“I promise I’ll be safe, dear, it’s only a little fog. You worry too much.”
Those were his last words to her.
It was a dark April night, and it was foggy out. Very foggy. Warrenville hadn’t seen such fog in innumerable years, although there were certain senior members that would tell you time and time again that they remembered fog like this from their childhood. The fog was like a liquid. It was so dense, so there, that even though it was past ten p.m. it still seemed darkly bright, because the fog reflected back what little light there was. Nothing could be seen after ten yards, except light, which carried eerily well in the fog. Orbs of light from distant cars or street lamps wavered, twinkling in intensity, but it was impossible to tell if the lamp was yards or dozens of yards away.
James was heading out to the gas station a few miles away to get a pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t the closest one to the house he shared with his wife, but it certainly had the cheapest cigarettes. Besides, he could use the few extra minutes as a kind of break. Not that he disliked his wife; you weren’t married for 10 years because you disliked somebody. He simply enjoyed time for himself, and sought out short respites like this readily.
He turned off of his road and on to Main Street. He could see his turn signals amplified in the hazy air around his car, and it was honestly a bit odd for him to look at. His eyes weren’t used to seeing light reflected off of what looked like visible air. Sure, when he usually put on his signal he saw it flashing dimly back from trees, and the bumpers of other cars. But in this sense, it looked like the light was glowing back right out of the foggy air. A right turn led him deeper into the fog; his road had more wispy, unevenness than the fog here.
He glanced up into his rear-view mirror, and he saw one headlight palely shining through the fog at him. The lone left headlight was somewhat rectangular; it reminded him of a headlight belonging to some boxy, angular car one would expect to find in the barrio of some high-crime video game. Something like an El Camino, maybe. It was probably about 100 yards behind him, his only reference point in this the fact that it had just crested a hill. The headlight seemed to hover resolutely the same distance behind his car and above the ground, matching his exact speed. When he went around a curve, it did too, momentarily shifting more into the quadrant of his side mirror, only to swing back to directly behind him, slightly to the driver’s side. He’d crest a small hill, and it would momentarily whiff out, only to blink back to life seconds later.
This car behind him made him uneasy. He wouldn’t be able to explain why, and didn’t even have a concrete answer for himself, but it did. It was that kind of faceless panic children get when they have to trek down a long hallway in the dark, afraid that a boogeyman is waiting to jump out of every shadow and doorway on the way. Or that feeling that late-night commuters get when returning home, that feeling that showing their back to the rest of the dark, unseen world when unlocking the front door is madness, inviting all kinds of assaults from the baddies that are invariably lurking in the shrubbery. That momentary terror when, at 2 a.m., we hear a floorboard creak in the supposedly empty house, and are catatonically frozen, sure that there’s a bloodthirsty invader in our home, and that he or she hardly has anything nice in mind. This kind of fear is the worst kind; it’s completely irrational, we know it’s irrational and could not justify it if we tried, but it simply cannot be argued away.
James felt this kind of momentary panic upon seeing this headlight. He had no idea why he should; surely it was just another late-night driver braving the fog for some kind of errand, perhaps picking up bread or milk (or both). And it wasn’t as if the driver were following him. Main Street was the main street, after all. Still, he just couldn’t shake that silly unease.
He turned right at the fork he came to, and moments later, in the restricted view of his rear-view mirror, he saw that lone headlight swing back to being pointed at him. This meant nothing, though; this road was just as likely as any for the car to have turned onto. Despite knowing that he was being stupid, James still wished that the car had continued on Main and left him on his own merry way. And he could really use a cigarette.
The light wavered as the car went over a slight dip in the asphalt, and as James glanced at it, he couldn’t help but think that the car was closer. He, of course, had absolutely no way of knowing this; but, like the panic, the feeling was concretely there. Perhaps it was that it felt like it was less time between when he and the headlight went over the dip than it was when he and then the headlight went over the hill? Maybe it was minute differences in the size of the headlight? It certainly wasn’t any kind of identifiable normal depth perception; because of the fog, everything was simply either less than about ten yards, or more than ten yards. The headlight, although perhaps a slight bit closer, still fit into the latter category.
Another turn to the right, and the headlight still resolutely followed. The fog thinned slightly here, and he could make out faint outlines looming out at him from the nearby houses. Every so often a dim glow would show that a light was on in a living room or kitchen. A few times he saw dim parade of blue lights, which would have been running parallel to someone’s sidewalk. Past the line of obscured sight, the shapes made no real figure; there was no ground or trees, and the houses, it appeared, were simply abstract geometric shapes that his brain told itself would come together this way and that to make actual forms. Aside from the small patch of road visible in either direction, the headlight, and his own car, he was alone, floating along through a milky grey void.
It was curious that the headlight would still be behind him. The road he was currently on was a very minor of side roads, almost a rural-suburban alley, and he was merely using it as shortcut over to the road on which resided his destination. Certainly it could be possible that the headlight’s car was also using this road as a shortcut, right? Although, he hadn’t seen any other cars out on the road tonight, and that the one he did see would have an identical route by mere coincidence seemed improbable.
But surely not as improbable as the car following me, he thought. That kind of thing was reserved for movies and the paranoid delusions of a schizophrenic. People didn’t actually tail people in real life. Crime was a real thing, though, and it was this fact that kept alive the small spark of panic smoldering in the farthest back reaches of his mind. The part of the brain that deals simply with ‘primal’ notions: eat, sleep, happy, sad, tired, scared.
