Sticky Specter

“DAMMIT!” Jill cursed.

“What now?” asked Dawn from the passenger’s seat.

“It just said ‘Stay below 45 mph to reach destination!’” she groaned, and slowed the cruise control yet again.

“I thought it said if we stayed below 55 we’d have enough power to get there!” Britney complained from behind her in the second row.

“Yeah, well the cold weather is on the battery’s efficiency, and all this elevation gain has probably been throwing off the power estimates even further. And maybe if you hadn’t been charging your phone the whole time, I’d have a little more battery left!”

“Whatever! I’ll plug my phone back in and you can have your whole ten feet of range back! Maybe if you hadn’t been playing that stupid farming game on the main screen during our last rest stop FOR A FREAKING HOUR…”

“That was like twenty minutes, tops! You’ve had that thing stuck to your face and plugged in for like this whole trip! Why don’t you try reading a book like Hayley next to you?”

“Because that’s all she ever does! She can't control herself!”

Hayley, upon hearing her name mentioned, looked up from her book, sighed, and went back to her novel.

“So, what’s the deal?” Sasha asked from the cramped third row. “Are we going to have actual beds to sleep in tonight, or should I get used to being squished up next to Vanessa back here?”

So far, their road trip was already going terribly, and their aggravation was showing. The six college girls were trying to reach a ski resort for their spring break. They had thought to take a backroad shortcut, but it had saved them neither time nor battery life. Since leaving the main highway, they had been following a decrepit road for miles into the wilderness, with only the GPS promising the road would lead somewhere eventually. But when a single-lane bridge they were supposed to cross turned out to no longer exist, the situation suddenly looked even worse.

“DAMMIT, DAMMIT, DAMMIT!!!” Jill screamed at the top of her lungs, as she brought the car to a stop. “WHAT THE FUCK DO WE DO NOW?”

“Can your GPS reroute us?” Dawn asked.

“NO, IT CAN’T! I haven’t had signal for an HOUR! The last turnoff was miles back, and who the fuck knows where that goes? I don’t even know if I can make it back to the last charging station! We’re fucked! Just FUCKED!”

“Well, hold on,” Sasha called from the back. “Britney’s got service. Just have her…”

“Sorry, I’ve been playing offline,” Britney interrupted.

“DAMMIT!” Jill cursed again, and rested her forehead against the top of her steering wheel in defeat. The others checked their phones, but each of them was out of service.

“I think we can make it back to that bed and breakfast we passed,” Vanessa suggested after a while of silence.

“No way, that place looked abandoned,” Dawn replied.

“All we can do is turn around anyway. Let’s just stop and see. Maybe there’s a phone.”

With no better options, Jill brought the car around and drove back the way they had come.

To their surprise, there were lights on in the old building. As Jill pulled the car up the long, gravel driveway, the dashboard showed a mere 10 miles of battery life remaining. Inside, a young woman greeted them. She was a strange girl, with long black hair, a slender, almost waifish build, an expressionless face, and modest, old fashioned clothing. She carried herself with a submissive slouch, seemed to make eye contact, and spoke so softly Jill almost couldn’t hear her. She introduced herself as Viola, and asked if they needed rooms. Strangeness of this place aside, they were overjoyed to not be stranded for the night.

“How much for a night?”

“Is $20 fair?”

“WHAT? Like per person?”

“For the group. We typically rent the whole place out as one. If that’s too much, I can…”

“You know what, 20 is great! Hey, do you have an electric outlet we can use? We drove here in an EV, and that thing is damn near dead. I’ll even pay your electric bill if need be, but we NEED some power!”

Viola looked confused, but said they could use any of the outlets they needed. Once they were paid and booked, Jill wasted no time in uncoiling the charging cable and finding an outlet on the porch.

“No surprise: we’ll have to make due with a 120 outlet. It’ll take a while, but in our situation, we can’t exactly… FUUUUUUUCK!”

The other girls stared at her, wondering what was wrong.

