The Road

In my narrating this anecdote, I wish that the reader considers the state in which I had been that very day, and that is to say, a state of perfect consciousness and awareness. During no time outside my little shed had I found myself deprived of proper sleep, sanity, or possessed by any form of dementia that would later on reveal itself as the primary cause of the manifestation of what I had seen on that road, for the only reason that even in the most disturbing state of mind, no horrors could come close to being pictured like those that had befallen my companion and I.

. . .

December 8th, 1968.

My coachman had arrived. Seeing him through one of the frozen windows, I made haste to gather my keys and put on my jacket, made from the grey pelt of mountain wolves. I made my way out onto the pavement, frost crunching under my boots, and approached the carriage. One of the two horses exhaled heavily as I nodded to Mr. Thomas with a friendly grin.
"Where to?" he said.
"The cemetery," I answered, somewhat surprised. Mr. Thomas knocked the side of his head with his knuckles, as if remembering this Sunday being no different than the others. Sunday was visiting day.
I proceeded to pull the handle and enter the carriage. A whistle from Mr. Thomas and the horses went into a moderate galloping, kicking snow as the wheels left a straight trail across the road.
My ride was somewhat agreeable, despite the joylessness of my destination. With nothing to do and my thoughts feeling like a burden to my mind, I contemplated the passing fir trees from my window, the same ones I was accustomed to seeing–or they accustomed to me. If they could talk, they would not. They would nod. 'They do nod,' I thought. 'Always, in somnolent motion.' From my pocket I pulled out a cigar and lit the tip, rolling the window so that the room would not become my coffin. 'It looks like a train,' that's what they'd say. I laughed to myself. The coachman had slowed his horses a while back due to the mirror of ice that stretched across the rest of the road. But what uneased me was when the horses stopped completely. My cigar always finished when I arrived near the entrance of the cemetery, and an ashtray would be placed on one of the pillars–the hands of the gates–inside which I would extinguish the butt. Right now, my cigar was only halfway burnt: we can't have arrived, something was wrong.
"Is everything all right?" I yelled to Thomas. Thereupon my inquiring and through the window entered a deathly breeze, strong enough to replace the use of my far-away ashtray, and enter the gap between my jacket and the skin of my neck. Goose-bumps spread from my stomach to my back, and instantly shot up to my head, as though with every shiver they shifted, until I poised a hand on the handle and, strange to say, faltered. 'Should I risk exposure to whomever was blocking us?' For a second, I thought of staying in, but having idiotically shouted from the carriage, my hiding spot had been hopelessly exposed since then. Besides, no thief–clever or oafish–steals from a carriage without searching the inside of it. This observation gave me the courage to exit my lair and inquire about whatever impediment presented itself before us. "Thomas?" I approached his seat, and saw him. The face of a man who seemed to witness a fear not even the most disturbing state of the human mind could grasp. He looked as if he were about to cry, or scream, but he remained, trembling. Paralyzed. And then I looked in his direction, and felt a violent contraction in my ribcage. My heart had been struck not by the consequence of malnutrition or disease, it was nothing of the sort. It had been struck by fear. Gut-wrenching fear, surging within my core as though in waves, and then I ceased to feel the shivers of wind, its gusts grazing against my skin and bloodying my knuckles, and I ceased to act indifferent towards the pain I had felt on my first Sunday, my very first visiting day, and I ceased to see, to see the world as it was, and saw it blurry, distorted. And then some illusory veil dropped, and behind there stood an infant. The infant, arms stretched out, a rose in one hand, an ashtray in another, stood, grinning impossibly from ear to ear. And his skin, colourless like tolling bells on rainy Sunday, the very day that initiated my visiting days, was of a dark silver. And his teeth, so eerily white–my beautiful child–proudly showed. And his hair–oh!–his hair, blonde gone ivory, nearing platinum. And his glasses, his glasses! How smaller they rendered his face, how bright they made the gaunt little figure look! My child, my son! For the first time, it was you who had come to me!

. . .

December 11th, 1968.

I awoke in my chamber.
Mr. Thomas was sitting on the bedside, downcast and silently drowned in concern. I grunted weakly, and felt him approach almost immediately. "Sir! Are you all right?" He helped me up on the bedside and gazed at me with saucer eyes. I stood there, pondering before nodding once. "Have I dreamt?" I found myself asking. No, because Thomas would not be here if I had. He offered to prepare tea and when we were both seated, mugs at hand, explained to me that I had fainted when gotten out of the carriage. A snow pile had apparently been blocking our way, and when he had made a comment about it not being as bad, I had dropped to the ground like a dead bird and remained unresponsive until he had brought me back to my shed.
"Three days . . ." I said, dismayed.
"I would leave for a couple hours and come back to check on you. But you would remain in deep slumber. I had even brought in a doctor to make sure you hadn't fallen into a coma, and I was told that all you needed was enough sleep, seeing that for some time your body had been demanding it."
My gaze shifted to my vase near a table, where Mr. Thomas had been sitting in my eternal sleep. Inside it was a bouquet of red roses. And then a click went in my head:
"The flower . . . I had forgotten to bring one," I said while rubbing down my forehead. It was the first time I had forgotten to bring one. And then a second click, this one shaking me much more, "Thomas . . . are you all right?" He looked at me with a face of 'Why wouldn't I be?'
"Yes, sir, why do you ask?"
"On the road, when I had gotten off the carriage and come to see you, that very moment, you were . . ." I could not shake away his look from my head, and it made me pause.
"Yes?" Thomas persisted curiously.
"You were frightened. What was it you had seen?" I wanted to see how he would have described it, if whatever had been on that road was even describable. What does one call something capable of reorganising mental structures in order to bring out within one this type of darkness?
"Frightened? How do you mean?" I could not have hallucinated this. The rose, the ashtray, what was it about them . . . ? Why hold these two objects, discordant by nature, at the centre of a road? Why want to hand them? But it wasn't him, I know it wasn't him. I know that now. Perhaps he had noticed a flower missing on his tomb–one which should have been there–and a cigar butt which ought to have been snuffed out at the gates. The day my son had not seen a dead smoke, he had grown impatient, and when I had forgotten his rose, he himself (not quite himself) had brought me one from his tomb. There it was, the thread of similarity! The handed ashtray had been a place for my smoke, and the rose, my gift. Ever since that day I made sure I was never in a haste.
And from that time onwards, visiting days began earlier.