The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  He used to wonder why they hadn’t hooked up. Convinced of their inevitable union, he had wanted their romance to be faultless. There developed what he came to see as an unfortunate conjunction of feeling: the hesitancy of worrying the time was never quite right attended the surety that there would be time enough for all obstructions to fall by the wayside. So he inadvertently created a sort of stasis of triviality, where small overtures which seemed insufficient to his expectations were never attempted, and appropriate ones were abandoned in the face of any slight frustration, be it a short paycheck, a bad haircut, inopportune drunkenness, or their other romantic entanglements knotting out of sync. As he got older, Nathan shifted the blame to himself for choosing to buy into the illusion of destiny so strongly. He remonstrated with himself for wasting so much time believing he deserved her simply because he loved her. By the time Charise met her husband-to-be, Nathan had come to think she was probably better off without him—and that he was better off not seeing her.

  Even so, the flame never died. He’d felt it flare disturbingly when he found out she was getting married. He considered calling, maybe trying to . . . he wasn’t sure what he might try to do. And that seemed to him a very good reason to stay away from the ceremony. The ‘forever hold your peace’ thing wasn’t going to be easy to sit through. Nathan wouldn’t speak up, but it pained him to think his silence would be a tacit abdication.

  Then there was Lisa, Charise’s ‘actress’ sister, whose familial love often faltered when tested by her jealousy and narcissism. If Lisa managed to get through the ceremony dutifully, and miraculously didn’t cause a scene at the reception, she’d be looking for a way to amplify her personal drama, and a lovelorn drunk that she’d always crushed on might present itself as the dangling fruit for which she hungered. Never hold the reception in the hotel where the guests are staying, Nathan thought. The Happy Couple were living in Cleveland, but her people were all from Detroit. They had decided to hold the wedding midway, at the resort town of Sandusky. There would be no easy escape. Nathan wondered if he would do it, just to be a little closer to Charise, even by proxy; if he drank the one too many he’d be sure to, after seeing her in her wedding dress . . .

  ‘Men are dogs.’ Nathan spoke the words aloud, not for emphasis but for comfort. He was driving into thickening fog. He’d travelled this route before after hours and though he was familiar with the fog’s eerie ambiance, he would never be comfortable with it.

  Nathan had sent his regrets that he couldn’t make it to the wedding because of the recording session (which he hadn’t yet booked when he received the invitation, and which could easily have been rescheduled). He felt reasonably sure that any disappointment Charise felt was assuaged by relief. He harboured a small, wicked hope she and her man had argued a little over his being invited in the first place. He could have just lied about the session (or made up a better excuse), but Nathan knew it would be worse to stay home, alone and idle. He knew he was going to need to be busy.

  Nathan had pressed the session all night to avoid lulls. When Opie smoked with the kids outside the studio and told a few old blue favourites, Nathan listened to playback and bumped the faders on the board. For most of the evening he had successfully evaded being alone with his thoughts. Now, driving through the fog, he balanced the tension of being in a blanked-out world left with nothing but his thoughts with his apprehension of dangers he knew possibly lurked just out of sight. He dropped speed. He couldn’t see any headlights behind or taillights in front—a rare occurrence on state route 23, even this late, though, as visibility had shrunk to under one hundred yards, Nathan knew he might not be as alone as he felt. He was most worried about a deer jumping in front of his car. He reminded himself to speed up if that happened. He was sure he had heard somewhere that it was better to speed up than to slow down or swerve.

  The fog pressed ever closer until Nathan’s car was enshrouded. He slowed even more.

  ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘You’re driving straight through it, son. So there’s not really such a thing as a ‘dense’ fog, right?’

  In response, the car’s engine sputtered and hiccupped.

  ‘Oh, no. Don’t do this to me, baby.’

  The engine stalled and the car rolled silently, slowing.

  Nathan pulled off to the berm. He felt his passenger’s side wheels slip slightly on grass as he pressed the brake. He exhaled loudly. The cars headlights revealed the solid edge marker entirely to the left of his car.

