Dark Mountain (16 page)

They were on a quiet, tree-shadowed lane no more than six blocks from home, Rose fooling with the radio dial to bring in a rock station, when a German shepherd wandered out from behind a parked car. Alice gasped. She threw an arm across Rose’s chest, knocking the girl backward as her foot shot down on the brake pedal. The tires shrieked. The dog swung its head around, seemed to glare at Alice, made no move to get out of the way. The hood hid it from view an instant before it was struck. The impact jolted the station wagon. Alice whimpered as the left front tire bumped over the dog.

“Oh, Mom!” Rose cried. She had a look of horror in her eyes.

Alice glanced at the rearview mirror. The shadowy lane was deserted behind them. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to drive on and get far away from it all, but she couldn’t do that without a rear tire passing over the dog. The thought of that sickened her. Her right leg, still stretched out and mashing the brake pedal to the floor, started to bounce in a frenzy as if its muscles had all gone berserk.

Rose fumbled with her seat belt.

“Just wait a—”

“We’ve gotta help it, Mom!” She flung open her door and leaped out.

“Rose! Damn it!”

The girl, paying no attention, was running around the front of the car. With a shaky hand, Alice turned off the ignition. She set the emergency brake, struggled to free herself from the seat belt, and shoved open her door. Her jumpy right leg started to collapse when she put weight on it. She hung onto the door to hold herself up. “Rose!”

It was too late. The girl was standing rigid by the front tire, staring down, her pretty features twisted hideously, palms pressed to her ears as if to block out a terrible noise.

Alice glanced down at the crushed remains of the dog. She raised her eyes quickly to Rose. “There!” she snapped. “Are you happy? I
told
you not to look!” She hadn’t, not really, but she’d tried. “I wish, damn it, just once, you’d
listen
to me when I tell you something!”

The girl kept staring at the dog. “Oh, Mom,” she muttered, and dropped her hands to her sides.

“Did you hear anything I told you?”

“We’ve gotta help it,” Rose said again, and started to cry.

“Oh, Rose, Rose.” Alice hugged her daughter fiercely. She started to cry. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry I yelled. I just didn’t want you to see. I’m sorry.”

“We’ve gotta help it.”

“It’s beyond our help, honey. It’s with God now.”

“No. Please. It can’t be dead.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“We’ve gotta take it to a vet.”

“It’s dead. There’s nothing a vet can do for it.”

“Please. If we don’t try…We’ve gotta
try
!”

“Trouble?” someone called.

Alice spotted a young, bearded man striding down the nearest driveway. Please, she thought, don’t let it be his dog. “It ran out,” she said. “I couldn’t stop in time. It just…ran right out in front of me.”

He stepped past the front of the car, and looked down. “You sure creamed it, all right. What a mess.”

Alice wiped her eyes. “Do you know who it belongs to?”

“Never seen it before.” He crouched down close to the remains. “Doesn’t seem to have a collar. A stray maybe.”

“We’re gonna take it to a vet,” Rose said.

The man raised his eyebrows. “You want to put
that
in your car?”

“No—”

“Yes! We have to, Mom. Please.”

“Honey, it’s dead.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Looks pretty dead to me,” the man said. He sounded a bit amused. “I’m no authority, but the way its guts are spread around—”

“Stop that!” Alice snapped.

“Sorry. I didn’t…Tell you what. If you really want to take it with you, I’ll give you a hand. Let’s not mess up your car, though. You want to hang on a minute, I’ve got some Hefty bags out in the garage. Go ahead and open your tailgate. I’ll be back in two shakes.”

Alice stood mute while he hurried away. She didn’t want the awful thing in her car. But she felt trapped. She couldn’t drive away without running over it again—not unless she first dragged it out from under the car. Besides, Rose would never forgive her.

She supposed that she did have a certain responsibility for the poor creature. She couldn’t blame herself for killing it—she’d been driving under the speed limit and it had stepped out right in front of her and nobody could’ve stopped in time. But she had been the one to kill it, even if it weren’t her fault. As much as she hated the idea, she supposed that hauling its corpse to a veterinary hospital would be the right thing to do.

Let them dispose of it properly.

They could leave it here for the Department of Animal Regulation to pick up. But other cars might…Maybe the man would move it out of the road.

Hell, she might as well take it. Make Rose happy. Unless
she was mistaken, there was a veterinary hospital on Wilshire, just a block from their dentist’s office.

She saw the man striding down his driveway with a garbage bag and a shovel.
A shovel
. “Get in the car, honey.”

