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

The old barista started to laugh, the tired chuckle of a derelict. He slipped off his cap and put it on the counter, rocking his head from side to side, his skull full of dents, as though someone had taken a hammer to it.

‘No. I’ve never heard of Uironda.’ His amused expression suggested exactly the opposite. ‘But let me tell you one thing . . . There are two kinds of death: sometimes the body remains, other times it vanishes along with the spirit. This usually happens in solitude, and, not seeing the end, we say that the person disappeared, or left on a long journey. Do you catch my drift, Signor Lenzi?’

Once again he showed his smile of microscopic sharp teeth, and Ermes couldn’t help taking a step back.

‘How do you know my name?’ This time he had shouted.

The old man remained motionless beside the coffee machine, staring at him and laughing.

Ermes turned around and rushed out of the deserted truck stop. The last thing he heard before sprinting across the parking lot straight for the Scania was the crow-­like voice of the barista, who yelled, ‘The espresso is on the house, Signor Lenzi! We hope to see you again soon!’

Half an hour after he’d started driving again, Ermes began to seriously doubt his own mental faculties. The more he thought about the business with the old man at the truck stop, about the little hand among the crows, about Uironda, the more he convinced himself that depression and failure had once more gotten the better of his judgment.

And yet the poetry was still there, in the photo taken with his smartphone. He hadn’t dreamed that.

His only desire was to return home. Rest. Spend the weekend with his son, at the sea, in the mountains, any place other than the road, the nothingness of a pointless journey. He cast a glance at the photo of Simone hugging Daniela’s headless body.

He turned on the radio, but no matter how much he fiddled with the dial he only managed to catch some static discharges and a strange chanting. Radio Maria, probably. He hoped he hadn’t lost his antenna, promising himself to have it checked at the next stop.

He gave up on music and put his mind on autopilot.

At 11:57 he realized that the traffic was thinning out in a strange way. It was almost lunchtime, and that stretch of bypass lined with monstrous coal-­stained factories was usually so congested that you could count yourself lucky if you managed to get past it without wasting more than ten minutes. Now, on the other hand, the Scania marched on without a hitch as the sky filled with clouds that were assuming a worrying yellowish tint as they advanced along the horizon.

Ermes turned his eyes towards a ramshackle Multipla that was passing him at a steady speed. It seemed to him that there was something out of place with its occupants: the driver’s head looked squashed, featureless, dangling on a too-­thin neck, while the woman in the passenger seat had her hands on the dashboard and her head bowed as though she were preparing for a violent impact. On the back seat, nestled in a car seat, something shuddered that was more like an enormous hunk of flesh than a baby. Ermes accelerated to match the Multi­pla’s speed, but it shot by, leaving a puff of yellowish smoke behind it; before it disappeared around a wide curve, Lenzi thought he glimpsed some bizarre shapes tapping on the vehicle’s rear windshield, shiny black figures that reminded him of the jaws of a stag beetle, the exoskeleton of some exotic insect.

Could they be going to Uironda? he wondered, astounded. He couldn’t manage to get that little story out of his head.

He rubbed his eyes, filled with a sensation of bewildered detachment, trying to keep his thoughts on driving, on driving and nothing else, and after having tackled another twenty kilometers with his heart beating in his chest like a bass drum, he had to accept the absurd fact that he was alone.

Alone.

There were no other vehicles on the highway. Only the old Scania with its now lusterless chromework and the tractor trailer squeaking like an old rocking chair. He slowed down, looking out the windows as if he had been marooned on a desolate, alien land.

There must be an explanation.

You were distracted and took the wrong road, you didn’t see a road work detour and you continued along a stretch of closed highway . . .

The cloud front, a catarrhous cascade of ochre fog, rolled in his direction, crackling with pink lightning, feeding his sense of bewilderment. The words of the old barista at the truck stop came back to him and he felt goosebumps running up his arms.

There are two kinds of death: sometimes the body remains, other times it vanishes along with the spirit. This usually happens in solitude, and, not seeing the end, we say that the person disappeared, or left on a long journey.

Nor were any vehicles to be seen in the lanes traveling in the opposite direction, beyond the dividing barrier. The landscape along the sides of the bypass seemed the result of a sloppy copy-­and-­paste: factories, water towers, lopsided cement high rises, all the same, gray, depressing. Ermes couldn’t pick out a single recognizable building in a stretch he had driven thousands of times. On the top floor of a gloomy apartment building, behind broken windows that recalled chipped teeth, he caught sight of two figures looking out, possibly a woman and a little boy. He wondered what they were doing in that crumbling structure.

Soon it would start raining. Maybe hailing. A vague smell of iron and electricity in the air foretold it, an odor that smelled of urgency, as the storm front rushed on. Too yellow, too bulbous, too tangible .

Ermes Lenzi’s umpteenth work trip was assuming the features of a nightmare.

He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the horizon. Some frothy offshoots of cumulonimbus began to coagulate under the action of the wind, and for several moments they recalled a titanic face silhouetted in the sky, a bald head with white eyes, without a nose, its mouth curved in a sardonic sneer of disapproval. An explosion of low-­timbred, guttural thunder cancelled out its features and Ermes was assailed by fear.

A primal, irrational fear, like he had never experienced before.

And you could say he’d had plenty of fear in his life. He had experienced frequent panic attacks after the breakup with Daniela. On a couple of occasions he had thought he was dying. But now it was different. As if every cell of his organism, every recess of his mind, was vibrating with a terror that had nothing to do with death, with annihilation.

His first idea, dictated by instinct, was to turn around. Stop the Scania and put the throttle in reverse, anything to put distance between him and those angry clouds, that deserted highway. He had to go back where he’d come from, maybe reach the truck stop with its strange harelipped barista and the disturbing yellow writing in the bathroom stall.

He had to come across cars, people, someone.

He lit a cigarette with parkinsonian movements, ordering himself to think rationally.

A U-­turn was out of the question. He would risk prison and lose his job for what in all probability would turn out to be nothing but a flight of fancy, an illogical alteration in his mind, which had been chewed up by the stress of the past months.

‘Fuck!’ he swore. ‘Breathe. Breathe.’

He had to proceed towards the next exit, the next junction. There was no other option, and he couldn’t be very far. How much time had passed since his last stop?

He directed a questioning gaze at the digital tachograph and was hit by a wave of nausea. It should have shown the kilometers traveled, the time elapsed since his break at the truck stop, but the digital numbers had been replaced by seven simple characters, which fluttered on the display like a crazed sign: