A Rental Car Takes a Left Down Rake Street and Disappears: Chapter 3

A handful of kilometres away, Beck Harbour was wishing his shift was already over.

He’d wanted to bail early. He’d called Caleb to ask.

“He was covered in blood, Caleb,” he’d said, “and ranting about how he lost his memory. He ran all the way from the reservoir. I had to call the police and ambulances and everything was chaos for, like, three hours…” A little exaggeration couldn’t hurt, Beck figured, and he couldn’t be held accountable for lying if technically he’d said like. “I have to write an incident report before I go and I feel like sh… garbage.”

Caleb’s voice was an irritated grumble, like Beck’s call had woken him. “Look at that sign outside,” he said. “That says 24/7 petrol, doesn’t it?”

“It’s only an two hours ‘til Chloe gets here for the morning shift,” said Beck meekly, but Caleb had already hung up.

So Beck had scoffed and scowled and drummed his fingertips on the counter and, eventually, resigned himself to keeping the station open. He gloved up and cleaned that spot by the door, the dirt and blood. Dusted up the worst of it and emptied it straight in the bin outside. Mopped the rest until it shone. Blood was well above Beck’s paygrade. At least Nathan hadn’t knocked over that tuna tin display.

A few customers came and went. Presently, Beck was watching a tall white woman in a blue Toyota Mirage at pump three, who kept casting annoyed looks towards the store and seemed to be muttering to herself.

“You can’t be having a worse night than me,” Beck muttered right back.

Nathan Fitch was a good kid, but holy hell. When things went sideways for him, things went sideways. Beck was trying not to resent him for it—trying to remind himself Nathan needed pity, sympathy, more than anything. Nathan’d always been a bit… like this. Flighty and unstable, jittery and paranoid, wheeling seemingly from one crisis to the next. More than once Beck had caught him talking to himself in the breakroom. There was clearly something wrong with his head, and he never seemed to be coping. Beck supposed that was to be expected, after that whole ordeal with Nathan's sister—

“You’ve got a rat out here,” the woman from the Toyota Mirage announced as she arrived at the night service window. Her burly coat was wrapped tight and her nose was crinkled. “Thing looks diseased. You ought to get rid of it. Disgusting.”

Hi. I’m good, thanks. How are you?

“Noted. I’ll take care of it.” Beck offered a placating, tight-lipped smile. “Pump three?”

The woman paid for her petrol and shuffled back to her car, pausing only to cast another look of disdain to the front of the store and, presumably, the rat.

Beck watched her pull away and disappear into the almost-daybreak, then sighed and wandered out front. It wasn’t weird for a rat to be outside a convenience store. They were scavengers! It wasn’t like the thing had found its way inside.

“Sometimes, rats are places,” Beck mumbled, half to himself and half to Ms. Toyota Mirage. “Oh, there’s a rat outside! Yeah, that’s where they live!”

He squinted, scanning for the creature. Sure enough, out near the buy-one-get-one-free meat pie sign, a small lump of fur was squealing softly and heaving. Involuntarily, Beck’s nose crinkled too. The thing was wriggling desperately like it couldn’t get its legs under it, and its fur slick and oozing with—was it bleeding? No. Maybe. Or maybe it had just gotten into a half-finished drink inside the trash. Or maybe this was just what diseased, feral rats looked like.

“Poor sap,” Beck said, nauseated.

He was in the middle of wondering what to do with it, whether to just… nudge it with his shoe towards the bins and let nature take it from there, when it sat bolt upright with a gurgling cry. Its legs were rigid, its eyes bulging, its body stiff like it was already in rigor mortis. It made a muffled wheezing noise, a high-pitched whistle to the sound, like it was trying to shriek with lungs that could no longer draw the necessary breath.

Beck took a healthy step backwards. Then another and another. Morbid curiosity kept him from hurrying all the way inside.

The rat’s fur began to ripple, its muscles flexing against its will. The wetness in the fur seemed apart from the rat, a separate mind, pulsating and writhing. It looked—it looked like it was soaking into the skin and vanishing somehow. Being pulled. Was it just Beck’s imagination?

But then rat itself started to shrivel. Whatever muscle and blood and fat it had inside its tiny body appeared to contract inwards, consuming itself. Its skin grew tighter, tighter, tighter around its skeleton, shrinking, straining.

Beck thought of a star collapsing in on itself, the gravity of a black hole. He turned away, a cold sweat lurking on his skin, and moved briskly for the door. He almost made it back inside without hearing the series of snaps and awful wet pop! he could only assume was the rat caving in, its skin and bones tearing apart as they were drawn chaotically into its centre.

Fuck Caleb. Fuck 24/7 petrol. Beck locked the door behind him, shut the lights off at the pumps, snapped the blind closed over the night service window. He stood behind the counter, reeling.

What the hell had just happened? Beck gnawed on his lip, hearing that awful noise in his head over and over, trying to force it into something that made sense.

“It’s been a long night,” he whispered. He was exhausted and stressed. It was not impossible his mind was playing tricks on him. Surely that was the only reasonable explanation.

Desperate for a distraction, Beck snatched a pen and got to work writing up that incident report. Then he counted the money in the till, and counted it again. He wiped down the counter, the fridge doors. By the time he was done, the sun was fully up.

Beck watched the light that stretched into the store, comforted slightly, but only slightly. What had happened was nothing, right? A trick of the shadow. Nathan had shaken him badly enough he was seeing things, hearing things.

Maybe we’re not so different, after all, he thought with an uneasy chuckle.

Beck steeled his nerve to go back outside and take another look, and found the sunlit area beneath the meat pie sign completely empty. The rat was gone. There was no exploded gore on the ground either, though, so…

Beck swallowed down a second wave of nausea. Probably dragged itself back to wherever it had come from. Probably nothing.

By the time Chloe arrived for the morning shift, Beck had made every effort to brush the rat from his mind, and had almost succeeded.

Everything always felt so much more ordinary in the daylight.