After all, she’d seen it reshape itself into something new. She’d felt it catch her when she’d been about to fall. It wasn’t sofar-fetched to imagine it could also do a lot of other weird things, when you least expected them.
Like driving itself. While suddenly playing cheerful music, most likely to make this seem normal and not scary. And then slapping her hand with a seat belt when she tried to lean across and get hold of the wheel. Just lightly, nothing, really, but then again it didn’t have to be. It happened, and she couldn’t help her yelp of uncanny eldritch-induced horror. And the radio abruptly crackling, then switching to the song “Please Forgive Me,” absolutely did nothing to help that.
It was worse, in fact. Now she had to reckon with the idea that the car wasn’t just some amorphous shape-shifting thing.
It was sentient enough to attempt apologies.
Though at least that meant she could try reasoning with it.
“Listen, truck, I can’t just let him be killed by devil dogs,” she said. Then goggled when the track changed to “Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right.” Followed by another crackle, and then “Don’t Worry.”
She didn’t know how worrying was not supposed to happen, however, while she was trapped in a truck with a sassy personality, as Jack got murdered by monsters. “You can play whatever you like, I’m getting out of here,” she told it. But in answer it just played “You Need to Calm Down.” And she felt pretty sure it had just tightened her seat belt. So she made the only move she could.
She reached for her pen.
And it tried to stop her, it did.
It snatched at her hand with the handle that should have been on the side of the door. But it missed, and now all she had to do was write.On the air is enough, her memories told her, and she obeyed. She scribbled words in front of her as if there was a pagethere.Stop and let me out, she put in a way that seemed to make a silvery trail behind every word.
But the moment the sentence was done, that clown honk sounded. Followed by another track change, just to really rub salt in the wound. “Stupid Girl,” the radio played, and at an ever so slightly higher note and faster speed than usual. So it came out all jaunty and mocking.
“I hate you, truck,” she told it as she tried again.
This time, she went with something simple.Release me, I command you, she wrote. And for just a moment, that silvery writing lingered, it brightened. She held her breath, ready to claim victory. Then the honk blared out.
“You’re Never Gonna Get It” played, for that one.
“When I get Jack out of this, him and me are gonna have a serious talk about how sadistic you are,” she said. Much to its amusement. It piped out “Bad” by Michael Jackson as she tried to take a slow, calming breath. To really think, and focus, the way Jack had said she needed to.
The way she almost remembered doing as a kid.
Emotion. Intention. Knack,she thought. Over and over, until it was almost like a mantra. Until it felt like she was slipping down, somehow. Into a different way of thinking, a different way of being.The way you used to be, some part of her said, and as it did everything seemed to go sort of quiet and still.
The music fell away.
The world went somewhere else.
It was just her and her pen. Back then, an old ballpoint she’d found in the woods.
Right now, that strange one of Jack’s, with the word on it that she almost understood now. It was hisinventedplace of work. The sort of imaginary, half-cobbled-together building he thoughtreal human beings went to every day.No wonder it sounded like something from a Stephen King story, she thought.It probably was. Then, somehow, she just wrote.
Take me to wherever my heart is, she put.
And this time there was no honk.
There was a sound like a hurricane caught in a jar, and somehow she was spinning, hard enough that it made her stomach lurch into her sides and her back.Like Dorothy on her way to Oz, she thought, the idea so sweet she almost teared up over it. She came to a stop with her eyes stinging.
But she had no time to let that hold her up.
Her feet touched the ground, and she had about ten seconds to register that she was on the road, in what should have been sunlight but was somehow now an eerie dusk, about ten feet away from an entirely demonic Jack.
Before a lot of things happened, all at once.
He bellowed “No!” just as something sprang from somewhere behind him, aiming for her. Then, just as she jerked back, half stumbling over her own shoes, Jack lifted his hand aloft, as if reaching for something. And something appeared. It formed itself in his fist, so fast it seemed to blink there.
Though even that wasn’t fast enough. He had to swing the hammer he now held at an impossibly steep angle, just to get close. It looked like it had almost dislocated his shoulder to do it.
But it smashed into that creature all the same.
