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

It was a question of moments.

Having passed the scene, Ermes looked in the rearview mirror: there were only the crows, intently pecking the asphalt, then taking flight towards a sad rest area overgrown with weeds. No carcass. No hand. He rubbed his eyes, crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

Yes, he needed a break and some coffee. The umpteenth stop in those glistening non-­places, the umpteenth espresso, the umpteenth heartburn.

Ten minutes later he got off the highway and parked the Scania in the area reserved for trucks.

He would have given anything to get rid of the back pain, to erase the image of the crows with their idiotic eyes scampering around that helpless little hand.

Too much butter. There was always too much butter in the truck stop croissants. Even so, he couldn’t stop eating them because they somehow gave him a sense of familiarity, of security. That mushy taste on the back of his tongue was always the same, it never changed.

He chugged the coffee, thanked the fat woman with the colorless eyes who was squeezing oranges behind the counter and dragged himself to the bathroom.

He was assaulted by the smell of stale urine and cleaning products. Without any particular reason, he thought of his ex-­wife and his son; it took him a few seconds to be able to remember their facial features, the way they laughed or pronounced his name.

Yellow-­painted nails, carrot-­colored hair.

In front of the mirror he rinsed his face with water and dry-­swallowed some aspirin. His backache gave him no reprieve, extending in hot rays of pain a little above his buttocks.

There was no one in the restroom. Letting out a long hissing fart, he headed towards the nearest toilet without looking at his own reflection.

Eat, shit, sleep, suffer, die. What a strange, repulsive contraption a human being is, he mused, surprising himself with the gloominess of his thoughts.

After cleaning the toilet seat with a large handful of toilet paper, he made himself comfortable; while he defecated, he occupied his mind by reading the writing that dozens of travelers had scrawled on the bathroom walls. Another certainty in his uncertain life. However far he might go in his Scania, whichever truck stop he might choose to stop at, the bathrooms always contained those written testimonials of a passage. Absences made into presences through words, scratched into the particleboard panels or traced with permanent markers.

As usual, a good ninety percent of the writings were obscene, for the most part offers or requests for sexual services accompanied by a telephone number.

Ermes stopped on

YOUNG COUPLE SEEKS HAIRY TRUCK DRIVERS

FOR MEETUPS

and

GAIA THE WHORE, CALL/FUCK

He started to laugh, a bitter disgusted laugh. Then, as he let his eyes run along the door of the stall, the heart­broken mirth caught in his throat. In the riot of obscenity and stylized male members, his attention was captured by some angular writing in fluorescent yellow that stood out from the rest.

And not only because of its color.

He read aloud:

There is no escape from the road

of black whirlpools that swallow tar,

take the junction, get to Uironda,

become part of this realm!

Uironda . It had been that name which had startled him, which had pressed a memory switch in his brain, triggering a scene he had experienced . . . how many years earlier? At least thirteen or fourteen, when he was little more than a novice at the job, a young man filled with hopes and good intentions, for whom the road hadn’t yet become a bore.

Uironda . He had heard the sound of the word, and now it was in front of him, written down. Memory is a strange thing. A meaningless term linked to a stupid little story told to him by a stranger. He had heard it uttered only once, at a truck stop in the Rho Fiera area near Milan, where he had stopped to take a little nap, and now those moments were returning to the surface as if by magic, with extreme clarity.

After a siesta in the rear cabin he had climbed down from the vehicle to get a coffee and phone Daniela, who was his girlfriend at the time. He had come across three truck drivers, between forty and sixty years old, seated at the edge of a flowerbed, drinking and talking; a tattoo-­covered guy with a long beard resting on his chubby belly gestured to him, holding out a can of beer fished from a cooler full of water and ice.

‘Have a seat with us here where it’s cool, boy,’ he had invited him with a smile, showing two rows of nicotine-­stained teeth. ‘The highway’s not going anywhere, don’t worry.’

Ermes had obeyed, had introduced himself under the comradely gaze of his three colleagues, and had taken part in a discussion that was surreal to say the least.

‘A pleasure, Ermes. I’m Massimo, and that’s Vittorio and Roby. We were talking about weird stuff,’ the tattooed man had explained, including the other two with a wave of his hand. ‘When you spend a good part of your life on the road, all sorts of things happen to you, for sure.’

‘Oh, yes,’ had replied Vittorio, a wiry man with the skin of an iguana and eyes overrun with capillaries. In his dilated pupils you could read his urge to speak. ‘I was just telling about that time when I was on the CB with a fellow trucker from Bari, Amos. Amos was his handle. We often crossed paths on the Turin-­Milan stretch, and we would talk for a few minutes, as long as the signal lasted. Anyway. It’s night, a shitty night, one of those where you’re running behind schedule and you can’t stop and you can’t wait to crack open a beer and have a shower and some undisturbed sleep. Amos and I have been tuned into channel five for a few seconds, we’ve hardly greeted each other and exchanged a couple of words, but I can barely hear him. Amos sounds strange to me, his voice is tired, but most of all it’s far away. I tell him a couple of times: “Amos, is your radio working, is your CB all right, are you already out of range? Because you sound far away.” And he goes: “Vittorio, I am far away, yes. This is the last time we’ll speak. I just wanted to say goodbye. Safe travels.” Then the communication freezes suddenly and it’s like my CB is going crazy. Static, weird sounds, I think I hear screams . . . then . . . silence.’

Vittorio had run the beer can along his sweaty brow, interrupting himself and fixing his gaze on the eyes of the others with a mysterious smile. Scratching his long beard, Massimo had invited him to go on, with the look of someone who has already heard a story dozens of times. Roby, the other driver, the oldest and quietest, with only a few thinning hairs and sad eyes, held his head down, smoking a stinking cigar. Vittorio had resumed the story, this time looking Ermes straight in the eyes.

‘So, I try to reestablish contact with Amos, but nothing. After a few minutes I catch another fellow on that frequency, we start to chat about this and that. And then at some point he goes, “Have you heard about Amos?” He knew him too. I get a chill at the base of my spine, you know, like when you have the feeling you’re about to listen to something you don’t want to listen to, and I respond, “Heard what? We talked a few minutes ago on the CB, the signal was bad. He said some odd stuff to me.” My colleague is silent for a few seconds on the other end, and then he bursts out: “What the fuck are you saying? It’s impossible, Vittò. You must be mistaken. Amos died yesterday morning. He ran off the road on the Gambetti viaduct and went flying off. I thought you knew. It looks like . . . it looks like he fell asleep at the wheel. There’s no way you could have talked to him.” I swear, I got goosebumps, my legs started to tremble and I had to pull off onto the shoulder to catch my breath. And suddenly I recalled Amos’s words: “ I am far away, yes. This is the last time we’ll speak. I wanted to say goodbye. Safe travels .” And that’s the strangest thing that’s happened to me in thirty years of driving a truck,’ Vittorio had concluded, winking at Ermes, who had listened to the tale with a mixture of fascination and disbelief.