content warning: car wreck trauma, death
It was a bad act. As usual, the night had got away from him. He’d spent his taxi money buying drinks for Sheena’s friend, Katie. He was confident he’d convince her to take him home. Told the others to go on. They were really hitting it off. Twenty minutes later, she went to the ladies and never came back. Stuck outside the emptying club, drunk, fifteen miles from home, with a dead phone and four euro in his pocket, it seemed like a brilliant plan.
The taximan was nice, which didn’t help. It would have been easier if he was less chatty. He was a pudgy bald man of fifty with a fat belly and thin moustache. Five miles from his house, and seven miles from the address he’d given, they stopped at a country crossroads and he began to retch.
“Are you going to get sick? ’Cause if you do it’s sixty euro,” the taximan said sternly. He didn’t reply, just bent over and sucked in a mouthful of air, feigning a hiccup.
“For fuck’s sake,” the taximan hissed as the taxi slewed onto the shoulder of the road and he reached across to throw open the door.
“Turn and do it out that way.”
He swung his two legs out the door, letting his head and arms hang limp for a moment. A faint sense of unreality washed over him as he moved through the plan in his mind. Although still a few miles from home, this was the perfect spot to do it. With the taximan still muttering obscenities under his breath, he stumbled forward, cupping his knees, pretending to grope in the darkness and then launched into a sprint, bolting through the cross.
Tires squealed behind him. He cut left and darted up an old laneway, his loafers squeaking rhythmically against his sweaty sockless feet. Up ahead a gate barred the way, he cleared it in two vaulting movements, its rusted and frilled ironwork leaving an oxidized stain on his palms. The desolate out buildings coalesced before him. Their stone walls fallen away and crumbling, collapsed roofs reduced to no more than jutting rotted beams and splintered shale, steeped in a deep silence that may have lasted for eternity if not broken now by his labored breathing.
To the right, at the bottom of a steep slope, lay a dry gully where the old road used to run, choked in a profusion of ivy and goosegrass and canopied by a cluster of ash trees. He sidled down the slope, bouncing from tree to tree until he got to the bottom. He hunkered down surrounded by the moldering smell of decaying life.
The headlight beams shone above him; he could tell by the sound of the idling engine that the taximan hadn’t risked driving up the lane. A door popped open and slammed shut.
“You fucking coward little cunt, I’m going to fucking do you, you bollocks.”
He continued on in the same vein growing more and more irate, his voice reaching a cracking pitch that echoed through the stone buildings above, sounding out every darksome corner. The longer it went on the more grotesque the threats of anatomical torture became. Had the inquisition had this man on its side, heretics would have been begging for the rack.
Through the latticework of shrub and bramble, he saw the mud-flecked runners of the taximan illuminated by the headlights on the road far above him. The taximan crouched mumbling to himself something about “getting one of those fucking police tasers.” He rose and scuffed his runners against the ground in mock surrender.
After another short tirade, he heard the rachet of the handbrake and the car ease back, reversing through the crossroads, its lights off. Dew impearled the surrounding foliage in the dappled moonlight. A few feet up from him the embankment was covered with ivy vines, he shuffled over and leaned against them and waited. Through the fretwork of gilded leaves above he glimpsed translucent clouds shuddering across the halfmoon, soaking up its beams.
His jeans were soaked from the knees down. The night had got uncomfortably chill. An hour ago, he’d been warm, sweating even, ensconced in a gyrating mass of fiery bodies. Some of them would be curled up in their beds by now. Others would be enjoying the second-hand warmth of chippy friers. Somehow, he was here. Sheena’s mate was not. His body was starting to get stiff.
A cigarette craving fizzled at the back of his head. If he turned his back and arched over, it would obscure the flame of the lighter from the road. No. He had to hold out. The wind soughing through the trees overhead was now the only sound. It was at least twenty minutes before the taxi approached again, lingering at the crossroads, shooting a bright conical streak over his head and into the void behind him. The engine cranked and whirled away to the right, fading until he was alone with the shivering leaves.
He drew himself up from his dew-soaked bed and clambered up the embankment, doubling back to the crossroads. Before him the road unwound in the chromatic hue of the moonlight, spooling ahead before tapering off in the distance, as if rendered by his presence. Trees reared up out of the gloom, nightmarish charcoal sketches, vague and insubstantial, flanking him with darkness. Despite the frigid air and the adrenaline, he was still half-twisted; he smiled a doltish serene smile to himself, pleased with his escapade and relishing the prospect of telling the lads.
