Christine - Stephen King [63]
I looked at Arnie's Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.
I wanted to look under the hood.
Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.
I went around to the front (I didn't like to stand in front of it - no good reason why not, I just didn't) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn't get it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.
I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn't, but at least technically
But this was something else entirely.
The web of cracks in the windscreen was smaller.
I was positive it was smaller.
My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay's garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windscreen had been a spider's web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.
Now the spider's web seemed smaller, simpler - you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn't been able to before, I was sure of that (just a trick of the light, that's all, my mind whispered).
Yet I had to be wrong - because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windscreen; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks shrink -
I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of course it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the flawed windscreen, and I had seen it the second time in the shadows of LeBay's garage. Now I was seeing it under these high-set fluorescent tubes. Three different kinds of light, and all it added up to was an optical illusion.
Still, I wanted to look under the hood. More than ever,
I went around to the driver's side door and gave it a yank. The door didn't open. It was locked. Of course it was; all four of the door-lock buttons were down, Arnie wouldn't be apt to leave it unlocked in here, so anybody could get inside and poke around. Maybe Repperton was gone, but genus Creepus was weed-common. I laughed again - silly old Dennis - but this time it sounded even more shrill and shaky. I was starting to feel spaced-out, the way I sometimes felt the morning after I smoked a little too much pot.
Locking the Fury's doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.
I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than a rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific - I am quite sure of that - except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the release.
And because it didn't want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?
That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).
A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of