He waded through the snow, approaching the first set of islands. The fuckstick had parked at the far set. Naturally. Don tried to glance up once, but the wind threw snow into his face in a stinging sheet and he lowered his head quickly, letting the top of the parka’s hood take the brunt of it.

He crossed in front of the car, bathed for a moment in the bright but heatless glow of its dual headlights. He struggled and floundered around to the driver’s side. The pump island’s fluorescents made the car into a garish white-over-purple burgundy shade. His cheeks were already numb. If this guy wants a dollar’s worth and asks me to check the oil, I’m telling him to cram it, he thought, and raised his head into the sting of the snow as the window went down.

“Can I h—” he began, and the h-sound of help you became a high, hissing, strengthless scream: hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhh—

Leaning out of the window, less than six inches from his own face, was a rotting corpse. Its eyes were wide, empty sockets, its mummified lips were drawn back from a few yellowed, leaning teeth. One hand lay whitely on the steering wheel. The other, clicking horridly, reached out to touch him.

Don floundered backward, his heart a runaway engine in his chest, his terror a monstrous hot rock in his throat. The dead thing beckoned him, grinning, and the car’s engine suddenly screamed, piling up revs.

“Fill it up,” the corpse whispered, and in spite of his shock and horror, Don saw it was wearing the tattered and moss-slimed remains of an Army uniform. “Fill it up, you shitter.” Skull-teeth grinned in the fluorescent light. Far back in that mouth a bit of gold twinkled.

“Catch yourself a drink, asshole,” another voice whispered hoarsely, and Buddy Repperton leaned forward in the back seat, extending a bottle of Texas Driver toward Don. Worms spilled and squirmed through his grin. Beetles crawled in what remained of his hair. “I think you must need one.”

Don shrieked, the sound bulletins up and out of him. He whirled away, running through the snow in great leaping cartoon steps; he shrieked again as the car’s engine screamed V-8 power; he looked back over his shoulder and saw that it was Christine standing by the pumps, Arnie’s Christine, now moving, churning snow up behind her rear tyres, and the things he had seen were gone—that was even worse, somehow. The things were gone. The car was moving on its own.

He had turned toward the street, and now he climbed up over the snowbank thrown up by the passing ploughs and down the other side. Here the wind had swept the pavement clear of everything except an occasional blister of ice. Don skidded on one of these. His feet went out from under him. He landed on his back with a thump.

A moment later the street was flooded with white light. Don rolled over and looked up, eyes straining wildly in their sockets, in time to see the huge white circles of Christine’s headlights as she slammed through the snowbank and bore down on him like a locomotive.

Like Gaul, all of Libertyville Heights was divided into three parts. The semicircle closest to town on the low shoal of hills that had been known as Liberty Lookout until the mid-nineteenth century (a Bicentennial Plaque on the corner of Rogers and Tacklin streets so reminded) was the town’s only real poor section. It was an unhappy warren of apartments and wooden-frame buildings. Rope clotheslines spanned scruffy back yards which were, in more temperate seasons, littered with kids and Fisher-Price toys—in too many cases, both kids and toys had been badly battered. This neighbourhood, once middle-class, had been growing tackier ever since the war jobs had dried up in 1945. The decline moved slowly at first, then began to gain speed in the ’60s and early ’70s. Now the worst yet had come, although nobody would come right out and say it, at least not in public, where he or she could be quoted. Now the blacks were moving in. It was said in private, in the better parts of town, over barbecues and drinks: the blacks, God help us, the blacks are discovering Libertyville. The area had even gained its own name—not Liberty Lookout but the Low Heights. It was a name many found chillingly ghetto-ish. The editor of the Keystone had been quietly informed by several of his biggest advertisers that to use that phrase in print, thus legitimizing it, would make them very unhappy. The editor, whose mother had raised no fools, never did so.

Heights Avenue split off from Basin Drive in Libertyville proper and then began to rise. It cut cleanly through the middle of the Low Heights and then left them behind. The road then climbed through a greenbelt and into a residential area. This section of town was known simply as the Heights. All this might seem confusing to you—Heights this and Heights-that—but Libertyville residents knew what they were talking about. When you said the Low Heights, you meant poverty, genteel or otherwise. When you left off the adjective “Low”, you meant poverty’s direct opposite. Here were fine old homes, most of them set tastefully back from the road, some of the finest behind thick yew hedges. Libertyville’s movers and shakers lived here—the newspaper publisher, four doctors, the rich and dotty granddaughter of the man who had invented the rapid-fire ejection system for automatic pistols. Most of the rest were lawyers.

Beyond this area of respectable small-town wealth, Heights Avenue passed through a wooded area that was really too thick to be called a greenbelt; the woods lined both sides of the road for more than three miles. At the highest point of the Heights, Stanson Road branched off to the left, dead-ending at the Embankment, overlooking the town and the Libertyville Drive-In.

On the other side of this low mountain (but also known as the Heights), was a fairly old middle-class neighbourhood where houses forty and fifty years old were slowly mellowing. As this area began to thin out into countryside, Heights Avenue became County Road No.2.

At ten-thirty on that Christmas Eve, a 1958 two-tone Plymouth moved up Heights Avenue, its lights cutting through the snow-choked, raving dark. Long-time natives of the Heights would have said that nothing—except maybe a four-wheel-drive—could have gotten up Heights Avenue that night, but Christine moved along at a steady thirty miles an hour, headlights probing, wipers moving rhythmically back and forth, totally empty within. Its fresh tracks where alone, and in places they were almost a foot deep. The steady wind filled them in quickly. Now and again her front bumper and hood would explode through the ridged back of a snowdrift, nosing the powder aside easily.

Christine passed the Stanson Road turnoff and the Embankment, where Arnie and Leigh had once trysted. She reached the top of Liberty Heights and headed down the far side, at first through black woods cut only by the white ribbon that marked the road, then past the suburban houses with their cosy living-room lights and, in some cases, their cheery trim of Christmas lights. In one of these houses, a young man who had just finished playing Santa and who was having a drink with his wife to celebrate, happened to glance out and see headlights passing by. He pointed it out to her.

“If that guy came over the Heights tonight,” this young man said with a grin, “he must have had the devil riding shotgun.”

“Never mind that,” she said. “Now that the kids are taken care of, what do I get from Santa?

He grinned. “We’ll think of something.”

Farther down the road, almost at the point where the Heights ceased being the Heights, Will Darnell sat in the living room of the simple two-storey frame house he had owned for thirty years. He was wearing a bald and fading blue terrycloth robe over his pyjama bottoms, his huge sack of stomach pushing out like a swollen moon. He was watching the final conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge to the side of Goodness and Generosity, but not really seeing it. His mind was once more sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that grew steadily more fascinating: Arnie, Welch, Repperton, Christine. Will had aged a decade in the week or so since the bust. He had told that cop Mercer that he would be back doing business at the same old stand in two weeks, but in his heart he wondered. It seemed that lately his throat was always slimy from the taste of that goddam aspirator.