The pain was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished
he had a bandage, but he didn't, and that was that.
He was in a freight car--had hopped it on the run at the yards, daring
to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to
hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation
to trouble.
The railroads were safer--far safer than either cars or air transport,
notoriously a lightning-rod attracting possession. Chandler was
surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car
smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting
forward and stopping again.
Then there was silence. It endured.
Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little
sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was
wrong.
It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a
few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to
be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their
amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about,
ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind,
had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and
spells--certainly they had not kept him from a brutal rape--but he felt
uneasy without them.... The train still was not moving. In the silence
he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.
He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden
wall, and looked out.
The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher
than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above
the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted
uncertainly, then stopped again.
Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.
From Chandler's car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex
of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need
to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a
brakeman running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was
not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to
account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had
gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the
central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that
went wrong these days.
The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.
Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen
this car with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of
pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing
possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were
almost never interfered with.
Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and
almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched
the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been
chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and
the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end
of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed
the ladder to its roof.
It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he
could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its
rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the
tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the
river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was
an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.
By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes
within half a mile or so--the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch
built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking
through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along
which the homes were strung.
Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious
than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and
he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had
a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark,
though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else
again.
Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled
the cap over the great raw H on his forehead and began to climb the
mountain.
* * * * *
He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house
with well tended gardens.
There was a wait. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown
grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It
was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again,
peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had
been right inside, listening.
A man stared at him. "Stranger, what do you want?" He was short, plump,
with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have
been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be
coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.
Chandler said glibly: "Good morning. I'm working my way east. I need
something to eat and I'm willing to work for it."
The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it
looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was
one curious thing--a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a
rainbow, lettered: