Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The first time I heard the voice,
I thought it was just the radiohissing back to live,
another fragment of statics squeezing through concrete walls. It was
two in the morning. I was in my easy chair,
and the world beside my Cutton window was absolutely still,
accept for the distant hum of traffic a memory more
than a sound. I pressed the crack phone against my
ear and played the message again. Each time the pattern
was the same, a rusty click, garble, shuffling, then a
voice rising out of the static. You see them two write,
three seventeen. After that, only when and what might have
been breeding Most nights, I let it run on a loop,
as a repetition might reveal something new. This time, something
sang in the background, so faint it didn't feel like
a noise at all, like a warning pressed into the tape,
into my own marror. I first saw the figure on
a piece of dash cam footage granyan and focused to
time stamps stuttering in the lower corner. Three sixteen forty one,
three sixteen fifty two. There's drizzle across the windshield, wye
persmearing the glare of the headlights, and that endless, endless
shoulder of Highway fifty one. White paint, flaking grass brown
from salt and heat. He'd expect to see rokill. Sometimes
a deer in the brush may be a flush of
tawny fur fleeing Instead. The figure face hidden behind the
ban of a reflective vest, calmly daubs black paint on
the pale shoulder as the world bows by. His movements, steady,
almost ritualistic form, a broken ring shape and familiar looping
back on itself. One moment he's angled away, bundled against chill.
Then he slows, cocks his head and looks not at
the camera at first, but then one gloved hand lifts
in the face or what's visible of it beneath the
brim of a weather cap. Turns fully to the lens,
as though he seing not just the truck but the
one watching. Lader throws green years down the line. In footage,
the truck thunders passed with barelious wherve. The camera jutters,
and when its stead is the figure has gone. No
sign he'd ever been there, except a faint blot of
black and the dirty pavement in the sense that something
has shifted for a handful of seconds. The highway is
lonely in a way I find difficult to describe, like
an empty house. Some one is listening at the door.
I sat upright in my worn arm chair, lapped up,
winking in the dark. The curtain beside me hung slack,
cold air breathing against my arm. Files flickered open and
shut across my batter deathed top, anonymous emissions from late
night highway message boards, clips past for encrypted sights, and
a truncated tips from drivers. Sometimes some one would upload
a raw video headlight sweeping the verge, a sliver of
figure lost in a sudden damp, or voices muttering in
the cab about how the line seemed dram shouldn't be here.
Official police locks might record the disturbance or not. Office vandalism,
rarely with precise details. I compiled each fragment, each beck
of weirdness, like a mag by hoarding foil. Every piece
brought a slump of recognition. I'd driven that stretch, I'd
slept a night of cabs by the cup. Whether's marks
sometimes appeared and then disappeared days later. More than once
I'd passed that same mile marker half arrays plastic bolted
back after being shorn off in an accident, and felt
the charge, the cold iron taste, a fear that had
no name. On certain nights, the world just doesn't feel right,
and your heart hammerson all the wrong beats. I didn't
want to believe the pattern, didn't want it tin in
under my skin. But as the clip reached its endostatic
swallow in the frame Glaskland of the painted symbol, there
was no escaping it. I knew their shoulder, I knew
it better than my own living room, And if I
let my thought wander, I couldn't say with certainty whether
I'd only pass through or if something had quietly unspooled
and rewound a part of me on that stretch, something
I was only just beginning to remember. On the road,
every mile bleeds into the next. You wake up not
quite sure what state you are in. Buy coffee with
limp Bill's pull from a console, Astraea cribble and a log,
just to remind yourself you're still moving forward. Before the
mystery warned its way into my bones, back when I
still drove from my nutyhull. My life was tight knit, predictable.
I whole freight through cornfields and mining towns, traced the
same lonely ribbon north and south between the edge of
the city and a sprawl of nowhere. There's a camaraderie
among truck is not the movie kind, no bluster, just
a low hum of mutual understanding. Early mornings, a truck
stops met trading. We coffee for stories, talking lob penalties,
those bolts, or rumors about the next way station. Sometimes
some one would throw out a joke about highway Helen,
the supposed ghost at mile two hundred seventeen, or swap
stores about a vanishing cat under the bridge near the
county line. Most tails were tired, softened with repetition, but
on the night runs it was the code that kept
you honest. We watched for each other, Headlights flashed twice
for trouble, a flash in a lawn beamed to look
you to loking trooper. Often a kind of cheerful fatalism
took over. The radio, thick with music and banter, turned
some sommer when the road went silent, that hush, when
even big rigs felt like robots on a black lake.
There's no loaning us quite like the hash of a
rest stop at two thirty in the morning, when even
the vending machine lights seemed worn down. The stretch between
miles two hundred ten and two hundred twenty was always
the dead spot. Few lights, a single aging rest ares,
sunk between drifts of wild grass and half hearted simac
bathrooms cleaned by a rotating cast. The truck is called
it the Ghost Miles, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. At night,
lamppost flickered or went out, and behind the building lay
a skirt of gravel, the kind of place she could
just vanish if he didn't pay attention. I remember a
friendly sort named Angel. He would stomp my punch card
for showers, always had a thermo steaming on the counter.
Then one Tuesday I rolled in before dawn, an Angel
wasn't there. Locker room locked up, his phone charger plubbed him,
but no sign of the man himself. His rook sat
in the corner door shut keys and ignition cab light
lazily pulsing, as though some one had just stepped into
the dark. After some shuffling, the sheriff's deputy shrug taped
off the track, and by weeks end a new faced
man in the showers, as if nothing had happened. No answers,
but Noah PERI that, they said, Angel must have just
moved on. I locked the miles anyway, sometimes numbly, sometimes
with mounting anxiety. I told myself everyone forgets things, your
shifting time, the shape of a dream, the start of
some sum But memories began to fueset the edges. I'd
wake with my regardling at an odd angle, not sure
how I'd parked a chill in my arms, as though
I'd just come in out of the cold. I started
keeping a second lauper, cruffer, more paranoid word scrawl whatever
I heard about the ghost mile on c B an
off un warning, some whists of rumor home life. When
I finally tried to hang out, the keys felt not
much more saddle, my trick knee ached, sick kiss, always
half unpacked. Cardboard boxes ring for my apartment. Some were
to lowbooks twenty seventeen, scribbled in the size, some with
maps o those with hot trinkets of pebble from the
media inn Aton fragment of warning sign. The atmosphere never changed.
There was at tension, just below the surface, like the
drawn breath before storm, and the knowledge heavy and spoken
that I had left something unfinished on the shoulder. By then,
the anxiety didn't need a trigger. Sometimes I'd come to
and realized I'd been perched at the kitchen window, watching
the empty lot behind my building, tracing imaginary loops in
the glass. Sleep was harder to catch when it came.
It felt bored, the fragile rest of someone who knows
they'll soon be called up again. I told myself I'd
left the road behind, but the highway never let me
stay away for alarm. The night I compared the old
dustk and footage side by side, everything shifted. I received
a new clip through the anonymous appline subject line bank
another highway, same featureless darkness, Timestown b Reading three seventeen twelve,
and when scanned, the coordinates matched less than a mile
from the previous video, almost to the dart. This time
the figure was less distinct, but the narrow halo of
a reflective vest gleamed alone in the streaming dark. Another symbol,
this one elongated unbroken drip from the brush and painted
a black or deep red. HOWD to tell in the glare,
the figure bent, straightened, then once again glanced in the
direction of the camera. Less curiosity, more expectation. I left
both clips playing, flicking between them. Despite different cameras and rigs,
the same things match the time, the angle of the figure,
the stretch of broken taw macaldopogrit. In one the symbol
looked like it had been quickly tied over, but in
the necks the mark was fresh, glistening in the rain.
