I knew something was wrong as soon as I pulled up at the truck.
It’s not that a pick-up can’t get a flat like any other car, but I’d been in the wrecker and tire repair business since I was a teenager, and just like anything else, you get to where you can see the patterns of things. Some people tend to have dead batteries. Others get into fender benders. And there are always those that come out to a tire that went flat over a day or two.
But a blowout, a real tire blowout where the driver didn’t hit anything? Those were rarer, and usually when it happened it was some dumb kid that didn’t pay attention to his tires or somebody without the money to fix a bald one. The man who had called the 24-hour line for a new tire had seemed like neither.
For one thing, he had been ready with the tire model he needed right from the jump. The oddest part of that was it was a tire we actually had in stock, which was rare for truck tires. He didn’t even act surprised or happy about it—just told me what he needed like he knew I’d have it to bring. At the time, I’d just chalked it up to him being a dumbass—people always act shocked that we don’t carry every part they could ever want or need in some impossibly large warehouse out back. Just a minute, ma’am, let me go 3d-print you that new carburetor for your ten-year old Honda. You’re in luck, sir, I bought that exact ignition switch a few years back just waiting for your call.
But when my headlights passed across the side of the red truck and landed on the man propped against the door, I felt uneasy. This was a work truck—older but clearly heavily used and well-maintained. And the man himself looked to be in his fifties, wearing worn jeans and a crisp blue button-up shirt. My first thought was he was probably a foreman or contractor somewhere, and maybe a pretty successful one too.
Getting out of my truck, I raised a hand to him as I glanced at the truck’s tires. I saw the flat immediately, but in the dim halo from my headlights, I was struck by the condition of the tire. It didn’t look bald or threadbare at all. Glancing back at the man, I gave him a smile.
“Had one pop on you, yeah?”
The man grimaced and nodded. “I did. Hell of a time for it too.”
I returned his nod. “Yeah…Well Mr. Trimble, I’m Pete. Good to meet you.” Looking away awkwardly, I turned on my flashlight as I squatted down by the tire. “Looks like it’s pretty new. Lots of tread left. I know you said you didn’t on the phone, but you sure you didn’t hit something?”
The man shrugged. “Don’t know. I didn’t notice anything until it started riding rough. You brought the replacement tire?”
“Yeah. I’ll have it on in a minute.” I glanced back toward the rear of the truck. “You don’t have a spare you’d rather me put on, do you?”
He frowned. “Spare’s rotten. That’s why I called you.” He glanced into the darkened interior of his truck’s cab. “Hurry it up if you can. I’ve got a bit of an emergency going on.”
Offering smile, I nodded. “Sure, sorry. I’ll get right on it.”
I had the car jacked and was removing the last of the lugs when I heard a squeal of static above me from inside the man’s cab. As I glanced up, Trimble yanked open the door and fumbled for something inside.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
I was curious, but I didn’t want to seem nosy either, so I pulled off the wheel and carried it back to my truck. I could hear something over the radio, but at a distance it was hard to make out anything more than a loud crackling whine that faded in and out. Looking back toward Trimble, I saw the man was half-in and half out of his truck, his face dimly lit by the front-panel of what looked like a CB radio mounted on his dash. As I watched, he brought the handset up to his face, his voice tight with tension and frustration as he spoke.
“I’m trying, Goddamnit. I’m getting my tire fixed and then I’ll be back on the road.” Taking in a deep breath, he went on, his voice calmer. “I…I know you’re scared. Just...have you thought of anything else you saw or heard? Any landmarks or something else to let me know exactly where…”
Another squeal of static and Trimble fell silent as he listened. I wished I was closer so I could make out what the other person was saying, but all I could hear was the rhythm of noise as the man nodded to himself.
“Okay…Okay…Shit, I’m close to that now. I…” He glanced out the front windshield and then turned back to look at me. “Wait a minute. I have an idea. Just…I’ll be there soon.” He dropped the handset as he stood up, his eyes wide and his jaw clenched as he stepped toward me with his hands out. “Look, I need to tell you something. Ask you something.”
I stepped back from the wheel but kept the prybar I was using in my left hand. “Okay. What’s up?”
He glanced toward his truck and then back to me, and I could see a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead now. “That…I’ve been talking to this lady tonight. On the CB.”
I nodded, wondering where this was going. Was that his deal then? He’s running around on the sly or something? “Okay.”
He took another step forward. “This lady…She’s trapped somewhere. Someone took her and put her somewhere, but she found a CB radio and got it to work. I’ve been driving toward the area she described for the last hour, but I wasn’t sure where she was. She can’t get out of where she’s at, but she’s been looking out the windows of the place, trying to see what she could in the dark.” Trimble pointed up toward the night sky. “But the moon’s out now, and she just told me about a big silo she can see. A big silo next to a little shed, down the hill from the cinderblock building she’s in. I’m pretty sure I know the place now.”
I frowned slightly. “So you’re saying this lady had been kidnapped or something?” When he nodded, I went on. “Did you call the cops?”
Trimble shook his head. “No, I didn’t. Maybe I should have, but at first, I halfway thought it was a joke. I was on the way home when I first heard her on the radio. The more she talked, the more I thought I knew where she was talking about and the more I believed her. Hell, I should have called then, but what could I tell them? And how long would it take for them to find her? She’s alone for now, but she’s terrified about the fella that took her coming back. I thought if I could figure out where she was and then call, it would save time, but then my damned tire blew.”
Shifting uncomfortably, I nodded toward the wheel. “Well, give me another five or ten minutes and you’ll be on your way and…”
Trimble shook his head as he broke in. “No, you don’t understand. This place is close. Walking close. But I…I don’t know what I’ll be walking into or if I’ll need help getting her out. I think she’s hurt and…and she may need to be carried. What I was going to ask is…will you go with me to look?” He raised his hand as I started to respond. “I know, you don’t know me. But I swear, I’m not a bad fella. Not trying to trick you or rob you or something. Hell, you look like you could whip me if it came to it anyway.”
I eyed the man uneasily. “Let’s just call the cops and…”
“There’s no time. The closest cops are probably thirty minutes away. This place I’m thinking of is ten, maybe fifteen minutes away on foot. If we go now, we can get her out before she gets in worse trouble. I’m going with or without you, but I’m taking the time to ask because it’ll be easier with two and…well, I’m more than a little scared if I’m honest.” His bottom lip trembled slightly as he met my eyes. “Please, mister. Pete. Pete, please help me help this lady if we can.”
Ignoring the pit in my stomach, I nodded.
I made Trimble walk in front of me as we traveled through the dark. We each had flashlights, but it did little to cut through the shadowy shapes growing in the fields and thickets we crossed. The moon had gone back behind another cloud, and the weight of the night was oppressive as I followed the strange man deeper into the countryside.
He was a strange man, and not just because of the story he had told. Part of it was how he moved. Standing against the truck, he had seemed fairly strong and able, but as we walked I noticed he had an odd, stooped gait, as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders and was growing tired of the load. But there was something else, too. He seemed oddly familiar to me. Not like I knew him exactly, but like I had seen him before. Like maybe,
“We should be getting close now. Just over this next hill if I remember right.” He pointed his flashlight back as he glanced at me for a moment, the reflected light showing the naked fear in his eyes. “It’s an old hunt house or something I think. Never been inside, but I’ve seen it…years ago.”
I nodded. “Okay.” We started back to walking, but that new glimpse of his face had just made my stomach tighten further. “Hey, have I met you before?”
He seemed to slow for a second and then, leaning forward more, he went on at a quicker pace. “No, I don’t think so. I think I’d remember.”
I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry and tight. “I just...maybe you’ve been in the store before? It’s just, you knew we had the tire in stock and you look pretty familiar.”
A long silence stretched between us, punctuated only by the crunching of dead scrub grass at our feet and the distant rustling of some trees as we crested the hill. Trimble suddenly stopped, and I thought he was going to turn and respond, but instead he just pointed to a lump of shadow down the hill as he let out a rough whisper. “There. That’s it. Let’s go.”
