Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)

by Douglas Clegg

  They saw the first billboard before they reached the eastern edge of Arizona. None of them really noticed it at first. Only Ziggy. But he had been smoking a joint for lunch, and started laughing after they’d passed it.

  “What’d it say?” Tammy asked.

  “Something about the Unspeakable.”

  “Unspeakable? What the hell is ‘unspeakable’ supposed to mean? You can’t speak it or something?”

  “Exactly,” Bronwyn said, only nobody detected the bitchiness in her tone.

  “Something unspeakable and unknown. An ancient wonder of the world. Coming up somewhere. Off some exit,” Ziggy added.

  Ziggy kept complaining that he couldn’t sleep because of all the bumps they hit in the road, so Bronwyn had them stop the car. She went to the trunk, opened it, and drew out a couple of blankets. She rolled one up for Ziggy’s pillow and threw the other one over him for comfort, although it was a warm day. Ziggy closed his eyes soon after, and they all snickered a little as he snored. Then, suddenly, he let out a bloodcurdling scream, to the point where Griff nearly pulled the car off the road.

  Ziggy glanced around: they all stared at him. “I had a nightmare,” he said.

  The second sign stood about fifty miles further up the highway among a mass of billboards about Trading Posts and Outlet Malls in Tucson. This time, Josh read it aloud as it went by, “Come see the mystery! The great ancient wonder! The Unspeakable, Unknowable Attraction! The Secret of the Ancient Aztecs!”

  Then, the last bit, about mileage and turn-offs to get to the site, “Hey, we’re apparently only 200 miles from the great mystery of the asshole of the universe.”

  “I love those kinds of places,” Bronwyn said. “When I used to travel with my dad, we’d stop at all of the roadside attractions. Sometimes they were just rattlesnakes in cages. Sometimes they had what looked like babies in jars.”

  “I saw John Dillinger’s dong once,” Griff said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “I did. It was in this museum in D.C. It was so big they kept it in this long jar. Just floating in this formaldehyde shit.”

  “Nasty,” Ziggy said. “That’s nasty. You die and then they cut off your dick and stick it in a museum.”

  “Don’t worry, Zig. Yours is safe,” Griff laughed. “There’s no itty-bitty museum.”

  “I want to go see the unspeakable and unknowable attraction,” Bronwyn said, flicking her cigarette out the window. She stretched out, and pressed her bare feet up against the dashboard. Josh looked at her feet, and noticed that they were small and perfect, with toes that didn’t intrude on each other, as his did.

  “What route was it on?”

  “No idea,” Josh said, watching the road, watching her feet.

  That night, in Tucson, they stayed at the cheapest motel they could find (The Roadrunner Inn) and then got out on the road after a big breakfast at Denny’s.

  Nerves were shot by the time they got back on the highway, only this time Griff insisted on driving, and nobody had gotten a good night’s sleep in the motel because Ziggy had the shits and the toilet wouldn’t flush and the smell alone kept them awake, to say nothing of the broken down air conditioning and the way the heat had shot up sometime after crossing Texas to New Mexico, and then, at its worst, into Arizona.

  Bronwyn spotted another billboard for the Unknowable Mystery, and this time it was more explicit.

  YOU’RE NEAR THE MYSTERY! THE UNKNOWABLE, UNSPEAKABLE TERROR OF THE ANCIENT WORLD IS JUST DOWN ROUTE 19 AT THE BRAKEDOWN PALACE AND SUNDRIES. NAVAJO BLANKETS! TURQUOISE! ARROWHEADS! FIREWORKS!

  “I intend to be the unspeakable, unknowable mystery of the modern world,” she said, and Josh watched as she closed her eyes gently, and thought she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

  Josh knew he shouldn’t shut his eyes and lean against Bronwyn and fall asleep. But he couldn’t help it.

  He dreamed that he and Bronwyn were in a deep green forest. The trees towered over them, like a cathedral of nature. The fern beneath their feet was like a bed. Bronwyn began to undress, stepping out of her panties, finally, and he began to feel her all over. She gyrated against his touch, and soon his clothes had fallen away, and Bronwyn went on her hands and knees. She glanced up at him, smiling. He took her there, on the fern, on a soft mossy floor. He felt the intense pleasure of warm wet heat when he went inside her, and she began whispering something about how he needed to wake up now. Only he didn’t want to wake up.

