The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Customized? he asked himself. Well, maybe … but who would bother to customize a station wagon into something so anonymous?

‘Hi, hello? Everything okay?’

He walked toward the door, squeezing the phone a little tighter without being aware of it. He found himself thinking of some movie that had scared the heck out of him as a kid, some haunted house thing. A bunch of teenagers had approached the old deserted house, and when one of them saw the door standing ajar, he’d whispered ‘Look, it’s open!’ to his buddies. You wanted to tell them not to go in there, but of course they did.

That’s stupid. If there’s someone in that car, he could be hurt.

Of course the guy might have gone up to the restaurant, maybe looking for a pay phone, but if he was really hurt—

‘Hello?’

Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. What he saw was dismaying. The bench seat was covered with mud; so was the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn’t look exactly as if hands had made them. The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils.

‘Is someone in there?’ He shifted his cell phone to his right hand and took hold of the driver’s door with his left, meaning to swing it wide so he could look into the backseat. ‘Is someone hur—’

There was a moment to register an ungodly stink, and then his left hand exploded into pain so great it seemed to leap through his entire body, trailing fire and filling all his hollow spaces with agony. Doug didn’t, couldn’t, scream. His throat locked shut with the sudden shock of it. He looked down and saw that the door handle appeared to have impaled the pad of his palm.

His fingers were barely there. He could only see the stubs, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started. The rest had somehow been swallowed by the door. As Doug watched, the third finger broke. His wedding ring fell off and clinked to the pavement.

He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus, something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand.

Doug tried to pull back. Blood flew, some against the muddy door, some splattering his slacks. The drops that hit the door disappeared immediately, with a faint sucking sound: slorp. For a moment he almost got away. He could see glistening finger bones from which the flesh had been sucked, and had a brief, nightmarish image of chewing on one of the Colonel’s chicken wings. Get it all before you put that down, his mother used to say, the meat’s sweetest closest to the bone.

Then he was yanked forward again. The driver’s door opened to welcome him: Hello, Doug, been waiting for you, come on in. His head connected with the top of the door, and he felt a line of cold across his brow that turned hot as the station wagon’s roofline sliced through his skin.

He made one more effort to get away, dropping his cell phone and pushing at the rear window. The window yielded instead of supporting, then enveloped his hand. He rolled his eyes and saw what had looked like glass now rippling like a pond in a breeze. And why was it rippling? Because it was chewing. Because it was chowing down.

This is what I get for being a good Sam—

Then the top of the driver’s door sawed through his skull and slipped smoothly into the brain behind it. Doug Clayton heard a large bright SNAP, like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire. Then darkness descended.

A southbound delivery driver glanced over and saw a little green car with its flashers on parked behind a mud-coated station wagon. A man – presumably he belonged to the little green car – appeared to be leaning in the station wagon’s door, talking to the driver. Breakdown, the delivery driver thought, and returned his attention to the road. No good Samaritan he.

Doug Clayton was jerked inside as if hands – ones with big palms and pencil-thin fingers – had seized his shirt and pulled him. The station wagon lost its shape and puckered inward, like a mouth tasting something exceptionally sour … or exceptionally sweet. From within came a series of overlapping crunches – the sound of a man stamping through dead branches in heavy boots. The wagon stayed puckered for ten seconds or so, looking more like a lumpy clenched fist than a car. Then, with a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet, it popped back into its station wagon shape.

The sun peeked briefly through the clouds, reflecting off the dropped cell phone and making a brief hot circle of light on Doug’s wedding ring. Then it dived back into the cloud cover.