I spent the next eye as combing public photoor date bases,
traffic logs, even poking through highway department hawkives. A pattern emerged,
one that was difficult to accept. The mark surface to
thought intervals, always between miles two hundred thirteen and two
hundred nineteen, always in the dead of night, always erased
or painted over by the next day. No two symbols
were exactly alike. Some twisted back on themselves, whethers broke off,
may curve, but none belonged to any recognized language, rought,
mocking or hobo code I'd ever seen. It wasn't graffiti,
not in any style I knew, though the strokes carried intent,
a language for no one, written in haste, but meant
to be seen. No, so I believed. Determined to chase
it further, I arranged to meet Harold, a retired driver
who'd been on its stretch longer than most of the
bridges out there. We met about a diner just off
its at one hundred ninety two. Harold stooped and lean,
cradled his coffee with both hands, as if guarding it
from chill. I ever mentioned the marksioux I began. He
looked off out the window, and at first his expression
twisted with faint amusement. A lot of nonsense and the
Sebee kids throw a cruise with too much time. I
showed him a photo i'd printed, one of the looping
cymbals shopped from a safe angle. His smile faltered, so
one like that night after the Derby fire maybe four
years ago. Pulled over behind a red mack, meant to piss,
stretch my legs. He squinted, as though parsing a dream,
and then hell, I'm not sure, passed out. Maybe next
thing I remember it was sunshine. Rigg never moved. He
lapsed into silence, and the lion beside his eyes went slack.
He drummed his fingers, then muttered, maybe I never saw it.
Was it even real? His words lingered in the air
with a dense leaden worry, and the empty spot in
my stomach grew. When he stood to leave, Howeld looked
back once more, eyes darting hestant. You dig into it,
you will sleep better. That's a promise. His warning felt
true in a way advice rarely does. Yet I couldn't
help myself. I covered my kitchen table, which she's a
smeared print of paper, tacking up each image, cross referencing
every detail, recurring times, angles of light, shapes or shoes,
or placement of a cone in the frame. I left
voice memos to myself, half desperate reminders not to let
anything slide into the cracks. As ires became days, I
began reaching out to rest stop workers from that stretch,
worming my way into their routines as though I was
still a driver, mug of coffee, a promise of a
tip just a little late in a conversation. More than
a few were willing to chat, specially when Camerson's supervisors
drifted elsewhere. The logs, however, were a different story. Access
required bribes or a favor ode. Even then, something felt off.
One clipboard's worth of video was missing, an ire or
a more time stamped malfunction. Another paper file, a stack
of enters, A knee tight crop I ended abruptly, system
overrate penciled at the bottom. No one remembered what prompted
the maintenance the week, only that nothing seemed out of place.
I started making notes each discrepancy matched up to the
window between three and four in the morning. At night,
I monitored online trucker groups, select of message boards where
only half the stores were true and names changed by dire.
There was the trucker who swore his phone buzz to
exactly three seventeen, a m displaying a text with his
unreal time location and a tiny JPG am mark identical
to the shoulder symbols leaping but sharp edge, almost like
a broken run. Another report of picking up CEB's static
just passed mile two hundred seventeen, where the interference cut
through music and drunken chatter. I don't stop at mile
two hundred seventeen. The static reportedly repeated, but no one
else in his cab hold. Screenshots cropped up, blurred, then
vanished with the next circle of posts. One week later,
both drivers had stopped posting their accounts ented overnight. I
tracked down Jamal and night janitor at the rest stop.
He lasted longer than most, cleaning bathrooms and mopping up
truck of filth for nearly a decade. After a shift ended,
we sat on the cup as he nursed a cigarette.
The glow painting is face orange. I ever tell you,
he said, I tried to catch one of those graffiti guys.
Did you get it on video? At first my phone
started filming them froze, just static, hit the site, battery
hot as helt. Next morning, I couldn't even find the video,
like it never happened. He shivered, even though it was
just cool enough for a jacket. Boss said, I looked tired,
old neckshift, couldn't remember half of what I did. I
let it go. He exhaled and ground out the cigarette, gay,
sliding away. Therefore I could ask more. He stood and
walked back to the service building, not glancing back. Late
nights blurred into one another. I sort it through records
of abandoned vehicles, winnebagos, sprinters, battered, size each case, and
complete every log, noting exactly nothing out of the ordinary.
No for entry, no stroggle. The only cleu was always
a time between three ten and three wan tee, every instance,
always that same stretch, always quietly erased from official memory
within the week. Driving felt different now. I waited until
a dense fog growled and across the paddocks, and tucked
my old if Menace one hundred fifty on to the
shoulder near mile two hundred seventeen at two fifty a m.
The wall of was a gossom of blow light, smearing
a pulse in my throat, thick and insistent. Leaving the
engine running, I slipped out, boots, crunching the shoulder. The
air tasted mineral cold. I carried my phone, flashlight beam
playing over grass bend as if recently trampled. I found
near the pavement edge a cressent, fresh black pain, not
yet slick with you. It was faint and incomplete, as
though hurried, as though some one had been interrupted. Farther
in the brush, something made a sound, neither animal nor
wholy human, just the faint scuffing of rubber on gravel,
then quiet again, as if sound itself had recoiled. I
photographed the symbol, then hurried back to my truck fro
clench tie. I'd barely started the engine when my phone
rang collard HEADN I has tate it, then answered distorted
STATICA whistle, a hush, then a smoker's grasp. You shouldn't
be looking three seventeen mean stay away. The line clicked dead.
Why the morning the paint was gone, erased, or paved over.
I ran the photos through every fil to anu tried
to pull out of shape the image. You only grew greenier,
softer at the edges in its place bloomed a sixth certainty.
The figure wasn't just tagging the highway. The mark's carried purpose,
a coded language I couldn't decipher warning or invitation or both.
The next week was a spiral. Each log book, clipping
and digital scrap hinted at increasing complexity. I poured over
the symbols, traced their contours, and realized, with a chill
that they were in arbitrary. Most resembled were at diagrams
a loop, a branch, then impass ovally with lines and nodes.
More than that, though certain flourishes echoed forgotten map symbols,
Hobo code for danger, old worker marks from decades past.
Things meant to be read fleetingly under arrest. One particularly
restless night, appieced together a time man I lined reported disappearances, symbols,
and traffic flowmat printed from state archives. At the intersection
of several events, the symbols changed. What was once a
straight loop now forked, then blended with a cross out
sholmost as if recording events were planning something more. In
the midst of this, I finally managed to cann with Lisa,
and you were a rest stop employee who sounded sharp
even for a clipp text and hushed full and calls
made from the supply closet. I'll tell you what I know,
but do not mention my name to anyone, she whispered,
voiced tense. He's repainting. Now he's looking at my The
line broke off. I stared at my phone, hot thudding
in my chest by rising, I called back over an
over voicemail. There nothing I scold the time and symbols
she described, but my mind had begun slipping. Lodwick pages, blurred,
enters crowded together. I flipped back and realized whole stretches
of time where gun trips I didn't recall mark outs
with dates that meant nothing. I ran my finger over
my notes, feeling a deep sick fear. My handwriting normally compact,
now ranskew paragraphs and finish margins, filling with odd sketches,
human figures, blood at the edges, always facing away. That
night I couldn't sleep. The window over my desk rattled,
curtain's fluttering on a pile of print out's lady old deskin,
image lipping, black symbol, half obscured, and I realized it
was no longer a warning. Each mark was a key
disguised in plain sight of way to unlock something that
lives on lonely stretch of highway. At three seventeen, something
always waited to mark two rays to return. And now,
by hunting, by remembering, by dissecting these clues, I was
already woven in My phone pulsed once more. It was
another anonymous submission. When I opened it, there was no image,
only a voice, hollow with distortion. You're part of the pattern, now,
three seventeen. Don't be late. You are part of the pattern.
Now three seventeen, don't be late. It landed sickeningly in
the pit of my stomach, not quite red, not a plea,
but rather a statement of fact. I stared at the screen,
hand clamped so tight to the phone that the plastic creaked.
For a few moments, the room around me lost all definition.
The doll took of the kitchen clock, the worn shape
of my shoes by the door, at the drone of
the refrigerator wall fell away. There was only the thin
electronic pulse of that message, and a vision of winding
ass while rolling away under distant lights. I did what
I always did when something had settled me, tried to
push it down with routine. I made coffee, ignoring the
tremor in my hands, wiped down the countertop, and shuffled
through the anoven mail. Uoming rituals almost helped, almost, but
every idle moments now done. The memory of that new submission,
the sender hamaster number, no trace of pomitted eta, no
reply possible. I spent years sorting the reel from the
fake and highway lore. But this was too precise, too intimate.
Whoever send and knew not just the shape of my obsession,
but the iro had held me hostage. The sky outside
was beginning to pale at the edges as Semi rumbled
past headlights, briefly painting the front yard. When it was gone,
the silence seemed even deeper. I checked the time stamp
on the voicemail. It was received at three seventeen a m.
Exactly same time as every other anomaly, every mark, every
vanishing truck. Unable to sit, I paced the cramped living room,
stepping between cardboard files and the tripod word half heartily
set up my old conquordor to film testimonials. The tip
was empty. The most recent recording ended abruptly mid sentence
with the high pitch wine. I scanned through old footage,
growing more unsettled as I realized how many segments seemed
to glitch at that Exat minute passed three, I thumbed
through the stack of print outs on the table, maps, locks,
screen shuts, each one annotated with frantic ballpoint skulls, unleaping arrows.
The deeper I sifted, the more certain I became free.
Seventeen was no random time. The highway wasn't haunted, not
by some wandering spirit, but by a system, a pattern
that used the same rules truckers used to keep each
other safe, only perverted signals, cords, warnings, and now by
tracing the line backward I'd entered the Patten's circuit. Sleep
was a distant hope. At daybreak, I forced myself into
the shower. The old routine of getting ready for a
drive came back, painfully, waiting for the water to run hot,
towing off heavy socks. Running upon along the jaw were stubble,
A grown rougher with negleck habit took over down to
lasi my boots with fingers that remembered nots better than faces.
I found myself packing a back back, spare batteries, camera,
extra ste cards, bottled water, sheaf of blank log pages.
I loaded the cab of the fminus one hundred fifty,
as if prepping for a long run, not knowing when
or if i'd return, I left anton the apartment door
back soon. If you need me check the old stretch.
It was half a joke, meant for nobody. By then.
The silence in the apartment was something alive. The highway
was where all the tension pulled me outside. The air
was sharp, brittle, with a faint hang of exhaust. Morning
traffic flowed three blocks away, commuted cars and light rigs
riding evergreen ruts to work. And distant warehouses. Mine was
the only truck on my street, dusty blue with a
faded company to calstill on the toolbox. As I approached,
I caught a whisper of something from inside, radio static flickering,
even though I'd left it off the night before. The
battery shouldn't have held a charge, not after month's idle.
I appeared inside nothing a sense memory. How many times
had I climbed into a cab after a long night
and felt that same pulse of low, anonymous energy, as
though the seat had been kept warm by someone knows
something else. I got behind the wheel, started her up,
and waited while the engine turned, coughed them, rumbled to
life Highway fifty one stretch and iro away. But every
corner I drove, every stop light fell slightly out of
register with my own memory, like dette view without a
clear refernt. My mind wandered through o routines, checked the
mirrors from the lights, scanderdash for warning coat. I wondered
if I should call some one, let them know where
I was going? But who would I call? Lisa hadn't
answered in days. Harald barely left his room. Now Demal
had stopped replying to texts. All roads still led to
the ghost mile. The coval leaf leading on to the
interstate looked the same as it always had, Pale weed
pressed up against concrete dividos, and the green eggs it
signed shivered in the crosswind. At the arm ramp, I paused,
studying the road ahead, as if I might spot a wrinkle,
a fold where last night's marks might still hide under
a veil of utah. There was nothing but the long,
robening black top. Empty. As a prayer, I keyed the
radio to channel nineteen. The old truck of frequency caught
the usual mishmash chatter out with warnings of a slow
roll into the city, one or two quick exchanges about
the state trooper pot with his lights off near the
by bass. I waited for a gap, then, unable to
help myself, keep the mic. Any one out there? Hit
mile two hundred thirteen through two hundred twenty lately anything
strange on the shoulder. Silence, Then a voice, a woman
young and quick avoided if you can road were Keselian's
down word construction too. Another voice lure piped in, you'll
make time on the westerly exit two hundred seventeen been
closed more nights than not. I tried again. Any one
seen markings on the shoulder, fresh paint, odd shapes, A beat,
then a burst of static. Someone almost denaudible durned, The
rest were scrambled, a flutter of wind. Noers. My scalp prickled,
not the first time. Messages gobbled for only me, but
it never stopped feeling personal. I pressed on mile two
hundred ten, rolled past the landscape flattening whilst sa macburn
spare and scarlet in the ditch, and the grass tickned
around the entrance to the rest avia. The building stood
listless behind a fresh, shambling fence. I slowed rolled through
the empty truck bay, catching the blowry faces of two
travelers at the vending machines. Beyond them, where the shoulder
dipped and the highway peeled in A tight curve of
the world seemed to draw back. The patrol car idled
at the exit ramp for a moment. I considered pulling
in and asking the deputy if it'd seen anything the marks,
the figures, any ghosts and reflective vesp, but the idea
felt ridiculous even as it surfaced. I kept dry as
the miles ticked pass. My eyes strained for every detail.
At the next curve, a section barely changed. Since my
earl is for runs, I spotted the faintest smear, a
blackness so thin it barely interrupted the pale shoulder stripe.
It bent into a looping arc, broken by a new
patch of asphalt. I pulled onto the verge and slid out,
fawn ready, heart drumming a sharp, high rhythm. Up close,
the mark was even stranger, a labyrinthin curl half obscure
at the surface, sticky under my finger tips, A fresh
painting may be less than twelve hours old. Around it,
the leaves and grass flattened as if pressed by boots
or knees. I circled snap in a burst of shots,
before fishing a small ruler from my pack to sketch
the outline for later comparison. Near By, I found another patch,
slightly older, pint scuffed but still visible. Different. In passing
an angle, the hummove semi in the discence brought me
upright quick. I stepped off the shoulder just as the
big rig thundered passed, its headlamps flickering over my crouch
shape for a fleeting instant I thought I saw the
driver's face flick in recognition, but the moment passed the
trail of vanishing down the snaking highway toward the next town.
I circled back to my truck, checking the rear view
for any sign I had been watched. Nothing but empty
fields and the drag of long grass against the guardrail.
I recorded a memo into my phone mile two hundred
seventeen eight twenty four A m markings fresh new symbol
pressed grass suggests two sets of print possible recent activity
fifty meters apot no visible figures adlphump drew my attention
back to the woods. A cluster of crows took flight,
breaking the line of trees at the edge of the
rest area, cowing in agitation as the road skyride. I
scanned for movement, but sore in the shifting shadow where
the sunlight failed to penetrate. Still, the hair is in
the back of my neck rose. There was something in
the aeronaud a chill, not a change in the wind,
but an old electric tension, as if the whole world
had pulled taut for one breath. The rest of the
day burned away in half hearted attempts at documentation a
cold State maintenance to ask about repairs on mile two
hundred seventeen, but the operator claimed no new work had
been done. I poured over public records and traffic advisories online,
finding nothing but the usual warnings about potholes and shoulder erosion.
Not once did anyone mention black symbols or missing drivers. Frustrated,
I tried to track Lease again. Her voicemail picked up.
The message clipped and oddly distant. Leave your name called
back after the fourth bell of the rest clipped silence,
punctuated only by another click at exactly three seventeen. By afternoon,
exhaust pressed down like a migraine. I lean my forehead
against the steering wheel, closing my eyes to the sunlit interior.
Memories began slip in, blending with a prison the shape
of the mark on the road, the taste of burn
coffee in the rest area, the sense that I had
visited this exact mile a dozen times before, but only
now realized what I was seeking. My phone buzzed in
my pocket. A new message appeared, Anonymous again, stop recording.
You've seen enough. The pattern grows if you mark it.
I blinked, unsure if I'd read it right. My hot
hammitd As I scrolled for a senda, I d nothing,
just another blank number. I checked my scent messages, found
two voice memos recorded to day, but both files empty.
The lines I drew from myself between what I'd seen
and what I could prove kept slipping. I forced myself
out of the cab, notebook in hand and started walking
the verge, tracing that six mile stretch step by step.
Every fifty pace, I paused to check for markings, footprints,
any sign some one had been here in the last
twelve hours. First tire tracks not matching any known County
vehicle turned up near two hundred eighteen, fading into the
wild grass. As I bend beside a patch of trampled earth,
a chirp of statics back through the radio I left
running in the cab. I straightened, listening. It repeated twice,
then was gone. Nothing but the cyclical drone of an
empty channel caught in the wind. A memory flickered. I
had heard that same patten before, years back before I
left the route for good. I pressed it on. At
the four mile poste, I found the remnants of an
orange cone, burnt at the edges, letters, half melted, stamped
property dot. It had been left by the wayside, overgrown,
but freshly kicked, as if someone wanted it visible only
to those looking for such things. I lowered it, shot
another photo, slipped a handkerchief over my nose against the dust,
and kept moving. There was no question. Now someone something
returned here at precise intervals, matching each vanished mark with
a new sign. The marks were not warnings in the
traditional sense, nor were they meant to be seen by
every driver. Those who paid attention, who build patterns out
of straight details, were the only ones drawn in, and I,
with my endless, needed to entangle and explain was being
marked bit by bit with each encounter. That night, back
in apartment with a single lamp burning, I organized the
photos chronologically, seven sets, all within the narroban near two
hundred seventeen. The marks evolved, at first crude circles, thin
tails looping off the main body. Over weeks they gained
complexity into linked lines, cross hatching shapes embedded like ciphers.
The third and fifth match top patterns I found on
decades old highway planning blueprints. A hint as someone or
something carried the curd of cost time, embedding it in
the bone structure of the route itself. A sense of
eyes pricked at my back, crawling the length of my spine.
I stood, shaking and closed the curtains. I spent the
next three days in a fog, uncertain, ires meals and
tasted the edges of my memory softening. I'd sit reminders
to check on the logs, make calls, organize evidence, but
later recall none of the details. Audiophiles appeared on my
laptop in my own voice for counting events with a
flatter effect, distant as if accorded underwater. I left messages
for Jamal, got nothing but an indefinite out of service
dial tone. I tried messaging the driver who had first
mentioned the sebe warning about mile two hundred seventeen, hoping
he might recall more details. His in books, once filled
with rough jokes and chained letters, was entirely empty, every
message gone. I started to worry about myself, not just paranoia,
but real confusion. Sometimes I'd wake from uneasy dozes at
my desk, unsure if an ira or a night had passed,
log book open to blank pages, or scull with another's handwriting.
Once I caught sight of a fragment torn free from
the spine, marked with a symbol I did not recall.
Drawing one sleeps morning, I set out for the rest
area again, determined to drag something, anything tangible, from the fog.
I avoided the main entrance, circling instead through a deer
path where the wire fence had fallen in on itself.
Cold air s came my exposed skin deuce looking through
my boots. The main building honkered in the dawn for
as embolv's buzzing, the windows drawn with blinds inside, the
smell of ammonia and burnt coffee mingled. I didn't recognize,
dismiss me with the clipped wave cleaning up up back.
No public access, I slipped into the side corridor, passing
the lock staff door, where a slip of yellow taped
police line still hung limp from above the latch. I
tried the handle, locked no way in without making a scene. Instead,
I knelt beside the foundation, where a slab of concrete
had lifted, revealing a slim gap clotter with weeds and
cigarette butts. There pressed into the loose dirt was another
shaped run with a finger or a short stick, lipped
and broken. The negative of the marks outside it was unfinished,
cut off by the sudden press of someone's boot. I
took a series of photos and tucked a bottle cap
beside it, a silent marker from myself, just in case
the symbol vanished by my next visit. When I rose,
an overwhelming wave of vertigo nearly tipped me. The ska
ab of the rest stop glazed into a hard silver,
and the hum of high was seen to turn inward,
wiring itself from my veins. A voice called out, hey,
lot's closed, boss, move alarm. It was the new night cleaner,
pale tents. His eyes darted sideways, not quite meeting mine.
As he walked away, I glimpsed a flush of something
dark staining his palm paint tire. Hard to say back
in my truck, the exhaustion pressed down impulses the same
dull voice my own neckered in my head on an
endless statically breeze seventeen. You don't be late, You're part
of the pattern. A s crawled to the last set
of traffic locks I downloaded before the account started vanishing.
The list of missing tracas, every name cissered with the
same final record, a mile marker two hundred thirteen to
two hundred nineteen, time of last contact always between three
ten and three twenty a m. Messages ended abruptly, trucks
left eiling and neutral personal effects and touched. As evening fell,
the air held a metallic edge. The world narrowed to
headlights sliding over black top, the lowmeron of semis on
distant overpasses. The certainty at the shoulder at two hundred
seventeen would always be both exactly the same and completely different.
Each time I returned that night, I dreamed of black
line's curling beneath my feet, winding from the road into
my own reflection, dissolving the boundaries between myself, a memory,
between witness and participant. When I woke, the notebook on
my desk was open to an incoherent page. The only
clear words grolled in all caps, Stay away from the pattern.
But I already knew it was too late for that.
There are moments, after too many sleepless nights and ives
crosshatch between fear and certainty, when the world stops rearranging
itself long enough for you to breathe when up blinked
awake in the morning following my last encounter with the
Mile in its mocks, my body felt for in a
set of boarded limbs. My hands, heavy and slow, trembled
as I tried to gather my belongings from the passenger seat.
The cab of my truck was filled with the dry
scent of old upholstery and roside dust, and in the
faint light, everything inside seemed bleached to the edges, less
real than their memories. I was trying to hold together.
My cell phone flash up at me with a blank
blue let lockscreen. I swaite, hoping for a message, something
from Lisa, anything at all to cut the silence. All
my recordings, every frantic log and clip Foy's memo were gone.
