DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (58 page)

He had not gone very far toward the highway when he chanced to look down at the gauges displayed on the dashboard before him,
which he was not in the habit of consulting very often, and saw that the needle of the gas gauge was prostrate, pointing at
E; he had no idea how long it had been lying there. There was, he knew, only one gas station between here and the strip beyond
the Jambs, where there were several: a decrepit one-man operation just then coming into sight. Wolfram’s.

Gray and unpainted, Wolfram’s seemed as much junkyard as gas
station; old cars and parts of cars, fenders, tires and radiators rusting, but a couple of refrigerators too and a weather-flayed
Naugahyde couch. The brand of gas advertised on the big round sign was one not sold elsewhere, and Wolfram was rarely there;
he trusted his customers to help themselves, and drop their money through a slot in his door.

Pierce had never pumped his own gas before. He had often seen it done though; had stopped here once with Spofford and once
with Rosie and watched them. He could do it; he had to.

He drew the Steed up to one of the two pumps, aligning as best he could its rear end with the handle; got out filled with
apprehension and dusted his hands together, ashamed at how little he knew, who was it that should have taught him and had
not, or was it (of course it was) that he had himself assiduously avoided learning these things, as he had all sports and
manly arts whatever, and now see; and thinking these thoughts, which he had thought before, he unscrewed the silver cap of
his tank (newer cars had theirs hidden behind small doors). Warning himself not to forget to screw that cap back on again,
he pulled the hose from the pump. He remembered that what you did next was flick the handle on the pump’s side upright, which
yes started the pump and reset the numbers on the front. He pumped; he finished, shut it off, gratified, remembered too to
put the cap back on; went and put his money in the slot. Peeked through the dirty glass to see if perhaps Wolfram were after
all in that den, observing; but could see nothing alive within.

Anyway he’d done it. The Steed however started sluggishly, as though its throat were clogged with phlegm. Pierce turned out
onto the road; a terrible odor arose around him, black, burned, wrong. Something was wrong. Pierce had only power enough,
foot to the floor, to get off the road, sat stalled then and gripping the wheel in bafflement. He raised his eyes to the mirror
and looked back at Wolfram’s. He could see the two pumps, that they were mismatched, and realized that he had noticed this
even as he had pulled up; and now saw that there was a sign hanging over one, the one colored red. When he got out of his
car and walked back a ways toward the station, he could read it. It said DIESEL.

He had filled his car with diesel fuel. He stared at the little scene down at the turn of the road, the shabby shop and the
two pumps, seeming to be shrugging and looking askance, not their fault. He thought it likely that no one had ever before
done what he had just done, no one; he may have destroyed his car; he thought of abandoning it there forever. Walk home, never
leave. He had not understood that there had been a choice to make, and he had made the wrong one. He thought
This could not have happened
.

And it had not; no it hadn’t happened. At the last second, as he stood at the pump holding the dripping nozzle (arm, nose
and penis in one), before penetration occurred Pierce had noticed that the pump he had chosen was red and the other one blue,
and had stopped, wondering why. Looked up to see that sign. And now, his tank replete with gasoline, he and his Steed went
down the valley of the Blackbury, past the Jambs and out onto the highway; Pierce watched the speedometer rise past fifty,
toward sixty, and after a time of straining ease off and coast, inertia carrying him forward.

