The Highway Boogeyman

By C. Rommial Butler

The first time I saw the thing’s face in my rearview mirror I damn near drove off the road.

It was only there for a moment, but it was enough for me to lose track of steering my car.

I couldn’t even have described it then. Its appearance and disappearance were too quick; but after catching a glance of it, I could feel its presence behind me as I drove.

Sitting. Waiting. Watching.

At the time I tried to convince myself it was the DT’s. I’d not drank in several days. My head started to ache, and my hands shook. I was recovering from a six-month bender, during which I drank at least a half a fifth of whiskey every day. The appearance of the thing could then be attributed to my brain’s shock at the onset of sobriety.

Much like the craving for a drink, however, the feeling that the thing was present, even when I could not see it, persisted.

What did I see?

It was dark. I was making the usual long commute to my job, where I worked the graveyard shift on an assembly line in a dairy factory. The lights from the streetlamps flickered in and out of the car as I drove, making for a nauseating strobe effect.

Surely the thing I saw was a trick of the reflection between my rear-view mirror and my back windshield; or so I tried to reason.

As I rationalized my fears, I recalled something an ex-girlfriend once told me. To see things which are normally unseen—like ghosts, spirits, demons—we have to catch them first out of the corners of our eyes and then turn our gaze slowly toward them.

Otherwise, she said, they disappear because you look too quick. Coupled with that unbidden thought was the recollection that the thing I saw in my rearview mirror was caught in just that way, out of the corner of my eye as I was turning my attention back to the road.

The frightful things that lurk in the shadows of our consciousness cannot possibly be as evil as the latent curiosity which causes us to seek them out.

While still staring ahead at the road, I shifted a part of my awareness to my peripheral vision, to the mirror. This time, being prepared for the possibility of seeing the thing, I thought I would not lose track of the road, but my hands quivered on the steering wheel with something other than the DT’s.

The thing resembled a man. He had a cartoonishly long albino face and a hooked nose. Around a thin-lipped smile was a red smear of blood which splattered upward across his face and forehead.

He was watching me. I began slowly to turn my gaze toward him.

The honk of a horn jerked my eyes back to the road. I glanced at the rearview mirror.

I ran a red light. A passenger in a car crossing that intersection was flipping me off from out of their window.

I took a deep breath. I told myself that curiosity could take a flying fuck and swore that I would not again attempt to see the presence that I felt. This is the DT’s, I told myself. This is just the DT’s.

The drive to work from my house is about forty minutes. I was on the final fifteen-minute stretch at this point, driving along a sort-of highway. One of those roads whose name is just a number. It has too many lights and not a consistent enough speed limit to really be considered a highway, in my opinion, but that’s what folks call it, and it gets me to work faster than the backroads.

Have you ever tried to sit still and pointedly ignore something in your vicinity which your mind insists on telling you is there—like some attractive member of the opposite sex that isn’t your date, or an angry-looking wasp, or some acquaintance you dislike and don’t want to make eye contact with for fear they will want to chit-chat?

This was like that, but with a heaping helping of HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT THING! boring its eyes into the back of my head. I took up a mantra during that indefinably long fifteen minutes. It went something like: “It’s the DT’s, it’s the DT’s, it’s the DT’s, it’s the fucking DT’s, it’s the fucking DT’s, it’s the DT’s…”

I chanted my mantra until I pulled into a parking space at the dairy factory.

I turned off my car, squeezed my eyes shut, and took another deep breath. I groped for the door handle and let myself out of the car. I walked up to the building assuring myself that an eight-hour shift of drudgery would exhaust the DT creepies from my system.

Work is okay when I’m high (isn’t everything?), but it sucks when I’m sober. It sucks even more when I’m struggling through some sort of withdrawal.

By the time that eight hours passed I should have forgotten all about the thing I imagined in the back seat of my car; but the memory lingered. Every agonizing, crawling second of my dead-end job was filled with a growing sense of impending doom.

I felt as if the thing were still looking at me. Right at me, all the way from the back seat of my car, emanating patient malice. My thoughts turned to how the blood staining its face splattered upward from the smear all over its mouth.

The idea occurred (and I could not convince myself that it came from my mind instead of to my mind) that the thing had somehow taken a bite out of a human heart ripped fresh from the chest of some unsuspecting victim.

My own heart beat faster as the gruesome scene of this feast played itself in a loop in my head. I would try and shut it out, to shoo it away.

