of their engines. The Charger was boring straight down at them. It never tried to get out of the way and the cabbie froze at the wheel.
“Jeeeeee ...”
Johnny was barely aware of the Mustang flashing by on their left. Then the cab and the Charger met head-on and Johnny felt himself being lifted up and out. There was no pain, although he was marginally aware that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame.
There was the sound of smashing glass. A huge gout of flame stroked its way up into the night. Johnny’s head collided with the cab’s windshield and knocked it out. Reality began to go down a hole. Pain, faint and far away, in his shoulders and arms as the rest of him followed his head through the jagged windshield. He was flying. Hying into the October night.
Dim flashing thought: Am I dying? Is this going to kill me?
Interior voice answering: Yes, this is probably it.
Flying. October stars flung across the night. Racketing boom of exploding gasoline. An orange glow. Then darkness.
His trip through the void ended with a hard thump and a splash. Cold wetness as he went into Carson’s Bog, twenty-five feet from where the Charger and the cab, welded together, pushed a pyre of flame into the night sky.
Darkness.
Fading.
Until all that was left seemed to be a giant red-and-black wheel revolving in such emptiness as there may be between the stars, try your luck, first time fluky, second time lucky, hey-hey-hey. The wheel revolved up and down, red and black, the marker ticking past the pins, and he strained to see if it was going to come up double zero, house number, house spin, everybody loses but the house. He strained to see but the wheel was gone. There was only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho. Cold limbo.
Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.
Chapter 3
1
At some time a little past two A.M, on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.
Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged halfway across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.
Vera’s voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. “Phone.”
“Yeah,” he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.
He went down to what Vera liked to call “the phone nook.” It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two-hundred-and-forty-pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader’s Digests, and Fate magazine.
Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.
A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you’d be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.
Hoping for the middle choice, Herb picked up the phone. “Hello?”
A crisp male voice said: “Is this the Herbert Smith residence?”
“Yes?”
“To whom am I speaking, please?”
“I’m Herb Smith. What ...”
“Will you hold for a moment?”
“Yes, but who ...”
Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone—bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions—the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modem life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, “Hold the phone, willya?” and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn’t