He decided to drive erratically, if only to get himself to stop worrying. He turned left into a development, and, of course, the headlight followed. He then turned right, kept straight at a stop sign, and then made a right again. The headlight followed, shining from between the dim monoliths on either side of the road, and even seemed to not stop at the stop sign. That might have just been a trick of the fog though; with a loss of a real sense of distance, speed as well seemed insubstantial.
As he turned left out of the development and back on to the road, so did the headlight, and he could have sworn it seemed closer still. He thought he could almost make out the faint criss-cross of the grill on the front of the car. At this point, despite his rationality telling him that it was simply ridiculous to think that someone was following him, he started to breath a little more rapidly, and his stomach felt light, felt as if it was somewhere around his lungs. His mind was dualistic; at the same time as he was telling himself that his fears were completely preposterous, that there must be a logical explanation to this, he was also convinced that this car was indeed following him, and with no good intentions for the end result.
He pressed on the gas, and his car slid up to 45 m.p.h. He crested another hill, and took a quick right, before the headlight crested the hill as well. He sped down the road as far as he could, ignoring the signs telling him that the acceptable speed was much lower than his, until he could barely see the main road anymore through the fog. He pulled to the side of the road, killed his engine, and cut off his lights.
He watched his rearview mirror, not breathing. Ten unbearably long seconds later, he saw the faint angular shape of a car with one stalwart headlight fighting through the fog. It coasted down the hill, not even slowing at the road he was on, and delved into the fog past the point of sight.
He exhaled heavily, and nearly hit himself on the forehead. How could he be so childish? Of course the car wasn’t following him; that was preposterous. Things like that just didn’t happen. He simply shared the road with another car as he left for his errand. Was that so weird? Not at all. In fact, for all he knew, maybe the driver of that car was headed for the same gas station he was heading to; his goal the very same low cigarette prices.
He restarted his car, and after making a rather awkward K-turn and narrowly missing a mailbox (it was, after all, rather hard to see), which seemed to form from the fog itself he headed back towards the main road. He slowed at the stop sign, and with the refracted glow from his turn signal guiding the way, pulled slowly back on to the road. He started to set off down the hill, now only half a mile from the gas station, when he nearly slammed on the brakes.
The headlight had turned off of the road he had just been on.
There was no way that that was possible, though. He saw the car head down the hill, with only one headlight. And there was simply no way that the car could have somehow doubled back and gotten behind him on the road without him seeing. And it couldn’t have looped around; the road that had served as his hiding place was a dead end.
Still, the headlight was very much there, behind him, and although he couldn’t see far in front of him, he felt sure that he would see no car farther on the road even if it weren’t for the fog. This, somehow, was the same car, the same headlight, and it had somehow gotten behind him. In fact, it was closer now than ever, he felt like he could almost see a dull, oblong cross branding the front end.
The reasonable part of his head seemed to have nothing more to say, and that left room for his panic to grow and expand until it was pushing his heart out through the front of his chest on every beat. He felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead and arms, and heard his breath catch. He moved his foot to the right and pushed it down, hard, and his car lurched forward. He sped down the hill, nearly reaching 70 in a matter of seconds, and still the headlight stayed the same distance behind him, seamlessly matching his speed. He would not let himself think that every time he looked up, it appeared closer; there was enough rationale left to tell him that that message applied to the side mirrors and not the center one. Still, he accelerated as fast as he could.
He glanced at the road, and had just enough time to jerk to the left, avoiding another mailbox by mere inches. The headlight didn’t move at all, left or right, and stayed simply at a spot just to the left of center. And it still was getting closer, he was sure of it now. Whether it was his empirical senses or his fearful brain telling him so, he was sure of it. He could see the somewhat solid form of the front end of the car jutting out from the fog, and he was briefly reminded of a boat breaking through a particularly high wave.
He went on like this, slowing only to negotiate turns, and looking at his rearview mirror more often than at the road. The car was closer, he knew it, he saw it, and he had no idea what it wanted or what he should do. It was inching, closer and closer, a dull blue hunk of metal pushing through the translucent, almost-there membrane of the fog. His arms started shaking, and his car started to make rapid waves in his lane, moving left and right by inches as his hands tried to grip the wheel through a film of sweat. In some absent part of his mind his fingers moaned from gripping so tightly, but he noticed this as much as he noticed that no matter how hard he pushed with his right leg, the pedal would not go farther so long as there was a car floor board under it.
He could no longer see the place where the wheels of the headlight’s car met the asphalt, and all that remained of the car was a bumper that seemed to float under one solitary light. The windshield should have been there, but the glow from the headlight was amplified to the point that it drowned out all else. And it was still looming, inch-by-inch. He desperately tried to nudge his car into going faster, but it would not speed up.
The headlight suddenly seemed to drift to the left, and for a moment he absurdly thought that the car was passing him. Suddenly, though, he realized what that must mean, and just as he looked down from the headlight to his windshield he-
CRAAASH.
The Buick stuck the trunk of rather large oak tree, and although a few small blossoms drifted lazily through the fog from unseen heights, the tree remained the immovable object to the car’s very stoppable force. The front end of the car, which had been traveling at nearly 80 miles per hour, had folded into something that resembled both a bowtie and an accordion. The back end bucked up as the air bags deployed, which quickly bloomed a bright red in the fog. The lights on the front end were shattered.
After the sound of the crash echoed out, all that was left was a low purring, as a car trudged by obliviously on the road. Its single headlight fought onward through the fog, and within moments, it was gone.
And that’s it. Not too bad, again, relatively speaking.
‘Til next time.
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