JULIE was driving in second the whole time. Her right arm was no longer able to work the gearshift. It hung down by her side lacquered with dried blood.
“Does it hurt?” asked Peter.
“No. I mean yes. I don’t know.”
“You must know if it hurts, though!”
Julie shook her head. The road was very steep and winding. At bends the girl struggled to steer properly. Her left wrist was now hurting more than her injured arm.
“Did the bullet come out?” Peter inquired.
“I don’t know.”
“If it didn’t come out by itself, it has to be pulled out,” observed the little boy.
“Be quiet,” said Julie. “No, talk to me.”
“Will we be there soon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have my maps anymore.”
“Are we lost?”
“No. I can remember the map. More or less, anyway. We have to go west. That’s why the sun is in our eyes.”
The engine coughed, spluttered, and died abruptly. A little red light on the dashboard came on. The 2CV was freewheeling, suddenly silent, the wind whistling against the windshield. Julie let go of the wheel to pull on the starter and the motor turned over and caught. The gear lever vibrated. Then the motor quit again. The little car was approaching another steep hill. Julie steered it onto the shoulder, where it came to a crooked halt. The girl applied the handbrake, shifted to neutral, and pulled on the starter again. The 2CV revved mightily but the motor would not turn over. Julie looked at the instruments. The needle of the gas gauge had fallen well below zero. The girl sighed a high-pitched sigh that almost broke into a sob.
“Isn’t it working?” asked Peter.
Julie got out of the car. The air was cooler now and she shivered. She took her bloodstained raincoat from the front seat and draped it clumsily over her shoulders. Then she fell suddenly into a sitting position on the asphalt. Peter leapt from the car, took Julie by the shoulder, and tried frantically to get her to her feet.
“I’m all right,” the girl murmured. “I’ll be okay.”
Clinging to the car, she got to her feet. She staggered a little.
“We’ll continue on foot,” she said.
“Oh drat!” said Peter. “I’m fed up with walking.”
“If you’d rather,” said Julie evenly, “I’ll leave you here on the edge of these deep woods haunted by big gray owls.”
“Shut up! Shut up!” exclaimed the little boy. “Okay, okay.”
Julie started off, unsteady on her feet. Peter trotted behind her. Darkness began creeping into the hollows, but beyond the crest of the hill ahead the sun was a pool of copper. The road, narrow and potholed, was deserted. Since the 2CV had left Montbrison the two travelers had encountered very few vehicles and only the odd pedestrian in the close vicinity of the town. For the last hour or more they had seen no one, and no sign of habitation.
Julie and Peter climbed towards the sunlit heights. A track crossed the little road. An improvised sign dangled from a post at the intersection. It bore the name of a hamlet that meant nothing to Julie.
Maybe, she thought, I’ll get to the top of this hill, then I’ll lie down and die and nothing will have mattered at all.
Her head drooped. She walked on like an automaton.
“Carry me,” Peter asked.
She made no reply. She kept on walking. The sky was misting over. Behind Julie, high above her, the clouds were taking on a blue-gray hue.
When the girl reached the top of the hill she almost failed to notice. But since the ground was no longer rising, her chin bumped against her chest and she raised her head and stopped short, swaying, before a glorious setting sun that whacked her full in the face with its light.
Below her feet lay a somewhat nondescript valley full of trees. Beyond it, almost immediately, the ground rose once more, precipitously, forming a mountainside even higher than the one the fugitives had just climbed. At Julie’s eye level, the trees vanished from its darkening slopes, and the summit sprang up above like a greenish skull. And there, far off, silhouetted against the sunset, and pointed out so to speak by the sun, a low, chaotic, grotesque structure adhered to that skull close to the summit.
“Look at the castle!” exclaimed Peter.
“That’s Hartog’s Moorish Tower,” Julie stammered.
“It’s all squished! It’s not a tower. It’s ugly.”
“No, no,” said Julie. “Come on. Let’s go down.”
The road looped into the valley, then followed the valley floor, leading away from the distant structure. Julie set off again, abandoning the dilapidated road, cutting straight down across fields and skirting copses. On the steep slope, helped by her own weight, she broke into a run. As she tried to slow down, her heels slammed into the ground and the shock carried to her injured arm. Peter frolicked around her, his fatigue forgotten.
The sun disappeared behind the Moorish Tower. Julie and Peter reached the bottom of the valley, where a fast-moving stream tumbled along. Anxiously, Julie contemplated its white eddies swirling in the shadows. Peter pulled her by the sleeve.
“There’s a bridge.”
He was pointing to a crude conglomeration of branches, planks, and logs a short way upstream. Julie followed him towards it.
The makeshift bridge, like something built by drunken boy scouts, was precariously balanced on large round rocks. The ropes that had once moored it securely to nearby trees were frayed, and so rotted that they almost crumbled at Julie’s touch. The plank walkway had holes in it at several points. Below, the water seethed black and gray.
By now night had fallen in the valley. Julie started onto the walkway and felt the breath of the torrent below upon her face. The girl clung to the rudimentary handrail that ran alongside the planking. The bridge trembled beneath her and she trembled along with it. She had the impression of being enormously heavy. The planks bowed beneath her feet and squeaked. Julie stopped halfway across and watched in horrible fascination as a rusty nail emerged slowly, like a penis, from the wood of a plank. The plank split, the twisted nail flew into the air and fell into the foam below, and Julie’s foot slipped through the walkway. The girl bruised herself as she grabbed onto the planking. Everything was shaking, around her and inside her head. She found herself on all fours, crawling along above the boiling race, desperately looking around for Peter. She heard the little boy call her, then saw him, already on the other side, hopping up and down with impatience.
“Hey, can’t you hurry up?”
The bridge gave way, and Julie flung herself forward. She ended up kneeling in the mud of the bank. Behind her, the walkway overturned. One end crashed into the creek. The whole contraption swung round into alignment with the current and plunged swiftly into the foaming waters, bouncing off rocks, coming apart, disintegrating, and disappearing with startling speed. The darkness swallowed it up.
Smeared with mud, Julie clambered up the bank. She was burning up with fever. She did not know where Peter was. She was driven on by a single idea: a hundred meters, fifty meters from where she was now, once past the foot of the mountain, there would be nothing ahead but a vast carpet of grass and flowers, and upon it would be the Moorish Tower, where Hartog was waiting for her.