Kettle Drive, Twin Peaks
Brian Michael Riley
Keep it up and you'll end up like Laura Palmer.
That was always the threat from as far back as she could remember.
Steevee figured the first time she heard it was, shit, when she was six years old, maybe seven, somewhere around there. The girl always had a tendency to wander, that was the thing. In Twin Peaks you got a whole lot of time on your hands and not a whole helluva lot to do. It's a boring little pit stop of a town, pretty much outer west bum-fuck between Osh Gosh and Nowhere. So Steevee had always just sort of wandered around. She found comfort in drifting here and there – if only to feel like she was going somewhere, anywhere but Twin Peaks. She would explore. Up and down Kettle Drive where she lived. Down around the three mile loop of Waverly Circle. Lap after lap of daydreamy strolls up some overgrown dirt road in the woods. To the end of this dead end or that one. Across one debunked train bridge or another. But no matter how far she wandered, she could never get lost. Not ever.
No such luck.
This of course was not how Steevee's mom saw it. Mother would always come tearing around in the Rav4, screaming bloody fucking murder for Steevee, honking like a maniac, drilling any neighbor who'd answer their door.
"You best keep an eye on that one, Pam," Mister Randall told her more than once. "You don't want another Laura Palmer on your hands."
And this would send Mother right into overdrive. She'd spend the rest of her search with a fingertip on the speed dial for the TPPD. And make no mistake, this panic was the real deal. Even Steevee had to admit that. The idea of Steevee meeting Laura Palmer's fate – or even the suggestion of such creepiness - was as serious as a heart attack. What had happened to Laura Palmer two decades ago was no fucking joke.
This is mostly why Steevee was so nervous tonight, standing down Kettle Drive at the blind intersection of Cranberry Court at ten before midnight on a Sunday. Not only was this a school night, this little excursion of hers was breaking just about every rule in the book. Bottom line, Steevee was skirting the danger zone. Shit, she could even be headed for certain disaster, who knows?
And truth be told, it turned her on..
The fact that she was giving the finger to the biggest urban legend since goddamn Sasquatch and the Chupacabra combined. The legend of the late, great, wrapped-in-plastic-prom-queen-coke-fiend, Laura Pamler.
Otherwise known as "Bob-meat".
Ugh, that's the term that totally bugged Steevee right the hell out.
Bob-meat.
Horrible.
That's who comes for you and ends you up like Laura Palmer.
Bob.
Bob killed Laura – even though it was really her dad who killed her – and then her cousin Madeline or something like that. Mister Palmer was possessed by Bob - or pretended to be Bob, or thought he was Bob, or called himself Bob or some fuckin' thing. At the end of the day, if you were going to end up like Laura Palmer, that meant you were ultimately Bob-meat. It meant you had met up with big, bad Bob. Sliced and diced and wrapped in plastic. But even worse, you were raped in some kind of awful and horrifying ritualistic way. The most awful rape you could possibly ever imagine. Of course any kind of rape was awful.
But nothing compared to what happened at the hands of Bob.
His sexual cruelties were the stuff of nightmares. Nightmares that haunted the kids of Twin Peaks for over twenty years now.
He was Twin Peaks' boogeyman. And right about now Stevee was crappin' her jeans at the thought of him.
"Come onnn, Jarrod," she said out loud, stepping up and down off the curb, dragging heavy on a Marlboro.
Jarrod and Darlene were due any second. Eleven thirty actually, about twenty minutes ago. There's no way in hell Steevee missed them. She snuck out of her room at exactly 11:30 and it only took maybe three or four minutes to reach the intersection of Cranberry, and Jarrod would've waited, no doubt about it. Shit, Jarrod would've waited hours for Steevee, she had made sure of that over the last couple months. She gave the idiot the best blowjobs he ever got. He'd even said as much. He'd never known a mouth quite like Steevee's. She could strip the bark off an oak hiking stick if she had the mind to. But if the son of a bitch kept her waiting at this intersection much longer, he wasn't getting squat tonight. Thoughts of spooky Bob, as well as the November midnight cold were really starting to creep into Steevee's skin, right down to her precious little bones. She was absolutely trembling.
"Jesus!" she said, realizing just how much she was shaking. Cold breath replaced the cigarette smoke in the air. It has to be close to freezing out here, she figured. She had to be out of her mind thinking she wouldn't need a jacket or socks. "Yep, I'm totally out of my fucking mind."
Like in agreement, an owl sounded out from above.
The thing wouldn't shut up, actually. It had been perched above the intersection before Steevee even arrived. Every now and again she would catch the blue and green flash of its eyes adjusting in the night. Strangely comforting, Steevee thought, a big old owl watching over her while she waited for her friends. She even heard its wings once as it flapped the cold off its feathers. It was a massive sound. Steevee compared it to what angel wings must sound like. Thick and serious. Beautiful and strange.