At first the unsuspecting victim was faceless. After a while my own visage imposed itself.

I vomited in the bathroom several times over the course of the shift. I saw the albino face reflected to me from my own puke as it settled in the toilet water. That thin-lipped smile said with smug satisfaction: I found my way inside you. I will tear my way out. I will eat your beating heart.

Normally, as bad as I felt, I would have told my supervisor I’m taking a sick day, but I was terrified to go out to my car.

Not only did I work through my shift, I asked if there was any overtime.

My supervisor looked at me as if he’d never met me before. He told me no. He asked if I was feeling ok. He was trying to make it seem like he was joking, but I could see from the expression on his face that I must have looked bad.

When I went to look at myself in the mirror before leaving, I could see why he was concerned.

I was pale. My own skin wasn’t so far from the albino effigy of the thing that was haunting me.

Lots of men like to pretend they have no fear.

Not me. I’m a coward, and proud of it. I’m not very big, and I’ve had my ass kicked enough to know I can’t fight.

This was not a fear I was used to feeling, however. I've been whacked out on a slew of intoxicating substances over the course of my life, but this shit never happened before.

Nonetheless, what was it that killed the cat, and got the coward’s ass kicked? That’s right, folks: curiosity.

I went out to my car.

It was autumn in the Midwest, but luckily not too late in the year, so that the sun rose by seven that morning. The sky and the grimy parking lot were filled with the budding light of dawn.

The shakes from the DTs, the jitters from the cold because I always dress too light, the creepies from the memory of the thing in my back seat—all these things congealed into one uniform shudder of horror passing over me in waves.

Yet as I approached my car, the dawn reassured me. No figure skulked in the shadows.

I chuckled at myself.

Behind the wheel, I was overwhelmed with relief at the absence of the thing. Chuckling gave way to hysterical laughter. I straightened up, put on a serious face, turned around and pointed an accusing finger into the back seat.

“Fuck you, you heart-eating bastard! Eat shit!” I screamed. The laughter broke in fresh waves.

Later, my co-workers were questioned about my behavior on this particular day. I would find out that I gave a show for all my peers who walked by my car on the way to their own vehicles.

Damning evidence, some would say.

I drove home with a light heart, DT’s aside.

The best way to get over the shakes is to take a few hearty rips from a water bong. When I got home I did just that.

I should have liked to do it before leaving for work, and, normally, I would have; but payday was yet a few days away, and though I had weed, I lacked money for anything but gas. I was willing to risk the hell at work to save myself a little paradise for the nights at home.

Mary Jane is a heaping load of good for a stomach emptied from enthusiastic retching.

After a few rips, and a good many coughs, I prepared a meal. Nothing elaborate. Just soup and biscuits.

But damn was it good! Simple things are good when you’re sick, especially when you’ve prepared them yourself. Minimum effort for maximum gain. That’s the stoner way. Amen and hallelujah.

I loaded another bowl in the Master Blaster (yes, this name is stenciled on the front of the bong) and sat in front of the TV.

I picked up the remote and flipped channels until I found something properly mind-numbing. Sports or cartoons always do. What do I happen upon but Scooby Doo, Where Are You? 

I’m intelligent, ok? But all I did when I was a kid was watch TV.

I was given free license with cable. I was a latchkey kid, and my parents weren’t home at night.

Naturally, when I first got home from school, I flipped on the toons. When night fell, I started hunting for tits and ass on the movie channels.

Kids nowadays don’t know about this because they have everything both uplifting and disgusting at their fingertips on the internet, but back then you had to hunt for it. As I grew into adolescence tits and ass prevailed over cartoons. Once I started getting laid in the real world, tits and ass on television lost its appeal, and I must have reverted to my admittedly confused inner child.

I’ve got a thing for all those old cartoons I used to watch. When stoned, the nostalgia factor is in full swing. Old Scooby was my favorite. Hell, Shaggy and that mutt always had the munchies, and he talked to his dog, and his dog talked back! How much more thinly veiled can the reference be?

All the cartoons from the seventies—especially Hanna-Barbara cartoons—felt like a primer for the lifestyle I came to embrace. You know, like the people who drew them were tripping so hard that they thought the same rehashed shit over and over was hilarious? And the psychedelia in the logos and the animations themselves! Nothing says “tripping balls over here” like logos on seventies cartoons.

