Beware the Young Stranger

6

As the MG growled deeper into the hills on the winding county road, Keith tried to keep out of his thoughts the picture of his aunt’s lifeless body.

The strange slow-motion quality was fading from his surroundings. A bird flitted normally across the path of the MG, and the details of the creature were not agonizingly clear.

The acuity of his senses in times of crisis was frightening. It was as if the phenomenon did not really belong to the dweller in his flesh. He had heard or read somewhere that soldiers under fire often experienced the same sharp appreciation of danger. He could not remember when he had experienced the feeling for the first time. He was nagged by a dark suggestion, that his father was somehow mixed up in it. The experience went a long way back, to the beginning of memory. As if he had been under fire since the birth of consciousness.

He braked the MG and took a steep curve under light acceleration. The car was a friendly tool in his hands. Below, the shallow valley rolled blue-green. Only the throaty tones of the car broke the silence.

The MG nosed up, framing the cloudless sky in the windshield. The crest of the hill swept past and the car began to drop.

She had felt so loose, so boneless... He bit his lip. Like a bundle of rags...

And when he had jerked his hands away, there had been a smear of red jelly on his fingertip.

The memory needled his face with a sweat which the rush of wind over the MG could not evaporate.

It was an out-of-kilter, Dali-like grotesquerie, this portrait held in memory. He could identify the wavering outlines of a crouching figure as his own. He had looked at her stillness and the smear of red on his finger, and he knew she was dead.

Then a scratchy needle on an invisible turntable brought forth sound. Voices belonging to Howard Conway and Jonathan Vallancourt.

He felt again the flowing movement of his muscles, the touch of drapery fabric against his cheek. He had stood behind that frail armor, not breathing, hearing Howard and Vallancourt come into the room.

If they would only leave the room for a moment, he had thought, he could slip out the window, re-enter the Ferguson living room from the rear of the house, pretend he had been looking for his aunt.

Oh, God, let them go away. Please make them go out for just a few seconds...

Instead, Vallancourt had jerked the drapery aside.

He shivered, remembering. And not remembering. For there was no real recollection of the next few minutes, merely a sense of motion. And an echo of Howard Conway’s astounded voice: “Police, John... Head him off!” The voice had been swallowed in the roar of the MG’s engine.

Keith lifted his hand from the wheel and wiped the sleeve of his checkered sports shirt across his face.

At least they hadn’t yet headed him off. He had been able to reach this lonely, little-used road. They didn’t know his destination, his reason for being here... unless Nancy had let it slip.

No, he thought. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have. They won’t suspect I’m here.

He dared to think he might get away for good. It had happened. Men disappeared, changed their names.

The System was the thing you had to beat, not individuals. The System digested a man’s habits, appearance. It was electronic devices, test tubes, cameras, microfilmed files; it never rested, never slept. It picked up a man in one place and through simple routine discovered that his fingerprints matched those left a thousand miles away.

With the name-change, therefore, had to come a change in personality, habits. He had to find a steady job, live quietly in the endless shadow of the System, never let it touch him, never draw its attention.

A dense woodland threw a heavy blanket of shadow over the MG. The air was cooler. It felt good on his face.

“I can. I will,” he said to himself. “This won’t be like the other times when I’ve almost made the grade, only to see everything go sour.”

His stomach muscles quivered at the thought of failure, of letting the System net him. Failure now meant total destruction. They had that Cheryl Pemberton thing in Florida, and now the death of Aunt Dorcas...

The road coiled with the contour of the land, dropping gradually. Through a break in the timber he glimpsed the sapphire lake. A boarded-up summer cottage shot past, then another. Several such cottages were about the lake, but not in sufficient quantity to spoil its natural beauty.

The MG rushed past the timber line, and the splendor of the cold, silent, miles-long lake, embraced by the green hills, monopolized Keith’s view. He began to feel better.

