For a more immersive experience, I recommend you wear headphones for this podcast. (theme music plays) (theme fades) Mil-Liminal Episode 6: Engine Trouble Hey listeners, it's me. It's been a minute. After the last incident at the GasCo, I had to stay a couple days in the local hospital for observation. It sucked, my throat felt like it was on fire for days, but on the plus side, the GasCo adults made me nice food, and my little shed is now filled with flowers and affirmation that they’d be super mad if something had happened to me. Anyway, I'm ok now, shaken, but alive. The bathroom still smells like algae, and has an ever hanging feeling of dread and dankness to it, but I'm getting used to things like that now. I just do my best to avoid it. Sam seems ok with that. Oh, wait. Maybe you're new here. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Caro Greene, and I'm the overnight attendant at a small gas station on the side of the old highway in the middle of the Pacific Northwest. I've been making this podcast for about half a year now, chronicling the weird and unexplainable things that happen the midnight hours, which...is a lot actually. There's rarely a quiet night here where something doesn't happen. Sometimes The Happening IS the quiet. Too quiet. Deafening eerie silence that twists itself around you, choking out everything, muffling the ticking of the clock, the hum of the fridges, the slight buzz of the overhead lights. the kind of silence where you feel like you need to make a noise just to remind yourself you're still alive, but when you speak it falls short, just an inch in front of your face, clipped off, muffled. Dead. It actually helps to wear headphones on nights like that, cuz even if I turn on the radio, its like the music hits a wall and sounds muffled no matter how loud I play it. Other nights are loud, deafening. winds wailing through the trees all around in all directions, the whipping of branches and moaning of the old building creaking under the pressure. or the rolling thunder and pounding rain that make you feel like you're inside of a tin can in a flashstorm. The kind of storms where the lightning stays high in the atmosphere and lights up the clouds periodically like its the end of the world somehow. Maybe it is, around here at least. You know when you're in a dark space, and lightning is flashing around you and for a few seconds everything lights up bright, like you flicked on a light or flashed a camera, and you have a fleeting thought of how terrifying it would be if the next time that happened, something was standing there? But of course, it never actually happens cuz monsters aren't real. Well, maybe not for you. (breif moment of creepy music.) Personally I'm kinda sick of getting jumpscared by the strange crooked figures in the parking lot everytime the power goes out and the lightning reveals them for a split moment. One night, its a motorcycle. It's 1: 57 am. There's a flashstorm, These things last about 45 minutes at the most and then peeter off, but man I wouldn't wanna be on a bike in this weather. Powers out except the emergencies, so its dim, eerie blue tint lights, completely black parking lot. I'm staring off into the nothing through the window, waiting for the storm to pass when I see the single headlight, a disconnected eye, tilt into the blank space of the lot, distorted by rain passing through the beam. it stops and flicks off, darkness. until a flash of split second bright lights up the world and I see the black outline of the bike. this isn't the usual crooked figures looming in shadows. This is a person, but the helmet and padded jacket still make their body uncanny, strange, wind pushing them sideways as they struggle to get to the door, which rocks back on its hinges in the pouring sideways rain. They pull it shut, undignified wrenching against the Act of God outside, and take off the helmet. It's a man with angry eyes, he's not that much older than me, but there's an edge to him, blurry, like deaths been chasing him for a while and his image is starting to wear down, bleed out at the edges. He's trying to look hard and i think how silly that is. We're in the middle of nowhere and the powers out, and who knows if the road is even out there anymore? Better to look nervous than like a tough guy. I tell him cash only, and when I say that, for some reason, I can tell his facade is wearing thin. He puts some items on the counter and mumbles about cigarettes. He won't look me in the eyes. This usually happens, it takes longer on a normal day for the passer throughs to get nervous, but on a night like tonight, it drains the color from your face real fast. I take his money and he's looking outside into the darkness. 'You oughta wait it out.' I tell him. 'These storms dont last long. but it's not worth skidding out and road rash or worse.' I notice a flicker in the lot. (Ominous Music starts) The Volvo is slowly cruising through horizontal downpour. Funny, in this weather it looks almost new. The paint reflects the dim blue of the inside of the store, creeping over it as it passes like a darkened mirror. I frown, tracking it with my eyes. The man looks at me and follows my gaze. I notice he squares his shoulders out of the corner of my eye. 