches. When he was fourteen Arnie came to me, scared and ashamed because he was having these sexy dreams and he thought they were making him wet the bed. But it was the ant farms my mind kept coming back to. How could he be dead when we had made those ant farms together? Dear Christ, it seemed like only a week or two ago, those ant farms. So how could he be dead? I opened my mouth to tell Mercer that Arnie couldn’t be dead those ant farms made the very idea absurd. Then I closed my mouth again. I couldn’t tell him that. He was just a guy.

  Arnie, I thought. Hey, man—it’s not true, is it? Jesus Christ, we still got too much to do. We never even double-dated at the drive-in yet.

  “What happened?” Mercer asked again. “Tell me, Dennis.”

  “You’d never believe it,” I said thickly.

  “You might be surprised what I’d believe,” he said. “And you might be surprised what we know. A fellow named Junkins was the chief investigator on this case. He was killed not so very far from here. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. A week before he died he told me that he thought something was going on in Libertyville that nobody would believe. Then he was killed. With me that makes it personal.”

  I shifted positions cautiously. “He didn’t tell you any more?”

  “He told me that he believed he had uncovered an old murder,” Mercer said, still not taking his eyes from mine. “But it didn’t much matter, he said, because the perpetrator was dead.”

  “LeBay,”
I muttered, and thought that if Junkins had known about that, it was no wonder Christine had killed him. Because if Junkins had known that, he had been much too close to the whole truth.

  Mercer said, “LeBay was the name he mentioned. He leaned closer. “And I’ll tell you something else, Dennis—Junkins was one hell of a driver. When he was younger, before he got married, he used to run stockers at Philly Plains, and he won his share of checkered flags. He went off the road doing better than a hundred and twenty in a Dodge cruiser with a hemi engine. Whoever was chasing him and we know someone was—had to be one hell of a driver.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He was.”

  “I came by myself. I’ve been here for two hours waiting for you to wake up. I was here until they kicked me out last night. I don’t have a stenographer with me, I don’t have a tape recorder, and I assure you that I’m not wearing a wire. When you make a statement—if you ever have to—that’ll be a different ballgame. But for now, it’s you and me. I have to know. Because I see Rudy Junkins’s wife and Rudy Junkins’s kids from time to time. You dig?”

  I thought it over. For a long time I thought it over nearly five minutes. He sat there and let me do it. At last I nodded. “Okay. But you’re still not going to believe it.”

  “We’ll see, — ” he said.

  I opened my mouth with no idea of what was going to come out. “He was a loser, you know,” I said. “Every high school has to have at least two, it’s like a national law. Everyone’s dumping ground. Only sometimes… sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine.”

  I looked at him, and if I had seen the slightest wrong flicker in those grey eyes that were so unsettlingly like Arnie’s… well, if I had seen that, I think I would have clammed up right there and told him to put it on his books in whatever way seemed the most plausible and to tell Rudy Junkins’s kids whatever the hell he pleased.

  But he only nodded, watching me closely.

  “I just wanted you to understand that,” I said, and then a lump rose in my throat and I couldn’t say what I maybe should have said next: Leigh Cabot came later.