Styx

A Chapter by Shibui

A drive down a lonely road puts Felix on edge.

A staccato rhythm of light and dark filled the cab of our black sedan as we passed on a dirt road beneath the boughs of tall trees and filtered moonlight. Beside me in the backseat was Grace, a girl just over a year older than I, tall and thin like stretched taffy with curly red hair that draped down her head like the leafy branches of a willow. Holding her amber locks back from her face, she’d turned round with half her body to look through the back window past the trailing fog of dust at the shrinking estate. Once it was a distant speck down the dirt road, a momentary illumination caused her irises to flash with a pale gray glow and highlighted her wistful gaze before her angular features were consumed again by fuzz as she reseated.

“We’re really leaving, then,” she sighed. I could see her eyes twinkling at me from behind that maze of hair, a slight smile crept across her pale lips.

“You going to miss it here?”

She gently shook her head, “I don’t think so. Will you?”

“Can’t you tell?”

The smile faded and she turned away with her chin in her hand to stare out at the blur of trees whizzing past us. “You should know better than that, Felix.”

“Was only joking.”

“Jokes can hurt, too.”

Our driver was a man we’d never seen before, which, in itself, was a bit of an oddity. He was clearly advanced in years, his dark suit in direct contrast to skin and hair seemingly the same shade of white " like snow a few days after the storm, hardened by the days and nights. When we cleared the timberline, a silvery glow flooded the interior and his deeply lined face looked like a plaster death mask, oblivious and hollow as it stared unblinkingly down the road.

We passed wide fields of corn and grain that stretched out into the distance until they disappeared in the dark. Barns and farmhouses were only barely visible beyond them, their slight silhouettes black against star speckled skies on the horizon. We drove a while until we reached the main highway that ran along a low river where the sky’s reflection spangled on rippling surface with twinkling light. We turned onto the main road and headed east through a small, gloomy village. The single paved street was poorly maintained the rows of shops we passed were all dark, deserted, and dilapidated. It wasn’t an uncommon sight to see towns like these as more and more people abandoned their hometowns for the cities and new exciting lives. Signs over storefronts become epitaphs over a grave wherein lay forgotten dreams buried in crumbling economic infrastructure.

Silence was heavy in the air and made me agitated. I let out a sigh, “I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“For earlier -- what I said, I mean.”

“I know.”

“Huh?”

“Not because of the power, but because I know you,” she gave a smug grin and pushed out her chest. “I don’t need to read your mind to know what’s on it.”

“Still, I just"”

“It’s alright,” she laughed. “I’d actually already forgotten about it.”

Further out from the town, we were in a part of the country where you could see nothing but empty plains for miles, the grass reflecting pale green and shimmering with dew. I got comfortable, nestled my shoulder into the leather upholstery and started to doze off.

“Look, Felix!” She bent her finger against her window pointing out toward grass-covered plains, barred from the highway by barbed wire. “Cows! A whole herd of them!”

Leaning over, I could only barely make out large, vague shadows on the grass before they were gone behind us. “Cows aren’t anything to get worked up over,” I said. “Try and get some sleep. We still have a way to go before we get to the airport.”

She frowned and nodded and turned back toward the dimly lit scenery to watch in silence.

After that, I shut my eyes for a while, but I don’t think I managed to sleep at all. Beneath and around me, I felt the car bounce and the gravity shift as it turned and each small noise and bump seemed to conspire against me. When we stopped, I opened my eyes again and we were at an old 24 hour diner just off the highway, perched on a small hill beside a gas station. Some hauling vehicles were parked outside in the lot from which you could see their owners dining and conversing beneath fluorescent lights through large windows along the front of the building.

Our driver cut the engine and stared vacantly through the windscreen. Grace and I shrugged to each other.

“Suppose this means we can get out and stretch a bit?” I asked her.

Grace looked at the old man through the rear view and curled her mouth into her cheek. “I suppose…”

When we entered the diner, the few inside cast looked curiously in our direction. One of the men muttered something to the waitress, a young pretty woman perhaps a bit older than us with dark brown hair in a blue plaid skirt and gray top beneath a slightly stained apron. She shushed the man that spoke and whispered something back before making her way over to us as we stood near the door looking around.

Her smile was warm and natural, full of white teeth that were only slightly crooked behind glossy red lips. “Can I get ya’ll a table?” she asked.

“We need the toilet,” Grace blurted out. The other patrons laughed out loud and her cheeks flushed until everything above her neck was monotone.

The waitress stifled a giggle or two of her own. “Well, they’re right over that way: past the counter and to the left.” We started in the direction she pointed. “Uh, can’t I get you anything while you’re here? Coffee? Slice of pie?”

“Oh!” Grace’s face lit up as she stopped and tugged at my jacket sleeve, her eyes shining in a shadowed veil of hair. “We’ve time for pie, don’t we?”

“Well, ain’t no one I know too busy for pie!” the waitress laughed. “What kind would you like, hun?”

“I don’t know…”

“What do you recommend?” I asked her.

She thought a moment before responding: “I’ll tell you what, my mama made a beautiful lemon meringue just earlier tonight -- should still be some left. How about I cut a slice for each of you, on me?”

Grace clapped and smiled and nodded profusely and I couldn’t help smiling with her. She had that effect on you if you let her.

“That’s awfully nice of you,” I said. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Hmph!” her visage turned suddenly reproachful. “Do I look like a ‘ma’am’ to you? Call me ‘Chris’, if you please.” She waved a finger under the tag on her apron. Sure enough, there was the name “Chris” spelled out in simple letters over the slope of her breast.

“Right, thank you Chris.”

Chris grinned and nodded before leaving us to tend to the other customers while Grace and I washed up in the restrooms. When I returned, Grace was waiting in a booth across from the counter next to a big window through which we could see the town dimly sprawling toward a range of mountains dark beneath the distant sky.

“I’m glad we stopped here,” she said as I slid in across from her. She leaned in and whispered to me and raise her head slightly to peek over my shoulder towards the black sedan in which we’d arrived. “Are you sure it’s okay for us to make him wait?”

“We can spare a few minutes, at least.” Looking up over the back of the padded bench, I saw the light of the lamp outside heavily reflected on our car’s windshield and the slight appearance beneath it of emotionless eyes staring back at me. “And I don’t think he would leave without us.”

Chris came by a minute or so later with two plates, each with near identical cuts of lemon meringue, and set them down in front of us. By the time I got to my first bite, Grace had finished about half of her own and was messily consuming the other. A piece of crust caught in a clump of hair hanging near her mouth and I batted it over her shoulder.

When she was finished, she belched audibly and reclined. Her face glowed with satisfaction. “…so good,” she moaned.

“That’s a compliment if I’ve ever heard one!” Chris laughed. “Don’t think I caught yer names.”

“I’m Felix. This is Grace.”

“Hi!” Grace waved energetically.

“Nice to meetcha!” she shook hands with each of us. “So, what brings you out this way?”

“Just heading back home.”

“Where to?”

“Chicago.”

“We came this way to visit relatives,” Grace added.

Over the next few moments, the corners of Chris’s lips began to droop. She cast a wary look out the window near the entrance where our car was parked and bit her lip. “Mind if I tell you about something?” she asked. “It’s a bit weird -- promise me ya’ll won’t freak?”

We both nodded our agreement.

“Well,” she began with a whisper, “for a while now, I been seeing kids ‘round your age come through here on occasion. It’s sort of a -- whad’ya call it -- a phenomenon? Anyway, there’s always two of them and they only come at night with a car just like that one ya’ll came in.”

I glanced around her back at our car in the lot outside as she gestured toward it. From behind the glass and the heavy reflection of light on the windscreen, I saw the old driver staring back at me with those empty eyes of his and it sent a shiver down my spine like ice water on the nape of the neck. Grace and I exchanged looks.

“We mostly just get truckers and the odd traveler -- not many people from out of town stop here for visiting. Ain’t much out here to see, less you like cow manure, anyhow,” she laughs.

“Yeah, that is weird, isn’t it?”

“Right? It’s become a bit of a legend around here, these days.”

I was trying terribly hard to appear interested in my half-eaten pastry. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the old man standing outside in the lot beneath a lamp over the front window. He stood stalk still there in the light, eyes wide and staring. No one else in the room seemed to notice, all engrossed in their meals and coffee and conversation -- all except Grace who clutched her head in her hands and began whimpering quietly.

Chris looked at her and put her hand on her shoulder. “You alright, dear?”

She grit her teeth. Her lips trembled. “I- I…”

It’s difficult to explain, but just then, I felt far away. As I looked down at my plate and picked at the well browned meringue in front of me, I was passenger in my own skull, peering through eyes that were mine, but, somehow, at the same time not.

“She’s probably just eaten too fast, it happens occasionally.” My lips moved without thought as though something deeply submerged in my mind had come to the surface. “Your story is interesting, but we don’t know anything about it. Like we said: we were just visiting relatives.”

“Alright…”

Chris looked at us each in turn. Grace seemed to be recovering from a migraine and rubbed her temples between her thumb and forefinger.

“I get it -- didn’t mean to spook you at all, Gracie. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”

She gave a weak laugh and smiled at us. Neither of us responded. My head swam in fog.

“I should get back to see if anyone else needs anything.” She took Grace’s plate. “If ya’ll need anything, just holler.”

As Chris walked away, Grace placed her shaking hands over mine. What was visible of her face was white as a sheet as she spoke in an unnerved whisper, “D-did you see him?”

“Yeah.” I turned my head and saw the old man was gone from where he’d been standing only moments before. He was back behind the wheel of the sedan as though nothing had happened.

Grace pulled away and planted her elbows on the table and cradled her face in her palms. “I thought my head was going to burst.”

She sat rubbing her head when I noticed a streak of blood oozing toward her upper lip from her nostril. “We should probably go.” I pulled a handkerchief from my jacket pocket and she squirmed a bit while I dabbed at the trail of glistening crimson. After I showed her the stain, she took it and pinched it around her nose as we started for the exit.

“Bye, ya’ll!” Chris shouted to us as we exited. “Be sure to stop in next time you’re in town!”

“Thanksh, Mish Chrish,” Grace called back through her pinched nose. The cloth hanging over her mouth fluttered over her breath. “Shee you next thime!”

Once we were in the backseat, there was only a momentary lapse between the shutting of the door and the gentle rumbling of the car’s engine. We didn’t talk about what happened.

Grace held out my handkerchief some minutes later. “I think it’s stopped now,” she said with a sniffle.

I waved her hand away, “Hang onto it in case it starts up again.”

Sitting in silence, we didn’t dare sleep for the rest of the drive. I spent the next hour staring daggers at the old man through the rear view and kept my hand on the switchblade in my coat.

© 2015 Shibui

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Reviews

Rick Monson

You have a knack for good descriptions of things around Felix. However, I don't seem much of a description of him. The chapter is intriguing and makes me want more... a good number of unanswered questions arise from a good opening.