For a second, I thought someone had planted a telephone pole in the middle of the road. I was leaning on the accelerator hard enough that it just looked tall and brown and straight, with a crossbar near the top.
As the distance between us collapsed, it came into relief, the center mass focusing into a long, brown coat, the crossbar, an identically colored, wide-brimmed hat. The monochrome was only broken by a long gray beard that sprouted from a similarly colored face. If I hadn’t been paying attention I would have plowed right through him.
It didn’t even occur to me to go around. I just slammed on the brakes, bringing the old Dodge to a rocking halt a few feet from him. I inhaled to scream at him through the windshield, to call him the crazy old man that he was, but he pinned me to the driver’s seat with crackling blue eyes.
My mouth was still hanging open when he finally moved. He bent down to pick up a sack that was so big I don’t know how I missed it sitting at his feet.
I watched him walk with it to the back of the Dodge, the windows of the car acting like some kind of prism he and the sack changed shape through, tall and thin to fat and short and everything in-between, the sack he was lumbering under becoming impossibly large in its proportions.
I don’t remember opening the trunk, but he dropped the mammoth sack in, then closed the lid with a heavy thunk. I blinked and he was by the passenger side door, folding himself until the end of his beard touched his knees and he slid into the seat next to mine.
The only thing I could think to say was, “How did you know I was going to stop?”
His voice was like something digging out of the ground, rumbling and inexorable, something that was there whether you wanted it to be or not. “They always stop.”
I looked out the window at the high, forested hills, the trees bare as dark skeletons, the longest night of the year settling in. I couldn’t imagine many people headed this way. Which is why I chose it.
I found bringing my gaze back to the old man hard to do, so I stared out at the road. “So where are you going?”
“Into the dark of the woods. There’s a road there. A special one. It’ll take us to all the places we need to go.”
I blinked, trying to shake off whatever whammy this old man had put on me. “Hey, I don’t know where you think I’m taking you – ”
The old man put an iron grip on my shifting arm, pulling me to his heavy gaze. He spoke forcefully enough it moved the whiskers of his beard. “You were a good boy once, Gerald. Before the war, before the divorce, before the pain and the pills. I know it. And so does the man in charge.”
“But that hole you’re in, son? You can’t hurt your way out of it. You know that. But you got to make up for the things you’ve done someway.
“So I’m here, cause I need your help. The world’s a dark place these days, and it’s squeezin’ the light. There ain’t no elves, no reindeer besides. Not no more. Maybe never again.
“So you’ll take me where I need to go. It’ll be the longest night of your life. I can’t say what you’ll look like on the other side of it. It does different things to different people. But we’ll travel some long paths to bring the light to those who need it.
“And I haven’t met a driver yet that regretted doin’ it.”
He lifted his hand from me then, and I locked on the blue eyes nestled in the wreath of his beard. There was a kindness there that I hadn’t seen before, a softness that made me realize he was giving me a choice.
I moved my hand back to the stick shift and my eyes to the road. “I guess we better get goin’ then.”
To see the author’s published work, go here.
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