Festival of Fear by Graham Masterton Page A

drown them out.
    I jumped down from my Jeep and ran across the road, dodging around the traffic. The truck driver was climbing down from his cab, too – a heavily-built Mexican in a red T-shirt and baggy green shorts, and a Dodgers cap screwed on sideways. He stared at me with bulging brown eyes, and said, ‘There wasn’t a damn thing I could do, man. I stood on everything, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.’
    The passenger door of Jack’s Cayenne had been crushed in so far that it had bent the steering wheel. The tangle of metal and plastic was almost incomprehensible, but I could see blonde hair and blood and one of Kylie’s hands reaching out from a gap in between the door and the front wheel-arch – unmarked, perfect, with silver rings on every finger – as if she were reaching out for help.
    â€˜Kylie!’ Jack was begging her. ‘Kylie, tell me that you’re OK! Kylie !’
    He climbed up on to the side of the SUV and tried to wrench open the passenger door with his bare hands, but it was wedged in far too tight.
    â€˜ Somebody call an ambulance !’ he screamed. ‘ For Christ’s sake, somebody call an ambulance !’
    Of course, somebody already had, and it was only a few minutes before we heard the whooping and scribbling of a distant siren. Jack stayed where he was, leaning against the smashed-in door, pleading with Kylie to still be alive.
    â€˜I stood on everything,’ the truck driver repeated. ‘There wasn’t a damn thing I could do.’
    â€˜I know,’ I said, and gave him a reassuring pat on his big, sweat-soaked shoulder.
    Two squad cars arrived, and then an ambulance, and then a fire truck, and the police made all of us spectators shuffle across to the other side of the street. The fire crew started work with cutters and hydraulic spreaders, trying to extricate Kylie from the wreckage. I could see sparks flying and hear the arthritic groaning of metal being bent.
    Jack was sitting on the back step of the ambulance, with a shiny metallic blanket around him. A paramedic was standing beside him, with one hand raised, as if he were giving him the benediction.
    â€˜I can’t afford to lose my license, man,’ said the truck driver. ‘I got all new carpets to pay for.’
    But I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was frowning off to my left, further along Olympic. About fifty yards away, I could see Sheba, Jack’s Great Dane. She was standing by the side of the road, quite still, more like a statue of a dog than a real dog.
    Looking back at the smashed-up Cayenne, I could see then that the rear offside door had burst open in the collision, and that Sheba must have either been thrown out, or jumped out. I was just about to tell one of the police officers that she was loose when Jack turned around and saw her, too, and sent the paramedic off to bring her back.
    Two police officers came over to us. One of them shouted out, ‘Anybody here witness this accident? If you did, I want to hear from you.’
    I was interviewed twice by two highly disinterested detectives from the Highway Patrol, one of whom should have had a master’s degree in nose picking, but after the second visit I received a phone call from my attorney telling me that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. Nobody had clearly witnessed what had happened, not even Jack, and the truck driver had been estimated to have been traveling at nearly forty miles an hour in his attempt to beat the traffic signals.
    I wrote Jack a letter of condolence, but I think I did it more for my benefit than for his, and I never sent it. Kylie’s casket was flown back to Australia, to be interred at the church in Upper Kedron, near Brisbane, where she had been confirmed at the age of thirteen.
    Occasionally, friends of mine would tell me that they had run across Jack at medical conventions, or in bars. They all seemed to give me a similar story,