When I tried the home button, the device stuttered and flickered,
then simply reset itself. The business cards I jammed into
the dashboard compartment, each one of thin life fine to
drivers or attendants who might still remember what happened, and
the ghost Mile had vanished, talked somewhere and accounted for,
may be thrown out during a fugue. I didn't even
know i'd ended. I touched the battle lopook that had
always ridden shotgun with me, the one with dog eyed
corners and coffee stains along the margins, its roos and pages.
Instead of my usual compressed scribbles, offered gaping blanks, interrupted
by busts of jagged, liping sketches Glisse didn't recognize, each
swirling in a pattern that seemed to flicker in sunnight.
The memory of sitting there in that precise gray dawn
by mile two hundred seventeen was vivid, the air heavy
and metallic, my own breathing too loud, and the persistent
itching certainty that I wasn't alone. Even now in the
warming cab, I caught the fiendest deck over overlapping voices
as if they were stitched into the fabric of the highway,
and still scraping at the edge of my earring. A
sign creaked above the rest stop parking lot. As I
stepped out, the air press closer than it should have dampened.
Somehow watchful, I crossed her where the fresh black C
symbol had been painted the night before, but the road
cruise or something else had already erased a mismatch of
Gray's sillant pooling in low san I loved hard, squinting
at the faint residue underneath the surface. But the line,
the language of warning or invitation or whatever it was,
hid in the camouflage of new asphalt. I had the
urge to trace the place it had been with my
finger instance dead. My hand hovered and dropped away, half
afraid my skin might remember something, my mind no longer could.
Each step I took left me more certain the patterm
was still moving, and I was now part of it,
whether I could remember the details or not. Back in
the driver's seat, I scanned the horizon. Long haul rigs
began to file past, anonymous, implacable, and somehow the site
was a comfort. I was not alone out here. Other
people moved through the miles, heads full of numbers and
half finished dreams, their own lives, embothered by the ripples
in mine. But something had shifted. The marks, I realized
were not just evidence to collect. There were nodes in
the system of call and response between the vanished and
the searching, a set of instructions that kept pulling the
next driver into their orbit. I felt a pulse under
my skin. I quiet, younging to return every sunrise every midnight,
as though I too would one day disappear cleanly, my
absence absorbed by the living road, and never note it,
except perhaps by some one else picking at the thread
behind me. Whatever had happened, whatever cost was ahead, there
would be no returning to the patterns of ordinary life,
not with the marks still humming behind my eyelids every
time I closed them, and not with three seventeen rollers
toward me night after night like a tytoo enormous dirt pace.
There's a peculiar peril in following a mystery deep enough
that you become part of it, when each answer only
thickens the questions, in every attempt to walk away, and
ravels a little more of what grounded you in the
first place. For the next two days, I lingered in small,
fevered loops, Drive a stretch of the highway, monitor the
rest stop, shadows from across the street, Return home, sleep
a little, then rise and search for new evidence something
inside me had changed since the last night. My phone's
alarm zet for two fifty a m startled me awake
in the small ires, even as exhaustion made it hard
to remember what day it was, or if I'd actually
slept at all. My sense of time began breaking apart.
I'd reacle reaching for the steering wheel. Then suddenly I
would be parked in the shoulder, engine taking softly. I
caught myself humming at stoplights. I'd stare at flyers tacked
to the bulletin board in the rest area. Missing dog
a charity, big sale. A dozen drivers faces under the
bold letters have you seen Me? And realized some were gone,
tape edges curling, but I couldn't name hua. When they disappeared.
I tried not speak with the attendants, but one recognized
me mirror, a stout woman with calm eyes who had
once slipped me an extra coffee on a late shift.
You keep coming back to this mile, she said, as
she refilled the air freshener by the lobby doors. You
lost something out there or just like the view. I shrugged,
tossing her a non answer, something about the open road
and unfinished business. She washed me, facing readable for an
extra beat. I was here the night Lisa went missing,
she said, voice flat. They said she just up and
walked off, but no one heard the door. Her car
still in the law. She checked over her shoulder as
if listening for eavesdroppers. Sometimes the night I feel like
I could walk into the maintenance corridor and not come
out the same side. I keep the keys around my
neck now all the time. I let her words hand
between us, not sure what comfort I could offer. I
had no answers for her, and the road outside the
window seemed to draw its own conclusions with each passing truck.
An uneasykenship wove itself between those who remain and those
who disappeared, connected not by what we remembered, but by
the empty spaces left behind. Every so often I called
out to Lisa, first on her mobile, then over the
old Sea Bee channel. No respt bonds ever came. Once
I left a message if you hear this, I am
still looking. But by the next day the recording had vanished.
My notebook stuff pertranscribed calls grew messer, some entries repeated,
some line numbers skipped inexplicably, and cymbals always more intricate
filled margins I barely noticed as a rope. At times
I'd find myself un consciously tracing the motions of painting,
a finger looped in midair, a palm unconsciously dobbing an
invisible line against my thigh around me. The friends I'd
built over a lifetime of trucking scene to receive each contact,
old by distance or forgetfulness. Howard sapt replying to messages.
Jamal's old post on the group boards had vanished, his
profile wipe clean. I tried to reach one of the
drivers who had sent the sea bee warning, an old
friend named Patsy, but her number click quietly to a
soft knot in service. The sense of isolation grew even
when Mirror sat nearby, enchatted as she cleaned. Her voice
seemed thinner, barely tethered to the present. One night, I
worked to a beeping sound and found my funds recording
up running caturing silence. I stopped it, scrolled back, and
discovered a series of short, staticky entes I had no
memory of, making snippets of background radio, the sound of
my own breathing, and an indistinct whisper in the last
stay in the pattern you are safe if you move.
I smashed back the covers, cold to the core. I
stopped trusting that I'd remember each piece, so I started
writing on everything. Receipts, paper tells the backs of parking stubbs.
I forced myself to check the clock in the ire
every hour, noting the time with date and location, and
what I could see gray sky, broken paint or red
reguiding three rosaway, hoping concrete evidence would anchor meet some
version of reality, but the gap still widened from the
rest area parking lot. I watched as regular cycle through
their own silent rituals, faces grow and haunted emory Attendants
moved through their routines, wiping down handles, glancing over shoulders,
glowering at the few strangers who lingered past midnight. Truck
after truck rolled through the zone between mile two hundred
thirteen and two hundred nineteen. Each time a driver had disappeared.
The pattern intensified. A post pulled from web forms see
bee check. Ins that once banned I owes now clipped
mercle seat static. The closer I looked, the mortal world
hollowed itself, like a house slowly purged of its history
until only the faintest out line remained. I called the
highway patrol on a hunch, using a burner number, and
asked directly about strange markings in the rash of disappearances.
The voice on the other end, young and Bland gave
a practice denial, but in the startic beneath his assurances,
a slow voice, sould barely restrained broke in, don't mark,
what isn't yours? Let it fade? Then the line shut
off abruptly, a hollowness in the silence. I began to
suspect a track in the pattern was a trap as
much as a solution, pulling it theny to a dree
deeper in, while the rest of the world on wand
your life behind you, erasing connections and memories. There was
no proof, no way to share the burden. Each attempt
left me more aware that even if I solved the riddle,
I'd be the only one to remember the cost. Some nights,
the radio on the dash played nothing but harsh, recurrent static.
If I toddled with the tune ner, the hiss would
sometimes break, and a coded voice would slide through, mattering
directions not in English, or reciting times and symbols, until
the channel folded back in on itself. Mile two hundred
seventeen became an obsession, its assphual and shoulder filled with vague,
dangerous possibility. I walked at dawn and dusk, noting any
subtle shift, the placement of a fresh traffic cone, the
angle of a new tail line, a fragment of yellow
ves snacked on the barb fence. I kept every stray, update,
every photo, every half visible mark. With every cycle, the
pattern grew sharper, clearer, and more alive. One night, some
were just past three m I pulled off to a
dirt turn around south of the old highwaymaker. The digital
clock in the dash jetted between three sixteen and three seventeen,
sometimes flipping back and forth in ways that made no
sense for a twenty year old analog system. I sat
in the track, adrenaline, pushing for fatigue, and set my
phone to record. This time. I saw the event directly
out in the gloom, A figure moved with slow, practiced
intend al on the shoulder toll and enveloped in the
shimmer of a reflective fest. Their face, even under the
feeble street light, was in a marked blur, mouth and
eyes lost under the brim of a battered cap. In hand,
a paint soaf brush danced back and forth, tracing the
lits shape. A labyrinth nodded in on itself, more elaborate
than any before. They did not wobble a glance over
their shoulder. Each step was measured as though counting out paces.
None of the rest of us could see, but as
I watched a flickering I could near the cover sequence
of movements like overlap in shadows. At first I thought
it was a trick of distant headlights. Then I realized
there were others. Three more figures, each caught in the
beam of a passing truck. Slamps gathered along the dark verge,
each wearing something familiar, a red plaid shirt, a green
beanie that looked like one LEAs he used to wear.
The form stood barely perceptible as the painter brought the
line to its end and turned, locking eyes with me
for a fraction of a second through the winschield. In
that span of time, words died on my tongue, The
urge to climb out to march, grooming across the asphalt,
and demand answers rose and collapsed, replace by single knife
and compulsion to join them. Sweat dripped into my clenched fists,
my own reflection in the glass doubled and redoubled, fist
distorted by exhaustion, vestiges of daylight on my cheeks. I
heard the old static song, soft and half song, looping
itself around the simple warning mark the line complete the pass,
do not resist. I gripped the wheel harder death SSP
for anything, a singular fact, a thought, or an anchor,
something to tie my dwindling reality down. But the figures
did not break step. The painter finished the symbol, lifted
a glove hand to his cap, and in a deliberate motion,
beckoned against my will. My hands started to open the door.
My mind held in protest, but my body moved with
alien calm. I stood on tarmacs, suck dry of color.
The rest are illumined silent to my left and the
median to my right. No engine sounds, not even a
click of cooling pipes, only the tap tap of the brush,
the hush of winter dry grass, and the distant, every
steady hum of the highway. I saw myself reflected half
in the truck's window, half in the still poll of
my own memory. As I raised a shaking foot and
crossed the painted threshold of the new mocking, my breath
slowed for a second. The roar of the world cut out,
replaced by a soft wave of incoherent memories, Lisa laughing
on a lunch break, tom All hosing down the coat,
Harald mumbling over truck stop coffee, his face already half
lost to time. Then a blinding blast of static burst
through the quiet, and vision twisted in on itself. I
was everywhere at once, in traffic, in the woods, in
the cat's cold silence, and on the shoulder, kneeling with
brush in hand. Night after night, cymbals mounted and remade themselves,
each one growing more complex and familiar as I traced
them into the earth, the foundation, the rec out of
the road itself. I saw vanished drivers, looping and lipping,
thin figures, endlessly winding their own exit for memory. The pattern,
now umissible, was alive. When I blinked, I was back.
I thought, I hoped I had broken free, but I
hadn't moved. The painter was gone. Only drops of black
paint rimmed the fresh mark, a lining complete. My own
hand trembled, fingers sticky with some residue. I couldn't scrub clean.
The radio in the truck raped it. You are next
record no more three seventeen mark or vanish. The words
laid un multiplied anger and mourning and invitation, all at once,
a forced and closing circle. The sound bit at the
last fragments of myself. My body drained, staggered for the cat,
I fumbled for keys, started the engine and pulled on
to the empty highway, barely registering the mild markers flashing
by in the dark. The following day, I woke in
the driver's seat at the rest stop again, as though
the night had collapsed and reced itself. I remembered nothing,
no drive, no mark, no paint, or just the burn
of sun through the window and the sharp throb in
my right hand, where invisible paint had settled into the
cracks of my skin. My phone was there, but wiped.
No call, locks, no files, just the default wallpaper. The
log book was empty, line after a line of white.
Nothing even my kind of app had deleted my reminders.
I checked the time stamp. Just after sunrise, April seventeen,
somebody knocked on the window. I started. Mirror's face peered in, concerned,
blooming in her features. Sorry to bother you, she said,
force muffled through glass. Are you all right? You've been
sitting there? Well? I swear I saw you here last
night too. I stammered something about lost time and pulled
myself out of the cab. My legs buckled robbery, slow
to follow direction. Standing, I heard akers again, the radio,
the end, the static, Lisa's missing voice. It all felt
like the recidue of a bad dream, but the ache
in my bones were stubborn and insistent inside. I scanned
the noticeboard. Most of the missing driver's photos were gone,
now cleanly stript, the corners of tape still hanging lies
as have ye seen me? Flour laf east down under
the bench. I reached to pick it up, but as
I did, my own name and grainy photo flashed across
the back like a trick of the light. I blinked on,
the illusion vanish, replaced by a smearing fingerprint and an
expanse of white. I sat heavily at table by the window,
Hunger and weariness twined together. The others in the room
avoided my gaze, their movements holding the gentle reluctance of
people skirting a wound. I tried to engage mirror again.
Does anyone ever come back if they disappear here? I asked?
She shook her head, not cruelly, but with the hard
pragmatism of someone who's given up on explanations. Sometimes we
remembered them for a while, then we forget. You know,
how it is out here? I nodded, but the answer
hollowed me. Behind mirror in a window glare, I caught
the briefest reflection of myself, not as I was that morning,
but standing on the highway's shoulder, vest and brush in hand,
tracing the lines for all to see and forget. Each
night afterward, I felt the pull increase. The pattern wasn't
just in the marks any longer. It was in me
and every other seeker who tried to map the void.
Trucks continued to vanished from the stretch, and the pacing
of marks grew more frequent. My own memory began collapsing
in chunks and hollows, names, faces, the details of my
life before the ghost smile or crumbling. I found myself
dreaming in symbols, painting looping lines with my finger tips
against the sweat damp bed sheet, lost in a maze
that borrowed the shape of the highway. Clues converged files,
reappearing just to vanish again, short messages in my own handwriting,
reading ear nexts and complete the pattern. All voices from
the radio, noamor my voices I recognize weaving, Lisea's clipped
ax and Harold's gut, all drawl into warning courses that
muddled together until I didn't know which phrases were mine.
I clung to hab it, to the wounds and rituals
of everyday survival. I kept trying to document, to photograph,
to speak the truth for anyone who might come after.
But each attempt and did itself. Video files are faulted,
static or the image of a spinning mile marker. Audio
logs distorted, Even written accounts decayed, the latter sliding off
the page, as if language itself failed. Near the ghost Mile,
the paranoid deepened. I set timers at random intervals to
wake myself, check the windows, and log the present. Occasionally
I'd catch myself half aside, boots in the wet grass,
hands curling through ear in practice shapes. Always there was
a faint smer of black beneath my nails, and ache
in my right hand, and the clowing knowledge that for
all I had fought the drawer, I was already lost
to the pattern. One evening, desperate to break the circuit,
I left the highway altogether, driving west past county lines
and crossing into towns I had last visited a decade ago.
