FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  Pace looked back up at her a little too quickly. She raised an eyebrow at his expression and put a hand out like a mime artist touching an invisible wall. “That is, assuming they want to follow you into the law enforcement profession.”

  Pace coughed into a fist. “Well, I won’t influence them unduly either way, Nelly. I guess we’ll just let them be what they want to be.”

  “Of course. After all, you’ve always done what you wanted. Haven’t you?”

  Her eyes were half moons, crinkling as they smiled at him, and try as he might, John Pace couldn’t stop his narrowing in response.

  “Sure.”

  Her smile broadened. “That’s all the Lord asks, John. Contentment with our lot.”

  They looked at each other for a second, until Nelly McFarlane lifted a finger and pointed up the corridor. “Is it appropriate for me to visit, do you think?”

  Pace pulled at his mouth. “I reckon. She might not know you.”

  “Well, maybe if I sit with her awhile, she’ll remember.”

  He nodded, replaced his hat and walked away. After six steps he realized that the squeaking of his shoes was once more the only sound. John Pace didn’t need to look around to know that Councillor McFarlane was standing still in the same spot he’d left her. Nor did he need to turn around to know which way she was looking.

  If there had been enough of a gap between the cars, the endless line of red taillights would have reflected on the wet road like a carnival. But there wasn’t an inch between bumpers. The traffic was solid, petrified by the simple need to funnel two lanes into one. As he stared into the night, viewing the endless frozen river of metal in front of him, Josh sat so far forward in his seat that his right knee nearly touched the dash.

  The CB was going crazy, a cacophony of voices butting in and out.

  “Man, oh man, northbounds. Best settle down and start yourselves a family in that there line, ‘cos the kids goin’ to be old enough to go to college by the time you reach Harrisonburg.”

  “Yeah. Real helpful, southbound. How ‘bout a location when this shit ends?”

  “Hey, come on, covered wagon. Let me get my goddamn nose in there, would ya?”

  “Bears up the inside in case you guys gonna try and sidestep this.”

  “Well, northbound, reckon you got about two miles of Schneider eggs an’ caterpillars ‘fore you even see the road agin.”

  “Peterbilt? You want in this outside lane here, I’m ready to hold back these four-wheelers for ya. Come on.”

  Josh scanned the lane ahead to see who was offering him an escape from the static line of cars. The traffic on the left was crawling, but at least it was moving. He looked along the conveyor belt of assorted vehicles until he saw a shiny tanker about ten cars ahead, stopped with a gap in front. He thumbed his radio.

  “ ‘Preciate it, thermos. My lane ain’t shiftin’ none, though.”

  “Hey, you guys think you own the fuckin’ road?”

  “Shut the fuck up, you four-wheelin’ scum. Man, who sells these jerkoffs their radios?”

  “Eh, Jezebel? Don’t worry none ‘bout that. Your lane’s gettin’ ready to move. You want me to sit here and wait?”

  Josh pressed “talk” again like he was detonating a grenade.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Real nice of you. I’m right there, buddy.”

  “Ten-four, Peterbilt.”

  Sunrise. That’s what she said. Three hours had disappeared driving north in a fearful trance and one had gone just sitting in this line of traffic. Josh took a couple of deep breaths to stop from screaming and gripped the wheel.

  His invisible companion.

  It was watching him. He could feel it. Only half an hour after leaving Griffin he’d started to question the whole damned thing. It had been the normality of it all. With the light fading and the rush-hour traffic building up just like it always did, everything had seemed so comforting and familiar. Josh Spiller had found it difficult to keep hold of Griffin’s words. He was sick, he’d decided. He’d see a doctor when he got home. Maybe a shrink.

  That sheriff. He’d said it straight, remember? Shock can play tricks on you. Yes, it surely can. He’d almost made himself believe in that again, and then, as he pulled out to pass a dump truck, he felt it.

  Those eyes locking on to him. And he knew it was real.

