Excerpt: The Haunter of the Maria

The moon was coming up, a big fat yellow glow, as Blake sped northwards along the Interstate.

He had tried going south, but it hadn’t seemed to make a difference; he still felt he needed to get away. Wherever he went, it seemed, he needed to get away. It was almost as though, whatever he wanted to get away from, he was bringing with him.

Whether that was blue lights in his head, or the really bad feeling in his hand, or the voice that said “I have always been here”.

Or whatever it was, the thing that he couldn’t quite seem to get straight in his head, the thing that made tears run down his face, and made him say, “Charlene, I’m so sorry” to the empty space around him.

He had driven south, all the way to Palm Bay; he had stopped at a gas station to fill up, and the attendant had given him some funny looks, possibly because of the way his hand was red and sticky and didn’t work very well now. He had driven around the outskirts of Palm Bay, and somehow he had got turned around, and now he was back on I-95 and heading back home to Brevard County and Cape Canaveral. Or not. He could carry on going north, he thought, see where the wind, or a tank full of gas, might take him. See if he could outrun the weird feeling inside his head right now.

That old song, the one he had thought of on the moon, it kept coming back to him. “Three wheels on my wagon,” he sang to himself, in between times, when he wasn’t telling Charlene he was sorry. He wondered if he was driving too fast. He had been driving too fast on the moon, he remembered that, and as the road signs zipped past, and the lines on the highway merged into one continuous blur, he wondered if he was doing it again.

But there was something he needed to get away from. Something he needed to outrun. Even though he knew he couldn’t.

There were blue lights in his head again – no, there weren’t. There were blue lights in his rear-view mirror. Flashing ones, many of them. The urge to get away suddenly became a lot stronger. Blake pushed down on the gas pedal, accelerating away from the police vehicles behind him. They were using some sort of trucks, he noticed. He giggled. Perhaps they were Jeep Cherokees, that would fit in with the song. “Those Cherokees are after me,” he sang.

He swerved abruptly off the Interstate at the next intersection. Lights and horns blurred past him; he was weaving in and out of traffic. There shouldn’t be much on the roads at this time, he thought, and realized then that he didn’t know what time it was, wasn’t too sure of where he was, either. The blue lights, inside and out, were getting worse. The police seemed very determined. He changed lanes at random, turned down side roads. There was a terrible blinding light in the sky, and the chattering thrum of a helicopter engine above him. “They look mad,” he sang, “things look bad … “

Another turn, and another, and suddenly he was reminded that Florida was a really narrow state. He could see the ocean, big and black and silvered with moonlight. The helicopter’s searchlight was bright and close and blinding, but the moon, the moon was in the sky, the moon was ruling the night as she had done for all the ages of the world. He had been there, Blake thought, he had stood on her face. It hardly mattered now. The road was leading straight into the ocean; it turned up ahead, he saw, turned sharp left, he would need to reduce speed and steer hard left to follow it. He stamped down harder on the gas pedal. He was running out of road.

“C’mon all you Cherokees sing along with me!” he screamed, ten seconds before he slammed into the Atlantic Ocean at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.