The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 13-14, 2016)
10: Out in the Dark
While at the Shack everyone slept . . .
The Harley blasted over the hills of Gravity Falls, sometimes on the main roads, sometimes on isolated logging trails, rarely going below seventy mph. Saturday nights in Gravity Falls Valley weren't exactly rush hour. Only five times in all did the motorcycle come within sight of cars or trucks, startling every driver but causing no accidents.
Once midnight struck, the sparse traffic vanished. The cycle had the world to itself as it—explored, maybe?—as it evidently attempted to find every highway, street, road, lane, and dirt track in Roadkill County. It didn't succeed, but not for lack of trying. About three a.m. on Sunday, it pulled up to the Valley's only Britco-Am gas station, the one that is open all night.
The clerk on duty was Merton Vetch, fifty, three times divorced, currently single, overweight, suffering from heart disease and a touch of alcoholism, a lifelong victim of insomnia—his inside clock was just set different, he said. He usually got to sleep about sunup and snoozed fitfully until four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Come nightfall, he was wakeful even without coffee. It had been that way since high school, which he did not finish on account of falling asleep at his desk every day. He'd dropped out during his second tour of tenth grade.
Now, when a guy sleeps all day, what littie sleep he gets, it's always interrupted and the poor guy wakes up every other hour thinking it's four already, and damn, it's just noon, anyway, when that's the schedule, it is hard to hold a regular job. Vetch had tried part-timing it but couldn't even make the rent. Finally he found the few night-owl jobs available in Gravity Falls Valley: Night watchman, repo man, liquor-store clerk (he lasted two nights before being fired because samples were not allowed) and finally gas-station attendant.
He'd leveled off and was never actually drunk on the job, but being a little bit buzzed was no big deal, so long as he could count change. Mostly he was satisfied to be making enough money for a roof over his head and food on the table. Vetch had worked for the station now for going on five years, and the beauty part, as far as he was concerned, was that for the 10 p.m.-6 a.m. shift just about all he had to do was sit, get himself something to eat around one o'clock (he usually brought in a sandwich and bought himself a cola), and catch up on his reading. Cushy job with very little bother. His boss didn't mind, and the head office of BritCo-Am was way up in Canada, and nobody from there ever came in to check up on him.
All he ever had to do was sit back, prop his feet up, and either watch the little TV mounted on the wall or, maybe two or twelve times a night, hop up (slowly) when the bell dinged to signal that a customer had pulled up to the pump island. Then trot out, put the gas in the tank, fill 'er up, ten bucks worth, whatever, though these days with regular at $2.9999 a gallon, ten bucks didn't go all that far. Anyway, take the money, run the credit card, and once in a blue moon if a customer asked, squeegee the windshield or check the oil or the air in a tire. Hardly ever happened, really. So most of his time was spent slouched on his chair, watching TV or on other nights, reading.
That night, Vetch was reading an Outdoor Oregon magazine from May 2015. The station's owner, "Mack" McKefree, subscribed to, like, a dozen different magazines, all on outdoorsy subjects like hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, or just, well, outdoors. He never threw anything away but once a year his missus made him clean out the stacks that had accumulated over the past twelve months, and he boxed them up and brought them into the station.
Now, it is true that Vetch did not hunt, fish, hike, or even get outdoors much, but he would read, in his high-school dropout slow way, just about anything, forgetting it as he went along. It took up the time, and he figured he earned his $10.95 an hour (a buck over minimum wage because it was the night shift, after all, and nobody else wanted it) just by slogging through the articles.
He read mainly in long uninterrupted stretches. With the business happening almost entirely out at the pumps, he usually had the office all to himself unless some kid came into the office for a liter Pitt's or a pack of condoms—the station was well-known to high-school kids as being a don't ask-don't tell Dad sort of place. They even had regulars.
One little snot-nosed pimpleface always told Vetch, "Uh, they're for my mom," which Vetch found frankly sort of disturbing, but it wasn't his business. Anyway, unless a customer came in for something like that, generally it was just pump the gas, take the money, and scratch your butt, make change when necessary. So it was good to have something to read, even if the stories were about "Wildflower Friends Along the Road" and even if two minutes after you finished the article you knew no more about wildflowers (whether friends or foes) than before you cracked the magazine.
That night he was on the next-to-last page of the magazine article when he heard the 'cycle blatt up. It did not cross the He glanced away for a moment and saw it already stopped well short of Pump 1 / 2, a few feet from the pneumatic hose which, if run over, rang the Milton driveway bell, the ding-ding that told him to get to work at the pump.
What the hell, did the guy not even want gas? Vetch couldn't see who was with the bike without getting up out of his seat, and that seemed like too much trouble. Either the customer would pull up to the pump or maybe he'd just go away If he pulled up, the bell would ring, if he went away, good riddance to some jerk. Let's see, what was that about vibrant purple lavender? Funny, he didn't even know that flowers could vibrate . . . .
But as he read, a full minute passed. More. Vaguely disturbed, finally Vetch stood up. Yeah, there was the damn hog, pink of all things, leaning on its kickstand short of the pump, as if waiting for someone to come out. No rider in sight. Maybe he went to the can—but no, he couldn't have, because the key to the bathrooms hung on the wall behind Vetch, chained to a two-foot-long section of cut-off broom handle so's the customer wouldn't stick it in his pocket absent-mindedly. Maybe the guy was off taking a leak in the bushes out back of the station. Who cared.
