There was a continual low buzzing in her head, over which the music from the radio seemed to fade in and out. Her eyes felt gritty and tender, and every time her eyelids drooped shut it seemed an almost impossible effort to open them again. Stretched out on the gas pedal, her right leg kept going numb, and when she flexed her toes to wake it again, her muscles were stabbed with sharp pains that nonetheless seemed to be happening at a distance, perhaps even to someone else’s leg. Her hands were stiff on the wheel, which had grown warm and sticky, so she had to peel her fingers off one by one to be able to wriggle them.
Becky was tired. No, more than tired. Tiredness was everyday, mundane, a normal sensation experienced after a day at work. Right now, she was spent, exhausted, absolutely shattered. But she couldn’t stop for a rest. She still had such a long way to go.
No rest yet.
Not quite yet.
Keep going.
Just a little longer.
Just that bit farther.
Then she could have a break.
A break.
A rest.
No rest yet.
Her thoughts cycled through her mind, little voices chanting over and over until the words seemed meaningless. In her stomach, besides the churning of too much junk food and too much bad coffee drunk too late in the evening, a gnawing anxiety was growing at how long the journey was taking.
Four hours and twenty minutes.
That was what Google maps had said.
Four hours and twenty minutes.
It had seemed like such a good idea to Becky. When she was invited to speak at the conference, she had immediately checked out the travel options. Flying such a short distance seemed obscene to her – she would spend longer waiting at the airport than up in the air. The supposedly high-speed, modern international trains would take more than nine hours.
That was nine hours in theory.
Becky had already had plenty of bad experiences with international trains.
Like the time that the first train, the vital initial link in the whole complex, fragile chain that was supposed to deliver her to her destination in time, was already delayed. After sprinting the length of the subway under Utrecht Central – heart racing, legs trembling, air scraping painfully in and out of her gasping lungs – she managed to sling herself and her bags into her connecting train just in time. To discover when she arrived in Maastricht that there were no trains crossing the border.
Or the night that she had waited interminably for her connection on a rural platform in the middle of nowhere, each announcement adding a little more delay to the arrival of her train, until the announcer apparently packed up and went home to bed, leaving her standing there in the blackness, alone.
Or the summer a mountain pass in Switzerland was blocked so all trains were diverted over an excruciatingly slow local line, a fact the railway company hadn’t deemed interesting enough to pass on to their customers. ‘They’ll find out for themselves’, they probably thought. As she had done, finally arriving at the hotel not in time for a pleasant dinner with the other delegates, as planned, but to be let in to her room by the yawning night manager, to snatch a few disturbed hours of sleep before she was up again and sat in a crowded conference room, trying to focus her bleary mind on what the speaker was saying.
No, she would rather be master of her own fate. Or mistress. Drive comfortably in her own car. Four hours wasn’t that long, she could have a break halfway, get a meal in a café. Google was supposed to account for normal traffic jams, but even with some unexpected delays it should still be perfectly doable.
The way out was fine. It was beautiful sunny weather. Part of the route passed through France, and so an ‘aire’ regularly appeared alongside the road where she could take a break. As a child on holiday, familiar with the dingy seediness of UK motorway service stations, the aires had been a revelation. Ranging from a simple picnic bench and portaloo to large complexes with good restaurants, games areas, shops and campsites, they were always pleasant and well-kept. Becky had eaten an excellent lunch, sitting inside a restaurant built into a bridge across the motorway, enjoying the novel sensation of watching the cars swoop beneath her feet and reappear on the other side. She hadn’t really needed to stop again, but an aire perched on a hillside with beautiful views over verdant valleys had tempted her out to sit on the bench with a bottle of water and a biscuit, watching deer sprint from the treeline across the grassy meadows.
Buoyed up by the easy outward journey, she had set off on the return lap full of confidence. But it was completely different. Rather than starting out bright and fresh after a good night’s sleep, she was worn down by hours of listening carefully to presenters, wrapping her head around complex technical details, carrying out animated discussions with people from Slovenia, Italy, France, China, Morocco, and many other countries. The days were long and the evenings filled with convivial dinners and drinks on terraces; camaraderie between researchers being perhaps the biggest benefit of attending a conference. Get an email from a random person asking for help and you ignore it. Get an email from the person who once told you their life story over a plate of paella, and you reply immediately.
It was a great conference, stimulating and rewarding. But by the end she was deeply weary, and she still had a long journey ahead. Straight off she hit the rush hour. Finally extricating herself from the jams around one city, she had about twenty minutes of reveling in the freedom of driving at normal speed, before she ran into the next tangle around the following metropole. An accident closed a tunnel, forcing her into a long detour. Her satnav got confused along the way, sending her round the same ring road twice. By the time she reached the long stretch of open countryside that overlapped the borders of three countries, the sun was already sinking behind the hills, a mass of threatening-looking clouds rapidly gobbling up the last rays of light.
