That ugly jacket. That CD he knows I hate. That watch he bought me on our trip to the Floating Isles.
The driver’s vision blurs, another stream of tears trickling down his cheeks. His grip tightens on the gear shift. A flick to the side, then up, and with a lurch he’s pressed against the seat with the force of the acceleration. He blinks, trying to wipe away enough tears to see the road properly, but it’s no use. He tosses another handful of memories out the window and onto the dark highway.
That pamphlet and lanyard for Ser Semira’s Arcane Law Academy. Plenty of respectable people become scholars, not lawyers, so why’s he pushing so hard for this? Can’t he just let me have one fucking thing that’s my own?
The dim light of the moons fades, but the driver is still too blinded by his tears to tell if it’s because of a cloud or if he’d entered a tunnel at some point. It feels too early to have hit the mountains, but then again, he has no idea how much time has passed.
The driver’s hand lands on something soft, and he’s quick to drag it across his face and mop up the lingering tears. As the road ahead of him slides back into focus, he realizes with a guilty pang in his stomach that he’d driven a significant way completely blinded. Thank the gods I’m on this road alone, and that it’s just a straight shot through the desert… He looks at the soft material in his hand, and his stomach twists for a different reason.
The scarf flutters out the window, and onto the dark pavement long after the driver’s car has sped away.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, the driver finally looks around the sparse landscape. The light of the twin moons has returned, though it’s little help – even with his full high beams, the driver can only see a few feet off the road, and it’s just scrub and the occasional cactus anyway. He looks in the rearview, out the windows, in the rearview again with an increasing desperation and heavy, sinking feeling in his chest. Where am I?
He squints out the windshield, hoping to spot a landmark he recognizes, but there’s nothing. Nothing except… pink? Blinking in the distance? Is that a gas station? On instinct, the driver glances down at the dash, and balks when he sees his tank is almost empty. Damn that to the Six. Empty? I filled up in the Port, and drove for what? Three hours? He glances to the clock just above the radio, and mutters another curse.
Four “8”s blink back at him in stark black against the sickly orange backlight. Mocking. And my clock reset itself. Awesome. Figures. If you’re gonna have one problem, why not have all of them? Broken clock, probably a gas leak, and my entire gods-damned life falling apart. Absolutely perfect.
“One problem at a time,” the driver murmurs, looking ahead to the pulsing pink light just a bit further down the road. As it comes into view, the driver realizes with a groan that it’s one of the old-fashioned stations where he’d have to get out and pay the clerk inside. I’m not fit to talk to any other human right now.
The decision between “run out of gas” or “talk to a person” is made by the sharp knocking of the driver’s engine, and he’s quick to roll up next to the solitary pump. There’s a light above him to illuminate the pump, and a dim light filtering through the filthy windows of the small shop just a few steps away, but by far the brightest light comes from the huge, flashing pink “OPEN” sign that takes up the entirety of the shop’s eastern wall. Well, the majority of the time it just says “PEN” – the “O” only flickers on occasionally.
After a quick glance in the rearview – definitely looks like I’ve been crying – the driver pops open the fuel door and heaves himself out of the car. The ground gives way beneath his feet, and he has to grab onto the top of the car to keep from collapsing. Sand? He looks down, but under his shoes is just the same rugged, black pavement he’d been driving on. Pressing down his weight experimentally, this time the road doesn’t give, just as solid as ever. I need some sleep.
In every direction is the inky darkness of the desert, this tiny gas station the only oasis of light for miles. Even the stars, usually so bright this far away from the cities, are absent. The driver can’t see any clouds in the sky but… they must be there, or why would it be so dark?
Turning to the little shop attached to the station, the driver digs in his pocket for his wallet, adamantly trying to ignore goosebumps prickling across his skin as it really hits him how off this all is. The gas station looks pretty normal, a bit old maybe, but something about it is just slightly not right – like looking at it through a mirror, seeing only the reflection rather than the real thing, that if he reaches forward he’ll touch a pane of glass instead of the doorknob...
He pauses with his arm extended. In his mind’s eye he’s a child again, reaching out to grab hold of a shiny door handle in the library where his sister worked. She’d grabbed his wrist immediately, firmly but gently pressing it to his side again. “Take care near doorways, gates, places that are not quite here nor there,” she’d said, shifting the weight of a half dozen books in her arm. “Like in that time between sleep and wakefulness, we are at the mercy of demons. They do not care that you are a child. They will prey on anyone passing into their realm of the between.” The driver had grown up with her ominous warnings about demons preying on those in distress or blithely using doorways without taking the proper precaution of a sprinkle of salt, but as the years passed and the disappearances grew further and further apart, his sister’s cautionary tales had faded to a faint echo. Hardly anyone he knows carries a pouch of salt anymore. The driver only continues to because it is one of the few possessions of his sister’s that remains.
Hastily shutting down any further thought of his sister, the driver reaches into the small leather pouch hanging from his belt as he rests a hand on the door. To the side, he can see the bright flashing pink of the store’s neon sign lighting up the pavement at the side of the building.
PEN. PEN. PEN.
A sudden breeze chills the driver’s skin, the pungent scent of sulfur burning his lungs as the pink glow to his right gets brighter and brighter, the buzzing drone of the neon so loud it’s bordering on painful. For a moment all he can see is that unnaturally pink light, and then his vision flickers with a dark static. Images flash in and out of focus, followed by sounds that surround him: a dark smile, low laughter, the tearing of fabric, something falling to the floor and shattering. The driver’s chest tightens, breath coming fast, the sheen of sweat on his back chilling him to the bone. He sees himself through another’s eyes, trembling, shaking in his sleep, face white as a sheet as he mumbles unintelligibly. There’s a twist of nausea in the driver’s stomach that he likens to finding an extra step on the stairs than he was expecting. Again, the pavement shifts under his feet, as if he’s stepped into deep, soft sand. In his haste to regain his footing, the driver leans forward against the door, and the faded wood swings inward.
OPEN.
“Welcome, traveler, it is a pleasure to have you here with us. Truly, we hate to see any mortal suffer. We are happy to relieve you of the burden of memory.”
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