999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [245]
The weather was colder again today. I don’t feel hunted, exactly. It’s as if someone is reaching out of the dark towards me, as if the opaque brown fog is beginning to bulge as someone pushes against it from the outside. Think this is going to be a cold winter.
Seventeen is the last year of being young. I remember when I was a kid, about fourteen, I guess, thinking how weird it would feel to be older. I could just about understand the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Eighteen seemed one of those ages like twenty-one where it’s not so much an age as a legal marker. A boundary line. You don’t think, Oh, it’s going to be like so-and-such being eighteen, you just think about the things that aren’t going to be illegal anymore. Nineteen, though. That seemed really old. Being nineteen was grown up and over the wall. Of course it doesn’t seem that way now. But it did then. Now I realize that 19 is 1 and 9, and 1 + 9 = 10 and 1 + 0 = 1. The first year of being old. 1 + 8 is 9, a ground zero year.
You have to watch everything very carefully.
I think about people waiting for birthday cards, Christmas cards. A phone call which isn’t going to come. Mothers, mainly. I wish I could say it made a big difference, but it doesn’t.
Squaring numbers is very easy. You just take the number and multiply it by itself. Anybody can do that. It’s an easy road to travel, like time in the usual direction.
Roads. I remember that time, back in England, when I drove up to Cambridge from London on the M11 motorway. If there’s any bad weather anywhere in the world, it’ll be on the M11. I’m telling you. It feels as if the road has been built to make the worst of it. There are high stretches, where strong winds seem to grab hold of the car and drag it towards other lanes; average stretches, where rain seems to sheet into the windscreen almost parallel to the ground; and then there are the dips. Especially just outside Cambridge there are long low patches, where fog collects and sits in a clump like porridge in a bowl. I used to have a girlfriend who lived there. For a year, in fact over a year, I used to drive up the M11 every weekend. I saw it in spring, summer, autumn, winter—and regardless, the weather there was worse than anywhere else. One night in October I drove down the slipway onto the motorway and found myself completely enveloped in fog. For the next ten miles visibility wasn’t even as far as the end of the hood of the car. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I couldn’t see my own headlights, never mind anyone else’s. I drove slower and slower and slower. I knew that after the next junction the road gradually got a little higher, pulled itself out of the trough all around the town. I kept waiting for the junction. Nothing passed me, and I saw no other cars, no headlights on the other side of the carriageway, no taillights on my own. After a long time I passed the first exit. Usually the fog lifted then. On that night it stayed exactly the same. Just as thick, just as deadening, just as much like driving slowly through the middle of a monstrous snowdrift that reached up to the sky. There was no sound, except for the hum of the engine. I’d turned the radio off, to avoid distraction. I couldn’t see a thing outside the car, except for slow swirls within the mist. I’d been going for about thirty-five or forty minutes when I started to feel uneasy, and after another ten I was beginning to get really nervous. I knew the M11 like the back of my hand, and a message was starting to persistently knock on the back of my mind, where the autopilot sits and keeps an eye on things. Isn’t it about time, it was saying, that we passed another exit? In normal conditions, I would pass the first exit about ten minutes into the journey, and the second at the half hour mark. This night was far from