“All the outlets here are two-prong! The cable won’t even fit! Who the fuck still has two-prong outlets?”

“I’ve got an adapter that should work,” Britney offered.

“It doesn’t work that way. That third prong is the ground wire. You can’t just connect it to nothing.”

“I use it all the time.”

“God dammit, Britney, if I fry my uncle’s SUV, he’s going to bludgeon me with a cactus! Assuming we ever make it back home at all!”

Having no other options, she used the adapter and plugged in the charger, hoping for the best. She returned to the driver’s seat to watch the display as the charging session initiated. She breathed a sigh of relief when the display registered power. There wasn’t much from this outdated socket, but it was something.

“And… we’re gaining three miles per hour. This is going to be a loooong charge.”

“What’s a full charge?” Hayley asked.

“300 miles.”

“Wait… 100 HOURS?” Dawn shouted. “That’s like four or five days!”

“Yep. We don’t have to charge to full, but definitely enough to make it out of these woods, plus a little to be safe. A couple days, at least. At least room and board here is cheap. Suspiciously cheap, not that we have any other options. My hands are tied. Probably kiss our ski trip goodbye. Might as well start unpacking.”

Once they had picked their rooms, they met up in the central living area. There was a fireplace, a dusty old couch, and plenty of old books, but no TV. The one phone they found was dead, but Viola was nowhere to be found anymore. With no cell service, the girls had to entertain themselves.

“What in the world was up with Viola?” Dawn jeered. “Like a twenty-something who never outgrew her high school goth phase!”

“And became a French maid,” Jill added. “Kinda hot, but definitely weird.”

“A French maid who works at a funeral parlor, maybe.”

Meanwhile, Britney explored the contents of an old writing desk, and found some handwritten notes in it. It turned out to be somebody’s poetry.

“Oh my god, listen to this!” she laughed, and started to read aloud. “‘As he fights his war, he will keep no company but the corpses of his comrades and his enemies, now laid side by side and indistinguishable. But if he should somehow survive the slaughter, he will only have my own corpse to return home to, murdered by his abandonment.’ Oh god, this is terrible!”

Dawn joined her in going through the writing, as they laughed at everything they read.

“Oh, here’s another good one!” Britney announced after a few minutes. “As my nails penetrate my tender, white flesh, the bright red comes out, the first color I have seen today, like roses trying to emerge from a bed of strangling snow. The pain brings me the sorrowful news that I am still alive.”

“Pee-yew!” Dawn laughed. “It’s like Mary Shelly and Edgar Allen Poe had a love child, and then forgot to hug her!”

“You just described Viola,” added Jill with a smirk.

“Well, these are all signed V. V. But this paper looks old. Like, too old to be her. Maybe her weird aunt?”

“Great aunt, more like. That first one sounded like world war era stuff,” Sasha mused.

“Huh? Who’s that, Dawn?” Britney asked, confused. “I don’t’ get it.”

“Mary Shelly?” Hayley answered, briefly looking up from her book. “She wrote Frankenstein.”

“Oh, okay! What about the other one… Edgar Allen Paul?”

“For fuck’s sake, Britney! Have you ever read a book before?” Vanessa teased her.

“Whatever. I need a shower so bad,” Britney declared, ignoring Vanessa.

“After reading all that Pulitzer Prize material?” asked Sasha.

“I needed one before that, but it definitely didn’t help.”

Even though it wasn’t that late, the girls were tired and stressed. One by one, they got up and made their way to their rooms, to wait for their turn for the bathroom, or to simply turn in for the night. Only Sasha and Vanessa stayed up, lounging together on the smaller couch.

But Viola hadn’t actually left. It was just that speaking to such a large group, even keeping herself visible to them, took so much out of her. When they had first walked in, she had hoped that maybe they could be her friends. But after hearing them openly mock her, including trampling all over her deepest, most personal musings from her life so long ago, those hopes were dashed. Rejected and spiteful, she decided that if they wouldn’t take the time to comfort her poor, tired soul with a little understanding, maybe she could at least get some amusement out of them.