“But it’s a junkyard!” she said, too loudly, her laughter spilling out among the words.
“Yeah, sure it is. But what a junkyard.”
She opened the door of the car and stepped out, looked at the seemingly endless acres of piled cars, ambiguous metal scraps, toilet seats and bicycles; at things so rusted up and run together it was nearly indistinguishable where one thing ended and another began. Good Lord, she thought, how does a small town accumulate so much garbage?
The flattened cars were stacked forty, fifty-feet high, the mountainous heaps of debris at least half that and twice as wide. A narrow dirt road twisted through the massive piles, like a path leading to a mystical land where everything was broken and rusted; an extinct civilization where only jagged ruins remained, massive paperweight reminders of a dead race.
“I’ve never seen so much crap in all my life,” she said, amused at her own vulgarity. “My god Jimmy, look how high it goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a whole city underneath all that stuff, hidden from human eyes. I bet the dumps in Chicago aren’t nearly as big.”
He laughed, and she could feel him watching her. But she kept her eyes on the towers. A wonderland of shit, she thought, keeping that vulgarity to herself.
“You know, there’s a story...” he started, then stopped. “Well, it’s gonna sound crazy.”
“Tell me,” she said, not knowing – not really – whether she wanted to hear the story or not.
“It’s kind of an urban legend,” he said, “that there’s a car down there, way deep in the yard, sitting all by itself. An old Ford or something. It’s rusted right through, big holes in the roof, in the hood. It’s got wheels but no tires, and it’s missing a door, and all the glass is broken out. But what’s really weird is the car’s color – as it first was, I mean. They say it’s painted a bottomless, empty black. Dark as outer space.” He paused, as if reflecting. “The kids like to say the car was built in Hell. Crazy, right?”
“Geez,” she said, scanning the piles of cars.
“What’s really scary about this car,” he continued, “even though it’s junked and old and useless… well, it’s said that anyone who dares sit inside of it...”
She looked at him, eyes wide. “What?”
His soft smile was amused, but his eyes had that hard look again. The look of ice so frozen it could never be thawed. He stepped behind her, lay his long fingers over her shoulders.
“They never come out,” he whispered into her ear as she looked on at the broken towers of metal, the vast field of a used past. “A few kids have disappeared over the years,” he said. “More than a few, actually. And lots of us hear rumors about dares and stupid stuff like that, stories about how kids like to go into Riley’s to hunt for that car, dare each other to sit inside and see, see if anything happens. And something must have happened, right? Something pretty terrible. Because those kids, the ones that went looking for that old rusty Ford, the ones who found it, who sat inside… they never came back. Not ever.”
Ellie noticed the reddening sun peek at her through the columns of junked autos and suddenly wanted to cry. An ache had settled into her guts like a cancer. She didn’t know why, maybe it was the thought of those kids who had disappeared. Or maybe it was just hitting her, full-force, that this was her home now, and these were the highlights. The day was almost gone, and what had they made of it? A creepy lake and a haunted junkyard. She wondered if she’d ever be happy again.
“Say, I have an idea,” he said, breaking her train of dark thoughts.
“Jimmy…”
“Let’s give it a try.”
She spun to look at him, saw his wide grin, his flickering eyes, his sculpted hair coming loose. A greasy strand hung over his face like a scythe.
“Try what?”
“To find it!” he said, grabbing one of her hands so tightly she winced. “We can try and find the car together. See, I think it’s a portal, you know?” he said excitedly, his words pouring out of him in a rush. “Like a doorway, between this world and another. Only, you can only go one-way, or maybe not, but maybe when you come back... when you come back it’s another time. The future, maybe… or the past! We’d leave and maybe never come back. Not ever. Can you imagine, Ellie?”
Ellie could imagine, and more than ever she wanted this day to end. She pulled her hand away, not as forcefully as she might have, but enough to wipe the smile from his face. “Jimmy, you’re scaring me.”
She turned away from him, looked down at her shoes. What a mess, she thought.
“Come on, Ellie, I was just joking,” he said to her bowed head, and she thought he sounded sincere enough. She felt hands rest lightly on her hips and pushed down the rising thrill of his familiarity. He turned her to face him. “It’s just a dumb story, okay? I was only fooling around.”
She nodded, but said nothing, couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Tell you what?” he said brightly, “Let’s get out of here. We’ll head back to town, get some food, then I’ll take you home so you can get your room set up before bedtime, okay?”
She was hungry now, and getting very tired. “I guess,” she said.
“Good,” he said, sounding relieved. “Then come on, there’s one more thing I want to show you.”
She followed, somewhat petulantly, but was glad to go. She twisted her head for one last look at the junkyard, squinted at a dark shape hunched atop a stack of faraway cars. She imagined wings wider than the car it rested upon unfurl from its core and spread against the backdrop of hazy red sun before the dense shadow dropped away, disappeared into the eroded world beyond.
How strange are the shadows here, she thought, then settled into the warm seats of the convertible, reminded of the fabled old Ford that made children vanish, a doorway to other worlds.
THEY PARKED AT the corner of Aylesbury Avenue and Dean Street in the heart of downtown Sabbath. The Chrysler trembled, then went still.
The streetlights popped on as they got out of the car, the glow of the bulbs rising from brown to beige to white as they walked along the broad sidewalk. She had her sweater on now; the sun was gone and the evening had grown cold and surprisingly damp. The streets were quiet, nearly empty. In the distance she thought she heard the lapping of waves from the lake, and wondered if the stillness of the watery expanse had finally been curdled by the wind, re-animated by nature.
Dean Street was wide and glistening, the lamps fully amped against the misty evening encroaching upon them, the small stores that lined each side of the street well-lit, although most were closed. A flower shop, a bakery, a clothing store, a bank. The young couple passed beneath the shadow of a theater marquee and she eyeballed the darkened poster stretched behind glass on the side of the lobby entrance, but didn’t recognize the image, or the title. The words seemed like gibberish. Perhaps a foreign film, she thought, but couldn’t fathom it in such a small town. The poster was blotted with vague, intense imagery, as if it might be a horror film, or a monster movie.
They passed by and she didn’t look back.
They approached the stark white window of a small drugstore. Bright white letters that hung against the brown brick façade read DOOGAN’S, the name bordered by a thin double-band of red-striped neon.
“How about a burger and a malted, on me?” Jimmy said, and Ellie just nodded, too exhausted now to argue or discuss. She was growing more and more depressed. She missed home. Not the house waiting for her a few short blocks away – the bedroom of blank walls and boxes, with curtains framing vistas of a world she did not recognize – but home. Chicago. Her friends, the house she grew up in, the neighbors whose names she knew like the back of her hand. Safety.
“Here we are,” he said cheerfully, and opened the door for her.
She stepped inside, blinded by fluorescent light. There was a row of small booths set into a clean white wall to her left, and a long counter to her right, lined along its length by red-backed swivel chairs. It reminded her, in a way, of Chicago, of the fountain shop she and her friends gathered at when they were younger, although it was much busier than this one.