My heart was beating faster now, eyes looking into every shadow for the bogeyman that had supposedly taken this poor lady. But what if that was a lie? Or what if it was true, but Trimble was the one that had taken her? Some maniac that was abducting people dumb enough to simply follow him out into the woods?
I tightened my grip on the prybar. He’d been right though. I was twenty years younger and forty pounds heavier than him. So long as I kept him in front of me, he’d have a hell of a time pulling anything. And I didn’t know that he was lying anyway. The story sounded strange, but these kinds of stories always did, didn’t they? Could I risk not helping just because I was too chickenshit to go out into the dark with a stranger?
Keeping my eyes ahead on Trimble, I dug my phone out of my pocket. I was going to see this through, but I was calling the cops before we went in there. No telling what we might find, and if Trimble was up to something, I’d rather find out now rather than once I was inside an unfamiliar building with him. Holding up my phone, I swiped open the screen and dialed 911 before lifting the phone to my ear.
Nothing. No dial tone, and after a few seconds, a double beep. I knew that fucking beep. Looking back at my screen confirmed it. No signal found. Idiot. I’d waited too long, and now I was…
“What are you doing?”
I glanced up to see Trimble staring at me. “I…I was just going to try calling the cops since we’re here now.”
He stared at the phone and then at me. “Any luck?”
I shook my head. “No service this far out.”
Trimble nodded before continuing to whisper. “Figures.” He pointed toward the dark outline of the building, less than fifty feet away now. “Let’s look around before we go inside. I think maybe there’s only one door, but better to see before we try to get in.” Turning off his light, he leaned closer, his voice trembling. “I’d kill the light too for now. W-we don’t have anyway of knowing where this guy might be.”
Shit, this guy was terrified. It simultaneously made me feel better about him and more scared of everything around us. If this was all real, we needed to hurry.
Sticking together, we circled the cinderblock rectangle, studying it in the patchy moonlight that came and went as we crept through the shadows of nearby trees. The wind kicked up again, rattling bare branches as a shudder went up my spine. We were back near where we had started, and he’d been right. One door and two dark windows.
I went to ask him how we should go in, but Trimble was already moving toward the door, and by the time I caught up, he’d twisted the knob and entered, turning on his flashlight again. I hit the button on mine as I stepped through the threshold. I’d expected to see furniture, maybe a stove or some hunting supplies, but there was none of that. Just a bare, dirty concrete floor broken down the middle, a black hole leading down into some kind of dug out basement or tunnel.
My eyes followed my flashlight’s beam as I did a second pass of the room.
“Where…where’s the rad…”
Trimble grabbed my arm tightly. “Do you hear her?”
I froze as I realized I did hear something. At first the sound was faint and warbling—more like water or fingers running over glass. But as I listened, it changed or I could hear it better. It was a woman, weakly calling for help from down in the dark below the concrete floor.
Squeezing my arm, Trimble began walking down the slope of broken floor and I followed, my pace matching and then passing his as the woman’s voice grew clearer. She was clearly in pain and terrified, and we needed to help her. And if the fucker that had her was down here, then God help him. Teeth gritted, I raised the prybar as I turned a corner a foot below the cinderblock building up above. I could still hear Trimble behind me, but I didn’t care anymore if he helped or not. My flashlight was already tracing the first outlines of a body chained down with stakes and what was…
Pain exploded in the back of my head as everything fell to darkness.
When I woke up, I was laying on my side, hands and feet bound behind me. Trimble sat a few feet away, watching me quietly until he noticed I was awake. My first panicked thought was that I had been right. He’d trapped this lady and now he had me too. Where was she…? My eyes lit on the figure laying between us, wrapped in dirty linens and bound by fine silvery chains tied to stakeheads all along the body.
Only the head was bare, and it was a lady, but her skin was pallid and grey, with lips that had shrived or been removed some time long before. As though appreciating my need to see, Trimble took one of the flashlights and shined it over her face more fully. The rest of her face was strangely beautiful, but in a terrible way. There was no question she was long dead, and the ruin of her mouth with its black, gleaming teeth only made the delicate grace of her other features more horrible. Trimble let out a low chuckle above me.
