Prologue

Prologue

The Fringes

Clancy Matthews was a salesman. Not a very good one perhaps but not an extraordinarily bad one either. The most accurate description for Clancy was “mediocre”. He was a mediocre salesman, a mediocre lover, and a mediocre guitarist in his spare time. Put simply, Clancy was average in every possible way. Perhaps this was why a life on the road suited him as well as it had for the past fifteen years. He had few relationships to tie him down: no wife, no kids, and a mother he called once a week, a father he’d not seen in five years. Unattached as he was, Clancy was mostly satisfied with traveling up and down the east coast, staying in cheap off-the-interstate motels on the company dime, and generally avoiding the stress of extended human contact. For awhile the job had become boring, and then Clancy developed a hobby. In his right jacket pocket, Clancy kept a tiny notebook and mechanical pencil. In his line of work, Clancy often found himself in establishments that he had come to think of as humanity’s fringes: rest stops, gas stations, and truck stop diners. These were places that seemed to rest just outside of civilization. They were the repositories of the unattached and average. Runaway teens, homeless hitchhikers, and many other unspectacular pieces of human driftwood inevitably washed up on the shores of the Fringes, and all of them used the restroom. For two years Clancy had amused himself by keeping an odd sort of collection. Within the tiny notebook and several others like it, Clancy recorded bathroom graffiti. Not the trashy stuff of the “for a good time call… variety, but the interesting ones.

Some were poems that made him laugh. Here I sit, broken hearted, tried to crap, but only farted. Some were cryptic messages scrawled in sharpie marker or ball point pen.Isabelle’s face is pale, why can’t she breathe the concrete? Or Can they see me if I make myself very small? In his time as self-appointed chronicler of the great American bathroom stall, Clancy had come to realize that the Fringes were inhabited by many who were clearly insane. Schizophrenic ramblings and mad omens made up a considerable percentage of his odd collection. The first time that Clancy saw the dragon he didn’t even record it. It was just a drawing, four inches square, on the top right corner of a pale green aluminum stall door at a rest stop outside of Raleigh, NC. He recalled later, when he saw the symbol (for it was a symbol) again that there was something odd about the dragon’s face but at the time it hadn’t stood out. Two weeks later when he saw it again, scrawled in pink lipstick on a gas station mirror, Clancy found that the dragon was deeply disturbing to him in some way. Perhaps it was the surrealness of seeing the symbol again, or the way that the dragon’s face seemed vaguely but unsettlingly human that made Clancy’s skin crawl. Looking at the mirror, Clancy felt every hair on his body raise and a cold chill crawl through his veins like ice in his blood. It was the pink lipstick. Clancy wasn’t a ladies man by any means but he was fairly certain in some instinctual way that the grotesque dragon was not drawn by a woman. Something about the crude lines was distinctly and savagely masculine. Why would a man have a lady’s pink lipstick? Clancy had taken the notebook out of his pocket and drawn a crude (mediocre) copy of the dragon, taking special care to capture the human aspect of its face. Four days later he saw it again at a diner in West Virginia. A week later he saw the dragon in a hotel shower in Connecticut. Each time he saw it Clancy made a mark in the back of his notebook. When his tally reached thirty sightings he began to do some research.

The first dragon sighting had been in Febuary. By April, Clancy had purchased a digital camera and as he made his way back through his usual sales route, he returned to photograph all of them. A few had been removed or painted over but he had managed to take pictures of Twenty two of the original drawings. The most disturbing detail of the return trips was that Clancy had found dates added to ten of the symbols, written underneath each of them in black marker. They were all written in the same handwriting. They were all dates that had not yet come. Some of the dates were months even years away, the closest he had found was only two weeks ahead. His research into the dragon symbol had yielded few results. Biblical references to Satan as a dragon were unsettling but not unexpected. In his heart Clancy knew that he had stumbled across something significant out there in theFringes.