The first night away was peaceful. I slept through until noon,
only faint echoes of static trailing at the edge of
my dreams, no marks on my hands, no files wipe
from my phone. But by the third night, the urge
returned to adonizing, sickening, nagging at every part of my mind,
like the beginning of a migraine building behind the eyes.
I found myself somewhere on a rule by w two
counters distant, pulled over on the gravel, staring at my hands,
black pain staining the cuticle. A loop symble tiny almost
proffer touched an ink on my palm, drawn su cleanly.
It must have been recent. I screamed and upped it
until my skin aaked. The mark wouldn't fade despite myself.
I turned back east that night. I'll long set across
every clock and phone my house tripped at once. Every
device showed a time between three sixteen and three eighteen,
though none matched perfectly. I realized with a jolt that
he urged to return was strongest just before three seventeen,
and each time I fought it, something else in me
slip away, faces, lessons, even the sound of my own
voice growing faded. The pattern was correcting laps as I made, on,
spooling my attempts at resistance, and guiding me inexorably back
to the mile resign. I prepared the way I always had, notebook, batteries, camera,
all mapped, bottle of tap water, gunstale. I got in
the truck. My hand shook as I started the engine,
But this time everything felt different. The sky seemed closer,
heavy with the voiced warnings, each mile marker hit with
the weight of a tall Even the beams of my
headlights seemed to bend toward mile two hundred seventeen, warping
the world so that every choice led only to the
same spot. The last few miles were a blur, signs
streaked by grasp at and on itself. The rest stop
humped with empty energy. This time, no patrol cars, no
aiding semis, just the dull drip of last night's rainwater
slithering across concrete. I parked in a far bay, facing
the open field. I waited, watching the digital clock three
ten eat twelve three fourteen. A wind moved through the trees,
carrying the faintest taste of sulfur and tower. The first
shadow broke loose from the median, slowly, methodically, A figure
material as from the darkness, reflective vest flashing in the
high beams, hands gloved brush dangling from one wrist. They
stood by the shoulder, tracing the familiar labyrinthine swirl that
had anchored itself in so many of my dreams. Several
other figures detached from the line of brush, each pausing
as they reached a verge, joining the paint at regular intervals.
Nunn spoke. None brokes dried or look my way. Their
faces were still a blaw, but I thought I recognized
something in a tilt of the head, a ragged calf,
the outline of shoes. Lisa was there, or some one
who wore her shape. The others too, could have been
Herald Jamal, even me if I imagined hard enough. The
painters hand swept across the cement, mark after mark, finishing
each with a tiny liping flourish. The pattern was a chain,
not a warning. A fully greed really passed from hand
to hand. My phone left open on the dash buzzed
and shivered, refusing my attempts to close it. The lock
screen flashed, A single message joined the circle. The clock
rolled to three seventeen. My body moved before I could argue.
I exited the cab, feeling the air pulse cold and
thick as rivoid. The world narrowed until only the marks,
fresh and glistening, remained, humming with invisible current. The dainter
to pause turned and handed me the brush. I hesitated,
mind spinning. In that hesitation, I remembered everything, the missing ires,
the erase names, the echoing voices repeating, don't mark what
isn't yours? I saw each leaping symbol not as a message,
but as an act of rigio, a way of wiping
away not bodies, but the memory of bodies. A whirl
recalibrating so that no one would dwell to Lannon who
had come missing and lie. Lisa's eyes, if they were hers,
held me for a moment. A flicker of pain, of
fear of recognition, darted through her, otherwise blowred features. The
others waited patient. The air thickened around us, a tidal
g holverdy, drawing me to the threshold. I raised the
brush the world erupted in static and unspoiled into a
wash of blinding noise. Memories, mine others, the vanishings, and
the marks and the rituals, repeated, night after night, pour
of the miscullen a torrent, until the only sensation left
was compulsion. A single direction complete the symbol. I let
my hand move, tracing mine after line across the crack
blacked up, layering all shapes with new ones, binding myself
to the route, the mile, and the system that lived
in its bones. With every stroke, something in me screamed
to stop, to break the pattern, to refuse this inheritance,
But the endless pull of the circle made resistance feel
like fighting the tide. Every moment spent Finton drew the
rest of me further out of memory's bled. The divisions
between self and other blurred, and with each pass of
the brush, I became less and less distinct, blending into
the pattern that would one day drawed the next seeker
after me. From the edges of the road. New headlets flickered.
Interview A semi rolled to a slow stop at the shoulder,
driver's face pale in the haze of fogged glass. The
radio in the truck wind, and in the next instant
the engine shut off. The others around me straighten, waiting
for their number to be called. I saw myself reflected
a hundred times, each with a different vest each marking
the road, as if it was always meant to be.
I looked down. I was half way through a new symbol.
My hands were black to the wrists, a cracks in
my knuckles, filled with dried paint. A final voice, as
thin as the wind, rasped in my ear. Here part
of the pattern. Now we all are. I stood on
the shoulder, brush poised, surrounded by strangers who should have
been friends, lovers, or merely names on a map. My
body moved on its own memory, fracturing the world, narrowing
to a single, endless task. A low whistle rode across
the fields, and the last vestiges of myself began to drift,
loose and weightless, into the hush of the empty mile.
I let the brush drop. I staggered from the shoulder,
desperate for the cold, sting of rain. Are the solid
weight of gravel under my boots. My breath tore out
of my chest, and ragged bursts. The paint on my
hands burned and tingled, as if it were seeping deeper,
becoming part of my blood. I forced myself toward the truck,
hot hammering in the cow The seat smelled of old
leather and fear. The dash can blinked as single red
eye recording. As I fell inside. I slammed the door.
The radio was dead, fritzing with broken static. My phone
thrown to the passenger sea viberted violently in the glare
of his crack screen. A new anonymous file arrived, a
subject line blank. I opened it. The dash on footage
rolled there clearer a's day stood a figure in a
reflective vest, brush in hand, laboring over afresh elaborate mark
at the precise angle I'd seen on countless nights. The
figure looked up, staring straight into the lens. My own face,
hollow eyed, smearred with black, stared back at me, mouth
working soundlessly. A single message slid below the frame, complete
the bass. I turned away from the screen and drove.
I watched the ghost mile was seen in my rear
view mirror, lines of black winding ever tighter across the
flickering pavement. The land fell silent, the world quieting in
the aftershock of whatever I had become. I didn't look
at my hands. I kept driving until dawn dissolved the
last edge of shadow between me and the rest of
the world. I knew then that the pattern was complete
for now. I now would remember at least a little
as as the asphalts still held this intricate vanishing marks.
I knew then that the passion was complete for now,
and I would remember at least a little as long
as the asphalt still held those intricate vanishing marks. I
kept myself moving after that dawn. I forced each iiO
Almoard to drove highways where the pavement bled into rough
gravel and the field's press corstrophobically close. Anywhere except two
hundred thirteen to two hundred nineteen. I ignored every urge
that flickered up at the edge of each leepless afternoon.
The church in my right hand, a borderless sensis that
I had left something behind and would never recover it
unless I returned. I let my trucks of dormitter roll
on state lined passing beneath me, engine noisy reassurance that
there was still a boundary I could maintain, even if
its purpose and limits were now suspect. For weeks, nothing
interrupted the illusion of moving forward. But the cost of
this defense crepin subtle at first, the mixed up posts
on truck of boards. All my save forto was blood,
the loss of every number that ever called during those dark,
impossible hours. No matter how far I fled, pieces of
me scattered behind, like flecks from a used up brush.