“I know that look. I know it well.” He gave me a nasty grin as he squatted down, stumbling with a grunt before catching himself. Grimacing, he pulled a pair of pliers out of his back pocket.
“Look…I don’t know what this is, but please. Just let me go. Don’t kill me.”
Trimble frowned. “Not going to kill you, idiot. Going to give you something. Pass along a gift, if you want to look at it like that.” Turning away, he reached forward to gently ease open the dead woman’s mouth. He paused a moment, shaking his head as he puffed out a breath. “Hell, even now it’s hard to do.” He glanced at me again. “Hard to give up. You’ll see what I mean.”
Shaking his head again, he gripped one of the body’s black teeth with the pliers and gave it a tug, grunting with effort as it finally came loose. As he stood up and turned to me, I started to beg again, but he ignored me. When he straddled me, I tried to thrash and throw him off, but it was no use. He put his knees on my shoulders and then eased the pliers down toward my face, the jagged, black tooth they held suspended above my head for a moment before he drove it down into my skull.
The world went black again, and when it came back, it was only in flashes. I remember seeing Trimble against the far dirt wall, vomiting up something dark before slumping back with a wet grin. I remember him untying me and saying that for what it was worth, he was sorry. I remember waking up a few feet outside of the building, the chill of morning dew making my whole body shudder as I sat up and felt my head. There was no mark there, or anywhere, as though it had all been a dream.
Standing up shakily, I went to the building and tried the door. It opened easily, and in the red morning light I could see that the split in the floor had been filled in with white sand while I was unconscious. Bending down, I picked up a handful and looked at it blearily. No, not sand. Salt.
It took me nearly an hour, but I found my way back to my truck eventually. It was just as I’d left it, aside from Trimble’s wheel, which was gone along with any other sign of the man. I thought about calling the police or going to a hospital, but I didn’t know what I’d say or what good it would do. At most I could carry them to a long-dead body buried in a hole under hundreds of pounds of salt, but after I told them everything, would the cops suspect anyone else but me of whatever had been done to her? No, I needed to go home and rest. Get my head straight and then decide what to tell, if anything.
And that’s what I did. When I made it home, I fell into bed and slept for twelve hours, waking up in the evening with a headache and a dim, numb hopefulness that it had all been a dream. I guzzled water and ate some luncheon meat out of the fridge before going back to bed, and by the next morning, I was feeling almost normal again. Real or not, it was behind me, and I needed to let it stay there.
It was as I was walking into work the next day that I first noticed the footsteps behind me. Soft and delicate, the whisper of skin padding lightly on concrete, just behind my own feet. I spun around, expecting to see a customer coming into the store, but no one was there.
Throughout the day, I kept hearing it. Footsteps following me wherever I went, but when I would turn, there was nothing there. By that afternoon, it was all I could think about, and I left work early to get some fresh air and clear my head.
I walked down the sidewalk toward the center of town, listening closely for the ghost steps behind me. They were always there, changing with mine depending on whether I was on pavement or asphalt, dirt or grass. By the time I made it to the back of the library, I was leaning against the building trying to catch my breath. Either I was going insane or something was following me. Stalking me.
Just then, I felt a small, firm hand on my shoulder, the cold of it cutting through the cloth of my t-shirt as its twin gripped me on the other side. I jerked away from the wall, almost falling backward at the unexpected weight bearing down on me. Pinwheeling my arms, I stumbled back a step as I felt something wrap around my waist.
A pair of freezing legs holding me tight.
I let out a scream as I looked down, reaching for the legs first and then the hands digging into my shoulders, but nothing was there. But she was on me. Oh God, she was on me now. I couldn’t see her or touch her, but I could still feel her, that impossible weight bearing down on me no matter where I went or what I tried. And I could still hear her, whispering with that raspy voice that terrifies and excites me when it blossoms in my ear.
Weeping gently as she warns me how terrible it is to be alone in the dark.
Softly rumbling as she purrs how much she needs me, loves me.
Telling me so many terrible and wonderful impossible things, all while promising one thing, one truth, above all else.
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