could feel the halves of it shift when he pulled at it, and he looked nervously at the street, but none of the cars driving by stalled.
Prying hard and rocking the halves away from each other, he soon had them almost completely separated. One more tug, and the thing would be opened.
He thought again of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, the one about the demon in the bottle. Here by the burned-out gas station, though, in Raffle’s car full of Raffle’s litter, on this alien street, it no longer seemed likely that some kind of old-world monster would erupt out of the little glass box.
He lifted off the top half.
And nothing happened. Inside it, laid into a fitted cavity in the glass was…a test tube? A glass vial, with a tapered black-rubber stopper. He put the halves of the glass brick down on his lap and lifted out the vial.
He could see that it was empty. He found that he was disappointed, and he wondered what the vial might once have contained. Somebody’s blood, mummy dust, gold nuggets with a curse on them?
He twisted out the stopper and sniffed the vial.
CHAPTER TEN
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a starfish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
A S if he had plugged in the wires for the second of a pair of stereo speakers—as if he’d attached the wires when the second stereo channel was not only working but had its volume cranked up high—Kootie’s head was abruptly
doubly
hit by the the ongoing music from outside now; and he found himself somehow jolted, shocked, by the mere fact of being able to hear.
Dropping the vial, he grabbed the steering wheel and gripped it hard, gritting his teeth, cold with sudden sweat, for he was falling with terrible speed through some kind of gulf—his eyes were wide open and he was aware that he was seeing the dashboard and the motionless windshield wipers and the shadowed sidewalk beyond the glass, but in his head things clanged and flashed as they hurtled incomprehensibly past, voices shouted, and his heart thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and shame all mixed together so finely that they seemed to constitute life itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur into white.
It wasn’t stopping. It was getting faster.
Blood burst out of his nose and he pitched sideways across the passenger seat onto his right shoulder, twitching and whimpering, his eyes wide open but rolled so far back into his head that he couldn’t see anything outside the boundaries of his own skull.
P ETE S ULLIVAN jackknifed up out of the little bed and scrambled for the front seat—but when he yanked the curtain back from the windshield he saw that the vanwas not careening down some hill. He almost shouted with relief; still, he tumbled himself into the driver’s seat and tromped hard on the emergency brake.
Ahead of him, beyond a motionless curb, half a dozen boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts were strolling aimlessly across a broad lawn. Their shadows were long, and the grass glowed a golden green in the last rays of sunlight.
Sullivan’s heart was pounding, and he made himself wait nearly a full minute before lighting a cigarette, because he knew his hands were shaking too badly to hang on to one.
At last he was able to get one lit and suck in a lungful of smoke. He’d had a bad dream—hardly surprising!—something about…trains? Electricity? Sudden noise after a long silence…
Machinery. His work at the nuclear power plant, at the other utilities? The whole Edison network—Con Ed, Southern California Edison…
He took another long drag on the cigarette and
Prying hard and rocking the halves away from each other, he soon had them almost completely separated. One more tug, and the thing would be opened.
He thought again of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, the one about the demon in the bottle. Here by the burned-out gas station, though, in Raffle’s car full of Raffle’s litter, on this alien street, it no longer seemed likely that some kind of old-world monster would erupt out of the little glass box.
He lifted off the top half.
And nothing happened. Inside it, laid into a fitted cavity in the glass was…a test tube? A glass vial, with a tapered black-rubber stopper. He put the halves of the glass brick down on his lap and lifted out the vial.
He could see that it was empty. He found that he was disappointed, and he wondered what the vial might once have contained. Somebody’s blood, mummy dust, gold nuggets with a curse on them?
He twisted out the stopper and sniffed the vial.
CHAPTER TEN
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a starfish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
A S if he had plugged in the wires for the second of a pair of stereo speakers—as if he’d attached the wires when the second stereo channel was not only working but had its volume cranked up high—Kootie’s head was abruptly
doubly
hit by the the ongoing music from outside now; and he found himself somehow jolted, shocked, by the mere fact of being able to hear.
Dropping the vial, he grabbed the steering wheel and gripped it hard, gritting his teeth, cold with sudden sweat, for he was falling with terrible speed through some kind of gulf—his eyes were wide open and he was aware that he was seeing the dashboard and the motionless windshield wipers and the shadowed sidewalk beyond the glass, but in his head things clanged and flashed as they hurtled incomprehensibly past, voices shouted, and his heart thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and shame all mixed together so finely that they seemed to constitute life itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur into white.
It wasn’t stopping. It was getting faster.
Blood burst out of his nose and he pitched sideways across the passenger seat onto his right shoulder, twitching and whimpering, his eyes wide open but rolled so far back into his head that he couldn’t see anything outside the boundaries of his own skull.
P ETE S ULLIVAN jackknifed up out of the little bed and scrambled for the front seat—but when he yanked the curtain back from the windshield he saw that the vanwas not careening down some hill. He almost shouted with relief; still, he tumbled himself into the driver’s seat and tromped hard on the emergency brake.
Ahead of him, beyond a motionless curb, half a dozen boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts were strolling aimlessly across a broad lawn. Their shadows were long, and the grass glowed a golden green in the last rays of sunlight.
Sullivan’s heart was pounding, and he made himself wait nearly a full minute before lighting a cigarette, because he knew his hands were shaking too badly to hang on to one.
At last he was able to get one lit and suck in a lungful of smoke. He’d had a bad dream—hardly surprising!—something about…trains? Electricity? Sudden noise after a long silence…
Machinery. His work at the nuclear power plant, at the other utilities? The whole Edison network—Con Ed, Southern California Edison…
He took another long drag on the cigarette and
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