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All movement stopped and all sound and I stood there on the hillside, tensed against the movement and listening for the sound.
Swiftly I sca
There was no sign of snakes, although there was something stirring around in the back of the cave, where it was too dark for me to see. A bluebird winged down and settled on an old dry mullen stalk and looked at me with beady eyes and from somewhere, far off across the valley, came the tinkling of a cowbell.
I reached out with a cautious toe and prodded at the jacket. There seemed to be nothing under it or inside of it, so I reached down and picked it up and shook it. Then I picked up the shoes and without stopping to put them on beat a retreat down the hillside, but very cautiously, holding in check an overpowering urge to run and get it over with, to get off the hillside and down to the car as quickly as I could. I went slowly, watching closely for snakes every foot of the way. The hillside, I knew, must be crawling with them—there had been the one upon my chest and the one that went across my ankles and the one still messing around in the back of the cave, plus God knew how many others.
But I didn't see a one. I stepped on a thistle with my right foot and had to go on tiptoe with that foot the rest of the way so I wouldn't drive the spines that were sticking in the sock into my flesh, but there weren't any snakes—none visible, at least
Maybe, I thought, they were as afraid of me as I was of them. But I told myself they couldn't be. I found that I was shaking and that my teeth were chattering and at the bottom of the hill, just above the road, I sat down weakly on a patch of grass, well away from any thicket or boulder where a snake might lurk and picked the thistle spines out of my sock. I tried to put on my shoes, but my hands were shaking so I couldn't and it was then I realized how frightened I had been and the knowledge of the true depth of my fright only made me more so.
My stomach rose up and hit me in the face and I rolled over on one side and vomited and kept on retching for a long time after there was nothing further to bring up.
The vomiting seemed to help, however, and I finally got my chin wiped off and managed to get my shoes on and get them tied, then staggered down to the car and leaned against its side, almost hugging it I was so glad to be there. And standing there, hugging that ugly hunk of metal, I saw that the car was not really stuck. The ditch was far shallower than I had thought it was.
I got into the car and slid behind the wheel. The key was in my pocket and I switched on the motor. The car walked out of there with no trouble and I headed down the road, back the way I'd come the night before.
It was early morning; the sun could not have been more than an hour or so into the sky. Spiderwebs in the roadside grass still glittered with the dew and meadow! arks went soaring up into the sky, trailing behind them the trilling tatters of their songs.
I turned a bend and there the vanished house stood beside the road, just ahead of me, with its crazily canted chimney and the woodpile at the back, with the car beside the woodpile, and the barn that leaned against the haystack. All of it as I'd seen it the night before, in the flare of lightning flashes.
It was quite a jolt to see it and my mind went into a sudden spurt of speed, scrambling frantically to account for it. I had been wrong, it seemed, to think that because the car had been in the road that the house had disappeared. For here was the house exactly as I had seen it just a few hours ago; so it stood to reason that the house had been there all the time and that the car had been moved and I'd been moved as well—a good mile up the road.
It made no sense at all and, furthermore, it seemed impossible. The car had been stuck tight in the ditch. I'd tried to get it out and the wheels had spun and there had been no moving it. And I—drunk as I might have been— certainly could not have been lugged a mile up the road and laid out in a snake den without ever knowing it.
All of it was crazy—the charging Triceratops that had disappeared before it could drive home its charge, the car stuck in the ditch, Snuffy Smith and his wife Lowizey, and even the corn squeezings we had poured down our gullets around the kitchen table. For I had no hangover; I almost wished I had, for if I did I could blame on the fact of being drunk all that was going on. A man couldn't have drunk all the bad moonshine that I remembered drinking and not have felt some sort of repercussions. I had vomited, of course, but that was too late to make any difference so far as a hangover was concerned. By that time the foulness of the booze would have worked its way well throughout my body.
And yet here was what appeared to be the self-same place as I had sought refuge in the night before. True, I had seen it only in the flare of lightning flashes, but it all was there, as I remembered it.
Why the Triceratops, I wondered, and why the rattlesnakes? The dinosaur apparently had been no real danger (it might even have been a hallucination, although I didn't think so), but the rattlesnakes had been for real. They had been a grisly setup for murder and who would want to murder me? And if someone did want to murder me, for reasons which I did not know, surely there would have been easier and less complicated ways in which to go about it.
I was staring at the house so hard that the car almost went off the road. I just barely jerked it back in time.
There had been, to start with, no sign of life about the place, but now, suddenly, there was. Dogs came boiling out of the yard and started racing for the road, bawling at the car. Never in my life had I seen so many dogs, all of them lanky and so ski
The door of the house came open and a man stepped out on the stoop and yelled at them and at his shout they came skidding to a halt, the entire pack of them, and went slinking back toward the house, like a gang of boys caught in a watermelon patch. Those dogs knew very well they had no business chasing cars.
But right at the moment, I wasn't paying too much attention to them, for I was looking at the man who had stepped out to yell at them. I had expected, when he'd stepped out, that he'd be Snuffy Smith. I don't know why I expected this—perhaps because I needed something on which I could hang some logical explanation of what had happened to me. But he wasn't Snuffy Smith. He was considerably taller than Snuffy and he didn't wear a hat and he didn't have a pipe. And I remembered then that the man could not have been Snuffy Smith, for there had been no dogs last night. This was the neighbor that Snuffy had warned me of, the man with the pack of vicious dogs. It would be worth your life, Snuffy had warned me, to go walking down that road.
And it had been damn near worth my life, I reminded myself, to stay with Snuffy Smith, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking moonshine liquor with him.
It was incredible, of course, that I should give credence to the fact that there had been a Snuffy Smith. There wasn't any such person; there simply couldn't be. He and his pinheaded wife were zany characters that paraded through a comic strip. But hard as I tried to tell this to myself, I couldn't make it stick.