Thin rust trickled from her ear—liquid.
Caldwell twenty-six miles . . .
Caldwell nineteen miles . . .
He was ten miles from Caldwell when the helicopter fluttered over the tree tops that sheltered much of the road. The car was bathed in sickly yellow light. He swerved left, right, darting out of the beam. But they broadened the shaft and covered both lanes with it. Bullets cut up the pavement in front of him. One pinged off the hood. A few vibra-beams sent little sections of the pavement boiling. Then, abruptly, there was darkness and no helicopter.
Slowing, he rolled down the window, listened. No whupa-whupa of fiercely beating blades. It was gone. It vanished; it did not simply drift away. Perhaps it had crashed. Yet there was no explosion, no crashing sound. He rolled the window up and drove on. They had spotted him near Caldwell, and he must bypass that town now. Forty miles away lay Steepleton.
He looked over the seat, felt his stomach flop at the sight of her, comatose and pale-dark. He pressed down on the accelerator.
Steepleton thirty-two miles . . .
Steepleton twenty-four miles . . .
At the boundaries of Steepleton there was a roadblock. Seven men, seven androids. And they knew damn well whose car was coming; they had their weapons raised . . .
Death is not something that creeps about in black robes, slavering. Death cannot be seen . . .
It can’t!
And yet his world was a graveyard. The moon rode high above clouds like pieces of torn shrouds flapping madly to the tune of the winds in the dead trees. He struggled up the hill in the cold air, the wind-born explosions of snow forcing him to squint.
“Good evening,” said the mortician.
He said good evening . . .
“Dust to dust,” the embalmer said from his perch atop a monument steeple.
“Ashes to ashes,” said the sexton.
He ignored all of them. He pushed onward, toward the summit of the hill where the sepulcher bit at the sky, a broken tooth. Somewhere a muffled drum. Somewhere a passing bell . . .
He pushed his shoulder against the stone door, felt the rusted hinges move a bit, heard them squeak, heard the rats run inside. Stepping in, the moonlight flooding in behind him, he advanced to the sarcophagus. They had buried her in a limestone coffin, for that facilitated the rotting of the corpse. Somehow, that filled him with rage. He thrust the immensely heavy lid free, looked down at her pale face. Gently—oh! so gently—he lifted her out, placed her upon the marble slab where no coffin yet lay.
Somewhere a tolling—in rereverse; somewhere a dirge is sung backwards.
And he would sing the oration; he would make with panegyrics . . .
“For the Moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulcher there by the sea—
In her tomb by . . .”
He was three miles past Steepleton. And there were no guards . . .
He pulled the car off the road and sat thinking for a time. Was his mind leaving him? There had been guards and a roadblock back there, had there not? Which was real, the police or the graveyard world? The police, certainly. He was no E.A. Poe who slept with his dead mistress. Besides, his mistress was not dead. He turned to look at her. Her face had become wrinkled as if she were in pain. He called her name. For a brief second, he thought she answered. But her lips had not moved. He turned back and faced front. It was ten miles to Kingsmir. What would happen there? Would the graveyard delusion come back? Would there be further oddities? He suddenly remembered the disappearance of the helicopter and shuddered. Pulling back onto the road . . .
. . . He woke and kissed her on the neck.
Her black-black hair spilled down her bare shoulders, over her bare breasts, curled under her pink ears . . .