I drove back down Kansas Road at five miles an hour, feeling my way. Even with the Scout’s headlights and running lights on, it was impossible to see more than seven or ten feet ahead.
The earth had been through some terrible contortion; Miller had been right about that, in places the road was merely cracked, but in others the ground itself seemed to have caved in, tilting up great slabs of paving. I was able to get over with the help of the fourwheel drive. Thank God for that. But I was terribly afraid that we would soon come to an obstacle that even the four-wheel drive couldn’t get us over.
It took me forty minutes to make a drive that usually only took seven or eight. At last the sign that marked our private road loomed out of the mist. Billy, roused at a quarter of five, had fallen solidly asleep inside this car that he knew so well it must have seemed like home to him.
Amanda looked at the road nervously. “Are you really going down there?”
“I’m going to try,” I said.
But it was impossible. The storm that had whipped through had loosened a lot of trees, and that weird, twisting drop had finished the job of tumbling them. I was able to crunch over the first two; they were fairly small. Then I came to a hoary old pine lying across the road like an outlaw’s barricade. It was still almost a quarter of a mile to the house. Billy slept on beside me, and I put the Scout in Park, put my hands over my eyes, and tried to think what to do next.
Now, as I sit in the Howard Johnson’s near Exit 3 of the Maine Turnpike, writing all of this down on HoJo stationery, I suspect that Reppler, that tough and capable old broad, could have laid out the essential futility of the situation in a few quick strokes.
But she had the kindness to let me think it through for myself.
I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t leave them. I couldn’t even kid myself that all the horror-movie monsters were back at the Federal; when I cracked the window I could hear them in the woods, crashing and blundering around on the steep fall of land they call the Ledges around these parts. The moisture drip-drip-dripped from the overhanging leaves.
Overhead the mist darkened momentarily as some nightmarish and half-seen living kite overflew us.
I tried to tell myself-then and now-that if she was very quick, if she buttoned up the house with herself inside, that she had enough food for ten days to two weeks. It only works a little bit. What keeps getting in the way is my last memory of her, wearing her floppy sunhat and gardening gloves, on her way to our little vegetable patch with the mist rolling inexorably across the lake behind her.
It is Billy I have to think about now. Billy, I tell myself. Big Bill, Big Bill… I should write it maybe a hundred times on this sheet of paper, like a child condemned to write I will not throw spitballs in school as the sunny three-o’clock stillness spills through the windows and the teacher corrects homework papers at her desk and the only sound is her pen, while somewhere, far away, kids pick up teams for scratch baseball.
Anyway, at last I did the only thing I could do. I reversed the Scout carefully back to Kansas Road. Then I cried.
Amanda touched my shoulder timidly. “David, I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to stop the tears and not having much luck. “Yeah, so am I.” I drove to Route 302 and turned left, toward Portland. This road was also cracked and blasted in places, but was, on the whole, more passable than Kansas Road had been. I was worried about the bridges. The face of Maine is cut with running water, and there are bridges everywhere, big and small. But the Naples Causeway was intact, and from there it was plain-if slow-sailing all the way to Portland.
The mist held thick. Once I had to stop, thinking that trees were lying across the road. Then the trees began to move and undulate and I understood they were more tentacles. I stopped, and after a while they drew back. Once a great green thing with an iridescent green body and long transparent wings landed on the hood. It looked like a grossly misshapen dragonfly. It hovered there for a moment, then took wing again and was gone.
Billy woke up about two hours after we had left Kansas Road behind and asked if we had gotten Mommy yet. I told him I hadn’t been able to get down our road because of fallen trees.
“Is she all right, Dad?”
“Billy, I don’t know. But we’ll come back and see.” He didn’t cry. He dozed off again instead. I would have rather had his tears. He was sleeping too damn Much and I didn’t like it.
I began to get a tension headache. It was driving through the fog at a steady five or ten miles an hour that did it, the tension of knowing that anything might come out of it, anything at all—a washout, a landspill, or Ghidra the Three-headed Monster. I think I prayed. I prayed to God that Stephanie was alive and that He wouldn’t take my adultery out on her. I prayed to God to let me get Billy to safety because he had been through so much.
Most people had pulled to the side of the road when the mist came, and by noon we were in North Windham. I tried the River Road, but about four miles down, a bridge spanning a small and noisy stream had fallen into the water. I had to reverse for nearly a mile before I found a spot wide enough to turn around. We -,vent to Portland by Route 302 after all.
When we got there, I drove the cutoff to the turnpike. The neat line of tollbooths guarding the access had been turned into vacant-eyed skeletons of smashed Pola-Glas.
All of them were empty. In the sliding glass doorway of one was a torn jacket with Maine Turnpike Authority patches on the sleeves. It was drenched with tacky, drying blood.
We had not seen a single living person since leaving the Federal.
Reppler said, “David, try your radio.” I slapped my forehead in frustration and anger at myself, wondering how I could have been stupid enough to forget the Scout’s AM/FM for so long.
“Don’t do that,” Reppler said curtly. “You can’t think of everything. If you try, you will go mad and be of no use at all.” I got nothing but a shriek of static all the way across the AM band, and the FM yielded nothing but a smooth and ominous silence.
“Does that mean everything’s off the air?” Amanda asked. I knew what she was thinking, maybe. We were far enough south now so that we should have been picking up a selection of strong Boston stations—WRKO, WBZ, WMEX But if Boston had gone
“It doesn’t mean anything for sure,” I said. “That static on the AM band is pure interference. The mist is having a damping effect on radio signals, too.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?”
“Yes,” I said, not sure at all.
We went south. The mileposts rolled past, counting down from about forty. When we reached Mile 1, we would be at the New Hampshire border. Going on the turnpike was slower; a lot of the drivers hadn’t wanted to give up, and there had been rear-end collisions in several places. Several times I had to use the median strip.
At about twenty past one—I was beginning to feel hungry -Billy clutched my arm. “Daddy, what’s that? What’s that!” A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us. I jammed on the brakes. Amanda, who had been catnapping, was thrown for-ward.
Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are things of such darkness and horror-just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.
It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots on Carmody’s hands. Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.