and Teddy were a long way ahead, almost out over the middle, and Vern was tottering
slowly along behind them, peering studiously down at his feet. He looked like an old
lady trying out stilts with his head poked downward, his back hunched, his arms held
out for balance. I looked back over my shoulder. Too far, man, I had to keep going
now, and not only because a train might come. If I went back, I’d be a pussy for life.
So I got walking again. After looking down at that endless series of crossties
for a while, with a glimpse of running water between each pair, I started to feel dizzy
and disoriented. Each time I brought my foot down, part of my brain assured me it was going to plunge through into space, even though I could see it was not.
I became acutely aware of all the noises inside me and outside me, like some
crazy orchestra tuning up to play. The steady thump of my heart, the bloodbeat in my
ears like a drum being played with brushes, the creak of sinews like the strings of a
violin that has been tuned radically upward, the steady hiss of the river, the hot hum of a locust digging into tight bark, the monotonous cry of a chickadee, and somewhere, far away, a barking dog. Chopper, maybe. The mildewy smell of the Castle River was
strong in my nose. The long muscles in my thighs were trembling. I kept thinking
how much safer it would be (probably faster, as well) if I just got down on my hands
and knees and scuttered along that way. But I wouldn’t do that–none of us would. If
the Saturday matinee movies down to the Gem had taught us anything, it was that
Only Losers Crawl. It was one of the central tenets of the Gospel According to
Hollywood. Good guys walk firmly upright, and if your sinews are creaking like
overtuned violin strings because of the adrenalin rush going on in your body, and if
the long muscles in your thighs are trembling for the same reason, why, so be it.
I had to stop in the middle of the trestle and look up at the sky for a while.
That dizzy feeling had been getting worse. I saw phantom crossties–they seemed to
float right in front of my nose. Then they faded out and I began to feel okay again. I looked ahead and saw I had almost caught up with Vern, who was slowpoking along
worse than ever. Chris and Teddy were almost all the way across.
And although I’ve since written seven books about people who can do such
exotic things as read minds and precognit the future, that was when I had my first and last psychic flash. I’m sure that’s what it was; how else to explain it? I squatted and made a fist around the rail on my left. It thrummed in my hand. It was thrumming so
hard that it was like gripping a bundle of deadly metallic snakes.
You’ve heard it said ‘His bowels turned to water’? I know what that phrase
means -exactly what it means. It may be the most accurate cliche ever coined. I’ve
been scared since, badly scared, but I’ve never been as scared as I was in that moment, holding that hot live rail. It seemed that for a moment all my works below throat level just went limp and lay there in an internal faint. A thin stream of urine ran listlessly down the inside of one thigh. My mouth opened. I didn’t open it, it opened by itself,
the jaw dropping like a trapdoor from which the hingepins had suddenly been moved.
My tongue was plastered suffocatingly against the roof of my mouth. All my muscles
were locked. That was the worst. My works were limp but my muscles were in a kind
of dreadful lockbolt and I couldn’t move at all. It was only for a moment, but in the
subjective timestream, it seemed forever.
All sensory input became intensified, as if some power surge had occurred in
the electrical flow of my brain, cranking everything up from a hundred and ten volts