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

was cold in the garage. The engine purred, headlights came on, a garage door rolled itself up ahead of them, and now somewhere an alarm bell was ringing stridently.

      “Now they’re going to wonder what’s going on,” Helen said, a certain satisfaction in her voice. The Subaru leaped into the night.

* * *

      She drove Pat in a direction that must have taken them away from the center of town, for the roads remained up-and-down-hill gravel. You might have thought you were already way out in the remote countryside, except there were so many mailboxes along the road, and gravel driveways curving away from the road uphill and down. There must be a fair number of houses tucked just out of sight. In the dark it was hard to tell.

      Gradually the driveways and mailboxes thinned out, then finally ceased to appear at all. They were really getting out into the boondocks now.

      “Where we going?” Pat asked, beginning to get curious.

      Helen didn’t answer right away. “There’s something I think I want to show you,” she said at last.

      A lot of road was going by in the lonely headlights. Traffic, that had never been heavy, had thinned out now to nothing. Pat wondered, and couldn’t tell for sure, whether or not they might be driving in some great circle, and it was all a hoax, a joke on him.

      “Sometimes,” he said, to be making talk, “I feel like I been on the road a hundred years.”

      “Don’t talk like that. I feel that way too much myself.”

      “You?” He sighed. “Actually you’ve just tried it once, right? With Annie to Chicago? And now you’re home again.”

      Helen turned on the car radio. Rock music came in. But then almost at once the music began to fade, as if they were far and getting farther from the station. At last she said: “Yeah. Just that once.”

      “And that’s where I met you. Right?”

      “No.” Now her voice was remote, and there was something in it that frightened Pat. “I told you where we met. It’s no good just trying to forget what has happened, Pat. You can’t change things that way. You met Annie and me both that first night in Phoenix. Uncle Del was giving a party— that’s what he liked to call it, anyway. You were invited. I mean Gliddon brought you in, along with a few other road-kids that he collected somewhere. He’s good at collecting. And he likes that kind of party too.”

      “Helen? Maybe you could just take me back somewhere near the center of town, and let me off. I’ll do okay getting a ride from there.”

      “But you got stoned so early you probably really don’t remember anything. Dear Uncle Del and his parties. And that one was especially bad because someone got killed. And did you know, we were all in a movie that night? You’re such a movie freak, I bet you remember that much anyway if you tried hard.”

      Pat had an inward feeling, terrible and indescribable, that he got usually when a bout of mental illness was about to strike. But he knew what was going on. No way he was going to be lucky enough to get out of that.

      “Or most of us were in a movie, anyway,” Helen amended, turning off suddenly onto an almost invisible side road. “On some of us it wouldn’t take,” she added obscurely. The car jounced violently. The road, or track, was badly rutted here and obviously little used. A branch dragged across the windshield. Then the bottom of the car scraped hard on a rock or graveled hump projecting up between the ruts. Helen drove on as if she hadn’t noticed the noise. Apparently no serious damage had been inflicted.

      “Was Annie in the movie?”

      Helen didn’t answer.

      “Come on, Helen, tell me. Annie isn’t really dead, I know that much. I got this feeling about her, you know?”

      “She’s dead!” Helen snapped at him, in a new and abrupt voice. She turned her eyes from the road to look at Pat, long enough so he wished she’d turn back and watch where they were going. Again low branches of some kind clawed at the windshield, and the car rocked in and out of ruts. So far the four-wheel-drive was pulling it through. Helen had to turn back to watch her steering. Angrily she said: “How can I help you when you keep on saying crazy things like that?”

      “Sorry, I…”

      A sign came unexpectedly into the headlights. It had been crudely improvised long ago, long enough that the wood and the white paint were weather-worn, the message barely legible. It said, simply enough: BRIDGE OUT.

      “Helen, you sure you know where we’re going?”

      Helen rounded one more curve, and then slowed down some more. Not for a sign, though. The headlights had now fallen upon what at first appeared to be a wreck—an old car slewed diagonally across what was left of the road, as if it had stalled in some attempt to back out or turn around. Standing near it and squinting back into the Subaru’s headlights were a pair of young people, a dark-bearded man and a brown-haired girl. Pat knew another moment of spurious recognition; but this girl was obviously too big and sturdy to be Annie. The man with her was bigger still; both were dressed casually but well.

      “Shall we stop?” Helen asked abstractedly, as if she were conversing with herself. Actually there hardly seemed to be a choice, given the blocked and narrow road. A moment later they had come to a halt, a few feet from the stalled car. The man on foot, trying to shade his eyes with one hand, approached the Subaru warily on the driver’s side. But before he reached it the girl, her eyes now freed of the headlights’ glare, was looking in through the window that Pat had just rolled down. She looked at Pat, and at the young girl driving, and relaxed.

      Helen was saying nothing, so Pat spoke. “Can we give you guys a lift somewhere?”

      “Sure,” said