  Nathan turned the key in the ignition. The flat hum of electricity ran from the starter but no pistons so much as sputtered. He tried again three times in thirty second intervals with the same result.

  ‘Well, at least . . .’ he began to say, but thought better of jinxing himself.

  The car seemed to read his unspoken thought: the lights inside and outside the car failed as the battery died.

  Nathan cursed. The sound of his voice seemed impossibly close to him in the confines of his sedan. He squirmed, rubbing against the car seat just to hear some other sound. When he stopped, he was alone with his breathing. The windows were smothered in lifeless white. Nathan guessed diffuse moonlight gave the still vapour surrounding him its weak, dull glow. He retrieved his smartphone from the passenger’s seat and turned it on. It reported: NO SIGNAL.

  ‘I am not in the middle of nowhere!’ Nathan shouted.

  Nathan swivelled his arm at the shoulder in a half-arc seeking a signal, but the display remained unchanged. He cursed again, and tried the responseless ignition one last time, and exhaled loudly again in some vague hope that the trio of useless actions would somehow keep him from the inevitable. He withdrew the keys from the ignition, exited the car, and shut the door behind him.

  Nathan looked again at his smartphone and was surprised to see that it had gone dark so quickly. He pressed the display again but nothing happened. He wiped away the condensation creeping over the surface and tried again to activate his phone. He shook the phone between curses and then coiled back to smash it to the ground, catching himself just before completing the rash act. The phone appeared unimpressed by the threat and remained unresponsive. Nathan slipped it into his pants pocket and looked around him.

  ‘Okay, this shit is thick,’ he observed.

  The far side of the divided highway was blank. Nathan looked north and south but saw no sign of approaching traffic. He was mildly surprised that no one had passed him even in the short time he’d been off the road. Even at this hour on a weekend, even with the more sensible drivers eschewing the fog route, at least one semi hauling freight should have passed already. Route 23 was too important an artery to ever be completely deserted. Nathan knew that if a semi did pass him going northward, that might prove to be as troublesome as not, because, though he had pulled off completely to the side (as far as the sloping embankment allowed), the road was in a gentle curve, where he stood. An inattentive driver might plough into his car, or worse—if he stood and tried to flag the driver down—into Nathan. Failing that (hopefully), Nathan wondered if anyone would bother to stop and wait a hundred yards forward in the fog. More likely, they would call the Staties or simply laugh at his misfortune. Nathan observed dispiritedly that he had retained his solitude while cataloguing the various ill outcomes of an encounter with a passing vehicle.

  ‘Not the place for a brother to break down,’ he murmured. Though Nathan always strived to maintain an attitude of equanimity, he knew from experience not every situation was favourable to expecting a reciprocal attitude, and he felt especially vulnerable alone on the side of a rural highway in the middle of the night.

  He weighed the alternative to waiting for help. Although he hadn’t seen any for most of his drive on account of the fog, Nathan knew there were farmhouses and farmer’s markets and even small communities along the highway, none too distant from the others. Though his predicament made him feel remote and removed, Nathan knew that he would likely come upon a building within an hour’s walk in either direction.
/>   ‘To find what?’ Nathan asked the silent mist. He envisioned an encounter at a farmhouse. ‘Good evening, sir. I’m a black man knocking on your door at 2 a.m. Have you any daughters?’ He smiled at his own joke, but the lack of other response reminded him of his isolation and the smile withered. He stamped his feet as though cold. There was no chill in the air, but Nathan’s clothes drooped against him. He shook his head. ‘Never leave your vehicle.’ He was certain he’d heard that before, too, maybe on the same program that told him to accelerate through wildlife on the roadway.

  Nathan looked away from the road, down the shallow slope to a fallow field of patchy blonde grass lying flat, as though wilted with dew. It, too, receded into seeming nothingness, but deep in the fog Nathan thought he saw a smudge of light slightly discolouring the homogenous haze. Nathan shaded his eyes (to what purpose, he didn’t know) and squinted. Though the fog did not lift or lessen, the light seemed to become more visible without swelling in luminescence. Nathan could not identify the light, but its existence was undeniable. As he watched, it became clearer, more present, as though in response to his attention. He felt certain the light was more than some dull farmhouse porch light.