  Then, something shifted in the woods, and the trees began to vanish, one by one. He didn’t care, because he felt so good inside Bronwyn, but soon, they were in an open space, and it was not Bronwyn beneath him at all, but Griff who said, “This isn’t trouble, Josh. Don’t worry. This is good times!”

  That’s when he woke up.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  Reality banged against him. Light of day. Heat in the car. Leaning against Ziggy now instead of Bronwyn.

  The car had come to a stop, in what seemed to be a ditch.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Bronwyn shouted from the backseat. She lit up a cigarette.

  Josh glanced from her to Griff, at the steering wheel. It was almost as if cartoon steam came out of his ears. Griff wouldn’t turn around and face the backseat.

  Tammy, however, would. “You bitch, just shut your hole. All of us were sleeping. We’re all too goddamn tired. And somebody stinks. Who stinks?”

  Josh glanced at Ziggy, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, dude.”

  Griff pressed his face down, almost to the steering wheel.

  “What happened?”

  “Mr. I-Can-Drive-Now fell asleep at the wheel,” Bronwyn said. She lit another cigarette and sucked back the first smoke and then spat a ghost trail of it out into the already smoky car.

  Josh, still half-asleep, his back soaked with sweat, feeling cranky and sore from the position he’d formed on the hump of the backseat, between Bronwyn and Ziggy, realized something. “Jesus. We’re sideways.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Didn’t anybody notice?”

  “I was snoozing,” Ziggy said.

  “I think we all were,” Tammy said in that little girl voice of hers that didn’t quite go with the big boobs.

  “Exactly,” Bronwyn said. “Griff included.”

  “Shut your hole!” Tammy shouted. She got on her knees, swiveling around in her seat. Her face looked less like blonde hose queen and more like pit bull with wig as she began listing all the ways Bronwyn sucked. “You’re like the bitch queen of the universe with your ‘I’m so sophisticated and together and I know everything and I look down on everybody’ bullshit. And second, you are after Griff. Just say it. Just because he didn’t care for you anymore, just because he dumped you —“

  “Correction,” Bronwyn said. “I dumped him.”

  “Bullshit, Miss Perfect Bitch, he dumped you, because you were too clingy and annoying and too much into proving everybody around you wrong, why is that? Why is everybody else always wrong? And don’t sit there with that smug Jewish look.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know what I mean, that ‘Jewish Princess from Intellectual Hell’ look.”

  “That ‘smug, Jewish look’,” Bronwyn repeated, slowly. “As opposed to your Shiksa whiney pigface?”

  “You’re jealous. You’re jealous because I have him. Because he wants me. Just admit it. Just admit it and get over it.”

  “First, admit that you’re a raging anti-Semite whose tits are bigger than her I.Q.”

  “Suck my dick,” Tammy said, and then pushed at the car door, opening it, and gingerly got out of the car, along the edge of the ditch. More obscenities flowed from her lips and she stomped off a ways down the road.

  Bronwyn, to her credit, took it all, enveloping her face in a cloud of smoke, a mask through which she could make sour faces back at Tammy without being noticed.

  Josh briefly remembered his dream: taking Bronwyn like a whore
, on her hands and knees, in the woods. Conveniently, he had already begun to forget the part where Bronwyn suddenly had become Griff.

  “I didn’t know Tammy was anti-semitic,” Josh said to no one.

  “Also anti-semantic,” Bronwyn said. “She probably doesn’t even know what it means. We gotta get the car back on the road.” More calmly, she added, “I hate you all.”

  “Where the hell are we?” Josh asked. He stood outside the Lincoln, and glanced from the torn and twisted map of the U.S. to the lunar landscape surrounding them.

  “Don’t get mad at me!” Griff said. “It’s not my fault! I took one turn.”

  “You took a turn?”

  “I got tired of the highway.”

  “You what?”

  “I thought Route 66 was here somewhere. I thought that’s what the sign said.”

  “Did you go south or north?”

