Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road Read online

  Her hand fell upon his, cool and papery, like onion skin. Henry pulled away from her, and Marianne’s hands emerged from the shadows of the Buick’s backseat, silvery-white in the moonlight, and curled their fingers around the frame of the open door. She clamped down and pulled herself forward, her tight, grinning face rising quickly from the car at him. Henry staggered backward with a gasp, and he watched as she unfurled herself, spider-like, to her full height on the side of the road before him. She had been a tallish woman in life and remained so in death, though so much thinner now, her face somehow longer and limbs spotty, rubbery. Her hair, sparse before, continued to thin and drop away, leaving broad patches of bare scalp that was beginning to peel and flake.

  “Christ Jesus,” he muttered. He noticed her arm—the one he had grabbed moments earlier—had five new blemishes that were quickly purpling. He choked back a pained gasp.

  Marianne canted her head to one side and widened her cloudy, dead eyes at him. He couldn’t fathom how she could see out of them, but none of this was supposed to be possible.

  “Henreeeee,” she said, her voice lilting into something approaching a song. It made his stomach flip. “Where are we going, lover? That fucking cross? Tell me it’s not the fucking cross, Henry.”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “All this way and that’s all you’ve come up with?”

  Her shoulders raised, rolled, and sagged again. She rolled those foggy eyes, too, and worked her jaw while her tongue probed at her teeth. Whatever was in there was finally getting a shot at trying out the body, or at least Henry figured as much. The first step she took was like a newborn calf or deer, the spindly legs trembling and unsure. He noticed how long and jagged her toenails looked now, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have put some shoes on her before he left Jersey. Even undertakers put shoes on the bodies they dumped in the ground. He shuddered, knowing that the Marianne he spent over a decade with would be horrified at the state of her post-mortem being.

  She reached for him again and it was all he could to not recoil at her touch. She stopped just short, her fingers hovering over his forearm. They waggled ever so slightly, the fingernails grazing the hairs on his goose bump-ridden flesh. He backed away, not hiding his disgust this time.

  “You’re repulsed by me.” Her outstretched arm fell back to her side as her grin faded.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer.

  “Good,” she said, reading his face in lieu of a response. “Good.”

  The grin returned.

  Henry’s lungs deflated, and his shoulders sagged. He thought again of the enormous cross, and he silently admonished himself for having considered that for a solution. None of this was in his wheelhouse, though he shuddered to think whose wheelhouse it was in. All he knew was that his wife’s rapid descent into the world of herbs and crystals and other assorted hokum had made him more than a little uncomfortable, but since it wasn’t his sickness, his death, he resolved to keep his mouth shut and let her do whatever the hell she wanted to do. The stone, in retrospect, seemed among the least ridiculous items she’d acquired from the sundry humbug dealers she’d found online.

  Five bucks, plus another three-fifty for shipping. When first he saw it, he was reminded of the smooth, flat stones he used to search for on the shore of Lake Hopatcong when he was a kid; long, lazy summer days spent skipping them over the surface of the water as he got better at it and the stones went farther and farther. A comforting memory triggered by her comforting hocus-pocus talisman. How bad could that be?

  Of course, that was before he believed in things that weren’t at all possible. Black, rotted things that didn’t belong in his life or this place. Things that, apparently, one could procure for fewer than ten American dollars and a healthy dose of desperation.

  Things one could not outrun.

  The cross loomed in the distance bright and steady, beckoning. He turned his back to it—that was a foxhole he had no desire to jump into. But to walk back that way also meant finding a place to stay for the night and maybe an all-night diner. His stomach growled. It had been hours since he had polished off the beef jerky he bought when he last got gas. He couldn’t remember where that had been, just that the sun was still out at that point.

  His mind wandered, and he thought of eggs, sunny side up. A mug of hot black coffee, no sugar. In the distance, a pair of eggs rose over the horizon—no, not eggs; they were headlights, blinding him as they closed in.

  Beside him, Marianne fell to the ground, whacking her head against the open door on the way down.