A waft of wind caused spindly branches to rattle and the brittle stalks of hogweed to gnash against the wild grass lining the tangled hedges either side of him. Periodically he’d glance over his shoulder, unable to shake the ancient primordial instinct he heard footsteps. After a while he had to stop to keep his surroundings from spinning out of control. He squatted and scrambled for a cigarette, jerking the packet out of his jeans and spilling a dozen of them onto the ground and scrabbling along after them pinching and dropping with his numb hands as they rolled with the wind. Funneling them back into the packet, he turned his back and lit one.
He was always listening for an approaching engine, looking ahead and noting field entrances he could dart into, fraying his nerves when he came across stretches where there were none. To his sodden mind black amorphous tree slashes appeared as people crouched by the roadside, resting for a moment. He approached warily, thinking what kind of person walks the roads at three in the morning? Madmen, lunatics, deviants all. People go missing after nights out, happens all the time. In a few days he could be a blurred, pitiful figure on grainy CCTV footage. Each of his minor actions analyzed and reanalyzed and newly imbued as portents of inevitable calamity. Appeals, anniversary appeals, new lines of inquiry, rivers dredged, persons of interest, and then nothing. Decades pass and then what does it matter anyway? Those who were alive at the time are dead. As dead as you. They all catch up in the end.
A crossroads. The same crossroads. How? Disorientated, he turned to light a cigarette and remembered turning against the wind to light his last one. He had turned into the wind, and in his stupor kept walking. His senses were so weighed down with thoughts of murdering maniacs he didn’t notice.
As he turned on his heel to retrace his steps, a fox nimbly loped across the road, stopping when it saw him and stretching its head aloft regarding him for a moment, the moonlight speckling its fur and causing its refulgent yellow eyes to glow as if possessed. It dove for the hedge, dissolving into the overgrown thicket. Toeing out his cigarette, he continued on the way he had come.
A mist was setting in, ferrying across the dips in the road in a silvery veil, a vaporous ghost ship cut adrift from its moorings. His feet were chafing, giving him a clomping limp, his damp clothes shrank to his body. The wind swarmed and smacked down the road; he walked now with his hands shoved under his armpits and drew his head turtle-like into his coat. A lone barn stood back in one of the fields, loose corrugate battering against its frame sending a clangorous rattle through the air.
The sound of an engine cut through the night and a grainy light shot past him. He glanced either side of him. There wasn’t any cover. Through the glare of the headlights, he could see it wasn’t a taxi but a white transit van. He stood up on the thin embankment in front of the hedge to the right; his body half turned away as it approached. The transit halted beside. A man of about forty rolled down the driver’s side window, his face obscured in the shadows.
“Are you alright there?”
“Grand, thanks.”
“You’d want to watch yourself on this road, it’s hard to see you.”
“I’ll be grand, thanks.”
“Are you near? D’you want a lift?”
He climbed down from the embankment and started to walk away, “I’m grand, thanks.”
The van rolled along with him, “Look, it’s no trouble, you could get clipped fairly handy.”
“I’ve somebody coming to collect me, thanks.”
The driver shook his head and clamped his hands onto the steering wheel before pulling off without another word.
He had begun to sober up, the noises of the night affected him now. He broke into an uneven trot, his loafers slapping on the tarmac, stopping every few hundred feet to make sure they weren’t drowning out another sound, footsteps or another car maybe. Blisters had begun to bubble on his feet. His knees were burning.
He passed a stretch of road known locally as “Bradyville.” Four red-brick houses in a row on the righthand side, peopled by various siblings of the Brady family. Light spilt out from hall windows in each. His noisy gait set off one dog, then two, then three. Security lights flicked on one after the other as if choreographed. A disembodied voice called out of the murk, “What is it, Jessie? Gowan, what is it, boy?” He picked up the pace, attempting to conceal the smacking of his limp by bouncing off the balls of his feet.
The barking faded behind him. He was two miles from home. The fields here were bordered by overgrown hedges turning what should have been a road into a one-track boreen. Hawthorn hedges stretched out in the darkness, their overripe branches drooping, reaching right down to the road, their tips swaying, lazily brushing the tarmac.
The dull unstd unstd unstd of techno music approached like an electric war drum. There was no embankment upon which to stand. Hemmed in, he threw himself into the hedge thorns gouging at his skin and tearing at his clothes. The car kept coming, its headlights flaring around the corner causing the leaves to glisten. Briars whipped off its windshield and lashed its sides. The guttural growl of the twin exhausts sounded like the cry of a beast. Panicked, he attempted to burst through the needled hedge into the field. Pain seared through his arms and across his face as he pulled at the hedge in a frenzy. It was a low riding dark blue Subaru Impreza.