'Whos that?' he asks, voice low. 'Nobody.' I say. I can feel fear creeping into the room like a snake, coiling slowly until it fills up all the spaces and crushes out all the air. The combination of the hour, the rain, the lack of power, blue lights and the endless Black has made liminal things stand still. Time stands still for a moment. The space between a second is endless. (music continues) He looks at me, and takes a step back. I wonder if I look strange in this light. monochrome blues on skin and hair, wide eyed baby face. Ghostly. he swallows and thinks for a second. I've stopped trying to convince people I'm not part of it. Maybe I am. (music stops) He leaves. I watch him retreat out the door, he steps through it, the emergency generator blinks out, washing me in darkness for a split second and he's stepping back in. He looks up, confused that he's coming when he was clearly going. He tries again. Same thing, the second he steps through the threshold the world flips and he's stepping back in. Stuck in a loop of the doorway. ugh. not again. He looks at me frantically, like I'm doing it somehow. I shake my head. 'You gotta take a lap around the chip stand.' I say, pointing towards it. I can see the subtle...not rightness about it. Usually I can tell. It looks right but wrong at the same time, like a low quality jpeg. He stares at me. 'It glitches sometimes.' He looks at the chip stand, and then at the door. and back at me. He tries the door one more time, defiant, and just like that, hes back, he shakes his head, and cautiously steps toward the chip stand, boot chains clinking. He takes a lap around it. 'Try the door again.' I say. He does. And then he's gone. I can see him running full tilt for his bike past the flickering Volvo. I hear the bike roar to life over the heavy rainfall. I see the headlight, choked by dark, swing up and around and leave the lot into the Black like a bat out of hell. Good luck dude. Glitching chip stands and wayward motorcyclists are the least of my problems, though ill have to remember to look harder next time the lost family comes in looking for directions, maybe they are stuck in a glitch too. After that incident, the nights are quiet for a bit. Not in the too quiet stuck in the void kinda way, but normal quiet. I don't even see the volvo for a bit, which i can't decide is concerning or totally fine if I'm being honest. I'm terrified of it, it sends chills down my spine even when i'm expecting to see it, but, I feel we have formed a kind of comradery, even though i think it's only in my head and 100 percent one sided. Frenemies. Someday, I’m going to learn to expect. (Ominous music starts again) I should know by now how these things go. It didn't take too long for the peace of the quiet nights to be shattered by the ear splitting ones. (Music stops) One thing I loved doing in middle and highschool was watching the stupider horror movies with my neighbor, the old ones with weird concepts, I'd be curled up and hiding behind faded star printed blanket that smelled faintly of cigarettes and axe, eyes wide, bracing for the inevitable yanking of the cover over my face so i didn't have to see the fake ketchup gore spattering the old vcr/tv combo he had on his nightstand. One of those movies was 'Duel.' It wasn't a bloody gorefest like so many others, it was about a man, a red plymouth valiant, and a truck. And after 90 minutes of car and semi truck accelerating through a desert highway without a break, we both came away with our ears ringing, vibrations of projected road noise in the tips of our fingers, and proceeded to shout the tagline at each other across the school grounds for the next week before dissolving into fits of laughter. DUEL! DUEL! What does this have to do with anything, Caro? Well, dear listener, not much. Except I’m sure you can see the road we are headed down a mile away… (see what i did there) (ominous music begins) Eerie green headlights veiled with fog. The faint smell of grime and moss floating on the night air. Silent engine, gravel crunching under balding tires. As much as I was expecting it to happen sooner or later, I was not prepared for the faceoff i was about to undertake with my old friend, the Volvo. (music fades) You know how this starts, just like it always does. Me having finished all my duties for the night, leaning up against the counter with a paper cup of crappy gas station coffee reading a dime adventure/horror comic. Still not sure where we get these things, I’ve never seen them anywhere else, and looking online doesn’t yield many results. Sam must be ordering random knockoffs from god knows where. But I’m getting off track. It was quiet. I’d turned off the Musak, cuz sometimes it can get grating on one's nerves after 8 hours of the same five pop songs on loop, a juxtaposition to the endless midnight. It was a still night, no howling wind, no horizontal rain pounding the side of the building. Just ambient silence, the gentle sounds of the trees breathing all around me in the night air. I could even see all the way to the highway