If I tried to anyone who would remember, static filled
the line. My voice warped, responses, never quite in sync
with the world around me. Sometimes, when I stopped for gas,
the glances of strangers seemed to pass over me, as
if I were only a curious shape. I echoed at
the edge of their attention. I found myself collecting small,
tangible ancus, crumple receipts of dates, coffee stirrs, a faded
tickets stuffed from a roadside amusement park far west of
the un marked mile. I labeled them, folded them into
a battered envelope, and sealed the flat with trembling fingers.
Some days I would read the labels aloud, names and
places and roads, over and over, steering off their reasures
that now came hungry and random. At night, I checked
my hands for paint. Sometimes I found nothing. Other times
a faint blackness seemed to find its way under my nails.
Even if I had spent all dayside a motel room
curtains drawn, the compulsion was always there, steady as a metronome,
to return to redrawer, to complete whatever piece of the
pattern I had left and finished. I resisted most nights,
but whenever I did, something peculiar fuzzed around the shape
of my memories. The further I got from the mile,
the more certain details dissolved. I'd sit on a motel
bed with notebook in my lap and realized a handful
of the names I'd so carefully trat were gone. It
felt less like forgetting and more like the world itself
had agreed to erase them behind my eyes. After two
weeks wandering the periphery of my old profession, tons Worthy
armarked Miele was nothing but a rumor and distant radio static.
My footage began vanishing off drives. Every phone I checked
had memory holes, Conversations, missing files corrupted my own face
in short silent videos, brushing and seen shapes in the air.
The inboxes that once spelled over with tips and grainy.
Dusk and clips were strip bare, emptied overnay. On the
rare occasion someone answered my calls. All they'd say was sorry,
this number's not in service. Even as the voice quavered
faintly in the background, the pressure to return sharpened. I
watched ask slip across motel coutains and felt the drag
of unfinished obligations. Each attempt to resist only brought on
a kind of vertigo spacial marine that left me grew
up in the door frame for balance, the old routine
that had once shielded me. Each checked, tires, logged, the
next route call, a head frayed. Driving amossy felt like running, yes,
but it also grew more and more like drifting a
shape of the country, walk by a problem I couldn't
recount with any clarity. Eventually, it was a message beneath
the windshoe of wiper of the truck that forced my decision.
At some name as highway pull outside a Marillo, the
note waited, hundredon yet unfamiliar. If you're reading this, he
left something unfinished, three seventeen complete the pass. There was
no signature, nothing on the back. Right away my hand
skyed the dash for the familiar brush. The pince dained rag,
but found nothing. Instead. Memory pressed against me, thick and
in as capable as sleep paralysis. I climbed back into
the cap, with the note trembling in my grip. For
a moment, the walls to keep running broke. I felt
the certainty that there was no utrunning theicle of the
mile of gravity fire, beyond accidents or messing time, only
a cycle completed or endlessly resisted, until nothing of me
survived save the compulsion to repeat the act. And so
near midnight I turned round. The oage took, explain or confessed,
drifted away, replaced by the clarity of imminent return. I
joined the ribbon of highway tailight, sculling ahead city after city,
receding into former shadow. My truck's engine purred, as if
it neither route by heart. When the final approach came,
I recognized the gentle pitch in the grade, the double
bend in the black top, the watery flash of a
failing street lamp over the rest stop parking lot. This time,
the sky was colrdless, the moon low and precise. The
iye O was two fifty three enough to feel, and
a marrow the pull of three seventeen, shaping every choice
to follow. Parking well before the curve, I cut the engine,
a hush absolute but for the course of cicadas and
the high, distant rumble of an approaching semi. I stepped out, back,
back in hand, as if every muscle knew its way.
The edge of the wrist stop property was deeply shadowed,
the weeds taking over. Someone had replaced the police tap
on the maintenance door with new ibrant caution strips. A
single cone, half melted, sat skewing the grass nearby. I
walked the shoulder, not searching for the fresh mark, instead
searching for the exact place where I would have to
add to it. The urge was stronger than it had
ever been. Memory tugged at me Lisa's and finished message
a blow shape of Timol's cap in the dark, the
way my own face had looked in the dashcan, painted
and strange. My phone vibrated. I pulled it free to
find the screen had gone bright. A countdown raising down
from twenty five three minutes below the numbers, A phrase
crawled slowly pixel by pixel one must mark all, must forget.
As I watched her truck rolled into the rest stop
bay Ere breaks sign. Its headlights painted my silhouette across
the verge, warped and unsteady, but mine. I felt the
shape of the brush in my pocket as clearly as
if it had always been there. My fingers closed around it, sticky,
without reason, and I started forward. In those final minutes,
my thoughts scattered. I saw the pattern's heart, a system
indifferent to reason or rescue, one that fed on memory
and repetition, that only retained the records of those unlucky
enough to notice its workings directly. The system didn't care
for stories or closure. His marks laced together every person
who had ever vanished in, every person struggling to remember them,
and those who tried to bear witness ended up painting
the road themselves, always at three seventeen, Always would hand
they only realized was their as after the work was done.
I stopped at the exact shoulder with the last timbol
should appear, With the brush poised, I felt the weight
of all the Vanishtans guiding miner relay, but on from
Face's predecessors to me, and from me to whoever became
empty enough to follow. For a long time, I didn't move.
The moon pressed coldly against my skin, breath clouding in
front of my face. But the moment came, as all
moments do. I decked the brush in the slick blackness,
pulled at the base of the curb, and let myself
become a thread in the endless weaving. Some time later,
hal on, I couldn't say it. I stood up again.
My hands were streaked, the more complete, the brush, so
familiar in my grip it might have grown. There no
memory of the act itself, only the certainty that I
had completed my turn. A load draw im pulse from
my phone, a new file, undated and aimed. I opened it.
There was a time stamp three seventeen. In the video.
I could just make out my own shape had bowed,
brush moving in time to the wine of passing trucks.
The last frame linger far too long on my hand, blackened, shaking,
and then the image went white. I looked up. The
edge of the highway was empty again. No other figures waited,
no police tate, no melting cons only at the ever
hungry silence of an unfinished pattern, already reaching for the
next willing set of hands. Afterwards, I waited at the curb, breight,
hollow and uncertain. When sunrise broke, nothing remained, and the
shoulder but faint streaks in instinct is a bad dream.
My brush was gone, the compulsion to stay of just
a little enough that I could stagger back toward the
truck and drive and not look back back on the interstate.
The sense of absence was immense, but so was a strange,
temporary peace. I could almost believe I was free. A
day passed, then another. On this third day, just before sunrise,
an anonymous email arrived in my inbox, with no explanation,
no sender. I opened the file, dragging it into my
batted laptop for now familiar stack burst and settled into
grainy footage. A dash camp pointed at the shoulder near
myle two hundred seventeen, A solitary figure crouched at the
verge of dawn, painting the line in you. When the
shape lifted its head to look into the camera, a
glimpse myself, cheek one, stark, thighs, empty, smiled, too faint
to be anything but reflex. Behind me, the marks curled
and curled overlapping in a sequence no one could ever recount,
and below the file in the body of the message.
Four wards waited. We are the pattern. Now, that was
all just that, repeating, until even the memory of watching
it grew in prone to holes. Another thread picked up
by whatever feeds in the overlooked mile, and that is
the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
you in the next one.