As the girl obeyed, Alice took the keys from the ignition and stepped to the rear of the station wagon. She lowered the tailgate. Hearing a car behind her, she rushed to the driver’s door and shut it. The car swung into the other lane. Alice looked down so she wouldn’t see those inside the car as it passed. She was relieved that it didn’t stop. Once it was gone, the road was clear.

“You sure you want to take this thing?” the man asked. “I could drag it over to the curb, have the pound come for it.”

“No, that’s all right. My daughter—”

“Yeah. Kids. You’re always better off going along with them. Hey, they’re usually right anyway.”

He spread the plastic bag flat on the pavement, its edge an inch from the blood puddle. Standing on it, he put on a pair of garden gloves. He spread his feet wide, pinning down the bag, and dragged the dog forward by its front paws. Horrified, Alice saw that some of its insides stayed behind, as if glued to the street. She gagged and turned away. She heard crinkling plastic, then the raspy scrape of the shovel. “There y’go,” the man said. To the dog? “You hanging in there? Ma’am? You all right?”

Alice nodded.

“Do you think you can lend a hand? We don’t want the bag to tear.”

“Of course,” she muttered. She faced the man, and tried not to look at the dog. “What should I do?”

“Let’s drag it to the back. If you can lift that end of the bag a bit, take some of the weight off…”

She stepped around the man. Crouching, she grabbed the edge of filmy plastic. The man lifted his end and waddled backward, dragging the awful load. The dog was very heavy. To keep from looking at it, Alice focused on the man’s head.
Though he appeared no older than thirty, his black hair was thin on top. That explains the beard, she thought: balding men often wore beards.

Finally, they reached the rear of the station wagon.

“Lift?” he asked.

“I’ll try.”

“Got a good grip on it?”

She adjusted her hold. “Okay,” she said.

“
Now
.”

They lifted. She felt the plastic stretch as if melting over her fingertips and knuckles. It spread and tore, but then the weight was gone, the dog supported by the tailgate.

The man crawled into the rear of the wagon. He tugged the bag, sliding the dog in after him. Turning away, he climbed into the backseat and left through a passenger door.

Alice shoved the tailgate shut.

“Okay,” the man said. He plucked off his gloves and picked up his shovel. “All set. You can probably get someone at the vet’s to take it out for you.”

“Well, thank you so much for helping.” She wondered if she should offer him money. That would be embarrassing, especially if he refused. “We really appreciate it.”

“Anytime,” he said, and made a wry smile. “Hey, if it pulls through, let me know.”

Sick, Alice thought. “I will,” she muttered.

Then the man was walking away with a sprightly step, the shovel over one shoulder. She half expected him to start whistling like one of the Seven Dwarfs.

“Hurry, Mom,” Rose called.

She climbed in behind the steering wheel. The girl was on her knees, looking over the back of the seat toward the dog. She was sniffing, dabbing at her nose with a wad of blue Kleenex. “Turn around and strap yourself in,” Alice said. While Rose sat down and fastened her safety harness, she buckled herself in and started the car.

She drove forward slowly to the end of the block. At the
stop sign, she checked the intersection carefully before proceeding.

“Drive faster, Mom. Please!”

“There’s no hurry,” she said.

“Yes there is!”

On the front lawn of a house just ahead, a boy in overalls was cavorting with a cocker spaniel. Alice watched them as she approached. Thank God it had been a dog, she thought, and not a child. That was too awful even to contemplate. What was wrong with the mother of this boy, letting him romp unattended in the front yard? The spaniel suddenly made a lunge toward the road. Alice shot her foot to the brake pedal, but the dog stopped at the sidewalk, wheeled around, and scampered back into the yard. Sighing with relief, Alice drove past.

The steering wheel was slick under her sweaty hands. She let go, one hand at a time, and wiped them on her skirt.

The shopping trip, she decided, was out of the question. After this ordeal, she was in no condition to face the supermarket. It could wait, or Arnold could go. Either way, she had no intention of leaving the house again today. When she got home, she would shut herself up in the bedroom with the new Sidney Sheldon book and not come out until…

From behind Alice came a low, rumbling growl. The back of her neck prickled.

“It
is
alive!” Rose blurted joyously, starting to turn around.

In the rearview mirror, Alice saw the German shepherd, forepaws on top of the backseat, fangs bared, bloody saliva hanging in strings from its snout. With a raging snarl, it sprang forward. Rose shrieked. Alice jammed on the brake pedal. The car lurched to a stop, throwing them both into their harnesses, slamming Alice’s forehead against the steering wheel. The dog tumbled onto the cushion beside her, its entrails slopping down after it, teeth
snapping shut on Rose’s wrist as the screaming girl tried to unbuckle her safety belt. It released her wrist and lunged at her throat.

