****
George stares down at his own pooling blood as it drips like rain from his elevated body. He’s fastened to the ceiling somehow, arms and legs spread apart, and once the red ocean beneath him drifts wide enough, he can see his own reflection in it. The sight makes him vomit, and the puke that falls from his mouth shatters the reflection, scattering the revelation of what has been done to him like a dream sequence in an old movie. He closes his eyes as the blood settles, not able to bear seeing his tortured body again.
The jukebox starts again as the V-8 engine in the parking lot roars to life.
“We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas…and a happy new year!”
He doesn’t understand why the demon has done this…this
thing
to him. The sunglasses reflected the whole excruciating procedure for him, giving him a show of the knife tearing through his flesh. He screamed. Oh, he had screamed! Calling out for deliverance at first, then death at last. But no help came, and death is still taking its time finding him. The creature never even asked another question, just breathed his stinking breath into his face as he cut…and cut.
Jesus!
his blurred mind calls out. He shakes what’s left of his head, and something else falls out of it, landing in the red puddle below with a loud
splat
, and he finally drifts away.
Eleven
The clear skies filled quickly, armies of storm clouds charging from nowhere and spilling again across the sky as soon as the Ford’s tires turned south onto Interstate 81. If Marcus didn’t know better (which he didn’t, did he?), he’d think the weather had just tricked them back onto the road. He’d never seen anything like it—one moment picking out constellations and the next unable to see five feet ahead of them in a total whiteout.
Marcus squeezed his eyes tight, not wanting to look ahead. No amount of “fear not, for I am with you” rehearsals could get him out of that old church basement—the one Satan had built a portal to.
“This doesn’t seem right,” Ashley’s voice stated shakily from the back seat.
The possibilities of what she could be referring to were endless, and Marcus tilted his head in search of clarity. On a day in which
nothing
seemed right, he wondered what might be prompting such a statement from his girlfriend now?
“The GPS says we’re on I-81,” Heather reassured her, evidently understanding her sister’s source of concern. “We’re going the right way.”
Why Ashley thought they might be going the wrong way, Marcus didn’t know. They couldn’t see anything, and Ian barely dared take the car up to five miles per hour as the blizzard rocked them back and forth. Nevertheless, Marcus opened his eyes and looked at his watch. “We’re going north,” he exclaimed.
“What?” The statement almost took Ian’s eyes off the road.
“No, look.” Heather held her phone up between the two front seats.
Marcus looked at it, growing concern sliding down his vertebrae and wrapping itself like a python around his nervous system. “Do we trust my compass or your phone?”
Ian swore under his breath, and the sound of the windshield wipers swinging back and forth on the highest setting filled the ensuing silence.
Marcus was scared. More scared than he’d been in a long time, perhaps since the day in the church basement. The only other experience that he thought might come close was the time in North Carolina when his dad was away and a bunch of the neighborhood kids got wasted and decided to come banging on his door, Confederate flags pinned to their shirts. But that had been stupid, blind hatred empowered by alcohol. This…this was something else entirely. But what? And why?
As if reading his mind, Ashley asked, “Why do you think this is happening?”
No one responded.
“I mean, first it was the radio. Okay, weird coincidence. Then the mailboxes. Earthquake? But the diner…the toilets, the lights, the storm…” She paused, the wipers squeaking away. “This is about
us
.”
Ian slowly took a bend in the road. “What do you mean?”
“If this was a movie, I’d think that Star Lake was haunted, that the diner was haunted. Maybe all of North Country. But the text messages were sent to
our
phones…text messages about
us
.”
Marcus looked up from the floor and back to Ashley. “Us as a group?” That didn’t seem to make sense. “Why?”
“Maybe we did something along the way,” she suggested.
“You mean like piss on an ancient burial ground or something?” Ian smirked.
