Diana Hartwell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The Lincoln crept forward at a walking pace. Diana kept both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the small patch of white the headlights could reach. The road under the tires felt flat, then softer, then flat again. She could not tell shoulder from lane. The wipers threw off snow and the windshield filled again before they returned. She told herself to hold the center. Whatever the center was. She thought about the man waiting for her, the one she had said yes to three times. He would be at the window by now. He would be calling the road she wasn't on. The front end dropped. It was not the ditch again. It was worse. The hood plowed into a bank that had built itself across the road while she wasn't looking, a soft mounded wall the wind had shaped between two unseen banks. The Lincoln shoved into it up to the grille. Snow packed the headlights out. The engine strained, coughed, and settled to an idle. The car stopped. Diana sat still. She pressed the gas. The rear tires spun free and useless behind her. The front was buried past the bumper. No mats left. No shovel. Nothing in the trunk but a jack. She cut the engine to save the fuel and remembered the exhaust. She got out to check the pipe. The wind hit her like a hand. She waded around the back and knelt. The tailpipe was clear. For now. She stood up and that was when she saw it. Something tall stood at the edge of the headlight glow, off to the right, where the road should have had a fence or a field or nothing. It was thin. Too thin. The shape of a man stretched and dried. Antlers branched above its head, pale as old bone. It did not move the way the snow moved. It held. Diana did not breathe. She told herself it was a dead tree. A trick of the light through the storm. She counted to five. The shape was still there. Then the snow closed between them and it was gone. She got back in the Lincoln and locked the door. Her hand shook on the button. She tried the gas once more, gentle, the way she had before. The tires spun. The car did not move. The hood stayed in the drift. She shifted to park. She was not driving out of this one. Not tonight. Not under her own power. She looked at the glove box. She opened it and took out the pamphlet she had never read. She turned on the dome light. Outside, the wind kept working on the car, packing it in. Whatever she had seen at the edge of the light, or had not seen, was on the same road as she was.