Time passed, Pierce sometimes inhabiting the car and looking out the windows at places he had not seen before, at other times
inhabiting other places and days, unaware that his hands turned the wheel the slight degree the road required and his foot
pressed down lightly on the pedal. Now the land on either side of the road was deepest country, brown fields rising to pine
forests and blue distance. Traffic was thickening, cars and trucks pouring past him on both sides as though he were immobile,
a humpbacked rock in midstream. He was, however, his speedometer told him, going nearly at the speed limit. For some time
he had been glancing frequently at it and at the other gauges and controls before him, as though ready to do whatever he learned
from them was necessary, but in fact mostly just passing his eyes over them in anxious repetition. On one such pass he noticed
a control he had not seen before, or had not pondered, a thick lever far down on the left-hand side. What’s that do, he wondered,
and the next time he came to it on his tour, and before he could caution himself to wait a second, he had pulled it. Several
things then happened at the same time. One was that Pierce regretted he had pulled the lever, was able in that moment not
only to reconsider but to prophesy that the consequences weren’t going to be good. Another was that there was a sudden gasp
of wind, and a horrendous noise, as something large and dark rushed upon him from nowhere and slammed against his windshield,
blinding him and instantly crazing the glass from edge to edge.

And Pierce, not knowing what had happened and looking into blank darkness, pressed hard on the brake—fortunately there was
no one close behind him—then twisted the wheel and turned the car off the road onto the shoulder, slowing to a stop as he
came to understand what he had done, which was to release the hood, which then had caught the wind of his forward motion,
been lifted like an unbraced sail, and banged into his windshield.

For a long time he sat immobile, his heart firing steadily like a gun and his hands still on the wheel. The windshield had
actually held, but there was a fine litter of glass crumbs in his lap and across the seat. He
thought of Rose in the night, when she had flipped the Terrier; how stupid she had felt, and how afraid of herself.

He got out. The force of the wind, fifty-five miles an hour, had flung the hood back so hard that the hinges had ruptured;
it lay now at a terrible arm-busted back-broken angle against the windshield. Pierce took hold of it and tried to force it
down again but it wouldn’t move through more than half the arc.

Now what.

You’d better be careful
she had said to him on the phone, telling him how her windshield had been smashed as she drove this road, it must have been
this one, right along here maybe. Smash Corridor. The Devil’s Hammer.

He turned to the vast road (much vaster when you stood beside it than it seemed as you drove along it) and wondered how to
get help. Trucks approached, hurtled past—the air of their passage thudding against him and his car—and receded with a cry
that sank fast from whine to growl, Doppler effect. Someone would soon stop, he supposed, a truck or car or farmer’s pickup,
and ask what had happened. Or a cop, alerted by some trucker’s CB radio; they all had them, he heard.

And he would explain himself to their puzzled faces, kindly or remote, amused or censorious; maybe one of them, some big-bellied
male, would know what to do, would have tools. Or he would be given a ride, or a wrecker might be called. He could not imagine,
could not, what would happen next; it was probably evident to every person in every car that passed, and saw him there, but
not to him.

The white sky was opening to the south and the west, and a late sun shone as though through prison bars. No he would not wait,
would not try to hail help, it was just too embarrassing.
I have stood sufficient
: what Little Enosh used to say. He looked upward, turning, turning the world.

Beyond the road’s shoulder where he stood the ground rose; tall trees walked along the ridge, their slender trunks leading
his eyes upward to solemn crowns, brown but not unleaved. As soon as he began climbing to them he ceased to hear the cars
on the freeway. When he reached the ridge he found that a tall chainlink fence arose amid the briars and tangled bracken,
marking the limit of the state’s property, maybe; dogs or children had tunnelled beneath it but big Pierce could not. He went
along it, unwilling to quit, and for some reason it ended, and let him pass around it and through the screen of trees.

Pastures shorn and bronzed, gentle swells going on upward and down, seamed with streams where willows grew. Sheep country,
he thought, and even as he thought it saw sheep in numbers arise over the breast of a far brown hill and clothe it, then hurry
away, goaded by busy
dogs. Pierce stood for a while, tasting the breeze, and then started downward. Soon he found himself amid more sheep, shepherded
by a boy and an old man. They greeted Pierce, the boy’s smile guileless, maybe even foolish, and the old one’s broad; he held
the stump of a pipe in his teeth, his cheeks were russet and his hair white and woolly like his sheep’s.

