The 'Geisters

by David Nickle

  None of that had woken her up, though.

  The cab light was on.

  It was on because the passenger side door was hanging open, up front.

  There was someone in the passenger seat. Wasn’t there?

  Yes. The door shut and the light went out, which meant that the shape she saw, the head bobbing on the thin neck, the tangle of hair . . . that had to be real, because the door had shut. And someone had to shut the door.

  “I’ve got a gun,” lied Ann. She hoped the hoarseness in her voice overrode the quaver.

  The only answer was a squeaking sound, of flesh rubbing against painted metal perhaps. Ann peered forward. No good. Too dark.

  Ann reached across the miniature counter top, found the light switch. A little fluorescent bar over the hotplate stove flickered to life.

  The passenger seat was empty now, so far as she could see. Ann swallowed hard—her mouth felt like it was full of chalk—and she crept toward it to confirm, grabbing the neck of the wine bottle.

  And as she did, she sighed. It seemed as though the seat were empty. She put her hand on the headrest, and peered over to be sure, and she swallowed even harder—because she hadn’t seen the thing that was there.

  It was a bird—its head cricked in toward its breast. Its back was bright yellow, its wingtips black and grey, a tiny black crown on its head. It was surely dead.

  The squeaking sound resumed. It seemed to be coming from all around her. It took her far too long, she thought later, to place it.

  It was the sound of a finger drawing across the windshield of the van; making words in the dew.

  STOP DAWDLING

  TAKE US HOME TOMORROW NIGHT

  I WILL HELP

  ii

  There were four places to cross the border that would take Ann to Ian Rickhardt’s place in Niagara. The most obvious one was Niagara Falls. East, she might have crossed at Buffalo. West was the crossing between Detroit and Windsor; roundabout, but still convenient.

  Ann chose the farthest; the little city of Port Huron, not far from Flint, Michigan and kissing distance from Sarnia.

  It was a long drive from Bloomington. And Ann stewed as she made it. She was a Canadian citizen, driving an Alabama-plated vehicle. She might have to surrender that at the border. She had heard stories about border officials taking a car apart to see if it was running drugs or weapons. She might wind up in custody.

  She had read about exit searches. It was something the U.S. border guards could do if they wanted, for any reason they chose. Once they stopped you . . . they could do anything they wanted.

  She knew she could disappear under such circumstances.

  She’d hoped to make it by dinnertime, but the weather wasn’t with her. A lashing rainstorm hit at Fort Wayne, so bad that she had to pull off into a rest stop for almost an hour, and traffic crawled along the interstate. She stopped in Lansing four hours later for a rest and something to eat.

  By the time she hit the city limits of Port Huron, it was closing on midnight, and the storm had tapered somewhat, so she could make some progress. But her windshield wipers were on high and the heater was blowing full on.

  As Ann drove through on the I-69 and the wind picked up, she began to wonder just what kind of help the Insect was going to provide.

  She had to slow up on the on-ramp to the I-94; a transport truck was pulling off to the side, leaving just enough room for her to get around. As she passed it, she thought she saw something sparking underneath. She kept going.

  She merged onto an empty I-94 and thunder rumbled. Had that been a lightning strike somewhere, reflected from the truck? Signs indicated the upcoming Blue Water Bridge. Lightning flashed again and in the aftermath, it seemed as though the world had gone dark.

  It took her an instance to realize that it had. She flashed her high beams on. Ahead was a small building at the roadside, and as she passed it, she saw in her rearview that someone had stepped outside, was waving a glowing blue cone.

  Ahead, another figure stepped into view, waving her to stop.

  She braked and pulled off to the side.

  The figure was in rain gear; she came up to the window of the van and rapped on it with her flashlight.

  “Step out of the car, Ma’am!” It was a woman, thick-featured. About Ann’s age.

  Ann said that she would. But when she turned back from unbuckling her seatbelt, the woman was gone.

  There was a thump! on the roof of the van. Ann caught a movement in her side-view, as a glowing flashlight rolled off the top. An instant later, the woman fell too.

  Ann looked outside. More figures were running over from the building. The woman on the ground wasn’t moving.

  There was a squeaking sound then, and Ann looked around.

  Written in the growing condensation on the windshield:

  DRIVE.

  Ann put the van into gear and drove. Ahead, she could barely make out a dark bank of toll booths; as she approached, the bar rose in front of her.

  She heard a muffled shouting sound that might have been screams as the rain relented, momentarily, under the awning. Then the rain hit again and she pushed on across the dark bridge.

  Ann found she was barely breathing; the cabin of the van was getting cold—just as it had been at Christmas, when the Insect killed her parents and paralyzed her brother.

  She had been waiting for this to happen—for thousands of miles, she’d been waiting for the Insect to manifest on the road, maybe in the midst of a traffic jam as she hit rush hour outside some Midwestern metropolis. There had been times, she had to admit, that she had wanted it to.

  Now, it was just her in the van. There were no crowds of people outside; no lines of cars waiting to make it through the checkpoint. She wondered if the swerving truck on the on-ramp might have been part of the cause of that. She wondered what the Insect had done to the traffic approaching the checkpoint farther back on the I-94, to keep it back, then waited until the last American crossed into Canada, before cutting the power.