  Did it have eyes? Could it see? The sweat had started to bead on his forehead as soon as he felt that prickling between his shoulder blades. Josh had pulled back into the slow lane and looked slowly around the darkened interior of his cab, more afraid than he’d ever been in his life that his eyes would settle on something that justified his alarm. But there had been nothing. At least nothing to see.

  He could feel the air in the cab growing warmer but blocked out the information he now held about the cause, choosing instead to merely treat the symptom by opening the window.

  It was harder to deny the fact that he could sense a malignant gaze.

  He believed Griffin. He believed her against his will and his reason, and he was heading back to Furnace to try and save himself from a horror he neither understood nor fully accepted.

  But now there was a new problem. The traffic.

  Sunrise. He tried not to let hot panic stop his breath, tried to use the time wasting away to do what Griffin told him and retrace his steps.

  As his lane started to inch forward Josh thought about the sheriff’s office. Had they given him anything? Sure they had. A copy of the statement. A ticket. A form to say he’d got all his belongings back. The belongings themselves, including his wallet. He ticked them off mentally, trying to recall the moments when they were handed to him and by whom, as his gaze drifted to his right and the twinkling lights of distant farmhouses and cabins on the darkened rise of the foothills. The car in front moved forward a few feet and Jezebel nosed after it almost as though Josh were a passenger. At the edge of the left lane tall halogen lights illuminated the roadworks, bathing the near-static vehicles in a cruel light. In its harsh beams the tanker stood still only a few car lengths away, reflecting back the slow-moving lane of cars from its ovoid steel drum as it waited for Josh to catch up and pull over in front.

  Although he’d done the same thing dozens of times for other drivers, tonight Josh’s gratitude for the courtesy was immeasurable. Time had never been so important. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip as the truck crawled forward, turning the CB down a notch against the abusive protests from some four-wheeler stuck behind the stationary tanker.

  The heat in the cab was more than noticeable now. It was becoming uncomfortable. Josh wound his window the full way down and propped an elbow on the sill, but the cool spring evening air he anticipated was a disappointing reek of diesel and carbon monoxide.

  He coughed and inched the truck forward a few more feet. The tanker driver was faint on the CB now that he’d turned down the volume, but Josh still registered he was being spoken to.

  “Keep her comin’, driver.”

  He turned the volume back up and replied, “Surely will.”

  Jezebel’s nose was coming level with the tail of the tanker and Josh made ready to pull in front. The long cylinder of burnished stainless steel danced with light from the stream of headlights and taillights, and Josh turned his head to look at the curious, elongated reflection of Jezebel that would join them as he passed it. Even though a brief vain glance at his own image had proved disastrous in Furnace, it was impossible not to look at the truck in the moving mirror that was a tanker. On a sunny day it made the rig impossibly glamorous as it passed, blue sky and stretched clouds forming a backdrop to the flattened strip of its image. But at night, as now, it was even better. Every orange light on Jezebel’s nose would be stretched to a coloured rope, sandwiched between the gleaming bulk of the truck’s silhouette like sideshow lamps reflected in the crazy mirrors of a fun house.

  Josh wiped more sweat from his forehead and let his arm dangle out the window as he looked.

  As always, you
had to figure out which bits of the truck you were seeing. It was a visual puzzle until you had it, and then it was easy.

  This time it took Josh a little longer. His cab was already halfway along the tanker’s side and he still blinked at his own reflection, unable to decipher its complexities.

  The electric blue of Jezebel’s paint work was illuminated by the halogen lamps, which painted a long, familiar dash of colour in the polished steel. But something about the shape wasn’t making sense. He narrowed his eyes, trying to work out what he was seeing. There were the lights at the front, and there was the exhaust pipe, shiny and squat.

  But there was something else. It was indistinct at first. No more than an irregular dark shape on the roof of the trailer. But as Jezebel progressed along the side of the tanker Josh blinked at the dark hump as it slid into view, and his pulse began to beat in his neck. Whatever it was, it was moving. It was impossible to define its nature from the stretched reflection, but its glistening undulations and steady progress along the top of the truck made Josh’s soul freeze. Like the reflection of the truck itself, the thing moving swiftly and fluidly over its top was stretched into a ribbon of black.

