SLATER GARCIA | VIA DE LA VALLE

VIA DE LA VALLE

Tessa ground her teeth, her cheeks still stove-top hot from her argument with the boy sulking in the passenger’s seat beside her.

I’m not adventurous enough.

She repeated his words to herself.

I’m not spontaneous.

Hadn’t they just spent a weekend hiking around Southern California’s cliffs? All this steam from him just because she wanted to get back the day before work rather than spend another day and have to rush back the night before. All because she needed a perfectly necessary cool-down day.

Interstate 5 flattened out in front of Tessa as she accelerated. Nothing illuminated the freeway but dim running lights and a deep indigo tucked away behind the mountains flanking San Diego.

She glanced down at her Highlander’s built-in GPS system and studied the map ahead of her. Off to the west, a blank, black space tore a straight line through the digital map, cutting off little side roads, cutting through the names of closed stores and sleepy neighborhoods. Just a glitch.

She recalled that there was a military fort just off the coast; it had been a decade since she last visited. It would have been consumed by the glitch if she had correctly deduced their location.

The black space gnawed at her. Just another annoyance on top of everything else. Her fingers tapped all over her steering wheel in an involuntary flurry and her leg bounced up against the center console between them.

I am me, I’m okay. Tessa grounded herself.

Finally, he turned to her.

“Can you stop with all the noise?” he groaned.

She snarled at him. “You know I don’t like being cramped in these tight little spaces, especially when you’re being such a big baby about everything!”

He scoffed and turned away.

Maybe that was the last straw. Tessa twisted the wheel and pulled across the road, tearing through lanes.

“What are you doing?” the boy cried.

“Oh, you suddenly don’t like adventures?” she snapped back.

“Yeah, I wanted to go on another hike, not die in a crash.”

“Come on, dear; your boring girlfriend is taking you on an adventure!”

She ripped down the curve off a ramp exit named “Via De La Valle” and peeled onto the main street, heading towards the glitch in her map. The void looked nice this time of year.

“Tessa, you’re taking my words out of context!” he roared. “I hate when you get pissy like this! The fact is. . .”

She tuned him out.

Greenish-white streetlights dimly illuminated the little town. Not a car on the road other than the few parked here and there against the sidewalk. A few closed businesses appeared around and about, interspersed with small beach houses. No one was home, not in the whole town, apparently.

She furrowed her brow at the road ahead. No lights after a point, just darkness. Right about where the glitch appeared on her GPS.

The boy pontificated relentlessly. Who knew what he was saying now; Tessa had found a more curious fixation and as her eyes darted in the blackness, his voice became a low and distant drone, like tire noise on a faraway freeway.

A hand shoved Tessa. She whipped her head around and snarled at the boy.

“Were you even listening to me?” he barked.

“No!” she yelled back. “Why should I have to listen to the same stupid spiel over and over again? To stroke your ego?”

Blackness overwhelmed them.

She gasped and slammed on the brakes. They lurched forward in tandem.

“What? What happened?” the boy demanded.

Tessa peered around her through the windows. Her headlights revealed nothing but a small crown of light that peeked out over the hood.

The little sleepy beach town was gone.

Tessa cursed as sweat beaded out of the pores in her hands. She pushed the shifter into reverse and plowed her foot down on the gas pedal, though no matter how far she seemed to travel, nothing appeared through her rear window but that all-consuming, ubiquitous night.

She slammed on the brake pedal again.

Tessa gasped for air, her flesh tingling, icy cold and stiff. “Baby! Look!” the boy pointed just ahead of them. Tessa turned to see, in the distance, a flickering dot of light just off to their left.

“Let’s get out of here. This place is creepy.” The boy shook her shoulder and she swatted him away. “Come on, we just got turned around. We can talk more about us once we get out of here.”

The dot of light burned in her periphery.

“I don’t want to talk more about us,” she trembled in outrage. “I want to go home. And to be honest, I don’t ever want to see you again.”

To punctuate her statement, she wiped her freshly leaking eyes, put the car in drive, and stomped the pedal. They sat in silence for a moment. For once in the last seven years, she felt she could breathe without gasping, like she could wiggle her fingers and stretch her limbs with weightless ease. Even in the crushing darkness.

Tessa spun the wheel towards the dot of light.

In mere moments, it enveloped them, swallowed the darkness, extinguished it. It burned Tessa’s eyes.

What now filled her field of view made even less sense than the darkness.

An endless room of spiraling crystal mirrors, like a kaleidoscope, but with no pattern, no order to the reflections. She smashed the pedal. The images twirled, incoherent and inconceivable, blurring.

Over the hum of her engine, something else roared, an ocean wave crashing against the shore, but there was something uncanny about the sound: it filled their cabin, which split away into reiterations like shattering

glass. The sound fissured into harmonies, not one sound, but thousands all at once. It roared again, forming a word.

Help.

The throng of voices bellowed, sonic ebbs and flows crashed against her ear drums. She glanced out, unable to discern where was out and where she was in relation to it. The thousands of faces broke into millions of doppelgangers, billions, trillions of visions of herself.