  Whatever it had done, Ann felt coldly certain the Insect wasn’t killing her. It had never been killing her, it had never really tried to, and it wasn’t going to start tonight.

  Lightning flashed, throwing the suspension cables over her head into a sharp relief. Ahead, she could see the Canadian customs checkpoint. Like the toll booth she’d passed through, these were dark—except for the tops of what looked like streetlight poles. There, something sparked.

  Cameras, Ann thought, feeling the certainty in her gut. The cameras are shorted out.

  “You heard my thoughts,” she said aloud as she accelerated toward the Canadian border. “You heard how fucking scared I was—to be coming at the border with Alabama plates and the face of the Mile High Widow. So you helped.”

  At some point, Ann had stopped muttering and started shouting.

  As her headlights illuminated the Canadian border checkpoints, she swallowed her words and sat straight. Ann knew she should just fly through here, faster even than she’d passed the toll both—that’s what the Insect told her to do.

  But she couldn’t quite make herself. She’d been terrified of this encounter; but something in her, some base programming, made her slow down.

  She rolled up to one of the dark booths. Someone was inside it—she could just make them out through the window, which sat about a foot higher than her line of sight. The booth was open, and a hand clutched the edge of it.

  The hand disappeared as she rolled by slow.

  Ann knew that she should have just pushed through. She had a clear run, if the cameras were all down. No one would know she crossed; her Alabama-state camper van would be hers.

  She rolled her window down, and craned her neck to see.

  Behind the counter, the agent—it was hard to tell much other than by the close-cropped haircut, it was probably a man—sat bolt upright in his
chair. He looked to be staring straight at Ann.

  “Are you—okay? Do you need help?”

  The man made a high noise that sounded like it was coming from the back of his throat.

  “Go through, Ma’am,” he said.

  Ann shivered, as an icy breeze passed between them.

  “Go on.” His voice was high. “Go through fast. Get help.”

  Ann took that as a pass. Through she went, past the dark secondary search, where she noted sickly four cars and a minivan were pulled over, to have their belongings searched. She didn’t stop this time, but kept to the path—swerving only once, to avoid a garbage can that had blown into the road.

  iii

  The weather cleared up as she passed through Sarnia. The streetlights came on again. In the oncoming lane, police cars sped toward Port Huron, but until Ann had passed a few on-ramps, she was blessedly alone on the highway.

  As she drove, she wondered just how alone she was. Had the Insect remained at the border crossing, wreaking mayhem as was its wont? Had it released her, now, to make the long drive past Sarnia, through London, and eventually southeast?

  An hour out, she found a highway rest station, and pulled into it to get some gasoline—order some coffee. There were TVs on in the central dining area, tuned to CTV’s news channel. None of the half-dozen or so late-night travellers clutching their travel mugs paid it any heed, and why should they? The weather scroll showed cool but clear skies ahead; the stock market seemed to be ticking along normally; and as for news?

  It looked as though the main story this morning was about the Prime Minister, and a couple of senior ministers, and judging from the stock footage, the Alberta oil sands. Ann wasn’t sure. She had been on the road, not paying attention to Canadian politics.

  There was nothing about the Mile High Widow. Not a hint of any trouble at the border.

  But there probably wouldn’t be, not yet.

  Tim Horton’s was the purveyor of caffeine and carbs at the rest stop. Ann didn’t care for their coffee but made an exception. It was rich and stimulating, and she thought she could drink a gallon of it if she had to.

  And she had to, because there would be no night spent at a campground tonight.

  Soon, the CTV screens would light up with news about what had happened at Port Huron. At the very least, about a dead or badly hurt U.S. border guard. Possibly about a terrible auto and truck crash on the I-94.

  Maybe, about hell opening up at Canada Customs and Immigration.

  Whatever the totality of that was—Rickhardt would know that she was back in Canada, and where she was coming from.

  And then . . .

  Then he might just start hurting Philip.

  Ann finished her coffee, tossed it away and headed to the rest room. She’d showered and cleaned up at the campground the day before, and that showed. If she’d had to, she could have put on a good face at the border.

  Even now—after everything, Ann congratulated herself silently.

  She didn’t look desperate at all.

  EMPTY VESSELS

  i

  There had been a limo waiting for Ann and Michael when the wedding was done. Ann had thought it was vulgar, and later, when she finally mentioned it as they were waiting for their flight at Pearson Airport, Michael would agree. Rickhardt had ordered it; a long SUV-style limo, the sort of thing rap stars and upwardly mobile movie actors rode around in. It had been idling outside the winery for a couple of hours before they finally departed in it.

  Ann had rolled down the window. There was a long gravel road from the concession line leading into the vineyard. On one side of it, rows of grapes blanketed the land to the south. To the north, there was a higher line of orchards. She couldn’t see a thing this time of night, but she liked the scent off the vines; it was fresh, and good.

  Michael put his hand on her arm and told her that he loved her, and Ann smiled to herself.

  “Do you now?” she said, intending it to be flirtatious. But she wasn’t good at that sort of thing, obviously.

