It had been a long goddamn day and it just wouldn’t end.
Ted had been up and on the road before the sun made its first appearance that day. Hours and miles had blended together as he tackled the full-day drive back home. The weekend away with the lads was worth it, but an entire day in a car could be as mentally fatiguing as standardized testing.
“Should have flown,” he mumbled to himself for the 40th time that day.
He looked over jealously as the sun sank below the horizon. Its day ending while his slogged on. Luckily home wasn’t such a far off hope anymore. It drew ever closer.
It wasn’t until most of the sky had darkened to a navy blue that he first saw it. The shadow.
His old Bronco was creaking down yet another state highway, the last lights of the dying sun leaking over the distant mountains to his right. He glanced over at his passenger window, looked away, and quickly looked back again.
He had tried to clean the passenger window the last time he had stopped for gas. It had still been covered with flecks of mud from the road that led to Tommy’s cabin. Unfortunately his efforts were wasted; the gas station’s squeegee had just left smatters of filthy water and grime all over the window. The dried streaks were light up by the setting sun, visible all around the edges of the window. But not in the middle.
He looked back again, the window’s center appeared much darker than the light gray streaks. It looked just like outline of the head of a massive dog. It was uncanny. It resembled the Hound of the Baskerville or something from a short story head had recently read about a black dog whose appearance signaled impending death. Memories of this tale crept back into his mind.
Two sharp, upright ears sat above what would have been a long snout. The bronco’s rearview mirror beyond the window added to the illusion. The mirror’s edge defining the imaginary beast’s jaw line. The shadow showed no sign of teeth, but a snout like that would of course be full of glistening barbs, used for tearing into flesh…
Ted readjusted himself in his seat and focused back on the road in front of him, falling back into thought. That the dirty squeegee water was probably older than him, a concoction made up of years of filth. Perhaps psychiatrists in that small, dusty town used it for makeshift ink blot tests. Or maybe it had eery occult uses like the tea leaves of fortune tellers. Maybe this long day was just getting to him. Yes, definitely that.
That gas station had given him the creeps, but he was getting low on fuel and couldn’t resist prices that low. It was a relic from decades gone by much like the old timer who sat, loitering on a chair outside the small garage. The man hadn’t said a word, only stared, even when Ted gave a weak wave and half hearted hello. No, the man had just stared. Well, one of his eyes had. A filmy light blue eye, the color of glacial ice had stared off in empty space. The man’s other eye, a brown so dark it was nearly black, had bored into Ted.
Ted had looked just about anywhere else, but at the man while urging the damn gas to get into the Bronco as quickly as possible. Now that Ted thought about it, the man surely had been senile. His dirty clothes and that unsettling look were creepy enough, but it was what was in the old man’s hands that struck Ted as the strangest part. The man been holding a random piece of rope, tightly in both hands. It was about 6 feet long and ran from where the man’s hands sat in his lap directly towards where Ted stood at the gas pump. The rope ended in a chain circle…it was a dull silver color adorned with patterns of rust the color of dried blood. Ted could hardly fathom a purpose for the item a the time, but now with dog’s on his mind, he could see it passing a sort of crude leash and collar.
Ted shook his head and turned up the radio.
“Peace of mind, peace of mind.”
He’d taken to repeating this phrase to himself for comfort when his over-active imagination gave him the heebie-jeebies. Something it did all too often.
He slowed as the highway finally met it’s end.Intersecting with the road that would bring Ted home.
Night had arrived in full. Ted obeyed the stop sign and waited for a single car approaching from his left to pass. The song on the radio ended and Robert Plant’s voice burst through the speakers; it looked like Led Zeppelin would be serenading him for the final portion of this never ending drive. It was one of those songs that, for the life of him, Ted could never remember the name of, but he could sing along to most of the lyrics.
“Gon’ make you burn, Gon’ make you sting”
The car passed and Ted looked right to make sure no other cars were coming from that direction, when he did the red taillights of the receding car sat right where the shadow-dogs eyes would have been.
“Fuck this”
Ted rolled down the window, the cold bite of the night air was better than his incessant imagination making his hair stand on end. He stomped on the gas and the bronco roared off down the road.
A short while later, Led Zeppelin gave way to Pink Floyd as Ted finally pulled into his driveway. At last his day would end.
He threw the Bronco into park and took a deep breath. There were no exterior lights to greet him; he hadn’t bothered to leave any on as he would be away for so long. He would have to make the walk from the car to the house through the darkness; alone. He pictured himself fumbling for his keys as monsters and murders stirred behind every tree.
“Peace of mind, peace of mind.”
Ted shook his head again, angrily. He really needed to man up and stop freaking himself out.
Under the safety of the Bronco’s interior lights Ted rolled up the passenger window. He stole a glance over and was relieved to see that the entire window was covered in smudges now. Why hadn’t he thought to roll it down and back up earlier? He could have saved himself a ton of unnecessary stress.
He killed the lights and shut off the Bronco, preparing to dash into the house.
It was then that something in the rear view mirror caught his eye. Two somethings. Ted’s eyes widened, his brain cried out frantically as it tried to soak in the nightmarish reality.
In that mirror glowed two large red circles. They sat atop a shadow, darker than night, that filled the cargo-bed of the Bronco.
A deep, ravenous growl filled the truck.
At last his day would end.