David Morrell - The Shimmer

During the winter, the early sunset made it necessary for Dani to bundle herself in a sheepskin coat and ride between the towns after dark. This didn’t trouble her. The stars and the moon-even if only a portion of the latter was showing-provided sufficient light for her to see the road. On cloudy nights, she held a lantern to show her the way.

An experienced horsewoman, she never worried about her ability to control the chestnut-colored quarter horse her parents had bought for her. But now, as the animal became more skittish, she tugged back the reins and pressed her heels down in the stirrups while she studied the shadowy landscape with greater intensity. In the heat of summer, coyotes weren’t the only threat the horse might have sensed-there would have been the risk that a rattlesnake had crawled onto the road to absorb the last of the day’s warmth, but that was out of the question tonight, when the temperature was cold enough to put a layer of ice on a pail of water.

Even so, Dani’s stomach fluttered.

Until recently she’d felt happily isolated in this quiet corner of Texas, but then her father had ordered a wireless radio from a catalog, and now, on this particular journey, Dani’s thoughts were disturbed by the escalation of the European war, which had reached new heights of atrocity and threatened to draw the United States into the fight between Germany and the Allies.

Just before beginning her ride toward Loden, she’d paid a brief visit to her parents and listened to a radio report about attacks involving chlorine and phosgene gases: the lung destroyers. There were rumors about something even more horrendous being developed: mustard gas, a blisterer that dissolved skin both inside and outside the body. The gas remained active long after it sank into the ground, with the consequence that soldiers kicking up dust as they walked through a field could cause the equivalent of another attack.

And those weren’t the only new horrors. Dani could only imagine the pain and terror produced by such recently invented weapons as tanks and flamethrowers. Thus, on this normally quiet ride, her thoughts were in greater turmoil than she would have expected.

Abruptly something on her right caught her attention. She frowned toward some sort of illumination on the southern horizon. Lights bobbed and weaved. Her immediate suspicion was that they came from torches carried by horseback riders. However, the only direction from which those riders could be coming was Mexico.

That thought filled her with dread because Mexico, too, had become a dangerous place. The recent revolution there had turned the country into warring factions to which Germany sent soldiers, weapons, and money, hoping the United States would be so distracted by the violence south of its border that it wouldn’t enter the war in Europe.

My God, Dani thought, could those be Germans?

The horse continued to resist her efforts to control it.

Calm down, she warned herself. The horse senses my fear. That’s what’s causing the problem.

No, those weren’t Germans invading from Mexico, she decided. Now that she paid closer attention, the lights didn’t look at all like riders with torches.

If they weren’t torches, though, what else could they be?

Only gradually did Dani wonder if these might be the lights she’d heard so much about when she was growing up. The stories had seemed fanciful, and she’d paid them no mind because although she knew many people in town who claimed to have seen them, she had not.

Now, on the distant horizon, the lights took the shape of luminous balls. Their colors were like segments of a rainbow. Sometimes they merged, red and blue becoming purple, or green and red becoming yellow. They drifted sideways or rose and fell as if in a current.

They got larger and brighter.

Dani became aware of a hum that gradually increased in pitch, and before she knew it, her ears were in pain.

Suddenly the horse reared up. She pressed down on its neck while tightening her legs against its flanks. Making panicked noises, the animal skittered sideways. Again it attempted to rear up, and suddenly- regardless of her expert efforts-it charged along the road.

The horse’s speed would normally have made it difficult for Dani to see obstacles on the shadowy road, but as she struggled to subdue it, she realized that the road had become unnaturally bright, with vibrant colors flashing toward it. Without warning, the lights were rushing over her, spinning around her, trapping her in a whirlpool.

At once the horse bucked so violently that she flew off the saddle. When she struck the road, pain shot through her ribs. Her vision blurred. Dizzy, she heard the horse neighing in alarm. The pounding of its hooves began again and receded into the distance.

Dani had no idea how long she lay unconscious. When she wakened, the lights were gone. Clouds had drifted in, partially concealing the stars and the moon. In the meager illumination, she squirmed to her feet. Despite the cold, the pain in her ribs made her sweat.

With a weak voice, she called for the horse, but the animal didn’t return. She called again, gave up, and struggled to find her bearings. Which way was Rostov? That was the closer town. If she made a mistake in direction, she’d walk toward Loden, and she doubted she had the strength to go that far.

She scanned the heavens in search of the North Star. The pain was so great that she feared she’d collapse.

The Big Dipper. Need to find the Big Dipper.

There. When she’d been a little girl, her father had made sure that she knew how to navigate by the stars in case she ever got lost in the dark. The two end stars on the Big Dipper pointed toward the Little Dipper, and the star at the end of the handle part of the Little Dipper was the North Star.

Now Dani could calculate which way was west, the direction that would take her to Rostov. She wavered along the increasingly dark road and stumbled. When she fell, pain jolted her into consciousness. She crawled and finally managed to stand again.

Time lost all meaning.

She felt another jolt of intense pain and realized she’d run into the side of a building. Only then did she understand that she’d reached town. Delirious, she took two wrong turns before she pounded on her father’s door.

When he opened it, she collapsed in his arms. The next morning, word of her ordeal spread through Rostov. Numerous friends came to satisfy their curiosity.

“Germans?” the veterinarian asked. The closest that Rostov had to a doctor, he recommended that Dani wear a corset to protect her ribs while they healed.

“No,” she said through the pain. “I don’t think so.” The corset put so much pressure on Dani’s throbbing chest that she had trouble breathing.

“But you told us you saw riders with torches,” Dani’s father said. “If not Germans, were they Mexicans?”

“No, I only thought-”

“It could have been a scouting expedition,” Rostov’s mayor decided. “Some of them got close enough to throw their torches at you. Carranza’s people are in league with the Germans. Everybody knows that. Maybe Carranza’s seeing how far he can sneak into Texas before anybody makes a fuss.”

“Or it might have been that bastard Villa,” the town’s blacksmith suggested. “He’s desperate for money and supplies.”

“There’s nothing between us and the border.” Dani’s mother looked horrified. “They could murder us in our sleep.”

“No, it wasn’t people on horseback,” Dani insisted tightly.

“What was it you said?” the mayor asked. “Whatever you saw seemed to be on the horizon, and suddenly it was spinning around you. Wasn’t that how you described it?”

“Yes.” Squeezed by the corset and her pain-swollen ribs, Dani could hardly speak.