  It was only when the CB barked that Josh realized his foot had left the gas pedal and Jezebel was coming to a standstill alongside the tanker.

  “What ya doin’ there, big truck? Get on up here. Them four-wheelers are bitin’ my ass to get in.”

  Josh had no voice to reply. He stared at the image in the curve of the thermos, watching as the reflection of the glistening form loped along the trailer and, with one supine movement, jumped onto the roof of the cab. Heat had already dried his mouth, and now fear was stalling his breath.

  His widened eyes swung to the velour-padded ceiling of the cab. The heavy thump above him that had ripped his gaze from the reflected horror was now accompanied by an excruciating scratching and scraping of metal. Josh knew a scream was being born at the back of his throat, but as his eyes slowly followed the grating noise along the roof and down onto the edge of the windshield, the next sound aborted the cry by removing what breath he had left, making him slap his hands over his face to block it out.

  “Wheeah. Wheeeea.”

  Not possible. The Tanner ice cream sign, that forlorn, squealing messenger of his inadequacy, was a million years away from this. It lived in another lifetime, in his dreams. Not here, in this waking nightmare on a packed interstate.

  Even through the red-black of his screwed-shut lids, he could see those limner children and their painted faces. Their tongues, licking in and out. Sharp, blood-red, pointy tongues, darting between rows of white teeth that, even as he struggled to banish the image, were becoming as pointed as those little wet triangles of flesh.

  Josh pressed his palms into his face and groaned.

  “No. Jesus. No.”

  But the sound persisted, screaming above the raised voices of channel 19, above the noise of Jezebel’s idling engine, above the muffled reverberation of the static traffic. “Wheeea. Wheeeaaa. Wheeeeaaa.”

  He let his hands fall from his face and opened his eyes. Moving across the glass at the top of his windshield were two long, curved objects. It was the way they were scraping against the transparent barrier between them and Josh that was producing the heart-stopping noise. Josh’s mouth moved silently as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Each object was around four inches long, the thickness of a palm frond, smoking slightly as though about to combust and ending in a curved point that narrowed to a razor edge. They moved slowly against the windshield, the bony fingers to which they were attached showing long strands of matted, coarse hair, the cartilage shining black and horny in the halogen light, and they left a sticky trail on the glass as they scraped. As he watched in terror, another started to appear from the opposite top corner of the windshield.

  Josh knew what they were. Yes, he did. He could read a road sign. He could recognize a friend in the street. He could tell a ship on the horizon from an island. Why should he choose now to deny what his eyes told him? They were talons scraping against the glass. Long, scabbed, diseased talons, searching for a hold on the roof of his cab.

  His head took control of his paralysed body, and before he could cry out. Josh let out the clutch and slammed his foot on the gas.

  The rig leapt forward as though it had been hit from behind, and the claws scrabbled wildly for an instant before disappearing back over the roof. Josh threw jezebel into first, punishing the engine with revs that pushed the needle into the red. The rig roared ahead, and as he steered for the clear patch in front of the tanker Josh cast one quick glance at the reflection as he passed. It had been thrown backwards, but only a little. As the truck built speed it was already lowering its massive body against the trailer roof and trying to move forward again. Josh swung the truck into the outside lane, then swung it again, crashing through the line of traffic barrels into the closed construction lane. He straightened her up and stamped on the gas like he was trying to kill a bug.

  “Jesus fuckin’ H. Christ. What you doin’, Peterbilt?”

  The tanker driver was yelling over the radio. He was joined by a Greek chorus.

  “Man, are you fuckin’ crazy?”

  “All trucks. There’s a lunatic screamin’ up the closed lane. Repeat. He’s comin’ up fast.”

  “Sheeit! Would ya look at that?”

  “Whoa! That’s fuckin’ cool.”

