The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  And not only because of its color.

  He read aloud:

  There is no escape from the road

  of black whirlpools that swallow tar,

  take the junction, get to Uironda,

  become part of this realm!

  Uironda. It had been that name which had startled him, which had pressed a memory switch in his brain, triggering a scene he had experienced . . . how many years earlier? At least thirteen or fourteen, when he was little more than a novice at the job, a young man filled with hopes and good intentions, for whom the road hadn’t yet become a bore.

  Uironda. He had heard the sound of the word, and now it was in front of him, written down. Memory is a strange thing. A meaningless term linked to a stupid little story told to him by a stranger. He had heard it uttered only once, at a truck stop in the Rho Fiera area near Milan, where he had stopped to take a little nap, and now those moments were returning to the surface as if by magic, with extreme clarity.

  After a siesta in the rear cabin he had climbed down from the vehicle to get a coffee and phone Daniela, who was his girlfriend at the time. He had come across three truck drivers, between forty and sixty years old, seated at the edge of a flowerbed, drinking and talking; a tattoo-­covered guy with a long beard resting on his chubby belly gestured to him, holding out a can of beer fished from a cooler full of water and ice.

  ‘Have a seat with us here where it’s cool, boy,’ he had invited him with a smile, showing two rows of nicotine-­stained teeth. ‘The highway’s not going anywhere, don’t worry.’

  Ermes had obeyed, had introduced himself under the comradely gaze of his three colleagues, and had taken part in a discussion that was surreal to say the least.

  ‘A pleasure, Ermes. I’m Massimo, and that’s Vittorio and Roby. We were talking about weird stuff,’ the tattooed man had explained, including the other two with a wave of his hand. ‘When you spend a good part of your life on the road, all sorts of things happen to you, for sure.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ had replied Vittorio, a wiry man with the skin of an iguana and eyes overrun with capillaries. In his dilated pupils you could read his urge to speak. ‘I was just telling about that time when I was on the CB with a fellow trucker from Bari, Amos. Amos was his handle. We often crossed paths on the Turin-­Milan stretch, and we would talk for a few minutes, as long as the signal lasted. Anyway. It’s night, a shitty night, one of those where you’re running behind schedule and you can’t stop and you can’t wait to crack open a beer and have a shower and some undisturbed sleep. Amos and I have been tuned into channel five for a few seconds, we’ve hardly greeted each other and exchanged a couple of words, but I can barely hear him. Amos sounds strange to me, his voice is tired, but most of all it’s far away. I tell him a couple of times: “Amos, is your radio working, is your CB all right, are you already out of range? Because you sound far away.” And he goes: “Vittorio, I am far away, yes. This is the last time we’ll speak. I just wanted to say goodbye. Safe travels.” Then the communication freezes suddenly and it’s like my CB is going crazy. Static, weird sounds, I think I hear screams . . . then . . . silence.’

  Vittorio had run the beer can along his sweaty brow, interrupting himself and fixing his gaze on the eyes of the others with a mysterious smile. Scratching his long beard, Massimo had invited him to go on, with the look of someone who has already heard a story dozens of times. Roby, the other driver, the oldest and quietest, with only a few thinning hairs and sad eyes, held his head down, smoking a stinking cigar. Vittorio had resumed the story, this time looking Ermes straight in the eyes.

  ‘So, I try to reestablish contact with Amos, but nothing. After a few minutes I catch another fellow on that frequency, we start to chat about this and that. And then at some point he goes, “Have you heard about Amos?” He knew him too. I get a chill at the base of my spine, you know, like when you have the feeling you’re about to listen to something you don’t want to listen to, and I respond, “Heard what? We talked a few minutes ago on the CB, the signal was bad. He said some odd stuff to me.” My colleague is silent for a few seconds on the other end, and then he bursts out: “What the fuck are you saying? It’s impossible, Vittò. You must be mistaken. Amos died yesterday morning. He ran off the road on the Gambetti viaduct and went flying off. I thought you knew. It looks like . . . it looks like he fell asleep at the wheel. There’s no way you could have talked to him.” I swear, I got goosebumps, my legs started to tremble and I had to pull off onto the shoulder to catch my breath. And suddenly I recalled Amos’s words: “I am far away, yes. This is the last time we’ll speak. I wanted to say goodbye. Safe travels.” And that’s the strangest thing that’s happened to me in thirty years of driving a truck,’ Vittorio had concluded, winking at Ermes, who had listened to the tale with a mixture of fascination and disbelief.

