Strangers

of the interstate, and scrambled up the far slope. He waited for three huge trucks to roar past, then crossed the eastbound lanes in the windy wake of those rigs. His heart was pounding with an inexplicable excitement, and for the moment he had forgotten the advent of night.
        He stopped on the far berm, at the crest of the highway's elevated bed, looking south and slightly west. He wore a bulky suede jacket with sheepskin lining, but his brush-cut gray hair provided little protection from the chilly wind, which scrubbed its cold knuckles across his skull.
        He began to lose the feeling that something of immense importance was about to happen. Instead, he was seized by the even creepier notion that something had already happened to him on that patch of shadow-banded ground out there, something that accounted for his recent fear of the dark. Something he had assiduously banned from his memory.
        But that made no sense. If important events had transpired here, they simply would not have slipped his mind. He was not forgetful. And he was not the kind of person who repressed unpleasant memories.
        Still, the back of his neck continued to tingle. Out there, not far into those trackless Nevada plains, something had happened to him that he had forgotten but that now pricked him from his subconscious, where it was deeply embedded, much the way a needle, accidentally left in a quilt, might jab and startle a sleeper out of a dream.
        With his legs spread wide and his feet planted firmly in the berm, with his blocky head hunched down on his blocky shoulders, Ernie seemed to be challenging the landscape to speak more clearly to him. He strained to resurrect the dead memory of this place - if, indeed, there was one-but the harder he tried to grasp the elusive revelation, the faster it receded from him. Then it was gone altogether.
        The déjŕ vu deserted him as completely as the sense of impending epiphany had evaporated before it. The tingle left his scalp and neck. His frantically pounding heart settled slowly into a more normal pace.
        Bewildered and somewhat dizzy, he studied the fast-fading scene before him - the angled land, the spines and teeth of rock, the brush and grass, the weathered convexities and concavities of the ancient earth - and now he could not imagine why it had seemed special to him. It was just a portion of the high plains virtually indistinguishable from a thousand other spots from here to Elko or from here to Battle Mountain.
        Disoriented by the suddenness of his plunge from the brink of transcendent awareness, he looked back toward the van, which waited on the north side of the interstate. He felt conspicuous and foolish when he thought of the way he had dashed from there to here in the grip of a strange excitement. He hoped Faye had not seen him. If by chance she had been looking out a window in this direction, she could not have missed his performance, for the motel was only a quarter of a mile away, and the flashing emergency blinkers on the truck made it by far the most noticeable thing in the swiftly descending darkness.
        Darkness.
        Abruptly, the nearness of nightfall hit Ernie Block hard. For a while, the mysterious magnetism that had drawn him to this place had been stronger than his fear of the dark. But that changed in an instant when he realized that the eastern half of the sky was purple-black and that only minutes of vague light remained in the western realm.
        With a cry of panic, he bolted across the eastbound lanes, in front of a motor home, oblivious of the danger. A horn blared at him. He did not care, did not pause, just ran pell-mell because he could feel the darkness clutching at him and pressing down on him. He reached the shallow gully that served as a lane divider, fell as he started down into it, rolled back onto his feet, terrified of the blackness that was welling up out of each depression in the land and from under every rock. He flung himself up the other side of the gully, fled into the westbound lanes. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic, for he did not look to see if the way was clear. At the van, he fumbled with the door handle, acutely conscious of the perfect blackness under the truck. It was grappling at his feet. It wanted to pull him under the Dodge and devour him. He yanked the door open. Tore his feet loose of the hands of darkness. Clambered into the cab. Slammed the door.