At first, it came down in a little sprinkle. But that was enough to set off a vague sense of anxiety.
“Just a little rain,” he said out loud. He made the wipers sweep one time. “There. See. Perfectly clear.”
He had hoped that would be sufficient. But the wipers and the self-assuring words were not enough to make the anxiety go away. He thought it might be intensifying.
The rain picked up over the next couple of miles. He turned his wipers on low but continuous.
“No big deal,” he said. But then he reflexively reached to turn down the stereo, which was quickly becoming mere noise to him, a distracter from the road he felt an increasing need to focus on. A few minutes later, the rain a little harder, he turned his stereo off.
He didn’t know why the rain would make him so anxious. There wasn't enough traffic that he would have to make a sudden movement that might cause him to skid. His vision was still pretty clear. Logically, there was no significant threat. But he still slowed down.
A cold sweat came over him. He became aware of his heart thumping in his chest and the tightness of his stomach muscles. There was a fiery pain in his spine as the rest of his body stiffened. His breath picked up. A semi sped past him, causing disturbed rain to rush his windshield. He gasped, as for an instant of a second his view of the road was gone. Then, of course, his vision improved as the wipers extracted what the semi had thrown his way. The panic did not dissipate so quickly. He considered stopping, but knew he shouldn’t. Stopping would only validate his fear, giving it a stronger hold.
Sully didn’t understand how he could be afraid of something that he couldn’t remember. Most of the night of the accident was gone. At least, most of that night was inaccessible to his conscious mind. But evidently, something inside of him beyond consciousness remembered those events, because he was still afraid.
Sully forced himself to push down the accelerator. He went from below sixty to just over seventy. That was ten miles per hour less than what he had been going before the rain started, but now he felt like he was speeding out of control. The steering wheel felt precarious in his hands, and his vision seemed to blur a little. Still, he pressed on. He got the Taurus up to seventy-eight and passed the semi that had just passed him, his heart banging like a snare drum in his chest. He turned his stereo back on and cranked it. His mind rushed and so did the oncoming road. His fear was intense. He pressed on.
Sully had researched this before he decided to try it. Irrational anxiety was supposed to dissipate when the feared situation was faced without a negative consequence. When the spider doesn’t bite, the arachnophobic recovers. When you don’t fall off the mountain, the fear of heights goes away. But now, in the mist of what he feared, it didn’t seem like fear would go away, only intensify, forever intensify.
But he pressed on. Time seemed to stretch out. The other vehicles on the road seemed so close. The edge of the road seemed so close. The night seemed to get darker. Even the music coming from the speakers seemed to intensify, louder and more distorted. But he pressed on.
Then, it was as if the pressure inside of him became too great. But he didn’t break. Instead, a valve was opened and his fear began to diffuse away.
He didn’t know how long it took, but soon Sully’s fear became manageable. He felt sure he would make it home. And just as his inner turmoil had, so did the rain begin to dwindle.
“Yes!” Sully shouted. “I did it!”
He hit the button on his stereo, skipping past songs until he found the right one. He wanted to hear I am Mine again. That’s what he was now. He was conquering his fear. He was owning himself. He found the right track. The mystical guitar began to play. It was a simple rhythm, but simple because it needed little accompaniment. He could hear it progress and know something profound was coming. The singer would deliver the lyrics that made the significant moment more significant. A quick series of drum strokes told Sully those words were about to begin. He would soon be feeling those words as much as hearing them. But before Ed Vedder began to sing, the music suddenly stopped.
Sully looked down at his stereo. The power was on. The counter was counting. But there was no sound coming from his speakers. That’s when he noticed that there was no sound at all. He looked up on time to see the ominous lightning illuminate the sky. Then the light was gone and sound returned with a thunderous crash.
Sully felt as if his air had left him and his heart had stopped. He was now afraid almost beyond thought. He hadn’t really seen what he thought he saw in that flash of lightning. At least, that was what he tried to tell himself. This wasn’t really happening.
But the road in front of him begged to differ. He could no longer see the lights of another vehicle ahead in the distance. He was alone. There were no longer the wide lanes of I-40. But that couldn’t be. How could he be on a two-lane highway?
It was all so clear to him now. He suddenly remembered that night from three years ago, the night he was returning from a road football game, Faith and Monica having stayed home, the night that he would not wake up from for two months, the night they told him about in the hospital.
He told himself that was all this was, just a memory. Or maybe he was dreaming. But then lightning struck again. Once again, he saw the giant black wall. The tornado owned the sky. It would soon own him too. He let off the gas, but it didn’t matter now. Too late. He felt the car lift off the ground like an airplane. The world spun for a couple of seconds. There was a crash. There was black.
#
The next thing Sully was aware of was the loud noise. It brought him from his unconscious state, and he watched the semi that had just blown its horn at him speed by. He looked back and saw more lights approaching. He had come to a complete stop on the interstate. Though it was hard, he knew he must move now. He crept the car down the road, letting vehicles pass. He got the Taurus up to fifty, the minimum allowable speed on the road. But with how bad he was shaking, that felt too fast, so he slowed down to thirty.
