The Visitors (v1.0)

36. IOWA

The sun had set and the early evening dusk was settling in when Jerry Conklin turned into the gas station.

"Fill the tank and check the oil," Jerry told the attendant.

While the attendant was busy at the pump, Jerry walked to the edge of the road. The station was on the outskirts of one of the many small villages through which he'd driven; a quiet little trading center for the farming country that surrounded it. The town, the same as all the others, was made up of rows of small, neat houses and a tidy business district. Lights were coming on in some of the houses and there was little traffic on the road. An evening hush had fallen over the community, broken now and then by the yapping of a dog.

Jerry stood at the side of the road, looking up and down it. Within himself the ache still persisted. He had been stupid, he told himself, driven by an illogical need that he could not define. He should have known, he told himself, that the trip would come to nothing. It had been silly to think that 101 would recognize him—although, in a way, it might have recognized him. But if it had been recognition, he could find no comfort in it.

He had driven to the farmhouse late in the afternoon after several failures to find the place and having to stop along the way for further directions.

The farmer had been in the farmyard, puttering around with a hammer and nails, repairing a pigpen fence.

"Yeah, it's still sitting there, guarding the field," he had said. "But it won't do you no good to go over there. You're welcome if you want to try, but I know what will happen. I'd go with you, but I got work to do. These hogs have been breaking out of here and I have to repair the fence so I can keep them in.

Jerry had walked to the field. Old 101 sat there, in a hayfield off to one side of the plowed strip of land. It made no move to chase him off. It just kept sitting there. He had walked out to it and walked around it, Staring up at it, trying to remember how it had looked when it had landed on the bridge. But while the memory of it straddling the river, with the bridge gone to kindling wood under its impact, still was sharp and clear, he found it difficult to equate it now with the way it had appeared the time he first had set eyes upon it. Somehow it seemed smaller now, although God knows, it was still big enough.

He had walked around it and moved up close against it, laying his hands upon it to feel the soft warmness of it. He had patted it gently and poked it with a playful fist. And it gave no sign.

"Tell me," he had said to it. "Tell me what I need to know."

It had told him nothing. It had paid no attention to him. But he was sure it knew that he was there. How he could be so sure of that, he did not know.

He had given it plenty of time. He talked to it. He laid his hands upon it and still it made no sign. So finally he had walked away, going slowly, turning back every now and then to look at it, but each time he turned to look, it still sat there as stolidly as it had been sitting all the time.

Although, he told himself, it had not chased him off. It had chased off everyone else who had approached it, but it had made no move against him. And that, in itself, he thought, might be a sign of recognition.

"Mister," said the station attendant, walking up to him and holding out the dipstick, "you need a quart of oil."

"All right, put it in," said Jerry. "This car always needs a quart of oil."

He paid the man and, getting into the car, drove out to the road and headed toward the town.

But when he reached the business district, he drove around a block and came out on the road again, heading back the way that he had come.

He was going back to that farm again and just why he was going back was not quite clear to him. An essential stubbornness, perhaps, he told himself, a desperate unwillingness to give up, a very stubborn faith in his silly conviction that there might be an answer he could get from 101. He didn't deliberately decide to go back, he didn't argue it out with himself, he didn't ponder it; he simply drove around the block and it was not until he was headed back down the road the way that he had come that he realized he was going back. Now that he had done it, he did not try to fight it.

He couldn't drive back to the farmyard again, he knew. While the farmer had been cordial, he had seemed a little nettled when he found that Jerry had not been chased by the visitor. Jerry had imagined that he detected in the farmer's face some trace of a dark suspicion.

Actually, he told himself, he did not need to go back to the farmyard. By walking half a mile or so, he could reach 101 by parking on a gravel township road. It would be dark by the time he got there and it was unlikely that anyone would spot him. The night was clear and in a little while, a near-full moon would be coming up and there'd be light enough to get where he was going.

He had a few bad moments when he got close to the farm, fearing that he would be unable to locate the place. But there were a few landmarks that he remembered—a rickety iron bridge spanning a small stream, a lone oak standing in a pasture close to an old haystack. Shortly after ten o'clock, he found the gravel road, drove up it for a mile or so and parked. From there he calculated that he would be able to spot 101.

Either his navigating had been better than he'd known, or he was just plain lucky, for in a little time he did locate the farm and the dark bulk of 101 squatting in the hayfield. He was, however, farther from it than he had expected he would be. He began hiking across the fields, stumbling occasionally when a foot caught in furrowed stubble. He had to work his way through a couple of barb-wire fences and in the dark, that was a ticklish job to do. The night had turned chilly and he buttoned up his jacket, turning up the collar as protection from the wind. Down in a ravine off to his left, an owl was making tentative hoots every now and then, testing out its voice, and when the wind veered slightly, he could catch the baying of a distant dog.

He moved through a lonely emptiness and yet an emptiness that seemed to hold some threat within it. He had the feeling that at any moment, something could come welling up out of this land he crossed, although he never could quite determine what it might be that would come welling up.

The walk seemed to take forever. There were times when it seemed to him that he had not moved at all, that despite all his walking, he was only marking time in the self-same place. To make up for that, to overcome that terrible feeling of no progress, he drove himself without mercy, sometimes running. But he soon quit the running, for it brought too many stumbles. Then, suddenly, he was there. In front of him loomed the moon-limned bulk of 101.

He staggered across the last few yards and collapsed against the visitor, protected by its massiveness from the chill of the northwest wind. He had a strange compulsion to stay huddled there, as if he had reached some sort of refuge and must cling to it. But that was silliness, he knew, and staggered to his feet, leaning his head against it as he fought to regain his breath.

Leaning against the great black wall that rose above him, he tilted his head and saw the quiet sparkling of the stars that were cut off abruptly by the soaring blackness that was 101. The loneliness stayed on, the loneliness and lostness. He had thought that it perhaps would disappear when he reached the visitor. But reaching the visitor, it seemed, had made no difference.

He had done it again, he thought. He'd come back again to repeat the folly that he had committed earlier in the day, the act of folly that had commenced that moment in his room when he had picked up the phone to ask Charlie if he could use the car.

Yet he had been so sure—not sure in any sense of logic, but Sure in a way that was beyond all reason.

His breathing had grown even now. He stepped back from the visitor, slowly began to turn about to face the fields again, reluctant to turn around, reluctant to take that first step that would lead him back to the car parked on the gravel road.

And, in that instant that he took the step, a snake-like something came swishing down upon him and snapped like an iron band about his chest. In mid-air he caught a glimpse of the autumn-bare fields, lit weakly by the moon, a glimpse of a tree-bordered creek that angled down a valley, the sudden flash of light from a distant farmhouse.

Then he was in that strange darkness that was not dark, but blue, caught a whiff of the dank mustiness that lurked in the dry, hot air. There was once again the swiftness of the flaring and the flickering that revealed impossible shapes that would not stand still long enough to see. The rows of circular eves still were staring at him. It was, he thought, as if he'd never left this place.

He had fallen to his knees and now he rose slowly to his feet and as he did, he reeled under a flood of hammering sensations that assailed him out of nowhere. He went to his knees again and stayed there, head bent, hands against the floor to keep from falling flat upon his face.

And all the while the sensations hammered at him, thundering in his brain, so many and so powerful that he could not shut them out, nor was he able to distinguish what might be the import of them.

"Take it easy," he gasped. "Let up. Let me have a chance."

The sensations went away and he swayed a little, as if he might have been leaning against something for support and it had been suddenly snatched away.

Then the sensations came again, but softer now, stealing up on him, as a cat might creep up on a bird.