2

I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression of me. I was burnt out, worn out, used up, and scared as hell, but I didn’t usually spend my evenings crying over a dead battery. Life may be a mean thing to inflict on a person, but we all got hit with it. Most of the time, I kept it together better than that.

Once I got my frustration out of my system, I did the only thing I could do and started walking. Most people would have called for help on their cell-phone-computer-thingamajig. I didn’t, because I didn’t own one. Most companies gave me dirty looks when I tried to give Dorothy’s license plate number as my home billing address. I could overcome that difficulty when I wanted or needed something badly enough, but an iLeash didn’t hold a lot of attraction for me. They tended to do funny things when I held them.

Funny things…it’s almost easier to admit I was weeping than to talk about such things. Tears, death, and the supernatural are not casual conversation topics. Let’s just leave it at the fact that me and anything Internet-related just didn’t get along. Most of the time, such devices flat-out refused to work for me. On the rare occasions that they did function, I usually ended up wishing they hadn’t. It’s a horrific curse, given how much I loved computers growing up. But Web abstinence is preferable to having another conversation with my deceased mother. Death can change a person.

The sun managed to flip below the horizon while I was still bemoaning my bad luck behind the wheel. The days were getting shorter, as October wound through its appointed course. It wasn’t that cold tonight, but my whole body shuddered at the memory of my mom’s voice.

“And that’s not even the strangest of it…”

“Shut up, nobody asked for your opinion.”

Everybody has a dark cobwebby voice that whispers to them from the hidden nooks and crannies of their mind. Mine was just a little bit louder and better developed than most.

“Right, I’m just part of your subconscious, not an invading alien intelligence from outside the fabric of space and time. Nothing to see here, move along.”

“Hey, I know where the imaginary gag is at. Don’t make me use it,” I snarled back at it.

“Yessah, mastah. I be good. I be good.”

“That’s more like it.”

Driving in, the entrance to the lake had been fifteen minutes from the interstate. I remembered passing a gas station and a bar about halfway from I-40 to the park, so my best guess was it’d be a half-hour on foot. I’ve been hiking in the growing darkness for about that long now, but there was no sign of civilization yet. It was only eight o’clock, but night was settling fast. Out East there’s so much light pollution, I forgot what night really was. Walking along a country road in Oklahoma didn’t offer the same illusion. Here, the primordial dark of night still lived.

Human low-light vision is mechanically different from our normal daytime sight. Color belongs to the sunlit lands and helps us spot ripe fruits from a distance with relative ease, distinguishing the red of the apple from the green of the leaves. In the dark, it’s all shades of grey. The hours after sunset lend a film noire tint to the world. It made even a tame wood, one regularly disturbed by human presence, seem strange and savage to the senses. I knew that those woods had been culled free of major predators for decades, but that fact didn’t register with my reptile brain. I refused to leave sight of the road.

I’d been rambling for over three years, but I could still get spooked. Rambling was my uncle’s word for it, but it fit as well as anything. After Sarai, after Harvard, I couldn’t stay in Boston. I packed up the stuff that mattered into Dorothy, sold the rest, and hit the road. I had a few thousand dollars saved up for a wedding and honeymoon that was never going to happen. I called home to Uncle James and Aunt Celia once a week, usually on Saturday nights. Aunt Celia, child of the sixties, thought I was looking for something. Uncle James thought I was nuts, but was far too polite to say it out loud. I couldn’t blame him: we Fisher men have a history of losing our minds over women.

Tonight, I was out looking for something: a new car battery or a kind stranger willing to give me a jump start. My wallet would have preferred a good Samaritan, but it would survive an auto parts store. I had spent six weeks in August and September working at a Renaissance Fair outside Atlanta and made surprisingly good money at it. Apparently, my unkempt brown mane made me look like a young Merlin. I was scared I just resembled a young Charles Manson.

Up ahead, the black, white, and grey of the evening forest gave way to the electric red of a roadside sign. I was too far away to make out what it said, but the presence of color was comforting. Nothing was going bump in the night, no phantasmal chains were clanking, but I was not alone in the dark woods all the same.

“We’re not alone, you mean. You’re never alone,” my internal voice piped in.

“Try not to remind me. Any ideas what it could be? It doesn’t feel fairy-esque.”

“Not a clue. But are you sure it’s out in the woods?”

“What do you mean?”

“The light from the sign. A creepy scarlet like that…on a moonless night. I bet it paints everything under it in shades of blood.”

“Quit it. The moon’s in the first quarter tonight. Besides, light means electricity and electricity means people.”

“Light usually does mean people. That’s why bugs are drawn to it. It’s where the food is at.”

I pushed him down, mentally shoving a cherry red ball gag into the hidden alcove of my upper right brain cavity. It silenced him, but I couldn’t help dwelling on the thought. I was close enough to see that the billboard was for the gas station, now, but…If I had been a hungry nocturnal predator of the forest, I might have followed the red beacon in hopes of a two-legged meal.