Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road Read online

  The restroom had probably never been very tidy or welcoming. It was the same as the ones in every other rest stop I had ever visited; concrete floors, windows set high in the walls to let in what little light could force its way past the dust-coated plexiglass, a trio of metal stalls and boxy troughs for sinks. I knew such rest stop bathrooms well from my many pilgrimages along I-70 and was familiar with them as homes for dead leaves, dead bugs, cobwebs, and dust. But this one was positively festooned with spider webs.

  It was as if the decorator for an old Gothic horror film had gone to town but had never been told to stop. The webs filled the room with such proliferation as to make no sense. No insect could ever penetrate them deeply enough for any but the ones nearest the door to catch any prey, and yet they filled every space, the strands sometimes the monofilament thickness that I was used to in spider’s webs, other times reaching a ropy girth that called to mind alien slime or the webs of mutant spiders from the movies.

  These were what had made forcing the door open feel like fighting my way past marshmallow fluff, and as I flashed my light across the sticky strands, I thought I saw something writhing in their depths. Something much too big to be an insect, and too malformed to be human. It let out a mewling sound, and I stumbled back, the door swinging shut behind me.

  Or had I gone through a door, after all? The light on the other side seemed changed in some subtle way, the setting sun painting the sky with the radiation glow of a post-apocalyptic future. That wasn’t all that had changed, either. There was an RV in the parking lot that hadn’t been there before. One that looked all-too familiar, down to the circle being pierced by the line daubed onto the door in something too dark to be paint.

  All around me, it seemed that the trees were moving closer whenever I wasn’t looking. I imagined them turning upside-down, their branches becoming spidery legs on which they crept nearer, only to plant themselves again, head down in the dirt, whenever my eyes swept across them. For all that I told myself it was a panic response, a trick of the mind, there was no denying that when I looked again what had been thirty paces from the picnic shelters became twenty, twenty became ten.

  With the trees closing in, I don’t know why I thought the RV was a safer place to be, but I found myself standing in front of its door nevertheless.

  On the other side I could hear sounds. Voices whispering, and something else. The sound of a dozen blades sawing flesh. The door had a handle, the kind that turns downward, a line piercing a circle into the earth, and I turned it and the door opened outward, and from inside came the reptile house smell of pennies and fresh soil.

  Inside was Damien Hesher. On his head he wore that same cow skull, its teeth and horns missing, transforming it into something else, the helmet of a cyclops, the head of an insect. On his hands he wore claws made from the bones of small animals; the same claws he had used, according to the coroner’s report, to tear out his own throat, though I saw now that those claws were unstained by blood.

  His neck was still a bloody, ragged wound, though something now moved inside it, working open and closed. “Eternity is a cruel thing,” are the only words he said to me, the sounds coming not from where his mouth should have been, but from the ragged hole in his neck. Then they came for him.

  The floor of the RV opened like a series of trap doors held tight by webbing, the seams invisible until triggered. Black limbs rose up from the floor, scuttling bodies like the ones I had imagined attached to the spidery trees. They embraced Damien Hesher, taking him back with them to wherever it was he now resided.

  The hand that he reached out toward me was not threatening but supplicating. Beneath those claws of bone, the pad of his hand was pink and soft. I felt sorry for him, this man who had thought he could peer into a dark well and not be frightened by what he saw. I stumbled back, as more of the dark shapes came surging up from the glowing trap doors, and felt a hand fall on my shoulder.

  She stood behind me, still as tall as my mom. She wore the same jeans and hoodie that she had worn when she disappeared, but the hand that touched me wasn’t anything I recognized, and in the dark shadows of that hood her eyes seemed to glitter, and a seam split her face, running up her neck, up her chin. Her smile was the same, though, and she said my name as my arms went around her and I pressed my face into her shoulder, realizing only as I did so that I had gotten to be just as tall as her, over the years.

  When I could no longer feel her arms around me, I opened my eyes, and found myself standing in the parking lot of the rest stop, my shoes on the asphalt. The RV was gone. The sun had set completely, and the night sky was filled with stars, the stunted trees having retreated to their usual distance, though I had the feeling it was only a temporary armistice, not a permanent peace.

  When I got back to my Passat and sat down in the driver’s seat, I felt something crinkle in my back pocket. Pulling it out, I found a faded polaroid of me and Danielle. I was sitting in front of her on the brass bed I had when I was little, and she was braiding my hair and smiling, her face suddenly clarified in the blur of my memory.

  Looking up, I thought I saw her watching me from the tree line, those black eyes sparkling, but when I shut off the dome light there was nothing there. Just the fading hint of a door closing in the rocky cliffside, maybe, nothing more.

  THE LONG WHITE LINE

  MICHAEL BAILEY

  “That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.”—Chuck Palahniuk

  “They always hug the line,” Tracie said, pointing to whatever black creature had died on the side of the road, and then we smelled it. Tracie drove, steered with her knees for a moment and tapped a snort of coke from a small glass vial to the underside of her pinky nail. She took in the drug, wiped her nose with her fingertips. Sniffed. She offered me the vial. I shook my head no and watched her slip it into her black jeans. “The long white line,” she said, batting her hands against the steering wheel. The radio was off, but she had some song in her head.

