All American Horror of the 21st Century

The Station. Bentley Little-2

On impulse, he stepped forward, reached out and touched the dead man’s arm. The form was solid. He’d half-expected it to be some sort of incorporeal figure, a ghost or shade—after all, the president’s body had been in full view of witnesses in Japan at the same time they’d seen it here and the tangible reality of its existence made everything that much more confusing.

The room flashed with light as Gina took a picture.

Derek jumped, startled.

There was another flash.

Was the expression different on the dead man’s face?

He couldn’t tell, but there seemed some slight change in the cast of the features, and he backed away from the chair, heart thumping crazily.

“I’m doing this as quickly as I can,” Gina said, as if reading his mind. “I want to get out of here. I don’t like this place.”

Derek beat her to it, ducking under her camera arm and returning to the office. She followed immediately, obviously afraid to be in the room by herself. “Let’s go.”

He hazarded one quick glance back. He could see only the legs of the dead man from this angle, but on the shadowed surface of the rotted wood wall was what appeared to be a face formed from the contours of the irregularly shaped boards, a disturbingly intense visage with eyes of mold, nose of shadow, and mouth of woodgrain. It could have meant nothing, could have been coincidence, but in this place under these circumstances, he found that hard to believe, and he instantly faced forward and hurried into the sunlight, not daring to look behind him as he ran around the side of the car and got in.

They sped away—for the last time, he promised himself—and as the car bounced along the rough dirt road, he let out a huge exhalation of air, unaware until that second that he’d been holding his breath. Gina, too, sighed with relief, although it sounded more like a moan than a sigh, and she clutched her camera in her lap as though afraid someone might try to steal it.

“I should’ve brought the digital camera, too,” she said. “Then we could have looked at it right away.” She turned to face him. “What if the pictures don’t come out? What if it’s all dark or all light or that ... thing’s not there?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to answer. And they hit the highway and headed south toward home.

* * *

The photos did indeed turn out, and Derek looked closely at the prints Gina had made, his insides knotted into a tight ball of cold. There were only three shots of the dead man in the chair, and they were so clear and real that he was immediately brought back to that horrific chamber. He could almost smell the dust, could almost hear the silence. In the first photo, a side view, Gina had focused on the head and upper torso. He could see that bashed-in portion of skull, could even make out blood that had dripped onto the collar of his shirt. From this angle, the open mouth appeared not like a scream but a grotesque deformity. The next was a full body shot, and it had a “Whistler’s Mother” feel, only the portrait at the center of the composition was the corpse of a murdered man. Derek found himself studying the background, looking for that face on the wall, and wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disturbed that he was unable to spot it.

But it was the third picture that held his attention. For some reason, the flash had not worked on this one, and the scene was far too dark. The dead man in the chair was little more than a silhouette against a smudged and grainy background. Yet even in the gloom, Derek could see what looked like a dress over the man’s pants and slender feminine fingers pointing downward from the hanging arm on the side of the chair.

Gina had captured the corpse when it was changing from the bludgeoned man to a woman.

Maybe, Derek thought, the thing in the chair was some type of shapeshifting creature that absorbed the physical characteristics of the immediately departed, picking up the essence of the dead like an antenna.

No. He’d touched that last corpse. It had been human. And real.

It was the room and the gas station that was so wrong and evil, not the figures in the chair.

They were pawns ... or victims ... or something ...

The phone rang, and Gina picked it up. She didn’t call his name, so it obviously wasn’t for him, and he didn’t pay attention at first. He kept looking at the photos, including one shot of the gas station taken with a zoom lens from the boulder area. But gradually he began to realize that her tone of voice was too somber and she wasn’t saying much. He looked up just as she asked, “When did he die?”

Eavesdropping on the last part of her half of the conversation told him nothing, but finally she hung up the phone, stunned. “Sue’s husband died. Heart attack.”

His first reaction was shock—Jim was two years younger than he was—but fear beat out sadness for the emotion that immediately followed. He met Gina’s eyes. “Do you think he went ... there?”

She looked quickly away, but he knew she’d been wondering the same thing, and he glanced down at the prints in his hand, at that dark top photo where the man was changing into a woman, and he shivered.

* * *

That night, in bed, Gina turned to him just as he was about to roll over and go to sleep. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

He didn’t want to hear this.

“About the gas station.”

He remained silent, refusing to take the bait.

“Do you think everyone goes there when they die?”

“No.”

“But who does? And why?” She moved onto her side, finding a more comfortable position.

“There must be a way to find out, to test it. What if we knew someone was going to die?” she asked. “I mean imminently. One of us could wait with the person, and the other one could wait at the gas station, and we’d both have cell phones—”

Derek shook his head.

“Or, even better, we could take the person there! And when he died—or she—we could see what happens. Right at that moment.”

He didn’t like the direction in which this was headed, and he cut off the conversation then and there, saying that he was tired and needed to sleep. But in his dreams, Gina kidnapped a little boy, drove him out to the desert, strangled him in the back room of the gas station and watched with excitement as a carbon copy of the child appeared in the chair.

In the morning, when he awoke, Gina was gone. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, told himself that she was just exercising, walking around the neighborhood, maybe going over to Starbuck’s to grab a latte. But when he saw that she’d taken his Toyota instead of her old Dodge, and when she hadn’t returned after an hour, he knew what had happened, he knew where she was.

On her way to the gas station.

Derek had no idea if the Dodge would make it out of Orange County, let alone all the way out to the middle of the Mojave, but he had no choice but to follow his wife. He didn’t pretend to understand what was driving her, the impetus behind her pilgrimage. But if he was being completely honest with himself, didn’t he feel it too? The abandoned gas station terrified him, and if he had his druthers, he would never see or even think of the building ever again. Hell, he wished they’d never encountered it. But at the same time, deep down, there was an impulse to return, a barely acknowledged, almost subconscious desire to know what was happening in that back room, to see who was in the chair.

She had more than an hour’s head start. Maybe two, possibly three. Even if he drove at top speed and the car did not break down somewhere on the way, she would be at the gas station long before he was.

What would happen when she got there?

He didn’t know.

He was afraid to even think about it.

He drove as fast as the car would go, well over the speed limit, and it was only dumb luck that prevented him from getting a ticket. The trip seemed to take forever, despite his speed—wasn’t that one of Einstein’s theorems?—and it was nearly noon when he finally pulled off the highway onto the unmarked dirt road that led to the gas station. Shot shocks bouncing, he sped past the collection of boulders that had originally attracted Gina to this place, cursing both the site and the photography obsession that had led to her interest in it. Coming over the rise, he saw the forsaken gas station on the desert plain below.

And the red Toyota parked next to one of the empty islands, sunlight glinting off its windshield.

Derek’s heart was triphammering in his chest, and he was filled with a cold fear far greater than any he had previously experienced. He honked the horn as he approached, hoping the noise would draw Gina out, but he saw no movement through the broken window or open office door, and his hands were shaking as he pulled next to the Toyota and shut off the car.

He opened the driver’s door, got out. “Gina!” he called as loudly as he could. He was afraid to go inside the building, wanted her to come out and meet him, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Gina!” he called again, angrily this time.

Nothing.

The world was silent.

Derek slammed the car door, and the noise was flat, muffled by the oppressive heat and heavy air. He could still see no movement in the office, and the doorway to the back room was completely dark. He hurried in, wishing he’d thought this through more thoroughly and brought something with him. A flashlight. A weapon.

A weapon?

Yes, he thought as he sped past that by-now-familiar metal desk. Just in case.

He stopped in the doorway of the secret room. “Gina?”

He didn’t know why she’d come here, what she’d planned to do or what had actually happened, but her unmoving body lay sprawled on the dusty floor, one hand stretched out as though reaching for the digital camera that was just beyond her reach.

She was also in the chair.

With an involuntary cry of anguish, Derek fell to his knees and shoved his face next to Gina’s. The skin of her cheek was cold, and her eyelids were frozen halfway over her pupils, as though she’d died instantly in the middle of a blink. He reached for her hand, grabbed it, but it too was cold. Limp and heavy at the same time. She was dead, but he had no idea how she’d died, and he looked to the body in the chair for clues. Other than the fact that she was sitting up instead of lying on the floor, however, there was nothing that to his eyes indicated a cause of death.