Alice fumbled with her own buckle. She flung the straps aside and threw herself onto the huge beast, hooking an arm around its neck as Rose cowered against the door and shrieked and tried to hold off its snapping jaws. Alice squeezed the thick, furry neck in the crook of her elbow. She shoved her other hand into its mouth, cried out as the teeth tore into her, but clutched the snout and pulled it toward her, away from Rose. Then she was falling backward, the squirming dog heavy on her chest, the teeth still grinding into her hand. “Rose!” she yelled. “Get out!”

The dog writhed and jerked, trying to roll but unable to free itself from Alice’s grip. If she let go, she knew it would flip over and go for her throat. Her hand was afire with pain, her fingers weakening, but still she held on.

The door behind her head swung open.

Rose, standing above her, grabbed one of the dog’s kicking forelegs. “Let go!” she cried.

“Rose!”

“Let go!”

She opened her fingers, felt the teeth release her. The dog stretched its head up, trying to snap at Rose.

Rose was trying to pull it out of the car! Didn’t she realize…

“No!” Alice yelled. The wet fur of the dog’s back muffled her outcry.

It was half out of the car, and didn’t Rose realize it would go for her? Alice wrapped her arms around its open belly, trying to keep the beast from getting out.

The body suddenly quaked as a thudding, crushing sound filled Alice’s ears. The car rocked a bit. The sound came again. Again. Each time, the car swayed and the dog jerked and trembled.

Then it was motionless on top of her.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

As the body was dragged off Alice, she realized what the thudding sound had been—
her daughter slamming the car door three times on the German shepherd’s head
.

“What’ve they got him for?” Benny asked as a young man standing beside a guard shack waved them ahead.

Tanya smiled at the man, and drove slowly past him. “He’s supposed to keep out undesirables,” she said. “People who don’t have any business being here. You get all kinds of crazies hanging around if you aren’t careful. Flashers, rapists, that kind of thing. It’s because there are so many women around. Every college has trouble like that.”

“Really?” Benny asked.

“Sure. Berkeley had about a dozen rapes when I was there. That’s one reason my folks were so eager to have me transfer down here and live with you guys.”

“I didn’t know that,” Benny admitted. “I thought you did it just to help Dad.”

“Oh, that was part of it, too.” She swung into an empty space next to a VW van. “There were all kinds of reasons,” she said. She reached for the spiral notebook and the heavy volume of Shakespeare plays on the seat beside her, but Benny grabbed them first.

“I’ll carry them for you,” he said.

Tanya smiled, and Benny felt a blush spread over his face. She really was so beautiful. Not as beautiful as Karen, though. He wished he could be home when Karen arrived.

He climbed from the car and joined Tanya on a walkway that led down the side of the parking lot. Not far ahead, he saw several buildings: some looked low and modern, all stucco and windows like his junior high; others were ancient,
square structures of red brick. The buildings were far apart, separated by broad lawns with more trees than a park. In fact, Benny decided, the campus looked very much like a park. There were even benches. “This is nice,” he said.

“I like it,” Tanya told him.

“Better than Berkeley?”

She shrugged.

“Not as much?” he persisted.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I like this better. Berkeley was so huge, I felt lost. There’d be a couple of hundred students in some of my lecture classes. You know this Shakespeare class? Fourteen students. It’s great.” She glanced at her wristwatch, and groaned. “Cutting it close,” she said. Instead of hurrying, she stopped. She nodded to the right. “My class is over that way. You’d better go on to the library without me, or I’ll be late. I’ll meet you there when class is over, so we can check out any books you want. Okay?”

“Fine.”

She pointed straight ahead. “See the third building down? That’s the library.”

Benny flipped up his clip-on sunglasses and counted the structures. “The one with the pillars?”

“That’s it. Kind of a dreary place. If you get sick of it, the student union’s directly across the quad. You can get yourself a Coke or something. I’d better get moving.” Benny gave her the notebook and the thick text. “Good luck,” she said, and hurried away. She cut across the grass, walking quickly, her rump shifting inside her tight blue shorts. Then she waved and called out, “Steve!” A guy climbing the stairs of a distant building turned around, waved back, and waited for her. Tanya jogged forward to meet him.

Benny watched until they disappeared through a glass door. Feeling abandoned, he lowered his sunglasses into place and started toward the library. The few students he passed on the walkway seemed to be in no hurry. Apparently, they were between classes. A young couple was sitting on a bench, holding hands and talking. On a rise off to his left, a girl in shorts
and a halter was lying on a towel, sunbathing while she read a paperback. A Frisbee landed near her. She ignored both the Frisbee and the shirtless guy who raced up and scooped it from the ground. The guy sailed it over Benny’s head, and ran across the walkway to rejoin his friends.