The courage he had felt minutes ago now felt like something from his distant past. Even his desire to get better was long gone. He had just had his first flashback to the night that the tornado got him.
How was it now that he remembered? Had it been buried deep in his subconscious, waiting for the right set of circumstances to cue the memory?
Whatever the psychology, Sully wanted no more battle tonight. He saw an advertisement for a hotel five miles ahead. It was a very long five miles.
#
Sully sat in the hotel parking lot, trying to calm down enough to deal with getting a room. He felt relieved to be safe for the time being. But he also felt small and weak. He felt foolish for approaching this so boldly. But most of all, he was afraid. He feared that at any second he would be taken from the familiar safe reality and thrust back into a world of tornadoes and being carried into the sky.
Was it an accurate representation of the actual night? Had the tornado really lifted him high into the air and dropped him? Or had his mind exaggerated?
He had seen pictures of his car. It was very condensed in size, the roof having caved, both the front and back ends smashed in. He had wondered how he could have survived at all. And yes, it did look as if it had been picked up off the ground and dropped.
After nearly half an hour, he felt like he could at least fake like he was okay. He shook the whole time he was in the lobby, but not enough that the clerk paid much attention to it. She went about her job, just tending to another stranger from the interstate.
Inside his room, he debated on whether he should call Anna. He really didn’t want her to know how messed up he had become and then be worried about him more than she already was. But she would probably be more worried if he didn’t call. He would just have to fake it with Anna too.
Yeah, the trips going fine. I just stopped because I’m tired. There wasn’t a tornado that lifted me into the sky. I didn’t come to with my car idling on the interstate.
Sully took a few ext
ra minutes to calm himself a little more. Then he made the call. Luckily, Anna didn’t pick up the phone. He left a short message.
#
Alone in the mist. But this time he can breathe. And he can move around. He wants to meet them, to know who they are, to know what they want and why they keep coming to him. But where have they gone? Where are the coma men?
#
Sully drove through Little Axe around noon on Saturday. He was relieved to be on the homestretch. All morning, he had been anxious that the events of the previous night would repeat themselves. But the rest of the trip had been madness free. It hadn’t even rained again.
It was only a mile to Perry Acres, the housing addition outside of town. His house was not actually part of the addition, but since it was only a small wheat field away, people often assumed that it was. He saw Anna’s Neon parked in the driveway. He wondered if she was still in her writing world, since he still hadn’t been able to contact her.
Sully’s house had been built by the farmer who lived in it years ago. The construction was sturdy but the layout strange. It was hard to know where the main entrance was intended to be. The front of the house had a porch and a door. But the side of the house, which ran along the driveway, had a sidewalk leading up to a smaller porch and then a foyer. This was where Sully liked to enter, and most guests seemed to naturally go there.
From the foyer, Sully entered the kitchen. From there, he looked into the dining room and saw Anna’s laptop on the table. He smiled, remembering how he had pictured it there the night before. He knew she must have just finished typing, because she had not shut it off.
Or maybe she wasn’t done. Maybe she had left the room briefly, and when she came back, he would be a distraction to her.
Off the dining room, at the front of the house, was what Sully thought was intended to be the living room, this being where the front entrance led to. Sully used it as a study. He would often go there to grade papers. Anna often went there to write in solitude if Sully and Monica were home.
Anna probably knew that he was home by now. He figured he could go into the study and wait while she finished up. Then she would come to him when she was ready. He had his hand on the doorknob, when he heard Anna’s alluring voice.
“Sully.”
Next to the study, separated from it by glass doors, was Monica’s room. Next to that, separated by a wall, was his and Anna’s room. That was where he thought Anna’s voice had come from.
En route to their bedroom was the strangest thing about his home. It was just this room in the middle of the house. Sully had made it into the living room when he made the other room into a study. The middle room might as well not have been there as Sully crossed it on his way to his waiting girlfriend.
He found her sitting in a chair against the wall. With one hand, she held a paperback a few inches above her face. A finger from her other hand was inside her open mouth, gently caressing her tongue. Sully looked at her from top to bottom as she pretended that she didn’t see him there.
She was wearing a gray T-shirt but nothing else. The way she was sitting, slightly propped, with her legs spread, he could see everything between her legs. Simultaneously, his mouth watered and his penis swelled. Then Anna dropped the hand from her mouth down. Without looking up from the book, she ran her fingers through the small patch of curly hairs and into the pink below.
“What ya reading there, baby?” Sully asked.
“Some book on cannibalism,” Anna responded lackadaisically. Then, in the same low-key tone, she said, “And now I’m going to eat you, my sweet, sweet Sully.”
There were a few seconds of pause, something Sully thought a part of this cool horror writer’s way of building tension, and then abruptly, Anna tossed the paperback aside. She jumped up and then jumped into him. She took him down to the floor. As she so often did, she ravished him.
#
Afterward, they lay naked on the floor, Sully flat on his back, Anna curled into him. Relaxed and satisfied, Sully laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Anna asked, making little circles on his chest with her fingers.
“You’ve got to be the most aggressive woman in the world.”