In any event, there I was taking hits off the bong and watching “those meddling kids” caught in the grip of another monster mystery when a voice sounded in my head.

The voice of the thing from my car.

Its voice hissed and slithered like a snake: Hello, Dewey. I lick my lips at the thought of biting into your still-beating heart…

I choked on a particularly hard rip and coughed.

It was in the TV.

It was the monster chasing Scooby and Shaggy; but it was looking out at me.

Its face was smeared with blood, as before. Its mouth was turned in that thin-lipped smile. A twinkle in dead eyes rooted me to the spot.

Yet I couldn’t help but laugh. I was so stoned, and the thing was chasing Scooby Doo! Scooby fucking Doo!

Scoob yelled Yipes! as the albino monster’s hands came within an inch of grabbing him, and I fell on the floor in an involuntary gush of guffaws.

I was clutching my stomach, rolling back and forth on the carpet, sometimes knocking my head on the leg of my coffee table or scratching my face against the upholstery on my couch.

I dropped the Master Blaster when I fell, spilling its tepid contents. I could feel the bong water seeping into one side of my boxer shorts.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

Into my head the thing hissed: You think this is fucking funny?

There was real malice in that voice, but I just couldn’t be swayed. Hysteria overcame me.

Every time I would try to grip the coffee table or the couch and pull myself up to run screaming from the house, the image of the thing chasing old Scooby Dooby Doo would rear in my head—I’d hear Yipes!—and I would fall back into the spongy puddle of bong water and be off again.

Then I heard a knock on my door.

I lived in an apartment. People came by all the time, usually to offer me drugs or see if I knew where to get any. I decided to ignore it. I still couldn’t stop laughing.

The knock came again, more insistent. I was damned if I was going to answer then. It was probably one of those so-called friends that were really strung out, trying to find anyone that was willing to share anything. I couldn’t deal with that in my state.

Then a voice came with the third knock.

“Dewey Richardson, this is the police! Open up or we’ll kick this door down!”

I should have stopped laughing. Really.

But this time I laughed louder, harder.

So much so that I imagine the cops heard me on the other side of the door, because it got smashed in not but a few seconds later and they were on me, pulling me up out of the stench of bong water by one arm and slamming me back into it face-first. Cuffing me. Dragging me to my feet and reading my rights.

I was arrested.

I was still laughing.

I’ve seen some pissed off cops before, but never any as pissed off as those two.

To their credit, they didn’t brutalize me in any way, but I couldn’t blame them for being angry.

They could have no idea why I was laughing at the time. They probably thought I was some psycho smitten with myself over the crime I committed, sadistically enjoying the attention.

Of course, I had no idea at the time that I committed such a crime, and I was too hysterical to ask why I was being arrested.

I laughed in snorts and giggles and chuckles all the way to the lock-up.

When I got to the station, they interrogated me about some hit and run killings.

Pedestrians being run down by a car on early-morning walks and left for dead.

The latest victim lived and was able to recall the vehicle that hit him. He got a good glimpse of the driver.

It fit the description of my car, on which there were a good many conspicuous dents.

How did I not notice?

I was informed to my chagrin that a mountain of evidence suggests that I, and my black ‘85 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, have been responsible for the deaths of eleven people, one of them a thirteen-year-old girl.

All of this comes to me still as a shock; but I must admit that it is so.

The evidence is too strong even for me to deny it to myself: it was my car, my hands on the wheel, driving home from work not on that sort-of highway which I always take to get there, but via the various detours along the many backroads which as an adolescent I learned so intimately, hot-boxing my first car with my buddies.

I am a sleep-driving murderer.

Months of therapy have failed to divulge any memory of my misdeeds, but since I was arrested research has shown that such things have happened before. Others have been caught killing in their sleep, none the wiser in their waking life.

Yet I would not have bothered to write this account if not to record for posterity this one fact, which in this moment has so unnerved me that tonight I will take a shank I stole from another inmate and puncture my own neck.

At the trial, the sole survivor of my vehicular killing spree came to testify against me.

It was the albino man with the thin-lipped smile.

The judge found me in contempt of court. The bailiffs had to drag me out.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

With Deep Regret and Confusion,

Dewey Richardson

-----

C. Rommial Butler is a writer, musician and philosopher from Indianapolis, In. His works can be found online through multiple streaming services and booksellers. You can read much more of his works on his VOCAL account.