Dark Rivers of the Heart

saturated shoes. The Explorer was riding lower than when last he'd noticed. The water was only an inch below the bottom of the window.
        Though moving fast, the river was less turbulent, perhaps because it had broadened. If the arroyo narrowed or the terrain changed, the flow might become teinestuous again, la inside, and sink them.
        Spencer was barely clearheaded enough to know that he should be alarmed.
        Nevertheless, he could muster only a mild concern.
        He should find a way to seal the dangerous gap where the window had been. But the problem seemed insurmountable. For one thing, he would have to move to accomplish it, and he didn't want to move.
        All he wanted to do was sleep. He was so tired. Exhausted.
        His head lolled to the right against the headrest, and he saw the dog sitting on the passenger seat. "How you doing', fur butt?" he asked thickly, as if he had been pouring down beer after beer.
        Rocky glanced at him, then looked again at the river ahead.
        "Don't be afraid, pal. He wins if you're afraid. Don't let the bastard win. Can't let him win. Got to find Valerie. Before he does.
        He's out there.
        He's forever… on the prowl…"
        With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant rode through the glistening day, muttering feverishly, searching for something unknown, unknowable. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the crumpled roof of the truck.
        Maybe he passed out again, maybe he only closed his eyes, but when his feet slipped off the brake pedal and splashed into water that was now halfway up his calves, Spencer lifted his throbbing head and saw that the windshield wipers had stopped. Dead battery.
        The river was as fast as an express train. Some turbulence had returned. Muddy water licked at the sill of the broken window.
        Inches beyond that gap, a dead rat floated on the surface of the flow, pacing the truck. Long and sleek. One unblinking, glassy eye fixed on Spencer. Lips skinned back from sharp teeth. The long, disgusting tail was as stiff as wire, strangely curled and kinked.
        The sight of the rat alarmed Spencer as he had not been alarmed by the flood lapping at the windowsill. With the breathless, heart-pounding fear familiar from nightmares, he knew he would die if the rat washed into the truck, because it was not merely a rat. It was Death. It was a cry in the night and the hoot of an owl, a flashing blade and the smell of hot blood, it was the catacombs, it was the smell of lime and worse, it was the door out of boyhood innocence, the passageway to Hell, the room at the end of nowhere: It was all that in the cold flesh of one dead rodent. If it touched him, he'd scream until his lungs burst, and his last breath would be darkness.
        If only he could find an object with which to reach through the window and shove the thing away without having to touch it directly.
        But he was too weak to search for anything that could serve as a prod.
        His hands lay in his lap, palms up, and even contracting his fingers into fists required more strength than he possessed.
        Maybe more damage had been done than he had first realized, when the top of his head had hit the ceiling. He wondered if paralysis had begun to creep through him. If so, he wondered if it mattered.
        Lightning scarred the sky. A bright reflection transformed the rat's tenebrous eye into a flaring white orb that seemed to swivel in the socket to glare even more directly at Spencer.
        He sensed that his fixation on the rat would draw it toward him, that his horrified gaze was a magnet to its iron-black eye. He looked away from it. Ahead. At the river.
        Though he was sweating profusely, he was colder than ever. Even his scar was cold, not ablaze any longer. The coldest part of him.
        His skin was ice, but his scar was frozen steel.
        Blinking away the rain as it slanted through the window, Spencer watched the river gain speed, racing toward the only interesting feature in an otherwise tedious landscape of gently declining plains.
        North to south across the Mojave, vanishing in mist, a spine of rock jutted as high as twenty or thirty feet in some places, as low as three feet in others. Though it was a natural geological feature, the formation was weathered curiously, with wind-carved windows, and appeared to be