Out of Their Minds (21 page)

The greenish light was brighter now—a deathly, sickly green—but as yet I could not make out the actual shape of the thing that followed me. The charnel-house odor was thicker and it clotted in my throat and filled my nostrils and I tried to gag, but couldn't, and of all of it, the smell was worst.

Then, quite suddenly, I saw the shape that came at me through the trees—not clearly, for the blackness of the tree trunks broke up the shape and fragmented it. But I saw enough to last me all my days. Take a swollen, monstrous toad, throw in a bit of spitting lizard, add something from a snake and you'll get a small idea, a very faint idea. It was much worse than that; it was beyond description.

Choking and gagging, water-legged with fear, I turned to run and as I turned the ground lurched under me and threw me forward on my face. I landed on some hard surface and my face and hands were skinned and there was a tooth that felt as if it had been loosened by the impact.

But the smell was gone and there was more light than there had been before and it was not a greenish light and when I scrambled up I saw there was no forest.

The surface I had fallen on, I saw, was concrete, and a sudden fear went knifing through my mind. An airport runway? A superhighway?

I stood staring groggily down the long lane of concrete.

I was standing squarely in the center of a highway. But there was no danger. No cars were roaring down upon me. There were cars, of course, but they weren't moving. They were just sitting there.

17

For quite some time I didn't realize what had happened. First I had been frightened at the idea of standing out in the middle of a high-speed highway. I recognized what it was immediately—the broad lanes of concrete, the grassy median separating them, the heavy steel fence snaking along the right of way, closing off the lanes. Then I saw the stranded cars and that was something of a jolt. An occasional car, parked on the shoulder, off the concrete, and with its hood up, was not too unusual. But to see a dozen or more of them in this condition was something else again. There were no people, nor any signs of people. There simply were the cars, some of them with their hoods up, but not all of them. As if, suddenly, all these cars had ceased to function and had rolled to a stop upon the highway. And it was not only the cars in my immediate vicinity, but all up and down the lanes, as far as I could see, were other standing cars, some of them no more than black dots in the distance.

It was not until then, not until I had taken in and mentally digested the fact of the stranded cars, that the more obvious fact hit me—the realization that should have come immediately.

I was back on the human earth again! I was no longer in that strange world of Don Quixote and the Devil!

If I'd not been so flustered by the cars, I suppose I would have been most happy. But the cars bothered me so much that they took the edge off any other kind of feeling that I had.

I walked over to the nearest car and had a look at it. An AAA travel map and a handful of other travel literature lay on the front seat and a vacuum bottle and a sweater were tucked into one corner of the rear seat. A pipe sat in the ash tray and the keys were gone from the ignition lock.

I looked at some of the other cars. A few of them had some baggage left in them, as if the people might have left to seek out help and intended coming back.

By now the sun had risen well above the horizon and the morning was growing warm.

Far down the road an overpass, a thin line blurred by the distance, arched over the highway. Down there, more than likely, was an interchange that would get me off the highway. I started walking toward it and I walked in morning silence. A few birds flew among the groups of trees beyond the fence, but they were silent birds.

So I was home again, I thought, and so was Kathy, if one could believe the Devil. And where would she be? I wondered. More than likely in Gettysburg, safely home again. As soon as I reached a phone, I promised myself, I'd put in a call and check on her whereabouts.

I passed a number of stranded cars, but I didn't bother with them. The important thing was to get off the highway and find someone who could tell me what was going on. I came upon a signpost that said 70S and when I saw it, I knew where I was, somewhere in Maryland between Frederick and Washington. The horse, I realized, had covered a fair piece of ground during the night—that is, if the geography of that other world was the same as this one.

The sign pointing to the exit gave the name of a town of which I'd never heard. I trudged up the exit lane and where it joined a narrow road stood a service station, but the doors were locked and the place seemed to be deserted. A short distance down the road I came to the outskirts of a small town. Cars stood at the curbs, but there was no moving traffic. I turned in at the first place I came to, a small café built of concrete blocks painted a sickly yellow.

No customers were seated at the lunch counter running down the center of the building, but from somewhere in the back came a clatter of pans. A fire burned beneath an urn back of the counter and the place was filled with the smell of coffee.

I sat down on a stool and almost immediately a rather dowdy woman came out of the back.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “You're an early riser.”

She picked up a cup and filled it at the urn, set it down in front of me.

“What else will you have?” she asked.

“Some bacon and eggs,” I said, “and if you'll give me some change, I'll use the telephone while you are cooking them.”

“I'll give you the change,” she said, “but it won't do you any good. The telephone's not working.”

“You mean it's out of order. Maybe some other place, nearby …”

“No, that ain't what I mean,” she said. “No telephones are working. They haven't worked for two days now, since the cars stopped running.”

“I saw the cars …”

“There ain't nothing working,” said the woman. “I don't know what will become of us. No radio, no television. No cars, no telephones. What will we do when we run short of food? I can get eggs and chickens from some of the farmers, but my boy, he has to go on his bicycle to pick them up and that's all right, because school is at an end. But what will I do when I run out of coffee and sugar and flour and a lot of other things? There aren't any trucks. They stopped, just like the cars.”

“You are sure?” I asked. “About all the cars, I mean. You're sure they've stopped running everywhere?”

“I ain't sure of nothing,” said the woman. “All that I know is I ain't seen a car go by in the last two days.”

“You're sure of that, though?”

“I'm sure of that,” she said. “Now I'll go and get your breakfast cooking.”

