Twilight by William Gay Page B

but the clockhands would not rollbackward. What he needed was distance. There was a hellhound on the trail and when the dark sanctuary of trees swallowed him he just kept on going.

    Yet sometime past midnight he came cautiously back through the timber again, and the field was alive with activity. He watched with an almost dispassionate bemusement varicolored lights flickering like spirit lamps, dark folk moving about the field. Disembodied voices almost surreal in this clockless hour drifted to him without clarity or coherence. The staccato static of a scanner like a dispassionate chorus commenting on the depths his life had fallen to. An ambulance backed out onto the roadway and tires slewed on gravel and it sped offtoward town. He waited for a siren but there was none forthcoming. It vanished in silence and he sat watching its lights wind up into the hills. A bitter grief lay in him like a stone.
    Another vehicle backed around and its headlights swept the field and ceased and he could see black figures moving about in the light. A wrecker with its revolving strobe. A figure at the wrecker was paying out cable across the field toward Tyler’s truck.
    He sat getting his courage up. His story straight. At length he rose and started to enter the field and then he stopped. There was a dread familiarity about one of the figures. The angular unmistakable shape of Sutter. Shouting something back from where Tyler’s truck sat canted against the tree. Instructions, directions, who knew? Overseeing all this perhaps. The worldhad turned strange and seemed to proceed without logic, or any logic he could follow. Even as he watched the cable tautened and the wrecker backed further into the field to provide more slack, and Sutter hooked the cable and shouted. Once more the cable grew tight and the creaking winch slowly drew Tyler’s wrecked truck back into the field.
    He hunkered at the edge of the wood and watched this shabby tableau. A wind stirred, clashed in the drying leaves. Leaves drifted about him but he did not notice. The wrecker was leaving with the pickup, climbing the steep embankment to the roadbed, its lights canted upward briefly limning moving trees then the clouds absorbed them and there was only a faint glow like some celestial light flaring behind them and the wrecker cut into the road with the headlights clearing out its path. Other engines cranked; all this seemed to be drawing to a close. One by one the other cars followed the wrecker likemourners in a funeral procession. Then the field lay dark and revenantial and silent and there came the cry of an owl.
    Still he sat. He seemed to have nowhere else to be, no one in all the world to talk to. The image of the ambulance lights wending upward over the horizon of dark hills would not fade, it seemed to have seared itself onto his retinas. A lifetime ago she strolled up the roadbed toward the school bus, books clutched defensively against her breasts, her face already closed against the anticipated catcalls and whistles. A lifetime ago she led him to the first-grade door and released his hand and consigned him to life. Little sister Death, commended to Fenton Breece.

    The house sat in the haunted glade. Fairytale cottage, gingerbread house, but where is the playful troll? The warlock seems not about. Somewhere about his rounds perhaps. A pale ribbon of nighcolorless smoke rose plumb from the flue and dissipated in the windless air.
    Tyler pillowed his face against the polished walnut and squeezed the trigger. A windowlight went and he heard glass fall somewhere inside. He waited. A rifle barrel might appear at a shotout window. A warping face appear like a face from a nightmare. He profoundly hoped it would. He just lay there with the sun warm on his back shooting out window glasses. Playing X and O with the six-pane windows. When at length he was bored with this he reloaded the rifle and with it yoked across his shoulders he went off down the slope toward the