THE DARK RIDERS: A TALE IN THIRTEEN RIDES
RIDE THE FIRST: CAR AND SALESMAN
Seventeen-year-old Teri Ross had never in her entire life seen anything like the car sitting outside her house when she got home from Mayfield High, and thanks to her brother Brad, she had seen a lot of cars. She could hardly believe it was real.
For one thing, the car, which curved way far down front and back from its center, was so low to the ground that Teri seriously wondered what would happen if it hit a bump. Even weirder, wheel covers that were part of the body swooped down so far you couldn’t see the tires at all. The covers would have to retract when the car moved; they would absolutely have to.
As if that wasn’t enough, there was the color. It was deep purple all over, but, and Teri didn’t know how else to put it, there were lights in it. Flashes of pink, red, and occasional dark blue surfaced in its hood, its roof, and its doors, but they came and went, as if welling up from some secret and hidden depth in the metal before fading away again.
Teri started walking around it, and from every angle it seemed the same: sleek, almost glowing with its deep purple color, powerful, impatient to be driven, likely to take off at any second and leave Mayfield, Illinois far behind.
She had walked completely around it once when she realized how much she didn’t like it. There was something brutal and nasty about it, almost like a bad smell. It just felt—wrong.
The next second Teri, really startled, stepped quickly back. As clear as day, the ridiculous thought had come to her that the car didn’t like her, either.
It was a relief to turn away from it and her crazy ideas about it and walk up the sidewalk to her Christmas box house, with its white siding and bright red trim. Sometimes she thought it was boring, but right now the oak and maple trees and quiet neighborhood around it seemed reassuringly normal.
She stopped short in the living room. There was a stranger there, talking to her older brother, Brad, and their mother. Brad, dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt, was sitting on the couch looking dazed, and that was odd; he would usually be standing up stretched as high as his stocky five foot seven frame would let him, square-jawed face stubborn and determined, when someone like the stranger was in the room. It was a guy thing with Brad. Mom, dressed for work in a neat blue skirt and blouse, was sitting in the dark mahogany chair, looking puzzled and slightly upset.
The stranger turned so quickly that Teri was startled and took a step back. Mom also stood up.
“Teri,” Mom said, “this is Mr. Lissard. He is a salesman.”
Here her mother stopped, as if not sure how to explain any more his being here. Mr. Lissard didn’t leave a long silence.
“So you are Teri,” he said, but not really like he was pleased that she was there. He had a quick, smooth voice that seemed to fill the room. “Do you like the Python?”
He was a big man for somebody so light on his feet, well over six two, and sleek, like the car outside. His dark suit fit him as if it had been molded on his muscular body, and his face was tanned and handsome and regular, reminding Teri of a local TV anchor, but his head seemed small for someone so large. He had well-groomed dark hair, his lips were parted in a full, even smile, and his teeth were too clean and too white.
“Is that what the car outside is called?” Teri asked. She didn’t like the name any more than the car, and as for the salesman...
“It is,” the man said in a solemn, almost reverent voice. “A revolutionary car, the only car of its kind. Just driving it is a reward in itself and a key to fulfilling larger ambitions. It can re-make your entire world. This is the car your brother has a rare, exclusive chance to own.”
That Teri did not believe.
“It must be really expensive,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” the salesman said, his voice softer now. “There is a price to pay. Very much. Only special people, like your brother—I had heard of his love for cars—find very special terms given to them for the chance to drive a Python. Not everyone has that kind of luck. No, indeed.”
“You’ve heard about Brad?” Teri asked. Brad liked cars, but he wasn’t famous for it or anything. “Are you from Mayfield?”
The salesman laughed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “From Cleveland. I have gotten to know people here, though.”
“What’s the difference where he’s from?” Brad said irritably. “He’s here to talk to me, not you.”
Teri flushed, the car salesman’s smile, already really wide, got a little wider, and she realized that the salesman didn’t like her any more than his car did. She was about to say something when her mother intervened.
“Teri,” she said, “come into the music room.”
Her mother’s voice had a warning note in it that Teri knew well. She got up without saying anything and left the living room to Brad and the salesman, her mother following.
Not many families had a music room, Teri knew, but not many families had a mother who used to teach piano and a daughter who wanted to be a concert pianist. By long habit Teri headed for the piano bench as her mother settled into the red-upholstered arm chair.