  Josh was breathing fast through a wide-open mouth. Over the roar of Jezebel’s tortured engine he could just make out the noise of claws on metal, and a whimpering sound escaped from the back of his throat as he pressed his leg harder to the floor.

  In front of him the pool of halogen light ended, and the way ahead was a strip of darkness, bound on the right-hand side by two lines of slowly moving red taillights. He was already doing forty, and he had no intention of touching the brake. The speedometer rose steadily, and Josh held his breath as he gripped the wheel with white fists.

  In amongst the cars forming the two solid lines ahead, trucks were starting to sound their horns.

  Josh’s head was reeling. He had acted on instinct and now his head was catching up. Surely this audience knew what he was doing. They must have seen it plainer than he had. Must still be able to see it. The nightmare had materialized and was clinging to his roof. Not in some dark alley or shadowy forest. But here, in front of hundreds of witnesses, able to watch him try to escape something unspeakable from the warmth of their vehicles, as if they were at a drive-in movie. Why were people not running screaming from their cars, pulling off the road or driving for their lives up this closed lane like him? Surely anyone catching a glimpse of what he carried on his roof would not only forfeit sleep for a very long time, but risk everything as he was doing just to be free of the sight of it.

  But if that were so, his fellow truckers, at least, were paying more attention to Josh’s eccentric driving than to his dark stowaway.

  “Yeeha! Go for it, big truck!”

  “Man, hope your rig’s got wings, fella. ‘Cos unless you take off pretty soon you’re gonna meet some hard-hat hardware square on.”

  Almost as soon as Josh heard it. Jezebel’s lights picked out the bucket of a digger lying at an angle across the lane ahead. The right lane was still solid with traffic, but he judged there was a gap of around twelve feet between the digger and the row of traffic barrels confining the line of cars. To brake now would mean jackknifing for sure, if not turning turtle over the cars on his right. There was no choice. He would have to keep his speed and try to squeeze through the gap.

  Harvey Walker, the driver of the Saturn that was inching its way forward to draw level with the abandoned digger, did not have the benefit of Citizens Band radio. He and his family were listening to a taped version of Aladdin for the eighth time in a row, and although it was still keeping the two-year-old passenger quiet, it had worn the driver’s nerves down to a thread.

  “The lamp! Give me the lamp, you fool.”
/>   Harvey sighed and drummed the wheel. “Yeah. Give Jafar the goddamn lamp and we can cut the shit down by fifteen minutes.”

  His wife shot him a look. “Hey. Enough.”

  He held his hands up in surrender without looking at her, as a satisfied chuckle in the back reminded him why they were listening to this garbage. Harvey rolled the window down and stuck an arm out into the cooler night air.

  “Mind Elroy’s not in a draught.”

  He looked at his wife this time. “You think I can make a draught happen in a car that’s doing no miles per hour?”

  “Well, I can feel one.”

  Harvey rolled his eyes and looked forward, then paused. “Hey. Listen to those guys.”

  The droning of truck horns drifted in, mercifully drowning out Aladdin’s eighth discourse with the genie.

  His wife wrinkled a nose. “I guess truckers think it’s beneath them to wait in line like everybody else. Though what good honking is going to do, I don’t know.”

  Harvey was about to reply in defence of truckers, just for the spice of an argument, when his side mirror filled with light.

  In the four seconds he had to do anything, Harvey did two things. The first was to pull his arm in the window, and the second was to yell his son’s name. But as Jezebel ploughed along the side of the car at fifty miles an hour, slicing off the mirror with the bumper, then ripping both doors from the chassis with the tarp hooks on the trailer, his wife burst a blood vessel in her throat with her scream.

  There was a silence, then, as the car left spinning in the truck’s wake came to rest with a bump against the central grass divider.

  In the few seconds of silence that followed the accident, Harvey Walker felt the cold air around him and knew he was alive. He held his breath and in those few moments he heard the sweetest sounds of his life. Elroy Walker said, “Daddy?” and Mavis Walker started to sob.