My querencia, he thought with a bitter smile. He wondered if it was the right Spanish word. Querencia, the place where the bull feels strongest. The spot on the sand to which el toro, tortured by the blood-lusting olé from twenty thousand throats, returns time after time. The brave bull, Keith recalled, with the matador’s sword finally piercing his heart, will strive blindly to reach his querencia, his dying place.

Always the bull dies, he thought, alone on the bloody sand. Always.

He tried to shake the thought from his mind. A bull was a dumb animal, with no gift or chance for making a choice. He was born to die, his end planned before he dropped from the cow’s womb.

But a man was different.

Wasn’t he?

Opposite a flimsy pier and boathouse, a gravelled driveway lay tangent to the road. Keith braked the MG, nosing into the drive. With a brief spurt of crushed stone, the car rounded the curve; and there was Dorcas Ferguson’s lodge, a rambling, rustic building with a railed-in gallery across the front.

Parked near the house was a small sedan.

Keith stopped the MG behind the other car. He got out quickly. As he did so, he heard Nancy Vallancourt’s quick footsteps crossing the porch.

His throat tightened as he looked at her.

She ran to him, laughing in relief. And she took his hand, and leaned toward him, and kissed him lightly.

“I was wondering if you’d changed your mind,” she said.

He drew her over to the split-log steps, sat down on one of them, pulled her down beside him.

She looked away, staring across the mirror of the lake at the distant blue mist of the hills. “Have you, Keith?”

“I haven’t changed my mind,” Keith said.

“Then why that look in your eyes?” She touched his chin. He jerked away.

“I beg your pardon,” Nancy murmured. She let her hands drop to her lap.

He turned to her then. “You don’t understand, Nancy.”

“I think I do.” She jumped up. “We went over all this last night. It wasn’t easy for me to come here, you know.”

“Nancy, please...”

“I suppose it’s better this way. For a while there you almost made a believer of me, bud.”

She ran toward her car. Keith rose. Let her go, he thought. Don’t say anything. Just let her go, back to the safe and normal world.

He stood slack-mouthed, sweating. She had reached her car. She was touching the door handle.

“Nancy!”

She paused then, but she did not turn to look at him. “Save it, Keith. At least you haven’t tried to postpone the elopement and substitute sex by the lakeside.”

“Listen!” he said. “You listen to me! What do you think I am?”

“I thought I knew, Keith.”

“Okay,” he said. “Remember it, will you?”

She ventured a look over her shoulder. “Do you really want me to go?”

“Why not?”

“What’s the matter with you, Keith?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying to me. What happened in town? Did my father get across to you?”

“No.”

“Tell me if he did, Keith. He means well. He may even be right.”

“He is, Nancy. He’s a smart man. Go back.”

“Come with me. We’ll tell him what we planned, and why. We’ll make him understand that nothing can come between us.”

He said nothing.

She was facing him now, trying to grin. “All right, let’s follow the original plan and find a justice of the peace. I prefer it to returning to town, anyway.”

He said nothing. How could he tell her?

“Lately, Keith, my bed feels cold. It isn’t a place to sleep, just to think of you. How can I be so shameless?”

“Nancy, I can’t take...” It burst out of him.

“But it’s got to be legal, Keith. The way we planned.”

“Nancy...”

“No. I can’t talk myself again into treating dad this way. It’s now or not at all, Keith. If you let me get into this car and drive away, that’s it.”

He stood with dangling arms. The wind off the lake was cold. The day began to take on the old slow-motion clarity.

“All right,” he said through stiff lips. “Here it is. They’re looking for me. They’re saying I killed Aunt Dorcas.”

She stared at him as if she were about to giggle.

He ran over and caught her arms and shook her hard. “Did you hear me, Nancy?”

She continued to stare at nothing. Holding on to her arm, he guided her toward the cottage. When they reached the porch steps, she sank down.

Then something snapped in her. With a clawing motion, she put her hands to her face and started to sob.

Keith wanted to clap his palms over his ears. The sight of her, the sounds coming from her, added to everything else, were too much to bear.