Believing by Zenna Henderson

Author:Zenna Henderson [Henderson, Zenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
Publisher: NESFA Press
Published: 2020-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Three-Cornered and Secure

I didn’t like the cloverleaf. Sounds foolish, a grown man—almost twenty-one—and presumably in his right mind, taking a dislike to a loop in a road. But it was so. Every time I approached the area, the skin on my arms from elbow to shoulder prickled and stung, and dread, ulcer-like, gnawed at a corner of my stomach. And, for some reason, I always recalled vividly that there was a spring somewhere here where my grandad always camped, finding water for his horses and shade for the wagon, on his week’s journey from the ranch to town. And my dad patronized the same spring to fill the radiator of his Model A on his six-hour trip over the same route. But now I hardly knew where the spring was, because who ever stopped out here in the middle of nowhere anymore? Except to build cloverleaves. So why did I think about the spring?

A cloverleaf, at that time, was a curiosity, especially way out here where the side road—the reason for the strange convoluted archings-over and goings-under—might, once a week, emit a pickup truck or a firewood-laden Indian wagon, and maybe once a season, a lost tourist. Of course now all that complication carries only half the traffic through here.

Anyway, aside from its unsightliness, I still couldn’t get used to the cloverleaf and I always shot out the other side of it and down the long, almost imperceptible slant of the Sonora down from Picacho Grande toward town with a feeling of relief, still conscious of That Thing looming behind me, bulking emotionally larger than the thrust and tumble of the red boulders of Picacho Grande behind it.

But one day it was different. As usual, as I entered the first curve of the cloverleaf, I was absorbed in trying to analyze my uneasiness. Suddenly the sky yanked up sideways into slanting wrinkles! Then it tore diagonally in sudden, soundless gashes!

I hit my brakes and felt a thump as though my front wheels had come back down to the road from somewhere. My whole body felt like a cork starting to pull out of a bottle. There was no place to pull over and stop—not where I was at the moment—so I got my foot back on the accelerator and eased forward. The suction that had been lifting me bodily from the seat of my car was gone and the sky, what I could see of it, was serene and unblemished again. I wiped a wondering hand over the bottom of my face. What was going on?

Then it did it again! As though something had grabbed the film the world was painted on and was dragging it up sideways! This time the slant of my car tilted me back firmly against the seat. I saw the upward drag widen into an opening rip. And before I could blink or think, my car slid right into it.

Sight was gone. Feeling was so distorted that I could relate to nothing except an emptying sink and then an inching forward to be born.

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