#and starring ME as the hapless idiot who either had the night of her life or got killed

[lokilickedme]

Road Trip

I woke up about twenty minutes ago to answer a text and realized halfway through my reply that I’d just surfaced from a dream that felt ridiculously real - and that all the details were still with me.  It was too good to let slip into the oblivion of wakefulness, so here I sit, still groggy, haven’t peed yet, typing it out.  I’m putting it in shortfic format but all the details are as they were dreamed, nothing’s been changed or added.

‘Twas a good one.  Sort of.  If you like that sort of thing.

Warnings for general unease and suspense and ambiguous ending, because yeah, I dream like that.

Starring a couple of familiar faces.

I’m driving.  Endless interstate, late afternoon, there’s snow on the median where the plows have pushed it but it’s been warm for days.  It’s melting off, leaving behind dirty patches dyed by splashing mud and blown debris.  Pale yellow grass pokes out here and there, like a warning that Spring has either come or gone.  I don’t have a clue which, but there’s a coat slung over the back of my passenger seat.

My husband is on the other end of my phone.  I need a map, I tell him.  I’m not supposed to be making this trip, this yearly pilgrimage to visit his old and demented father.  I don’t like him, I never have, and I don’t know the way.  But for some reason our standard placeholders have flipped and I’m in this car, on this interstate, driving to Wyoming while he stays home with the kids.

I’m driving East, and I know that makes no sense.  I’m winging it.  He’s giving me directions the way he always does, in a way that my nontypical comprehension center unsurprisingly doesn’t comprehend.  Stay right.  The road will merge.

And then it doesn’t, so I keep going straight.

I must be a thousand miles off course before I decide it’s time to stop.

The scenery changes abruptly, as if it’s been listening to my thoughts.  Concrete highway becomes rocky dirt road, traffic becomes trees, and eventually, as dark begins to replace the sunny warmth of late afternoon, I pull up at a cabin, sort of.  A half screened, half enclosed crackerbox square bungalow, flashing me a new coat of brown paint as if it’s proud of its spiffiness.  It’s been painted a thousand times, I know if I dig my fingernail into the brown coating it will scrape away at least a dozen layers of the browns that came before it.

The key is in an unlocked lockbox out front.  Someone knew I was coming.

Inside I find a bed, as square and frequently made and remade as the bungalow itself.  A heating unit the size of a refrigerator in the corner next to the bed with a stiff lever switch that I can’t flip, maybe because it’s been turned on and off as many times as the walls have been painted and the bed’s been made.  I struggle with it for a while, then give up.  The bathroom is small.  It has a shower, small and square, and a sink with a mirror above it in the same shape.  Everything here seems determined to go against the nature that surrounds it, refusing to be anything but...square.  The hardwood floor clacks unnervingly loud with my footsteps.

I realize I’m in a cabin in the woods.

And I know this doesn’t bode well.

I call my husband, tell him I’ve stopped for the night.  He asks where I am and I make something up, because I really don’t know.  I tell him I can’t turn the heat on, he tells me to look around for some tools, I tell him I’ll be back on the road in the morning.  He reminds me I’m on a deadline.  I see my father-in-law’s face in my head, and I hate it.

I know he’s been dead for two years.  The dream doesn’t seem to care about that.

The bungalow is single-room.  One wall is screened, exposing me to the view of anything that might be out there.  I know there are others, peppered here and there throughout the woods, each numbered with a lockbox out front, waiting for someone to go inside and sleep, take a shower in the tiny bathroom, fight with the heater switch.  I’m not alone but all I can see are trees.  I don’t care much for the screened wall.  I also don’t care much for the long built-in open toolbox that stretches the length of that screened wall like a windowbox for deadly implements instead of flowers.  A goddamn liability if someone decided to come kill me during the night.  I pull several hammers and what looks like a machete out of the toolbox and push them under the bed.

I’m staring at a map, trying to sort just how far off course I am, when a knock on the door startles me.  It opens to reveal a tall man in a Sheriff’s uniform, smiling the sly smile of a man who’s friendly but cautious and maybe just a little bit suspicious.  He wants to know if I’ve settled in comfortably, but mostly he wants to know what I’m doing here.

Donald Sutherland, circa 1990.  White hair, white beard, the laughing eyes of a serial killer.  I wonder how much they paid him to play this role even as I’m telling him I’m only here for the night and will be leaving in the morning.  I’m not really listening while he goes through his spiel - a mom and pop convenience store up the road, gas station further on, Ranger station a mile over, is there anything I need?  I’m thinking of the machete and hammers under the bed and notice he’s eyeing the toolbox as if he knows something is missing.

The heater I blurt out.  I can’t get it to come on, the switch is stuck.

Let me get my Deputy to fix that for you, he’s good with things like that.  Gonna get cold tonight.

His Deputy steps out from behind him, and I wonder if he’s been there all along or if he simply walked up without me noticing.  He’s instantly familiar.

Tom Hiddleston.  Why does the Deputy look like Tom Hiddleston?

Likely for the same reason the Sheriff looks like Donald Sutherland, circa 1990.  I step back as he comes through the screened door, taking off his hat and greeting me, friendly and helpful and not waiting for permission to come inside.  The Sheriff grins and tips his head to me.

See you in the morning he says as he turns to leave.

And then he’s gone, but I see no car drive off.

I have a million questions, but he wasn’t the one to ask.

The Deputy doesn’t stop to look around the room.  He’s been here before, he knows where everything is.  He looks at the heater switch, laughs like he knows something but doesn’t share the joke or the information with me.  My phone is ringing and I silence it.

You’ve been traveling a long time.

I nod, even though I haven’t.  I’d left that afternoon, it had only been a few hours.  I stand near the foot of the bed, watching early evening fall suddenly into the deep dark of night through the screened wall, my feet just inches from the tools under the bed.  They’re weapons, I know.  Nobody needs that many hammers.  The Deputy knows they’re somewhere in the room but he makes no show of looking for them.

He’s handsome.  His hair is a bit shaggy and he’s bearded.  And he’s moving around the bungalow as if it’s his house, doing the things one does when in familiar surroundings.  He goes into the bathroom and I wait, wondering if I should call my husband.

It never enters my mind to leave.  There’s one last glow of sunlight slipping down beneath the edge of the horizon through the trees and I make my decision, though it’s not at all clear what that decision is.  My head simply makes it without telling me.

He’s talking to me, the Deputy, from the bathroom.  Chatting comfortably, friendly - he’ll check the place over, make sure it’s safe, get that heater going, look under the bed for boogeymen.  I know he’s not here to do any of those things.  He’s at the sink with his back to me, washing his hands, or maybe he’s rinsing the razor he’s holding.  I could do any one of a number of things but I don’t do any of them, and as I stand behind him I know why.

None of it would matter.  If I went for the tools he would simply overpower me.  If I ran, he would catch me.  If I screamed, nobody would hear me.  If I hid, he would find me.  This is his territory, I just arrived.

He looks at me in the mirror.  He’s not the least bit concerned about me doing any of those things.  He lets his lips curl gently into the soft smile of a kind predator, and then he reaches over to turn out the light.

He’s standing between me and that last sliver of sunlight now, and as it disappears behind his head and darkness takes us, I tell him I’m cold.

Don’t worry about that, he says.