Dazzled by the headlights for a moment, he forced himself to look up and see the whites of a girl’s unseeing glazed eyes, before the solid beam jerked to the right and the car screeched and flew off the road into the field, taking a section of ditch with it, swerving drunkenly and becoming top heavy and rolling two, three, four times shedding glass and metal as it went, righting itself on the last tumble. The engine ran for a few seconds; the exhaust coughed out a dying puff of black smoke before it quit. Its headlights stayed on, slicing through the night like two swords.
He set off at a steady jog, through the gap in the ditch following the newly ploughed rutted track. The roof had crumpled. The radiator was hissing and a figure slouched in the driver’s seat. Her heavy red hair lay on the air bag covered in fine white dust. He reached out trying to pry open the door, his hands crisscrossed with red bleeding scratches. The frame was warped and wouldn’t budge. The young woman drew her head back, lolling it from side to side. She had a pointed pale face that was amazingly unscratched.
“Can you tell me your name?” he asked, reaching in through the glassless window and putting a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and squinted at the steering wheel pinning her into her seat. Awakening from her doze she looked up at him with unfocused eyes.
“Do you have a phone on you?”
She reached to the hollow by the gearbox, and then whipped her head around, struck by a flash of remembrance.
“Darren. Where’s Darren? Darren.”
For the first time he noticed the passenger side of the webbed windscreen peeled back like the lid of a tin can.
“I’ll look for Darren in a minute, I need your phone, though.”
“I don’t know where it is, it was here and now it’s not,” she was on the verge of tears now.
“Right, alright, okay, I’ll go look for Darren, you need to stay calm and keep feeling around for your phone.”
He didn’t have far to go. Darren lay to the left of the headlight beam. A velvet red cleft ran down the side of his head and his neck was contorted at an impossibly lifeless angle. With impious hands he rifled through his pockets and found a phone. The screen was smashed. Tossing the phone into the night he turned and saw a thin furl of gray smoke reeking from beneath the bonnet.
He ran over and stared at her and then at the car, trying to work out the puzzle before him.
“Where’s Darren?”
“He’s fine, he’s a bit shaken but I have him in the recovery position. We need to get you out.”
“What about his phone?” He ignored her and yanked at the door.
There was a snap from under the bonnet. The smoke was now thick and black and toxic.
“It’s going to go on fire, I need to get out,” she shouted, reeling back in her seat.
He leaned in through the window and grabbed her by her narrow bony hips and heaved, both choking on the fumes of melting plastic. Her cry of pain matched his cry of exertion. He tried again, and she slapped his back, telling him to stop. The world was briefly turned off as the headlights flickered and died, leaving them fumbling in the darkness for a moment before an unwelcome flame winked from under the bonnet.
“Help me, help me, I have to get out,” she shrieked.
Tightly gripping her thighs, he wrenched, ignoring her slapping and cries of pain, determined to get her out even if it meant pulling her legs from her body. The wind had caught the smoke, sending a plume into his face, stinging his eyes. A flame licked out. There was a harsh astringent smell of singed hair. Her eyes glinted red. She began rocking her body violently against the steering wheel. He reared back away from the car but found her hand gripping his right arm, her nails drawing blood. Without looking at her, he brought his left fist down hard on her arm, rending himself free and tumbling back onto the wet grass.
Through the crackle and the snap of the flames he could hear her hoarse shrieks as the scene dwindled behind him. There was no dramatic explosion although he wished for one. He longed to know her death would be quick. It burned steadily and he thought of her there, writhing, her skin crackling, her hair sizzling, stewing in her own fat. Tears ran down his cheeks as he ran across the road and into another field and another, running along the ditches until he found the next gateway leading towards the top field.
He was in open country now, away from any roads. Before topping the crest of the hill, he looked back. The smoke sketched out against the dim sky, caught by the wind curling in long elongated plumes. The sky around the car purpled by the red shimmering glow. Blue lights twisted and darted from the road as police cars, ambulances and fire engines weaved around the narrow road in formation. He stood for a while, entranced by the bluish tinge dancing on the hedges impelled to stare by some primitive instinct, like an insatiate moth.
He plodded over the crest of the hill; his feet saturated with dew as he waded through the ankle high grass. He walked until the bordering hedges sunk back into the night, becoming unseen. A thick ceiling of immobile cloud now blocked the moon. He was walking in a different darkness now. A depthless black night with no hint of surroundings, the sky above cancelled. He was unsure even of the ground beneath his feet. He felt his legs growing shorter and shorter melting into the grass until the earth finally gave way and he fell, tilting and reeling into the sudden abyss.
Patrick Kruth is a factory worker from Ireland. This is his first published story. You can find him on Twitter @KruthPatrick. patrickkruth96@gmail.com
SPOT IMAGE CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA
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