Chapter Two - Arrow

I don't know how long I'd been driving. Shit, I don't know how long I'd been doing anything. Time stretched out like a line of cut paper dolls, except there were long gaps of nothingness – somehow the doll chain hung together, but then things disappeared in the space. Things like my memory. Or even my senses.

I was cruising at seventy-five when I came upon the black sedan. The temp gauge needle crept up, but I stared it down and it held its position. The sedan looked familiar. Maybe my dad had owned one all those years ago. It shone in that vintage sort of way, the fins as sharp as spears. The sedan flashed its brake lights and I hit mine in reflex. Wait, how did I know that car? My father never drove anything that big. This was from somewhere else.

I was almost tailgating, so I figured I better ease up before we were clinking bumpers. I needed to either get some distance from the car, or floor it and pass. A dark shape popped up in the sedan's back seat, filling the rear window. I strained through my bug-splattered windshield. What the hell was that? A chalk white face appeared next to black shape, and a pair of bowed lips glowed against a woman's stark skin. The image hit me so hard that I slammed on my brakes. I fishtailed the truck. Even as I spun, I still cranked my head to stare at her face. Those bowed lips swelled to the size of a bleeding watermelon, and I heard them speak aloud, not like a memory, but like she was in the truck cab with me, her cool breath in my ear. The words didn't form sentences.

"Black...soft... earth...flesh...green...far."

The truck slid across the shoulder and slammed into the ditch.

Like the holes in my brain, the missing dolls in the chain, none of it made sense – but it meant something. I was so mesmerized by her voice, I barely felt the truck slam to a stop. My foot had been on the brake the whole time. Forgot to pump my way out of the slide. Forgot? I was frozen.

The truck was old school, weighed as much as a Sherman, still, it was a miracle I didn't roll.

My arm started to throb. When I turned to look at it, the skin puckered up and grinned at me. A trickle of blood slipped under the scab and drew a serpentine line down my forearm.

I finally knew one thing. Last night I had talked to the chalk woman and met the black beast.

The half-ton's engine stalled, but I didn't turn it over again. I sat in the ditch thinking about those bowed lips. I remembered asking her the question.

"What was your name again?"

No response.

I tried again. "Last time I didn't catch it. We talked in that bar in Yellowburn."

"I didn't give it," she'd said.

I had met her more than once. Met her and talked with her. I closed my eyes and pictured a smouldering house trailer, then it burst into fire, her running into the field, me after her, then that big beast toppling over me. Was that where the gash on my arm came from? Teeth or claws, what ripped the flesh?

My skull throbbed like someone had hammered a four inch spike into it. I cranked the engine, pulled out of the ditch with the tires spinning, four-wheel drive my ass, and headed down the highway.

They say your body remembers a lot, but not in ways that can be put into words. Right now the part of me that slammed on the brakes when I saw the sedan wasn't sending telegrams to the figuring-shit-out part of me. I trusted my legs more than the swiss-cheese brain.

The general weirdness faded as I picked up speed and the road straightened into an arrow. The sedan was long gone. Driving was the one thing that calmed me. Tires humming on the asphalt were a hundred times better than those vibrating loungers at the mall, and there wasn't a salesman with food court breath next to me in the cab saying how I couldn't live without one. Hate those sons-of-bitches.

Money was running out and I'd probably have to start looking for a job again. I'd eyed a few help wanted signs over the screen door of the countless road diners I visited. The greasy bacon and eggs didn't change as I drove across the country, but the people did. I had met some characters.

In Holdfast there was the guy who channelled John the Baptist. He kept telling me to repent, make my ways straight and all that. I didn't think I was that bad of guy – so I challenged him a bit. He was drinking hot water, no tea bag, steam rose from his beard on every sip.

"No one thinks they're all that bad until the time comes."

"Time comes for what?" I asked him.

"Exactly," he said.

Then he started spouting off in what was either an ancient dialect or the D.T.'S talking. After I left the diner, I passed him in the parking lot. He crunched down on something that I hoped wasn't a bug.

Then in Breeston there was the girl at the gas station doing a goofy dance to no music I could hear. She dressed somewhere between 1970's hippy funk and depression era rags, her ripped jeans hanging dangerously low, threatening to be shaken right off her ass at any moment. I was hypnotized by the movement, and considered offering her a ride. When I walked up to her, the dance intensified and her hair swirled around like she was either having a hell of a time or was on the border of a seizure. I kept walking.

I had seen this country through gas stations, hotel bars perched next to giant granaries, diners that served the same plate of eggs and burnt toast, played the same tinny country twang over the radio next to cash register, and general stores that doubled as liquor vendors in towns that had no reason to still exist. Like the dancing gas station girl I had a soundtrack, sometimes it came from my truck radio, but most times I carried the tunes around in my head. I never sang along. The guitar lines pulsed through my head as I passed through another empty town.