Dusk gave the aires a more sinister character. Stopping off for a pit stop at one simple site, nothing more than a layby with a single portaloo, she was acutely aware of how vulnerable she was. A family also using the facilities waited by the door as they used the loo in turn. Becky was so uneasy that she almost asked them if they would wait and watch the door for her, but hesitated too long, and was still working up the courage to ask when they headed off in a group back to their car, chatting and laughing. Sitting in the cramped, smelly space, the thought of who might be waiting when she opened the door again made it very hard to pee, especially when a sudden howl outside made her jump. But when she emerged, there was nothing there, only her own little car looking lost and lonely in the sudden rainy squall that swept down.
Usually, Becky had good night vision. But the light from her headlights and those of the oncoming traffic was scattered by the falling rain, reflected from the myriad puddles and distorted by the drops on her windows. The view through the windscreen was a bewildering, ragged patchwork of smears, making it very hard to discern anything ahead. The fluorescent lights in one of the city tunnels had already given her a nagging headache, and the splintered light was rapidly aggravating it.
Unpleasant as the fluorescent lights had been, however, she soon bitterly missed them as she reached a stretch of road that had no lighting at all. She switched to high-beam but the rays simply reflected off the rain, so she could hardly make out the course of the road, and the lights of the occasional oncoming car completely blinded her, leaving her blinking furiously to clear her vision before the road could take an unexpected bend.
Heavy rain made it impossible to read the shadowy road signs as she passed. Her phone battery had died hours back, and when she had scrabbled in the glove compartment for the cable to charge it from the car, she realised she had left it at home. So now she had no idea where she was. She wasn’t even sure if she’d crossed the border yet. Was this Belgium or the Netherlands? Surely not still France? Please, not still France. The road seemed to extend into infinity, as if it were swallowed up by her tyres only to be disgorged and fed back again in a loop. The gloomy undergrowth on either side of the road unreeled like a tedious, never-ending film.
Time seemed to slow. Songs on the radio stretched out, pop singles turned into prog rock symphonies. Every time she glanced at the clock on the dashboard, only a few minutes had passed. Her head was too muzzy to calculate how long she had been going for. A feeling of dread started to creep through her, the irrational fixation that she would be travelling for eternity, that she would never arrive.
Keep going
Just keep going
Soon you’ll get there
Get there
Get there
Never get there…
Becky shook her head sharply. What an absurd notion. Straight out of a tacky horror film. Which, incidentally, would be set in a much more evocative location. Picturesquely desolate American badlands, spookily atmospheric Transylvanian woods, verdantly tangled Vietnamese jungle. Time loops, hauntings, chainsaw-wielding maniacs simply didn’t fit in with the borderlands of north-west Europe, where the fields were tended with an industrial efficiency and you were never far from the next cluster of dwellings, which were not rambling cottages or Gothic mansions, but grey, square, bourgeois homes, with the obligatory pharmacy and small shop selling cigarettes and bingo cards. She had been driving too long. At the next service station, or aire, or whatever the things were called in Flemish or Dutch, she would pull over for a break.
After she took this decision, it seemed to take several hours until the moment of deliverance when a rest stop emerged from the haze. But by the clock it was only seven minutes. Becky pulled into the small layby, parking neatly next to the oblong silhouettes of three portaloos. Turning off the ignition, the sudden absence of the engine rumble and the swish of the tyres on the road was like an echo reverberating in her ears. Only the sound of the rain remained, spattering on the windscreen and drumming on the roof of the nearest portaloo.
Taking a deep breath, Becky stretched, thrusting her arms out as far as was possible in the small space, listening to the popping of her joints. She took a sip of lukewarm water from her bottle and regretted not having brought a thermos full of strong black coffee. Perhaps a bite to eat would help. She leaned over and dug around in the plastic bag of food on the passenger seat, scrabbling in the debris of wrappings from the snacks she’d already consumed.
She wasn’t sure what made her suddenly look up. Something…some noise outside the car, some movement in the dark. The droplets rapidly multiplying on the windscreen now the wipers were off, and the mist accumulating on the inside from her breath made it impossible to distinguish anything outside in the gloom. Becky wiped a patch clear of condensation and peered through it. Outside, something was moving. A shadow within a shadow, a silhouette in the stygian blackness. She couldn’t make out the shape, but the way it moved, deliberately slinking, with a suggestion of immense strength coiled and ready to spring, set off some primitive alarm inside her. Her heart started to pound, chills running down her spine as the hairs on her arms stood on end. Jerking her hand out of the bag, she desperately grabbed at the key, her fumbling fingers failing to grasp it for a few heartstopping seconds, before it finally turned and the engine roared to life. Becky slammed down the accelerator and sped out of the rest stop, the car skidding back and forth on the damp tarmac.
Out on the road, the monotony of the dim, empty road and the patter of the rain gradually calmed her. Her breathing slowed and deepened, as her heart regained its usual steady rhythm. Perhaps she had just imagined it. She was so tired. There seemed to be constant movement at the edge of her vision, but every time she turned her head to look at it directly, there was nothing there. Mile after mile passed by. Then, like a beacon on the edge of a turbulent sea, light beamed out ahead from a roadside café. Her whole body trembling in anticipation at the thought of sitting safely in a bright dry refuge, a mug of steaming hot coffee and a plate of warm food on the table in front of her, she thankfully turned in to the car park.
