They stayed that way for too long. It would be a surprise, she thought, if Simon's hands suddenly shifted and crushed her throat.
His hands released her face. She flinched, but they didn't touch her again. He exhaled.
“Fuck,” he said. His voice shook a little. “You're just some bitch, you are not worth this grief...”
The terror was still a lump she couldn't spit out or swallow. She talked around it, she had to. “You could let me go. You could just let me go right here. I haven't seen you, please, I haven't seen you, not really, I can't describe you to anyone. I'm no threat. I don't even know where I am.”
“Utah,” Simon said, distractedly, as if he weren't really paying attention. “Edge of Utah. Middle of nowhere.”
“You'll be long gone by the time I make it to anyone,” Charlotte said. She tried to sound warm, reassuring, the way she might speak to a small child if he were upset. It occurred to her a split-second too late that this was a bad idea. She pushed on. “I might not even make it to anyone, you know? I might just --”
“Stop talking,” Simon said. He spoke very quietly. “Just shut the hell up and let me think for a minute.”
The car door opened and the car shifted around them as Simon got out. He banged the door shut. It had brought a waft of heat and dust in, but no other smells she could pick out: no gasoline, or burnt rubber, or exhaust. No food, or smoke. They really had stopped in the middle of nowhere.
Charlotte was dizzy. It was a good thing she was sitting down because her head spun and she felt a little detached from the world. Adrenaline and terror, she thought at first. Then realized it was more likely because she hadn't eaten in, what, three days? Four days? She had no idea how long she'd been strapped by her ankle to this seat. It felt like years.
The heat was too much, so she put it away and replaced it with the gentle chill of a warmed-up car cruising across a wintry landscape. The plastic tie around her ankle hurt, so she put it away and stretched her legs. The sitting still was unbearable, so she put it away and put the car in motion. The loneliness hurt, an ache like an old wound that would not heal. So she put that away.
“We're here,” Eric said. He smiled when she looked at him. “Close your eyes, love.”
She closed her eyes obediently. Eric drove a few minutes more, then stopped the car. He opened the door, a chill breeze wafting in. There were no smells with it, nothing but the sharp, clean air of winter in the middle of nowhere. She heard his footsteps around the car, and then he opened her door and helped her out. Her left ankle hurt a little, like she had sprained it or something...but Eric supported her weight. With her eyes closed and the roughness of the snow underfoot, she needed his arms around her waist.
They walked a little ways. “I hope this was worth the wait,” she teased, leaning against him. He was a hutch of warmth and pleasure in the cold landscape.
“I think it is,” he said. “I'm sorry you hate to wait so long.”
“It wasn't so bad,” she said, but that wasn't true and they both knew it. She leaned on him a little harder and realized that tears were welling up in her eyes. The lump of terror that had been in her throat, it was just a lump now, and it was making it very hard to breath.
They stopped walking and she pushed her face against his shoulder, and she sobbed. Nothing graceful or controlled about it. She just sobbed and cried. It was so hard to breathe now, so incredibly hard to breathe, that lump in her throat constricted her airways until it felt like nothing was coming in. Eric's hands were around her, caressing her back and brushing her long hair out of the way.
“It's okay now,” he whispered, kissing her ear as he spoke. “You're here. It's okay now. Just hold onto me.”
“I miss you,” she managed. “I love you... and I miss you so bad.”
“I know.” He kissed her again. She felt dizzy, so dizzy, and inhaling wasn't filling her lungs. “I'm right here.” Suddenly, he sounded a little more urgent. “Open your eyes, Charlotte. Look around.”
She did. She turned away.
The world had transformed around them. Behind them, a snowy world full of whiteness and black trees, a small blue car sitting on the side of a black strip of road. But her feet and boots, they were on velvet grass. A blue sky domed over the world. Before her, around her, as far as the eye could see: sunflowers.
Endless sunflower fields. They stretched on and on, all their black eyes turned toward the sun, rows of them running down into valleys and up hills, cresting the hilltops as they reached for the sky. The fields ran all the way to the horizon, where maybe they finally brushed the light blue dome that they longed for. Brilliant yellow petals wreathed around black, unblinking centers atop tall green bodies with strong, broad leaves. There were narrow paths between the rows.
Maybe it was because she'd pushed herself against Eric's chest that it had been so hard to breathe, because now it was the easiest thing in the world. Warm, clean air filled her and calmed her. What a silly girl she was sometimes, Charlotte thought: to make herself stop breathing against Eric's jacket.
Eric's hand closed around hers. She turned to him and he kissed her, full and hard on the lips. She gave herself utterly to the kiss.
And then, hand in hand, they went off down the miniscule paths that wound through the sunflower fields like veins. The sun was high, and it felt like it might never set. They could explore forever, together. That was how it felt.
