Despite the monotony of highway driving, Lydia welcomed the freedom of the freeway with open arms and a feel-good music playlist. Her sedan’s tires blurred over the fresh asphalt in a wash of white noise, carrying her past ripples of field, pasture, and small township alike. The anonymity provided by high speed and a lack of stoplights let her observe rural America in perfect peace. There was something special about passing the world by, and as the sun’s heat pushed against her A/C from a cloudless sky, Lydia couldn’t find it in her to be upset about the two day drive to her parents’ house. She turned up her music and let the sun sink lower on the horizon, dripping orange over the eaves of the barns and ancient gas stations that dotted the landscape.
It wasn’t until the last hint of color left the sky that she pulled off the highway and into a town that primarily consisted of a slightly less ancient gas station, a small grocery store, and a motel, all perched on a slope overlooking the interstate. She was trying a slightly different route this time, and found that the cheap motel met enough of her standards (no mysterious disappearances and less than fifty dollars per day) to spend her travel-weary night there.
The fantastic view of the hills rolling beneath her feet made her feel better about that decision. A steady trickle of cars flying down the interstate gave the impression of a river in the moonlight, sappy as she thought the comparison was. Setting poetic observations aside, Lydia shuffled into the threadbare lobby with her suitcase, and was checked into the motel by a teen who couldn’t be accused of getting a good night’s rest in the last week. One wrestling match with the room’s outdated key later, she locked the deadbolt and finally let herself relax, ready to zip through the shower and into the vaguely cigarette-scented bed. It wasn’t until she tucked herself under the sheets and reached for the bedside lamp that she felt something off.
Every instinct she had went on alert, freezing Lydia where she lay. Straining her ears only made her rapid heartbeat clearer and— her heartbeat.
Only her heartbeat. No crickets, no neighboring guests, and no highway rush.
The world outside her room was silent.
Her mouth dried faster than a desert. The A/C that no longer rattled like it was dying suddenly made the room too cold, her fingers stiff as she pulled them close to her chest.
I have to be overthinking this. She slid out of bed anyways.
The clicks of the deadbolt and lock echoed like gunshots, and the un-oiled door hinges shrieked in the oppressive quiet. Even the air outside was perfectly still, suffocating despite the open sky, sticky and clinging where it had been a refreshing breeze before.
Lydia hesitantly stepped out into the parking lot. She had to find some proof for why her heart was pounding, why the world had switched to something so alien she felt it in her bones.
Her bare footsteps were audible on the warm asphalt as she tiptoed across the parking lot toward the freeway. Under the light of the half moon and motel signage, she peered down the grassy slope, unsure what the hope fluttering in her chest was for.
Car headlights and taillights dotted the highway in gold and red, unmoving and silent like the rest of the blue-tinted hills. Everything was frozen as if it had never been moving in the first place, a perfect painting of rural America; an image Lydia admired hours earlier under different circumstances.
Lydia swallowed thickly. Maybe… this is a dream, or a hallucination that will go away if I just… go back to bed. Yeah. She stepped back from the curb. That’s a plan.
She turned towards the motel, only for utter horror to grip her. Where the straight lines of the motel’s brick exterior once cut squares in the flowing hillside, now a red and gray smear stood, blending further into the trees behind it as she watched. Everything around Lydia began to blur like a ruined oil painting. The nearby cars sunk into the parking lot, which itself bubbled and pooled into a tar pit. Panic shot through her chest, and before she knew it she was yanking her feet out of the tar, stumbling back over the curb, tripping, and—
Falling.
The grass cushioned what would’ve otherwise been a miserable tumble down the hill, sliding to a scuffed stop a few feet from the interstate.
Lydia grunted as she hauled herself upright. Her musings about grass stains were interrupted before they could start by something moving near the motel— or rather, something bleeding through where the motel used to be. The first external noise of the night, a rumbling growl that rattled her chest, was all it took for her to turn tail and cross what remained of the freeway.
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The firefly dots of car lights had also been stretched, though less grotesquely than the motel. She forded her way through a river of streaking luminescence, red on the right hand current and yellow on the left, regardless of where she was. She tried not to focus on sight so much; looking at anything was starting to give her a headache. Instead she focused on the sensation of passing through cars that weren’t there anymore. Much more pleasant, even though spots burned where engines had fused into liquified light. The central concrete barrier was more of a cold, waist-high undercurrent than anything else, hardly enough to slow her down, certainly not solid enough to stop her.