  Michael took his hand back. “Of course,” he said.

  That was then.

  Now, Ann had trouble even finding the place. She’d bought a road atlas for North America back in Alabama, and she had to stop and refer to it three times. She might’ve excused that by the simple fact that she was coming at it from the west, and the numerous times she and Michael had driven here had been from the east—from Toronto. Fatigue might’ve had something to do with it; she’d been on the road for nearly a dozen hours.

  But as she slowed down and stopped at the last turn, and just sat, staring into the dark—she thought that might not have been it.

  On some level, she just didn’t want to do it. Or more precisely, she did want to—but she feared it.

  “What are we going to do?” she said to the dark. “I need to get Philip out of there. But I can’t just do that. We need to . . . we need to plan.”

  Ann felt a cool breath on the back of her neck. “Ah,” she said.

  She shut her eyes. The spectrum of colours drew across her thoughts wordlessly, and she breathed deep. She had seldom come to this place so wordlessly. Might that be because she had, on some level, stopped fearing it?

  She felt the deeper darkness; and coalescing before her came the corridor, the stairs, the doors along it, all shut.

  “This is the new tower, isn’t it?”

  Yes.

  The word came as a rattling of lockers, as though this high school corridor were the Insect’s throat.

  “And you’re finally talking to me—not just sending messages in the morning dew.

  Yes.

  “Well thank you.” Ann took a breath in the world; here, the air smelled of sweat, and furnace oil. “Can we make a plan?”

  We already have.

  The lockers stopped rattling entirely, and were quiet.

  “What is it?”

  And Ann felt the breath again at her neck. She turned.

  There was nothing but darkness. Behind her now, the lockers started slamming, open and closed.

  Ann opened her eyes.

  The transmission shifted into drive, and the van began to move through the intersection. The signal indicator switched on. Ann slammed her foot on the brake, but it wouldn’t move. She took hold of the steering wheel, tried to turn it straight; but it was no good. It turned to the right, and the van wobbled down the concession road.

  Ann mashed her hand down on the horn; it tooted once, briefly, then became as immobile as other things. In desperation, she twisted the ignition key, and tugged on it. It stayed put.

  The van accelerated, and the blue light of the dashboard indicated the headlights had switched to high beams. Far down the road, she could see the Rickhardt Estates sign on the road—a deep purple backing with a delicate curled font in white that mimicked the label. It was two kilometres off.

  Ann undid her seatbelt, and twisted around to look back as the van continued on its course. It was dark there; no sense of any presence, or any movement whatsoever. She was about to try and crawl out of the seat—head back there—when she heard the squeaking sound again. She turned to look.

  Words were appearing letter by letter—and disappearing, wiped away as fast. She could make out:

  TOP IT STOP IT

  . . . before the wipe took the entire thing and left the windshield clean, and dry.

  The van lurched to the left.

  Out the front window, she could now see lights, at the end of a long narrow roadway.

  She swore. The van was taking her along the drive to the Rickhardt Estates.

  And she was pretty sure it wasn’t the Insect doing it.

  The van was going more slowly now. She tried to open the door, but of course it was locked. She shuffled over to the passenger side, tried it too, expecting and receiving nothing. She twisted around in her seat a
nd kicked at the window, but it held firm, and so she kicked again.

  The van stopped, and there was a shudder as the engine shut down.

  The van began to rock back and forth. The engine started again, but this time it went into reverse. There was a crunch, and Ann was thrown in her seat. The van switched gears, pushing forward and turning and lurching through the narrow ditch at the side of the drive. It bumped again, and crashed through branches. It was going into the orchard.

  The window fogged, and in it, the words

  RUN

  wrote themselves, followed by

  I WILL HELP.

  The driver’s side door swung open as the van snapped the trunk of a young apple tree and juddered to a halt.

  Ann didn’t waste time. She pushed the door open and stumbled out. Back at the road, she could see flashlight beams cutting through the dark. There had been a car shadowing her—without its lights on, obviously. But now they were on and it was three-point-turning into the orchard.

  Ann stepped into the shadow of the van before the light could catch her. Without even giving her eyes the chance to adapt to the dark, she ran.

  She made it a long way before stumbling; the trees were in rows, and she kept going straight through. Behind her, the headlights speared through the trees, the now-leafless branches. When she finally stumbled, it was more from exhaustion; the adrenaline had been spiking her along for the past six hours. It was a resource of very diminishing returns.

  Ann fell against a narrow trunk, gasping for breath. She wanted to vomit, but held it back. She needed to hunker down, find a place to hide. She thought about climbing the tree she was leaning on. It was an apple tree, small and not very high, but the branches were low. She gave it a try. Something in her shoulder started to tear. She let go, and fell back to the loamy earth.

  “Fuck.” She sat there, huddled against the trunk of the tree—feeling like nothing so much as a field mouse knowing there were owls about.

  But the light was gone. The low clouds glowed slightly to the east, and the south, where lights from towns reflected back. But even that seemed muted. And the orchard had become very quiet. It was almost as though she had stepped over a ridge when she slipped from the tree—fallen into a cleft or a valley where she was entirely alone.