Headlights(86)
She says, “And there was this other thing … Ever since I’d passed into Colorado, I felt this … I felt that I wasn’t alone. I started hearing things. Static mostly. Sometimes, this sort of … pulse, almost. Heartbeat, but strange. Big. And I’d wake up sometimes to shadows moving around me. There were—are—shadows, everywhere. So many. I thought that maybe I just had cracked, you know? That my brain … after what happened …
“One night, I was sleeping in my car, and I just … felt something. Outside. It wasn’t an animal, or a man. Wasn’t the shadows. This was bigger … I knew it wanted something from me. Somehow, I just knew that. I stepped out of the car and I followed the feeling. It took me down a highway, down the side of the road into a field. An open drainpipe. There was a body in it. It didn’t have any skin. I knew it was female, but nothing else.”
“When was this?” I ask, my voice barely audible.
She meets my eyes when she says, “Six years ago. November.”
And …
She’s talking about Claire Wright’s body. Fourteen-year-old Claire Wright.
My ears ring, the room spins.
“I thought I was dreaming,” she says. “It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. Besides Eden. It was Eden all over again. And not. And this presence, I felt it push in against my back, all around me, heard—felt, almost—its movement in the night. This out-of-timeness, this feeling that I was insulated from the rest of the world, at least for that moment. Like it had blocked out everything else. And I knew it wanted me to find this. This was my fate, and I deserved to hate myself. I deserved to feel all of it. So I took a step toward it, and then another. And I just…”
She stares at the carpet and somewhere else entirely. Then, she lifts her gaze to me and says, “I didn’t kill any of them. They just … started appearing, where I was. That presence, whatever the thing was, pushing me toward them, putting them in my path. I thought it was the universe or God or whatever there is, giving me the punishment I deserved. I thought I was in some kind of hell. And…”
She tucks her hair behind her ear, takes a breath. “I got this feeling, that whatever it was that was watching me, that walked with me … it liked it. It liked me feeling everything I felt—fear, pain, relief in the punishment, almost, and it liked me … eating. It happened eight times. The thing leading me there, watching me eat the body. On the sixth body, I broke my tooth on a femur. Had to go get a fake one.” She keeps her eyes on the tooth in her hand, turns it over again.
“And then it just stopped after the eighth one. The bodies stopped coming. And I thought, maybe, just maybe, I’d earned my place in the world again. That I was allowed to be here, now that I’d done what it wanted, had owned up to it. Faced what I’d done to Eden eight more times. And then a job came up, away from people, out in the mountains, and I thought it was meant to be. I thought I was being released.” She laughs a bitter laugh.
“When it started up again, the killings, I felt the presence again. I felt it wanting me to go with it, and I knew somehow that there was another body. I just … I somehow felt it. But I wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wasn’t going back down there, and I wasn’t going to give in. I’d learned to live again, at least in the way that I could. I watched animals, looked after the land, I lived in the quiet. I could exist in the daylight, in nature. But I felt that tug, from the night. From whatever the … presence, or … thing. I could feel that it was upset, didn’t like that I wasn’t there, wasn’t playing my part. It came to me in nightmares, in shadows moving around my cabin, in this dark sort of pulse. But I fought it. Twice. I didn’t want to go back, didn’t want to feel it ever again. And then…”
“Everett Brown came and found you,” I say.
She nods.
“And he stuck a tongue in your mouth.”
All of it, if I believe her, if this story is true …
“I could feel … it wanted me to swallow it, to eat it. It was trying to remind me. When we were in Aspen, when you played that video of Ryder Smith talking about the…” She swallows. “And that file, everyone saying it. I knew that’s what it was. That it was the name of this thing that had been visiting me. I don’t know how, I just knew.”
“But … why?” I ask. “Why would it want you? What would it get out of you eating the bodies?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I have a theory. Um, do you know about the Egyptian plover?”
“What?” I say.
“It’s a bird. Tiny. And it sits inside crocodiles’ mouths, cleans the meat from their teeth and eats it. The crocodile lets it sit there without ever closing its jaws because the bird is providing it a service. In turn, the crocodile offers the plover protection. Remoras with sharks, cows and cattle egrets. Symbiosis. I could feel sometimes … that’s how it viewed me, the thing in the night. The … Witchwalker, I guess. In the motel, I could feel it. It wanted me back because it felt we were in some kind of symbiotic relationship. It gave me what it thought I needed, the punishment and giving in to my shame. When you carry that kind of thing for so long, when it sits on your shoulders and your whole being, it feels … good, almost. To give in to it, sometimes. I … when I was eating … it was fear and self-hatred and pain and guilt and … but it also … in an awful unbearable way, felt like release. And that thing in the night, I think it liked my company. Like James in Aspen. Protection, in exchange for my being there.”