Charles Williams: Go Home, Stranger

The country was changing now. They were running out of the timber into a flat marshland covered with cattails and high grass and crisscrossed with canals. He saw her lights swing sharply in a right-angled turn, and they were running directly into the fading afterglow of the sunset. It was a forbidding landscape. The dark plain swept away toward the horizon to the south and west as far as the eye could reach, the monotonous marsh growth shadowy and inhospitable in the gathering night. No habitation was visible anywhere, nothing but the road running ahead.

The warning began to sound suddenly in his mind. If this was actually where her caller had told her to come, it was beginning to smell.

He thought swiftly. He could speed up and pass her, force her to stop. Maybe he could talk her out of it. But, hell, he thought angrily, that would ruin everything. He’s down here somewhere, and if I make her turn back I may never find him or get another chance. I’m not her mother; she’s old enough to know what she’s doing.

It was ho good, and he knew it. He couldn’t let her do it. He cursed, flipped on the headlights, and hit the throttle. Then he saw the lights ahead of him swing sharp left as the road turned south again, deeper into the vast solitude.

The walls of grass flew back toward him and disappeared into the darkness behind. Wooden bridge boards clattered. He reached the turn, and when he was around it, skidding and throwing shell, he saw she was farther ahead. He swore again. She had seen his lights come on, and she was trying to run away from him. He ground on the throttle again. And then he saw it happen. It was sickening.

Her headlights slued crazily and then swung, tilted against the sky, as the car went out of control, skidded, and went over. For one terrible part of a second they were at right angles to the road, shattering light against the wall of grass, then they disappeared as if the car had been swallowed, instantly and entirely, by some huge monster of the swamp. There was no sound at all, not yet; nothing but the awful evidence of the lights and then the end of them, as he hit the brakes with pure reflex and began fighting his speed down just inside the margin of control. There was no time to wonder what had happened, until the sound did reach him, and then he knew. In the second before he heard the crash, he heard the other thing. It was a gun.

His car was skidding now. The rear wheels were yawing toward the ditch. He eased the brake and fought it back onto the crown of the road, and when he straightened out again he was almost on the spot. There was no Cadillac in his lights. He could see the road, and it wasn’t there. There was a canal, and a wooden bridge with one railing, and that was all he saw before he slashed down with one hand at the light switch, set the hand brake, arid was out and running even before the car had shuddered to a stop.

Darkness swallowed him. He ran bent over to keep from silhouetting himself against the-sky, and he could see nothing except the faintly luminous shell of the road. Then he felt the bridge flooring under his feet, and stopped. There was dead silence now except the pounding of his heart and the suck and slap of water as the wave the Cadillac had set up died away in the pads and grass farther along the bank of the canal. It was the left-hand railing that had been ripped off, and even as he jumped he could make out the dark shape of something that could be part of the car sticking out of the water.

The water came up to his shoulders, and he could feel mud suck at his feet as he threshed his way forward, groping for the car. It couldn’t make any difference, he thought bitterly; she’s dead anyway. Then his hand hit something. It was a tire. He raised his head and could make out all four of them, just sticking above the surface. The car was lying on its top. He went under, groping frenziedly along the side. His arm brushed broken glass, and he felt the pain of a bad cut. The door handle had to be just above that glass somewhere. Then he felt it. He pulled. It was jammed.

The other door, he thought furiously. God, how long had it been now? As he floundered around the end of the car and down on the other side, some part of his mind was still trying to guess what the man with the gun was doing. Where was he now?

The water was deeper here. He took a quick breath and went under. It took only a second to locate the door handle. He unlatched it and pulled, feeling the terrible need to hurry run through him like physical pain. It was stuck. He set his feet against the side and heaved, fighting it. The door moved a scant inch and stopped. He pulled himself down to his knees and felt along the doorframe, and then he knew what it was. The top of the car had settled so far into the mud that the only way the door could be opened would be to dig enough of the muck from in front of it to allow it to swing. And long before he could do that she would be dead, if she weren’t already.

Then he felt a surge of hope. The window was rolled down. There was opening enough for him to slide through by keeping his stomach flat against the mud. He was pulling himself down when he felt the car shift a little and settle again. He fought down the whisperings of panic. Was it worth it, for a woman who was probably already dead? If the car rolled now, or sank a little deeper into the mud, he’d never get out.

Then, for the first time, he became conscious of the sound. It was a spasmodic thumping somewhere inside, a sound that could be made by the unconscious and futile threshings of someone drowning. There was no help for it. He had to try.

He was halfway in now. For the first time he realized he should have returned to the surface for another breath before attempting it. How long had he been under now? Twenty seconds? Thirty? His lungs were beginning to hurt. Soft mud sucked at him, while the window frame brushed ominously against his back. He felt the car slip again. He threw his arms about wildly, felt his hand touch something, and grabbed.

It was an arm. He slid his hands along it and caught her shoulders. She was struggling weakly, and one of her hands fastened itself in his clothing. He began inching backward, pulling her down toward the window. The car shuddered and settled another fraction of an inch and he fought back panic. His lungs were tortured; he had only a few seconds more. Then he was outside, pulling her body through the window. He put his feet against the muddy bottom of the canal and pushed upward, still holding her by the shoulders. Their heads came clear of the surface with a little swirling and splashing of water, and almost instantly the night erupted with the wicked crash of the gun.

He felt rather than heard the impact as lead slammed into the water a few feet off to his left. It was too dark now to see anything at all; the man was shooting at the noise they had made in surfacing. Standing perfectly still, up to his chin in water, Reno heard the metallic clack, clack as he operated the bolt and knew the man was shooting a rifle. The gun crashed again and lead ricocheted off the surface of the water to go screaming into the night. Reno sucked in a deep breath and was just going under when a brilliant shaft of light suddenly burst out across the surface of the canal.

His mind was clear now, and he was full of a cold and terrible rage. He was down on the mud at the bottom of the canal, against the side of the car, holding the inert figure of the woman in his left arm. She had ceased struggling, and every passing second robbed her of a little more of her dwindling chance for life. He had to get her out of there within a minute or two and start applying artificial respiration to save her, even if she hadn’t been hit by that first shot that had made her lose control of the car. Aside from the natural desire to save her if he could, he knew now that Conway was somehow the answer to the whole question and that if she died he might never know what it was. His only lead would be gone forever.