The Nightmare Trip

By Micah Christopher

Cyrus Schwartz is reeling from the loss of his longtime girlfriend, Angelica, after she was killed in a horrendous car accident. One year after her death, Cyrus awakens to discover he can hear her voice calling to him, beckoning him to go out and find her...and soon decides to follow every word. It would be a decision that would forever alter his life, and the entire world.

Was this his beloved Angelica returned to him after all this time, or something more sinister? Was this voice what it claimed to be? Or was he simply hallucinating, having driven himself mad during his dark year of self-isolation and abuse of illicit substances?

Following the voice in his head, Cyrus embarks on a road trip--a trip of unknown length or destination--in order to be reunited...a trip with many pit stops and infinite dangers along the way.

A nightmare trip.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886544435

Book preview

cover.jpg

The Nightmare Trip

Micah Christopher

Copyright © 2022 Micah Christopher

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 979-8-88654-442-8 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-443-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Part 1

The Beginning-and the End-of All Things

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part 2

The Outside World

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part 3

Meanwhile, on the Flip Side…

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Part 4

The Price of Admission

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

As the mortal recalled a precious memory from his sad little life, the ringleader sat in his private quarters in the back section of his grand circus tent, drawing the memories in through the barrier that still separated the two of them, pulling the images and sensations across the circus grounds, past all its attendees and into the tent, over the stage that was the ringleader's throne inside his kingdom, and into the corner of the circus where only he and his assistant were allowed to set foot in. It was in this dark corner where the ringleader could distort the memories for his own needs, utilizing the same irreligious practices he had harnessed in order to build this circus, to move it this place or that as necessary and to keep its grounds and occupants in the order he saw fit.

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part 5

Reminiscing on the Shores of Purgatory

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Part 6

Souls for Currency (One Night's Stay)

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Cyrus awoke to what felt like the worst hangover of his life (and he had had many—in varying degrees, as not all are created equal). His head pounded from dehydrated abuse. His eyes were bloodshot and stung from the dry heat. Sweat covered him like a case of influenza hell; it streamed down his bare chest and midsection, moving into the waistline of his jeans, pooling up there until the elastic band of his boxers were sickened with it.

Part 7

Fear Is a Place to Live

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Epilogue

About the Author

Dedicated to everyone we have lost, or ever will lose, to th is thing we call life. Sur ely their souls do live on.

And to my family, for being a continuing source of encouragement and inspiration.

Part 1

The Beginning-and the End-of All Things

Chapter 1

Home was so far away: That was what Cyrus kept telling himself—and in many ways, he was right.

Home was so far away.

Sure, he was still twenty minutes from his little hometown (and his tiny cabin within that little town), but that wasn't it because, for Cyrus, home wasn't a resting place, or a pit stop destination, but a person.

A girl. Hell, why try to sugarcoat it—the girl. His girl. The one and only. The one with perfectly smooth skin, skin she knew how to use to her every advantage, rendering him powerless to her influences. The girl with irises of the deepest and most royal emeralds (which, in his mind, put all the world's most precious jewels to shame) and those wide, moist eyes in which the emeralds were placed. My god, those eyes. Don't you know she knew just when and how to flash them up at him, making him feel powerful as he submitted to her control, solidifying his place as hers and hers alone.

And while she may have developed into a young woman at the time of her death, to Cyrus, she would always be that little girl who took the initiative to speak to him all those lovely, and now heckling, years ago. For that was the first moment she took her delicate hold. Somehow, even after a decade of living together, she always made him feel like that nervous, love-stricken boy from yesteryear, that part of his being that would never die. The part of him that had fallen for that little girl with the rebellious streak while trespassing on the roof of their high school.

But that was okay…back then. In that past life. For in those times, he didn't need control. He had her—and everything else was just toneless whistles and white noise in the background of his mind. And things were fine that way. Hell, from what Cyrus could recall, he had been downright happy.

Happy, he now thought mindlessly, numb to all of life's intricate beauties. He teetered on the brink of joyless laughter. Sitting on the edge of calamitous cynicism, all he could ask himself was, "What the fuck is that?"

And now…now that she was gone, Cyrus had been left behind, left here, left with nothing. Everything he was or ever could have been, buried along with her.

Her name was Angelica, but to him she was just Angel.

His Angel.

It had been a year now, exactly one year to the night. A whole year without her, he heard from the darkest corners of his mind. The thought sounded remarkably like his own voice, though he knew what was really speaking: it was the demon on his shoulder. You know the one: that tiny pesky devil that whispers to you of all your worst fears, deepest regrets, every fault and shortcoming that ever stifled humankind, using them to strengthen the power of evil over all us mortals. Cyrus couldn't have been certain whether or not the demon had always been there, perched on his shoulder. All he knew was it hadn't spoken up and made itself known until after Angelica's death. And now after a year spent listening and obeying, Cyrus felt as if the demon had its hands on all his levers and pulleys, controlling him, using him for its own will in order to create more sin, more sicknesses, in order to bring about his end in a timely fashion. Sometimes Cyrus thought he wanted that too.

His grip tightened on the steering wheel, turning the pale skin of his knuckles to a transparent shade of pink like the meat of a flayed salmon when exposed to the moonlight flooding his windshield. The bony peaks of his knuckles were all but visible underneath—even through a layer of oil and grit on his hands, residual soilage from his day at the auto-repair shop. Calloused patches of his palms scraped against the rubber cover over the steering wheel (which itself resembled the tread of a tire, helping his fingers keep a grip when certain hostile maneuvers became necessary or unavoidable). In the silent cab of his forward-plummeting shell, the sound of his dry, rigid skin rubbing against the steering-wheel cover was remarkably loud, as if he were no longer human but something reptilian, something covered in scales or made of stone. His nails—having been neglected for some time now—dug their uneven and yellowing edges into the back of the wheel and stick shift as he ran through his cycles: clutch and shift, clutch and shift, heartache and bitterness, clutch, shift; driving a straight line down a bleak and lonely road; searching for a finish line but unsure what he would do if he reached it.

