I’m trying to write this down to get it out of my head. I can’t say I’ll do a good job giving any of you all the answers, but I’ll write things down as best as I remember them.
This happened a few days ago. Me and my friend, who we’ll call Jake, are students at a university in central Texas. I won’t get more specific than that for privacy’s sake; you just need to know that it’s a pretty decent school, even if it’s not everyone’s first choice.
Jake and I have been friends since middle school. Everyone always assumed we’re dating, but Jake’s never been into the whole romance thing and I’ve never been into men, so it’s never been a source of tension for us. We’re as close as two friends can get, though. We were both excited to be going into the same school, and we even got a two person apartment off-campus together.
I decided to go with creative writing as my major. I’ve always been loved writing stories, and I planned on turning it into a career by any means necessary. Luckily my professors love my stuff (even if sometimes I don’t think it’s that great), and I even got a piece published in a literary magazine by some miracle. There was a lot of booze poured that night.
So you can imagine my excitement when I got an invitation to attend a conference for female writers of the South. Thing is, I started to get real nervous about it as the day approached. I was gonna be among some of the top up-and-comers in this field. I was probably gonna have to talk craft with them. hat if I ran into someone who made my stuff look like some old pulp story?
I decided to ask Jake to tag along with me for morale support. He’s always been fair yet encouraging whenever he’s read my stuff, even if my major wasn’t his thing. Jake went into psychology. He’s less interested in becoming a therapist than he is in looking at the mind from a clinical angle. He’s the type who actually enjoys designing experiments and that kind of thing. Nevertheless, I trusted him to support me. Luckily, the conference was happening over Spring Break, so it wasn’t like he had much else to do.
The plan was simple. We’d take my car, get on the interstate and head north towards the city where the conference was being held. We could make it in a few hours if we stuck to the highway. We left our place just after lunch and got on the freeway. If all went according to plan, we could make it to our hotel before dinner.
The trip started off easy. I was driving since I have a thing about letting other people drive my car, and I slipped into that highway trance thing people talk about, where you can drive for hours but not really remember any of it. It freaks some people out, but honestly, I’m glad my brain is smart enough to realize it’s not necessary to remember every little thing that happens on the interstate.
I was snapped out of my trance by Jake lightly shaking my shoulder. He had seen a sign for a Whataburger and wanted to stretch his legs and grab some fries. I checked the time on the radio clock; we had plenty of time to take a quick pit stop.
We pulled off the interstate and into the Whataburger parking lot. The place was surprisingly busy for mid-afternoon on a weekday. We got in line and when we got to the counter the cashier, a teenage girl who would clearly rather be anywhere else, looked at the two of us and grinned slightly.
“You spring breakers get your week ruined too?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?” I replied.
“You guys got turned around, right?”
“Turned around by what?” Jake asked.
“Oh, y’all don’t know then.” the girl said. “Interstate’s closed about 3 miles up ahead.” She gestured towards the packed restaurant floor. “I’ve listened to just about everyone in here complain about some sort of spill that’s closed all the lanes.”
I must have looked dejected, because Jake decided to say something to cheer me up.
“Hey, it’s no big deal.” he said. “We’ll just take some backroads. It’ll take longer, but we should still make it before it gets dark.”
Jake got his fries and instead of sitting down to eat, we went back to my car and pulled up Google Maps on my phone. Sure enough, something had happened on the interstate up ahead between us setting out and pulling into the Whataburger, and Google was showing that if we had kept going you would have run into a monster of a traffic jam.
Luckily, we saw that there was a backroad that could take us around the jam and then spit us back out onto the interstate. It would add an extra 30 minutes or so to the route, since it gradually curved away from the highway before curving back towards it. We figured it’d be worth it, and we set out onto this road.
The road turned out to be two lanes of asphalt that wound their way through tall pine trees. As we got further away from the highway, we saw less and less cars passing us, and the trees seemed to grow taller and taller. I started to enjoy our little detour. It was nice to do some nice country driving after having to deal with the noise and speed of the interstate. But that’s when it started.
The first thing we noticed was that it was getting dark. We looked at the time; it was way too early for the sun to be setting, even for winter. We tried to double check when the sun would be setting that day, but neither of our phones had a signal. We talked and were able to reason that maybe we were just mistaken about how soon it would get dark, and that our phones probably just lost service due to us being out in the country.
