James Jenkins: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

Ermes Lenzi couldn’t take it anymore.

After fifteen years as a truck driver, after hundreds of thousands of kilometers traveled, he felt like a needle that was always running over the same vinyl record. A disc of tar, whose grooves were the highways devoured by the old Scania, the only songs the roar of the motor and the dull throbbing of his back pain.

Whose sad, bleary eyes were studying him from the rearview mirror? No, they couldn’t be his.

When you no longer recognize your own reflection, you’d better start worrying, my friend , he mused, noticing a movement in his lower abdomen, as if someone were stirring his bowels and his conscience with a red-­hot ladle.

‘Fuck,’ he murmured, his voice weary from an eternity of truck stop sandwiches, burnt coffee, and smog. ‘Fuck these streets that are always the same. This goddamn backache. Daniela. Everything.’

From the sun visor on the passenger side his seven-­year-­old son Simone looked on, hugging a headless woman. The photo had been taken one sunny morning, one of those days when the sky is so blue it hurts your eyes. Ermes remembered that moment well, a piece from a period in which he had been happy and which now seemed to belong to another life, another puzzle.

In the background of the image some trees stood out, an emerald-­green field, and the gentle curves of two hills.

The woman’s fingernails were manicured, painted fluor­escent yellow. Simone’s hair was so red that it recalled a violent sunset, his cerulean blue eyes seemed to rival the sky.

Ermes had torn his wife’s face off the snapshot in a fit of rage, crying and swearing. A year had already passed since she left him, taking along with her the house, his son, and a good part of his dignity.

‘You’re never here, Ermes. I can’t raise Simone on my own. We’re not a family anymore . . . I don’t know what we are. I . . . don’t think I love you anymore.’

Daniela’s farewell could be summarized like that. A few words to tear out his heart, throw it on the ground and dance a jig on it.

His protests hadn’t done any good, his promise to reduce the hours spent in his truck, his tears, his excuses, their son who was drifting in a cloud of apathy as the days passed and the arguments grew more heated.

She wanted a divorce.

‘When a woman makes a decision, you’d better believe it’s hard to get her to change her mind. Always remember that,’ his father, a truck driver like him, had told him once. But Ermes had never given too much weight to the old man’s words, and the hope of winning Daniela back had become an obsession. Then he had discovered that she was seeing someone else, the elderly manager of a small firm in Turin.

It was like he went crazy.

In the course of a few weeks the pleas turned into telephone calls in the middle of the night, surveillance, scenes.

One evening he had intercepted the dandy who was screwing Daniela and had fractured two of his ribs and a cheekbone. If passers-­by hadn’t intervened, he would have kept on punching and kicking him until he killed him.

At that point the stalking and assault charges had come simultaneously, and his wife’s top-­notch attorney had massacred him, leaving him high and dry.

Basically he was working now so he could cover his legal expenses and pay support to Daniela and Simone, whom he could see only one weekend a month. He lived in the rear cabin of the truck: a bed, a fridge, a television the size of a postage stamp, and two electric burners. Like a vagabond, a gypsy.

There had been panic attacks, alcoholic blackouts, a long break from work. The situation had settled down little by little. He had stayed on his feet, but he could no longer see the point in anything.

Joyful images from the past attacked him like starving beasts, sucking the marrow from his bones and reducing him to a state of perpetual exhaustion. His existence had become a journey without a destination, a succession of streets leading nowhere. Stinking truck stops, packaged cookies, urinals, high-­beam headlights, cigarettes, showers, anti-­wart slip-­on shoes, pitiful meals, dismal thoughts, Little Trees air freshener, rest areas. He was forty-­two years old, had few friends, and the only things he managed to accumulate were debts, kilos on his waist, and X-­rays that told him: ‘Well, you’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years with your ass on a seat, you’ll have to have surgery on that herniated disc sooner or later.’

He felt alone. A wanderer on life’s road. So fucking desperately alone.

More and more often when he shot across an overpass he would entertain the idea of pulling over to the shoulder, getting out of the truck, and throwing himself off. A simple leap to leave all his problems, his anxiety, behind him. If it weren’t for Simone, maybe . . . When had he seen him last? He didn’t remember. But he hadn’t been well. Gaunt, dark circles under his eyes, his spirit crushed by his parents’ separation.

A horn honking from somewhere brought him back to reality. The sound waned away, the cry of a dying person in a hospital ward.

Ermes struck the steering wheel with a weak, resigned fist, slipped a Camel between his lips and tried to concentrate on the road that would bring him to a warehouse located on the outskirts of Krakow for yet another delivery of Made in Italy furniture.

There were still too many hours left.

The digital tachograph, the contraption installed in the truck to monitor speed, length of stops, and kilometers traveled, informed him that in half an hour he would have to take his first break. The rules for road safety for commercial vehicles were ironclad: forty-­five minutes of rest every four-­and-­a-­half hours of driving, a maximum of nine hours a day, never more than fifty-­six hours a week. He had colleagues who circumvented the system by attaching expensive devices to the tachograph, but Ermes had never yielded to the temptation. If he were discovered, he could kiss his driver’s license goodbye for a couple of months.

He was somewhere on the A4, around fifty kilometers from the Verona exit. Another eleven, twelve hours of driving awaited him. He had left at four from Turin and the rising sun, a fiery ball low on the horizon, cast a blinding glare on the guardrails. He weighed the idea of turning on the CB radio and talking with some fellow driver traveling the same stretch, but decided against it. The conversations were always the same. They wouldn’t help him.

The traffic began to intensify. Enclosed in their little metal boxes, hundreds of individuals rushed towards the usual tasks, factory, office, routine; expressionless faces behind the windshields, pale and rigid hands on the steering wheel like those of mannequins in a shopping center.

Lenzi first focused on the wheels of a truck identical to his that was passing him, then brought his eyes back to the road: about three hundred meters away, a little group of crows hopped around some roadkill on the shoulder, plunging their beaks into soft, yielding tissue, tearing strips of flesh with famished determination.

He eased up a little on the gas pedal, curious: there was something wrong about the upside-­down shape on the ground over which the birds were going into a frenzy. It was too large to belong to a cat or a dog, and it seemed to still be moving.

‘What the hell . . . ?’

Coming up to where the crows were, Ermes stuck his head out the passenger’s side to see better, and the cigarette nearly slid out of his mouth.

In the flutter of black wings, in the disorderly plunging of heads and beaks, he glimpsed a hand lying on the asphalt, a hand covered in clotted blood which might have belonged to a small woman or a child. The rest of the figure was covered by the shapes of the large birds, their feathers glistening like tar.