There was no reason for me to put myself in this absurdly unsafe position. Stopping for the night at Elle's Inn, just off of the solitary road whose mountainous borders turned the area into a bowl full of darkness, struck me as an overzealous invitation for death. After hours of worsening mental numbness, my brain had finally reanimated with paranoid visions of the horrors that would greet me if I were to stay here. Maybe if I tried, I could convince myself that fearful adrenaline was a substitute for sleep and keep on driving, but the road was no safe haven either. I had two headlights and an aching wreck of a body on my side, pitted against the darkness, the ice, the scurrying animals, and the total absence of human beings.
Except, apparently, for Elle, and whatever guests she might have staying with her tonight.
As sketchy as Elle's Inn seemed - and its weathered front home and five stocky cabins were sketchy as all hell - it had also come through with divine timing. Just as my cognitive function was starting to fail, the dim lights on Elle's sign had miraculously flickered into view. As far as I knew, it could be miles and miles to the next rest stop, and my body could give out on me miles and miles before then.
The paltry light fell gray upon the snow. The serenity of the undisturbed ground gave way to an abrupt shatter as I jammed a clumsy limb through the masterpiece. From the moment my sole cracked the perfect crust of the snow, the atmosphere of the place seemed to shift into what could only be described as a scowl. My presence was an invasion. I could feel the unearthly glow glaring at me through the shuttered windows of the front office, but fatigue and freeze compelled me to ignore the warning and knock anyway. After a few minutes of waiting, I cautiously tested the knob.
"Hello?" I called, wavering between loud enough to be heard by someone who could help and low enough to avoid being heard by anyone else.
Even the wind didn't respond. A voice in the back of my head told me this was a sign - not just a sign, but a second chance at life. I could hop in the car and keep driving, driving far away from whatever Hell this place would reveal itself to be. Of course, while I might avoid a painful death at the hands of mountain-dwelling murderers, there was no guarantee that I would be any safer behind the wheel. All it would take would be a five second nap or an overlooked patch of ice, and I would wind up mangled in a tree or frozen in the river. Even if I did survive the inevitable wreck, I would end up at the mercy of whoever or whatever found me first.
Once my imagination started filling in the blanks, I crunched past the front office toward the five small cabins, identical in their simplicity and vacancy. Only one cabin, the one at the very end, had its outdoor light on, dangling above its splintering door. The windows offered nothing but a reflection that I didn't currently care to see. It could have been that the resident or residents were asleep, and if that were the case, then a stranger's knock at the door at this ungodly hour of the night would not be well-received. At that point though, with the cold crawling under my clothes and the darkness closing in on the meager lightbulb above my head, it seemed a small price to pay for survival. I rapped my knuckles against the door and followed with an ear to listen for a grunt, a snore, a rustle, any sign of a human being.
Even the wind didn't respond.
I leaned against the wall of the last barren cabin and stared out into the void. A small part of me - the optimism I typically repressed - had me dreaming of a warm room, a cozy bed, maybe even a hot shower if that existed in this forgotten part of the country. Disappointment reigned, joining up with the ice gnawing on my bones and the fatigue tugging at my muscles. I could hear my parts scraping grumpily as I peeled myself off the wall and clomped my way through the snow, once smooth but now scarred with footprints.
Not all of them were mine.
My eyes trailed after the deep imprints starting from the cabin door, headed in the direction of the entrance. I laid my own foot in the well - a full size larger than me, if not more - and pursued. The path seemed intent on leading me back the way I came, but soon the trail began to curve to the left toward a cluster of white trees, where it quickly disappeared into a lightning scar tangle of branches. Standing on the outskirts of the impenetrable forest, I wondered again why I put myself in absurdly unsafe positions.
Everything I feared about this place could be waiting in these woods: creatures and killers beneath the blessing of shadow, pulling me into their maw by way of an invisible tether tied to these stranger's prints. There was definitely a tether to them; something about their lingering energy bode me to follow, follow and be saved. I didn't know where these prints or their energy came from, whether the source was benevolent or malicious. It was fear versus faith, both of them rooted in the unknown. Every muscle in my body twitched to turn and run, faith be damned in the name of fear, but the ones that mattered didn't twitch; those muscles overruled my legs and dragged my body forward, permitting the forest to swallow me whole.