  It had been then that Roby, the third trucker, had broken in. It had been then that he’d heard the word which now, traced in yellow lettering on the door of a stinking lavatory, was once more before his eyes: Uironda.

  The man had begun to speak in a submissive, almost infantile voice. The spirals of smoke from his cigar softened his features, which were wrinkled with grooves, his fingers gnarled and twisted from gripping the wheel and maneuvering the gearshift.

  ‘Yours is a curious story, Vittorio,’ he had begun, squashing the butt of his cigar under his boot, ‘but I have a better one. Well, really I don’t know if it’s better, but it’s certainly more interesting than some lame highway ghost.’

  Despite his feeble voice and melancholy eyes, the old man had given Ermes a feeling of wisdom and authority.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Uironda?’

  They hadn’t done more than shake their heads and fetch a second beer from the cooler, disregarding the soundtrack of horns and engines beyond the glass and cement outline of the truck stop.

  Roby had scratched his bristly chin and had opened his mouth a couple of times silently as if he couldn’t manage to find the words. ‘Uironda is a highway exit that doesn’t exist but is there, which takes you to a town or a city that doesn’t exist but is there. Or rather, it exists, but not on this plane. As if it were an overlap, an interference. Uironda is a mirage. It’s a story that goes around among those older than us, a kind of urban legend. A Romanian trucker told it to me when I was first starting out.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ the tattooed guy had interrupted him. ‘Never heard of this Vironda.’

  ‘Uironda.’

  ‘Tell us more.’

  ‘Well, the Romanian who told me about it wasn’t very clear. According to this guy, Uironda is a place that you can reach or glimpse when you’ve spent too many years on the road and the continuous headlights on your retina, the repe­tition of certain structures and habits, has set your mind in the right way. When you’ve been driving for hours and the view is always the same, and the guardrails, the architecture, the road, are repeated in an identical way for kilometers, sometimes you seem to be hypnotized, have you ever noticed? And that’s the moment when it’s like you’re in a trance, when you’re driving while your mind is somewhere else, and when you’re most liable to doze off. And it’s in that moment when the highway exit leading to Uironda can be seen: when you’re at the limit, desperate and confused, when you’re dead inside and the road has taken away too many hours of your sleep and too many moments of your life. You can see the exit for Uironda and in some way . . . take it. That’s how it was explained to me.’

  ‘What the hell kind of story is that?’

  ‘It’s a sort of word-­of-­mouth myth that goes around in our narrow circle. I’ve been sitting on my ass on that truck seat for forty years, and I’ve happened to hear that name other times too. Whispered in a truck stop bathroom, shouted by a drunken whore in a parking lot, crackled from a truck’s CB radio . . .’

  Ermes, who had listened to the story with extreme att
ention, had leaned forward. In those days during his breaks he usually bought pulp sci-­fi novels and read them before sleep, and Roby’s story had captivated him.

  ‘So this Uironda would be a kind of parallel reality, if I understand right? Another dimension, like you read about sometimes in science fiction books?’

  ‘Yes, boy, something like that. Have you ever thought about the life we truckers lead? We live as though in an alternate reality with regard to common people. The highway, the truck stops, the parking lots, are all non-­places, places people pass through and immediately forget . . . We’re the ones who know them best, who live them the most. Uironda is supposed to be a kind of alternative reality in an alternate dimension. Something like that, boy, indeed.’

  ‘And what’s supposed to be in this Uironda, if I might ask, Professor Roby? And why that name?’ Vittorio had mocked, concluding the question with a vulgar sneer.