When the first of the dates was still two days distant, Clancy’s company car sputtered to a stop in a patch of grass off of the interstate. His cell was dead, the car charger foolishly left behind at his two-room apartment. As many times before Clancy gathered his suitcase (filled with a few changes of clothes, emergency toiletries, and product samples) and his digital camera, locked the car and began to walk north parallel the road, pausing to stick out a thumb when vehicles approached. The plan was always the same: hitchhike to the nearest business, call the head office, and rent a car for the rest of the trip. Clancy heard the rattling approach of an eighteen wheeler and extended his thumb. He was relieved to see the truck slow and then pull over on the shoulder of the highway. Clancy ran to the waiting vehicle, pulled open the door with an irritating steel-on-steel squeal, and climbed into the diesel powered behemoth. He thanked the driver and closed the door. As the large truck pulled back onto the road and began to accelerate, Clancy and the driver exchanged the usual chit-chat: introductions, where you headed? Clancy found the driver unremarkable as himself. Just another piece of driftwood in the Fringes. After a few minutes the man took an exit and pulled into a large, well-lit gas station, bringing the truck to a halt. As Clancy climbed out into the parking lot he reached back into the truck for his suitcase. The driver extended his hand to shake; as Clancy gripped it he noticed a faded blue-green tattoo just above the man’s wrist that had been hidden by the driver’s sleeve until now: a dragon with an oddly human and familiar face. Terror gripped Clancy’s heart but he tried not to let it show in his eyes. He retrieved his camera from the seat but his nervous fingers lost their hold and he dropped it into the mess of burger wrappers plastic bottles and crumpled napkins that littered the truck’s floorboard.  As he lifted the camera by its strap out of the trash a small cylinder-shaped object under the seat caught his eye. There in the shadows beside an empty soda can was a half used stick of pink lipstick. It was a color he had seen before, and it was splattered with blood.

Clancy Matthews disappeared on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. Security cameras at the Shell gas station on exit 326 off of I-75 in Georgia clearly record Clancy exiting the cab of a blue eighteen wheeler on Monday, March 15. The truck pulls away and out of frame. Clancy enters the station. The cashier on duty recalls Clancy for two reasons. In the words of the cashier: The guy seemed really nervous, I thought he was strung out on pills or something. Dude spent a good hour in the bathroom. Weird. Clancy used the station payphone to contact his head office. His car was found in the exact spot described in this call, still locked and seemingly untouched. Security cameras again capture Clancy as he leaves the store and enters a rental car delivered eighty-five minutes after his arrival at the station. The car is a Ford Focus, blue, four-door. The ford pulls away from the station. It is the last visual record of Clancy Matthews for fifty-six days. When Clancy fails to arrive at his expected appointments the following three days and the rental car is not returned, police are contacted. A search for the salesman yields confusing results. On the Tuesday following Clancy’s disappearance the Ford is found abandoned at a rest stop 260 miles from the gas station where he was last seen. The car contained only his suitcase in which only clothing and product samples were found. Clancy’s fingerprints were found on the rest stop pay phone and further investigation proved that he had placed a call from the phone at 8:00 Pm on the previous Wednesday. The call was to his mother who was not at home at the time and did not receive it. No message was left on her voicemail. Additional fingerprints were found in the restroom on the sink and paper towel dispenser. Dogs tracked Clancy’s scent from the car to the third stall of the restroom but oddly enough the trail stopped there. The dogs were unable to track Clancy from that point on.

Fifty six days later cameras in an Exxon station in Raleigh, NC capture footage of Clancy Matthews bursting out of the restroom screaming before collapsing on the floor in front of a Pacman arcade game. In the video one can clearly see that the man is covered in blood. His clothes are tattered. When police arrive on the scene Clancy is not responsive. To this day he has not spoken a word since his curious reappearance. Security footage corroborates the station worker’s claim that Clancy never entered the store. He simply appeared. Three items were recovered from the traumatized man: a mechanical pencil, a small notebook (badly deteriorated), and a digital camera. Only ten people have had access to the camera itself and of those ten only three have managed to view the entire body of images recorded. The camera recorded seventy-two images and one brief out of focus video. Most who view the images on the camera are overcome with a sense of horrible dread followed by a wave of nausea and are unable to view more than the first ten or eleven images. The video clip itself last for only fifteen seconds, and reveals little more than a reddish blur, darkness, and static. More disturbing than the video clip’s imagery is an unsettling wet sound that audio technicians have determined are Clancy’s footsteps on some unidentifiable surface. More disturbing perhaps is the content recorded in the notebook. At some point in Clancy’s horrible ordeal, before his mind shattered, he began to document an incredible and bone-chilling story. The entries in the notebook become increasingly disjointed. The final entries are little more than cryptic phrases. The final statement in the notebook that can be considered language and thus the final communication of Clancy Matthews simply reads:Oh God, that face…