To celebrate the recent release of my short story collection, The Devil Wears a Dressing Gown, I present this story as a teaser.
The
Road through Hell
by
D.A.
Cairns
(first published in 2004 in Champagne Shivers, then again in 2012 in short.story.me)
“Slow
down!”
“Why?”
said Pete, easing his foot off the accelerator slightly. “It’s three o’clock in
the bloody morning. The coppers are asleep. Gimme that bottle!”
“It’s dangerous,” replied his long suffering girlfriend,
Kelly, before reluctantly handing him the bottle. She was used to his penchant
for speeding and criminal disregard for safety. An urgent reminder in the form
of loud verbal abuse was usually all it took to bring him back into line, even
if it never lasted very long.
“It’s so dark,”
she said.
“It’s night time,
stupid!”
They always
travelled at night. In fact they did everything at night. She didn’t really
know why, it was just the way they were. Living a life of occasional highs
under a smothering blanket of darkness.
A sign appeared on
the left of the narrow highway, shining briefly in the unearthly glare of the
headlights. Kelly read it out loud in a tone of forced interest, as she often
did, mocking Debra Winger’s senile father in Forget Paris.
Welcome to Hell.
A New South Wales
pop. 653
“Wanna spend a night in Hell honey?”
“Why don’t you
drive right on through to Heaven instead?” said Kelly, trying to sound
flippant. She had never felt more afraid and it wasn’t just the name of the
town.
A shadow moved on
to the road ahead, and stayed out in front of them for a few seconds. Then it
disappeared. Did she imagine it? It returned, quickly growing as though
inflated by an invisible compressor, and began to form into a ragged sphere. What
was it? Could Pete see it?
She pointed but
Pete was already looking, straining for a better view.
“What the hell was
that?”
He flicked the
high beams off, then on again to see if it was a trick of light. No trick. The
shape grew larger still and was soon joined by another, then another.
Pete gripped the
wheel in panic, his blood starved hands shared a ghostly luminescence which
shone on his face but he did not slow down.
“Is it an animal?
I can’t see. I can’t tell!”
Kelly was frozen,
suffocating behind a mask of awful terror as she watched a third shape ooze up
from underneath the road. The three things maintained their speed and kept
themselves just in front of the car before suddenly merging into one. The new shapeless
entity was bigger than the car.
As they stared in
dumb horror, a huge misshapen head extended from the centre of the black
formless mass, followed quickly by two arms, then two long and powerful legs. It was running!
Kelly screamed as
it turned to look over its shoulder at them. Accompanied by a wide toothless
smile, two bloodshot eyeballs floated in a sea of torn flesh, gawking
mischievously.
Madness gripped Pete, insane fear drove him to
press harder on the accelerator as the monstrous apparition turned its whole
hulking frame to face them. Still running, backwards now, it laughed at them.
“I’ll kill you, get
off the road, I’ll kill you!” roared Pete.
“I’ll kill you,
get off the road, I’ll kill you!” mimicked the beast, its disturbingly deep and
raspy voice amplified inside the car.
In the same
instant that the running creature put up his open palmed hands and stopped dead
in the middle of the road, the car crashed into a tree and split in two. Flung
like worthless trash, the twisted halves of metal and plastic sped through the
cold night air in opposite directions, carrying human debris with them.
The crumpled
bodies of the young couple were discovered the next morning, on either side of
a sign post which stood like a sentinel in a grassy field. The doctor rose from
his knees and nodded to the police sergeant who pulled a blanket over the face
of the woman. He looked at the sign and sadly shook his head as he read.
Welcome to Hell.
We have two graveyards and no hospitals.
Please drive carefully.