Help. The mob cried again.

“Let me out of here!” Tessa cried, but to her horror, the other voices entwined with her own, calling out her exact demand in chorus.

She impulsively reached for the boy, but he was everywhere, broken into shards. He surrounded her, beside her own image, which blinked frantically back at her, dumbstruck with shock and terror. She glanced down at her hands. Her hands were everywhere.

Before she could release another cry of desperation, her mind split. Every thought and memory burst apart all around her, only to rush back into its singularity again. Consciousness heaved like a lung, like a heartbeat.

Herself.

Not herself.

Herself.

Someone else.

Herself.

Everyone else.

Herself and everyone else.

Everyone.

With each expansion she collected memories, thoughts, points of view, perspectives, until there was no distinction between someone else’s mind and her own. Until there was no longer an other. There was no one.

There was everyone.

A memory swirled in vacant darkness, a dust devil of synaptic pulses whipping up and taking shape.

A hall in a military fort, a secret meeting of scientists. A withered corpse faced them from the front, half-naked, eyes half-closed, crisscrossed legs. The man’s leathery skin, yellow with death, was inexplicably preserved. In the center of his forehead, a third eye blinked and darted around the room. Wherever it looked it sent ripples through the crowd, displacing matter for a moment with a gaze. Not a human eye, not an eye like anyone had ever seen before. The size of a palm, white with glowing purple bioluminescent veins. The pupil morphed amoebically, shifting with all it perceived.

An accident. A catastrophe of wizardry and science, animated in the preserved corpse of an ancient monk, found in the Himalayas, stolen and studied, but not for long.

The eye blinked in another direction and the gaze ripped through the other half of the room.

As far as the eye could see, it tore into creation, until creation reshaped itself into mirrors. Mirrors on mirrors on mirrors. Endless repetitions, ceaseless regurgitation. Every memory, every thought intertwined.

One entity.

No entity.

This never happened to me.

Tessa gasped, finding herself, her fading corporeality, clinging by a thread. Within the rippling reflections she felt what it meant to be her own mind, her own body.

Breath burned in her lungs and her eyes throbbed.

Her eyes. No one else’s.

“Get me out of here!” she cried. Alone.

She reached out, feeling with all her nerves her flesh, her bones, her muscles, each heartbeat through her veins, reformed through shards of broken glass. She saw herself in her reflection. Her real self appeared and she stretched out towards it, soaring through glass.

Her fingertips grazed the mirror. Fingertips against fingertips.

She burst through the darkness with a violent gust that blew her onto the asphalt. She crashed into the ground, the impact left her wheezing and writhing on the ground. The tang of blood soured her tongue.

“What the fuck. . .” she hissed.

She pulled herself to her feet and trembled with adrenaline. First, she grabbed her head, making certain it was still there, then her belly, each arm, each leg. Cold beach spray danced on her skin like delicate little needles. She was really there, staring into a wall of blackness.

“I’m here. I’m me. This is me. I’m here,” she repeated to herself, and smacked her temples as if this would nail the concept into her brain.

She remembered the boy, stretched out a hand to the wall of black, wondering if she had the capacity to return, to retrieve him. And what if she didn’t?

Tears streamed down her cheeks.

Another memory pummeled her like a freight train. The first time he met her. . .

The boy shuffled his portafilters in and out of their sockets. Second semester in college, first job ever. Not an expert barista by any means, but not the worst among his coworkers.

8 p.m. Just about to close, but there was always the rush of students before the end.

The door opened.

A new face. Young, pretty. A freshman, no doubt. Short. She couldn’t have been older than 17. The boy, 19, chuckled at the thought. . .

His memory tingled in Tessa’s mind.

Tessa had taken something with her from the kaleidoscope. Herself.

Everyone else.

The boy smiled. Tessa smiled. A fond memory, shared. A memory that made them miss the old times, when they were younger and excited, when they were thrilled at the prospect of falling in love.

They wiped their tears with Tessa’s. The road ahead left them without a vehicle, and while they didn’t feel as if they were bleeding or broken, the fatigue nearly left them immobilized. They gasped for air, nearly crumbling under their own weight.

Whatever it was they had experienced wouldn’t matter if they just sat there and starved under the cold sky. They needed to escape, to find a place where they could alert the police, the CIA, the military, whoever.

They broke into a run. Streetlamps blurred in their periphery. Something caught their shoe, sending them hurling into the ground. Their chin burst, burning in agony. They reached up, cupping their face as blood trickled through their fingers.

Tessa’s mind tingled.

Something contaminated her thoughts. An intruder. Memories that belonged to someone else leaked into her own.

“I am me, I’m okay,” Tessa and the boy recited together, in one throat, in one body.

“I am me.”

Slater Garcia has a short horror-comedy story published with Samfiftyfour and a ghost thriller novel published with Mischievous Muse Press. He takes great delight in his peculiar life with his wife, his dog, and his small armada of weird vehicles that he hopes to get running properly someday.