THE DARKNESS STAYED WITH HIM for what seemed like a long time. Then, vaguely, as he slumped down and forward, he was aware that the car radio had come on. Glowing dials through the choking haze, and the soothing strings of the Fred Waring Orchestra and the down-home southern drawl of Wallis Beekins on NBC with stories, interviews and good old gossip live and living from the Land of the Stars … The words and the city spread below him vanished through spasms of pain into a black, stinking tunnel.
Funny, really, to have come so far, and yet to have got nowhere. The same empty nowhere that everyone ended up, he supposed. He was floating further out from the blackness now, and the intense burning in his lungs and throat was lessening. Just a guy in a car on some midnight overlook slowly dying from lack of oxygen. He could see himself with a curious detachment. Could see the pumping black hosepipe jammed hard through the window which his paralyzed limbs were too feeble to remove. He was a slumped body, starting to judder now, the lips graying, the eyes rolling in some final spasm, that someone would find in the morning when all life was gone, and briefly wonder about why and how. But not that much…
The weirdest thing was, he knew he wasn’t alone. Something else was there with him inside the car. It squirmed up and out of the foul black air like a swimmer surfacing, and formed changing arms, and a face that wouldn’t stay still. With terrible eyes flecked with engine fire, with clouds of the exhaust roaring from its oily mouth, it leaned forward to regard him. The thing seemed to be made entirely of smoke. His tongue thickened in his throat, rooting for empty air as he tried to cry out, but it was useless, hopeless…
The thing, the shape, the presence, wouldn’t leave him. Perhaps it was death itself. And he knew it was close now. So close that he could feel it touching him. He saw his own hands lying lost and remote far down through the darkness, and felt stronger hands which burned and throbbed enclosing them. Their grip was remorselessly strong, and outflowing arms followed, drawing him into an ever-deepening embrace. And through it all there was a terrible pressure, an endless roaring.
He was past struggling. He was beyond help. But the thing of fumes really was holding him, lifting him, jerking his limbs like a puppet. He felt his head crack the steering wheel, felt his teeth snap sharp against his tongue. He saw his own hand twist out in front of him, saw it ablaze with rags of dark. Then his arm was wrenched sideways, and a sharp pain, bizarre in its ordinariness, slammed through him from his elbow. The pain flared again when the same movement repeated, but this time was followed by a glittering crash, and an extraordinary rush of air.
He grayed out for a moment. He gasped, gagged, his belly a writhing knot, as the fumes rushed out. But he was breathing. He was breathing, and the window beside him was broken and the black pipe which had been belching death had flopped away across the gravel and he was Clark fucking Gable and he was alive and his throat burned and his left elbow hurt like hell.
The engine was still running. He fumbled again at the key, wiggling the damn thing to and fro. Still wouldn’t budge. Everything in this car was clever, electric; far too clever for him. He felt down around the ignition slot. Something small and rough had been wedged in there with the key. He picked and fumbled with numb fingers until it finally gave. Half a matchstick. Nothing more. He turned the key again. The Delahaye’s vee eight subsided with a small, polite cough. The radio dial glowed. The soothing night sounds of the Fred Waring Orchestra playing A Cigarette, Music and You still poured out from the expensive Motorola speakers. He fumbled the door handle through a grit of broken glass. This time, it opened easily.
He stumbled from the car, fell to his knees in a spill of glass. He stayed hunched on all fours for some time, coughing and retching until the effort got too much and he slumped flat. Then, some unknowable time after, he came back to proper consciousness and—slowly, warily—used the Delahaye’s open door to drag himself back up. He leaned swayingly against the car and looked around the dark overlook. Some kind of presence had been here with him. He was sure of it—as sure as he was that it wasn’t some last spasm of his dying body that had broken that door pane. He listened. All he could hear was Wallis Beekins’ soft burr from the radio, the chirp of the cicadas and his own thudding heart. He held up his hands, but the faintness and blurring came only from his dried and weary eyes. They were streaked with nothing but dirt and blood.
The night. The cicadas. Murmuring music. A solitary car went by above him on Mulholland Drive. He listened for another, but he guessed it could be a long wait. The city glittered thinly now. It was late, and dark.
Loosening his necktie, hawking and spitting, picking shards of glass and bits of gravel off himself, he clambered his way around the Delahaye’s panels, pulled off the hose that had been fixed around one of the twin exhausts and threw the thing far out over the overlook barrier. He checked the trunk. Empty. No cardboard suitcase. Then he limped over toward the corner of the overlook where he’d thought he’d seen a parked car. That, too, had gone.
He slumped back down inside the Delahaye, holding the wheel and breathing hard. His head was pounding and his mouth tasted like a motor workshop floor. He found one of Daniel Lamotte’s handkerchiefs and used it to wipe his hands and face, then brushed out some more of the glass. He checked inside the lit glove compartment and stared at the packet of Lucky Strikes which lay there, but the last thing he felt like was a smoke. The radio’s backlit dial looked like sunset over some fairy city.
… and that’s the last word worth hearing tonight from here in Tinseltown. To America and all her brave allies, this is Wallis Beekins wishing God’s blessing and goodnight.
Then there was only hissing. Clicking it off, starting up the Delahaye's engine, he reversed from the overlook and turned back up onto Mulholland Drive.