“Mom,” Teri burst out, “we can’t afford another car, especially one like that. Look at it! It must cost close to a hundred thousand dollars! Why is this Mr. Lissard even here talking to us? They’ll take our house away!”
“Calm down, Teri,” her mother said, with a faint smile. It was something she said to Teri a lot. To Teri’s annoyance Brad had started saying it recently too, and since he was short and blond like Mom and had the same pinkish square face, it really got to her. She told him to stop, but of course that only made him do it more. She herself was dark and taller, like her dad.
“But Mom,” she said.
“We aren’t buying a car, Teri,” her mother said. “I told Brad I wouldn’t co-sign any papers for him. I’m sure that car is expensive, and whatever that salesman says, he knows Brad doesn’t have the money to make even low payments on his own.”
“Oh,” said Teri. That was true. Brad would have to have six jobs like his to pay for anything like the Python.
“We couldn’t really even afford the Mustang,” she couldn’t help adding. The Mustang, a collector car that would have been worth a lot if it had been in better shape when he and Mr. Seligman got it, was Brad’s pride and joy.
“Maybe not,” her mother said, looking a little more tired. “But cars are the thing Brad loves, Teri, like you love the piano. We have to try to afford both.”
That shut Teri up. A cold, guilty feeling shot through her. She took lessons with the only teacher who would do her any good, at the university fifty miles from here; there were fees for the contests she entered, and there was transportation to both lessons and contests, as well as the sheet music she seemed to always have to be buying. Most expensive of all were the payments on the Steinway baby grand piano that had been going on for four years already. As if that weren’t enough, there was her dream of entering Julliard, or one of the other big music schools. She knew it all really weighed down on her mother. She felt bad about it, but it was her dream, and she couldn’t stop wanting it.
“—only car made that runs this way. Not the internal combustion engine, not electric, not just solar, and not atomic. Its combination solar and—”
The salesman’s raised voice, its smooth power reminding Teri of the car he sold, broke into the silence between Teri and her mother. Mom had obviously stopped to listen for a moment, then realized what she was doing and spoke up again.
“It will all work out somehow, baby,” Mom, looking at her keenly, said. She got up, came over, looked down at the keys of the piano with a kind of half smile, and ran the fingers of her right hand gently over them. She kissed Teri on the forehead and went on out.
At least starting to practice would take her mind off what was happening in the other room. Teri opened the lid of her piano bench and took out the sheet music for Schumann’s Carnaval. All its pieces started with different combinations of the same four notes, taken from the name of the town where a girl Schumann admired lived, and it was about the strange dancing and cavorting characters of the Harlequinade. Teri had had to go on line to find out about those stars of pantomime and puppet show whose masks and makeup both hid them and also told you what they were like. It wasn’t one of her current pieces, but somehow it seemed right for the salesman.
It was May and the branches of the two maple trees outside the window were moving in the wind, the light around them a sort of greenish-yellow from the sun on the leaves. They would be her inspiration today. She held her hands above the keys. They automatically curved and took on the right shape. She pulled them back, and they lost it automatically. She advanced them again.
Strike. Her hands were making the grand, stirring chords of the “Preambule” come to life. It wasn’t very long, but it cleared everything out of her mind but the music. The notes lived not only in the air, as she struck the keys, but in her head, as a beautiful pattern, something she was building with her mind as much as her hands. The pattern glowed with emotions; it was alive, like the maple trees, only in a different way.
“Pierrot” came next, dancing sadly and gracefully by in his white face and white costume with its green decorations. In playing Carnaval she was playing a pattern of masks, which could tell or hide a truth, changing things into what they were not, and even do harm. She was just in the next section, where Harlequin himself, in his multi-colored costume, invisible to some of the other dancers, but not to her, cavorted wildly—
“AHHHH!”
The scream from the other room startled Teri so badly she crashed her hands down on the keyboard. Rushing out to the living room, Teri stopped cold when she saw—
The Python salesman was curled up on their living room rug, his head almost between his knees and his hands over his ears, moaning harsh, high-pitched squealing sounds, while Mom and Brad looked on in astonishment.
