“Grab on and help me,” I said.

Leigh placed both of her hands over my right hand and we pulled together. That crackling sound became a little louder, but still the ice wouldn’t quite give up its grip on the foot of the door.

“We’ve almost got it,” I said. My right leg was throbbing unpleasantly, and sweat was running down my cheeks. “I’ll count. On three, give it all you’ve got. Okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

“One… two… three!”

What happened was the door came free of the ice all at once, with absurd, deadly ease. It flew upwards on its tracks, and I stumbled backward, my crutches flying. My left leg folded underneath me and I landed on it. The deep snow cushioned the fall somewhat, but I still felt the pain as a kind of silver bolt that seemed to ram upward from my thigh all the way to my temples and back down again. I clenched my teeth over a scream, barely keeping it in, and then Leigh was on her knees in the snow beside me, her arm around my shoulders.

“Dennis! Are you all right?”

“Help me up.”

She had to do most of the pulling, and both of us were gasping like winded runners by the time I was on my feet again with my crutches propped under me. Now I really needed them. My left leg was in agony.

“Dennis, you won’t be able to work the clutch in that truck now—”

“Yeah, I will. Help me back, Leigh.”

“You’re as white as a ghost. I think we ought to get you to a doctor.”

“No. Help me back.”

“Dennis—”

“Leigh, help me back!”

We inched our way back to Petunia through the snow leaving shuffling, troubled tracks in the snow behind us. I reached up, laid hold of the steering wheel, and did a chin-up to get in, scraping feebly at the running board with my right leg… and still, in the end, Leigh had to get behind me and put both hands on my kiester and shove. At last I was behind Petunia’s wheel, hot and shivering with pain. My shirt was wet with snowmelt and sweat. Until that day in January of 1979, I don’t think I knew how much pain can make you sweat.

I tried to jam down the clutch with my left foot and that silver bolt of pain came again, making me throw my head back and grind my teeth until it subsided a little.

“Dennis, I’m going down the street and find a phone and call a doctor.” Her face was white and scared. “You broke it again, didn’t you? When you fell?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you can’t do that, Leigh. It’ll be your folks or mine if we don’t end it now. You know that. LeBay won’t stop. He has a well-developed sense of vengeance. We can’t stop.”

“But you can’t drive it!” she wailed. She looked up into the cab at me, crying now. The hood of her parka had fallen back in our mutual struggle to get me up into the driver’s seat, where I now sat in magnificent uselessness. I could see a scatter of snowflakes in her dark blond hair.

“Go inside there,” I said. “See if you can find a broom, or a long stick of wood.”

“What good will that do?” she asked, crying harder.

“Just get it, and then we’ll see.”

She went into the dark maw of the open door and disappeared from view. I held onto my leg and sparred with terror. If I really had broken my leg again, there was a good chance I’d be wearing a built-up heel on my left foot for the rest of my life. But there might not even be that much of my life left if we couldn’t put a stop to Christine. Now there was a cheery thought.

Leigh came back with a push broom. “Will this do?” she asked.

“To get us inside, yes. Then we’ll have to see if we can find something better.”

The handle was the type that unscrews. I got hold of it, unthreaded it, and tossed the bristle end aside. Holding it in my left hand along my side—just another goddam crutch I pushed down the clutch with it. It held for a moment, then slipped off. The clutch sprang back up. The top of the handle almost bashed me in the mouth. Lookin good, Guilder. But it would have to do.

“Come on, get in,” I said.

“Dennis, are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

She went around to the passenger side and got in. I slammed my own door, depressed Petunia’s clutch with the broom-handle, and geared into first. I had the clutch halfway out and Petunia was just starting to roll forward when the broom-handle slipped off the clutch again. The septic tanker ran inside Darnell’s Garage with a series of neck-snapping jerks, and when I slammed my right foot down on the brake, the truck stalled. We were mostly inside.

“Leigh, I’ve got to have something with a wider foot,” I said. “This broom-handle don’t cut it.”

“I’ll see what there is.”

She got out and began to walk around the edge of the garage floor, hunting. I stared around. Creepy, Leigh had said, and she was right. The only cars left were four or five old soldiers so gravely wounded that no one had cared enough to claim them. All the rest of the slant spaces with their numbers stencilled in white paint were empty. I glanced at stall twenty and then glanced away.

The overhead tyre racks were likewise nearly empty. A few baldies remained, heeled over against one another like giant doughnuts blackened in a fire, but that was all. One of the two lifts was partially up, with a wheel-rim caught beneath it. The front-end alignment chart on the right-hand wall glimmered faintly red and white, the two headlight targets like bloodshot eyes. And shadows, everywhere. Overhead, big box-shaped heaters pointed their louvers this way and that, roosting up there like weird bats.

It seemed very much like a death-place.

Leigh had used another of Jimmy’s keys to open Will’s office. I could see her moving back and forth in there through the window Will had used to look out at his customers… those working joes who had to keep their cars running so they could blah-blah-blah. She flipped some switches, and the overhead fluorescents came on in snowcold ranks. So the electric company hadn’t cut off the juice. I’d have to have her turn the lights off again—we couldn’t afford to risk attracting attention—but at least we could have some heat.

She opened another door and disappeared temporarily from view. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty now.

She came back, and I saw that she was holding an O-Cedar mop, the kind with the wide yellow sponge along the foot.

“Would this be any good?”

“Only perfect,” I said. “Get in, kiddo. We’re in business.”

She climbed up once more, and I pushed the clutch down with the mop. “Lots better,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the bathroom,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“Bad in there?”

“Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there’s a whole pile of mouldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.”

So that was what Darnell left behind him, I thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars. I felt cold again, and thought that if I had my way, I’d see this place bulldozed flat and pasted over with hottop. I could not shake the feeling that it was an unmarked grave of a sort—the place where LeBay and Christine had killed my friend’s mind and taken over his life.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Leigh said, looking around nervously.

“Really? I kind of like it. I was thinking of moving in.” I caressed her shoulder and looked deeply into her eyes. “We could start a family,” I breathed.

She held up a fist. “Want me to start a nosebleed?”

“No, that’s all right. For what it’s worth, I can’t wait to get out of here, either.” I drove Petunia the rest of the way inside. I found that I could run the clutch pretty well using the O-Cedar mop… in first gear, at least. The handle had a tendency to bend, and I would have preferred something thicker, but it would have to do unless we could find something better in the meantime.