  ‘The man who told me the story was very vague on that point too . . . First he said that the dead are in Uironda. Those who died on the road. Who go there to spend eternity, in a kingdom of metal and cement. Then he muttered that in Uironda there’s something that none of us would ever want to see but which at the same time we would want to contemplate with all our might. The most atrocious and unspeakable desires, the deepest fears, the darkest hopes, the atrocities one has committed. As for the name . . . well, I couldn’t tell you. Uironda. It’s a name like any other, for a place like no other.’

  ‘And someone . . . in short, does someone claim to have been there? Have you ever met someone who says he’s been to . . . Uironda?’ Lenzi had asked, before draining the last of his beer.

  ‘Uironda doesn’t exist, boy. It’s a highway legend,’ the man had cut him off, spitting a yellowish gob on the asphalt. ‘And if someone claims to have been there, well . . . they’re either full of shit or out of their mind.’

  Ermes remained seated on the toilet a few moments longer, staring at the yellow writing without seeing it, the memory of the first time he had heard of Uironda unraveling in his mind, then he wiped himself, got to his feet and took the cell phone from his jeans pocket.

  He snapped a couple of photos of the poetry, read the words aloud,

  There is no escape from the road

  of black whirlpools that swallow tar,

  take the junction, get to Uironda,

  become part of this realm!

  uncertain why he was doing it.

  Maybe to have proof.

  To remember.

  And maybe to spread the absurd legend of Uironda, recounting it to some fellow driver to kill boredom.

  After washing his hands and rinsing his face, he headed once more to the café area. He ordered a second coffee. His eyelids felt heavy, as if they were encrusted with dirt. The chubby barista had disappeared, replaced by an elderly dwarf with a bristly moustache doing its best to hide an enormous harelip. The convenience store chain cap lowered on his head conferred a ridiculous, clownish touch.

  Ermes observed him captivated while he made the coffee, his insect-­like movements, the skin of his neck a desert of wrinkles and ugly spots. His age could be anywhere between seventy and a full century.

  ‘Here’s your espresso, Signor Lenzi,’ he croaked, pushing the little cup towards him with a smirk. He had too many teeth. Too many tiny teeth.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ responded Ermes, reaching for a packet of sugar. The movement stopped in mid-­air. A tightening in his lower abdomen. ‘How do you know my name?’

  The old man looked at him with a perplexed air, bending his dinosaur neck a little to the side. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ His harelip was trembling.

  ‘My surname. You said: “Here’s your espresso, Signor Lenzi”. How did you know it?’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ squeaked the old man. Now his face was deadly serious, molded wax over pale skin. ‘You must have heard wrong.’

  Ermes tried to think of something to say, but all he did was swallow air like a fish out of water. All of a sudden he felt very tired, uneasy, scared. When he managed to speak, the words didn’t coincide with his thoughts.

  ‘Say, have you ever heard the story of Uironda?’

  What the hell are you saying? his mind shouted. He looked around as if to make sure that no one had heard him. Only then did he realize the truck stop was empty. Not a soul. The stagnant smell of burnt toast lingered in the air, mixed with the stench of exhaust fumes.

  The old barista started to laugh, the tired chuckle of a derelict. He slipped off his cap and put it on the counter, rocking his head from side to side, his skull full of dents, as though someone had taken a hammer to it.

  ‘No. I’ve never heard of Uironda.’ His amused expression suggested exactly the opposite. ‘But let me tell you one thing . . . There are two kinds of death: sometimes the body remains, other times it vanishes along with the spirit. This usually happens in solitude, and, not seeing the end, we say that the person disappeared, or left on a long journey. Do you catch my drift, Signor Lenzi?’

  Once again he showed his smile of microscopic sharp teeth, and Ermes couldn’t help taking a step back.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ This time he had shouted.

  The old man remained motionless beside the coffee machine, staring at him and laughing.

  Ermes turned around and rushed out of the deserted truck stop. The last thing he heard before sprinting across the parking lot straight for the Scania was the crow-­like voice of the barista, who yelled, ‘The espresso is on the house, Signor Lenzi! We hope to see you again soon!’

