‘Must be going crazy,’ Lonnie said, and laughed shakily.
Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.
‘What happened back there?’ Doris asked. ‘What was it, Lonnie?’
‘Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note.’
‘You didn’t lose it, you took it off. It was covered with — ‘
‘Don’t be a fool!’ he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. ‘I lost it, that’s all.’
‘Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?’
‘Nothing. Let’s not talk about it. Where are we?’
‘Lonnie — ‘
‘I can’t remember,’ he said more softly. ‘It’s all a blank. We were there . . . we heard a sound . .
. then I was running. That’s all I can remember.’ And then he added in a frighteningly childish voice: ‘Why would I throw my jacket away? I liked that one. It matched the pants.’ He threw back his head, gave voice to a frightening loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that whatever he had seen beyond the hedge had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the same wouldn’t have happened to her . . . if she had seen. It didn’t matter. They had to get out of here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were.
‘Let’s get a cab. I want to go home.’
‘But John — ‘ he began.
‘Never mind John!’ she cried. ‘It’s wrong, everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab and go home!’
‘Yes, all right. Okay.’ Lonnie passed a shaking hand across his forehead. ‘I’m with you. The only problem is, there aren’t any.’
There was, in fact, no traffic at all on Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly down the center of it ran a set of old tram tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. Farther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. They could hear cars, but the sound was faraway, diffuse.
‘Maybe the street’s closed for repairs,’ Lonnie muttered, and then had done a strange thing . . .
strange, at least, for him, who was ordinarily so easy and self-assured. He looked back over his shoulder as if afraid they had been followed.
‘We’ll walk,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can get a taxi if we get away from here.’ She was suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.
‘All right.’ Now he seemed perfectly willing to entrust the leadership of the whole matter to her.
They began walking along Norris Road toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic remained constant, not seeming to diminish, not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the constant push of the wind. The desertion was beginning to nibble at her nerves. She felt they were being watched, tried to dismiss the feeling, and found that she couldn’t. The sound of their footfalls
(SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR)
echoed back to them. The business at the hedge played on her mind more and more, and finally she had to ask again.
‘Lonnie, what was it?’
He answered simply: ‘I don’t remember. And I don’t want to.’
They passed a market that was closed — a pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to were piled against the window. They passed a launderette where white machines had been pulled from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls like square teeth from dying gums. They passed a soap-streaked show window with an old SHOP TO LEASE sign in the front. Something moved behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face of a cat. The same gray torn.
She consulted her interior workings and tickings and discovered that she was in a state of slowly building terror. She felt as if her intestines had begun to crawl sluggishly around and around within her belly. Her mouth had a sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.
They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can’t, her mind informed her matter-of-factly. I can’t go under there, anything might be under there, don’t ask me because I can’t.
Another part of her mind asked if she could bear for them to retrace their steps, past the empty shop with the travelling cat in it (how had it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or even wonder about it too deeply), past the weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn’t think she could.
They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A strangely painted six-car train — it was bone-white — lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom.
The wheels kicked up bright spinners of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and saw that in the last hour he had turned into someone she had never seen before, had never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow grayer, and while she told herself firmly — as firmly as she could — that it was just a trick of the light, it was the look of his hair that decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.
‘Come on,’ she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel her own trembling. ‘Soonest begun, soonest done.’ She walked forward and he followed docilely.
They were almost out — it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief —
when the hand grasped her upper arm.
She didn’t scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her mind wanted to leave her body behind and just . . . fly. Lonnie’s hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side — she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.
The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape’s hand.
It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It hung there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was she could make out . . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes
‘Give us a fag, love,’ a husky cockney voice said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something swee and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.
Those green eyes were cat’s eyes. And suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges off scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair.
She tore free, backed up, and felt something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound —
Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brain rattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where.. or for how long.
What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road (atleast she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. DAWGLISH & SONS, read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name ALHAZRED emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork.
Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes.
‘Lonnie!’ she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her mouth and fall like a stone at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End — if she was still indeed in Crouch End — and that thought brought fresh terror.