Simon drove on, alone.
He had traveled miles before he calmed down and felt the anger and terror settle. The road rolled on beneath his red Cadillac. Dusty plains stretched out beside him, shades of brown and black. They led to towering, jagged mountains which rose out of the salt plains.
This had been the worst vacation ever, and he was pissed as hell about it. It wasn't his fault, not even a little. He'd done nothing different this time. So what the hell had happened to get him saddled with such bad luck?
But the more the miles rolled past, the more the dry desert heat baked away the gloom. Eventually, he was thinking, ‘Well hell, this might not be so bad after all’. He'd never picked up a girl in Utah before. He liked the beachfront girls of the Pacific coast, but he'd seen some of them Mormon bitches in Salt Lake City. He could go for one of 'em. She'd be normal, with the usual screaming and crying and trying to escape. Nothing terrifying. And it was pretty far off whatever pattern he might have. It'd work. The trip was salvageable. Totally salvageable.
The sun crept down the sky, flaming into a blazing red as it sank below the horizon. Simon turned on the radio, where Credence Clearwater Revival sang about a bad moon, John Fogarty hoping you'd got your things together. Simon turned on his headlights.
Eventually, the long crawl of the straight freeway got to him. It had been a horrible day, and he was exhausted. He pulled off the freeway, a ways from the road, killed the engine and the lights, tilted his seat back and closed his eyes. There was no one next to him to worry about. He could sleep as deep as he liked. Like anyone on vacation might do.
He was almost asleep, he was just on the verge, when a gust of frigid air hit him and snapped him awake, quick as if he'd been slapped.
He sat up, squinting. It was brighter than nighttime now, and he gaped: He was in the passenger seat of the Cadillac. Beyond the car, a snowy landscape stretched endlessly, his view of the horizon broken only by the thick forests of snow-covered pine trees. The tarmac unrolled ahead of the car as it hurtled down the road.
The air vents pulled air in from outside, blasting unbelievable cold at him. He tried to reach forward and push them away, but his hands wouldn't move. He looked down.
His hands were zip-tied to his thighs. And when he tried to shift his legs, he discovered they were zip-tied too. He couldn't see what they were tied to, but he knew. He knew precisely where to attach those on the underside of a car seat, after all.
“...the fuck?”
“You shouldn't have done that,” said a voice beside him. He looked over at the driver.
“You're dead,” Simon said stupidly.
“Yes,” Eric said. “You really shouldn't have done that.”
“Done what?”
“Touched her. Hurt her. Gone near her,” Eric said. Simon's teeth chattered so hard, he could barely hear Eric over the sound of them rattling in his skull.
The world around the car was gloomy and menacing. It scared Simon to look out the window. It seemed alive, the snowy world: like there were huge wolves behind each tree, unspeakable creatures lurking beneath the piles of snow, waiting to tear him apart, waiting to scream insanely at him. He shivered so hard.
Claustrophobia settled in and he tried to yank his hands free. All he managed to do was send burning pain up from his wrists and shred his own skin. It didn't help. His breath came in short bursts, the cold air hurting his lungs.
“Settle down, we're almost there,” Eric said.
“This is a dream,” Simon said. “This is a stupid dream. Like that shit she was always talking about. Her daydreaming.”
“Like that,” Eric agreed. “Precisely like that. But she was better than you, and better than me. I think that means she had a better quality dream, don't you agree? I envied that about her. I loved that so much.”
Eric pulled off the road and drove through the snow. The car slowed and sank until Simon thought it would simply get stuck, but it pushed on. The trees loomed very close, reaching down to brush it with pine-needle skeleton fingers and thick shrouds of snow. The sky was invisible now, obscured by the canopy of the trees. Simon shivered so hard, it hurt his wrists. He couldn't stop.
“We're here.” Eric said, stopping the car.
There was nothing around but endless trees and the feeling of something lurking. Terror flared up in Simon's stomach, so forcefully that it caused tears to prickle his eyes.
Eric opened his door. He pushed it all the way open and then began to walk away.
“Wait!” Simon screamed, gibbering in terror. “Don't leave me here! This is a dream this has got to be a dream!”
Ten feet away from the car, Eric looked back. “You know,” he said, “I don't feel that matters one way or the other.”
He kept walking. Simon shrieked after him as madness swallowed his brain, fired him so that he wasn't aware of the loss of feeling in his hands, and his legs. He was unaware of the woods around him or the car or anything but his own terror and claustrophobia and the raw-throated violence of his screams...
Peter Damien patrols the Midwest from his home base in northern Minnesota. He is the only Midwestern superhero currently in existence, and evil quakes at the mention of his name, Captain Thunderpants. Not being tremendously busy in this area, he also writes copiously, lives on Twitter, defends himself against the onslaught of two small boys who are in his care (parenting, not weird Robin-esque "ward" stuff) and nursing a tea addiction. He harbors the suspicion that in a slasher movie, he'd be the first to go. He can be found online at www.peterdamien.com . OR, commit a crime in the Midwest and HE will find YOU.