  Half an hour after he’d started driving again, Ermes began to seriously doubt his own mental faculties. The more he thought about the business with the old man at the truck stop, about the little hand among the crows, about Uironda, the more he convinced himself that depression and failure had once more gotten the better of his judgment.

  And yet the poetry was still there, in the photo taken with his smartphone. He hadn’t dreamed that.

  His only desire was to return home. Rest. Spend the weekend with his son, at the sea, in the mountains, any place other than the road, the nothingness of a pointless journey. He cast a glance at the photo of Simone hugging Daniela’s headless body.

  He turned on the radio, but no matter how much he fiddled with the dial he only managed to catch some static discharges and a strange chanting. Radio Maria, probably. He hoped he hadn’t lost his antenna, promising himself to have it checked at the next stop.

  He gave up on music and put his mind on autopilot.

  At 11:57 he realized that the traffic was thinning out in a strange way. It was almost lunchtime, and that stretch of bypass lined with monstrous coal-­stained factories was usually so congested that you could count yourself lucky if you managed to get past it without wasting more than ten minutes. Now, on the other hand, the Scania marched on without a hitch as the sky filled with clouds that were assuming a worrying yellowish tint as they advanced along the horizon.

  Ermes turned his eyes towards a ramshackle Multipla that was passing him at a steady speed. It seemed to him that there was something out of place with its occupants: the driver’s head looked squashed, featureless, dangling on a too-­thin neck, while the woman in the passenger seat had her hands on the dashboard and her head bowed as though she were preparing for a violent impact. On the back seat, nestled in a car seat, something shuddered that was more like an enormous hunk of flesh than a baby. Ermes accelerated to match the Multi­pla’s speed, but it shot by, leaving a puff of yellowish smoke behind it; before it disappeared around a wide curve, Lenzi thought he glimpsed some bizarre shapes tapping on the vehicle’s rear windshield, shiny black figures that reminded him of the jaws of a stag beetle, the exoskeleton of some exotic insect.

  Could they be going to Uironda? he wondered, astounded. He couldn’t manage to get that little story out of his head.
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  He rubbed his eyes, filled with a sensation of bewildered detachment, trying to keep his thoughts on driving, on driving and nothing else, and after having tackled another twenty kilometers with his heart beating in his chest like a bass drum, he had to accept the absurd fact that he was alone.

  Alone.

  There were no other vehicles on the highway. Only the old Scania with its now lusterless chromework and the tractor trailer squeaking like an old rocking chair. He slowed down, looking out the windows as if he had been marooned on a desolate, alien land.

  There must be an explanation.

  You were distracted and took the wrong road, you didn’t see a road work detour and you continued along a stretch of closed highway . . .

  The cloud front, a catarrhous cascade of ochre fog, rolled in his direction, crackling with pink lightning, feeding his sense of bewilderment. The words of the old barista at the truck stop came back to him and he felt goosebumps running up his arms.

  There are two kinds of death: sometimes the body remains, other times it vanishes along with the spirit. This usually happens in solitude, and, not seeing the end, we say that the person disappeared, or left on a long journey.

  Nor were any vehicles to be seen in the lanes traveling in the opposite direction, beyond the dividing barrier. The landscape along the sides of the bypass seemed the result of a sloppy copy-­and-­paste: factories, water towers, lopsided cement high rises, all the same, gray, depressing. Ermes couldn’t pick out a single recognizable building in a stretch he had driven thousands of times. On the top floor of a gloomy apartment building, behind broken windows that recalled chipped teeth, he caught sight of two figures looking out, possibly a woman and a little boy. He wondered what they were doing in that crumbling structure.

  Soon it would start raining. Maybe hailing. A vague smell of iron and electricity in the air foretold it, an odor that smelled of urgency, as the storm front rushed on. Too yellow, too bulbous, too tangible.

  Ermes Lenzi’s umpteenth work trip was assuming the features of a nightmare.