  Griff shrugged, a hapless look on his face. “Maybe north.”

  “How long do you think you were driving like that?”

  Griff closed his eyes, as if doing so could make him remember. Then, he opened one eye. “Not sure. Maybe an hour? Maybe…maybe a half hour?”

  “All we have to do is turn around,” Bronwyn said calmly. “If we’re north. We just go that way.” She pointed to what she assumed was south, then, glancing at the sun, adjusted this slightly.

  Josh thrust his hand out. “Give me those.”

  “Give you what? My smokes?”

  Josh grabbed the pack of Merits from her hand, shook it violently until a cigarette popped out. He thrust it between his lips, and wrested the Bic lighter free from her grip, and spun the wheel until the small flame came up. He lit the cigarette.

  Bronwyn glared at him, and then her face seemed to calm. “They’re good for this kind of occasion,” she said. “Even if they kill you.”

  “Everybody dies from something.” He took a long draw of smoke into his lungs, coughing most of it back up. “All right. We need to figure out how to get the car back on the road. There are five of us. There’s no reason in hell why we can’t all get down on the other side of that ditch and push. We can bounce it back up.”

  “I’d say it would be a smarter use of daylight to go back to the highway. It can’t be more than twenty or thirty miles back, over that ridge.” Bronwyn pointed with her cigarette. “Three of us stay here, two walk it. I don’t mind a walk. I can walk ten miles. It’s not that hot. We go back and we flag someone for help. There’s gas stations and rest stops all over the place on the 10.”

  “I’m boiling,” Tammy said.

  “I’m not walking twelve miles,” Josh said. “Damn it.”

  “Me, neither,” Griff said.

  “I can do it. Ziggy?”

  Ziggy shook his head. “I got bunions.” Then, he added, “I inherited them from my grampa. Third generation bunions.”

  Bronwyn looked at the others. “I’m not going alone.” Her eyes narrowed to slits as she stared at Griff.

  “If we all work together,” Josh said. “We can get the car out of the ditch.”

  Bronwyn looked at him with squinty eyes, her head cocked slightly to the side.

  Quietly, she said, “So, you really think we can get it back on the road?”

  He glanced at the others, then back at Bronwyn. “Yes.”

  “It looks like we’d need a towtruck. Or some other kind of way to lift it.”

  Josh glanced back at the Lincoln and then at Bronwyn. He felt his heart racing, and he wasn’t sure why since he wasn’t panicked or all that worried. He felt something he hadn’t generally felt in life. Something that no one had ever demanded of him. He felt as if he knew how to handle this.

  “We can seesaw it up,” he said.

  “You study engineering?”

  “I didn’t have to,” he said, grinning. “When I was four, I spent a lot of time on seesaws. I got the gist. Look, it’ll take hours to walk back to the highway. If we all just pitch in, we can get out of this ditch and be on the road in less than an hour. I’m sure of it. And if it doesn’t work, I will walk with you. No, I’ll do better than that. You can wait here and I will walk to the highway and get help.”

  Her face brightened, and she nodded, slowly. “Okay. But will you do me one favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t pretend.” She reached over and plucked the lit cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the gravel.

  Josh had been wrong. It took the better part of two hours, and Tammy whined, Ziggy was no real help at all, but Griff and Bronwyn both put some muscle into pushing, and when they finally got back on the road—with the sun going down a bit to the far western hills—the car made some funny rattling noises that Josh guessed originated somewhere in the rear axle.

  Josh turned the Lincoln around, and headed back toward what they hoped was the highway. Instead, he found a confluence of ribbon roads, a narrow crossroads with what looked like pyramid shaped hills in the distance and that strange cast of sulfurous light and purple shadow in the sagebrush, that meant night would seep across the desert roads within a few hours.

  Without asking the others for their suggestions on which way to go, he took the road that seemed to be headed West, and soon it went from a narrow two-lanes, to a wide two lanes, and he felt pretty good about his choice of roads until he heard the back left tire blow out.

  But he didn’t even know about Dave Olshaker.

  Now, let's back up a few days.

