Out of Their Minds

Hanging desperately to the horse's mane, I stole a brief glance backward and saw, out of the corner of one eye, the sickly gree

Then, so quickly that I had no inkling of it until after it had happened, the horse was gone out from under me. He went out from under me as if he'd never been there and I fell straight down, landing first upon my feet, then falling backward and skidding on my bottom through the forest loam for a dozen feet or so before I shot out over the lip of a declivity and went rolling to its foot. I was shaken up and battered somewhat superficially, but I was able to stagger to my feet and face the cloud of sickly green that was plowing through the woods behind me.

I knew exactly what had happened and I should have expected it and been ready for it, but it had seemed so commonplace and ordinary, riding on the horse, that I'd never thought of the probability that at any moment the re-enactment of Gettysburg would come to an end. And now it had come to an end and back on those ridges and on the round-topped hills the still-living men and the huddled bodies scattered on the field, the shattered ca

I was left alone in this little sloping valley that ran through the woods to face the revolting greenishness that was raging on my trail—green in color and green, too, in the terrible smell of rotte

I felt the horror—I felt the hairs rising on my nape and my guts were churning and there was a sickness in me that made me somewhat less than human; but there was an anger, too, and it was the anger, I am sure, that kept me sane. That goddamned Referee, I thought, that dirty little double-crossing stinker! He hated me, of course—he had a right to hate me, for I had beaten him not only once, but twice, and I had turned my back and walked away from him, contemptuously, while he, squatting on the wheel of the ruined ca

The greenish light was brighter now—a deathly, sickly green—but as yet I could not make out the actual shape of the thing that followed me. The charnel-house odor was thicker and it clotted in my throat and filled my nostrils and I tried to gag, but couldn't, and of all of it, the smell was worst.

Then," quite suddenly, I saw the shape that came at me through the trees—not clearly, for the blackness of the tree trunks broke up the shape and fragmented it. But I saw enough to last me all my days. Take a swollen, monstrous toad, throw in a bit of spitting lizard, add something from a snake and you'll get a small idea, a very faint idea. It was much worse than that; it was beyond description.

Choking and gagging, water-legged with fear, I turned to run and as I turned the ground lurched under me and threw me forward on my face. I landed on some hard surface and my face and hands were ski

But the smell was gone and there was more light than there had been before and it was not a greenish light and when I scrambled up I saw there was no forest.

The surface I had fallen on, I saw, was concrete, and a sudden fear went knifing through my mind. An airport runway? A superhighway?

I stood staring groggily down the long lane of concrete.

I was standing squarely in the center of a highway. But there was no danger. No cars were roaring down upon me. There were cars, of course, but they weren't moving. They were just sitting there.

17

For quite some time I didn't realize what had happened. First I had been frightened at the idea of standing out in the middle of a high-speed highway. I recognized what it was immediately—the broad lanes of concrete, the grassy median separating them, the heavy steel fence snaking along the right of way, closing off the lanes. Then I saw the stranded cars and that was something of a jolt. An occasional car, parked on the shoulder, off the concrete, and with its hood up, was not too unusual. But to see a dozen or more of them in this condition was something else again. There were no people, nor any signs of people. There simply were the cars, some of them with their hoods up, but not all of them. As if, suddenly, all these cars had ceased to function and had rolled to a stop upon the highway. And it was not only the cars in my immediate vicinity, but all up and down the lanes, as far as I could see, were other standing cars, some of them no more than black dots in the distance.

It was not until then, not until I had taken La and mentally digested the fact of the stranded cars, that the more obvious fact hit me—the realization that should have come immediately.

I was back on the human earth again! I was no longer in that strange world of Don Quixote and the Devil!

If I'd not been so flustered by the cars, I suppose I would have been most happy. But the cars bothered me so much that they took the edge off any other kind of feeling that I had.

I walked over to the nearest car and had a look at it. An AAA travel map and a handful of other travel literature lay on the front seat and a vacuum bottle and a sweater were tucked into one corner of the rear seat. A pipe sat in the ash tray and the keys were gone from the ignition lock.

I looked at some of the other cars. A few of them had some baggage left in them, as if the people might have left to seek out help and intended coming back.

By now the sun had risen well above the horizon and the morning was growing warm.

Far down the road an overpass, a thin line blurred by the distance, arched over the highway. Down there, more than likely, was an interchange that would get me off the highway. I started walking toward it and I walked in morning silence. A few birds flew among the groups of trees beyond the fence, but they were silent birds.

So I was home again, I thought, and so was Kathy, if one could believe the Devil. And where would she be? I wondered. More than likely in Gettysburg, safely home again. As soon as I reached a phone, I promised myself, I'd put in a call and check on her whereabouts.

I passed a number of stranded cars, but I didn't bother with them. The important thing was to get off the highway and find someone who could tell me what was going on. I came upon a signpost that said 70S and when I saw it, I knew where I was, somewhere in Maryland between Frederick and Washington. The horse, I realized, had covered a fair piece of ground during the night—that is, if the geography of that other world was the same as this one.

The sign pointing to the exit gave the name of a town of which I'd never heard. I trudged up the exit lane and where it joined a narrow road stood a service station, but the doors were locked and the place seemed to be deserted. A short distance down the road I came to the outskirts of a small town. Cars stood at the curbs, but there was no moving traffic. I turned in at the first place I came to, a small cafe built of concrete blocks painted a sickly yellow.