  I’d had too much to drink and avoided recreational drugs.

  “Don’t you wanna know why?” Tracie said, watching me and not the road.

  We’d had sex in the car, under a streetlamp. I was thinking about that, about the bra on the floorboard, her torn underwear on the middle console. She’d used me, I knew, had finished and climbed off before I could and slid naked into her jeans, started the car and drove.

  “Don’t I wanna know what?

  “Why they always hug the line?”

  Cars hit them, I told her, all the damn time: chipmunks, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, deer; cars hit them as they tried crossing from one side to the other, the impact forcing them forward and to the side of the road. It was an odd conversation to have after what we’d done. We were late, a few hours past when I told my dad I’d be home, and he’d be passed out on the couch, I knew, but I’d never been out so late on a school night, and we were discussing roadkill. We should have been talking about us, about our plans after we graduated.

  “Kids?”

  “Huh?”

  “You think kids ever get hit?”

  Sometimes, I told her, or so I guessed. There was always debris on the side of the road, like old shoes—always one and never two—and clothes, toys, a helmet, a crumpled bike, or a stroller, broken glass and bumpers and hubcaps and ash from flares and red taillight remnants from past accidents. Kids probably got hit now and again.

  “Why, have you ever seen a kid on the side of the road? Dead, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, tapping the wheel. “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “It may have been a doll.”

  “You didn’t stop to check?”

  “My mom was driving, and I think it was a doll. She said it was a doll.”

  I let that sink in and adjusted in my seat. It was almost morning and we were going seventy, at least, and I expected at any second for something to jump out in front of us from either side
of the road, an animal with reflective eyes, a damn person even, a child . . .

  “Dead things are always hugging the white line,” Tracie said. “What mom hit was already in the road. Sounded plastic. I remember looking back. Looked like a doll, like one of those old ones in white frilly dresses with ceramic faces, you know?”

  Jesus, I thought, and let her talk, let the drugs talk. Her eyes were shifty.

  “Worst I ever hit was a squirrel,” she said. “I remember the sound.”

  I’d hit a deer once, or the deer had hit me, but I didn’t tell her that. Put a nice dent into my front right fender and broke the headlight on that side, but the deer had lived—at least for a while—and had sprung off into the night. I still remember the adrenaline rush I felt when pulling over, the blood and hunk of pelt on the grill. There were two: a doe and a buck, jumping either into or out of my way that night, and I’d hit the doe.

  “Sometimes you see squirrels in the middle of the road, or chipmunks,” Tracie said, “but the bigger things, they always hug the white line.”

  I couldn’t help but think about the coke she’d snorted. The first time I saw her with any, she’d been straddling the toilet at her parents’ house. They were out on one of those parent date night things and Tracie wasn’t supposed to have anyone over, especially boys, so of course she invited me over so we could fool around. I’d knocked on the door, no one answered, and it was unlocked so I went inside. I found her in the bathroom snorting a credit card cut line from the back of the tank. Want some? she’d said, holding out a rolled dollar bill, but I shook my head no because I’d never done drugs, had never seen any before meeting Tracie. I’d only drank.

  “My older sister,” she said, no longer tapping, the song in her head over, “she told me once, a long time ago when I was still in kindergarten or maybe preschool, that animals came to the road for warmth, mostly at night, because the sun beat down on its black surface all day and at night the heat drew them to the roads, and that that’s why so many animals were drawn there. Everything in this world dies alone. It makes sense. If I were an animal and about to die, I’d come to the roads. I’d be drawn to the warmth.”

  I imagined a single-file procession of animals, their cold and dying bodies wanting something more before passing on to the great beyond . . . vultures waiting on fence posts.

  “You’d hug the long white line?”

  “I would.”

  And it sounds cliché as all get out, but that’s when we hit something, or something hit us, something large—a deer, a dog, a coyote, a person—smashing into the front bumper and tumbling over the hood, caving in and spiderwebbing the windshield. A cacophony of noise, as if someone were pummeling the car from front to back with giant fists and then it was over.

  I’d been looking at Tracie and she’d been looking at me, the car apparently pulling ever so slowly to the side of the road, the tires grating over the rumble strips. The noise had pulled our attention back to the road and we were riding that white line for who knows how long, the car half on the asphalt and half in the gravel and Tracie braked, and the car skidded, fishtailed, jumped back onto the road, but she’d kept going. We’d slowed to fifty or sixty but kept going.

  Jesus, I thought and looked over my shoulder. The road behind us was red-illuminated-black, like the world looks when closing your eyes against the sun.

  The shape of something on the side of the road shrank with distance.

  “Stop,” I said. “Stop the car, Tracie!”

  She nodded in agreement, these little short, rapid nods, and her shaky hands pulled the steering wheel clockwise until we were on the shoulder.

  “What was that?” she asked. “What was that, what was—?”

  “I don’t know just stop the car,” I said, like one giant word.

