Summer Of Fear (21 page)

I threw open the door and jumped out.

“Hey, come back here!” Mike shouted.

I did not answer. My eyes were focussed on the curve up ahead. “We’re almost to it,” Mike had told me. Beyond that curve was the place that I was headed. You’ve done your job, Sarah, I thought wretchedly. You’ve really done it! A leak in the gas tank!

I began to run and after a moment I realized that Mike was running beside me. How long we ran I do not know for after a while we reached a point where there was no such thing as time. There was only my pounding heart and the blazing heat of the sun on my head and the thud of my feet as they struck the road. I could not seem to get enough air into my lungs. The heat shimmered on the road like rippling pools of black water moving always a little ahead of us, and I knew we would never get there until it was done.

It was late, too late. As I rounded the curve I knew what I would see. Swerve marks on the road. A gaping hole in the guardrail. A blazing car in the ravine. How could I have thought to defeat it? It would have to be. Sarah had planned it and Sarah did not make mistakes.

But I was wrong, for that was not the scene that greeted me. The rail was intact and there was no sign of an accident. There was only a stretch of road that I knew well, so well, and as I recognized it I knew, too, what was to happen in the next few minutes.

There had been a dream in which I was running along a winding road. There were stark, red cliffs on one side of me and on the other there was a dropoff. My legs ached and my breath was coming in gasps, and I cried to Mike who was running beside me, “Will we get there in time? Can we get there before it happens?”

He said, “Are you crazy, Rae? If you’d only explain—”

“I can’t!” I cried. “There’s no time!”

Up ahead, far, far ahead, a tiny reflection of the noonday sunlight signalled the approach of a car coming toward us down the road.

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop!” And as in the dream, I ran straight into the middle of the road with my arms outspread. The car came roaring toward me, and I was able to look directly into the eyes of the driver, wide, familiar eyes that recognized me as I did them. I could see Mother’s face as she hit the brake, a white face blank with amazement. The car went past me and then it began to swerve. Like a child’s windup toy with faulty steering it moved in a steady line toward the dropoff and came to a stop a matter of inches from the edge.

There was a moment of dead silence. Then, as from far away, there came into my head the sound of singing, high and joyful and sweet. Faint and far, a ringing in my ears, part of the dizziness of relief, or something else? Angel Julie singing?

I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that we had, after all, made it in time. Mike’s arm was around my shoulders and Mother was opening the car door and getting out.

“My Lord,” she said shakily. “The steering cable must have snapped. If I hadn’t seen you and started to slow down before it happened—” She glanced at the dropoff and shuddered. “What in the world are you two doing here? When I saw Rae running up the highway I couldn’t believe my eyes I”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Rae knew, somehow, about the car.”

“It’s been so long,” I said. “I called the magazine office. They said you left there a little after eleven. It’s almost twelve-thirty now. You should have reached this spot a long time ago.” Something had delayed her. That was obvious. Something had been working for us, something that Sarah, with all her powers, could not defeat or control.

“What was it?” I asked. “Why did you take so long?”

“I stopped,” Mother said, “to get you a present. I told you there was something I was planning to get you.”

She gestured toward the car window and I looked in and saw it, there in the back seat—the clownish white face, the cocked ears, the friendly, inquisitive brown eyes. It was a miniature of Trickle.

“This has been such a difficult summer for you, honey,” Mother said, “I thought it might help to have your own dog again. Not that he will ever replace Trickle—you don’t replace a person—but he can make his own place in your life. All of us in the family have been so worried about you. We hate to see you so unhappy.”

And there in her eyes was the answer, the thing Sarah had not reckoned on, had not been prepared to handle, had not known how to combat.

It was love.

Once more it is summer. Golden summer.

I stand on the front lawn with the morning paper. The dog, Lucky—(at four years old he can hardly be termed a “puppy”)—rolls around in the grass at my feet, begging to be played with. The sun is warm on my hair and on the back of my neck as I stand reading the article in section C. There are often such articles. There was a time when I skipped over them, hardly noticing they were there. But for the last four years I have read them carefully, paying attention to every detail.

A family lost in the mountains. An unidentified “girl friend” of the daughter’s, lost with them. Their camper truck and belongings missing. Who, I wonder, is the girl friend? Is she involved in the tragedy—or might she have created it? There is a photograph of the family but this girl is not in it. Was she the one who held the camera? Or did someone else take the picture, and was this girl one of the group who was photographed, and did the image somehow not emerge when the negative was developed?

“That part I cannot accept,” the professor told me. “It’s pure superstition.”

“But I found her destroying the film before it could be developed!”

“That proves nothing except that Sarah herself believed her image would not be there. She was taking no chances. If the film had been processed I would guess she would have been on it. Still, who knows?”

There are so many things we cannot know. Was Sarah a real witch or did she just believe she was?

My father thinks the latter.

“There are reasonable explanations for everything,” he says. “The steering failure in two cars could have been a strange coincidence. Hives can be caused by nerves. A dog can be poisoned. Teenage boys are often infatuated by girls who are different from those they are used to knowing; such romances seldom last but can be very intense. Gas tanks can leak. An elderly man can have a stroke and partial recovery.”

“But the recovery began so immediately upon Sarah’s leaving!”

“It could have been psychological. Just knowing she was gone could have given him the will to get better.”

She was gone when we got back to the house. It was Bobby who had released her from the darkroom.

“She kept yelling for me to help her,” he said. “How could I know I shouldn’t unlock the door? She said Rae was playing a joke and had shut her in there. When she came out she went to her room and got her things and left She didn’t say where she was going.”

So we cannot know. We can only assume that she is somewhere, entwining herself in the lives of those she meets, using them as she can to gain the things she wants.

Sarah!

Julia!

And so I stand now on the front lawn, reading, and behind me the door of the house opens. It is a duplex, part of the student housing at the edge of the university campus, much smaller than the house in which I used to live with my parents and brothers. I turn and lower the paper and smile at the blue-eyed man who stands in the doorway.

“Hey, Red,” he calls. “How about fixing breakfast? Have you forgotten that summer classes start early?”

“No, Mike, I haven’t forgotten,” I say laughing. “Isn’t it about time though that you learned how to fry an egg?”

I stick the paper under my arm and whistle for Lucky, and we head for the house. For too long now I’ve dwelt upon the past. One cannot live indefinitely with shadows. The summer of fear lies well behind us. It is a time now of new beginnings.