Evidently, the car had skidded off the road and into the tree. Then the driver had backed it onto the pavement again before the engine failed.
But where is the driver?
Another motorist might have come along from the west and taken any injured person to get medical treatment. But that seems too fortuitous and too timely. After all, the accident can’t have happened more than a minute or two ago.
The driver’s door is open, and when Vess leans inside, he sees that the keys are in the ignition. The windshield wipers sweep the glass. The taillights, the interior ceiling light, and the gauges in the instrument panel are all aglow.
He steps away from the car and looks at the tree toward which the tire tracks lead. The bark is scarred from the impact but only superficially.
Intrigued, he surveys the rest of the grove on that side of the highway.
Quite possibly, the driver climbed out of the wrecked car, dazed from a blow to the head, and wandered into the redwoods. Even now she might be traveling farther into the primeval grove, lost and confused—or maybe, having collapsed from injuries, she lies unconscious in a fern glade.
The closely grown trees form a maze of narrow corridors, more wood than open space. Even at high noon on a cloudless day, sunshine would penetrate to the forest floor only in a few thin bright blades, and stubborn darkness would impose itself in most of these deep reaches, as though each of the many hundreds of thousands of nights since the grove’s beginning had left its residue of shadows. Now, still on the witching side of dawn, that blackness is so pure that it seems almost like a thing alive, crouching and predatory and yet welcoming.
This special darkness stirs Mr. Vess and makes him yearn for experiences that he senses are available to him but that he cannot imagine, experiences that are mysterious and transforming, yet which he cannot even dimly envision. Far into the redwoods, down corridors of fissured bark, in some secret citadel of bestial passion, where shadows dwell that are older than human history, a mystical adventure awaits.
If the woman, in fact, is wandering in the woods, he could park the motor home and search for her. Perhaps the knife that he found at the service station is an omen, after all, and hers may be the blood that he is meant to draw with that blade.
He imagines what it would be like to take off his clothes and enter the grove naked with the knife, relying solely on his primitive instincts to stalk her and bring her down, the rain and mist cold on his skin, the air steaming once he has breathed it, unchilled by the rain but imparting his heat to the night, tearing ferociously at the woman’s clothes as he drags her to the forest floor. He is already erect with the dream of it, but he wonders if he would attack her first with knife or phallus—or perhaps with his teeth. That decision would be made in the moment of capture, and much would depend on how attractive she was; but he is convinced that whatever might happen between them would be unprecedented and mysterious—and inexpressibly intense.
Dawn is coming in an hour or so, however, and he would be wise to be on his way. He must put more distance between himself and the places where he took his entertainment during the night.
Being good at being Edgler Vess requires, among other qualities, the ability to repress his most ardent passions when indulgence in them is dangerous. If he instantly gratified every desire, he would be less a man than an animal—and either long dead or imprisoned. Being Edgler Vess means being free but not reckless, being quick but not impulsive. He must have a sense of proportion. And good timing. Hell, he needs the timing of a tap-dance master. And a nice smile. A truly nice smile combined with self-control can take a person a long way.
He smiles at the forest.
*
The motor home stood on the pavement, approximately twenty feet from the battered Honda, shrunken in appearance because the redwoods dwarfed it.