Tales From the Gas Station: Volume Four, page 29
part #4 of Tales From the Gas Station Series
“You have to scream, Jack.” There was a sudden urgency in Spencer’s voice.
“Shut up!”
The voices in the cloud were louder now. Coming together. Greeting one another. The horse dragged me through a bramble of thorns and stopped abruptly. I didn’t even take the time to catch my breath before pulling myself up to look at why we weren’t still moving. Oh shit, I thought as I realized the situation had suddenly gotten much, much worse.
We were standing in a clearing at the top of a short embankment. A few feet down, water rushed past, strengthened by the recent rain. The stream, at least fifteen feet wide, was all that separated us from the other two black horses. They were waiting, I understood. They didn’t want to start without us.
The horse to the left was covered in animals. Black birds—crows and vultures—blanketed its back and face like thick scales. Some still attempted to flap their wings, but most were flattened out like two-dimensional representations of their former selves, completely absorbed into the creature’s skin. Its back leg contained a massive growth like a gray tumor that I slowly came to recognize as a coyote. The jaw and mouth of the long-deceased creature had melted into the area below the knee. Flies buzzed in and out of the former canine’s eye sockets.
The horse on the right carried but one trophy—a black bear. An adolescent, from the looks of it. Draped over the horse’s back like a nightmarish fur poncho. I couldn’t tell if the animal was frozen in the middle of attempting a bear hug or if it was making a valiant attempt at hunting a bigger animal, but now they were glued together. A long trail of slobber ran down the side of the horse from the bear’s mouth as it breathed heavily and growled. When the bear noticed us, it kicked its back leg—the only appendage still free, and made an attempt to get away. Amazingly, I knew what it was thinking. The bear was part of that horse now. Its mind had joined the cloud. If I had to transfer it into words, it would be, “Hey, bald house-bear! Do something! Get us out of here!”
The other thoughts overtook it. The thing that was about to happen was about to happen, and what was about to happen was not something I wanted to happen. They were going in turns, in the order they arrived. First, the horse covered in birds. It dragged the lump of rotting coyote behind it and walked towards the stream. The few birds left alive fluttered and fought against the cold, but their screams ended in merciful silence as the animal submerged.
“They died quickly.” I couldn’t tell whose thought that was. They all began to feel the same. Perhaps it was my own?
The bear horse went next. The bear fought every way it could. It tried to swing its weight. It tried to kick. But by the time the horse’s first hoof touched water, the bear had completely entangled itself. There was nothing left of the bear that wasn’t horse except for its mind, and even that was beginning to fade into the cloud. The last independent thought to come from it felt a lot like, “Help!” The bear’s eyes went under. Then the horse went under. And then there was nothing left but those voices, calling to the only ones left. “Your turn.” “Join us.” “The water is fine.”
“Enough fucking around,” Spencer said. “It’s time to scream.”
I over-thought it in a hurry. Spencer wants me to scream, so it’s probably a bad idea. And if I do, what then? Rosa hears? Rosa comes running? She wouldn’t understand what’s happening, and she wouldn’t be able to help. No, if I scream, Rosa will be the next victim. The only way to keep her safe is to figure this out on my own.
The horse began moving forward, pulling me towards the water, and that first step was a doozy. We fell several feet down the embankment, but the horse caught itself. My added weight was trivial. These things could pull bears without breaking a sweat. I was nothing. I couldn’t get away. It was too late to cut off my hand. And inside, I could feel my mind falling, hurtling towards something dark and comfortable. The cloud was inviting me to become like them, free of this world, free of the pain. It wouldn’t take any effort. All I had to do was relax.
“Scream!” Spencer commanded.
“No!” I said through gritted teeth. “They’ll hurt Rosa!”
“You should be more worried about yourself.”
The horse continued to drag. The ground below me felt different. No more grass and vegetation. Now it was wet sand and mud. Nothing for my hand to grab anymore. The cold permeated my tattered clothes and stung my skin. The horse continued straight ahead. It knew what it was doing. It tried to calm me. “It’s so beautiful down there. The water is much deeper than you think. You’ll see.”
I thought it would be impossible for this moment to get any worse. I thought it was impossible for my heart to beat any harder. But then-
“JACK!”
I heard her scream my name. She was close. Very close. I told her to stay put. Why wouldn’t she stay put?
The horse dragged me into the water. Cold swallowed me. We were only a few steps in, but I could feel the steep decline coming. I could still fight. I could pull myself up, keep my head above water, but not for much longer.
“JACK! WHERE ARE YOU?!”
Spencer stood at the water’s edge. He shook his head and said, “Last chance.”
The voices in the cloud were becoming irritated. “Stop fighting!” “What’s wrong with him?”
I was losing my focus. Losing my mind. Drunk on insanity. I took a deep breath and screamed at the top of my lungs. “ROSA STAY AWAY!”
Then we plunged into the water. My head went under. Water surged past, colder and colder. We were flying. Pressure rapidly built up inside my skull so intensely I thought I was going to pop. My eyes couldn’t see anything but blackness. My aching ears heard nothing but the deep rumble of a current all around. And then, I heard the voices in the cloud. They were not happy...
