Alan Ryan - Dead White

Copyright 1983 by Alan Ryan
All rights reserved.

The train kept coming, wheels turning, chains rattling, snow whirling around it in a cloud.

Susan took a few steps closer to the tracks And then she was blind. No, not blind, there was something holding her, holding her head and covering her eyes. She gasped, froze, skin prickling all over. She could feel gloves, thin, soft material like cotton against her face.

No!

She clawed frantically at the gloved giant hands. And then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone.

Susan spun around.

There was nobody there.

Nothing.

Only the darkness and the wind-driven snow, biting at her eyes and her face.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright 1983 by Alan Ryan

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 8-10 W. 36th St., New York, New York 10018

First printing, November 1983

ISBN: 0-812-52541-8

CAN. ED.: 0-81252542-6

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Pinnacle Books, 1430 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

For

Marie

A sad tales best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

The second time the green Datsun skidded on the ice, Susan Lester thought she was going to die. Her hands froze solid to the steering wheel and locked there for an instant, while her own voice shrieked in her head to turn into the skid. She released her breath, and a cloud of mist puffed from her mouth in the cold interior of the car. Christ, turn into the skid!

Then her fingers unlocked, and the instant of time fell away behind her in a blur of white-covered trees and blowing snow. Fat wet snowflakes slapped against the windshield and ran like tears before the wipers whisked them away.

Susan gritted her teeth, made some wordless noise, and hauled the wheel into the skid. The front tires slid away, slowly, slowly, coming around in line with the rear end of the car. For an instant, the Datsun threatened to go sliding off the other way but, just in time, Susan caught it, brought the wheel back a little, deliberately loosened her grip enough to feel the play in the steering, and, tentatively, the car righted itself.

A bead of sweat trickled from under her red knitted cap, hesitated at her thin eyebrow, then ran, stinging, into her right eye. She squeezed the eye shut and man aged another thirty or forty feet of slow progress on the treacherous road before she felt safe in lifting a hand from the wheel to wipe at her eye.

Slowly, fearfully, the car made its way along the road, lurching heavily into deep puddles, like a frightened, living thing testing each foot of space before trusting itself to proceed.

Then, suddenly, the wind shifted from behind the car and hurled a rattling gust of snow against the window beside Susans head. The car rocked for a moment, then settled back uneasily to its slow progress.

Oh, come on, world, Susan murmured. Give a girl a break, willya? She was leaning forward over the wheel, eyes rigidly fixed on the snow swirling across the hood, squinting to see through it to the road ahead.

Shed been driving this roadNew York State Route 7 west from Cobleskill toward Oneonta thirty miles awayfor six years, ever since shed gotten her license just after her sixteenth birthday, and she knew it as well as she knew anything else in her life. But now it was hid den behind shifting clouds of white and the ineffective slap of the wipers.

The snow had started early that Sunday morning, eased off for a while at midday, then grown furious late in the afternoon while Susan visited friends in Coble skill. When she saw the storm gathering strength again, shed thought of leaving then to get home safely to Deacons Kill, but the friends still had their Christmas tree upthey still had a pumpkin from Halloween, toothe wine was good, the talk cheerful, she had stayed too late, and now the storm had grabbed her.

The snowfall had revised the landscape, buried and blurred the familiar lines and angles and made them into soft and shifting shapes that had never been there before. In one place along the road, a drainage ditch at the edge of a field was nothing more than a thin blue shadow. In another place, the curve of the road melted into the landscape of a hill, a lawn, a driveway, and the road that stretched to home had disappeared in the gray, cold lace of living snow.

Come on! she said under her breath, and hit the wheel with the side of her fist.

The car moved sluggishly forward, tires slipping on old ice beneath the new slush. Susan squinted through the blowing snow, hunting along the side of the road for the turnoff to Deacons Kill.

Then she saw it, the road curving away to the right, sloping upward between the trees. Carefully, she rolled the wheel over, feeling the car shift direction beneath her, lose its grip for a shivery second, then catch again. Slowly, she eased it into the turn and headed for Deacons Kill.

Dummy, she muttered softly to herself. Learn when to go home. Youre a big girl now, all alone in the world. Better learn how to take care of yourself.

The car groped its slow way through the blinding whirl of snow, its headlights snatching ineffectually at the swirling cloud ahead.

The road north from Route 7 to Deacons Kill climbed through the hills, twisting and turning like a thing alive. On the right, snow-shrouded woods flashed momentarily into view as the headlights swept across them on a curve. Then, as the car swung back the other way, the lights disappeared across an empty gray expanse of dead and frozen fields.

Stay calm, Susan, my girl, she told herself. Just stay calm. Home sweet home is straight ahead.

She tried not to picture herself and the car sliding off the road into a ditch, but her imagination ran away with her and, in her minds eye, she had a vivid picture of the little green car overturned, wheels still sadly spinning, herself pinned in the wreckage with a broken leg, slowly freezing to death as the night wore on and the wet snow soaked in against her skin.

I am cursed with a lurid imagination, she said distinctly into the cold air of the car, and watched her words puff out before her face and disappear.

She tried not to think of her father.

Danny Lester, owner of Dannys Diner on Route 7 just west of the Deacons Kill road, had died the previous summer when the driver of a huge trailer rig had lost control of his truck on the wet road in a rainstorm. The truck had slammed through the diner just at the busiest part of breakfast time. Her father had landed face down on his own grill and had suffered for three endless days in the intensive care unit of Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta before giving up the fight.

Susan tried not to think about it, not to think about any of it, not to think about the wreckage of the diner that had been more home than place of business to her widower father, not to think about the bloodstains everywhere, especially not to think about the dead body of the truck driver or the smashed cars the monster truck had shoved aside like toys.

Oh Christ, Susan breathed. Get a grip on your self.

Orphaned now and just graduated from the State University campus in Cobleskill, Susan had set about making her way alone in the world. When the insurance check finally arrived, she went out and bought the Datsun. She hadnt driven a car since her fathers death. Onward and upward, shed kept telling herself, and had grimly gone out to drive the mountain roads in the rain that fall, determined not to be afraid.