Our bed had grown. It was now almost three times as tall as when we had left it.
I stood still. Roger quivered at my side. The blankets had risen from within as though by a yeast, to a height of some six feet, and the whole bed was glowing hellishly. From the center of the dark room, through the red covers of the bed, came a blurred radiance.
Alarm spread to my feet. Relax, Coco, I ordered myself.
But I rushed for the door of the tavern.
I ran outside through torrents of rain. When Roger caught up I had the key in the ignition.
Our hearse wouldn't start.
Surges of black rain slapped the windshield. Ahead, a gentle uphill slope.
"Out!" Roger barked. "Push!"
A strong guy, Roger, and I was strong for a girl, but it isn't that easy, pushing a hearse. He shoved from the rear, I shoved from a window, working the wheel. "Left, Coco, damn it!" We got the thing on the road by rocking it, but it took every ounce of strength we had to force it to the exact point where the uphill slope of the road began to dip.
When it rolled, he slipped in through the rear door, me through the front. The engine, dragged forward in gear by gravity, coughed ... spat ... fired like a motorboat ... and refused to start.
We rolled to the bottom of the dip.
It was uphill from here in both directions.
Morbid, cold, hot, frustrated, stormbound, hopeless, we looked under the hood with our flashlight, found nothing, kept on looking, and saw it. Under the distributor. A wire, hanging loose. The innkeeper must have pulled it. We stood up, yelling to the blast.
"Bastard fixed us so we'd stay in that room!"
"Goddamn cretin pulled a goddamn wire so we'd stay –"
"In that bed!"
But some wires come off by themselves. I reconnected it. Roger fastened the hood. I grabbed the wheel.
The motor started to my touch, weak, but running. Roger turned to give a farewell glance to our tavern and "Good God," he cried, stunned, "he's after us!"
A glance at the rearview mirror: I saw the old man coming at us through the rain, stumbling, gesticulating furiously.
I put the hearse in gear. We moved, but there wasn't much power. The spark plugs, still wet or wet all over again, were firing improperly. "Use the choke," Roger screamed, his bravado gone. I tried using the choke, which didn't help. The radiator was still hot, the road was going up, I felt the strain on the engine, I felt like telling him to throw his four hundred pound iron sculpture of Ligeia overboard. And I did. I yelled, "Get back there and throw that fucking metal nude of yours overboard!"
He got back there. He pulled open the window between the driver's seat and the coffin bed and crawled through to dump his masterwork.
"He's gaining!" he shrieked. He was so frightened, he actually shoved the thing, he tried. He could hardly budge it.
I urged the big ancient unpersuadable hearse forward. It wouldn't pick up speed. It slowed. The hill got steeper. I tried slipping the clutch. If we could get to the top of the rise I glanced and saw the old man in the mirror, larger than life, maniacally threatening, running for us.
"It's him! You were right!" Roger twisted around and screeched, "That's Old Man Death!"
Roger unstable? I could see him, he was hysterical, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I could see over the rise, we were at the summit, it was downhill from here, and as though released by an overheated mind, steam raged from beneath the hood, bursts of vapor rose around us, the hearse struggled barely ahead of the old man, spouting, gushing, billowing through the rain like a dying whale. And in that uproar of fog I heard the innkeeper screech insanely, "Pay!"
I put on the brakes.
The little man caught the handle of the rear door and wrenched the hearse open. "Pay!" he shouted at Roger, reaching in for him.
I sloshed to the back. The old man was crying. Good God! I removed his feeble tendonous wrists from Roger's arm and tried to find my broken friend's buried face.
The old man took us back. His fingers on ours were gristle. He was stern, shaken, forgiving. In the bedroom he lifted one corner of the hellish red covers for us.
We looked in, squinting, nearly blinded. A wooden frame rested on the bottom sheet. It held the upper sheet and blankets carefully high up. Out and away. For a chilled couple on a stormy night. Set in the wooden frame, dozens of electric bulbs -- long rows of incandescence burned with a fiery dazzle.
Bed warmer. His own invention. From deep in his throat came a proud noise like crickets. There must have been three thousand watts of light in that bed.
We paid. Neither of us had the guts, though, to stay the night.
We slogged up the road. Roger, like an exhausted child, went to sleep in the bed of the hearse without a word.
At the wheel I sat brooding. A hungry lust twisted my entrails. I slunk around back. He looked so wet, so crushed, as if he'd been run over. Caught in the beam of my flashlight, his eyelids fluttered, opened, he stared, dumbfounded, unable to believe what? Where he was? who I was? that we were both still alive? A burning metallic taste ran like bilge from the gutter of my heart to the trough of my mouth. My jaws separated. My head, thrown back, lashed forward.
He was too dazed to know what I meant. It didn't matter, it did not matter to any part of me that each crescendo of shrieks threatened to fracture the seams of my skull. His fist turned on my windpipe, choking me. I chomped down harder. His pain sang to me.
I smashed him against his Ligeia.
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