Adrenaline flooded Bobby and turned on lights in his head he hadn’t even known about. He dodged around the stack of boxes, spilling the top two off. His foot struck an empty garbage can and knocked it against the wall. He almost stepped on a hissing furry something — the cat again. Bobby kicked it aside and ran out of the alley. As he turned toward The Corner Pocket he slipped on some sort of greasy goo and went down on one knee. He saw the mortuary clock in its cool blue ring: 9:45. The cab was idling at the curb in front of The Corner Pocket’s door. Ted Brautigan was standing beneath the banner reading COME IN IT’S
KOOL INSIDE, paying the driver. Bent down to the driver’s open window like that, Ted looked more like Boris Karloff than ever.
Across from the cab, parked in front of the mortuary, was a huge Oldsmobile as red as Alanna’s pants. It hadn’t been there earlier, Bobby was sure of that. Its shape wasn’t quite solid. Looking at it didn’t just make your eyes want to water; it made your mind want to water.
Ted! Bobby tried to yell, but no yell came out — all he could produce was a strawlike whisper. Why doesn’t he feel them? Bobby thought. How come he doesn’t know?
Maybe because the low men could block him out somehow. Or maybe the people inside The Corner Pocket were doing the blocking. Old Gee and all the rest. The low men had perhaps turned them into human sponges that could soak up the warning signals Ted usually felt.
More lights splashed the street. As Ted straightened and the Checker pulled away, the purple DeSoto sprang around the corner. The cab had to swerve to avoid it. Beneath the streetlights the DeSoto looked like a huge blood-clot decorated with chrome and glass. Its headlights were moving and shimmering like lights seen underwater . . . and then they blinked. They weren’t headlights at all. They were eyes.
Ted! Still nothing but that dry whisper came out, and Bobby couldn’t seem to get back on his feet. He was no longer sure he even wanted to get back on his feet. A terrible fear, as disorienting as the flu and as debilitating as a cataclysmic case of the squitters, was enveloping him. Passing the blood-clot DeSoto outside the William Penn Grille had been bad; to be caught in its oncoming eyelights was a thousand times worse. No — a million times.
He was aware that he had torn his pants and scraped blood out of his knee, he could hear Little Richard howling from someone’s upstairs window, and he could still see the blue circle around the mortuary clock like a flashbulb afterimage tattooed on the retina, but none of that seemed real. Nasty Gansett Avenue suddenly seemed no more than a badly painted backdrop.
Behind it was some unsuspected reality, and reality was dark.
The DeSoto’s grille was moving. Snarling. Those cars ain’t real cars , Juan had said. They something else.
They were something else, all right.
‘Ted . . . ‘ A little louder this time . . . and Ted heard. He turned toward Bobby, eyes widening, and then the DeSoto bounced up over the curb behind him, its blazing unsteady headlights pinning Ted and making his shadow grow as Bobby’s and the Sigsby girls’
shadows had grown when the pole-light came on in Spicer’s little parking lot.
Ted wheeled back toward the DeSoto, raising one hand to shield his eyes from the glare.
More light swept the street. This time it was a Cadillac coming up from the warehouse district, a snot-green Cadillac that looked at least a mile long, a Cadillac with fins like grins and sides that moved like the lobes of a lung. It thumped up over the curb just behind Bobby, stopping less than a foot from his back. Bobby heard a low panting sound. The Cadillac’s motor, he realized, was breathing.
Doors were opening in all three cars. Men were getting out — or things that looked like men at first glance. Bobby counted six, counted eight, stopped counting. Each of them wore a long mustard-colored coat — the kind that was called a duster — and on the right front lapel of each was the staring crimson eye Bobby remembered from his dream. He supposed the red eyes were badges. The creatures wearing them were . . . what? Cops? No. A posse, like in a movie? That was a little closer. Vigilantes? Closer still but still not right. They were —