At last my paralysis broke and I fled from the house, still screaming. I ran across the dooryard to my
Pontiac, flung myself in, and screamed out of there. The groceries meant for Uncle Otto tumbled off the back seat and onto the floor. The eggs broke.
It was something of a wonder that I didn’t kill myself in the first two miles — I looked down at the speedometer and saw I was doing better than seventy. I pulled over and took deep breaths until I had myself under some kind of control. I began to realize that I simply could not leave Uncle Otto as I had found him; it would raise too many questions. I would have to go back.
And, I must admit, a certain hellish curiosity had come over me. I wish now that it hadn’t, or that I had
withstood it; in fact, I wish now I had let them go ahead and ask their questions. But I did go back. I stood outside his door for some five minutes — I stood in about the same place and in much the same position where he had stood so often and so long, looking at that truck. I stood there and came to this conclusion: the truck across the road had shifted position, ever so slightly.
Then I went inside.
The first few flies were circling and buzzing around his face. I could see oily prints on his cheeks: thumb on
his left, three fingers on his right. I looked nervously at the window where I had seen the Cresswell looming… and then I walked over to his bed. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my fingerprints away. Then I reached forward
and opened Uncle Otto’s mouth.
What fell out was a Champion spark plug — one of the old Maxi-Duty kind, nearly as big as a circus
strongman’s fist.
I took it with me. Now I wish I hadn’t done that, but of course I was in shock. It would all have been more
merciful if I didn’t have the actual object here in my study where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I should want to — the 1920’s-vintage spark plug that fell out of Uncle Otto’s mouth.
If it wasn’t there, if I hadn’t taken it away from his little one-room house when I fled from it the second
time, I could perhaps begin the business of persuading myself that all of it — not just coming around the turn and seeing the Cresswell pressed against the side of the little house like a huge red hound, but all of it — was only an hallucination. But it is there; it catches the light. It is real. It has weight. The truck is getting closer every year, he said, and it seems now that he was right… but even Uncle Otto had no idea how close the Cresswell could get.
The town verdict was that Uncle Otto had killed himself by swallowing oil, and it was a nine days’ wonder
in Castle Rock. Carl Durkin, the town undertaker and not the most closemouthed of men, said that when the docs
opened him up to do the autopsy, they found more than three quarts of oil in him… and not just in his stomach,
either. It had suffused his whole system. What everyone in town wanted to know was: what had he done with the
plastic jug? For none was ever found.
As I said, most of you reading this memoir won’t believe it… at least, not unless something like it has
happened to you. But the truck is still out there in its field… and for whatever it is worth, it all happened.