  When we stopped, she let go of the wheel and looked to her trembling hands, which opened and closed and opened and closed. She reached for a pack of Marlboro Lights in the center console, removed a cigarette and tried to light it with a Bic; she flicked the sparkwheel three or four times before giving up and throwing all of it to the floor.

  I unbuckled and opened my door, but just sat there, the car chiming.

  We stared at each other.

  She was high as fuck, her pupils dilated, her nose red and sniffling.

  Tracie reached into her pocket and pulled out the vial and I thought she was going to take another hit, and I probably would have let her, but she squeezed the vial in her fist and threw it out the driver’s side window as hard as she could. She pulled another cigarette from the pack on the floor and was able to light it this time, held it out to me, and for some reason I took a long drag, although I’d never smoked before, the smoke tasting like I felt.

  What hit us had smashed her radiator; steam rose like an apparition from the hood.

  Splatters of red filled the broken windshield, but not a lot.

  “My parents are going to kill me,” Tracie said.

  The thing behind us had crawled closer. objects in the mirror are closer than they appear the side mirror read, but the thing in the road was definitely closer, with something like an arm now stretched out in front of it. A black moving shape in the dark, irradiated by taillights.

  “It’s still alive,” I said, coughing.

  Tracie turned around, said, “What is it?” and we both stared.

  She got out first, and then I followed.

  It was crawling toward us; not an animal, but a person.

  “Oh my god!” she said, cupping her mouth.

  I tried calling for help, but my cell phone didn’t have signal this far out from town and Tracie’s phone was dead and she didn’t have a charger. We were stuck in a bad situation.

  Whoever we’d hit, we’d hit him or her going who knows how fast—sixty-five, seventy, had we slowed to fifty?

  He or she wasn’t crawling toward us, we soon realized, but convulsing into spasms, his or her arm twitching against the road, and as we drew closer, we discovered the body was so mangled it was impossible to discern male from female. Its face smashed into the road, arms hugging the white line, his or her clothes mostly black, like Tracie’s, but seeping, the body like a ragdoll, the fingers on the most outstretched hand clenching and unclenching until finally still. The body was small, like us, perhaps a fellow student at our high school.

  I threw up right there, onto the asphalt.

  Tracie didn’t say anything, just kept looking at the body and saying Oh my god over and over again, like a mantra.

  The road was dead. We hadn’t passed a single car in either direction all night. We waited for what seemed hours, neither of us knowing what to do. No one ever came to our rescue, and we were about a half-hour drive to either of our homes, much too far to walk.

  She found the vial of coke she’d thrown out of the car, unbroken, and after hesitating she bent down and picked it up, gave me a guilty look, and slipped it into her jeans.

  “We need to do something,” she said.

  “I know we need to do something,” I said, “but what?”

  The mutual idea was to move the body away from the road, so we each grabbed a leg and pulled, the body hesitant against the road, arms dangling behind like streamers. The non-mutual idea was to keep going, deep into the woods, and so we kept going, pulling the body over pine needles and fallen branches and rocks until we were under a canopy of darkness. And we conspired to keep between us what had happened, to restart the car if it could restart and to let the engine overheat as we rolled into town. We’d hit a deer, we’d say, and of course everyone would believe us, because it happened all the time on this particular stretch of road.

  We were far into the woods, using what little light my cell phone offered to lead us through the dark, and covering the body with branches when Tracie screamed. She’d accidentally touched the person’s hand, tripped over a rock while backpedaling, and fell onto her ass.

  “She has the same ring as me,” Tracie said.

 
“Everyone has mood rings,” I said, and in the dark her mood looked black.

  Neither of us recognized the hand, although the fingers were delicate and for the first time I realized the nails were manicured. We’d hit a teenage girl.

  “I need to get out of here,” Tracie said, her words convincing enough to follow. “I need to get out of here, get me out of here!”

  Something snapped in the woods and it was enough to get us moving.

  I led us back the way I thought we came, through bushes and tall grass, but Tracie’s car wasn’t waiting for us at the road, no headlights or taillights in either direction.

  “Where’s my car?” she asked, but I didn’t know.

  No blood on the road.

  “We must have walked farther out than I thought.”

  “So which way?” she said, but I didn’t know that, either.

  We walked what seemed north for a quarter mile or so, and then turned back. It was a dark and winding road, but there’s no way we could have missed the car; every damn turn seemed the same, especially at night. We walked back for what seemed another quarter mile, but everything looked so familiar, and so we kept on walking.

  “Where the hell’s the car?” Tracie said, nearly frantic, her words like static.

  Suddenly there were headlights around the next corner.

  Tracie stuck out her thumb, and then thought aloud, “Oh shit, what do we tell them? What do we tell them?”

  “We tell them our car broke down and ask for a ride,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie, but what if they’d seen Tracie’s car? What if they’d already seen the accident or the blood or the big red smear? “What if it’s a cop?” I said instead, and this was enough for Tracie’s arm to fall to her side. She looked to me and I looked to her and neither of us knew what we were going to do.

  It was a long stretch of road and the car came fast and as it approached I wondered if it were slowing as it edged onto the shoulder to give us a ride—it seemed to slow, anyway—as rumble strips created a raucous noise beneath the tires before they hit gravel.