Icarus Transfigured 27c

Michael dropped the phone in the passenger seat and, being more cognizant of his situation, opened the car door to survey exactly where he was. The side-glare of the headlights lit up a row of densely packed trees running parallel to the highway, although the crest of an embankment was observed in a breach. The cutaway put him maneuvering his Saturn to direct its lamps into the opening. With the terrain illuminated, he trudged up the slope on foot. Calloused earth crumbled underneath his shoes, presumably from where train rails and ties were pulled up. A dilapidated billboard pitched forward into the darkness to indicate a way over more weed-buckled asphalt; its peeling surface hinted at direction:

PE -A-B O P T- UTT -ND MOTEL

Erosion had removed the mileage marker, but Michael returned to his car and carefully nudged it over the incline. He proceeded along this secondary road and hoped the sign was not leading him astray. Another unlit billboard ahead loomed. The motorist slowed on nearing it, but his headlights turned up another advertisement succumbed to weather and time. He was immediately on top of a third sign, and, sensing it in a similar state, aimed past it. His high beams stabbed at the shoulder, kicking up movement; the car skidded to another stop. The startled man glanced behind him, but saw no animal break across the road. He peeked down at the cell phone to confirm it was still turned off and resumed his wary way. A fourth sign sprang up in short order; he accelerated by it in a dare. Other billboards waited down the straightaway—too many and too close together. He was determined at first to ignore them, but picked up on something counterintuitive about how the shadows of telephone poles swept across the signage. They were not pushing out from the highway with the light, but inward toward it. Suddenly one dropped across the road!

The driver again swerved to avoid crashing into a tree.

He got out of his car to find the same configuration of road sign, breach, and sprawled trunk. Incorrigibly curious headlights illuminated blacktop ablaze with broken glass beyond the latest roadblock. Glittering shards stretched endlessly down the black highway in a twin sky of stars. The unpromising abyss sent his attention more constructively to the embankment across from him. It was darker than before, as though a shadow watched him with unhurried purpose. He knew it would be dangerous to confront his pursuer while behind the wheel, so gathered courage to face the breach.

“Who are you?” he cried into the phone. “What do you want?”

A snapping sound echoed in both the earpiece and the branches in front of him. “-- - -- - - - - ----- -- - -------- - - - - - - - - ---- - - - ---”

The trees along the roadside were so closely stitched together he could do little more than scan up one cracking trunk and down another to pinpoint the precise location of the disturbance. No lateral movement was detected against the tree line, though the same could not be said about the darker limbs against the less-contrasted sky. He dropped into the idling car, shifted it into reverse, and turned his high beams into the trees. Climbing back out, he stepped into the glare. His address was now directed at whatever was lurking in the woods.

“Show yourself!”

His shadow, with outstretched arms, was etched into the scenery in a crisscross of light and dark hatches. It seemed quite natural when another shadowy figure joined his on the stage. On grasping its only half-human form, he kicked up gravel spinning on his heels; only straggling leaves twirled in his taillights. The shadow slithered away, but something more sinister moved overhead in the trees—barely caught in the light at all. At first he thought it was a joke, but the impossibility of it swiftly sank in.

The grinning head of a horse was suspended in midair.

The man’s cold skin flushed with a shot of blood. He shrank from the incomprehensible sight. Then, like sheared timber, a spindly leg and hoofed foot curled down to the ground with an earthshaking thud; it was joined by another. The rest of the creature broke from the landscape to betray its staggering height. It looked spidery among the mostly naked trees, yet had otherwise been perfectly camouflaged. With the deceptive delicateness of a walking stick insect, it navigated the popping branches, articulating its joints in a spellbinding, marionette way. The beast seized on the man’s paralysis to begin flashing, stroboscopically, in and out of its fractured shadow. The luminous bursts dropped down in a shredded curtain, making the creature appear to move slower than it really was. A high-pitched, disembodied screech, reminiscent of rustling cicadas, accompanied the light show, and its oscillating drone produced a similar time-dragging effect. The theatrics were intended to be disorienting, with light and sound bracketing a rapid physical transformation.

The monster’s morphing snout lengthened to brandish a mouth full of sickle-shaped, crimson teeth, while its expanding eyes, sallow in color, billowed as fiery bed sheets. It unleashed a bloodcurdling whinny and reared higher to graze the dark canopy that crowned its head. Sparse hairs stiffened and retracted, exposing a semi-transparent mantis abdomen that fluoresced and swirled like glassy agate. Shades of emerald, lavender, and deep saffron squirmed amid glowing layers of milky white lace. The monster’s display resembled a cuttlefish putting on dazzling war paints to hypnotize prey, so much so Michael was affected, even enthralled. It appeared ready to pounce, yet continued to change. The patterns in its belly congealed to take on the form of human organs, including a beating heart. The skin, too, grew increasingly opaque; breast-like nodules sprouted.

The fading man’s feet plumbed to find solid ground—blood was likely dust in his veins. He tripped over leaves clawing at his ankles, and the momentum was enough to spin him heading to the car. A glance through the door glass turned up nothing against the moribund backdrop, although the shrill sound of the beast continued to carry through the woods in a whirling chorus. It revved up only to die away down a rabbit hole. The thing—whatever it had become—was once again hidden among the trees.

