The Narrows(17)

She fumbled with her seat belt and managed to get it undone. Her heart strumming like a banjo, she opened the car door and staggered dazedly out onto the roadway. She braced herself for the horror of what must surely lay several feet or yards down the road, though she was too terrified to move away from the pool of warm light that issued out of the open car door.

“Hello?” Her voice held the paper-thin quality of an AM radio broadcast.

Something moved in the center of the roadway. Maggie’s body went cold. As her eyes adjusted to the lightlessness, she could see the crumbled form of a small human body, a pair of bare legs folded up into a fetal position. The figure was whitish-blue beneath the glow of the moon, though the tapered swell of its thighs radiated with the sickly red light of the Pontiac’s taillights.

As she watched, the figure’s legs parted. She heard—or thought she heard—a wet, guttural clicking coming from the shape. Even now, with its undeniably human form, Maggie was struggling to convince herself that what she had hit had been a deer or a dog or any such careless, brainless animal that had wandered stupidly out onto the road in the middle of the night…

It’s not a person, it can’t be, that is a f*cking whitetail deer, a goddamn stray dog, that is not a person, it isn’t, it’s too f*cking small to even…

It was small because it was a child. There would be no convincing herself otherwise.

The figure dragged itself across the pavement toward the cusp of the trees, retreating from out of the taillights’ glow. Maggie saw one tiny white foot—five distinct toes splayed—scrabble for purchase on the roadway. The child was injured, probably severely, and she wanted to go to it and attend to it and make sure there wasn’t something she could do to help it, but fear rooted her firmly in place. She was powerless to move.

The bleating of a car horn followed by the blinding dazzle of high beams caused Maggie to scream. She spun around to see a pair of headlights engulfed in a cloud of exhaust barreling toward her. She heard the approaching vehicle’s brakes squeal. The headlights jounced as the vehicle jerked to a sudden stop.

“Help me!” she screamed, frightened by the fear and panic she heard in her voice. She raced toward the driver’s side of the vehicle just as the door popped open. “Please! I need help!”

“Calm down, calm down.” Even in her hysterical state, she could see that the driver was Cal Cordrick. He had a John Deere cap tugged down low on his scalp with a large brass fishhook clipped to the brim and a few days’ growth at his chin. He reached out and placed one hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “That you, Maggie? Maggie Quedentock?”

“Jesus, Cal! Thank God you’re here! I hit—”

“You all right?”

“I hit someone! He’s in the road!”

Cal peered over her shoulder, presumably to examine the queer positioning of the Pontiac in the center of the road. Then he looked back at her, his eyes small and pink and wet, like the leaky yet soulful eyes of hound. Nervously, he rubbed one thumb up and down his prickly chin. “Stay here,” he said, shoving past her.

She turned and watched him walk slowly past the Pontiac. He paused only for a moment to peer into the open door then kept going. To the darkness, Maggie heard him call out, “Is anyone out there? Hello? Anyone need help?” When no answer came, he kicked into a slight jog, his footfalls hollow-sounding on the pavement, until he disappeared into the blackness. Only the sound of his boot heels assured Maggie of his existence.

Cal Cordrick’s footfalls stopped.

Maggie felt something leap in her chest. Silently to herself she counted to ten…or at least planned to; by the time she reached six, she could no longer control her fear. Too easily she could imagine the darkness as an actual living creature, a creature that had just devoured poor Cal Cordrick whole, just as it had seemingly devoured the child she’d hit.

“Cal!” she shrieked, the timbre of her voice shattering the silence. “Cal! Cal Cordrick!”

Nothing…nothing…

“Cal!”

Cal’s shape reemerged from the darkness, though for one horrific second she thought the figure was that of the person she’d struck with her car. Maybe it wasn’t the darkness that was alive after all. Maybe it was the thing she’d hit that had devoured Cal and was now coming back for her.

Thing, she thought.

But it was Cal, only Cal. His John Deere cap was off and he was running one hand through the stubble at his scalp. She didn’t like the look on his face.

“Ain’t no one out there,” he told her evenly.

“Cal, I saw—”

“Ain’t no one out there, Maggie.” He stopped beside the front grille of the Pontiac and looked at it. There was a dent in the hood and the plastic grille was cracked in two places. “You been drinking some, hon?”

“No,” she blurted.

“Maybe a little?”

“Well, I mean, yes. I was. Earlier.” She felt confused and foolish. Was she dreaming all this? “I’m not drunk, Cal.”

“Could be you just imagined you’d hit someone…”

“No.”

“Or maybe it was a deer. Maybe it just kept running off into the woods. They can do that, you know. My brother once hit a twelve-point buck up on 40 with his Durango and the thing hardly batted an eye at—”