Then the temperature dropped. Contrary to popular belief, it can get cold in Texas during the winter, but I swear it felt like it dropped twenty degrees. I cranked up the heat, but it didn’t seem to do anything. I looked around us. The trees seemed taller, and there was no wind passing through them. The sound of the car’s wheels on the asphalt seemed to be quieter too.
Then it got even darker, and fast. The sky went from the orange of dusk to the deep black of midnight within a minute. The world beyond our car’s headlights had disappeared. All we saw were the two yellow lines that went through the middle of the road, like a guide rail keeping us from flying off into the void.
And then the yellow lines disappeared.
Our car’s headlights were on but they illuminated nothing. It was like being at the bottom of the ocean. It was just us, floating in the abyss, with only a thin metal shell to keep us safe.
Before I could even get the chance to scream, the darkness seemed to vanish in an instant. We were back on the road, and it was day again. Everything looked normal.
I was breathing heavily, and when I turned to look at Jake, his face was frozen in an expression of terror. He was clutching his chest, breathing hard, with sweat pouring down his face. He pointed at something ahead of us. I turned to look back at the road. There was a gas station coming up, and I pulled in so fast that I ended up hitting the curb, which spooked us even more.
As soon as I had stopped, Jake took a moment to catch his breath.
“Water.” he croaked out. “I need water.”
He got out of the car and stumbled towards the gas station. I got out and looked around. The place seemed empty. No one else was in the parking lot or at the pumps. A neon sign held up by a metal pole said this was “Aaron’s Pit Stop”. The open sign was lit up and I could see that there was a middle aged man sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. He barely looked up as Jake came through the doors and heading straight for the drinks in the back of the store.
I walked in after Jake, and I swear, I will remember the following the conversation word for word for my entire life.
“Got caught in the dark, didn’t ya?” the gas station attendant said. I turned to look at him. He had put down his newspaper. A name tag on his lapel said he was Aaron.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve only see people look like you two after they went through the dark.” he said.
I didn’t say anything. What on earth do you say to that?
“You look pretty alright.” he said. “The other guy, on the other hand…” he said while pointing at Jake. Jake had grabbed a water bottle out of the fridge and had started to chug it.
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay for it.” Aaron said. “So, quick question, what do you remember?”
I took a second to pull myself out of the shock this Lynchian conversation had put me in and said “We, we were driving down the road, from the interstate, and then it got dark and cold and–”
I cut myself off.
“There it is.” Aaron said.
It had seemed like we were just spat out of the darkness, but the more I thought about it, the more something seemed off. I pulled out my phone and realized something.
We were WAY ahead of where we should have been at the speed we had been going. But what really jumped out at me was the time. My phone’s clock was saying it was an hour later. But whatever had happened to us had seemed to happen over a few minutes so why-
Suddenly I realized something. To this day I don’t understand how I know this, but I do.
Something had appeared to us out of the dark. I could remember now, we saw something, something terrifying, but whenever I tried to picture it, my mind drew a blank. The thought of what we had seen made me shiver, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Aaron asked. “That’s for the best. It means it went easy on you.”
“What, what is this conversation, what is it?” I asked.
“Something that comes through here every once in a while.” Aaron said bluntly. “Let it do it’s thing, and it won’t touch you.” He turned to look at Jake, who was just finishing his second bottle of water. “What’s he do for a living?”
“He’s, he’s a psych major.”
“Oh, that ain’t good.”
Suddenly Jake fell to the floor. His head hit the linoleum with a dull thud. A pool of blood began to slowly spread across the floor.
“It doesn’t like the scientific types.”
The ambulance arrived too late. The doctors said it was an aneurysm. Silent killer.
I went back to the apartment. Didn’t even call the conference to tell them I wasn’t coming. I didn’t care. I didn’t sleep. I haven’t slept.
I’m too scared to go to sleep. I’m worried it’s gonna show up in my dreams. That my subconscious will dredge it up from the depths of my mind and render it for my mind’s eye to behold in all it’s terror. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
I’m keeping the lights on for as long as possible. Please, please, don’t let it get you. Stay out of the dark. Stay away, for the love of god, please…