Marcus cringed. Had it really come to this? Characters in some horror story? Was that their reality now? Granted, there was nothing in the toolbox of his own human experience that could offer any explanation for what he’d seen at the diner, but…
hauntings
? It was too much. Too ridiculous. There had to be another explanation. This wasn’t a movie with a fictional script for its context. This was the real world.
“The car,” Heather breathed, interrupting his thoughts.
“The car?” Ian frowned.
“It all started when we got in the car, with the radio.”
Marcus realized that she was right, even if it didn’t make any sense.
“You’re saying that the
car
is haunted?” Ian risked a quick glance into the rearview mirror. “It was the
car
that made the storm go away for a minute?”
“Harold said the last guy who rented the car disappeared, that they found the car abandoned. What if…”
Ian let loose the condescending laugh of an unbeliever. “What if he was killed in this car? What if his spirit is—”
“What if he’s in the trunk?” It came to Marcus so fast that he hadn’t had time to properly filter the idea.
Shock worked its way across Ian’s face. It was a ridiculous idea, that the spirit of some dead guy was haunting them through the car he’d died in…but the very prospect of an actual body being in the trunk was no laughing matter, no matter what it meant. Harold did say the car hadn’t finished being prepped. “What if they never even checked the trunk?” He heard himself ask.
Heather and Ashley leaned forward and away from the backseats that separated them from whatever might be behind them.
“What if he’s back there?” Heather asked.
“What do you want me to do?” Ian asked. “Pull over and check it out?”
“I can’t believe we’re in a friggin’
haunted
car!” Ashley shouted.
“We’re not in a haunted car!” Ian countered. “Knock it off.”
“Then you explain what the hell is going on!”
“Listen, just because we can’t explain what’s happening doesn’t mean it’s ghosts and goblins! Besides, the car wasn’t
in
the diner. And what, you expect me to believe that this
spirit
, or whatever the hell you think it is,
is sending us messages on our phones? Threatening Marcus because he’s black? Was the guy some psychic racist before he died and now he just wants to scare whoever rents the car? What’s that movie called,
The Curse of the Red Taurus?
Or
Poltergeist in the Trunk
?”
“What’s he talking about, threatening you because you’re black?” Ashley asked, looking at Marcus.
“The table,” Ian answered for him. “It was etched into the table back there.” He wasn’t sure if Marcus wanted to get into that aspect of his messages or not, and he felt bad for letting it slip.
“Maybe you should slow down, Ian,” Marcus warned.
This time Ian did turn and look at Marcus. “Slow down? I’m just saying—”
“No!” Marcus shouted, thrusting a finger at the speedometer. “Slow down!”
Ian looked down and saw the needle swing past ten. He swore and applied pressure to the brake.
Nothing.
He swore again.
“What?” Marcus clutched the handle beside him.
Ian was pumping the break. “Nothing’s happening!”
Ashley leaned forward and gripped the sides of Ian’s chair. “What do you mean?”
“No brakes!”
The needle passed fifteen.
“Try the emergency break!” Heather shouted. She was beginning to hyperventilate.
Ian didn’t have any other choice. They were going twenty miles an hour on a wilderness road in a blizzard. If the brake worked, they’d skid, temporarily losing control of the car. But if he did nothing, they would only pick up more speed, having no way of following the next turn. “Hold on.” He pulled the brake.
Nothing happened.
The girls began screaming.
Marcus closed his eyes, one hand on the door handle, the other out against the dashboard. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…’”
“Shut up, Marc!” Ian snapped.
Thirty miles per hour.
Ian’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Everyone buckled?”
Then something materialized from out of the moving void, standing right there in the stunted glow of the headlights.
They all saw it in that fraction of a second before impact.
Ian reflexively slammed on the useless pedal while thrusting himself back against his seat, spinning the wheel at the last second and forcing the car to spin sideways.
Marcus braced as a slew of random images flashed across his mind’s eye. His life. It would take half an hour to write down all that he’d seen and felt in that split-second, even longer to explain it, but there was no pad and pen waiting for him on the other side, just an incredible noise—the crack of a cosmic snare drum and cymbals of exploding glass.