And then there was the chalk girl. That white skin glowed in my brain. Why did I know where I met the dancing hippie chick, but I couldn't place her? Maybe it was too recent – names and faces piled up in the corners of my brain like cords of wood, only with relative distance did one tumble out of the pile for closer inspection. Maybe this was why truckers look dazed at the stops. I had thought it was tiredness from the road. But maybe something started to happen when you saw so many places, so many people, and everything blurred together like the dotted line that became a stream of yellow piss underneath your tires – that still didn't explain the black outs. Who was she, why was she in the car with the beast?

A soundtrack of swamp rock pulsed in my mind. I was so lost in the dizziness of my own thoughts that I almost missed seeing the black sedan. I slowed down, u-turned and pulled into the parking lot. A weathered sign read Riverside Diner. I looked across about a hundred miles of bald prairie and didn't see even a hairline creek. It must have been a metaphor or a yearning hope.

As I walked past the sedan in the lot, my boots kicked up gravel that tinged against the gleaming hubcaps. My knees buckled and I dropped to the ground. What the fuck? I braced my hand against the driver's door and pressed into it – it was like touching dry ice. I tried to pull my hand back but it was stuck to the metal, burning and cold at the same time. I pulled hard and the flesh ripped. As I fell, the ground opened and swallowed me into the blackness.

*     *     *

I woke up staring into cup of coffee with a spiral thread of cream making its way to the edge.

"Are you well?"

Before I looked up, I'd already pictured the colour of her skin, those red lips, a shock of black hair slashed across her forehead.

"What's happening?"

"Are you still blacking out?" Her voice had a reverb to it–wet and bassy.

"I don't understand... why?" Sweat gathered in the crease of my forehead, my hands shook. "Last night... we talked and –"

"It's probably best you're not remembering a lot right now. It'll come back when it needs to."

I watched her lift the water glass and drain the contents in one long gulp. I expected to see a lipstick stain on the glass when she placed it back on the table but the glass shone spotless. An image flashed in front of me, a crisp blade splitting flesh, my flesh, a heavy shape pinning me against damp ground. And then her voice from across the table, not within the image, speaking to me.

"... time will not follow its usual path once you've slipped across. You're fighting to keep things linear. That is what your body is used to, one thing follows another, like your ABC's and your one, two, threes. But this isn't that. It's going to be disorienting for a while. Oh, and caffeine doesn't make it any better."

She slid a glass of water in front of me.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what's happening I--" I didn't even know what to ask.

"Just drink."

I sipped at the edge of the glass. The ice bumped against my lips and reminded me of my hand on the sedan door. Then, as I drank, I closed my eyes and saw the highway, the ditch, the brake lights of the sedan, the Dandy diner, the fan – I watched it all in slow reverse and it led me back to last night. We were in a dark room, wood and smoke, a bar I guess. There was the tall man with the broken nose, with the knife that cut across my arm, no... it was my leg, but then the flesh closed around the knife, and the blood disappeared into the wound. Then there was the wolf. It started to pull together – something about time, how they had found a way to get past it, through it, to dive into the stream like a series of rapids and ride along until you spilled out at a different point, a different place on the road. Except it wasn't an ordinary road. It was bent... in space and time.

"I saw you in Breeston." I said. "And before." A final tile slipped into place. "Time – you told me I could escape it if I wanted. Things didn't need to be this way."

"What way?" she asked.

"They don't need to follow," I said.

I felt my leg where the knife had gone in. The memory became crystal. His voice was in my head, guttural like he had a ton of phlegm that he needed to expel.

"You straddle the line, your body, your blood, needs to be in both places. That is why you need to be cut. That's what he said."

"Uh-huh. Drink some more water."

"Why the wolf?" I asked.

Chalk girl smiled. She asked the waitress for some more water, and could she have a bit more ice this time?

"It's falling into place for you. The wolf, as you call it, is needed to keep you here."

"Here? Place or time?" My head still spun.

"A bit of both." She twitched, her elbow jerked out in a brief muscle spasm. "I have to leave."

I stood and pain shot through my knee. I collapsed back into the booth. The waitress heard the noise and rushed over, almost spilling her tray of water.

"Are you okay?" She set down the tray, the ice made soft clinks against the glass. "Whoa, you should probably go see a doctor about that."

I followed her gaze to my left knee. It was stained deep red and glistened as fresh blood pumped from the cut. The diner went out of focus and I felt myself slide out of the booth and onto the floor. The waitress yelled something but I couldn't make it out.

I fell into another space.

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