Nightmare Journey
The silence that followed seemed to Albert Bowes interminable. His head grew light and his legs grew heavy. He wanted to run, but how can you run when your knees won’t move and your feet are sewn to the ground? And, even if Albert had possessed the power to run, where would he have run to?
Few of us, whatever our record, lack some form of sanctuary. At first, it is just our mother’s knee. Then, perhaps, it becomes a nursery or a house, or a town, or a ship; or, failing these, our thoughts. Albert’s sanctuary was an unattractive room in Bristol, where he formed his doubtful policies and sought escape from their consequences. Insecure though it was, it at least provided brief periods of repose and relief, standing between him and immediate retribution.
But now even that unsavoury haven was cut off from him. Should a miracle occur and should he find himself back in Bristol, this hideous monstrosity he had picked up from the road would seek him out and fasten itself upon him. He was certain of it! It was as though the slender rope that had hitherto held Albert to solid ground had been hacked through—by a jagged hook!—leaving him alone in the world with a maniac!
The silence that seemed interminable lasted, actually, only ten seconds. Then Albert’s passenger spoke again.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
It was a cynical question. The speaker knew quite well what was the matter, and why Albert’s eyes were fixed so vacantly on dancing print. Then, all at once, the dancing print began to dance away from him, and the newspaper slid from his fingers. The passenger was relieving him of it.
This woke Albert up. He leapt into the air, and his back struck the car as he came to the ground again. Meanwhile, the passenger eyed the headlines of the newspaper, and smiled.
“What! Is this what has upset you?” he inquired. “Just an old woman being murdered?”
Albert could be callous, but such callousness as this was beyond his experience.
“Come, come, don’t lose your nerve,” continued the passenger. “These things happen, you know. Why—look at me!”
He held up an arm, with its case of flapping sleeve. Albert tried not to look, and failed. His passenger had the power of a snake.
“I am quite calm, you see,” said the snake. “True, my sleeve flutters, but that is just the breeze. What lies within the sleeve is perfectly, perfectly steady.”
He raised the sleeve higher as he spoke, and Albert found it pointing directly at him. “Here—stop that!” the trembling man managed to murmur.
“Stop—what?” inquired the passenger. “First, afraid of a newspaper, and then afraid of a sleeve? Really, my man, you must try and get hold of yourself. We’ve work ahead of us, don’t forget.”
Work? What work? Albert fought hard to rediscover that point inside him where his independence resided.
“Look here—I’m not going on!” he muttered.
“Hey? Not going on?” exclaimed his passenger, sardonically. “Of course you are going on! You are going on to Boston, my man—to earn your fifty pounds.”
“S’pose I say I’d rather not?”
“It won’t make the slightest difference what you say! A bargain is a bargain, and there is a penalty for breaking it.” He paused, and, removing his eyes from Albert’s, transferred them to the newspaper. How the fellow contrived to retain the newspaper in the flapping folds of sleeve was an uncanny mystery. “Believe me, you’ll find it much wiser to keep your bargain,” he added, softly. “I’ve always kept mine.”
There was a pause. Albert gulped, and tried a new tack. “Well, this—this work,” he said, hoarsely. “Is it—just to drive you to Boston?”
“What else should it be?” answered the passenger.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why do you ask?”
With unexpected doggedness, Albert floundered on.
“Didn’t you say just now that I’d need to keep my nerve?”
“I did.”
“Well, then!”
“What, then?”
“Blast it, you don’t need nerve just to drive a car!” exploded Albert.
The passenger considered the point for two or three seconds, then stepped a little closer.
“You seem to have something in your mind, my friend,” he said. “What is it?”
“Nothing!” replied Albert, quickly, and tried to back away; but when you are already pressing hard against solid substance there is nowhere further to back to. “I told you, didn’t I?”
“In that case, please avoid the annoyance of going round and round in a circle,” retorted the passenger, now speaking sharply. “You’re wasting time, and it’s time to move.”
Then Albert put up his last fight.
“Is it! All right! I’m going to move,” he said. “But you’re not going to move with me!”
He turned towards the driving-seat as he spoke these bold words, and the next moment felt hot breath on his neck. His passenger had slipped up behind him.