The driver dove into his front seat, dropping the cell phone on the console; it tumbled over the side to disappear in the dark floorboard; static continued to drizzle out of it. With no time to locate it, the Saturn propelled off the scant shoulder. Michael shot up the embankment and sped away over flying gravel, exhaling only when his tires found blacktop and the line of the dark road. Static flittered in the whizzing-by telephone lines overhead. One pole bowed like a leg joint. He was hurling by it when a knee banged hard against the rear passenger door. Glancing in the rearview mirror, nothing emerged along the road to follow him, though the struck door now bumped on its hinge. The cursed highway threw up another sign. This one was bright and legible:

PEEK-A-BOO PUTT-PUTT HALF MILE

He looked over his shoulder to see the signage shrink in the taillights, and realized a draft from the loose door was kicking up ashes in the backseat and sucking them out the gap. Unable to account for his panic, he pulled off the road to arrest the hemorrhage. The suitcase had unclasped in the backseat and shifted forward into the floorboard. Cinders were hurriedly scooped into the urn, but it was taking too long. The motorist looked up on hearing the squeal of swerving tires; the ungodly scream seemed to crawl down the trees. He saw nothing until the Cadillac ambulance blindsided him with a flash of red light and a wail of ear-puncturing siren. The lit interior flushed out its passengers—all wore ghoulish masks. Blood was smeared on the inside of the back windows, though more like scratched into it with a fistful of pubic hair. A copulating couple blurred on a stretcher under this veiny membrane before the lights—all the lights—blinked out in the distance. The shrouded vehicle peeled away with marked acceleration, and Michael, wrenched to his spine, returned trembling to the driver’s seat. He poked about in the floorboard for the phone, but the nature of the static made the location of its source indeterminable. Fear as much as frustration forced him to abandon his search in favor of a need to keep moving.

The road forward was empty, and the timid reach of his headlights gave him the barest of heads-up. He halved the remaining distance to his uncertain destination, and then halved the distance again, and again; Zeno’s Paradox had grown legs to pace his car. Still, the fearful man kept to his torpid pace in anticipation of more signs, and in hope of making his car as un-tempting a target as possible. The whittled down shape of the ambulance soon emerged ahead and dashed this hope. It floated as a little ghostly ball on the bleak patch of road, clearly hanging back in a scheme. Michael’s car sank into the asphalt, defecating. Yet the Cady’s distance stayed fixed in a torturous taunt, and like a tombstone bobbing from the end of a stick. It occasionally weaved in the black current, but then convulsed before slowing more. It all but stopped in the middle of the road, and for a fleeting second appeared vaporous; but it was only a plume of smoke puffing out its tailpipe. In a hiccup, the Cadillac tore away with another whine of tire, and what Michael thought was a cloud of exhaust was actually a dress—a wedding dress—blowing down the road to meet him. Just as his headlights caught the full whiteness of it, it took on the contours of a female body crouching in his lane! The mumbling man jammed the brakes, but the gown was already under the front tires. The force of the blow sent a blood-curdling tremor through the car’s chassis, and when the driver dared to peek in the rearview mirror, the red-tinged dress was seen rolling down the pavement like a trampled body. It did not dim on the receding blacktop, but continued to glow brightly in the fire of his taillights. Finally rising in a gust, it stiffened once more with human form before scrambling down a crossroad. The crest of a hill rose to cut off the view, leaving the limbs of surrounding trees poking up like luminous capillary veins. The brakes were still not responding. And now the steering wheel did not work. The expanse beyond the dark shoulders was alive with a menacing choreography. Trees in the foreground appeared motionless, moving in lockstep with the car, while trees further away scurried across the terrain. It was the exact reverse of what it should be. The whole landscape resembled stage scenery being shuffled by stagehands instructed to confound. A dilapidated red barn popped out of the shadows with a splatter of bug guts on the windshield; it shrank away with dripping whitewashed words on its roof.

PEEK-A-BOO PUTT-PUTT NEXT EXIT

The paralyzed man braved the rearview mirror again, seeing the barn darken to a speck. In the high corn behind it, the glowing dress-like apparition had become a wobbly globe, travelling in the same direction as his car, only on a road that paralleled his. . It was quickly dead even with his Saturn and mirroring its every fluctuation in speed. Still, its presence on the sparsely wooded landscape felt more like a candle flame reflected on the car window than an object in space. Michael stared forward on the empty highway in a desperate attempt to ignore it, but sensed the form was getting closer, as if the two highways were about to merge. Then, with absolute clarity, he realized—whatever it was—it was flying like a plane directly toward him!

He jumped away from the door. “Jesus Christ! Save me!”

The headless, limbless torso of a woman crashed into the side of the car with a bone-shattering smack. White buttocks smashed hard against the window, making the glass explode with hairline fissures. The body exerted a tremendous force on the shimmying vehicle. Horrified, Michael watched the fold at the ass widen. Warm, fogging breath escaped the gap to reveal wet teeth. Blood trailed away over blackened gums to pool at the doorframe. He babbled incoherently, craning his head to take in a piercing eye wedged between the stub of an arm and a hip crest.

The monster stared in through the backseat window! The remainder of its form morphed into long spidery legs in the taillights, which galloped to keep up.

Someone was abruptly at Michael’s side in the passenger seat…

T H U M P!
T H U M P!

The car veered into the surreal scenery; time scraped off like quarks in the blackness. Thoughts—barely his own—flattened against the sides of his face. One after another, hard, burning surfaces collapsed into a place too small and immediate for his body to follow.

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