It’s early in the evening, the time of day to start rolling up the windows- I seem to have driven my way into Fall, or lost a race with it and this morning I found the first hints of frost on my windshield. I’ll need to scrounge a blanket from somewhere soon, who knows what happened to the last?
Rest Area #212 off the highway has me well and truly stumped. It’s given a write-up in Shitholes but is, by all accounts, just your normal sort of stop. There are bathrooms, reasonably clean, and a few old park benches outside, reasonably weathered. The information area is outdated and mildly vandalized, the pamphlets there warped and discolored by the sun. Who pulls off at a rest stop and takes directions from one of these, I wonder. Wouldn’t a person already have a destination in mind? Wouldn’t they have planned their trip such that they arrive at said destination according to a time table? I don’t think I would take water slide advice from one of these pamphlets, or water park advice of any kind.
Even if these slides are the tallest in the state.
Even if they are housed in a massive, heated structure so as to be a year-round affair.
Even if these kids appear to be in various stages of ecstasy, going down the slides.
Even if their parents seem to approve from the illustrated sidelines.
With a candy bar out of the vending machine I sit in my truck and wonder what it is I’m supposed to be looking for.
“For the safety of our readers, parking at Rest Area #212, off the highway, is not recommended. The mysteriously numbered Rest Area #37 just another hour down the road maintains similar facilities and has a pinchy, but well-meaning swing set for the kids.”
So I’m going to stop at #37 too, sure, but what’s going on with this place? It isn’t marked on the map in the book or the road map I picked up with gas. There wasn’t any signage to speak of until the ‘Exit for Rest Area’ announcement. Maybe I should have asked someone along the way.
The red car, the only other means of transportation in this lot, has been empty as long as I’ve been around. Nobody in the restroom when I was there, very few signs of life. That’s a strangeness of sorts for someone grasping at straws.
The car is empty, the reflection of my chewing the only movement. I kick the tires and find them full, don’t see any extraneous dust or foliage on the roof. A smell like cinnamon reaches me and I see the window is cracked, a smoker’s vent. The engine feels cold under the hood.
The bathrooms are still empty, I check the men’s and then, very cautiously, the women’s. These are cement buildings with few places to hide and they echo noises I don’t seem to catch. If you press your ear close, I wonder, would you hear the ocean? I doubt it. Maybe something else, though, some more stagnant body of water.
The women’s has a few more stalls than the men’s, that much seems reasonable, but the stall on the very end, which I had neglected to look at carefully on my first round, opens on a goddamn fucking staircase into the ground, I shit you not. There are plenty of reasons not to walk down the stairs, the foremost of which is that this still constitutes sneaking around the women’s room. It’s my job to look into these things, though, or it’s what I do instead of having a job.
I descend against my better judgment.
The old flashlight I left at Phil’s has been replaced with a newer model, a thing that emits cheerful white light even in places like these. The ghosts of my childhood were yellow like kidney failure under incandescent bulbs. Modern spirits are black and white, the way they were written in books. We’ve come full circle.
The young man at the bottom of the stairs is black and white and red all over like the joke but he’d dead and covered in old blood. There is no smell. Beyond him is a vast gray tunnel, far vaster and more gray than I’m normally comfortable with.
I step over the man and into the tunnel.
I was wrong before, when I said there was no smell. There is a smell like an old closet, like old, musty clothes. The air is still and difficult to breathe, it moves sluggishly into my lungs, seeming to resent the process as much as I do. My light finds a wall ahead, the way divides and moves almost imperceptibly downward with every step. The man behind me, the body, is facing the exit. He died trying to leave.
There is a toilet to the left of the fork, clean minus a few drops of brown urine under the seat. This stall caters to a niche audience, I would imagine. The tunnel continues to the right but before I am able to continue the body behind me, the man, begins to make noise. He starts to breathe.
The man’s breathing is audible all this way down the tunnel because it’s loud and labored. Under the dim light from the top of the stairs I see the rise and fall of his back, the expansion of his chest so dramatic that it seems, in the shadows, at odds with common anatomy. He swells like a balloon and then deflates, each exhale a violent, sputtering rattle. There is no movement, no sound, but for the man’s breathing.
I approach him cautiously but my footsteps change nothing. The man’s eyes are closed, his lips billowing. He has broken ribs, his chest shudders wildly underneath his clothes. The source of this man’s blood remains unclear.
The setting sun blinds me the moment I step outside. I run to my truck, pull the small first aid kit from my glove compartment. There is a hammer on the floor in front of the passenger seat and I grab that too, in case I need to protect myself. I dash back to the restroom, back down the stairs of the last stall at the end. The man’s breathing has lost its rhythm, each intake shorter than the last.
There are gloves in the kit and I put them on. I feel along his abdomen, afraid turning him over will only worsen things. The man’s chest has no structure, his ribs move freely under the skin. He doesn’t seem to notice me and his breathing continues to sputter out. Eventually it stops altogether.
I check his pulse, sitting very still so that I can be sure. His blood shines under the flashlight, lying next to me on the bottom stair. And then there is a noise ahead, like the tap of a foot. When I begin to adjust the light, smearing blood across its handle, I hear a polite cough.
Someone is sitting on the toilet, far ahead in the tunnel, their legs just skin and bone sticking out from around the corner, terminating in dusty blue jeans and old, leather shoes.
The man in front of me is dead, his heart motionless under my fingers.
The toilet flushes and the thing ahead begins to stand. A sickly, bulging stomach appears around the corner, clammy and pale under the LEDs.
The man in front of me is dead.
I run back up the stairs, fleeing in bloody gloves to my truck. The women’s room at Rest Area #212 lingers in my rearview mirror longer than seems normal, the place casting a shadow on my thoughts. I drive without the heat, afraid, in the short term, of its hoarse, rasping breath and thinking of the man who died in the tunnel and also of the thing that seems to live there.
-traveler