He was too stunned to cry, though he was having a difficult time drawing breath and a low continuous moan was escaping from between his lips. He knew that he should have expected this, but somehow he hadn’t, and the shock seemed to have rendered him incapable of coherent thought.

He suddenly realized that the body in the chair could disappear at any time, replaced by the corpse of another, and he quickly grabbed this Gina around the waist and, with considerable difficulty lowered her to the floor. On impulse, he kicked over the chair and shoved it into a comer of the small room.

He turned to look at his wife. Both versions of her. Other than their postures, they were exactly the same, down to the half-mast eyelids and the partially open mouth. His gaze was drawn by the dull silver of the camera that lay just beyond the reach of what he considered Gina’s real body. It was her digital camera, not her 35mm, and it dawned on him that if she’d taken any photos, he would be able to look at them.

Did he really want to?

It was not a question Derek even considered. He picked up the camera and pressed the button to scroll back through the last pictures taken. He overshot his mark and had to scroll forward through a series of photos taken on Mother’s Day: Gina with her mom, unwrapping presents, eating at a salad buffet. The sadness was sharp and painful, bringing with it logistical and practical issues as well as memories. Then he was past the personal pictures and in the desert. The gas station. The front office. The back room. There was a child in the chair, a dark-skinned nearly naked boy who appeared to have died from malnutrition. And the last shot: the boy disappearing, Gina taking his place, both figures ethereal and nearly transparent.

Derek stared at the small camera screen, trying to figure out what was happening in the picture. As far as he could tell, the dead Gina had started to appear in the chair even as the real Gina was alive and photographing the scene. He had no idea how that was possible or what it meant, but Gina had not taken another photo. Whatever had happened to her had happened then or immediately after. He looked down at the body lying on the ground, arm outstretched. She must have seen something, because after she’d been struck or smitten or however incapacitated, she’d still attempted to reach for her fallen camera. Her last act had been attempting to take a picture, and he was filled with guilt that he had ever belittled her passion.

His eyes went to the section of wall that resembled a face. The visage looked exactly as it had before, rotted wood and shadow and mold combining to create that disturbingly intense countenance. Only from this angle, the black eyes appeared to be looking straight at him with what could have been anger, could have been hunger.

He wanted to tear down this building, wanted to come back with a f*****g bulldozer and raze it. He even considered running out to the cars, getting the tire irons out of each trunk and coming back to smash that chair and gouge out that face, whaling on the walls, ripping off those boards and destroying as much of the room as he could.

But he didn’t. Instead, he looked down at the bodies of his wife, trying to read the expression shared by both faces. She had died in mid-blink, he decided, and that partial hooding of her eyes made it difficult to ascribe an emotion to her death. Body language said more. The sitting Gina appeared rapt, as though viewing or hearing something absolutely fascinating. The Gina lying on the floor and reaching for the camera seemed desperate to record something of vital importance. Neither of them appeared to be in pain, but while his wife had not died in agony, she had died, and he would probably never know why or how.

He walked over to the face on the wall and spit on it.

This close, it did not even resemble a face. The individual components looked like what they were: rot and mold, shadow and grain. But nothing was what it seemed here.

He glanced toward the overturned chair in the comer, then walked over, picked it up and set it right again, in exactly the same spot it had been in before.

He should get out of here, drive back to civilization, call the police, make arrangements. But he looked at the two Ginas and knew he couldn’t leave. No matter how much he hated this place. No matter how scared he was.

Like her, he had to know.

Taking a deep breath, he sat in the chair.

And waited.

* * *

There was a time, back in the 1970s, when we were convinced that the abandoned gas station would be as much the symbol of the last part of the 20th century as a forsaken Oklahoma farm house fogged in black swirling dust was of the 1930s. But things didn’t work out that way. The ghost gas station now stands kitty corner to the Speedway, where you can get two slices of pizza for breakfast and gas at just under five bucks a gallon. So why shouldn’t Bentley Little’s old gas station serve as portal to who-knows-and-what-the-hell ... right?