Anna sat up. “Does that bother you?” she asked, the look on her face confident.
Again, Sully laughed. Before he had met Anna, he didn’t know women were capable of having sex like her. He doubted most men could match her intensity. And it didn’t seem to be leveling off as they spent more time together.
“No. I can’t say that it does.”
Anna smiled and lay back down beside him, obviously not oblivious to the complement she had just received.
“Did you get my messages?” he asked.
Anna hesitated and then answered, “You know, it’s the funniest thing. I was at the table writing last night, and it was going pretty well. I heard your message and figured I’d call you later. Then, the next thing I knew, I was sleepy. And not just get-ready-for-bed sleepy. More like, I-wonder-if-I-can-even-make-it-to-the-bed, dog tired. I barely remember walking back to the bedroom and getting undressed. I didn’t even hear the phone ring the second time. I must have slept right through it.”
Almost on cue, the phone beside the bed rang out. It was an older model that Sully kept around simply because he figured nobody could ever sleep through its blaring ring. A little astonished by Anna’s story, he got off the floor. He answered the phone on the third ring.
“Hello.”
“Sully,” his mother’s voice said abruptly. “Did you just get home?”
“Yeah, a little while ago. Why?”
He heard his mother moan. Then her voice croaked as she said, “Something bad has happened.”
“What Mom? What is it?”
“Ohhhhh!” his mom cried.
Anna came up to him. “What Sully? What’s wrong? Is Monica okay?”
Monica? Yes, she had to be okay. He would have been notified before his mother if something had happened to Monica. Faith would have called him first. Faith would never call his mother, scared to death to speak to a woman who hated her.
“It’s one of your students,” his mother finally said.
#
The last time anyone saw Caitlin Barr alive was Friday night around 10:55PM. She had attended a party for the Little Axe football team, which had just won its first game of the season. She had left alone, rushing home to make her eleven o’clock curfew. She never made it.
The official report from the Sheriff’s Department was that something inside the cabin of her car must have ignited. Then, trying to escape, Caitlin opened her front door, allowing in a rush of oxygen that fed the flame, causing it to engulf her. They found her remains about a half-mile from her parents’ farm.
The next two days of school were cancelled. Services were held on Tuesday.
Sully had been raised in Little Axe. The road to the cemetery ran by the high school to the outskirts of town. Many times he had seen the processions drive by. The Little Axe cemetery, in his mind, had always been a place for two types of people, the really old, and the occasional baby that didn’t make it. Those in between simply were not allowed. But now, the rule had been broken.
And what a perfect fucking day for a funeral Tuesday was. The sky was clear and the wind nonexistent. Sounds rang out with clarity. Images were clean and crisp. A town stood in shock as a coffin containing the charred remains of a seventeen-year-old senior at Little Axe High was lifted onto a platform. There were sounds of people crying, but they were drowned out when Caitlin’s mother, who had been silent in her catatonic state, erupted.
The fifty-year-old housewife, and once proud mother of one child, rushed up to the platform, screaming, “No! No!”
Pallbearers, Mark Walker and Craig Norris, two of Caitlin’s former classmates, caught Mrs. Barr’s leaning body before she could slip into the open grave. They held her body at an angle over the large hole in the ground, as the woman clad in a black dress flailed her arms about the l
arge sky blue coffin that contained her favorite person in the world.
The two pallbearers looked around in fear and confusion, until Caitlin’s father came to their assistance. As Mr. Barr dragged his resisting wife away, she screamed, “Don’t put her down there! She’s just a baby! Don’t take her away from me, please!”
Up to then, Sully’s mind had been on the lost girl and her classmates, whom he would have to face the next day. At that point, seeing the child’s mother become the most desperate, pathetic creature he had ever seen, seeing her father’s hollow expression, he began thinking of his own daughter, who was now so many miles away.
Anna was on one side of him and his mother on the other, both clinging to him. He pulled them both closer and pushed the thoughts away.
#
Sully wanted to go home after the funeral. But there was a sense of urgency in her voice when his mother asked if they would ride to Elk City with them for dinner. He felt pangs of guilt, realizing that he had not considered what the day must have been like for her. He doubted there was anyone in town whom could identify with the feelings of Mrs. Barr more than his mother, having once almost lost her only child.
Wind for him, though. Wind instead of fire.
He rode in the backseat of his parent’s Grand Marquis, one hand in Anna’s beside him, the other stretched over the front seat to his mother. As his father drove silently, his mother alternated between spells of quiet tears and outright bawling, as Anna sat there with a blank expression on her face, possibly with her novel in her head, Sully thought. He wondered how much this would disrupt her. She told him before that the initial stages of writing a novel were always the most difficult. She had gotten no work done since he had come home from dropping off Monica, constantly with him, consoling him, helping him console others. He thought she would recover fast, as soon as she picked up the pen again. But he worried that he thought her too strong. He worried about taking that strength for granted. In his mind, he resolved that he would insist she work tomorrow. But part of him, the part that clung to the belief that Anna was infinitely strong, knew that his assertions would be in vain. Anna would make up her own mind.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 18