Jeanine Skowronski
At the end of a too-long, two-lane highway that eventually turns into a one-way dirt road, there’s a gas station. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure, even though it’s all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere. Two skinny petrol pumps under a sad, square canopy. A flickering sign held up by a half-lit hut. A rundown trailer next to a makeshift garage: three wooden walls at least bound by a slab of steel. All rust-red and rot.
Inside the garage, an old man pokes at an old car’s engine. You’ll recognize him, too. Bony frame. Weathered skin. Blackened fingers. Brown overalls. His hunched back is turned toward the road, so he doesn’t see the girl, the one spilling out of the woods right now. Torn jeans. Matted hair. Split lip. Blood-stained shirt.
Behind this girl (and the gas station), the house looms; you know, the one that exists at the end of every road in every outskirt or dark wood or backwood or boondock or bad part of town. This house, like many other houses just like it, sits on top of a very high hill, a cluster of serrated black stacks stabbing the soft blue sky.
And I know, I know, you’re bored, maybe, because you’ve seen these things together, too, before (girl, house, man, way station), but listen, it’s not usually at this point of the story, when the sun is going up, not down, when the lights in the twin turrets of that house are blinking off, a pair of eyelids drifting asleep, not awake, its base a black mass, a belly satiated, not hungry.
And this is a specific man. He’s got greasy gray hair, but kind green eyes. And that is a special girl. After all, she made it out of that house, down its hill and through this forest. And now she’s crossing the road, limping a little, but mostly because she’s missing one of her high-heeled boots and there’s a coffin-handled bowie knife with obsidian rivets (more on this later) sheathed in the other one.
The man—let’s call him Edgar, because that’s what it says on the gas station’s flickering sign: EDGAR’S—Edgar still doesn’t see the girl, but he is thinking about her. He’s been thinking about her for hours, really, ever since the screams started drifting down the hill and nipping at his shriveled ears. No, no, to be honest, he’s been thinking about her for the last two days. Because, two days ago, the girl and her four friends pulled up to his station in their dusty, white Ford Taurus. And the scene went the way it always goes:
“Fill ‘er up?”
“Mhmm.”
“Hull House?”
“Straight ahead.”
Except, at the very end, that girl smiled at him as she climbed back into the passenger seat. And it was a small smile, a sad smile; one corner of her full mouth reaching up, the other twitching out before drooping back down to earth. Mostly, though, it was a familiar smile, one that Edgar swore he had seen somewhere before he had gotten stuck beneath a big house’s black shadow, though he couldn’t quite be sure. His memories of that time are hazy, ill-defined shapes and figures trapped in the middle of a sandstorm. But for a second, just a second, he had made out a face. And maybe it looked like his mother. Or his estranged daughter. No, definitely his mother. And his daughter. Yes, certainly, both. And so, before the Taurus’ door could close, for the first time in ages and ages (and ages), Edgar’s dry lips parted.
Beware.
The girl—let’s call her Alice, because, well, that’s her name—Alice, of course, is not smiling now. She’s scowling, the edge of each lip pulled in, so her mouth is balled up, like a fist, as she nears the open garage. Her black boot clicks against the slab of uneven concrete. Tick, tick, tick.
Edgar, old Edgar, finally looks up.
“You!” He gasps.
“You,” Alice replies. She wastes no time; she pounces. The man manages to catch her by the wrists. They wrestle. With each other, sure, but mostly with their own demons, and so Alice quickly overpowers Edgar. You see, after years and years of gassing up cars so they could get to the top of that hill, his demons are drained. They’re just some shriveled shells hiding in his many, many pockets and creases, while Alice’s demons have pooled in the center of her chest. And they’re full of rage. She’s full of rage. She’s been full of rage, to be honest, pretty much her whole life, ever since her dear old dad left and her once-loving mother (and her aunt and her sister) turned to the drink. It’s just now she has an excuse not to hide it, given an evil old house just ate all her friends.
The girl’s demons join hands; they push. Our pair falls to floor. Alice rolls and mounts Edgar. She pulls the coffin-handled bowie knife from her boot, wraps her fingers around its obsidian rivets and presses the blade to his neck.
“You knew,” she hisses.
“I didn’t,” the old man lies.
“Of course, you did.”
Edgar struggles, but weakly, meekly, so he succeeds only in inching closer to the coffin-handled bowie knife. A drop of blood appears on its curved tip. He stops twisting; he stops turning. He exhales. “I told you.”
“You didn’t,” Alice says, but now she’s thinking about two days earlier when she and her friends pulled up to this gas station and she noticed the old man’s kind green eyes and how they kept drifting up that hill, how they seemed drawn to that house; how she watched him sneak glances over her friends’ shoulders until eventually he glanced at her and she sad-smiled at him because, sometimes, just sometimes that was the quickest way to placate a stranger. And she remembers that she heard something, maybe, a bit later, as their car chugged up that hill; over the crows’ caws and the wind’s whistle, there was a whisper: Beware. But it was faint and more of a feeling, a shiver up her spine, a cold breath on the back of her neck. And since her friends all said she had a bad habit of looking for omens, Alice had shrugged off the signs.
Alice shakes her head now. “No,” she tells Edgar, who’s gone stiff, motionless, but straight, like a tree trunk. “You let us go.”
