Lighthouses on the Edge of Infinity

Chapter 1: The Wolf’s Fool

It's 3am again, and I'm awake and woke in every sense of the words.

They say 3pm is a useless hour. It's too early to eat a meal that has a name, but too late to get anything of real importance done either. What does that make 3am then? Some say that the Hour of the Wolf is when the threadbare places in the world are worn just a little bit thinner. Thin enough you could poke your fingers through it till something else pokes you back. Or bites them off, depending on what that something is.

I can't sleep so I give up on the concept, climbing out of the backseat up to the front. These days, hipsters who live out of their cars are calling themselves ‘rent rebels’. That’s a cute, trendy of saying that you are too broke and in debt to afford a place to live. I’m doing my own time on this rock in a vehicle so I just start driving, looking for the places that have been scraped too thin.

Someone has to.

Along the way, I see the other night people. The homeless shuffle in and out of the streetlight like ragged moths. They test out the generosity of the passing drunks, some sober enough to choose the lesser of some evils.

Having some better luck at opening wallets, the Daughters of Twilight are trying to get in one last round of Johns looking for trade before clocking out for the night with sweaty cash in hand to pay off their pimps. The drug dealers are there too, some vices playing into each other hand in hand. They all do a brisk business in this strange hour.

3am is the hour of prayers made in desperation, and brittle promises that will cave in on themselves under the weight of a fresh dawn, but most of all, 3am is full of the awake making terrible decisions. Life changing decisions, most of which they will regret when they are harshly revealed by daylight. Streetlight deepens shadows, obfuscating certain truths while moonlight and starlight softens lies with their silvery caresses on the eyes.

I let them do their thing, literally and figuratively staying in my lane. I drive by a cemetery, and out of old habit and fresh fear, I hold my breath. I ignore all the little movements I see there twitching between pillars and planks of pale stone and rusting metal. I tell myself it's just the play of shadows and the wind in the moonlight. I play dead in passing, coming back to life as soon as I'm out of earshot of the dead. The homeless I talk to from time to time have told me to never walk past that place at night. They would know. I choose to believe them. They notice things other people don’t, or choose not to for the sake of being ‘normal’.

There is something with me in my little car. It's sitting bitch in the backseat. I can feel it. I know it's there. I know because it feels just like the sensation you get when you know someone is staring you down from across a room.

I resist the urge to check my mirrors. If nothing is back there, it means I'm paranoid, and probably not on the fun side of crazy anymore. The alternative is that someone...something...is back there, here in the car with me, and it is waiting for me to turn around to look at it. Damned if I do. Damned if I don't.

Instead of choosing door number one or door number two, I spin the wheel of life. I focus on the road, looking for and finding an open gas station. It glows like a mirage made of bad fluorescent lighting and harsh angles. It is not soft or inviting like a vision should be, almost too alien for me to consider stopping. Almost, but not enough to detour me as I feel more than hear whatever is sitting behind me shifting its weight heavily in the backseat.

I get out of the car as carefully as I can while still managing to make to appear casual, like I am not running away from my own car like a crazy person. I make myself keep my eyes forward, toward the gas station even though its strange lights are blinding me with their supposed normalcy and brilliance.

I'm the only one there. The cashiers of these places are either desperate for company, or abhor it. My cashier tonight falls into the latter category, glaring at me as I enter as he tries to hunker down behind the register. I don't look like I'm going to rob the place or shoplift so the cashier ignores me from that point on, returning his attention to the most current edition of Hustler. I don't care. I’m not here for meaningful conversation. I just needed an excuse to get out of the car.

I take a piss, and leave without buying anything. The cashier doesn’t even look up from the boobs he’s memorizing for his spank bank as I exit. My car is empty when I return. I say a little prayer to anyone listening that it stays that way. I need to find somewhere safe to sleep for a couple of hours. Some place where no one will notice me, or want to peek into my car.

Sadly yet fortunately for me, Walmart is about the only thing that fits the bill. I hide my little car among the RVs and semis already camped out in the no-man’s-land of the parking lot, taking refuge there in strange company. In all the ways that matter, they are all a type of night people as well. We are all hopeless wanderers here, little leaves being carried in and out of places on the wind.

I am so tired. I can't go on like this for much longer. I haven't slept in a real bed in months, but I can't afford to stay in one place for too long either. If I stand still for too long, the shadows will creep in after me. They live there in the dark, the real kind of dark, not the fake one us humans have made a peace with. A lot of wicked things live there, in the real and in the fake. Woke and alone in hour of the Wolf, sadly I am what stands between the world as we know it, and what lives to tear holes in those threadbare spaces.

It’s all their fault.

I much as I want to hate the time travelers for what they are doing to me and everyone else whether they are aware of it or not, the fact of the matter is that they’re not here in person for me to rage at. What they leave behind in their careless wake through the time stream and the parallel worlds created from their meddling is what I have to deal with on a regular basis. For all my gifts and sins, this is my calling, my burden in life. Like many others who share this fate with me, I am a soldier of the unseen war, the one you have no idea that you are a part of too.

I am a lighthouse on the edge of infinity.