but her father had been in the Army, and Wanda had been an Army brat. At the age of fifteen - perhaps only a year before the mystic shift in the balance of power from the hands of the old into those of the young - she and her family had moved to Wichita, and that had been the end of that.
There was a certain lipstick she had worn, and in that long-ago summer of 1934 it had tasted like fresh raspberries to a Will Darnell who was still quite slim and clear-eyed and ambitious and young. It had been a taste to make the left hand stray to the erect and enthusiastic root of the penis in the middle of the night . . . and even before Wanda Haskins consented, they had danced that sweet and special dance in Will Darnell's dreams. In his narrow child's bed that was too short for his growing legs, they had danced.
And, now thinking of this dance, Will ceased to think and began to dream and, ceasing to dream, began to dance again.
He awakened from a sleep that had never really deepened solidly some three hours later; he awoke to the sound of the big garage door rattling up and the inside light over the door - no fluorescent but a blaring 200-watt bulb - coming on.
Will tilted his chair down in a hurry. His shoes hit the mat under his desk (BARDAHL written across it in raised rubber letters), and it was the shock of pins and needles in his feet more than anything else that brought him awake.
Christine moved slowly across the garage towards stall twenty and slipped in.
Will, hardly convinced even now that he was awake, watched her with a curious lack of excitement which perhaps only belongs to those summoned directly from their dreams. He sat upright behind his desk, hamlike arms planted on his dirty, doodled-upon blotter, and watched her.
The engine raced once, twice. The bright new exhaust pipe shot blue smoke.
Then the motor shut down.
Will sat there, not moving.
His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom's speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.
No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.
He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him . . . except maybe something like that was happening now.
He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say: The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming . . . what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontaneous, dream-oriented imagery . . .
Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins . . . but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.
And he had seen Cunningham's '58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had seen the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight-cylinder engine as it died.
Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.
He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white. The paint job was deep and clear and perfect, umarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.
The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.
Will touched the hood. It was warm.
He tried the driver's side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new