David Wisehart - Blood Alley

The diner had the creeping quality of déjà vu. Claire hadn’t felt it when she first stepped inside, but now the sense was overpowering.

Fowler…

A name from her childhood. A name she’d once heard whispered when Mama Johnson thought Claire was asleep on the sofa.

Fowler…

She had been five years old then, and thought Mama Johnson was her real mother. One day looking for a missing crayon, she saw a paper with her name on it: “Claire.” It caught her eye because she’d just learned to spell her own name. The name on the paper looked like “Fowler, Claire,” but she wasn’t sure what the first part meant. She thought maybe it was a different person with her name. She’d taken the paper and showed it to Mama Johnson, but Mama just got mad and sent her to her room.

Claire never saw that paper again, nor did ever she see the name “Fowler, Claire” in that house again, but Mama Johnson had been very upset about it, so the memory remained.

Fowler…

Claire sipped black coffee and wondered about her earliest childhood memories. Could she trust them? Were they real, or the inventions of a lonely little girl?

Her true family might be here somewhere, down this desert highway. She had bounced between so many different families. Two years here, three years there. But she never belonged to any of them.

Is this where I belong? she wondered.

Fowler…

Claire had searched for that name on the Internet. There were Fowlers scattered all across the country, and a few living near Cedarview, where tomorrow’s funeral would be. She hoped that this road trip might give her a chance to meet the Cedarview Fowlers.

And even if that proved to be another dead end, she understood now that it really was the search that mattered. If she kept at it long enough, and learned from her mistakes, and never gave up hope, then one day she might finally arrive at the truth.

Fowler…

The diner’s familiarity intrigued her.

What is it about this place?

Then she realized—

The roadside memorial .

It had rattled her. There was something about seeing the ghost bike and imagining that poor boy who got hit.

She felt connected to him somehow.

In her purse Claire kept a notepad, a diary of her search. She pulled it out.

“What’s that?” Dakota asked.

“None of your business.”

Claire jotted down: Roadside memorial. Ghost bike. Boy killed on highway outside Dinah’s Diner. Blood Alley.

Dakota removed her ear buds. “I used to have a diary, but I could never keep it going. I tried a blog once, but I got bored with it.” She set the cell phone aside, and craned her neck to see the diary. “Is that about me?”

“It’s private.”

“Why?”

“It’s about my parents.”

“Oh, right.” Dakota nodded and sat back. “Trevor told me. You’re adopted.”

“Fostered.”

“Like with pets?”

Claire clicked her pen and closed her diary. “I’ve got a foster family. The government pays them to be my parents. They do it for the money.”

“I wish I was adopted,” Dakota said wistfully. “My parents are nothing like me.”

The front door opened. Trevor entered the diner with Ethan right behind him. Trevor was grinning.

Always the optimist.

Ethan looked like he’d just run a marathon and collapsed a foot from the finish line.

“Everything’s fine,” Trevor said, sitting down beside Claire in the booth.

Ethan sat down next to Dakota, and put his arm around her.

Dakota removed his arm. “You’re all sweaty.”

“Yeah,” said Ethan. “Doing man’s work, while you ladies cool your calluses in the air conditioning.”

“I don’t have calluses.”

“Exactly.”

Trevor said to Claire, “We should be on the road by dark.”

The waitress stepped up to the table and said in a solemn tone, “There’s a motel back the way you came. Not more than five miles. You could start out in the morning.”

Ethan pulled out a deck of SAT flash cards from his back pocket. “We have a funeral in the morning.”

He flipped through the cards, testing himself.

The waitress said, “You know there’s an eclipse tonight. Lunar eclipse.”

“Yeah,” Dakota said. “We heard it on the news.”

“There’s things they don’t tell you on the news…”

The old trucker set his beer down on the counter. He kept his back to the others. There was dust and gravel in his voice. “I wouldn’t drive Blood Alley tonight.”

Ethan looked up. The flash cards froze in his hands. “Blood Alley?”

“That’s what we call it,” said the waitress. “On account of all the accidents.”

She pointed to a wall with photos and news clippings.

The wall was twenty feet off, but Claire could make out a few words from the headlines:

ACCIDENT…

TRAGIC…

KILLED…

HORROR…

It was another memorial, an homage to gruesome events. Claire saw a dozen photos of car accidents, but couldn’t make out the details.

“The road is dry and thirsty,” the old trucker said. “It drinks blood.”

The room went quiet, and Claire’s heart stopped to listen.

The waitress started it up again with a laugh. “Oh, don’t mind old Joshua.” She waved a dismissive hand at the trucker. “He likes to scare the tourists.”

Claire heard the wind howl. A mournful sound for a mournful place.

“It’s a haunted highway,” said the trucker, Joshua.

“Haunted?” Dakota echoed.

“By the Highwayman.”

“Killed his family during a lunar eclipse,” the waitress put in. “Then killed himself. They say he comes back when the red shadow’s on the moon.”

“The Highwayman?” Trevor scoffed with amusement. “Never heard of him.”

“He’s heard of you. You’re on his road.”

“It’s a state road,” said Ethan.

Joshua shook his head, but kept his back to the group. “You kids know nothing. State road? In the daytime, maybe. But one night, when the dark is quiet and the moon is full, and your sins lay heavy upon your soul, you might just meet the Highwayman, riding his ghost car down Blood Alley. Lots of people seen him. Few live to tell the tale. Those what don’t…why, they’re still riding that road. Riding it forever.”

Dakota said, “But that’s just a story, right?”

Joshua answered low and mournful. “He gets inside you…deep inside your head…makes you do things…crazy things…”

“Like what?” Trevor asked.

“Take a turn too fast on a dead man’s curve…play chicken with a pretty pair of headlights…drive off a cliff to see if you can fly…but you gotta fight him off. Gotta know who you are—who you really are.”

The waitress leaned in toward Claire. “You see anything strange, Honey, you take the very first exit—”

“No exit,” Joshua said. “No escape. The only way off Blood Alley is through it.”

He set a twenty dollar bill on the countertop and stood up from his chair.

“You’ve seen him?” Claire asked. “The Highwayman?”

“Once.” Joshua turned to her. Burn scars covered his ruined face. “I best be going before it gets dark.”

Claire watched Joshua shamble to the door. He limped like a wounded knight-errant heading out for one last battle.

Joshua pushed on the door handle. The door seemed to fight him. He forced the door wide against a fierce wind that rattled the bell and riled the trinkets on the counter.

A souvenir display rack spun like a pinwheel and toppled.

Postcards fluttered to the floor.

Joshua passed through the exit, and the door threw itself shut, rattling the windows.