The 5th Witch Read Free

topped a hundred miles an hour.
    Another car slammed past, then another and another—more and more of them, until it sounded as if somebody were hurrying in a panic through a huge house, slamming every door behind him.
    As they approached Isla Vista, Dan saw taillights ahead of them, as he always did, and he had to brake, hard.
    “God,” said Gayle, as she always did.
    It was the same in every nightmare, and it had been the same in real life on the night it had happened.A recreational vehicle in two-tone brown, driving at a crawl, with oily black smoke billowing from the back of it. On the rear bumper it bore a sticker that said Jesus Is Suspicious .
    “What do you think that means?” he asked Gayle, just as he had asked her on the evening she was killed. “Do you think they’re trying to say that Jesus kind of, like, suspects something, or do you think they mean that Jesus is acting kind of strange?”
    “Maybe both,” said Gayle.
    “Well, whichever it is, I wish in the name of Jesus this guy would move his wreck of a camper out of my face.”
    He made a signal and pulled out to pass. As he did, a truck came toward them with its lights ablaze and its horn blaring, and Dan had to swerve back in again.
    “Dan—be careful. Please.”
    He blinked at her, still dazzled. “How long do you think I’ve been driving? Eighteen years and only one accident, and that wasn’t my fault. Some Hell’s Angel with a death wish.”
    He pulled out again. The highway ahead looked clear, so he put his foot down.
    The Mustang rumbled louder and louder. Lightning crackled across the sky, and all of a sudden the air was filled with a blizzard of paper and dust and seagulls that thumped against the windshield, leaving it splattered with blood.
    “Dan—!”
    “It’s fine! We’re going to be fine!”
    But then he realized that the camper was being towed by a long black tractor trailer and that it was going to take him much longer to pass than he had calculated. What he had thought to be smoke from the camper was pouring out of the tractor’s exhaust stack and blowing across the highway in front of them sothat he could barely see. And still the seagulls thumped against the windshield, bursting apart and spraying blood and feathers.
    Dan, something’s coming the other way .
    He switched on the windshield wipers, and the glass was immediately smeared with two opaque crescents of blood. But he could see the lights approaching, four main headlights and a whole rack of floodlights, and they were growing brighter and brighter at a terrifying rate. A bus maybe, or a truck. He could hear its horn blowing, like three discordant trumpets.
    There was nothing he could do but jam his foot down even harder. They had almost drawn level with the tractor’s front wheel, although their windshield was filled with blinding white light, and Dan thought: I never imagined that I was going to die like this .
    There was a fraction of a second when he believed that it was too late. But then they pulled ahead of the tractor, and he twisted the wheel to the right, and a huge Amoco tanker blasted past them, still blowing its horn, so close that its slipstream sent the seagull feathers whirling up inside the Mustang’s interior.
    “ Shit ,” he said, looking in his rearview mirror at the tanker’s disappearing taillights.
    And it was then that they collided with the rear end of a truck loaded with scaffolding poles, and one of them smashed through the windshield and hit Gayle directly in the face.
       
    That was when he always woke up—with that last picture of Gayle in his head. It was so grisly that he would have to limp to the bathroom and lean over the sink, his mouth filling with bile, his stomach muscles clenching and unclenching, his eyes tightly closed until the image faded away.
    Then he would raise his head and stare at himself in the mirror—a lean, haunted face with angular cheekbones and a sharply pointed nose and eyes the color of