Edgar looks up at the rusty steel ceiling before closing his eyes. “If that house doesn’t eat, something will come for me,” he confesses.
And with that, Alice’s brown eyes go black, and, for a moment, she’s back in that house, un-ignoring all the signs she had continued to ignore as the girls explored its halls, because, sometimes, just sometimes lying is the quickest way to placate your friends. Stains in the ruby-red carpets. Scuff marks across the cobwebbed ceilings. Thick zombie bars on the bedroom doors. Strange off-white walls with thin squiggly lines sprouting from their baseboards, here and then there, a leafless tree or an inverted pair of lungs. And in between those trees (or body parts), there were a few circular mirrors that seemed to blur the girls’ faces, except, perhaps, for Alice’s, whose face appeared clear, somehow, with all its edges, though maybe it was just what Kate said: a trick of the light.
But then the floorboards were creaking. And the hallways were shrieking. And Dora was screaming. And Laura was bleeding. And Ames was flying off the second-story balcony and crashing to, then through the foyer’s tiled floor. And Kate was holding Alice’s hand as they raced to the front doors, at least until the leafless trees came to life and wound their branches around Kate’s wrists and dragged her, kicking and screaming, into a wall. Alice felt something wrap around her ankle as her fingers found the doorknob.
“No, no, no,” she says.
Now Edgar shakes his head. And he’s back, too, not in the house, of course, because he can’t remember ever entering it, but at the gas station, two days earlier again, when he had whispered to that girl not once, but twice — beware, before the car door slammed. Beware, as the car pulled away — beware, beware, beware, really, again and again, with his fingers crossed, not because he was lying, but because he was thinking, hoping that if screeches could roll down that hill, maybe, just maybe, warnings would float up it.
But he’s back further, too, to all those times that he hadn’t whispered because he had been too busy listening to the steady growl, that beating hum that always permeated the station. Fill ‘er up. With the co-eds in the RV. Fill ‘er up with the couple in the orange sedan. Fill ‘er up with the boys in the Jeep Cherokee. Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up when the road went untraveled for weeks and weeks and that big black house started to bleed into the horizon, turrets turning to tendrils that started reaching, wafting further and further down the hill each night. And Edgar had tried to ignore them, tried tinkering with that old car in his old garage, over and over, only somewhat aware that there was nothing he could do to get it to turn on and take him back to civilization. And so, when the next car neared — a 1999 Toyota Corolla carrying a feast of teenagers — things went the same, just with a little more urgency.
“Fill ‘er up?”
“Please, yes, please!”
“Hull House?”
“Straight ahead. Floor it.”
Beneath the girl, Edgar re-opens his eyes, which go wide. Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up. “I had to,” he realizes. “I’m sorry.”
And so maybe Alice thrusts out or maybe Edgar leans in, but either way, the blade of that coffin-handled bowie knife disappears into his neck and blood appears on her palms, and, for a moment, just a moment, he, she, you, me — we are at peace.
But, of course, that’s not the end of our story, because Alice is still here, and while she’s no longer full of rage, she’s also not quite empty. Inside her, the demons disperse. They claw toward her extremities, her fingers, her toes, her throat. And she’s not sure what to do with them or herself, really, so she simply shoves off Edgar, slides into a corner and stares.
Alice stares at that coffin handle with the obsidian rivets, but, more importantly, she remembers staring at it. After that black tendril lost its grip on her ankle as she lost her boot, after the front doors gave way oh-so-suddenly, after she tumbled down the driveway and sat up in a pile of dead grass and dirt. After the house spit her out, I mean, she had found herself looking at that curved-tip knife, splayed across her palm, and she hadn’t known where it had come from—or, more accurately, she hadn’t cared, because she knew somehow exactly where it was supposed to go; no, where it needed to be, which is where it was now, in the old man’s chest. And so, Alice suddenly understands.
“Something came for you,” she tells poor, dead Edgar — Deadgar, let’s say (What? Too soon?) — before stealing a look, finally, at that large, looming house on the horizon. The light in the left turret blinks, winks at her just once. And now, yes, she can hear the growl, no, a hum permeating the gas station. You hear it, too: Fill ‘er up, fill ‘er up, fill er’ up.
At the end of a too-long, two-lane highway that eventually turns into a one-way dirt road, there’s a gas station. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure. The girl, too, though now she looks a bit different. Greasy hair. Scarred lip. Beige overalls. Sludge-stains over her blood-stained shirt. She sits in front of two skinny petrol pumps, chewing on a long piece of straw. She doesn’t tinker with the old car in the old garage; she doesn’t sleep in the rundown trailer. She just waits and waits (and waits) until the next shiny, white car pulls into the station. And it goes the way it always goes.
“Fill ‘er up?”
“Mhmm.”
“Hull House?”
“Straight ahead.”
And Alice—that’s what it says on the gas station’s flickering sign: ALICE’S—Alice smiles a sinister smile, a sly smile, a familiar smile, both corners of her mouth reaching up without her lips spreading out, pointing, like her half-crooked fingers, to that old black house on the hill, which has, once again, grown hungry.
JEANINE SKOWRONSKI is a writer based in N.J. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit, Lost Balloon, Five on the Fifth, (mac)ro(mic), Complete Sentence, Crow & Cross Keys, and Tiny Molecules.