“What is that?!”
“Oh shit! It’s coming straight for us!”
...Actually, they seemed worse than just unhappy...
“How does it know we’re here?”
“Did it see us?”
...They seemed afraid...
“That thing will kill us all!”
“WHAT DOES IT WANT!”
...I felt their fear and understood it to be true. Something was out there. Something dangerous. Something that would kill them all if it didn’t get what it wanted...
“IT’S AFTER THE HUMAN! IT MUST BE!”
The next thing I knew, I was being pulled out of the water. Rosa’s voice was in my ear, screaming something I couldn’t hear. My legs were wobbly, but eventually they hit mud, and I started to walk. The world settled into place around us. Rosa was waist deep in the creek, her arms around me, pulling me to the edge where Gaston waited and arped angrily.
As soon as we were free of the water, I hit the ground and started sucking sweet, sweet air back into my lungs. I thought I was a goner for sure there. I was lucky Rosa didn’t listen to me when I told her to stay away.
She collapsed onto the ground next to me.
“Those things,” she said. “Were those… mimics?”
I took another round of deep breaths, then looked at my hand. “No,” I answered. “I’m pretty sure that was… some… unrelated otherworldly bullshit[29].”
The palm where I’d been fused to the horse was bright red and tender as hell, but the stitches were completely gone and my slice wound had magically healed into a gnarly scar. Silver linings.
I turned to Rosa. “Those things, they let me go… Why would they do that?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier,” she said, climbing to her feet. She offered me a hand and helped me up, then went to retrieve the camo jacket she’d discarded by the water’s edge. “The reason I’m never around when the weird stuff happens… It’s simple. The weird stuff stays away because it’s afraid of me.”
29 We have a saying where I grew up. “Never trust a horse.” [«]
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sometimes, I wonder if luck really is the chaotic, unpredictable force of nature we assume it to be. Maybe there’s something more to it. Maybe the randomness has a pattern we’re simply too close to see. After all, I’d just been through quite a bit of extraordinary bad luck. Was it a coincidence then—or was it the universe trying to correct an imbalance—that I would suddenly find myself in such extraordinary fortune? What were the odds that a monstrous creature would drag me so far off the only established trail, only to throw me up in a random spot in the middle of untold acres of forest, and somehow, I would recognize exactly where we were standing? What were the chances that we would now be somewhere I actually wanted us to be?
“You have more practical experience with monsters than I do, but shouldn’t we, I dunno, get as far away from the nightmare aquatic horse monsters as possible?” Rosa was standing near the bank of the water, bent over and wringing out her hair. She’d taken a second to catch her breath, but refused to turn her eyes away from the water.
“It’s hard to explain,” I answered. “But… For a moment there, I was connected to those things. I could feel what they felt, and trust me, they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
She made a doubtful high-pitched humming noise, crinkled her nose, and asked, “Are they though?”
“They think they are, at least. And that’ll be enough to keep them away.”
“What’s the plan, then?”
“We follow the water’s edge. I know this place. This is part of Goose Creek, about a mile upstream from the old bridge. Sabine and I used to come here all the time as kids to make paper boats and race them.”
“I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it is astounding that you are still alive.”
“I know, right?”
Rosa finally looked away from the water and turned to me. There was a sadness in her eyes as the weight of the moment started to take its toll. I felt it, too. I almost died...
“Rosa, I told you to stay where you were because I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Thank God it wasn’t your decision. Huh? Otherwise, you’d be underwater horse food.”
“Yeah, I owe you one.”
With a sly smile, she said, “I’ll put it on the scorecard.”
We found my shoe a few yards downstream. I led the way, not that it required a guide. It was a direct path. This close to the water’s edge, the worst obstacles we had to contend with were a few logs and the occasional snake. I offered to carry Gaston, partially because I needed the portable heat source. My clothes were wet and full of holes, and every breeze reignited the stinging of my thorn-scraped skin underneath. It was all I could do to keep from shivering, lest Rosa insist I take the camo jacket for myself. But I already owed her too many favors as it was.
“You were right,” I said, halfway to the bridge. Rosa hadn’t brought it up, but I knew she was thinking it.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I stopped. “The memory thing. You were right.”
She stopped as well, gave me the is-this-some-kind-of-trick look, and said, “Go onnn…”
“The last fight I ever had with Sabine, it was over me going to work on my birthday. I said some stuff about her parents and she told me to shut up or they might hear me.”
Rosa shook her head. “Okay?”
“We were at my house. Her parents weren’t there. How were they supposed to hear me?”
“Okay?”
“I remember it clearly. She said the words, ‘Be quiet.’ She said, ‘They’re going to hear you.’ She said, ‘Don’t go.’”
“I don’t follow.”
“She wasn’t talking to me back then. She was talking to me just now. From my memory. She was warning me about the water horses! Sabine knew there was danger and she tried to tell me to shut up and stay put. And if I’d listened to her, we could have completely avoided the last round of monsters.”
“Hang on. That memory was from a long time ago, right?”