  “Marianne!” Henry rushed to her. As he bent over her, he nearly hit his head against the same door. He swore under his breath as he lifted her head and felt dampness. He pulled one hand away—it was dark but there was no mistaking what it was.

  “Is everything okay here?”

  He hadn’t realized the vehicle was already upon them, and he hadn’t heard the driver get out. But the headlights were blinding, and with one wet hand still holding Marianne’s head, he shielded his eyes as a figure emerged from the glare.

  “Oh, shit,” the driver said.

  He wore a mesh ballcap and a red hunting vest over a plaid shirt. His face was indistinct, but Henry could make out the shaggy black beard that covered a good half of it. Behind the man, a late model Chevy pickup idled, something shrill warbling from the radio inside the cab.

  “She fell,” Henry said.

  “I got a CB,” the driver said. “I’ll radio for help.” He moved to return to the truck.

  Henry barked, “No!”

  The driver stopped, slowly turned back to Henry, who rose to his feet and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt.

  “I mean, I think she’s exhausted, maybe. It’s been a long day. A long drive.”

  “Is that—is that blood on you?”

  Henry shot a glance down at himself, at his hands and shirt, where indeed there was something dark, wet, sticky.

  “No,” he said, his voice starting to crack. “No, no. Look, maybe just help me get her back into the car, huh? I don’t want to trouble anyone. She’s just tired, really. We’re both just so goddamned tired.”

  He wished to hell he could see the driver’s face, read his expression and maybe his thoughts. All he really wanted was for the nosy bastard to go away, but he needed to feel sure he went away comfortable enough with the situation that he didn’t get anyone else involved. Though part of him considered the wisdom of making her—it—somebody else’s problem, it wasn’t going to be easy explaining any of this, especially when she was doing such a bang-up job playing dead for their guest.

  No, this was Henry’s problem.

  “Yeah,” the driver said at some length. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

  He approached somewhat warily, and when he reached Marianne, he knelt down beside her. Henry crouched, too, and he didn’t like what he saw in the man’s face now that he was close up. The man touched her arm and squashed his eyebrows into a tight knit.

  “Mister,” the driver said, swallowing hard. “She doesn’t look . . . ”

  Quickly, he retracted his hand and shot up, eyes wide and wild.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ. That lady’s dead.”

  He edged around Marianne and cleared the Buick’s open back door, and he began moving backward toward the idling truck.

  “No, no,” Henry pleaded. “Listen, she’s a little sick, maybe, not feeling all that great, but we’re just so tired, man. Come on, now. Hey, would you stop a minute, now?”

  “Stay back,” the man said. “Stay right there.”

  “Not dead,” Henry said, shaking his head back and forth and advancing slowly toward the man. “You got it wrong. She’s not dead. I can prove it. I can prove it to you.”

  As soon as he said it, he decided it wasn’t true. He couldn’t prove it, because she was dead. She’d died there on their bed, back in Jersey, and he knew it. One only had to look at her, to smell her, to feel the rubbery give of her cool skin, to s
ee that. And she wasn’t budging—not as long as she kept up this charade.

  Yet looking at her now, still and white on the gravel and lifeless grass, her eyes sunken into her skull and dry lips receding from her teeth, all Henry could see was the same thing the frightened stranger saw.

  A corpse.

  His dead wife.

  He said, “Oh my God.”

  Henry grabbed handfuls of his own hair and fought back the scream rising inside of him. Dead, his mind screamed back at him. Dead dead dead dead.

  Grief welled in his chest, bleeding from his heart and spreading throughout the rest of him like the cancer that took Marianne. A grief he could not face, a grief that preferred madness to being left alone in this life.

  “What have I done?” he asked, but there was no one to answer him. Marianne was dead, and the stranger was already back in the cab of his truck, holding the CB receiver to his face.

  Henry fell into a stumbling gait, pinwheeling his arms as he rushed the Chevy. He was desperate to explain, to make the man see what this really was, that it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it looked. Please please please no no no.

  “ . . . a big problem here on the westbound side of 57, over,” he heard the driver say.

  You don’t understand, please no, don’t, Henry’s mind babbled, but the words got stuck in his throat. It was just a mistake, not a murder. It was too much to take, but he had a grip on himself now. Why couldn’t this goddamned son of a bitch just settle down and listen?