Slowly the squealing got softer while they all stood there staring, and the salesman uncurled slightly; then he rolled up onto his knees, his hands clutched weirdly at either end of his still grinning lips, as if he were afraid they were going to come right off his face. He turned in Teri’s direction, and it was almost like he was blind; he didn’t seem to be seeing her at all. The next instant he dropped his hands to his sides.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked him.
“Headaches,” the salesman said, not at all smoothly. “Splitting. It is the air. I must go now. Come back later. At a better time. The atmosphere is not right.”
He got slowly to his feet, staggering slightly. He raised his hands to his mouth quickly, as if still worried his lips might come off, and then he dropped them again. As if there weren’t enough weirdness, Teri saw that after his rolling around on the floor and everything, his dark suit seemed completely unwrinkled. They were all staring at him.
“The Python,” he said, staggering slightly. “Wonderful. Will take you places. You have never been. Experience different. Car. Owner. One with your car.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Teri’s mother asked.
Teri didn’t think he could be all right. Nothing he was saying made any sense.
Suddenly the salesman seemed to be really seeing them again. He looked around, first at one of them, then at another. The look he gave her, which nobody else could see, went so far beyond the dislike she had suspected that she stepped back slightly.
“Must go now,” he said. “Back later.”
They all moved together to the front window to watch as he staggered to the car, got in, and drove off, not all that steadily.
“That,” Mom said at last, “was very strange behavior. Can that man be—well, quite normal?”
“He’s O.K.,” Brad said sullenly.
“Really?” Teri asked, her voice rising higher than she wanted. “Like all the normal people roll around on the floor, try to tear their faces off, and glare at everybody?”
Brad flushed.
“Maybe your playing gave him a headache,” he said angrily. “Sometimes it gives me one.”
“Yeah, right,” Teri said, now also angry, but her Mom broke in before either of them could say anything else.
“That’s enough! Brad, it’s about time for you to get ready to go to work. Teri, go finish your practicing.”
Brad muttered something under his breath and went out. Teri went back to the music room, remembering guiltily how hard things were now for Mom.
By the time she was done, Brad was gone to his service station job. Brad had graduated from Mayfield High in December, and was now trying to get enough money together to start community college next September. Things were rough for Brad too, Teri reminded herself, and although that didn’t excuse his being a butthole, she wasn’t that mad at him anymore. What she couldn’t get out of her head were the strange and sullen car, the eerie lights in its paint job, and its unpleasant salesman. She found herself replaying his sudden fit and rolling on the floor over and over in her head; his hands had clutched and unclutched as if he could not control them, and there had been a slight but steadily increasing hissing undertone to his voice. Most of all, she could not forget how wide his smile had gotten, so wide it seemed about to tear his whole face off.
She texted her two best friends about it, describing everything, and then felt stupid because she hadn’t used her cell to take the picture of the Python Shannon had asked for. The whole thing, Teri thought, would probably give her bad dreams.
She lay in bed, and the salesman’s face looked in at the window. He was smiling, or more like grimacing, both face and smile stretching wider and wider, until they were all she could see, and the stretching lips of the smile threatened to—
The salesman’s face tore away.
It didn’t just dissolve and leave nothing; no horror movie mess lay underneath it. There was color: a confusing mass of blues and greens, a medley of browns changing into deep crimson, and over and around all, a strange orange-red light. Teri was not afraid; the colors that had been released by the disappearance of the face were beautiful. There were shades among them that she had never seen before: blues that were no blue she knew and greens darker and more passionate than the darkest and wettest grass. Most of all, warmth, a warmth she wanted to sun herself with, came from the orange light.
The colors shifted and took more definite shape. The blue rippled softly and in waves, as if stirred by an unseen wind; the green rose and fell. Suddenly, Teri knew.
She was seeing a place. The face of the salesman had covered the face of a new world.
A hissing sound filled her ears. From somewhere there was a moan, and suddenly from all sides a new color, a sullen red, dark and malignant, poured onto the others, moving with deadly speed, faster as the hissing grew louder, covering everything in its path as if it were the lava and ash of a volcano. What it covered it changed, forming—
Teri was lying on her bed in the dark, heart pounding. The Python salesman’s face, Mr. Lissard’s face, torn by a wide grimace, stared at her from outside her window.
She shrieked; the face vanished. She lay still, unable to move, her heart pounding.
“What’s wrong, Weed?”