Benny was glad that nobody seemed to notice him. He felt out of place here among these college kids, an intruder in their special world. He half expected someone to challenge him and throw him out.

A skinny, middle-aged woman in a pantsuit approached, scowling through her tinted glasses. “Excuse me, young man,” she said in a sharp voice.

His heart quickened. “Me?”

“Yes, of course you. Which way is the administration building?”

“Gee, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” she said with disgust. “The
administration
building,” she repeated, more loudly this time as if to penetrate his deafness or stupidity. “Weller Hall.”

“I don’t know him, either,” Benny said. The whiny sound of his voice embarrassed him.

“It’s not a
he
, young man.
Weller Hall
. It’s the name of the administration building.”

“Oh.”

She huffed through her nose, and Benny eyed her nostrils, expecting snot to fly out.

“I don’t know where anything is,” he admitted. “Just the library and the parking lot.”

“If I’d wanted the library or parking lot, I would’ve asked. I’m looking for—”

“Weller Hall,” Benny interrupted.

“Are you being smart with me, young man?”

“No, ma’am.”

“See that you’re not,” she snapped, and hurried off.

Shaken by the encounter, Benny quickened his pace. What was she, crazy? Couldn’t she tell, just by looking, that he didn’t belong here? Crazy old bag.

Crazy old bag
. Somebody—Julie?—had used those words about the mountain woman. The witch.

Benny glanced back.

Gone! She was nowhere in sight. A creepy feeling scurried up his spine.

Probably she just went into the building back there.

But what if she is the witch? What if she followed us down from the mountains, followed us home?

As he climbed the steps toward the library door, he pictured the witch in the dark with her arms high, shouting her curse over the noise of the wind and rain. He tried to imagine how she might look in a gray pantsuit, wearing fashionable glasses, her hair fixed up. With a sick feeling, he realized she might look very much like the woman he’d just met. If only he’d had a better look at the witch’s face.

“Don’t be dumb,” he said to himself out loud.

Then he took off his clip-ons and pulled open the library door. Carpet silenced his footsteps as he walked toward the circulation desk, where a young woman was reading. She held a felt-tipped pen. She wore a white blouse with a frilly collar, and had golden hair like Karen. Benny saw nothing threatening about her. She looked up as he approached, and smiled. “Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” Benny whispered. “Is it all right if I look around for a while? I’m waiting for my cousin. She’s in class.”

“Certainly. No problem. If you want to look at some magazines, the periodical room’s over behind those stacks.” She pointed to the right.

“Thank you.”

“Help yourself. If you have any questions, I’ll be right here.”

Benny thanked her again, and walked over to the card catalog. Nobody else was using it. Except for a few students seated nearby at long tables, reading or scribbling notes, the big room was deserted.

He studied the drawer labels. Finding one marked
WIK–WIZ
, he slid the drawer open. He flipped through the cards
toward the back of it. Soon, he came to a card marked
Witchcraft in Salem Village
. Behind it was
Witchcraft Through the Ages
, then
Witchery Ditchery Doc
, a novel. No good to him. He flicked that card forward.
Witches and Warlocks
. That sounded useful. But the next card set his heart racing:
Witch’s Spells and Potions
.

He looked at the call number, and frowned. Instead of Dewey decimal numbers, which he understood, there was a series of letters.

Well, the librarian
had
offered to help.

Taking the ballpoint from his shirt pocket, he started to write the letters on the heel of his hand. The pen skipped badly. Then he noticed a small tray of scrap paper on top of the catalog. He took down a piece, and wrote out the call letters, author, and title.

Then he returned to the circulation desk. The woman finished marking a passage with her yellow felt-tipped pen, and smiled up at him.

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” Benny said, “but do you know where I can find this book?”

She glanced at the paper. “Oh, that’ll be downstairs. Are you familiar with the Library of Congress system?”

“No, I—”

“Well, you just go alphabetically along the shelves. They’re all labeled. Then, when the books are all lettered the same, you go by the numbers underneath. It’s pretty simple, really.”

“Fine. Thank you. Uh…it’s downstairs?”

Nodding, she swiveled her chair around and pointed. “Right through those double doors.”

“Thank you,” he said again. Taking the scrap paper, he walked alongside the counter and pulled open one of the doors. It swung shut behind him. The landing was dimly lit. Benny looked up at the fixture, a globe with the debris of dead bugs showing through its frosted glass. Wrinkling his nose, he started down the stairs. They seemed to be concrete, but rang under his footsteps as if there was metal inside.
The echo made him uneasy. He tried to descend more quietly. As he neared the next landing, he imagined taking off his shoes to muffle the noise. That would be dumb. And what if somebody saw him? “Hey, kid, put your shoes on. What’re you trying to pull?” Besides, why should he worry about making a little noise?

When he reached the landing, he looked down the final flight of stairs and hesitated.

It was dark down there.

The globe overhead cast its light on the first few steps, faded, and left the lower ones in murky gloom. The fixture below was a dull, gray ball, its bulb either turned off or dead.

He’d seen a movie last summer, where a monster lurked under a staircase. He leaned over the railing and peered down. There did appear to be an open space beneath the stairs.

Don’t be a jerk, he told himself. He took a deep breath and charged down into the darkness, more certain with each clamoring footfall that he was not alone in the stairwell. The bottom of the stairs took him by surprise. He thought there was one more step, but there wasn’t. His right foot pounded down hard on the floor, sending pain up his leg. He stumbled forward, his shoulder driving open the door, and fell sprawling as the door slammed the wall with a stunning crash.

He picked up his glasses and glanced at the lenses. They hadn’t broken. He put them on, and slid the clip-ons back into his shirt pocket. Then he got to his feet. Rubbing his sore knee, he looked down the long aisle ahead of him. He glanced to the sides, down narrow lanes between bookshelves. He saw no one. More important, no one had seen him; he felt like a clumsy idiot.

Klutz.

It was like the night he’d tripped Heather.

Good thing Julie wasn’t here to ride him about it.

On the other hand, he almost wished she
was
here. Except for a buzzing sound from the fluorescent lights, the
room was silent. It’s supposed to be silent, he reminded himself. This is a library. But somehow it seemed too silent. He strongly suspected that nobody was down here but him.

With a glance at the lettering on the shelves to his left, he realized that the witchcraft book was probably somewhere down that aisle. He should find it, grab it, and hurry upstairs. But the thought of the stairwell sent a shudder through him.

Sooner or later, he would have to face it. Unless he waited down here long enough for Tanya to come. The librarian knew where he was. She’d tell Tanya, or maybe she’d come down herself in a while. Or some students might show up and…For all Benny knew, there might already be students down here, silently searching the shelves. If he found one, he could follow him out.

This is really dumb, he thought, as he started walking slowly up the center aisle. He glanced each way into the narrow spaces between the shelves.

There’s nothing in the stairwell. I’m just yellow.

So I’m yellow. If there just happens to be someone else down here and I just happen to see him leaving, I’ll just happen to follow along. No harm in that. Nobody has to know what I’m doing. Nobody will ever know, if I don’t tell.

He was halfway to the end of the aisle without spotting anyone when he noticed a sound like someone panting. He froze. The sound seemed to come from his right, somewhere not far ahead. Between those shelves. If he took just one big step, he could probably see.

It was a quick, harsh gasping sound that someone might make after running hard. Then a moan that made his skin prickle.

He knew he should take that single step forward. Or better yet, stride boldly by and just happen to glance over as he passed. But he couldn’t. Instead, he backed silently away.

After several paces, he ducked into the stacks to the left. Hidden by the ceiling-high shelves, he made his way quickly to the far wall. There, he turned left and rushed back the
way he’d come. He passed between the final set of shelves. Crouching at the end, he peered down the center aisle. He saw no one. He glanced behind him at the door to the stairs, only a couple of yards away.

Maybe he should run for it. The stairwell frightened him, but now it seemed no worse than the room itself. He had to get out of here before…The book. He needed the book. If he left without it, all this would’ve been for nothing.

He eased backward. The scrap paper was a crumpled, sodden ball in his hand. He picked it open, spread it out, and compared the series of call letters to those on a book near his shoulder.

He must be close. Standing, he sidestepped away from the aisle and scanned the labeled spines. The search led him deeper into the stacks, farther and farther from the door. As his eyes moved over the books, he listened intently, ready to bolt. He heard nothing but the buzz of the fluorescent lights.

On tiptoes, head tilted far back, he squinted at the top row of books. He couldn’t quite make out the lettering. It’s probably up there, he thought. If it is, I’ll have to climb for it. The shelves were metal, about four feet long, deep enough to hold books on both sides, secured at each corner to upright rods. They looked very sturdy. Benny grabbed a forward edge, and tugged it. There was no wobble at all. He wouldn’t try climbing, though, until he was sure he had to.