The Late Lunchers: An Interlude

At lunchtime they had left the office where they both worked and he had driven them down a series of winding side roads until they found the beautiful rolling fields they had once passed and taken note of on an earlier midday jaunt. The fields teemed with richly hued wildflowers and were surrounded by trees and low growth not quite closely gathered enough to be described as woods.

After finishing a light picnic lunch, they walked together unhurriedly through the warmth of the sun beneath the bright blue sky. Gentle breezes stirred the light-dappled limbs of the alders and sent the long grass around them springing to animated life. They talked in a desultory way of their plans for the future and their hopes for what he described as "the longer term" of their lives together, and at one point she took his hand and they kissed briefly, chastely.

When the time drew close to half past one, they stopped to rest before making the trek back to his car, in a large clearing where fallen leaves had formed a dense ground cover that crackled loudly underfoot. The noise of the leaves had gradually drawn her attention to the otherwise almost complete silence of their surroundings. No birds fluttered or sang, no sound of smaller animals scurrying through the underbrush could be detected. The only sound the intermittent soughing of the breeze as it wandered among the trees like a lost companion.

She mentioned this curiosity to him. He shrugged, appeared ready to say something then paused. At last he spoke in a facetious way, telling her a story that he had once heard about a place very much like this. Rumors of a once prosperous family turned by cruel twists of fate into a brood of damned recluses, the lone surviving son who grew into a madman with a hook for a hand, vanished teenagers, subsequent police searches that found nothing but a derelict house now mostly swallowed up by weeds. She paled at these stories but he laughed cheerfully, dismissing them as "urban legends" and incidents out of "some godawful slasher movie" from decades earlier. Still her mood did not lighten, and he, cursing inwardly his own tactlessness, suggested they had better get going now if they intended to return to work on time, and the two moved off together.

The car was parked at the end of a straight narrow dirt road that went some way into the woods and stopped abruptly for no clear reason. Trees overhung the road on both sides plunging everything below into shadow in a way that had appeared cool and inviting on their arrival, but now seemed vaguely threatening to her. They entered the car quietly, an invisible wall of sorts having risen up between them, but his mood only worsened at the sight of the battery indicator glowing on the dashboard. Cursing under his breath, he attempted to start the car a few times anyway, without even false hopes of success.

Bewildered, they sat together for a few minutes while he protested vainly about the car's heretofore "perfect" performance and then muttered a few vague oaths directed at an unspecified garage or other. When this accomplished little, and after some further bickering between them over who could possibly be at fault for this apparent oversight, he withdrew his phone from the glove compartment with the intention of dialing the number of his road service, but then hesitated at the sight of the fluctuating bars in one corner of the screen.

He told her that he had to go back up the road a little way to get a better phone signal (adding in a bitter attempt at jocularity that at the very least they should take it as a good sign that the phone's battery hadn't also "inexplicably decided to pack it in and call it a day"). Having left her own phone in her desk she could only accept this result. She urged him to hurry, estimating that if all went well they might be back to the office no more than ten minutes late. He exited the car phone in hand and they exchanged a brief smile that promised a return to more pleasant moods.

She turned in her seat and watched through the back window as he jogged down the road away from the car, waving the phone around in front of his face. As he grew more distant his shape gradually appeared to merge with the shadows of the road, and in no more than a minute or two even the bright white of his shirt, eerily suspended in the dimness, was swallowed up by the darkness, and she lost sight of him.

She turned forward in her seat and sighed, gazing through the windshield at nothing in particular. The movement of shadows within shadows. The glare of sunlight on a patch of bark that oddly resembled a submerged human face of indeterminate age or sex. Tall tree shapes like the legs of ancient wooden giants standing in some ghastly formation spread out into the still, silent distance on all sides, as if they were the only living things left on this earth, awaiting some alien command to act. A sudden sense of vast desolation and abandonment dismayed her. There was no reason for it.

A horrible sound pierced the surface of her disagreeable reverie. A scream was the only way she could describe it, but it was like no cry she could imagine a human mouth could utter, distorted and deep like the roar of some enraged jungle leviathan yet at the same time possessing a high peaking unearthly shrillness that threatened to rend the very molecules of the air asunder. Her hands flew to her ears and her eyes squeezed shut automatically as the awful ululations went on and on. This continued for at least a full minute, during which she attempted to gauge the distance and direction the sound or sounds were coming from, without success. Then, without warning, the hideous noise stopped, and silence reigned again. Some horrible bird, she reassured herself nervously, not believing this explanation.

Regardless, she leapt out of the car immediately and began making her way back down the road. She called out his name a few times but there was no response. The darkness grew around her as she walked and the shadows seemed to stir and loom forward as she approached. Again she continued to call his name but received no reply. She made her way forward reluctantly, glancing back at the car and regretting leaving its meager shelter.

Then she realized she was hearing something. Footsteps, shuffling down the road ahead of her. She stopped dead still and listened. Another walker on the dirt road, approaching. She called out his name again, loudly, desperately. There was no response but the continued slow, steady footsteps. But within seconds a figure grew visible in the further dimness, at first just a shadow, then a vague shape, and then a white form immediately recognizable as his white long-sleeved business shirt materialized, hanging in the air like a ghost. She ran forward and clung to his arms, cursing his unhelpfulness. He said nothing, did not resist her. She ran her hands up his arms to feign choking his useless neck. But her hands stopped still when they found the rough stump of flesh where his throat abruptly ended.