something else entirely, and if I didn’t hang on to my senses and find the road I was done for.
I got up to my feet and looked behind me. I could see nothing at all. The shack could have been fifty feet back there, or it could have been a hundred miles. I tried to think, to see the whole clearing in my mind. I had run straight out the front door, so the road had to be somewhere to my left. I turned that way and started walking, feeling my way through the stumps and bushes of the clearing and fighting down that terrible yearning to run. Unless I got back on the road I didn’t have a chance.
Then I felt the ruts under my feet. I had found the road. I turned right, and started running again, trying to keep between them. My breath burned in my throat, and I was cursing in a monotonous kind of frenzy. Of all the cars on the lot, I’d had to pick that one. Why in the name of God hadn’t I at least asked Gulick which one it was when it cut loose on the lot Saturday afternoon? Why hadn’t I had sense enough to see the warning in the way the motor had turned over when I’d started it?
I was soaked now. Water ran out of my hair and down my neck. With every step it sloshed in my shoes. Suddenly, I felt the road swerve left, and then I was out of the clearing and starting uphill through the timber. The horn didn’t seem any louder as I got nearer to it. Was it getting weaker? I listened, holding my breath, but I couldn’t tell. That insane urgency pulled at me, starting me running again. I missed a turn in the road and stumbled into the trees, and tripped over something and fell. The purse slipped out of my hands. I squatted on my knees and groped blindly in the mud with my free hand, afraid to let go of the shoes with the other. The sound of the horn was growing weaker. There wasn’t any doubt of it. I could hear it dying. And then I could hear myself, cursing endlessly in a sort of lost and hopeless madness as I swung my hand around in the mud and water and drowned leaves, feeling for the purse. It never occurred to me I could leave it; nobody would ever find it, and there was nothing in it to identify her anyway. I had the money clasp in my pocket. I had to find it. And then my hand brushed it and it slid. I reached over and grabbed it and floundered back into the road. The pitch of the horn was changing.
I don’t know how I made the last hundred yards. I was gasping, and wind was burning in my throat. I kept falling. And all the time I could hear the horn growing weaker and weaker, like an alarm clock running down. Then I was up to it. It was off to my left. I plunged off the road, feeling ahead of me with my hands to get around the tree trunks. I bumped into the car, felt my way along it to the door and opened it, and tossed the shoes and purse inside. The horn was still groaning faintly. I yanked the hood up and groped around under it, jerking at wires I came in contact with and pounding on the firewall. It stopped. I collapsed weakly on the fender. In the sudden silence the rain sounded louder, falling through the trees and drumming on top of the car.
Getting off the fender with an effort, I closed the hood, and went back to the door and got in. Water ran off me on to the seat. I switched on the ignition with shaky fingers and reached for the starter button, weak with the unbearable suspense of it and wishing I knew how to pray. I pushed it and the starter groaned once, coming around until it engaged the motor, and then it stopped. I tried once more, and there was nothing at all. The battery was dead.
I sat there for a minute slumped over the wheel listening to the mournful sound of the rain and feeling the sick emptiness of fear inside me. It was the thing which had been goading me down there in the clearing and while I was beating my brains