The phantoms of mountain-dwelling murderers still lingered close behind, the fear of them thumping in my chest. I tread careful and slow after the stranger, praying to find them with arms outstretched, ready to receive a refugee from the cold night. The color seemed sucked out of the world, leaving nothing spare for the shocked white of snow and bark and the black void that filled the spaces in between. The footprints never wavered in their confident sashay between the trunks. Paranoia pulled at me to break from the siren's song, but before I could stop to reconsider, the forest began to thin. Soon, I found myself at the edge of a clearing; just ahead, the end loomed tall and rusted.
I longed for the cover of wind to quiet the crashing of my approach. The bus was in a state of disrepair: tires rotted, windows smashed in, ugly gray peeling off the corroded frame. I couldn't tell whether it had been left there due to choice or catastrophe, but the incident must have happened years ago. Nature had welcomed the forsaken structure since then, playing mother once more to mankind's garbage.
Something in the bus was glowing. The faint gold dripped out from the windows in the back, just visible enough to betray some human presence. When I was close enough to read the faded letters stenciled on the side - consonant jumbles and the sole intact word, "MOOSE" - I stopped to listen. I waited for the shuffle of movement, for the creak of a reluctant seat, but heard nothing.
Finally, I called, "is anyone there?"
The silent vacuum tensed. Out of a broken window, a long bowie knife emerged in glimmers.
"Could be."
If the dangling blade wasn't enough of a warning, the guttural rasp in their voice should have sent me sprinting back through their footprints. It was the voice of someone who had been disturbed, someone whose friendliness I had likely overestimated. For all I knew, it could have been the voice of the very phantoms I had been running from.
"You don't need that," I assured the occupant. "I'm just trying to spend the night here, you're the first person I've found since I pulled in."
They took their time crafting their reply. The mutual caution was strangely comforting.
"It's passed Elle's bedtime."
"Yeah, mine too."
It was strange to hear the gruff voice chuckle, a stubby breathing that sounded more like a cough. The knife retreated back inside. A few moments later, a lantern extended out of the same window. Behind the light, a weathered face crinkled its eyes to see me. The lantern and the smoldering end of her cigar illuminated the sun-bitten color of her skin, pushing the shadows to pool in the creases by her eyes.
She blew me a cloud that said, "you look as desperate as you sound."
"I can't dispute that," I admitted. "I've been driving for hours, I think I'd die if I got back behind the wheel now."
"How about just the backseat?"
She nodded toward the door before pulling the light back inside. I hurried around the bent front of the bus to where the stranger was standing at the top of the stairs. Her gloved hand stayed clenched on the hilt of her knife, holstered to her hip, while her other hand braced against the ceiling just inches above her head. I could see some of the more unruly tendrils of her short burgundy hair brushing the tetanus off of the metal. I climbed inside to the stair just beneath her and still hadn't reached her neck.
She took her hand off her knife and lifted my chin.
"Poor little thing," she murmured.
There was a bald spot of seats just before the back two rows; in their place on the driver's side rested a small table where the lantern glowed, the cigar rested, and a journal lay open with ink still drying. The stranger walked ahead of me and tossed the journal to a different seat before sliding into her original place. The seat was draped with a heavy red quilt, welcoming against my weary body as I lowered myself onto the edge. Her broad arm reached for the far corner and brought it and me against herself.
I could feel the heat swelling in her lungs as she took another drag; I greedily sapped whatever ember of warmth I could get. She released another cloud, and this time I was close enough to tell that her cigar wasn't filled with tobacco.
"What's your name, little thing?" she asked.
I told her my name was Elliot.
"Lola."
She granted me a pull of her blunt, and I held the warm smoke inside as long as I could to keep my blood from freezing. The arm around me tightened, bundling me deeper in Lola's crux and into the comforting haze that quickly set upon me. The snow was melting outside.
"You don't sleep in this bus, do you?" I asked.
Lola chuckled again, "naw, it's where I take my smoke breaks. Elle doesn't like it in her place of business, but she turns a blind eye to this hunk of scrap. Let's me smoke to my heart's content."
She gestured the nefarious drug in the air as if thanking Elle's feigned ignorance.
"That's nice of her," I remarked.
"You're probably the first person in the world to ever describe her that way," Lola said. "I can tell y'all haven't met. There's a reason she keeps her livelihood as far from human civilization as she can, you know."
