Then she let herself out.
Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder's house. Why had she gone there? She hadn't passed a dozen words with Harold since she'd gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else's had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too, she remembered as she put the Vespa's ignition key in its slot. Like the sudden urge to pick up the planchette (Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers! the box said), it had seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself. His thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold's, he hadn't been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that and she'd had a moment's bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known.
Harold's was a private place.
"What's happening to me?" she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west.
Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don't you? When all the choices have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what's left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk... whatever there is to be risked.
Mostly you risk yourself.
The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa's headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the world.
The Vespa's engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there (why, you're horny, Nadine, she thought with shrill good humor, naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.
An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater - but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day - which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season - you could see Boulder, and I-25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.
Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist's sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider's stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.
Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man's-land between two spheres of influence - Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.