[back to contents]
WRITERS CORNERED:
an interview with Peter Damien
Where is home?
Home at the moment is Northern Minnesota, United States. In a few weeks, though, we load up the billions of books and kids and head on out to Washington, on the west coast. Partially because I very much miss the ocean and the mountains, but also because fighting the Wolves and Woolly Mammoths in Minnesota every winter is exhausting.
Do you write full time?
I do! When my first son was born, nearly five years ago, I started staying at home and writing. Harder than I expected, writing full time, but it IS better than the alternatives, although you can't convince me of that on the bad days.
What inspired this story?
It started as a creative exercise, and expanded from there. Here's how it happened: my absolute favorite band in the world is Nightwish. A few years ago, they did a song for the soundtrack of a movie. They made a music video, using footage from the film itself. Here's the music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smiFk6KHr_8
The creative exercise was that I tried to take the scenes present in that music video and find a pattern to them, create a story for them. I deliberately avoided looking up the film or learning anything more about it than was present in just that video clip.
Of course, no story stays with just its inspiration. It went on from there. I think the story and the video kind of work together. If you take them as a whole, they augment each other. (The song was on nearly endless repeat while I wrote the story.) Later on, after the story had been finished and gone out into the world, I looked up the film and discovered that I was a billion miles away from their story. That made me happier still. (Mostly for fun, there are various other Nightwish references in the story. But I'll leave it to someone else to spot them.)
Tell us about creating a blind protagonist. (Why and where the idea came from, as well as how you set about creating her world.)
In my first attempt at the story, she wasn't blind. That was okay, I suppose, but I'm always looking for ways to push the stories and ideas just a bit further. There have been an uncountable number of horror stories about a pretty young woman being menaced by a murderous nutjob. You've read it, I've read it, so what's the point in rehashing it? Quite why I settled on her being blind as opposed to anything else, I don't remember now. It made her stand out a little more, gave the story some of the energy I needed to push through it.
Actually writing her proved to be a good deal more difficult. Occasionally, I find myself writing an element into a story which in my head I've constructed for film, or for comic books. Even now, quite some time after having written this story about Charlotte, I can still see some of the panels and layouts and pieces of artwork that I would have been aiming for, had this been a comic. I can still see the transitional shots, had it been film. That was frustrating, to convey those transitions between her worlds, and to make it clear within the flow of the text that sometimes she couldn't see, and sometimes she could. I mean without writing SHE CAN SEE NOW YOU GUYS periodically throughout the story. I wasn't sure it worked, the gradual shift between which senses she was using most at any given moment. I wasn't sure it would make sense, but it didn't seem to have bothered anyone but me. Isn't that how it always is, with writers?
As for creating her world, the snowy landscape she and her boyfriend drive through...there's this beautiful stretch through Montana of long highways, surrounded by trees and hills. The road goes on for ages, rising and falling as the landscape changes. In the snow, it's spectacular. But I was careful not to do any research and just to recall my own memories and visuals from driving through there. That's what is important, after all. Anyone who has access to Google Earth can go find out the precise topology of the region.
How did the story evolve? Did you know where it was going from the outset, or was Charlotte’s journey also a journey of discovery for you?
The story itself went through four 'drafts'. I'm hesitant to think of them as proper drafts, though. I'm no good at those. What happens is, I start the story and write it for a few (or a lot) of pages, and then suddenly go "This doesn't work," and scrap it and start over. I did that a few times. I knew the basic elements. I knew Simon's murder-plot, his plan to drive across the country. It arose from my own irritation watching shows I find pretty dimwitted, all those crime shows about sassy crime-solvin' cop-teams who have Catchphrases and Techno Music and stuff. Also, like any writer, I spend too much time thinking up clever ways to commit crimes I never plan to commit (EVER PLAN TO COMMIT, law enforcement officials reading this interview).
It was realizing she was blind that set the story going at full speed. It gave me not only the tools and ide
as to shift between the two worlds, but gave me something to talk about and think about.
I knew the ending from the outset. I almost always know the ending, but not in any grand and useful sense. I knew that she would wind up dying, that Eric would wind up having been more than a memory, that there was a sunflower field waiting for her, and so forth. But I didn't know anything useful, like why Simon would kill her, or what she would do to try to free herself. All of that is pretty much scene by scene for me. I write the one bit, and can see that it leads to this next bit. Eventually I realize what's going to happen to cause the ending. Occasionally, when it happens, the ending falls to bits and a new one appears. I never mind that.
Something Wicked #19 (March 2012) Page 6