Marcus felt the restraints holding him back as his world spun…overturned…and blinked out.
Twelve
She’s giddy with the prospect of what’s going to happen, of what Matt’s hand on her thigh ensures is going to happen. He keeps leaning over and tracing the nape of her neck with his tongue, setting her senses on fire, filling her with anticipation. At sixteen, it won’t be her first time, but it has to be better than the last. Matt is older than her, a senior and captain of the varsity football team. He’s experienced. He knows what he’s doing. He already has her well beyond self-consciousness and any feelings of guilt. He has her wanting it. Bad.
She takes his hand from atop her dress and moves it beneath the prom gown. His hand on her skin is electric. As it slides upward, she holds her breath, not able to hear anything in the car anymore. Matt’s other hand is on her chest, and he’s leaning into her, his body pushing her against the door. The door handle presses into her side, but the pain is no match for the hurricane of emotion raging inside her. His fingers reach the hem of her panties, and she lets a sound escape from her lips. Suddenly she’s aware of her surroundings again, slightly embarrassed that John and Kimberly next to them and Doug and Patricia up front might have overheard her pleasure. But John and Kimberly are busy in their own world, Kimberly’s dress up around her hips and John…she can’t tell where John is. And Patricia is straddling Doug as he tries to navigate the Pontiac faster down the road. They’re kissing like crazy, Patty moving her hips back and forth on his lap.
Something about this seems off to Heather, but Matt’s hands are clouding her judgment, and she can’t seem to process what it is that’s wrong with the situation.
A violent jolt and an explosion of noise instantly replaces all feeling of pleasure with dizzy vertigo and hot flashing pain…
She thinks, floating, spinning, “Ashley! She was raped!”
The thought of that sickens her, and she can’t seem to bring herself to actually believe it. Her little sister…raped. It’s too much. How did that happen? Why hadn’t she
told
anyone? She marvels, time at a standstill, at how close she’d come to revealing her own secret to Ashley. It doesn’t matter. There is no way her little sister is going to forget that a revelation had been dangling from the tip of her tongue. She’ll be back for a full explanation as soon as their situation allows it. The question then becomes, “When she does bring it up, do I tell her?” Of course she will…
She opens her eyes, disoriented. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there. Everything’s dark. After a few minutes, her body begins issuing reports of pain. She tries to move but can’t. Something’s pressing against her, trapping her. She looks down and sees nothing. She looks up and can see moonlight shining off pieces of broken glass outside a window.
A window…
She becomes aware of something slithering up her arms and neck. Something wet. She can hear crickets. Able to move her head slightly to the right, she can just make out a single beam of light cutting a path through the darkness. It’s illuminating a strange shape surrounded by grass. She squints, trying to figure out what it is, because it looks so much like…
Suddenly, it all comes back to her.
She screams, knowing.
Patricia is lying out in the grass, her blue prom dress now red beneath the lone spotlight. Her face looks peaceful, like she’s sleeping. Heather knows she’s not.
Doug.
He’s lying in a bed of small, glass cubes. He’s in the car, on the roof,
and
out of the car, in the grass. But how…
The slithering sensation… She understands then that she’s hanging upside down, blood running up her arms and neck, her hair hanging toward the roof of the car! The pressure against her, pinning her against the door is…Matt, John, and Kimberly! And she can’t move.
“Matt,” she manages to whisper.
Nothing.
“John? Kim? Are you okay?”
Nothing.
She starts to cry.
Half an hour later, still hanging upside down in the car, she begins to come apart.
She begins to think, “But I can’t tell Ashley, because what if Ian… No! That’s not why. It can’t be why! I’m not that…” Her thoughts swirl, her fracturing psyche unable to process any of it. “Ashley was raped!” just keeps playing on a loop, torturing her, disorienting her.