Not since London had Johnson driven, but his license was current and immaculate. Even his ironic leg, driving, gave him no problems.
He hired the red Skoda in town. It wasn’t bad, easy to handle.
On the afternoon of the almost full moon, having waited on the Nores Road for six and three-quarter hours, he spotted Jason’s blue BMW instantly. Johnson followed it on through forty minutes of country lanes, between winter fields and tall, bare trees, all the way to a small village known as Stacklebridge. Here, at a roundabout, the BMW turned around and drove straight back the way it had come.
Johnson, however, drove on to Newsham and spent an hour admiring the Saxon church, sheep, and rush-hour traffic going north and south. He had not risked the obvious move of also turning and tracking the other car homeward. Near Sandbourne, he was sure, Jason would park his vehicle in concealment off the road, perhaps in a derelict barn. Then walk, maybe even sprint the last distance, to reach his house or the pier before moonrise.
The nature of his studies had often meant Johnson must be patient. He had realized, even before following the blue car, that he could do nothing now, that was, nothing this month; it was already too late. But waiting was always part of watching, wasn’t it? And he had been stupidly inattentive and over-confident only once, and so received the corrective punishment of a knife. He would be careful this time.
He didn’t need to dream about it now. He was forewarned, forearmed.
But the dream still occurred.
He was in the pier ballroom, and it was years ago because the ballroom was almost intact, just some broken windows and holes in the floor and walls, where brickwork and struts and darkness and black water showed. But the chandeliers burned with a cold, sparkling lemon glory overhead. All about were heaps of dancers, lying in their dancing clothes, black and white and rainbow. They were all dead and mutilated, torn, bitten, and rotted almost to unrecognizability.
Jason came up from under the pier, directly through the floor, already eating, with a savage hunger that was more like rage, a long white arm with ringed fingers.
But his eyes weren’t glazed now. They were fixed on Johnson. They knew Johnson. And in ten seconds more Jason would spring, and as he sprang, would become what he truly was, even if only for three nights of every month. The nights he had made sure everyone who knew of him here also thought he spent in Nores.
Johnson reacted prudently. He woke himself up.
He had had dreams about other people, too, which had indicated to him some psychological key to what was troubling them, far beyond anything they had been able to say. Johnson had normally trusted the dreams, reckoning they were his own mechanism of analysis, explaining to him. And he had been very accurate. Then Johnson had dreamed that gentle, tearful Mark Cruikshank from Publicity had come up to him on the carpark roof at Haine and Birch and stuck a long, pointed fingernail through his heart. The dream was so absurd, so out of character, so overdramatic that Johnson dismissed it as indigestion. But a couple of days later Mark stabbed him in the groin, with the kind of knife you could now buy anywhere in the backways of London. For this reason Johnson did not think to discount the dreams of Jason. And for this reason, too, Johnson had known, almost at once, exactly what he was dealing with.
Christmas, personally irrelevant to Johnson for years, was much more important this year. Just as December was, with its crowds of frantic shoppers-not only in the festive, noisy shops, but in their cars racing up to London and back, or to Nores and back.
Moonrise on the first of the three nights (waxing full, declining to gibbous) was earlier in the day, according to the calendar Johnson had bought. It was due at 5:33 p.m.
Not knowing, therefore, if Jason would set out earlier than he had the previous month in order to beat the rush-hour traffic after four, Johnson parked the hired Skoda in a lay-by just clear of the suburbs, where the Nores Road began.
In fact the BMW didn’t appear until three-thirty. Perhaps Jason had been delayed. Or perhaps, as Johnson suspected, a frisson of excitement always ruled the man’s life at this time, adding pleasure to the danger of cutting things fine. For, once the moon was up, visible to Jason and to others; the change must happen. (There were plenty of books, fiction and non, to apprise any researcher of this point.)
On this occasion, Johnson only followed the blue car far enough to get out into the hump-backed country lanes. Then he pulled off the road and parked on a narrow, pebbly shoulder.
He had himself to judge everything to within a hair’s breadth.
To begin the manoeuvre too soon would be to call attention, and therefore assistance and so dispersal. Indeed, the local radio station would doubtless report it, and so might warn Jason off. There were other places after all that Jason, or what Jason became, could seek refuge in.
Probably Jason always turned round at the Stacklebridge roundabout, however. It was the easiest spot to do so.
Johnson kept his eye on his watch. He had made the trip twice more in the interim, and it took consistently roughly eighty minutes to the village and back. But already there was a steady increase in cars buzzing, and frequently too quickly, along the sea-bound lane.
At ten to four the sun went. The sky stayed a fiery lavender for another thirteen minutes.
At four twenty-five Johnson, using a brief gap in traffic, started the Skoda and drove it back fast onto and across the narrow road, simultaneously slamming into reverse. A horrible crunching. The car juddered to a permanent halt.
He had judged it on his last trip: stalled and slanted sidelong across the lane, the Skoda blocked the thoroughfare entirely for anything-save a supermodel on a bicycle.
Johnson got out of the car and locked the doors. He made no attempt to warn the next car whose headlamps he could see blooming. It came bounding over the crest of the lane, registered it had about twenty yards to brake, almost managed it, and tapped into the Skoda with a bump and screech. Belted in, the driver didn’t come to much harm. But he had buckled a headlight, and the Skoda’s bodywork would need some repairs, aside from its gearbox. The driver scrambled out and began to swear at Johnson, who was most apologetic, describing how his vehicle had gone out of control. They exchanged details. Johnson’s were the real ones; he saw no need to disguise them.
As they communicated, three more cars flowed over the crest and, not going quite so fast, pulled to a halt without mishap. Meanwhile two other cars coming from the direction of Sandbourne were also forced to stop.
Soon there was quite a crowd.
The police must be called, and the AA, plus partners and others waiting. Lights from headlamps and digital gadgets flickered and blazed. Mobiles were out all along the verges, chattering and chiming and playing silly tunes under the darkling winter trees.
All the while, the back-up of trapped cars on either side was growing.
Covered by this group event, Johnson absented himself carefully, slipping off along the tree-walled hem of the fields, making his way back up the static vehicular line towards Stacklebridge.
People asked him if he knew what had happened, how long help would be in coming. He said some idiot had crashed his gears. He said the police were on their way.
It was full dark, five-fifteen, eighteen minutes to moonrise, when he noted Jason’s BMW. It was boxed in on all sides, and people were out of their cars here, too, shouting, making calls, angry, frustrated, and only Jason still there, poised over the wheel, staring out blankly like something caught in a cage. He didn’t look angry. He wasn’t making a call. Standing back in darkness under the leafless boughs, Johnson observed Jason and timed the moon on his luminous watch.