Contract Null & Void

Walpurgisnacht I

He was north of the Golden Gate Bridge on the Coast Highway, pumping his way up the steep hairpin turn without even breathing hard. What he carried was fitting for Walpurgis Night, when witches supposedly made rendezvous with the devil — Allemands à l’excès, with their fear of women! Even his light expensive racing bike was a sort of parallel for the broomsticks — or he-goats — the witches rode.

The last of the light was gone, even far out across the Pacific, but he’d ridden this route a hundred times, day, night, in heat, in icy cold, in blinding fog, drizzle, outright rain — it held no terrors for him despite the almost sheer cliff face a few feet from his spinning tires.

Nobody knew where he was; since they’d come looking he’d been a ghost, a wraith, nothing more than a rumor. But held to his bike rack by tightly wound bungee cords was the evidence. He’d sleep the night at the beach cabin; in the morning he’d call, his unlikely allies would come, and the three of them would plan their strategy.

He was flooded with light. A high-compression engine screamed as it slammed the needle against the post in the red zone. Tires shrieked. He didn’t even look back. His mind was ice, computing strategy. First thought was to crowd the narrow dip of ditch between the blacktop and the rising rock face to his right. But the pursuers wouldn’t mind losing a fender if they could smear him against the cliff in the process.

His only hope was the edge of the world. He swung boldly left across the narrow road so he was inches from it, bent over his bike, his legs churning as if to send him across the finish line at the Tour de France. Finish of him instead, perhaps; but only if the driver was first-rate enough to risk the sheer fall.

The driver was. The front left fender of the black sedan brushed against his back tire as the car swept by, punching the rear of the bike out into the air beyond the edge of the road. The light machine was whipped around in a deadly circle and flung into the night. The rider went with it, shot out into space as from a catapult.

The retreating sounds of the sedan were lost in the thud and roil of surf on the black rocks far below.