  He reached the truck and grasped the door by the open window, and just as the startled driver dropped the receiver and recoiled from Henry in fear, the passenger side door flew open and Marianne flew into the cab like a wraith.

  “Marianne!”

  The driver squealed like a hog being slaughtered when her teeth sank into his neck, her jagged, gray fingernails into his face and one eye. The man’s hands slapped blindly at her as he thrashed behind the wheel, but the earthly remains of Marianne didn’t loosen their grasp on him. She shook and snarled, whipped her head with her teeth still clamped down on him. Blood, black as the night, burbled out of him and sprayed the windshield. Another massive 18-wheeler rumbled past on the interstate and blew its deafening horn as it swerved to avoid taking the passenger side door off the truck, but it didn’t slow down.

  And by the time the semi had vanished into the pitch, the driver was dead, his red throat opened and right eye ruined, his body blanketed with his own blood.

  The CB crackled, then fell silent.

  For the first time, Henry noticed the insects singing somewhere in the grass and brush behind him. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened to them.

  “Henry . . . ”

  When again he opened his eyes, he found Marianne sitting calmly in the pickup’s passenger seat, knees together and hands folded in her lap. She slowly turned her head to face him, and in the shadows the blood on her face looked like a dark beard had sprouted.

  In spite of himself, Henry laughed at that.

  “Now we have a truck,” Marianne said. Her voice was wet and syrupy.

  The task of dragging the driver out of the pickup and over to the Buick was considerably more difficult than Henry anticipated. It was the second body he’d ever moved, but substantially heavier than Marianne’s. When at last he got the man into the backseat and covered him with the blanket, he was awash with sweat and his breath was ragged.

  The gas gauge on the dash was close to E when he finally climbed in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. Henry heaved a sigh, then cranked the gearshift into D. He drove below the speed limit and headed for the next exit, where there was a Shell station they’d passed several miles back. Once he was gassed up, he’d get back on the westbound side as they had been, before spinning out.

  When they passed the Effingham cross again, bright in the night sky, Marianne snickered. Henry could smell the decay in her breath, the coagulating blood on her blouse.

  The ocean, he thought, pushing the unpleasant odors from his mind. I’ll take her all the way to the ocean. With this in mind, he could almost smell the salt spray, feel the sun on his neck.

  “We’ll go in together,” Marianne said. “The water. Both of us.”

  “Yes,” Henry agreed, slowing the truck at sight of the Shell sign ahead.

  “My beloved,” she rasped.

  Henry smiled, knowing he was not mad, after all.

  WHERE THE WILD WINDS BLOW

  MATT HAYWARD

  The Dyna’s headlight spluttered, strobing the mountain road like a bad disco. Tony gripped the handlebars and relaxed the bike to a steady twenty, unable to navigate the flickering. He rolled to a stop and kicked the stand before easing himself from the seat with a grunt. The bike purred, and he tapped the tank for good luck. If the night could get any worse, this was it.

  “Baby, don’t do this . . . ”

  He kneeled and knocked the malfunctioning light with his knuckle. It blinked once, twice . . . died.

  “You givin’ up on me, too? Fine.”

  His dry mouth tasted of stale booze and too many cigarettes. He worked up some saliva and managed to swallow as he got to his feet, the only glow now coming from the city through the matting of spruce on his right. His jeans sagged and he tightened his buckle a notch, unfazed by the past week’s shed weight. Colliding with a vagrant at fifty caused all kinds of side-effects.

  Tony clicked his tongue, squinting further up the mountain road and gauging the danger. Twenty-odd miles to go, the left side an abrupt plummet and the right nothing but pines. The trip home could be made. In the dark. If he was careful.

  “And if I keep from seein’ double long enough.”

  That, too, he thought. Like smacking a homeless man head-on, downing a bottle of whiskey also had its effects on the body and mind. He thought of Lisa back home, pacing the living room in her robe and chain-smoking a pack of Luckies for the sixth night in a row. He’d taken off with the Dyna for three-day stints before, sure, but not in the last decade. The fight this time, what little he could remember, ended with him getting the bottom of a bottle in the right eye socket. Now the bruised skin was still tender to the touch, but healing.