  ‘Gas station? Convenience store?’ he wondered.

  Nathan thought it possible. He might easily have missed a turnoff in the fog; he had had no inclination to look for one. Nathan tried to guess the distance to the supposed building while trying not to acknowledge the decision he’d already made. ‘Never leave your vehicle.’ He frowned as he eased down the embankment.

  Nathan’s feet pressed limp strands into the spongy ground as he walked. The field was just sodden enough to pull at the heels of his loafers. ‘Wrong shoes,’ Nathan grumbled. He looked down and took stock: the faux-silk button-down shirt tucked into the belted old-school chinos he wore to look just a little more professional and more authoritative than anybody else at the session were woefully inappropriate to the setting in which he now found himself. Not like you were expecting this, he thought, as though defending himself against criticism. ‘Just gotta say . . . somethin’,’ he muttered. In the confines of the car, his voice had sounded too close; in the middle of the field, with its borders lost so far in the deep haze as to make their very existence questionable, his voice sounded distant, as though it left his lips, went out to the surrounding fog, and was released back to its owner when it was found to hold no special truth worth stealing away. His footsteps reported only a soft give and slip, though it seemed to Nathan that even if the grass and the earth had been dry they would provide no better accompaniment. His breath hissed through his nose even as he struggled to keep his breathing steady. He tried to keep his eyes forward on the brightening glow in front of him. He thought he’d walked five minutes, maybe ten—a quarter mile? Couldn’t have walked a half-mile. I wouldn’t go that far from the road. He tried not to look into the unchanging void on either side; he knew there was nothing there and he didn’t want to start imagining there might be something there, even as he hoped to God there was something there. After one unavoidable sidelong glance, Nathan was surprised to see that the light in front of him had fractured into several smaller flares. More than one light, he thought. Must’ve been staring at it so hard I didn’t notice until I looked away. The effect made it seem as though, once gathered, the lights had drifted from each other, especially as the one in the centre—presumably the one that caught his attention in the first place—seemed to dim as he approached. Less refraction, he reasoned. From farther off, the fog makes the light seem bigger. ‘And those other lights are just like stars coming out—they were always there, I just couldn’t see them because the brighter light kept them hid.’

  The ground angled upwards, and Nathan was soon out of the field. Tacky mud still lay beneath him, but the ground was generally more firm on the new plateau. Nathan felt he was now level with the small settlement he thought indicated by the lights. The fog kept its density, but the block outlines of buildings began to show between smudges of laden trees.

  Motion to his left caught Nathan’s eye and he jerked his head in that direction. The hot sting of popping a muscle shot down his neck. Nathan cursed and jammed the heel of his palm just below the base of his skull. He saw nothing in the mist as he pressed out the tingling. ‘Idiot,’ he growled. But as he dropped his arm to his side again, he stiffened. A blur shifted to his left, though he heard no sound of movement. Suddenly there emerged the form of a young woman. Nathan was so startled he stumbled backward. The woman seemed to take no notice of Nathan’s reaction; indeed, she seemed to take no notice of Nathan at all as she crossed his path between the field and the town. A simple, drop waist flapper dress hung from thin straps on her narrow shoulders. The dullness of the night and the fog sapped the colour from her clothes. One gloved hand clasped the opposing wrist over her abdomen. The permanently ruffled brim of a lily pad hat hid most of a short curled bob underneath and framed her perfectly oval face. Her nose was pointed and as small as her pursed, painted lips. Her thin, arched brows bespoke haughty indifference. He whispered his assessment, ‘Like a damn art deco print.’ Still the woman took no notice of him.

  Nathan stepped forward and raised his hand. ‘Ma’am,’ he called to her. ‘Miss? Look, I know it’s late, I’m sorry. My car—,’ he indicated the way he came.

  The woman passed by him, her pace deliberate and slow, and disappeared again into the fog.

  ‘Well, shit.’