It was Brad’s voice, kept low so as not to wake Mom. His room was next to hers. He didn’t call her “weed” much anymore; he had started calling her when she had hit her first growth spurt.
He came into the room and closed the door behind him at the same time Teri turned on her bedroom light. They had worked that out earlier this year. Teri had been having a lot of bad dreams, and if she cried out Brad came in, closing the door so that their light or their talk wouldn’t wake Mom. He stayed until she calmed down and felt better.
Teri looked at the window again: no face. Suddenly she felt really guilty for complaining about the stupid car.
“It was a nightmare, I guess,” she said. “I thought I saw a face at the window,” she went on.
Brad walked to her window, peered out of it from different directions, and then opened the screen and stuck his head out.
“Nobody out there,” he said, turning to face her. “No ladders or anything, either.”
He hadn’t even made his voice sound sarcastic.
“Thanks, Brad,” Teri said. “Did I wake you up?”
Brad shook his head.
“I just got back from work,” he said. “It’s only about midnight.”
“Thanks,” Teri said again, looking at him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but they didn’t do that. Brad smiled at her, though.
“Sleep tight, Weed,” he said. “No more nightmares.”
He didn’t remember that was what Dad used to say, or he wouldn’t have said it. He went out, and Teri shut off the light and told herself firmly that it had been a nightmare, but deep inside something didn’t believe that’s all it had been.
Even though it hadn’t been real, something was telling her it had also been a warning.
THE FIRST OUTRIDE
It was when Dobbs, his Chihuahua, stopped dead and gave one short bark that Mr. Alford looked at the neat white house across the street and saw the shape at one of its upper windows.
He should have been able to see it clearly. He was only taking Dobbs for a second walk, and later than usual—around midnight—because the moon was bright, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and bright shining stars and a warm little breeze seemed to freshen things and promise that if only you went out, something special would happen. Maybe, Mr. Alford thought, he would see something special, or remember how he had used to feel, years ago.
So it was light enough even without the streetlight on the corner, but he still couldn’t make out what was at the window, except that it was moving like it was alive, but how could that be? There was no ladder or anything to stand on and there were no wings, so it would have to be somehow clinging to the side of the house. Of course maybe it wasn’t alive, because there was some trick of light, or of shadow, around it and nowhere else, a sort of blurring like an out of focus photograph. One thing he could tell, even with the blurring, was that it wasn’t human; the area of the blur had the wrong dimensions.
It was alive! Mr. Alford’s heart started beating faster as all of a sudden the thing turned until it was head down—head down!—and clambered more swiftly than any human could down the side of the house to the ground.
Mr. Alford drew a deep breath, his head pounding with excitement. This could be dangerous. He knew he should walk away, but he had come out looking for something new, something to liven up the life he shared with Dobbs, and this was certainly new. He began to cross the street, keeping his eyes on the thing, which was now moving, fast, in his direction. He still didn’t recognize what it was, because just like its shape was wrong, so was its movement. It was jerky in a way that made it hard for him to focus on it. In a second it would be close enough that surely what it was would be clearer.
Just then the leash jerked in his hand and curled around his legs, and involuntarily he looked down.
“Dobbs!” he said sharply to the shivering, obviously fearful little Chihuahua. “Heel!”
When he looked up again he started and took a step back, almost tripping over the leash. About six feet away stood a grinning man, much taller than his own five six and much more muscular than he was; Mr. Alford would describe himself as “portly.” The man wore a smoothly fitting dark business suit, and he was movie-star good looking. Mr. Alford disliked him on sight.
“You should not be here,” the man said in a hissing voice, his grin widening even as he said it. “You should not have seen us.”
There were two more strange movements in the darkness, and before Mr. Alford could even blink, two other men uncannily like the first—same size, same muscles, same suit, same grin—were standing beside him.
“Now look here,” Mr. Alford began apprehensively, but in his surprise he had slackened his grip on the leash, and with a sudden jerk, Dobbs was loose and running as fast as he could. Mr. Alford turned to look—
—and saw one of the three men bend over, and there was a blur. The next moment the man had caught Dobbs and was standing upright, his grin widening even as he held up Mr. Alford’s Chihuahua, and the nightmare really began.
“Dobbs!” Mr. Alford yelled, and then the other two men were clutching him.
“We will show you,” the first one, grinning more widely than ever, “something new: a whole new world.”