Chapter 1
Laura: Now
She awoke to darkness and echoing thunder. The back of her head was a screaming symphony of agonizing pain. As she swam gradually back into consciousness, confusion transformed into slowly dawning terror. Her mouth was taped closed and filled with a ball of foul-tasting cloth. She recognized the coppery flavor of blood; it was overwhelming and caused nausea to constrict her throat. She fought the urge to vomit, knowing that she would drown if she did. Laura Henley fought the fear, pressed it into a corner of her mind, and held it at bay like a rabid dog that could bite if she let it too close. She began to take note of her surroundings. She couldn’t see of course but she could hear. What she initially thought was thunder she now was certain to be the deafening roar of a tractor trailer rattling down the highway. She was forced between two large boxes, possibly refrigerators judging by their size. Her hands and feet were bound tightly with cords. She attempted to lean forward and found she couldn’t. A strap across her chest held her upright and was attached to the trailer wall behind her.
Her last memory before awakening in the truck was of paying for gas and a coffee at the station across the road from her motel. Laura recalled stepping around the side of the building, looking for a payphone. She didn’t remember hearing the man approach. Now as she fought to concentrate, she found she couldn’t picture his face. The ache in her skull warred against coherent thought, but Laura forced herself to focus. She did remember that the man who had hit her had been wearing a blue shirt. Pushing her mind further she was almost certain that he had been exiting the store when she entered it. He had held the door for her. Laura tried again to picture his face. She thought he may have had a thin beard, perhaps sunglasses. He’d been wearing a hat with a deer head logo on it. Nothing about the man seemed to stand out in her mind. In fact his look seemed to her so perfectly unassuming as to make him anyone. Faceless. Unidentifiable. She had no way of knowing how long she had been unconscious or how far from the station she now was. It had been morning when she was taken. Her weight shifted from side to side and the piercing squeals of the truck’s breaks filled her ears as she felt the vehicle slow and finally settle to a stop. For a moment there was silence. But not perfect silence. Something was moving in the darkness. Laura could hear a thumping and shuffling sound coming from her right. She realized with a chilling certainty that she was not alone in the darkness.
Clancy: Then
Clancy allowed the phone to ring a few more times before finally slamming it back into its cradle with a frustrated sigh. He was still shaken by the trucker. He was certain that the dragon tattoo had been the same. For heaven’s sake, he’d been documenting the horrible thing for too long not to recognize it. He saw it in his sleep now. The first date had arrived: 3/17/10. Clancy wasn’t sure why he had come a third time to this rest stop. The date held some sinister significance he was sure. He had told himself that he wouldn’t come, that he would just check the news. He had driven all this way fully intending to drive right past the small building tucked away at the base of the tree line. It wasn’t until he pulled into the gravel lot and placed the Ford in park that Clancy knew what he intended to do. The dragon, with its human face and cruel grin had called him to this place and he hadn’t been able to resist. Whatever wickedness was going to descend upon that place, Clancy intended to be there to see it, to record it. As he pushed open the door and entered the no longer white-tiled room, he half expected to see the gory remains of a butchered corpse sprawled on the floor and bleeding into the drain in the center of the room. Perhaps he expected to find a head resting half exposed in one of the round porcelain sinks, blind eyes staring at the ceiling. Instead he found the room unchanged. The fluorescent light fixture above him still flickered, strobe-like above and Clancy noted that the paper towel dispenser was still empty. It seemed that while he was drawn to the place others avoided it, maybe somehow sensing its menace. Clancy had a brief vision of birds in the sky diverting around the spot, giving it a wide berth lest they fall dead from the sky. He shuddered and crossed the floor to the stalls. When he neared the third one he reached out his hand toward the pale green door. From outside he heard tires rolling across gravel and the distinct sound of a parking eighteen wheeler. In a sudden panic he rushed to the door and flicking off the light in the bathroom he cracked the door open just wide enough to see. Outside in the lot sat the idling form of the truck that had picked him up. The driver had gotten out and crossed in front of the vehicle, heading in the direction of the rental car. For a brief moment the headlights illuminated the familiar bearded face and Clancy shut the door. Scrambling in the dark, feeling his way along the filthy walls Clancy stumbled into a stall and climbed onto the toilet. He concentrated on slowing and quieting his breathing. One of the notebook statements flashed unexpectedly through his mind: Can they see me if I make myself very small? Clancy felt his skin erupt in gooseflesh and tried to become small, willed himself to be invisible, to be shadow, to be away. The door to the restroom creaked open. The florescent lights hummed back to life. Clancy nearly screamed. Somehow in his panic he had hidden in the dragon’s stall. Its toothy grin mocked him. The date scrawled on the door may as well have been carved into tombstone marble. Clancy heard the sound of something being dragged along the floor and dropped in front of the stall. From the other side of the door Clancy could hear the trucker breathing. Then the stall door swung open, the man shoved something heavy into Clancy’s lap pinning him against the wall. The flickering light above shattered but didn’t plunge the room into darkness because there was now a dull red glow shining out of the crudely drawn symbol on the door bathing Clancy in monochrome. In the red glow of the dragon Clancy could see the headless body of the woman draped across his chest, he looked up into the truckers face, saw the madness in the man’s eyes and the rapturous smile on his face. And then Clancy did scream.
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