  Nathan shrugged and rolled his head back and forth. The encounter had been unnerving. ‘You ain’t scared,’ he tried to reassure himself. ‘What’s scary about a skinny white girl walkin’ around . . .’ walking around in the fog at two in the morning? No, that ain’t nothing to worry about.

  Nathan rubbed his hands together. ‘Bitch is crazy. That’s all.’

  Or she was a—‘No.’ Nathan chuckled and half-heartedly imitated Scooby Doo, ‘G-g-g-g-ghost??? Nope. I will not be entertaining that notion.’ Grinning broadly and shaking his head, he strode forward.

  The nearest light source was a lantern atop a five-foot brass pole. Standing in front of it, Nathan realised he was on a dirt path that seemed to encircle the enclave. The light appeared electrical; the glow through the glass panes was even and steady. Nathan saw identical lamp posts in either direction along the curve of the path. Buried lines, he thought.

  Nathan left the path and approached a single-floor structure with a peaked roof. He passed by a single, boarded-up window. The siding was worn, made from narrow, wooden slats; paint flecked in layers and curled away from the wood. Nathan walked to the corner of the building. On a wide porch sunk in the middle, he beheld a large woman seated on a sooty, plastic chair, facing his direction. A swing seat lay off its hooks beside her; brown chains pooled at each end.

  Well, at least she won’t be prejudiced, he thought.

  Nathan found himself oddly dumbstruck at the sight of her; it occurred to him again that it was strange that someone—more than one someone—should be awake in the country at that hour. He was even more confused that, though he was directly in her line of sight, the woman ignored him.

  Nathan cleared his throat. The woman glanced at him, looked away, and then looked back again. She shifted forward in her seat and straightened as though the thin rail on the side of the porch obstructed her view, and squinted at Nathan. He thought for a second she might rub her eyes in disbelief, but instead she settled back and slinked down in her chair, chuckling.

  ‘ ’Scuse my staring, honey,’ she drawled, ‘but you look so good I thought I must have dreamed you up.’

  Nathan went around to the front of the house. The woman swivelled her head to follow and shifted slightly in her seat, but did not reposition the chair.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, sister—.’

  She cut him off with a hand motion. Her eyes moved over his body. ‘Mm-hmm-hmm. Gimme a sec. I don’t want to forget you.’

  Nathan was trying to think what else to say when the woman, still looking at N
athan, cocked her head and called over her shoulder, ‘Carson!’

  From somewhere in the distance, a thin voice drifted in reply, ‘Busy!’

  One side of the woman’s mouth pulled back and her cheek puffed out. ‘Well, duh,’ she muttered and then yelled back, ‘Company, Carson!’

  No reply came. After a long half-minute Nathan heard the soft padding of feet shuffling unhurriedly.

  An elderly white man emerged from the gloom. His eyes were cheery and his smile was lost in a full, unkempt beard. He was thin and slightly hunched, but walked unassisted. He wore matching tweed vest and trousers; his shirtsleeves were rolled. Nathan noted a tear in the fabric just above one knee. The man walked his last six paces with a hand extended in greeting.

  ‘Howdy, Hello, Welcome,’ he said, giving Nathan a weak handshake with papery skin, ‘I’m Carson. Big fella, ain’t cha? Pleased to meet you . . .’

  ‘Nathan.’

  ‘Oh! Nathan!’ Carson presented him to the woman on the porch. ‘Nathan!’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  Nathan took his hand back and couldn’t fight the urge to surreptitiously wipe it on his chinos. ‘My car broke down on the highway.’

  ‘In the fog,’ Carson helped, with a bobbing motion of his head that Nathan took for nodding.

  ‘I was wondering—look, first things first, where am I?’

  The woman on the porch guffawed.

  Carson tittered, but admonished the woman, ‘Now, Luelle.’

  Nathan was becoming irritated. The situation was too strange to graciously endure levity. He frowned. Keep cool, man. As much as he wanted to express his displeasure, he wanted even more to be out of the situation and back on the road, and that might soon require the assistance of his tormentors.