That Which We See In the Dark (And That Which We Don't)

That Which We See In The Dark

Sometimes it's a horse, sometimes it's a giant black dog, sometimes it's a plain faced man, sometimes it's just something with a set of legs and you never look quite close enough at the body, because the legs are all that matter. Down long silent stretches of heartland highways, I'd conjure up this travel companion, born with only the purpose to race alongside the car I was in and dodge the obstacles that dotted the side of the road. Before wifi was a feature in modern cars, before cellphones were mainstream or even in-vehicle DVD players this was the best way to pass the time on long car trips, strapped into the back. When it was too dark to attempt to read and there were no streetlights to pass to give me a fleeting second to swallow a few more lines of text, there was always the roadside racer. If I felt particulatly vindicated for an eight year old, I would have this racer trip and fall once or twice, scramble to get to its feet but never falling behind as it sprinted across the landscape with the minivan I inhabited. I never bothered to wonder if this racer was aware that I controlled it, if it even knew of my presence, because it never seemed to look at me. It only galloped beside the road, and it always vanished into the landscape whenever we reached our destination, perhaps to keep running until I would summon it again.

I'm driving down a long arm of silent heartland highway nearly twenty years later, the only sign of a world outside my car being the fleeting glimpses in my headlights, rising out of the darkness before me only to burrow back into question behind me like the back of a whale just peeking from the lowest points of the waves. My car, my space shuttle through the empty space that seems to envelope my metal hull, is silent as I like it at night. Silent because I need to see, and if all I hear is music in the darkness I might not see the deer that like to spring like flowers out of the soybean fields that flank me. Fifteen miles running north to south and I've yet to encounter head nor taillights, and when a pinprick of light seems to rise from the darkness ahead of me I'm quick to realize that my incoming hitchhiker is not a deer debating a leap under my tires but the reflective tape of the mile markers. I want to relax, but there's bound to be a time where that pinprick is indeed the eyes of an animal and I briefly recall the fact that kamakazi deer are responsible for more deaths in North America than any venomous creature or carnivore we have.

Another five miles. The soybeans are now corn fields. Still driving, still driving.

Cornfields are a space I try not to pay attention to at night. Call it superstition but it always feels like there's something just behind the first few rows of grain, just beyond easy visibillity. Maybe it's the way the stalks resemble legs, maybe it's the fact I've seen the movie Signs too many times, maybe it's because there's nothing natural about a field of the same plant uninterrupted for miles in any direction. Driving gives me plenty of reason to not let my eyes wander to either side of me and potentially catch the eye of whatever is watching me from the corn. But when the road is straight and the size of the universe reduced to the farthest reach of your headlights, the dark fields surrounding become tempting.

My eyes are tired and I'm getting restless, so I dare a glance.

There's a dog standing on the right side of the road, on the shoulder. Black, it's eyes catching the headlights.

My mind goes back three miles previous, when I saw a dead animal I barely recognized as a dog laying in the ditch and I begin to try to prepare for the possiblity this animal might attempt to greet the car. When you learn to drive you're told that if you encounter an animal on the road you can't stop or even slow down. You drive forward and hope you don't feel something run under the tires.

The dog starts to move, my shoulders lift to rest by my ears as my back tenses entirely.

But the dog is only running alongside the car, remaining on the shoulder. I glance at my spedometer.

I'm going fifty miles per hour.

The dog trots pleasantly beside my car, not even giving me and my vessel a sideways glance although I know that I'm what it's running with. My eyes snap back to the road, I can't watch the dog for long, but every time I glance to my right, it's still running faithfully.

Except for the time I look and it's a horse. Big, black, somehow its eyes are as bright as my headlights, and it gallops silently beside me, giving no indication of tiring.

I keep driving, my knuckles white on my wheel. I want to turn on the radio, prove that I'm not the only human left in the world, reassure myself that there is more out there than me, this creature, the corn that caged me and the miles of road I was steadily eating. But I don't. And the horse is silent, and the corn is dark.

I haven't looked to the left of me in a long time, I've been focused on the creature to my right for so long. Yet I don't look left. Because without looking I know there is something else there, and unlike the horse or the dog, this thing is watching me. I feel its eyes burning the side of my face and there's a pulling sensation on the edge of my vision. It wants me to look, it dares me to look. It needs me to look.

I glance to my right.

A shadowy man races with my car, I catch glimpses of the edge of its eyes, bright and intense as headlights. I want to call out to the creature, somehow thinking it can help me, wants to help me. It doesn't acknowledge my gaze. I focus on the road again.

I don't look at whatever is to my left but I feel it. I catch glimpses of something huge, with too many legs because I don't even see the corn or the sky above the field to my left. Either it's running so close to my car my window is consumed by it or it's so large it consumes the landscape. It's begging me to look, I want to look, but I don't want to see. My chest is starting to hurt, my heart will surely break the ribs that cage it.

The thing on my left is fogging my window and I want to scream.

I look right. I only see the legs of some unknown animal, the shape unclear.

Help me. Help me.

The corn in the fields is whipping about in a furious wind, the stalks snapping angrily and the leaves shining like blades. I want to cry, I can feel the thing on my left trying to rip open my car, I can feel angry claws curling against the glass of my window but it needs me so desperately to look.

Soybeans.

The sky opend up and the world is quiet. I lean on the brake and urge my car to stop. I'm shaking and my head throbs from clenching my teeth so very tightly. Eventually, I look in my rear mirror.

A dog sits on the side of the road. Big, black, and its eyes bright like headlights. It is alone.

I sit in my car until the lamps of another car appear in the other direction, driving north. As they approach the field, the dog gets up, and I watch it break into a gallop next to its new payload.

I see nothing else follow.

I resume driving.