But it does. it does matter. It's Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!
He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gage's nose-facing in the right direction.
Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five minute drive back to Ludlow.
52
At one o'clock that morning, Jud Crandall's telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B amp; A coupling shed with George Chapin and Renй Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey-jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it-while outside a nor'easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B amp; A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and Renй Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucks-port who-That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone-it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty-three, all sixty of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin, boyo. That's no way to run this railroad...
not tonight.
He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.
It was Rachel.
"Jud? Has he come home?"
"No," Jud said. "Rachel, where are you? You sound closer."
"I am closer," Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. "I'm at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike."
"Biddeford!"
"I couldn't stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me too. And you feel it. It's in your voice."
"Ayuh." He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadn't trembled-not before this nightmare had commenced anyway. Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.
Power's growing. I can feel it.
Dim terror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.
"Jud, please tell me what's going on!"
He supposed she had a right to know-a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Norma's heart attack, the death of the cat, Louis's question-has anyone ever buried a person up there?-Cage's death...
. and God alone knew what further link Louis might be forging right now. Eventually he would tell her. But not over the phone.
"Rachel, how come you to be on the turnpike instead of in a plane?"
She explained how she had missed her connecting flight at Boston. "I got an Avis car, but I'm not making the time I thought I would. I got a little bit lost corning from Logan to the turnpike, and I've only got into Maine. I don't think I can get there until dawn. But Jud... please. Please tell me what's happening. I'm so scared, and I don't even know why."
"Rachel, listen to me," Jud said, "you drive on up to Portland and lay over, do you hear me? Check into a motel there and get some-"
"Jud, I can't do th-."
"-and get some sleep. Feel no fret, Rachel. Something may be happening here tonight, or something may not. If something is-if it's what I think-then you wouldn't want to be here anyway. I can take care of it, I think. I better be able to take care of it because what's happening is my fault. If nothing's happening, then you get here this afternoon, and that will be fine. I imagine Louis will be real glad to see you."
"I couldn't sleep tonight, Jud."