Pierce walked and talked with them. Other shepherds could be seen on the hills, marshalling their sheep like untidy armies.
Why were they all gathering here? It was time for the move down from the mountains, he was told, to the warmer valleys to
the west and south, where they would spend the winter.
Transhumance
, Pierce thought: a big change, mountains to valleys, summer to winter; but the same change, one that herders have been making
yearly for centuries, millennia even. He noted the ocher identifying marks on the sheep’s wool and how it differed from flock
to flock, some marked on the hindquarters, some on the shoulders, and he remembered the name of the stuff they were marked
with: it was redding.

And so because night was coming on Pierce stayed with them in their encampment in the yellow willows by the stream. All through
the night more shepherds and sheep came in. Pierce wondered if Spofford might be among them. He lay long awake listening to
the dogs and to the voices of the excited sheep, needful and silly; but toward dawn they slept. Pierce slept. Before day came
they began to move, all as one, and Pierce went with them.

Going down the long passes through the forested hills they kept together, and were careful not to let their lambs stray; they
never saw any of the packs that went the same way they did, but they were there. They could be heard sometimes at night, not
a howling but a faint yipping, like puppies: the dogs heard, and pricked up their ears. Pierce took his turn walking the perimeter
of the flock, sleepy but not weary; no not weary, glad. Glad that he had happened to be wearing good strong boots when he
left home; glad, too, to be no longer among those condemned to pursue. What he had once so much wanted or sought, whatever
it had been, he would learn to do without. He could remember, now, why he had come out from the City to these solitudes in
the first place, and why he had left behind all that he had left behind. He walked on behind the flocks toward the valleys
and the west.

Or no he did not, of course he didn’t: didn’t climb up from the highway and pass through those trees, though he did wonder,
looking up at their tops, at the clearing sky beyond them, what lay that way, and did think that if he were offered some way
to pass on and away from this he might take it. But no, he just got back behind the wheel and started
the Steed (no he had not shattered the windshield, at the last moment a fleeting caution had caught up with him and he had
not pulled that lever; he had pulled off the road for a moment, though, already exhausted and feeling a worrisome flutter
in his bowels, what if he were seized with some dreadful urgency while caught in the midst of a jockeying flotilla or making
a tough hill; okay after all, though, it seemed). He rolled along the shoulder for a moment waiting for the traffic to thin,
and then tramped down the accelerator, teeth bared and hands tight on the wheel. Be definite and fearless, she had told him,
when entering a stream of traffic.

Hardest of all, to do and to tell of, was the going down into the city of Conurbana when at last it was brought before him
by the unfolding road; to go off where the signs said “Downtown” and circle down halfconstructed ramps, through temporary
concrete chutes barely one car wide, where yellow and even orange signs warned him away, some set around with little flaming
lamps. But he did all that too, gripping his wheel so tightly that he felt his fingertips growing numb; searching the streets
for familiar sights, that vast plaza and its monolith maybe. Surely he would remember her corner, where he had stood bewildered
and afraid, but once he was out of the downtown city center every corner looked like that one. Until—this never happens—he
came to a stop at a red light, and the street was Mechanic, wide and poor, and he remembered it, and turned wholly by chance
the right way on it and it soon intersected hers, he caught the street sign out of the corner of his eye and turned the right
way down that one too, even odds really but not for Pierce, and after a fearful string of blocks saw her red car, actually
saw it parked on the street before a nondescript building, hers. So it really had all happened, here in this city. He parked
behind it; when he got out he saw that one of its tires was flat.

Not only that. Its windshield was intact, but the roll-down window on the passenger’s side was gone, replaced by a panel of
ragged and milky plastic.
The window shattered
, she’d said,
but only on your side
.

Well hell.
That
window was the one he had compulsively tried to close, jamming its little handle over and over. And all her other passengers
too no doubt. And from the tension it just finally.

Not the Devil anyway. Or rather only the devil that is in things, in built things especially, the physics devil who does only
what he must, nothing personal. Pierce might have laughed (he had long been troubled himself by that one, after all) but didn’t.