Was this, I wondered, this thing that had happened, what the Devil had meant when he had told me he had a plan? Sitting atop Cemetery Ridge, he had made it sound as if it were no more than a plan that he was formulating when, in fact, it already had been put into operation. Perhaps it had been initiated at that very moment when Kathy's car had left the turnpike and had entered into the shadow world of man's imagination. The other cars on the highway had rolled to a stop, but Kathy's car had been shunted to the cart track atop the mountain. When Kathy had tried to start it later, I recalled, it had refused to start.

But how could such a thing be done? How could all the cars be made to cease to operate, rolling to a stop, and then impossible to start?

Enchantment, I told myself; enchantment, more than likely. Although, just thinking of it, the idea seemed impossible.

Impossible, certainly, in the world in which I sat, waiting for the woman in the kitchen to cook my breakfast for me. But probably not impossible in the Devil's world, where enchantment would stand as a principle as solid and entrenched as were the laws of physics or of chemistry in this world of mine. For enchantment was a principle asserted time and time again in the olden fairy tales, in the ancient folklore, in a long line of fantasy writing that extended even into the present day. At one time people had believed in it, and for many, many years, and even in the present there were many of us who paid polite and not quite whimsical regard to this old belief, still reluctant to put aside the old beliefs and in many cases still half believing in them. How many people would go out of their way to avoid walking underneath a ladder? How many still felt a chill of apprehension when a black cat crossed their path? How many still carried a secret rabbit's foot, or if not a rabbit's foot, a certain lucky piece, a coin, perhaps, or some silly little emblem? How many people, in idle moments, still hunted four-leaf clovers? None of it was serious intent, perhaps, or only mock-seriously to cover up an unmodern attitude, but in their very acts betraying still the basic fear that lingered from the cave, the eternal human yen for protection against bad luck or black magic or the evil eye or whatever other name one might put to it.

The Devil had complained that mankind's simple, thoughtless adages gave a lot of trouble to his world, which must accept them as laws and principles, and if such things as three times is a charm became actually operative in the Devil's world, then the simple matter of enchantment as a moving force became a certainty.

But while it was operative there, how could it be extended to this world of ours, where the principles of physics surely would hold an edge over the forces of enchantment? Although, come to think of it, this whole business of enchantment had its origins with man. Man had thought it up and passed it on to that other world and should the other world turn around and employ it against him, it would be no more than he deserved.

The whole thing didn't make any sort of sense when viewed within the logical context of the human world, but cars standing on the highways, the inoperative telephones, the silent radios and television sets did make a powerful kind of sense. Much as man might disbelieve in the efficiency of enchantment, there was here, all about me, evidence that it really worked.

And here was a situation, I told myself, that badly needed sense. If no cars would run, if no trains could operate, if all communications were cut off, then the country, in a few more days, would be heading for disaster. With transportation and communications gone, the economy of the nation would grind to a shuddering halt. Food would be in short supply in many urban centers, perhaps with an unreasoning rush of hoarding hastening that time. People would be hungry and the hungry hordes would stream out from the cities to seek food wherever they might find it.

Even now, I knew, twinges of panic must be in evidence. Facing the unknown, with the free flow of information halted, all manner of speculation and rumor would arise. In another day or two, spurred by those rumors, a full-fledged panic would be on.

The world of man, perhaps, had been struck a blow from which, if no answer could be found, it might not recover. The society, as it existed, was an intricate structure which rested, in large part, upon rapid transportation and instant communication. Pull those two foundation blocks out from under it and the whole frail house might come tumbling down. Within thirty days this proud structure would be gone and man would be hurled back into a state of barbarism, with roving bands seeking bases where they could sustain themselves.

I had one answer—an answer as to what had happened, but certainly no answer as to what to do about it. Thinking about it, I knew that even the answer I did have would be unacceptable. No one would believe it; no one, more than likely, would even give me the time to try to convince them it was true. The situation would give rise to a lot of crackpot explanations and mine would be only another one of them—another crackpot explanation.

The woman popped her head out of the kitchen. “I ain't seen you around,” she said. “You must be a stranger.”

I nodded.

“There are a lot of them in town,” she said. “Came up off the highway. Some of them a right smart ways from home and no way to get back and …”

“The railroads must still be running.”

She shook her head. “I don't think they are. Nearest one is twenty miles away and I heard someone say that they aren't running.”

“Just where is this place?” I asked.

She eyed me suspiciously. “Seems to me,” she said, “you don't know much of anything.”

I didn't answer her and she finally told me what I'd asked. “Washington,” she added, “is thirty miles down the road.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It's a good, long walk,” she said, “on a day like this. Going to be a scorcher before the day is over. You plan on walking all the way to Washington?”

“I'm considering it,” I said.

She went back to her cooking.

Washington, thirty miles: Gettysburg, what would it be—sixty miles or more? And I had no assurance, I reminded myself, that Kathy would be in Gettysburg.

I thought about it—Washington or Gettysburg?

There were men in Washington who should know, who had a right to know, what I could tell them, although it was most unlikely they would listen to me. There were men, some in fairly high positions, who were friends and others who were good acquaintances, but was there any one of them who would listen to the story that I had to tell? I checked a dozen of them mentally and there wasn't one of them who'd take me seriously. To begin with, they couldn't afford to; they couldn't subject themselves to the polite ridicule which would greet their lending any credence to what I had to say. In Washington, I was convinced, I could accomplish nothing more than butting my head against dozens of stone walls.

Knowing this, my very inclination shouted that I must get to Kathy's side as quickly as I could. If the world was going to go to pot, the two of us should be together when it smashed. She was the one person in the world who knew exactly what I knew; she was the only member of the human race who would understand the torment that I faced—the one person who would be sympathetic and willing to lend me help.