Vetch sat down for another five minutes, slowly turning magazine pages without reading, barely noticing the color photos. Then he stood up again. Damn 'cycle was still out there. He squinted. The front window could have been cleaner, and an enormous cloud of little white moths were swirling around the outside lights above the gas island, making the glare oddly flickery. Was that somebody standing beside or behind the pump? Not using it, not pumping any gas, but just standing there patiently? Seemed to Vetch that he could make out a blurry maybe-human shape.
Something about the bike tickled his memory. Pink . . . oh, yeah. There was that crazy batch of loons from, where was it? South of town somewhere, outside the Valley. Statin's Ankles or something like that, they called themselves. Their stupid bikes were pink. Rumor was that a manufacturing error had led the company to paint a few dozen bikes pink instead of red, so they discounted them. Or maybe, heck, who knows these days, the bikers just were pink kinda guys.
Vetch sat staring out the window, tried to outwait the guy. Nothing doing. Fifteen minutes later the figure—he thought, anyway—still stood there, like a patient statue. Maybe he was sick. Or more probably drunk.
Grunting, Vetch reached under the counter and pulled out the secret drawer that everybody in the Valley knew about. It contained a Taurus Raging Bull revolver, an ugly sort of hand cannon already loaded: first two .454 magnum cartridges, which would drop about anything up to a rhino, and then four .410 shotgun shells loaded with four 000 buckshot pellets each, in case your aim is shaky and you need a little spread. If just one of those heavy pellets went home, it would ruin somebody's day, or so Mack had told all his clerks.
Vetch got up, the weight of the sidearm heavy in his right hand. He opened the door and stood there, squinting. Yeah, somebody was standing slightly behind the pump, silently, the figure oddly dim as though the fluorescent light didn't fully hit it. Kind of a hard-to-make-out gray-green. "Hey!" Vetch yelled. "What's the deal, guy? You want gas? Pull up to the pump."
The weird character just stood there, unmoving.
"You can't park where you are, it's illegal," Vetch yelled. "You want me to call the cops on you?"
No response. It was getting kind of creepy.
"OK, I'm gonna call the police," Vetch said. He went inside, but paused to look back through the glass. What the hell?
The guy was moving—but not exactly like he was going to come in and plunk down like eighteen bucks so's Vetch could go and pump five gallons of gas, those Harleys took premium.
He walked with strange steps, kicking his legs almost out at random, his upper body reeling around as if barely attached at the waist, his arms dangling and swinging.
Drunk for sure, Vetch thought.
The guy's arms swung loose at his side, and his head lolled back as if he were studying the sky for omens. His stride looked so bizarre that it popped gooseflesh up on Vetch's arms: the figure swung out its left leg, planted its foot, nearly took a knee, then straightened, arms a-dangle, and flung out its right leg.
The man, if it was a man, walked an erratic path, zig-zagging, but still making for the station door, like a sailboat tacking across a wind and making bad progress. What got Vetch was that he looked so loose, an ill-strung marionette operated by an insane puppeteer.
Vetch retreated behind the counter, opening the drawer to find the key to the front door, he didn't want that crazy man in here—
All the lights in the station went out. All. The gas island, the pumps, the exteriors, the interiors, even the pump monitors. All out.
Suddenly it was as black as nightmare.
"Damn!" Vetch fumbled for the phone, found it, held it to his ear. A dial tone, anyways. It was an old phone, if the buttons had ever lit, they didn't any longer. He punched the number by feel, 9-1-1. The phone rang once.
With his free hand, Vetch laid the gun down on the desk and scrambled around in the top left drawer. Mack smoked stogies, and he always kept—yeah, he felt it, the big box of kitchen matches, why didn't they answer the phone?
He scratched the match across the top of the desk, and it flared to yellow light.
From the darkness inches from his eyes, the customer's face materialized.
The match illuminated a greenish-pale head that looked melted, hairless, a gaping mouth, green gums full of fangs, no incisors or bicuspids or molars, just inward-curving, pearly fangs, and the eyes, the eyes, the eyes—
There were no eyes!
The mouth stretched wide and the teeth clamped down and the operator was saying, "What is your emergency?"
Vetch got off one shot that hit the creature right in the chest and didn't bother it. The big window grew a spiderwebbed crack around the exit hole. The .454 slug had enough impetus left to cross the highway and chunk a four-inch diameter hole clean through a young redwood.
"Sir? Sir?" The 911 operator, probably concerned because of the gurgling screams. Then something ripped the phone cord out.
A full minute later, what was left of Vetch shambled out of the station, feet crunching on scattered glass. While the eerie form—now shifting, nearly gaseous, no longer human-shaped —mounted the motorcycle and moved it over the pneumatic hose (ding-ding, rang the Milton bell inside, faint and forlorn and funereal), the thing that used to be Vetch filled the tank with premium. He capped the tank and did not hang up the pump. Green vapor flowed out of his open mouth and nose and joined the cloud hovering above the Harley.
The motorcycle roared away.
Vetch fell to pieces.
Eventually a coyote wandered up, attracted by the scent of meat. But when it found what was left of Vetch, it turned and fled away in fear and disgust.
The sky was just beginning to pale when the motorcycle roared back into the parking lot behind the Skull Fracture.
Something no longer solid got off. The bike fell on its side and lay there.
Like a drift of luminous mist, the shapeless thing glided to the back door. Which was closed and locked.
But not airtight. The stuff, glowing a faint blue-green, no longer even remotely resembling a human shape, flowed into the crack beneath the door. Because even uncanny things must follow some rules, and one was no going outside during daylight hours.
And so it returned. Spread and thinned until it was just a haze in the air. Searched for a place to settle and wait.
Wait for someone else to come and find it.