“Haven’t you learned, even yet, what it will cost to double-cross me?” came the hiss in his ear. “No one ever double-crosses me and gets away with it! Do you hear me? Ever! EVER!”
The voice began to rise, but suddenly ceased, as though checked by an iron control. Then it continued, more quietly, but no less forcefully, while the speaker’s breath burned fiercely on the listener’s nape:
“And do you think there’s any possibility that you could double-cross me, even if you decided to try? Listen, fool! You have no more chance with me than that cat has over there. Watch it!”
The cat had leapt out of a hedge. Now it stood, eyeing some vague object in the distance. An instant later, it rolled over on its side, and lay still.
“And, now, will you move?”
There was no more fight in Albert Bowes. He stared horror-stricken at the dead cat, then mechanically mounted to his seat. How his legs, which he had no power to direct, managed to function he could not say. All he knew was that they did function, that they appeared to be directed by some power outside himself, and that here he was, with his right foot touching the accelerator and his left foot touching the clutch.
“One moment, before we start,” said the speaking-tube, “so that we may be absolutely and finally clear. From this instant until we reach Boston I shall be behind you. There will not be one instant when I am not behind you. I have slid the glass partition a little to one side, and your back is thus presented to me without any intervening substance. Just to prove this, I will touch it.” The voice ceased, and something sharp gently prodded the back of the most terrified man in the kingdom. Then the voice continued, “You felt that? Good! If the necessity arises, you will feel it again. But it may not be quite so gentle, next time. It may be sharper, and hot like a burning furnace. It may even break your back, and you may lie afterwards as quietly as that cat in the road there, and as that old woman you have just read about in the paper, and…But perhaps these are enough to go with, eh! Now, answer me. Did you hear all I said. And did you understand?”
Albert tried to answer, but no words came. Something pricked his backbone, and he shrieked hoarsely, “Yes!” Then he let in the clutch, and the car once more moved forward.
His mind became numb. He drove mechanically. Time grew meaningless, and roads merely strips in a nightmare punctuated by sign-posts. He could not have told you during any minute what had happened during the minute before. They might have just left Evesham, or Tewkesbury, or Charlton, or Bristol. All he knew was that the nightmare went on and on and on, while a cold spot in the middle of his back had a large hole in it.
Somewhere in the hole was fifty pounds. It tickled and cracked and burned. Not till the nightmare ended could he turn round and look for it. And the nightmare didn’t seem as though it would ever end.
Stratford, Warwick; Warwick, Kenilworth; Kenilworth, Coventry. They meant nothing to him, beyond a temporary change in the nightmare to slow motion. Between Coventry and Leicester they lost their way in the darkening lanes, and did not find the way again for an hour. He did not even remember that; it was his passenger who rediscovered the way and who communicated the necessary instructions to the speaking-tube. The instructions reached the ear of a man stricken through terror with mental paralysis.
Now it was quite dark, and the nightmare was illuminated only by the car’s two yellow eyes. The eyes ran into Melton Mowbray. Then they ran up into hills and down into dips.
Beyond Grantham the hills and the dips ceased to exist—if they ever had existed; Albert couldn’t tell—and the two yellow eyes ran along the monotonous levels of Lincolnshire. The way was lost again. A tyre got a puncture. The wheel was changed and the way was found, and the nightmare was resumed. Had they lost their way? Did they get a puncture? Albert didn’t know…And then, at last, a whiff of sea air, an aroma of salt, a sense of conclusion. Somewhere rose a tall black tower. Somewhere else rose another tower, like the first one’s skeleton. Low hedges. Dark buildings…Boston.
But they didn’t stop. They went beyond the buildings, and round by a river, and into a new form of flatness beyond. A marshy flatness. You could smell the flatness. And now there were no hedges, and you felt you’d be off the map any minute.
“We’ll be in the sea in a minute!” thought Albert.
The thought startled Albert for two reasons. The first was because of its implication. The second was because it was a thought! It was the first coherent thought he had had since Evesham!
Others followed, crowding upon him like shrieking, drowning things. Where are we? What time is it? What am I doing? Where’s my brain been? What’s this thing pressing into my back?
The thing was pressing hard. Ahead loomed a dark embankment. A moment of terrible clarity came to him. Power returned on the wings of frenzied necessity. He stepped on the brake, and leapt.