out there in a world that, throughout her lifetime, had become
increasingly fraught with danger.
His attention deviates from the road ahead only for quick glances at the
strange shapes that loom out of the darkness and the rain on both sides
of the highway. Broken teeth of rock thrust from the sand and scree as
if a behemoth just beneath the earth is opening its mouth to swallow
whatever hapless animals happen to be on the surface.
Widely spaced clusters of stunted trees struggle to stay alive in a
stark land where storms are rare and drenching downpours rarer still,
gnarled branches bristle out of the mist, as jagged and chitinous as the
spiky limbs of insects, briefly illuminated by headlights, thrashing in
the wind for an instant but then gone.
Although the Honda has a radio, the killer does not switch it on because
he wants no distraction from the mysterious power which pulls him
westward and with which he seeks communion. Mile by dreary mile, the
magnetic attraction increases, and it is all that he cares about, he
could no more turn away from it than the earth could reverse its
rotation and bring tomorrow’s sunrise in the west.
He leaves the rain behind and eventually passes from under the ragged
clouds into a clear night with stars beyond counting. Along part of the
horizon, luminous peaks and ridges can be seen dimly, so distant they
might define the edge of the world, like alabaster ramparts protecting a
fairy-tale kingdom, the walls of Shangri-la in which the light of last
month’s moon still glimmers.
Into the vastness of the Southwest he goes, past necklaces of light that
are the desert towns of Tucumcari, Montoya, Cuervo, and then across the
Pecos River.
Between Amarillo and Albuquerque, when he stops for oil and gasoline, he
uses a service-station restroom reeking of insecticide, where two dead
cockroaches lie in a corner. The yellow light and dirty mirror reveal a
reflection recognizably his but somehow different. His blue eyes seem
darker and more fierce than he has ever seen them, and the lines of his
usually open and friendly face have hardened.
“I’m going to become someone,” he says to the mirror, and the man in the
mirror mouths the words in concert with him.
At eleven-thirty Sunday night, when he reaches Albuquerque, he fuels the
Honda at another truckstop and orders two cheeseburgers to go.
Then he is off on the next leg of his journey–three hundred and
twenty-five miles to Flagstaff, Arizona eating the sandwiches out of the
white paper bags in which they came and into which drips fragrant
grease, onions, and mustard.
This will be his second night without rest, yet he isn’t sleepy. He is
blessed with exceptional stamina. On other occasions he has gone
seventy-two hours without sleep, yet has remained clear-headed.
From movies he has watched on lonely nights in strange towns, he knows
that sleep is the one unconquerable enemy of soldiers desperate to win a
tough battle. Of policemen on stakeout. Of those who must valiantly
stand guard against vampires until dawn brings the sun and salvation.
His ability to call a truce with sleep whenever he wishes is so unusual
that he shies away from thinking about it. He senses there are things
about himself that he is better off not knowing, and this is one of
them.
Another lesson he has learned from movies is that every man has secrets,
even those he keeps from himself. Therefore, secrets merely make him
like all other men. Which is precisely the condition he most desires.
To be like other men.
In the dream, Marty stood in a cold and windswept place, in the grip of
terror. He was aware that he was on a plain as featureless and flat as
one of those vast valley floors out in the Mojave Desert on the drive to
Las Vegas, but he couldn’t actually see the landscape because the
darkness was as deep as death. He knew something was rushing toward him
through the gloom, something inconceivably strange and hostile, immense
and deadly yet utterly silent, knew in his bones that it was coming,
dear God, yet had no idea of the direction of its approach.