When she tumbled out of the fake river, Lydia allowed herself a glance back at the motel hill. She snapped her eyes shut. The crackling, grumbling, humming, shattering sounds were painful enough without looking at their visual counterpart. Whatever it was, it looked like it was going to cross the highway, so she needed to move out of its way. Better yet, escape this hellish place.
As Lydia sprinted left along the weedy freeway shoulder, she tried to think about how she might get out of this. How did she get here in the first place? She’d only walked out of her motel room in the creepy silence, which was currently being interrupted by the hill-sized epilepsy attack. What was so special about exiting her motel room?
Though maybe it was that simple. Thresholds had some ju-ju significance in many cultures, she was pretty sure, and nothing inside the motel had melted when she’d been waffling at the door. If nothing else she’d like to feel the comfort of being sheltered from the thing when its massive not-foot squished her. The motel was out, blocked as it was, but maybe she could get to the gas station or grocery store.
The patchwork sounds indicated that she was probably far enough away from the monstrosity to cross the freeway to the side with the ‘town’. Just as well, since the trees on her side were starting to twist and make ominous slithering noises.
Lydia pushed her way back through the highway-river, trying to ignore how the burning, chilling, tingling sensations lingered on her skin, and started trekking up the hill to the nearest manmade shape. She ignored the grass slipping and twining between her toes, she ignored the rolling of the landscape around her, and she definitely ignored the creature whose existence hurt to merely—
It was looking at her.
Its attention scalded her the way the noon sun would, only instead of stopping at the surface, it bored through her, all the way past her heart and lungs and rib cage, out the other side.
Whatever the entity used as its forelimbs hadn’t crossed the river yet. It hadn’t left yet. And now, it changed course for her.
Tears pushed their way out of her eyes, forced by the lower frequencies of the creature’s calls, and even as her steps grew heavier and the seconds stretched to days, Lydia knew she had to keep going. It didn’t matter what the thing intended to do to her; simply being close enough for it to reach her would ensure a miserable death. She moved on, damning the consequences of the entity’s attention.
When her feet tried to sink into the tar pit in her exit strategy’s parking lot, she ignored that, too. She was busy, she told the ground, and she simply didn’t have time to die of something so paltry as existential suffocation.
Her fingers closed around the half-melted handle of what she assumed was a door. The building wasn’t quite looking like a building anymore, but she convinced herself that that would have to do.
What she couldn’t ignore was the void on the other side of the smeared rectangle.
Lydia— and it took her a second to remember her name, what she stood to lose if she died here— closed the rectangle. And opened it again.
Would an empty void be better than this? Her thoughts were being compressed by the weight of the— large? Enormous? Hideously oversized?— thing that was moving her way, but that thought still bubbled up.
No. She braced herself against the not-melting-you-should-be-solid ground. I have to leave. It’s right here!
Lydia collected what pieces of herself hadn’t been shaken or squeezed out of her yet. I have to go home. Open, shut. I need to go home.
She slammed the door-like object open and closed repeatedly, chanting her admirably lucid mantra to herself all the while. I want to go home. I need to go home. I really, really, REALLY don’t want to be here—!
The entity of indeterminate size slid closer, its presence continuing to occlude her sanity through sheer pressure, when finally— an opening!
Lydia launched herself through the door and pulled it shut behind her like her life (very likely) depended on it. It took a few seconds to blink her tears away, either because of how bright the lights in this new place were, or because her brain had been about to leak out of her facial orifices. She didn’t care at that point.
Looking around, she realized she was very much in the normal world, the decrepit town grocery store to be precise, and also very much barefoot in her pajamas. In front of a long-suffering late shift cashier.
The real world felt too rigid, too sharp for a moment. Like her opinions on what shape and purpose each object should have didn’t matter— which, she supposed, they didn’t. The ease and clarity of those thoughts left her staring at the cashier a little too long. It was kind of nice to feel the sour burn of embarrassment rather than incomprehensible terror, though.
Composing herself, Lydia waved a goodnight to the cashier, hoping against hope they’d forget the disheveled intrusion, and promptly speed-walked back to the motel down the street, which had been returned to a Euclidean state of being. She threw herself into bed and slept as much of her midnight escapade away as she could.
The next morning, Lydia decided that this route did not save any time whatsoever compared to her usual one, and happily left the nameless town behind forever.
If the grass stains remained fused to her pajamas, she ignored that, too.