The car park seemed remarkably full for this hour on a dark, stormy night. Becky squeezed the car into one of the last available spots, right on the edge. Turning off the engine, she could hear shouts and drunken laughter. Taking a better look at the brightly-lit façade, her heart sank. Not a café, but a bar, and by the looks of the men hanging around – and they were all men –it was a pretty rough one. As she stared, blinking, the glowing neon light on the roof resolved into the unmistakable curves of a naked female form. This was no place for her. Perhaps she could just sit in the car park for a while, have a little rest. She closed her eyes, feeling the pounding just above her left eye, wishing the velvety blackness behind her eyelids weren’t shot through with painfully bright flashes. Then a sudden spike in the drunken braying made her eyes spring open again. Two hulking figures had detached themselves from the pack lurking under the overhang of the roof and were making their way, half swaggering, half staggering, in her direction, while the others whistled, bayed and yelled encouragement. Fear coursed through her veins, the adrenalin surge like a shot of espresso. Becky wrenched the ignition key round and jammed the gears into reverse, shooting backwards and then forwards, away back out onto the open road.
The sweat of fear poured down into her eyes, blinding her and stinging painfully. She blinked frantically to clear her vision, while hurtling on at a speed she never usually reached even on a dry road in daylight. Her gaze fixed on the rear-view mirror, searching full of dread for any pinpoints of headlights pursuing her. Then she glanced back forwards through the windscreen –
– the dark shape shot across the road right in front of the bonnet, and she frenziedly braked. She was rattled around in her seat as the car slid on the wet surface before coming to a stop slanted across the road, with a jerk that wrenched her neck and banged her head. The clap sent her drifting away, to a warm, peaceful place where sleep sweetly beckoned. Then the frenetic whine of the windscreen wipers pulled her out of her daze. Hazard lights, she thought, I need to turn on the hazard lights, but her dull brain couldn’t think how to perform this simple task. At random, she hit buttons and yanked levers. The wipers were silenced. Her window slid open. It let in the smell of the rain, but also something else, a rank, bestial reek. The rain abruptly stopped, and in the sudden silence she could make out the sound of claws scraping on the tarmac. Menacing, rasping breathing, coming closer. The car rocked as something bumped up against the rear end. Becky’s fingers closed around the only thing she could find, her water bottle, a pathetic lump of thin plastic. The car shivered gently, and it was almost as if she could feel whatever it was brushing along the bodywork, creeping closer, as if were rubbing along her own skin. The foul stench intensified, sickening her, as the panting grew louder. Her eyes fixed on the open window. Any moment, it would appear there…
There was an explosive flare of lights and a wild honking, then the crushing sound of air brakes. The massive form of a truck loomed up with a terrifying speed, then slewed to a halt just a metre away. Furious shouting as the trucker jumped down out of his cab, storming towards her car. He was heading straight for the – thing. ‘Look out!’ she shrieked, her whole body flinching at the imminent snarl, the agonised screams… Then the trucker was at her door, wrenching it open. ‘Stupid bitch’, he shouted. ‘You tell ME to look out! With your car across the road like that…’. As he raged on, she twisted round in panic to point out the danger. But, in the actinic glare of the truck’s headlights, there was nothing to be seen.
Becky turned off the road into the car park of the café, with a wave to the trucker that tried to convey both gratitude and an apology. He hadn’t believed her story of some sort of animal, but once he’d properly looked at her, her obvious terror had softened his fury into an irate grumble, and he had, with grudging chivalry, offered to escort her to the next café. The adrenalin flowing through her body, combined with the scornful impatience of the trucker behind her, which was somehow flawlessly communicated by his glaring headlights and the aggressive low rumble of the engine, had helped her make the last few miles to the café. And it really was a café this time. She climbed out of the car, feeling every muscle protest with pain, and walked up to the door in a dizzy haze. The musty fug of deep-fried snacks, poorly cleaned toilets and sweaty drivers rose up to meet her. But in that moment the doorway, lined by neon adverts and garish posters for energy drinks, seemed like the portal to salvation.
The trucker watched her walk in, then put his truck into gear again, snorting in disgust. Women. They had no business being out on the road at night on their own. No common sense, no stamina, no nerve. You saw that hysterical cow back there, nearly making him crash because she imagined some crap about an animal stalking her. Stalking a car. On a main road. Did she think the fucking thing could fly? Or did she believe in werewolves with supernatural powers? No, long-distance driving should definitely be left to the professionals – the male professionals. He smoothly accelerated the truck onto the main road, plunging boldly into the dim treelined chasm ahead. He was tired, but that came with the job. Tempting as it had been to take a break himself at the café, he needed to get on. He still had such a long way to go.
In the corner of his eye, a dark shape seemed to lope along the side of the road, just outside the beam of the headlights, effortlessly keeping pace with the truck. He blinked his eyes to clear them, and shook off a sudden sense of apprehension. It was just tiredness clouding his vision. But he didn’t need a rest yet.
No rest yet.
Not quite yet.
Keep going.
Just a little longer.
Just that bit farther.
Then he could have a break.
A break.
A rest.
No rest yet.