It had been quite a year. He could feel it in his aching bones—his entire skeleton, in fact the complete framework of his physical body. Mourning had wrapped itself around him like a weighted veil, tugging at him and dragging him down every waking moment, making everything he tried to do these past twelve months that much harder and more painful. And there was plenty of mourning and grief to go around, which made the veil feel as if it got a little heavier with each passing day. So everything he did, all the things that made up the rat race of life, the back-and-forth, work, home, work, home, had been rendered pointless—now that he didn't have…her. Pointless, torturous, agonizing. After all, why should you bust your ass with the day-in, day-out if you didn't have that special someone to go home to? (There's that word again—home.) And instead of walking into their open arms, you are greeted by the cold and lonely air of a meaningless structure: just a pile of wooden bones topped with a roof full of broken shingles that had been long since overtaken by moss as if it were an airborne illness.

Each day that Cyrus forced himself to live on, to continue on without his Angel, he found himself feeling like giving up a little more than the day previous. Perhaps he had already given up, falling away from whatever plan the universe had been unfolding for him, opting out of the whole operation the very moment he watched her coffin lowered into the frozen ground of the cemetery.

Mornings were the hardest—having to get ready for another day spent without her, knowing it would inevitably end like all the others: in heartache, unrest, and a wretched unease about living in such a filthy place any longer. Days felt like nothing more than sin, these days without his Angel, and they each left a tiny stain on his mind, polluting it slowly and surely, adding on to all the other pollutants that were his vices, and gradually turning his skull into little more than a bowl for the swamp soup his brain had become. Bitter and boggy within the weaving of its deepest fibers.

His body was on the verge of shutting down—even in his sludgy mind, he knew this to be true—and was soon to fail completely, forcing his hands from the wheel and allowing his car to careen in any direction it pleased. Unless he allowed his body to rest, that is, and soon: to sleep the sleep of the dead—to go down and stay down for a long, long time.

Rest, he thought as if it were a holy word. He supposed it was. He was so very tired. Tired of it all because of it all. A true limbo for all those broken hearts that ever have existed or ever will exist as time goes by.

This rest, for a weary soul such as Cyrus, would require what we (for our own sakes) will call the Ritual. Once completed, this Ritual would send him free-falling into a pit of nothingness, a bottomless well placed in the center of the swamp in his mind, a place where only dark exists and the shadows fly manically around your mind's eye in tight little circles, stripping away your worries one piece at a time like a series of hasty and ill-conceived lobotomies. And tonight—as with every night he performed the Ritual—the increased weight of the veil draped over his face and weighing down on his head would cause Cyrus to sink further into that pit than ever before, deeper into himself, the sleeper and dreamer of a thousand welcomed deaths.

At this thought, the demon on his shoulder perked up. It began whispering hushed words of hate and sorrow into his ear. It reminded him of the reasoning and necessity to perform the Ritual, as if he had forgotten. The skin of his lobe burned as the demon clung to it with its nailed fingers, holding on for balance as Cyrus sliced down the deserted road.

Soon, he told the demon. I'll give you what you want. Soon. He kept the car at a respectable (albeit, illegal) speed as he raced toward that rest, that all-important Ritual. With each flick of his foot upon the pedals, the baggie shoved into his sock chafed the inner skin of his right ankle, turning it raw one tiny movement at a time. Very soon, he told the demon on his shoulder, trying to appease it and quiet its wretched whispering. Then as he fidgeted in his seat, attempting to shake the demon away from his ear, the sharp points at the top of his belt buckle dug into his lower abdomen, scraping into the utmost layers of skin and callusing the faint scars already there.

Cyrus drove down County Road 6, his headlights cutting into the darkness. He peered through the low yellow light produced by their lenses with his own faded eyes. Trees zipped by his windows headed for his rear view, their bare limbs and arthritic joints standing out as harshly outlined spider veins against the delicately balanced black-and-blue haze of the nighttime sky, their few remaining leaves shriveled and curled in on themselves like dead insects stuck to the bark, teetering on their frail stems, threatening to detach and plummet to the ground at the slightest breath of wind. He watched the moonlight, bright and opened wide to the land below it, as it peeked through the passing branches, spotting him in a spectral laser light show as he drove through. This dotted display illuminated the dingy exterior of his car and highlighted the dust kicked up from his tires—dust swirling around and lingering inside the current of vortex air building at his rear bumper. The moon reflected off the swirling specks of road grit, twinkling off some of the more responsive dust particles within the cloud. From his side mirrors, this phenomenon looked more like a phantom mist lingering above the road. A phantom trailing right behind, close enough to reach out and take hold of his trunk. He checked from one side to the other repeatedly, keeping a close eye at the continually shifting shape.

Then he brought his face up to the rear view and watched this moonlit phenomena following behind; seeing it so close yet unable to close that small gap and seize him in his spot made Cyrus think of an old folktale his father used to tell him. Cyrus always loved hearing it because, as his dad explained it, Cyrus's maternal grandmother used to tell his father the story when his father was just a small boy in Germany. Hearing the outlandish tale always made Cyrus feel connected to his grandmother (whom he'd never been able to meet) and to where the Schwartz family had originated. Of course, those were happier times too—before his grandmother died of liver disease, leaving his father to migrate to America alone, heartbroken and unsure of what life would hold, hanging on to a promise he had made her, a promise to make something better for himself in America, something better than the impoverished life they endured in their village.

He tried not to think of all that negative (he was all filled up with that shit already) and to instead concentrate on the whimsical little tale dancing around his head:

Run, run, as fast as you can, he recited, eyeing the phantom cloud on his tail.

You can't catch me…

But before he could finish, thoughts about his sorry, unsubstantiated existence crept in. He hung onto the last line, making it stay behind, and replaced the end as he saw appropriate.

I'm the Living-Dead Man.

Perhaps it was the demon speaking these words into his mind, perhaps it was his own warped sense of self, but it felt right nonetheless. Cyrus shifted and watched the odometer climb. The phantom mist grew, spreading out across the road. As it chased Cyrus, its reach extended to the trees lining his side of the road and ripped off their ragged leaves by its sheer turbulent force. And the world fell apart a little bit more the longer Cyrus was in it.

Beyond the trees on either side of the road sat mainly farmlands. Already stripped of the year's bounty, the nubby remains of their stalks stood out in the expanse of fields like rows upon rows of loyal little soldiers standing guard under the moonlight as a thick ground fog rolled by and weaved through the rows. Each row whipped by him as fast as his Angel's death: here one second, gone and out of sight the next, before you could even know to stomp on the brakes or turn a different direction.

If only he'd known not to take that particular road that night. If only he could have known that kid wouldn't obey his stop sign at the intersection. Had he known, then Cyrus wouldn't have taken advantage of the break in traffic. He wouldn't have turned where he had, taking the shortcut down Rambleside Avenue. Instead, he would have traveled just a bit farther and merged onto Main, where they had been heading anyway. They were on their way to the last stop in Angelica's birthday outing. It was a little clothes shop Angelica had been wanting to visit since it had opened a month earlier. Angelica was anxious to see what kind of selection they offered, but Cyrus's mind was hellishly stuck on something else, for once they arrived at the store, wrapping up their night out, Cyrus was prepared to ask her a question, the question of all questions, the one he had been practicing in his head for a month or more. Had he not taken that byroad, then that oblivious kid would have probably just flew across both lanes of empty asphalt, dropped down the ravine on the other side of the intersection, and plummeted headfirst into the trunk of a waiting telephone pole. Cyrus didn't wish death on anybody, especially someone so young, but if it was going to happen anyway, at least it could have happened without him and Angelica caught in its path. If only he had taken a different route, none of this would have happened, and both of them would have sailed safely off into the rest of their night, his Angel in the seat beside him, giggling, singing to the radio, and dancing (as much as she could in his cramped car and beneath the constrictive hold of the four-point safety harnesses he installed into the front seats, but I'll be damned if she didn't always find a way). She could have continued to be perfect as she was.

If only he could go back, he would do things differently and never take her or the life they shared for granted—not for a single day, a single moment, for the remainder of his life.

Yeah…if only…

But he couldn't go back, and thinking he could did nothing but empower his sense of hopelessness and make him feel like giving up—giving in to the universe that no longer wanted him, and jonesed for his death anyway.

We were just driving, he pleaded to no one in particular, hoping someone might hear (even though he knew better) and take pity on his poor, pitiful self.

The crash ran across his battered mind, showing itself in short segments smash-cut together between the blanks in his subconscious, showing grainy through his scarred memory like an old, poorly kept VHS tape.

Incoming headlights—moving fast…far too fast and much too close.

A sudden impact, his reminiscing continued, demanding to be seen and heard and, most importantly, felt.

Jackknifed. Hit dead-center in the passenger-side door. Cyrus could hear the demon on his shoulder laughing at that one—Dead-center! Ha!—and got an eerie intuition that the demon was the one actually causing the memory, not him. He pictured his demon sitting there beside the image projector in his mind, its clawed hand on the crank, spinning it round and round and laughing its ass off as the death scene came into view shone against the pearly white wall that was the interior of his skull.

The way she flew…or at least tried to. Cyrus had the unfortunate chance to see the top half of Angelica's body being flung sideways by the force of the impact, the harness holding her back, compressing her chest as it tried to fly away, just as the harness had when she would dance, scooting her plump little ass this-way-and-that over her seat in her merriment, and moving against the heavy-duty straps. Her window exploded, showering her in a cloud of glass shards, the headlights of the '39 Mercury Model 8 the kid was driving making them sparkle like weightless diamonds orbiting her face and trapped inside her flipping nest of hair.

Through his fractured memory, he could still hear those terrible crunching noises. And each time he dared to look back on that night (which was every day, without fail), it would become ever more apparent what that crunching was: the crimping metal of the door, her leg being pinned and smashed on the other side of it, and—if he were being honest with himself—her neck, overburdened with whiplash and forfeiting its hold. Her body had jerked toward him, flailing until caught by her belt, prohibiting it from moving any further in the direction it wanted to go. The sudden stop in momentum caused her limp, lifeless arms to swing wide, pinwheeling above her head and scraping against the thin cloth lining his car's ceiling, then toward him. As if reaching for him in her final moment alive and her first moment dead, simultaneously. Her hands were tense and seized like dead spiders curled up on a cold floor, each finger bent uncomfortably inward around her palm. At the end of each spider leg were her fingernails. They were painted immaculately earlier in the evening as Angelica prepared for their night out. She had done them in the galaxy-black nail polish she loved so much. Multicolored sparkles inside the black paint glittered into Cyrus's eyes with help from the headlights of the colliding car. Each nail was like its own constellation. And for a brief moment (the briefest, in fact, although that wouldn't lessen its impact on his heart and mind), Cyrus could see the whole universe.

And then nothing. Life went black. For as quickly as the car had collided with them, it had forced them off the road, over the shoulder, down the incline of a grassy ravine and into the path of a waiting telephone pole. They smacked into it with their driver-side door, crumpling the metal. Cyrus's head succumbed to whiplash and smashed into the door window, smashing through the glass and colliding unencumbered with the wooden pole. Utility lines leading to adjacent poles momentarily loosened, appearing to leap into the air as Cyrus and Angelica came to their violent stop. Then as the pole splintered and crooked forward—drawing its streetlight closer to the roof of the Mustang, shining a light on the scene—the utility lines were pulled tight and were close to being snapped by the tension.

That goddamn kid, he heard himself sob from somewhere deep, wherever it was the demon went to fan his flames and fuel the garbage fire that was his debilitating and hateful despair. He took everything from me!

He ran his scaly hands over the wheel, producing more of that raw reptilian rubbing. He dug his nails in further, ground his teeth together with a side-to-side motion of his lower jaw. His pale skin flushed with rage, but he tried to subdue it. It wasn't the kid's fault…or his own, no matter how much he wanted to believe one or both options in front of him at times. After all, it was not like the kid meant to do it—the official report noted that he wasn't even strapped in and likely died on impact since the vintage car the kid drove had never been equipped with airbags. No—if anyone could be blamed, it was the universe. That old fickle bitch. And while that explanation may have let him off the hook in some regard, it didn't help him much, for it still left a burning and unanswerable question: how could one person defy the universe, control it, and make it correct the mistakes it had made. How could any one person go against the fabric of all meaning and existence and make the world bend to their will? He would have better luck trying to revive his Angel with lightning rods or something, and that shit only worked in the movies.

Cyrus forced his concentration to the road ahead, trying to shake off the picture show and the increasing stench of death that came with it, though he had never been able to, for he had found this stench came from within himself, touching everything he came in close contact to. And by now, after prolonged exposure, this rotting stench had seeped into the interior of the car. Deep into the fibers of the seat cushions and spread across the dash and steering wheel and stick shift. And that was something that could never be washed out (not that he had tried to wash it out; he just knew). He navigated through the darkness, his vision spotted with the lasting effect of those tiny constellations of Angelica's that were burned into his eyes all that time ago, smelling the death emanating from himself through small, ingrate breaths.

There were no turnoffs or turnarounds along this lonely stretch of road, for the back lot of each property met with the edges of the curb shoulders, the far-reaching ends of large farmlands comprising every square inch of land in Cyrus's view. It was as if the land itself were ashamed or afraid of what could happen on such a desolate road and had to face another direction in order to hide its own disgust. No houses were visible from this route either, no illuminated windows in the distant dark to guide his way, no trails of smoke rising out of chimneys to remind him of what warmth once felt like—only field after ravaged field, full of decapitated stalk or giant rolls of hay lolling around inside the expanse like slumbering beasts.

This section of County Road 6 had been dubbed No Man's Land, and for reasons that reasserted themselves every time he commuted through. It ran from the big city of Norton Heights and traveled east, toward his small town of Orchid, about twenty minutes away—and while it existed between the two municipalities, it seemed to belong to neither. There was clear signage indicating the borders of both Norton Heights and Orchid along the curbside of County Road 6 but had none signifying itself. Over the generations, a simple unincorporated area became the thing of local folklore, with many tales of murders, kidnapping, and mass disposal of victim's bodies along the route. These stories were all unsubstantiated, of course, and as far as Cyrus knew, none of them had evidence to back them up—evidence compelling enough that it could have sparked a police investigation—but that didn't stop him from thinking about them as he speared ahead through the darkness. The most common story said the operator of a semitruck liked to either pick up hitchhikers from this place, then proceed to do untold things to them for a prolonged period of time—or the truck driver used this deserted area to bury and dispose of bodies of victims he had picked up elsewhere (no one was really sure which, though they were sure it actually happened when you asked them). There were many similar stories involving arguments over neighboring farmers that would end bloody and subsequently get covered up, hidden beneath the dirt. And so many others he'd heard over the years, it would make your head spin and make Cyrus sound like a madman in love with conspiracies if he were to recite them all. But the fact remain that—in certain circles—the general consensus is that over the generations, these fields had been used for so many unmarked graves that at night, if one were brave enough to parade through the fields alone and on foot, the person could see the spirits of all these murdered souls rising from the ground to wander aimlessly around the never-ending acreage. His hair stood on end, as if static electricity were running across the tops of his forearms. He glanced quickly to the land beyond his passenger window but saw no ghosts. Only harvested fields.

There were no streetlights along the road. Cyrus hadn't been graced with one since leaving the noisy, hectic roads of Norton Heights. He wouldn't see another patch of lit asphalt for several more miles, when he crossed over into Orchid. He hunched forward in his seat, bringing his tensed forehead to the windshield, his chin shifting back and forth and grinding his teeth above the steering wheel. His headlights continued to barely hold up their responsibility of showing him the way.

He squinted and scowled into the darkness, silently cursing it like the enemy it was. This world had taken her from him, and for that it could never be forgiven, and Cyrus could no longer be a part of it. He had done just about everything to reaffirm that these past twelve months, to the point where he no longer recognized himself. But that was all right—hell, it was what he wanted. Cyrus wasn't the same, never would be the same, not without her. If a Cyrus had to live in this Angel-less world, it wouldn't be her Cyrus; it would be someone else, someone who knew nothing of love and ran off a constant diet of pain and misery.

Cyrus dwelled on what once was, and the baggie began to burn a bit more from its hideaway in his sock. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and the belt buckle jabbed into his guts, prodding with the two points protruding from the top of it.

He could see her smile: her tiny, perfect teeth, overbitten and gleaming behind her outstretched and glittery lips. He could taste her candy apple lip gloss as it transferred to his mouth and his tongue, could feel her lips on the side of his neck, spreading the goose bumps on his forearms to the skin of his neck, then down his back, then her teeth (my god, those teeth) as they took hold, sank in, latching onto the side of his neck like a heavenly leech, compressing the veins and tendons, and gently suckling at his skin. He vividly remembered taking his own turn at the unspeakable act; licking the sides of her neck in long, thin trails; kissing the saliva to make her shiver in pleasure the instant before he dug softly into her tanned flesh. Through all the muck in his brain, he still remembered—vaguely, but remembered nonetheless—just how her skin tasted and how invigorating it was to sample the forbidden nectar that lay underneath, how it jutted out of her and flowed over his teeth, and how it coated his tongue, his gums, and lovingly lined the inner walls of his cheeks. A blood oath, never to be broken. An oath to be renewed again and again, whenever the mood struck.

Cyrus ran his tongue over his teeth and along his cheeks, only to find how unnaturally dry his mouth was. Without the blood of his Angel, he found his soul quenched, shriveled, and cracked. And no matter how many vices he had picked up in his year of mourning, they all paled in comparison to her. Plus he was unaware that his jaw was slack and that his mouth had been hanging slightly open (as it did when he was in deep thought), which did not help with his dry mouth.

And his heart—that bundle of dead muscle in his chest that, since she had been taken away, was good for nothing—sank a bit more, falling further into the pit in which it had already been placed, that endless well in the center of his mind's swamp.

Somewhere inside, he could still smell the cotton candy perfume she was partial to wearing on date nights or whenever she was feeling particularly rambunctious. Oh, how it made his heart stop in place, the very smell. Upon arriving home after a long day at work, sometimes he would open the door to their cabin, only to be overwhelmed by the lively, cheap scent as it flooded around him like the siren's song luring sailors into the depths. The shock set upon him in those instances was so real his heart felt as if it was stopping for her. But it wasn't dead, far from it, merely catching its breath in preparation of what was about to come, readying itself for the exhilarating highs it was about to reach as it soared into the heavens trapped in their bedroom ceiling.

His hands became clammy over the wheel and shifter knob as he thought about running his palms over her hips, her thighs, cupping her face and delicate chin in his hands—the ways she touched him—how her legs felt when pressed into his sides…the things she used to say… She empowered him like nothing else in this world.

And just like that, the veil became a bit heavier, bearing down on him a bit more than the previous night, and the night before that. Cyrus could envision the demon on his shoulder knitting, looping string together with its claws and adding more length and more weight to the veil. Love truly was hell.

Autumn leaves littered the road and clogged the ditches along the curb, their once-vibrant reds and yellows and oranges now dull and full of brown decay, their bodies cracked and crumbling and moist with nighttime frost. They leaped from the road as Cyrus drove through, swooped up by the air current expanding around his car, their frozen bodies swirling in the air and sticking to the car, clinging to its body and spotting its sheen to show against the moonlit blacks and reds of the car's body like chicken pox. Those to leap first had the misfortune of getting gobbled up by the grill guard attached to his bumper before they could get too far.

The days had grown colder—oh, so cold. Had been for a while now. A string of unrelenting chills tied together by time, time, and more time. And even though, technically, the Ohio days were becoming shorter and shorter this time of year, they seemed to drag on forever. The only thing that seemed to change as the season went on was the ratio of day to dusk; some days the sun just couldn't wait to go back to sleep, and Cyrus could share in that sentiment. That left the night to stay a bit longer all the time, to shower him in darkness and expose him to all its frightful delights.

This autumn had been one of the worst he'd ever seen, and he'd seen many. In his mind (from his muddied recollection), it had come much earlier than in years prior—hit harder too, and all at once, skipping the days of alternating warm-then-chilled wind currents rolling over the land beneath thinly pressed, nomadic clouds, and moving right into days of ongoing lake effect winds topped with a graying-blue sky that bled from one day to the next, letting in little to no sun, and changing none. He left his cabin one day to see the leaves had started to change, and the next they were gone, laid around the base of the trees like tiny worshippers sprawled out at the feet of their god and exposing his quaint little property to the prying eyes of the bustling traffic from the road below his front yard. A chill set into the earth effortlessly on this, the unholiest year of all. It had been a harsh transition from one season to this, leaving all within its wake shocked and shivering and running for dry land. Cyrus wondered what kind of nuclear winter they were all in for.

It was now two days until Halloween, in this, the year of our Lord, 2017.

Halloween. Jesus Christ, that was always her favorite.

He supposed over the last decade, it had become his favorite holiday too.

The loneliness piled up on him. His grief—sitting in the windowless place that was his mind, where no one would know its acquaintance but him—sharpened its fangs and claws as they grew, preparing to continue the assault on his tortured spirit. He couldn't remember last Halloween, for he had been in and out of a morphine drip-induced coma for almost a week after the accident, his neck in a brace, his head heavily bandaged, his left eye covered with a thick gauze (which, upon first waking, made him sure he had lost the damn thing to the trauma of the accident), not being able—or willing—to move, having no choice but to watch basic cable from the hospital's outdated TVs or sleep. He chose to sleep: after all, doesn't sleep go hand in hand with depression?

He raised a hand to his left eye and ran a fingertip over the scar. It cut down the side of his forehead, into the tail end of his left eyebrow, then continued down beside his eye, running across the outer ridge of his eye socket, and pointing to the top of his high cheekbone. The middle of the scar, where the stitching had begun to unravel as soon he checked out of the hospital due to his own lack of concern, was wide and grotesque; together with the two pointed ends, this unraveled middle made his scar look like a football that had just been freshly shaven from a pig's back and hung vertically to dry. Being composed of thin and feeble flesh, the scar got cold a lot faster than anything else. It was cold right now, turning a grayish purple inside his pale face. And when it was cold, it stung, sometimes traveling all the way to the back of his eye—and sometimes he felt like it was trying to burrow further.

The heat in the car worked (as far as he knew anyway); he just chose not to use it and let the autumn do what it wanted to do.

The cold had already set into him anyway: it drilled deep, as with the grounds of the earth. It had reached his heart and seized its operation. His blood had slowed to a crawl from one season to the next, then stopped completely. His skin tightened, forcing him to live inside an ever-shrinking cage. His lungs had shriveled up, unable to thrive in such conditions, and took his breath away at some of the most inopportune times. The autumn, it seemed, had completed the metamorphosis started by the crash—and his unlikely survival from it. Little by little, he was slipping into the grave, right beside her, where he belonged.

Halloween may have been the worst holiday to live through without her, but it certainly wasn't the only one: Thanksgiving pulled down on him, serving only to remind him of how ungrateful he was for his life that had been spared that night; Christmas was nothing but black, its snowy wonderlands replaced with cigarette ash and tar; New Year's came, and his only resolution was to find a way to reverse time back to when he could still hold her in his arms; Sweetest Day was fantastically sour; and Valentine's Day alone in the cabin had taken what was left of his red heart and turned it a ghoulish green. Then of course came his birthday (happy fucking twenty-seventh, Cyrus) in which no song was sang in her soft little voice, no perfectly picked presents, no smiles and giddy strides as she presented the presents to him one by one—nothing but the lonely echoes of a past life running through the rotted caverns of his brain.

And now it seemed the cycle would repeat, going on forever. Cyrus watched the road unfold, wondering how long he could take it before it took him.

Chapter 2

Realizing his finger was still on the scar, he dropped his hand and turned on the wipers. Their disintegrating blades squeaked across the glass, clearing the windshield and his field of vision from the accumulated leaves, sending their decaying bodies off to a certain doom beneath his rear tires. From this new, unobstructed view, he noted his progress along the County Road. Orchid was close, getting closer.

With that came a thought, one that recurred each time he took this little trip, and it always came right about now, when he was on the cusp of reentering Orchid. The thought was simple and painfully (oh, so painfully) obvious, but that didn't make it any less significant: he didn't want to be alone and would do just about anything not to spend another night in his solitary confinement. More than that, this recurring thought said that he could do something about the loneliness, if he truly wanted to.

Angelica, blessed be, had been put to rest at Orchid Memorial Cemetery, not far from the cabin they'd once shared—playing the role of two lively lovers—and instead of turning off there, toward the empty house of only hollow memories and reminders of what he'd lost, Cyrus merely needed to stay on the county road a few minutes longer and turn onto Main Street in the center of town. Then a quick two-minute descent traveling south would bring him to the dead end of the street—to the cemetery gates, which were always open, welcoming all visitors at all hours.

A foul taste became evident in his mouth: sour and mucusy. He didn't like thinking about this but was helpless in making himself stop. Thinking about using the tire iron in his trunk like a makeshift pickax, shoving the pointed end into the earth above her coffin, breaking up the frozen ground, and spastically scooping the dirt out by hand until he reached the lid.

But then what?

It was true that if God could be thought of as Dr. Frankenstein, then surely Angelica was the stitched-up, swirly haired bride to Cyrus's monster. They were meant to be together—made for it, even. But still…it had been an entire year, and Cyrus didn't want to think about what kind of condition her body would be in, regardless of how good a job the mortician had done on her face and mangled leg in order to make her presentable for calling hours. Surely, after all these months, that work would have unraveled. He strangled the wheel, moving his jaw side to side, grinding his teeth audibly against one another, trying to snuff out the defiling thoughts.

But he wasn't quite sure he wanted to push the thought away completely.

Because scariest (but most promising) of all was when he actually managed to convince himself to go through with it, just turning his brain off long enough to perform the unearthing. Anything to be with her again. The universe had fucked up royally and thus far hadn't cared enough to fix its mistake, leaving him here, in a place where he didn't belong—not if he didn't have her beside him. It wasn't fair. And maybe it was time he fixed the mistake himself.

But even if he somehow managed to dig those six feet down—those, which might as well be as deep as oceans, as they separate us permanently from those on the other side—without breaking his wrists and all his fingers, what then? For some reason, he noticed that everyone he'd ever seen buried (and he'd seen more than he cared to for one lifetime) had their coffin placed inside a concrete crypt of sorts just before they were lowered into the sweet, cold nothingness of the cemetery grounds. The general opinion among the people was this had something to do with preventing the coffins from collapsing over time and creating potholes in the land—a morbid visualization that would state to the world above that what lay directly below had decayed to dust and could no longer hold the weight of the earth piled on top of it. At any rate, he bet the concrete lid to one of those sonsabitches weighed a good hundred pounds or more. So even if he got down to it, surely he would be too spent and/or broken at that point to lift it.

And then what? He'd just be a muddy, sweaty lunatic sitting in a hole, straddling her crypt, waiting for someone (the groundskeeper, more than likely) to discover him and call in the white coats. And what a fucking disaster that would be. The town would shun him and forever look down on his family. Since his surname Schwartz was posted prominently on the sign to his father's auto shop, just off the county road at the east end of town, he didn't figure that would be too good for business. His sister, Marietta, who, until just recently, had a pretty good law practice in a small leased building on Main, would be spared of most public shaming, but her kids went to Orchid Elementary, and their fellow classmates would probably be cruel to the girls about what their Uncle Cyrus was caught doing. His dear, sweet mother, Shia, would probably have a heart attack or fainting spell on the spot when she heard the news, leaving his father to try and hold her up with his aging back full of withering disks.

But all that didn't stop Cyrus from fantasizing what he might do if he actually got to her at the bottom of that cold nothingness. What did he really want? Would he just place her in the passenger seat, buckle her up, and drive her home? One last ride, as it were—to make up for the mistakes of the past? Would that be enough? Or would he bring her inside the cabin they once called home? What then? Would he prop her up in the corner of the living room and pretend she was still alive, moving and gyrating beside the radio as he watched from the love seat? Would that be enough, or would he feel the need to lay her down in the bed they once shared? Would he crawl in next to her, hold on to her sides the way he used to?

He turned from the thought, the taste in his mouth putrid and worsening.

No, I could never, he thought sincerely, for no matter how lonely he was, how much he was dying to see her again, he just couldn't do that to her grave. Even the thought of it was so…sacrilegious. Never before had he used that word but knew it befit this situation. He never knew anything truly holy existed in the world until she came into his life. He didn't know angels could die, until the night he lost her.

Besides, no matter what lengths he went to, nothing would bring her back. She was gone. Sure, he could put her corpse in their bed and cuddle it all he pleased, but it wouldn't change that one inevitable detail. For she would never be able to return the favor, never again say all those things to him that she used to. Yes, her body may have still been here, but there was nothing inside it—Cyrus knew this all too well (although, knowing is sometimes the biggest hell of all, isn't it?). Be it her spirit (she certainly had plenty of that) or the myth commonly referred to as the soul or whatever it was…it had gone. The light of her life faded away before his eyes that night in this very car. In that seat over there.

His eye wandered right and looked from the side of its socket. The bucket sat empty, its white leather skin glowing beneath the moonlight spilling in through the windshield, showing it as something brilliant and beautiful in a world full of dread and ugliness. He thought about the days and weeks after the accident (oh, those hellish days, the beginning of his nightmarish year), when he ripped out the seat and burned its cursed materials. They had been soaked through with her blood, clear through to its foamy meat and wiry bones, and Cyrus, back on his feet—although a little shaky from morphine withdrawal while his prescription was still getting filled at Mr. Landrie's Pharmacy on Main Street—couldn't allow this to go on any longer. No one else was allowed to taste her but him. He watched it burn, letting the musty smoke hit him in the face and push its way up his nostrils, saying her name over and over in his head as the black trail wafted into the sky like a signal for anyone who may be watching, and able to interpret. He then salvaged a replacement from a run-down Mustang in the junkyard behind his father's shop and reupholstered it with the white leather. Now it sat there, empty and pale, like the ghost of what once was and would never be again.

The rest of the seats, including his own, were still covered in the cheap black vinyl upholstery that had always been there—for as long as he had owned it, anyway, but before Angelica died, these seats, and the floor mats, would have been regularly shampooed and wiped clean and sufficiently dried, ensuring there were never any stray smells to disgrace her button nose or dirt to sully her perfect skin. Now, however, these materials had absorbed the last year and sat stale with its odors of oil and metal shavings, rust, and old fast-food containers thrown carelessly into the floor space of the back seats. He inhaled conservatively, the accumulated odors striking his nostrils in a way they hadn't lately; perhaps it was the increased stench of death bringing out the worst in everything else.

His tire fell off the road, forcing his stray eye from the seat. The passenger side bumped along the gravel shoulder. Rocks flung from his tires and struck the car's underbelly, pinging like machine-gun fire off the steel skid plate covering and protecting its innards. Each impact reverberated through undercarriage, rattling the gas and clutch pedals, vibrating the soles of his weathered work boots.

Easing the wheel left, not really caring if he made it or not, Cyrus returned the front end to its rightful place over the asphalt. He shot a glance to the rearview mirror. There was a crack in the middle of its view (another casualty of the accident, the mirror had been knocked off the windshield during the accident. He had only found it after ripping out the old passenger seat and found it hiding underneath like a scared and wounded stray. He contemplated throwing it out, but instead of replacing it, he just crazy-glued its plastic posable arm back to the windshield), but he could see just fine in spite of it. Trying to keep his head still as possible, he scanned the road behind him, waiting for the reds and blues to start flashing—just knowing they were about to; that was just his luck.

He could just imagine the exchange he was in for.

Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?

No, Officer. Why?

You were doing a bit of swerving back there.

Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.

Have you been drinking tonight?

No, sir.

Were you on your phone?

No, Officer. I don't have a phone.

Okay, then why were you going off the road just now?

Oh, I was just thinking about the pros and cons of digging up my dead girlfriend.

Blank stares exchanged.

Luckily for him, this was No Man's Land and, aside from the occasional passing cruiser, remained relatively free of any law enforcement; instead of flashers, Cyrus only saw the sharp, bare fingers of the autumn wilderness and the night-blue sky above in which they reached to, as if pleading for Kingdom Come—a place somewhere up there beyond the stars, just on the other side of that fat, generous moon.

