An Aversion to Ladders 27c

Michael dropped the phone in the passenger seat and, being a little 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 road, although the crest of an embankment was observed in a breach. The cutaway had him maneuvering his Saturn around to direct his lamps into the opening. With the path illuminated, he trudged up the slope on foot. Calloused earth crumbled underneath his shoes, presumably from where train rails and ties had been pulled up. A dilapidated billboard pitched forward into the darkness to point the way over more weed-buckled asphalt; its peeling surface only hinted at direction:

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

Erosion had removed the mileage maker, but Michael guessed the park lay somewhere outside Stonesthrow. He returned to his car and carefully nudged it over the incline.

The motorist proceeded along this secondary road and hoped the sign was not leading him astray. Another unlit billboard ahead loomed on the passenger-side of the car. He slowed as he neared it, but his headlights turned up only another advertisement succumbed to weather and time. He was immediately on top of a third sign, and sensing it was in a similar state, aimed to speed by. His high beams stabbed at its grassy posts in passing and kicked up movement. Smashing his brakes, the car skidded to another stop. The startled driver glanced back, 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. More billboards were waiting 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 were sweeping across the signage. They were not pushing out from the highway with the light, but inward toward it. Suddenly one was lying across the road!

The driver again swerved to avoid crashing into a tree.

He got out of his car to find the exact same configuration of road sign, breach, and sprawled trunk. His headlights illuminated blacktop ablaze with broken glass beyond the roadblock, so he crawled over the obstacle in search of an explanation. Glittering shards stretched endlessly down the black highway in a twin sky of stars, although one light, higher off the road, sent him marching off over a grassy field. He kept checking his rear to see his car’s beams through a haze of seed heads, and promised himself he would walk no further than he could maintain visual contact with them. The terrain soon eclipsed the beacon, though the light ahead was too close to abandon. It burned from the window of a dark house. Seeking directions, he stepped up onto the porch and knocked; there was no answer. The moment was used to assess the state of the property; none of the bare windows had panes. A sudden drop-off greeted him on the other side of the cockeyed door. It was a jolt, but not as much of a jolt as finding dirt under his shoes. The floor of the house was missing. The light seen from outside was that of a candle emanating from a room somewhere on the premises. A few pieces of furniture were on hand in the faint gleam—all still aligned with the walls and miraculously upright. The house had been ripped off its foundation (perhaps by a tornado), but not even a chair had toppled. It was as if a magician had yanked a tablecloth out from underneath a table setting without a tinkle of silverware. Michael did a cautious scan of the front room and spotted a large framed photograph on the wall in front of him. It marked the beginning of a hallway, and pointed the way to a lit room. Stepping up to the picture, he was struck by its odd composition. A family sat under a shady tree with a picnic lunch. The mother had her back to the photographer, and the father was cut off from view by the mother. Only a happy little girl was facing the camera. Yet something surreptitious was at work in the picturesque scene—something not apparent on first pass. Was it to do with an inconsistency in the pattern on the blanket under the family? Or were there too many forks and knives? Or too few? Anxious, Michael’s gaze floated over the contents of the picnic basket uneasily until he at last narrowed in on a covered dish. Its metal top was reflecting tree limbs above the gathering—bare tree limbs that could not cast the leafy shade present on the ground.

Something unseen was throwing off the unassuming shadow...

A chair, barely within reach of the fluttering candlelight, ebbed in and out of a doorway across from the trespasser. It again leaned forward on its legs to dip into the illumination; a glimmer revealed two steely eyes. It was not a chair but a dog. Almost fainting, the man mirrored its movement. Growling was at his back before he fully realized he was running down the hallway toward the light source. Barking followed fast on his heels, and claws were promptly bearing down hard on the face of a door he took shelter behind. The ferocious mongrel grew stronger with each leap at the flimsy barrier. Low, fierce scratching became a pounding fist high at his head! Terrified, Michael braced the door, but knew the cell phone in his pocket was turned off. The dog abruptly gave up and tore away with telling speed; the intended prey threw his head around, seeing first a shriveled jack-o-lantern on a cobwebbed table, and then grasping the dog’s alternate plan:

No glass was in these windows, either.

He did a frantic turn around the room, enticing the candle flame into another dance. One undulating shadow between a wall and chest of drawers was deeper than the others. Wisely, he pulled the room door open before diving behind the heavy piece of furniture; the gash in the wall was wide enough for him to crawl in. No sooner had he wedged himself in the fissure than he heard a foot, unlike the footpad of a dog, stepped through a window. Michael held his breath on seeing his pursuer’s shadow emerge in a slit of light on a wall. The beast appeared to be staring at the door, as though contemplating whether his quarry had left the room or not. After a few wrenching seconds, it was clear the dog was not going to budge. The man was trapped, and very quickly the waiting became unbearable. The cell phone was fetched out of his pocket and clicked on.

“-- - ------ - - - ------ -- - -------- - -- - ----- - ---- -------”

Still, the shadow did not move.