“I don’t completely understand it myself, but I think, somehow, Sabine is actively trying to help us.”
The rain continued to fall until we reached the old bridge. From here, it was a familiar hike to my old apartment complex. By the time we emerged behind civilization, the two of us were looking pretty rough. Drenched. Ragged. I was scratched up and covered in dirt. Rosa was wearing a giant camo jacket over a funeral dress with sneakers. It looked like we were taking our walk of shame after a wild night at a murder mystery themed frat party. Any normal person who saw us would be right to be suspicious. Possibly even suspicious enough to call the authorities. We needed to get out of sight, and there was only one place for us to do that.
“And who exactly are the Cromwells?” Rosa asked as we made our way through backyards to the unit by the communal dumpsters.
In a complex populated by drug addicts, religious fanatics, and junior-high dropouts, the Cromwells, I explained, were considered “the weird ones.” Mr. Cromwell was the self-appointed “neighborhood watch.” When he wasn’t crawling around inside the dumpster, he was either locked away in his room or patrolling the grounds, usually wearing nothing but work boots, tighty-whiteys, and a tank top. No matter what he was up to, he always carried an oversized stogie in his mouth and a revolver on his hip. To my knowledge, he’d never shot any people, but several cars that parked too close to his pride and joy—a jet black ‘68 Plymouth Roadrunner—ended up with unapologetic bullet holes in the middle of the night.
Mrs. Cromwell made taxidermy squirrel art, which would have been creepy enough if she were actually good at it. The fact that she was self-trained, combined with the fact that most of her starting models were tire-flattened and scraped off the road, meant that the “decorations” nailed all around their door frame took the word “art” all the way up to the logical breaking point.
I had no idea what the Cromwells did for money, but they couldn’t have been too bad off, considering that one time they actually bought a pet tiger “for protection.” It took up residence for a couple of weeks and made the entire complex smell like tiger pee before some suits came along to sedate the animal and take it away. It was quite the scene. There was a news van and everything.
The couple mostly kept to themselves, but every now and then they’d open their home to the weird little kid who didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go while his parents were away for most of the day. Thinking back, it’s obvious that the Cromwells weren’t playing with a full deck of cards. And if I’d had better role models, they probably would have warned me to stay away from the less-than-sane family living by the dumpster. But I didn’t have better role models. I had the Cromwells. And the first time I knocked on their door, Mrs. Cromwell took pity and invited me in for cabbage soup.
Whenever I stopped by, which was once or twice a week, Mrs. Cromwell would make sure I had a full belly before I left. I paid them back with any squirrels I found. At no point did Mr. Cromwell ever acknowledge my presence, which I think was the closest thing he could give to acceptance. The Cromwells may have been crazy, but they were a lifeline until that fateful day I had to leave… the day they came for me. That stupid day.
The worst part of that day was how insultingly ordinary it was. I mean, when they came to take away the tiger all of the residents left their homes to watch. There were people out there I’d never seen before. There was even a firetruck on standby just in case, I don’t know, the tiger exploded or something. The crowd of onlookers was so dense I couldn’t see the action. But when they came for me—a real-life human—it was a completely different story. A couple of people in ordinary clothes found me sleeping outside my front door. They asked me a few questions about my mother, then they explained that I was going to have to come with them. And that was that. No crowds. No onlookers. No spectacle. I was nine years old, and I never saw the Cromwells again. What were the odds they were even still alive?
One look at the doorway to the Cromwell’s apartment gave me my answer. When she saw it, Rosa made a nervous sound somewhere between “Uhhh” and “Nooo.” Mrs. Cromwell had been busy. Her squirrel army had grown by an uncomfortable degree. There were squirrels dressed in dolls’ clothes. Squirrels holding plastic swords. Flattened squirrels all around the walls like the thick layers of a paper collage. And standing a couple feet tall, right next to the doorbell, the pièce de résistance: something I can only describe as the squirreltipede. Multiple squirrel bodies stitched together (or, upon closer inspection, hot-glued together) from neck to torso to neck to torso. Sixteen arms, sixteen legs, eight rigid tails, and one head. In its topmost left hand, it held a sunflower.
Gaston let out a high-pitched whine as I knocked on the front door. Rosa put her hand on my arm and whispered, “Is this a good idea?”
I answered, “Most definitely not. But it’s the least bad idea. We ran out of good ideas when we left the deer stand. I thought you knew.”
The door opened in front of us. I looked at the old woman standing there. She looked up at me. She was much shorter than I remembered. Her wild, dark hair had turned into even wilder gray. She was wrapped in a blue robe with a thin, half-spent cigarette sticking out of the corner of her mouth. It took me a second to realize everybody here was waiting for me to start the conversation. I broke the silence with an awkward “Hi, Mrs. Cromwell.”
A few more seconds passed before she finally spoke.
“Well come on in, then.” She took a step back and called out loudly towards the stairs, “Husband! Stray child is back!” Then, she turned and walked inside, gesturing for us to follow. Cigarette smoke escaped her lips as she called over her shoulder. “First, take off shoes.”