  Lisa’d promised to stay sober with him, and goddamn it, if she caved then he had a fucking right to hit the town, too. Sure, he might’ve gone overboard with a week—and a fifty-worth a night in Jeff’s Juke only paid back in a sore head—but the principle mattered. Now, at the end of this all-time low, he could return home and stitch it all back together.

  Except, Wednesday night’d ended in a hit and run . . . Boy, have you fucked the puppy.

  He planted his hands on his hips and scanned the road, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The wind hissed through the trees. He could make it home . . . praying, of course, that Lisa hadn’t already set fire to the place and shat in his Corvette. A seventy-thirty chance at this point. Either way, he needed to go back, if not for her then to gather his things and hit the road. Before the local rednecks slipped into gear and caught up to him for killing ol’ Homeless Harry.

  Unlikely, seeing as Tony’d dragged the hobo’s body to an alleyway and left him in a sleeping position. Bums died all the time, who’d waste their evening with an autopsy?

  Right after, with his nerves shot, hands trembling, and with his leg screaming—the top layer of skin left somewhere on the street—Tony’d hobbled back to his bike and taken off, leaving the body behind a buzzing trash can. A three-minute ordeal tops.

  “Better safe than sorry.” Tony shook away his swaying vision and shuffled back to the bike, his thigh burning with each step. He’d doused the leg with whiskey the night of the crash while watching a rerun of The Price Is Right in a motel off the highway. So far, the wound stayed clean but he’d need proper bandages once home.

  He lifted the leg across the seat and eased himself back on the Dyna. She rocked in response. Once satisfied he could see at least ten feet head, he kicked the stand off and pushed forw
ard, keeping a stable fifteen at first. The Dyna growled, a metallic panther chewing up road.

  Tony shivered in the night chill, the thought of coming home and clicking on the heater in the living-room giving his chest a flutter. He could curl up on the couch and drift off for the night, what little was left of it, deal with the inevitable argument and severe hangover after he’d caught at least a little shut-eye.

  “Daddy’s comin’, sweetheart. Don’t go just yet . . . ”

  As he slipped up to twenty, his confidence rose along with the speed. An urge to gun the bike—to thirty, forty, fifty—kicked in. That very urge, last time, ended with him skidding from the Juke’s lot at three a.m. and smacking a vagrant from his shoes. Still, his stomach tickled with excitement. The steep drop to his left teased him to try. Or better yet, close his eyes and count to ten, see where he ended up . . . for The Thrill.

  His knuckles whitened as his lids fought to shut but his brain refused, still having enough sense to know the consequences of wrecking the bike on the mountain. Hitching back to his and Lisa’s didn’t appeal, not when only the odd trucker took this route to grab breakfast at the diner in the hills or grab a beer in town before hitting the highway.

  “Just get home . . . you’ve had your fun. Just get home.”

  But Lisa had drank. And after promising him to stay clean, too.

  She’d let him down.

  And you’d only be letting yourself down by getting into more trouble. You’re done, Kid.

  “ . . . But the night ain’t over yet.”

  Tony crept the bike to twenty-five, the speedometer jittering. Wind lifted his hair from his shoulders and the sensation curled his lips. He could go further.

  The whiskey seemed to agree.

  Into thirty, his heart nudged his ribs like an old high-school buddy: That all you got, Pussy? Come on. Where’s the Tony Williams the ladies gush for, eh?

  Touching fifty now, Tony surprised himself with a laugh and leaned forward, adrenaline thrumming through his veins in a good hit. He took a corner and his left hand refused to brake, the tire skidding and spitting rubble from the cliff edge. The sheer drop came into view for a split second— a chunk of dark pines separating the mountain from the town bathed in blue moonlight— and Tony had a brief impulse to leap from his seat and drop. Surely it’d last at least eleven seconds? And what a fuck load of fun that’d be! But then the bike took off again, back on course, pulling both him and his death wish away by its own accord.