  Back to the Saturday night when the rest of them all took off in the Pimpmobile for the West Coast. Picture a big strapping guy of twenty, in the back of a pick up truck, with eyes that just popped open like he’d come back from the dead. He’d had a dream, and it involved a couple of things he didn’t like to think about, one of them being his friend Billy Dunne, and it freaked him out to think about it. Dave Olshaker snarfled awake, farting as he woke, and he was royally pissed. He’d been up ‘til at least six or seven A.M., and after leaving Tammy in the frat house, he’d gotten in the pickup with his buddy Billy Dunne and gone to do 360s in the mud of the cow pasture out by McCrory’s lake. Sometime, in a haze of beer and piss, he passed out. Woke up, looking at the back of Billy’s head, too. What a shocker that had been.

  It was like the dream! Just like the dream!

  He didn’t like to think about what happened the night before. Even if he could remember, which he wasn’t so sure about, given the Mother of Hangovers that held him in its grip. He had a taste of what he had come to think of as sour ass in his mouth, and a hammering in the head that so distracted him that he barely realized he’d woke up in the backseat of his Ford pick-up truck.

  He got on the road once he found out from one of Bronwyn Shapiro’s friends exactly what route they were taking. He told her Bronwyn’s dad had called, and he needed to call him back to let him know. “For safety.”

  That's when a girl named Kathy Emmons stepped forward and told him how to track them down.

  His head hurt so much, Olshaker ended up having to pull over at a place he liked to call Motel 69. Billy got the room, and Olshaker barely got his sorry ass to the bed before passing out again. Before he turned off the bedside light, he told Billy he had to sleep on the far side of the bed.

  “Why?” Billy’s eyes were all bloodshot and his face was pockmarked from too many Milky Way bars and Mr. Pibbs and Pabst Blue Ribbon in between to wash it all down. He looked like an old man with a mop of bright yellow hair thrown on his scalp.

  “’Cause you stink,” Olshaker said, but it wasn’t completely true. He was a little afraid that he’d start dreaming about Tammy and in the dream wrapped his legs around her, only when he woke up it might be Billy’s thighs rubbing against him.

  Out of this general fear, Olshaker kept his clothes on that night.

  They’d lost a day, but they got back on the road and ended up pretty much following the route that the Pimpmobile had taken.

  And he was there, in Arizona, when the Pimpmobile took th
e wrong turn off the main highway.

  He drove his truck up to a plateau, and got out binoculars to watch what Tammy was up to with her friends.

  And when they got the flat tire, he turned to Billy Dunne and said, “Holy shit. We got ‘em, buddy. We got ‘em.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Dave Olshaker thought a moment, cocking his head back to look up at the white blank sky. Then, Dave reached down under his seat and drew out a warm can of Pabst, popped the top and took a chug down. “Kee-rist, I don’t know. But that jockstrapped asshole has my baby. And I mean to get her back anyway I can. She belongs to me.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Griff said. He had kicked the tire six or seven times as if he could bring it back to life.

  “You really don’t have a spare?” Bronwyn whispered to Josh, pressing her lips so close that he could feel her heat on top of the heat of the day.

  Josh looked out over the highway. Nothing but scrub, dust and a long barbed-wire fence. Sweat trickled down his back. He felt a mushiness of sweat around his balls. He wished he had a nice motel room with a long cool shower.

  Ziggy was already toking out on a big rock above the highway. “Hey, I see somebody coming!”

  “Yeah?” Tammy shouted back.

  “A trucker! We’re gonna get a lift. I know we are!” Then, he shot his arm out, pointing to the west. “There’s something way over there, man! It looks like a gas station. All we have to do is get the trucker to give us a ride and we’re set.”

  “Thank god,” Bronwyn said, lifting a cigarette in the air like she was flipping the bird. “This is my last smoke.”

  The truck was a big ass Kenmore, and the guy slowed down, pulling on his horn. Tammy was out in the middle of the highway, jumping up and down. It was her tits that did it—that’s what everyone felt without having to say a word about it. Someday, they’d build a memorial to her boobs. They were bouncing like basketballs, and no trucker in his right mind wouldn’t have come to a stop just to see if it was a mirage or a real live woman of twenty with humongous breasts.