Chapter 6: The Road is a Trap

Chapter 6: The Road is a Trap

The world outside the car windows was a blur of hostile green and grey. The endless stands of New England pine pressed in on the highway, their dark branches like skeletal fingers reaching for the road. The sky was a sheet of flat, unforgiving light. For Liam, the car was not a vessel of escape; it was a claustrophobic cage hurtling through a landscape that no longer felt neutral.

He drove, his hands clenched around the steering wheel, his knuckles white. Beside him, Sarah sat rigid, her gaze darting from the rearview mirror to the woods flitting past. The heavy iron fireplace poker lay on the floor at her feet, a crude and useless talisman against the thing that haunted them. They hadn't spoken more than a few words in the last hour. The silence was thick with the things they couldn’t say, choked by the memory of their neighbor's grief-stricken face and the ghost of a fifteen-year-old forum post.

An inescapable imprint. The words from PhotoNegative_79’s digital epitaph played on a loop in Liam’s mind. He was a fraud, performing this escape for Sarah’s benefit, letting her cling to the hope that distance equaled safety. He knew better. He knew with a cold, hollow certainty that the Glimmer wasn’t in their house. It was in his head. It was tethered to the photograph that was no longer on his laptop but was seared onto his memory. They weren't running from it. They were its vehicle.

“We should call the kids,” Sarah said suddenly, her voice startlingly loud in the quiet car. “Let them know we’re coming. That we’re taking a surprise trip to see them after we stop at my sister’s.”

The lie was so fragile, so pathetic. Liam knew it was an attempt to grasp at normalcy, to hear the voices of their children and pretend for a few precious minutes that they were just a family on a road trip.

“Okay,” he agreed, his voice a dry rasp.

Sarah dialed, putting the phone on speaker. It rang twice before a familiar, cheerful voice answered. “Hey, Mom!”

“Josh! Hi, honey. Are you with Maya?”

“Yeah, we’re just grabbing lunch at the union. Everything okay? You sound… weird.”

Liam’s stomach tightened. Their children, twins with an almost psychic attunement to their parents’ moods, could hear the fear bleeding through the phone lines.

“Everything’s fine!” Sarah’s voice was too bright, too forced. “Just a bad connection. Listen, Dad and I decided to take a few days off. We’re on our way to Aunt Carol’s, and we thought we’d swing by campus tomorrow to take you guys out for a real dinner. How does that sound?”

There was a pause. “That’s… awesome,” Maya’s voice joined in, laced with suspicion. “But isn’t Dad in the middle of that big server migration at work?”

“It can wait,” Liam interjected, trying to sound casual and failing miserably. “Needed a break. Getting some fresh air.” The lie tasted like ash in his mouth. He pictured the dead raccoon in his driveway, the pale, faceless thing stepping out from behind a tree. This was the opposite of fresh air.

“Okay…” Josh said slowly. “Well, great. We’ll see you tomorrow then. Drive safe. Love you.”

“We love you, too,” Sarah said, her voice cracking on the last word. She ended the call and tossed the phone onto the dashboard as if it were burning her. The brief, painful connection to their old life was severed, leaving them more alone than before.

They drove on, turning off the main highway onto the winding state routes that would take them deeper into the mountains toward Carol’s house. The paranoia that had been a low hum now grew into a scream. Every pair of headlights that appeared in the rearview mirror felt like a pursuit. A lone figure walking along the shoulder made Liam’s heart seize, but it was just a hitchhiker with a backpack. A dead deer on the side of the road, a common enough sight in these parts, made Sarah gasp, her hand flying to her mouth.

Liam’s gaze kept flickering to the side mirror. He kept expecting to see it. A pale shape keeping pace with them in the trees, flowing through the forest as effortlessly as they drove on the pavement. I look at the picture, and I feel like it’s looking back.

They were on a particularly desolate stretch of road, a two-lane blacktop with no other cars in sight and the forest crowding both shoulders, when it happened.

It wasn't a hiss or a slow leak. It was a detonation.

BANG!

The explosion was deafening, a gunshot right next to his ear. The entire car lurched violently to the right, the steering wheel ripped from his hands. The horrifying shriek of shredding rubber filled the air as the rim of the back-right wheel scraped against the asphalt.

“Liam!” Sarah screamed.

Instinct took over. Liam wrestled with the wheel, fighting the vehicle’s savage pull toward the trees. He pumped the brakes, trying not to lock them, his muscles straining against the momentum. The car fishtailed, its back end swinging out before he corrected, finally wrestling it to a shuddering, grinding stop on the gravel shoulder.

Silence descended, broken only by the frantic ticking of the cooling engine and the sound of their own ragged breaths. The smell of burnt rubber filled the car, acrid and suffocating.

For a moment, they just sat there, hearts hammering.

“Everyone okay?” Liam asked, his voice shaking.

“I think so,” Sarah breathed.

He pushed his door open and stepped out into the eerie quiet of the afternoon. The silence here was different from the silence in their house. It was a vast, natural indifference. He walked to the back of the car.

The tire was annihilated. It wasn’t just flat; it was gone. Long, black strips of tread lay strewn across the road behind them. The rim was bent and scarred, a jagged metal wound. There was no fixing this. Not with the small spare in the trunk.

“Damn it,” he swore, kicking at a loose piece of gravel. They were stranded. Miles from the nearest town, with spotty cell service at best.

Sarah got out of the car, her eyes wide as she took in the damage. She looked up and down the empty road, then at the wall of trees that seemed to lean in over them. “What do we do?”

And then, Liam saw it.

At the edge of the woods, about fifty yards away, there was a flicker of movement. It wasn’t an animal. Animals had fur, colour, substance. This was a fleeting impression of wrongness. A flash of slick, pale skin against the dark bark of an oak tree. A form, impossibly tall and thin, darted with an unnatural, fluid speed from one shadow to the next. It was there for no more than a second, a glitch in his vision.

But he had seen it. And Sarah, following his frozen gaze, had seen it too.

Her breath caught in a choked sob. Her hand went to her mouth, not in surprise, but in the dawning horror of absolute comprehension. The last vestiges of her hope, the desperate belief that escape was possible, crumbled into dust.

They stared at each other across the roof of their broken-down car. There were no words left. There was no need for them. The lie he had been carrying for her was now their shared, undeniable truth.

The road was not an escape route. It was a trap. And they had driven right into its jaws. As the sun began to dip below the treeline, casting long, menacing shadows across the road, they stood by their crippled vehicle, two lost souls realizing they hadn’t been fleeing a haunted house. They were the haunted house.