Michael shifted his weight forward; bits of drywall tumbled down on his head; yet the predator showed no reaction to the noise. Pushing against the chest that blocked his view of the creature, he was slow grasping the unreality of its shadow in front of him. It more resembled a puppet than a living thing. Shaking, he peeked out from his concealment: A footboard post connected to a bed frame was the sole source of the apparition. Michael realized the dark, closed-in nature of the house put him at a disadvantage. He retraced his fearful steps back to the front of the house and the porch.

The dog was nowhere to be seen.

Desperate to escape, he shot back across the field. The high grass, lacerating his shins, slowed him, and the beast was soon heard cutting the same path. He glanced back only once—and only to see the dark dog-like man running upright in the thicket! Ahead, the Saturn’s high beams came into view, but he was late to appreciate that, in the growing glare, he was no longer being followed. He collapsed against the side of the car, noting with more consternation the tree was missing from the road. Looking down the glass-strewn highway, he knew it would be even more dangerous to confront his monster while behind the wheel, so gathered courage from his headlights to face the field.

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

“-- - -- - - - - ----- -- - -------- - - - - - - - - ---- - - - ---,” was the reply.

A snapping sound echoed out of the forest behind him, swinging him back around.

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 exact location of the disturbance. No lateral movement was detected against the tree line, even though the same could not be said about the darker limbs against the less-contrasted sky. He dropped into 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 shadow joined his on the stage. On grasping its only half-human form, he kicked up gravel to spin around; only straggling leaves twirled in his taillights. The shadow had ebbed away, yet did not entirely disappeared from the road. It shrank on the pavement like cooling tar, mimicking the shape of the tree that had lain there. Something more sinister was moving overhead in the tree limbs and barely caught in the light at all. At first he thought it was a joke, but the impossibility of it swiftly sank in…

It was the grinning head of an animal—now more horse than dog—suspended in midair...

The man’s cold skin flushed with a shot of blood. He shrank away from the incomprehensible sight. Then—and like sheared timber—a long spindly leg and hoofed foot curled down to the ground with an earthshaking thud; it was joined by another. The rest of the creature at last broke from the landscape to betray the full measure of 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 long, 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 then unleashed a bloodcurdling whinny and reared up even 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, was growing 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 unexpected momentum was enough to spin him heading to his 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 car, 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 already hurling by it when a knee banged hard against the rear passenger door. Glancing in the rearview mirror, nothing was seen emerging along the road to follow him, though the struck door was now bumping 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 shrinking in the taillights, and only then realized a draft from the loose door was kicking up ashes in the backseat and sucking them out through 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 rain down from 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 were wearing 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 as 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 around looking for the phone, but the static bounced around in the floorboard in an indeterminate way. Fear as much as frustration made him abandon his search in favor of a need to keep moving.

The road forward was as empty as before, and the feeble reach of his headlights gave him only the barest of heads-up. He was halving the remaining distance to his uncertain destination, and then halving the distance again, and again—it was as if 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 of him and dashed that hope. It floated as a little ghostly ball on the bleak patch of road, and was clearly hanging back in a scheme. Michael’s car sank into the asphalt, defecating. Yet the Cady’s distance remained fixed in a torturous taunt, and like a tombstone bobbing from the end of a stick. It occasionally weaved in the black current ahead, but then appeared to convulse before slowing even more. It all but stopped in the middle of the road, and for fleeting second appeared vaporous. But it was only a plume of smoke puffing out of its tailpipe. In a hiccup, the Cadillac tore away with another whine of tire, and what Michael had 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 and rumbling with the weight of a carcass! The force of the blow sent a blood-curdling tremor through the chassis of the small car—even ratting the contents inside the glove compartment. The horrified driver yelped and peered into the rearview mirror. The red-tinged dress was rolling away down the pavement and mimicking a trampled body. He continued to stomp the brakes, but they were useless. Another look back had the garment rising off the receding blacktop in a gust; it was still glowing brightly with the fire of his taillights. It stiffened again with human form and scrambled down a crossroad. The crest of a rising hill rose to cut off the view, leaving only the limbs of surrounding trees poking up like luminous capillary veins. The brakes were still not responding. And now the steering wheel was not working. 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 were scurrying across the terrain. It was the exact reverse of what it should have been. The whole landscape was like stage scenery being shuffled around 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.

PEEK-A-BOO PUTT-PUTT NEXT EXIT

The paralyzed man looked in the rearview mirror to see the barn darken to a speck. In the high corn behind it, the glowing dress-like apparition had become a single, wobbly globe. It was traveling in the same direction as his car, and 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 reflection 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 were smashed hard against the window, making the glass explode with hairline fissures. The body was exerting 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 up at the doorframe. He was babbling incoherently, crooking his head to take in a piercing eye wedged between the stub of an arm and a hip crest. The monster was staring in through the backseat window! The remainder of its form morphed into long spidery legs in the taillights, which were galloping to keep pace.

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 his face. One after another, hard, burning surfaces collapsed into a place too small and immediate for his body to follow.