He shifted his attention ahead and peered into the yellowing rays of his headlights. After the year they'd had, they looked like little more than a pair of burned-out flashlights installed into the front of the car. Usually all the car's bulbs would have been replaced as needed, the fuses checked, their plastic lens washed and polished, along with the rest of the car's body, tires, and rims on a biweekly basis (repeated more frequently if need be). Oh, those were good days, that past life. Fluids flowed endlessly like a waterfall of life's blood, replenishing the car's circulatory system, its inner workings replaced little by little as needed—or as desired—and its mechanical joints oiled as Cyrus saw fit. He supposed he did this for the same reason he put the grill guard on the front end: he did it all to keep Angelica safe. Two years after high school, while out joyriding on some of Orchid's backroads—even drifting a bit east and crossing over into the neighboring town of Winters' Grove—navigating all the lost routes and forgotten back roads he had become acquainted with over his years growing up in Orchid, years spent racing toward no place in particular, Cyrus had the misfortune of having a deer run out in front of him. The deer (a decent-sized buck, maybe a four-pointer, if Cyrus's hunter lingo was correct) was only in the road long enough to align itself perfectly with the center of his hood when the two made contact. The deer didn't have enough time to notice the headlights inches away and, because of this, was still in mid-stride as it was hit. Its legs were violently swept out from under it, causing its furry body to flip, roll over, and skim across the top of the hood. Cyrus only had time enough to pull his hydraulic hand brake before the buck's head came smashing through the windshield, along with a small—yet widespread—spray of broken glass. In those seconds after the car finally screeched to a halt, he still remembered seeing Angelica, strapped into her seat and frozen, her eyes staring at the deer in a panic. She looked into its busted, upside-down face, its tongue slung from its distended jaw, blood leaking from its shredded jugular, dripping down the broken windshield and waterfalling down the face of the radio. All Cyrus saw were those antlers, broad and mature, pointed toward Angelica's face (dear God, her delicate face) and throat. Angelica had slid forward in her seat, thrust there by the harsh deceleration, and was leaning against the hold of her standard-issue three-point safety belt, a mere foot and a half from impalement.

After vacuuming all the glass and cleaning the blood from the dashboard—and giving the entire body a good once-over with soap and wax and removing a clump of hairy flesh from the hood vent—Cyrus replaced the windshield with reinforced polycarbonate glass and equipped the front bumper with that all-important grill guard, just in case. He also replaced the seat belts with four-point harnesses for better hold. It was all for her: to keep her safe as she rode along. And ride along she did, sometimes enjoying it even more than him, he thought. Sat right over there and enjoyed the ride he had in store for her, whatever ride it might be on that particular day. But that was another life.

The bulbs in his headlights had burned out shortly after Angelica's light diminished and left his world forever cold, and Cyrus had neither the need nor worry to replace them. Let the world show as dark as it really was. Thanks to this night's moon, however—which was full enough to awaken the monsters from their hiding places in the distant woods all around—Cyrus was able to see fairly well once his eyes adjusted. The darkness revealed itself to him a sliver at a time, just enough to keep him on the road, but it was enough.

Time passed by, counted by the unreadable face of his radio, which emitted a green foggy light onto his shifter hand from a wide LED screen above. This screen was broken, obliterated, cracked from the center out, spreading in all directions to the farthest reaches of the plexiglass display like a spider's web lain over top; the cracks in its display just so happened to coincide with a pair of nasty scars between the knuckles of his shifter hand. But to be honest, this wasn't a coincidence at all.

It was the day of her calling hours. He had left the funeral home in Norton Heights and drove along this very road, although both his parents and his sister insisted he shouldn't be driving, not after what he'd been through and was still very much recovering from—that he should instead drive along with them to and from. He refused and, after the service, lost their tale somewhere behind in Norton Heights, leaving him the sole refuge as he entered the mythical territory known as No Man's Land. They had followed him on the way up, insistent that he was in no shape to drive. But the only thing impairing his driving was feeling their eyes on the back of his neck. But now he'd given them the slip and was alone for the return trip. His radio filled the silence inside, giving a sort of soundtrack to his solitary mourning as the demon on his shoulder began knitting the veil, that damned veil he would be sentenced to endure from that point on. Cyrus was oblivious to the music and didn't really take note, so wrapped up in himself that the rest of the world didn't exist. Not until a certain song came across the air, that is. His lost and wandering gaze was forced downward as the radio waves disgraced the contained pocket of air inside his car with their sadistic memories.

So he cut it out. Bashed his fist into its face over and over, again and again and again and, while throwing his haymakers, jerked his steering wheel from side to side, moving his tires dangerously close to left-of-center and flirting with the drainage ditches beyond the curb shoulder. Had there been any other traffic on that stretch of the County Road, surely Cyrus would have warranted a few blaring horns and a few flipped birds. With every white-hot spark of pain that flashed into the splitting skin and flattening nerves of his knuckles, he could see her face, smiling, her eyes half-squinted in delight as she sang along. His fist continued to swing and crash and rebound spastically until the music—and the images of her face—slowed to a blurred, muddied crawl, then stopped completely. By the time he put his hand down—now split and slick with dripping crimson—back over the shifter, the display was a consistent hum of pale green, no numbers or letters or symbols any longer. Nothingness. Blank. The plastic beneath the topmost layer of glass was bent and twisted all to hell. The rubber buttons beneath the screen had fallen into the stereo's housing and now lie at opposing angles like broken teeth about to tumble down one's throat. But more importantly, there was no more music. Cyrus shifted again, digging his nails into the shifter to keep his grip, climbing the speedometer faster than its LED counter could keep track. Then Cyrus drove back to his empty home, the rest of his funeral procession nowhere in sight.

The knotted sandwich baggie tucked away in his sock decided this was the moment to act up again, bringing him back to the here and now beyond his windshield. The baggie stung like de-icing salt in an open wound—an industrial sting, something manufactured