Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

began to try to look out of the cabin door, she could no longer see the pickup anywhere as an integral object. Only debris, unidentifiable pieces of this and that, lay within Mary’s field of vision outside the cabin.

      After a tune she painfully dragged herself, losing some blankets in the process, over to the door. From there she could see more. There lay a fender. One of the truck’s wheels had come to a stop against the cabin wall.

      After another time she raised her eyes. On the other side of the semi-clearing, Del’s robe was draped between two high branches of a Ponderosa pine. The robe sagged like a laden hammock. There was no sign of Del’s head or hands or feet, but the robe was certainly not empty…

      …and the scene of the cabin and the wreckage began to vanish. This vanishment was a process as intermittent as the disappearance of the lights of a house passed on the road at night behind a long screen of trees.

      On the road at night. Driving a lonely road, while slowly and surely things seen passed away.

      Driving, riding, along a desert road, with her head slumped on a shoulder that gave her, oh, such a marvelous feeling of security…

      She was back in the jouncing truck again, but no it was not the truck this time thank God it was the Blazer, and Mary was upright in the right front seat. Ahead of her the headlights speared continuously along a curve of high desert road, narrow unpaved road with bear grass and cactus along its sides. There were no other lights to be seen, in all the midnight land about.

      She had gone to the Seabright house, to pick up her things, with Thorn…

      Thorn.

      He was driving, and he glanced sideways at her for a moment, mildly, as the weight of her head came fully up off his shoulder.

      She drew a hard breath.

      “Softly, Mary. Gently! It is all right. You were remembering some unpleasant things.”

      “I was … I was right there…”

      “No, you were not there tonight. I had started to drive in the direction of the cabin, the place where the explosion happened. But it proved unnecessary to take you there. Everything worked, you were able to tell me all era route. So we are now heading back toward Phoenix—that pleasant glow in the sky ahead is from the city’s lights. We shall be there in a couple of hours.”

      A couple of hours. She yearned for the lovely city. She felt weak inside, as though recovering from an illness. Loneliness and night and disorientation overcame her. She had never felt so far from home in all her life. She had never understood before how runaways must really feel.

      Weakness turned her back toward childhood. She was a bad girl, and she wept now, for all the sins of her past life. For infatuation and sex in Idaho. For broken promises. For living with Robby, endangering his immortal soul. Was it really his idea or hers that they should not get married?

      Thorn glanced at her again. “Ah. You are experiencing a common reaction to the experience you have just been through. It will pass. Presently you will feel much better.”

      “What experience have I been through? What have you done to me?” The words came out in a snuffle.

      “What have I done? Very little. Ah, here we are. I must obtain some petrol.”

      In half a minute the deep invisibility of the night gave forth a small, almost abandoned looking gas station into the headlights. Thorn could hardly have seen the place before the headlights picked it out; he must, thought Mary, vaguely be familiar with this road. Anyway, the place was certainly closed, utterly dark and still.

      Thorn pulled in, though, and up to the gas pumps, and turned off his engine as confidently as if he had seen some of those television-commercial attendants cartwheeling out to give him service. When the headlights went out, Mary saw that a thick crescent of desert moon had risen, to make the setting a ghostly stage.

      “I shall be only a moment,” Thorn said from just outside the vehicle, and slammed the door carelessly behind him.

      Mary was not going to offer any comments on the practicality of trying to get gas here tonight; not now, and not to Thorn. With great relief, though, she found some of her mental strength returning. All right, she had done some things in her life that were wrong, but nothing all that terrible. Even when she closed her eyes again, Thorn’s face seemed to hang before them. It wasn’t his fault that she felt lousy. He understood. And he didn’t want her to cry, to suffer.

      For some reason, what Thorn wanted had suddenly become important to her. Even more important than—than—was it really love that she knew with Robby, after all?

      She opened her eyes again, just in time to see her companion vanish beside the silent station. Yes, vanish was the right word, though the building was near, and the moonlight fairly bright, it seemed that he had just disappeared.

      Mary waited quietly, wondering if the owner perhaps lives somewhere in back, and had heard the car door slam—

      And Thorn was back again, even as he had gone, standing now beside the gas pumps with keys jingling in his hand. He was rattling them impatiently against a pump, with a muttering of what sounded like Latin oaths.

      Mary said, through her partially rolled-down window: “You hypnotized me, didn’t you? We were at the house…”

      “Your property that we went to retrieve is all in the rear seat. This damnable device will not … ah.”

      Very faintly, there came the sound of small motors, electricity.

      Mary turned to look into the rear seat of the Blazer even as the dim figure outside began to pump gas into its tank. There were here familiar string-tied boxes, one of them unopened since Chicago. There was the small, battered spare suitcase that she had all but forgotten. Things she evidently didn’t really need. All her essential stuff