‘Rumors of ‘The Dread Toll’ emerge over embers, they being a series of less beloved tales than your Jersey Devils and myriad-gender Moth-Beings, muttered only after the fire has wound down and allowed the night to encroach upon storytelling. The reluctance to voice these stories stems from a two-fold problem with every toll taking- that meeting a booth implies that a driver was either intoxicated or on the verge of sleep, and that the outcome of each encounter is widely mundane.
The average paying of ‘The Dread Toll’ begins late at night or early in the morning, often on a stretch of road that is familiar to the driver. A checkpoint emerges on the horizon, a gray, cloudy booth and a weathered gate. Condensation and grime obscure the toll-takers inside their boxes- though we know them to have humanoid silhouettes and dull voices. They demand payment through a crackling speaker and raise the gate when paid. The toll itself feels expensive, but not so expensive as to warrant arguing.
And the toll is always money.
That’s the ‘dread’ that lingers with those who meet the tollbooths, long after they have paid and gone on their way- a discomfort at the idea that the American supernatural is as strapped for cash as anybody else, that money is the force that turns all imaginable worlds.
The state of the country’s gray infrastructure is currently unknown, but it would behoove the lone driver to keep a roll of quarters in the glovebox. Prices are on the rise.
-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