She wondered how old the owl was. How long do those things live anyway? Canaries live to be like thirty or something, Steevee knew, though she couldn't remember how she knew. Darlene maybe?
Darlene was Steevee's besty and Darlene was way smarter than Steevee in just about everything. That was one of the main reasons why Steevee stuck so close to the girl for all these years, ever since elementary school. Darlene was book smart and street smart. She was an orphan when she was like four or five because her parents died in a freaky crash with a logging truck. Darlene was an honest to God survivor. After the funeral she moved in with her wacky Aunt, and that bitch was completely crazy – like hi-I-carry-a-log-everywhere crazy - so Darlene wound up pretty much taking care of herself all her life. Steevee considered herself lucky to have a besty like Darlene, specially now in their senior year of high school. The real world was practically right around the corner and Steevee was super glad that Darlene and she would be taking it on together..
Besties til the endsies.
Unlike this fucking jerk off, Jarrod. He's lucky if he makes it through tomorrow.
"Guys, where are youuu?"
Steevee flicked the butt of her smoke into the the street and the owl gave a cry at the ricochet of embers. And then there came the great sound of its wings again – but this time different. The owl had taken flight. Steevee covered her head a, feeling as if the owl was descending right on top of her. That's what it sounded like. Fast and terrifying swoops all around, like the girl was on a helicopter landing pad – but only for an instant.
Because in the next instant she was alone in the dark.
Truly alone now.
"Oh, don't go," she kind of pleaded. "I thought we were friends."
Friends.
Ha.
Where the fuck were Steevee's friends? It had to be close to midnight by now. She slid her cell out of her back pocket to check the time. That was about all the thing was good for at the moment – for checking the time. There was never any reception up where she lived – as was the case with most of Twin Peaks. Unless you lived right in the middle of town, like right around the R&R, you were usually fatally reception bar-deprived. And sure enough, Steevee was completely bar-deprived when she checked.
Bar-deprived and apparently out of order.
Or something.
2:13 AM.
Um. WHAT?
She slid the phone closed and popped it back open. Again the screen lit up with 2:13 AM. It made no sense whatsoever. No sense at all. It had just read eleven forty something like just a few minutes ago, the last time she checked, she was sure of it. So one more time Steevee slid the phone's cover back and forth.
2:14.
"What the fucking hell." Then two more times she slid the cover. "Since when is it all of a sudden daylight savings?"
Sure, like that made any sense. Daylight savings. What are the rules of that? Spring forward, fall back. But even then it should be earlier than it was. If anything, it should've been 10:40 or something. Fall back.
Steevee stood very still. Very silent and very still. She noticed no breath in the air because she was not breathing. The feeling was like waking up from an after school nap – one where it's daylight when you conk out, then nighttime when you wake up, but jolt awake because you're falling off a ledge but it's really just the sofa and it's just totally disorienting. And for a second, one brief and frightening second, you're just lost.
Yes. That's it.
Steevee was lost.
So she thought it through again, this time out loud. Whenever she thought stuff out loud, it helped her feel not as nuts. It was most helpful when stoned or tripping on Molly. Talking to herself helped Steevee get her bearings.
"Okay first of all it is not two fourteen in the morning, that's impossible, we know that for sure. How do we know that? Because of the clock in my room before I snuck out the window. The digital clock on my nightstand said eleven thirty – I know it did because I waited until exactly eleven thirty to open the window. Okay, right, so then even if it is midnight already, which I know it can't be, and it was daylight savings and we somehow sprung forward – it would still only be like one AM."
Gaining this perspective, Steevee only became more frightened. The situation was just making less sense.
"Dude, you're freaking out. Just hold on. Just hold the fuck on. The only other explanation is some sort of reception thing, something having to do with the zero bars. Like the phone memory or clock function or whatever is out of whack because we're out of range up here. It probably has something to do with something electronic that I don't even know anything about. It's just a malfunction. Who knows?"
And then the phone's alarm came screaming out. The setting was an old fashioned dinner bell and it scared the shit out of the girl. Fumbling to turn it off, she caught sight of the blinking alarm notification.
November 11, 2:15 A.
Date with Bob.
She couldn't help but scream and toss the phone out into the street. It bounced across the pavement, shattering, spitting off its backing and battery.
The girl's head was suddenly pounding and dangerously so. Like maybe an aneurism. Like something deep inside had burst, some vein or vessel in her brain had sprung a leak. She could feel heat, gushing liquid heat, filling up behind her eyeballs, cascading down her nasal cavity to the top of her throat, like the stinging drip of an Oxy line or bump of speed. Figuring she'd better sit her ass down until this passed, the girl stepped off the curb and the step took forever –
And her foot never found the street –
Because she was falling, falling.
Falling.
TO BE CONTINUED