tonight, the darkness contained to the farside of the road, dancing and creeping in its need to consume, confined by asphalt. No Glitching in the chip stand. Heh, I'm getting too poetic here. The point is, it was a quiet, normal night. And that in itself set the scene for unease, cuz if there was anything I’d learned about the GasCo in my few months of working here, it was that there is no such thing as a quiet, normal night. So you can imagine that I was on high alert. I hadn’t seen the Volvo in about a week. Now, it wasn't like it showed up everyday or anything, it wasn’t on a regular schedule like Jeb’s almost nightly shambling, or other residual haunts around here. It came and went as it pleased, low beams throwing long shadows on the gravel as it moved almost soundlessly through the lot. I’d even seen it stop at a pump before, long enough that if one used their imagination a bit, they could fill in the blanks of a ghostly driver filling the tank with gas to continue on their looping journey. Not tonight though. Tonight it startled me, creeped up and parked in a different space than it usually occupied. Instead of off to the side, I looked up to see phantom green lights in the space in front of the door, right front and center in my field of vision. O…kay? I squinted at it for a second. Nothing happened, just the faint flickering in the lights caused by some short in the wiring (go figure, this thing looked like it had been at LEAST a decade submerged.) I ignored it, the same way I ignored the leering eyes of the creeper passer-throughs. No need to stare. I caught the flash in my field of vision, more than a flicker, the lights blinked out for a moment and came back on, illuminating bright reflection on the glass in front of it. I stared for a moment. Wiring must be getting worse. The lights flicked again. Ok no, that was deliberate. (ominous music) The Volvo was flashing its lights. At me? Did it actually know about me? Could it sense my presence inside the same way I sensed its outside? Small little flesh living thing creeping around inside an illuminated box for it to study, wonder about, make assumptions around? No way, that was absurd. It was a CAR. Nothing more. The lights started flickering rapid fire now. So I went into the store room, out of sight, out of mind, right? The power flickered. NOPE. Not doing this. I shook my head and started loading crates of soda and juice to stock the fridges with. I had been ignoring doing it earlier, cuz I was feeling lazy, but now seemed like a good time for a distraction. That went on for about fifteen minutes, me going back and forth filling fridges, the volvo flashing, power acting up around me. I suppose when it figured out that wasn't going to work, well. That's when the honking started. (distressed theme music plays) It started out small. Weak, like the battery was dying. A small scrongly whine. But it started to increase. Once every five minutes. Several short one long. Every ten seconds for 3 minutes straight. And I did everything I could to ignore it. At one point a customer came in. There was NO WAY they could avoid hearing it. Everytime I opened my mouth to speak, the horn would go off. It would have been comical and Mr.Bean like if it wasn't so off putting. At one point it was continuous, it went on for so long the Volvo's lights started to dim and flicker and it finally had to stop and recoup itself. I breathed a sigh of relief. Until the next day. This time it started off with the honking. Honk honk honk over and over and over until I thought I was going to actually go insane. In a huff I marched over to the door, forgetting myself for a moment, hand on the push bar. The honking stopped. I blinked. And pulled my hand away. It started up again. WHAT DO YOU WANT? It continued. I pushed the door open a half inch. It stopped. And that's when it dawned on me. The Volvo wanted me to go outside. Nuh uh no way. I pointed a finger at it through the window and violently shook my head. No. I turned around and walked away. How long could this continue? Your battery will die eventually. I’d noticed it hadn’t been cruising the parking lot like usual, just sitting in that spot. I hadn’t seen it in the daytime, and none of the other employees had ever talked about or complained about it. I never saw it come and go either, but who was I to judge? It was a ghost car, maybe it COULDN’T show up in daylight. Maybe it was a vampire car. I honestly am not going to put anything past the realm of belief at this point. That was my first mistake. Thinking it would give up. Inanimate objects with no thoughts hood empty have enough space for endless persistence and patience. And maybe batteries don’t die in the ghost realm. The honking and flashing went on. And on. And on. Until I couldn’t take it anymore. I stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the Gasco, in front of the car, fingers still holding the door frame, one hand still in the safe zone. (Music stops) ‘WHAT?!’ I demanded. ‘WHAT do you want from me , huh?’ a beat of silence. The unmistakable click thunk of the hood popping. Creaky hinges, rusty metal, the 2 inches dark space of what was inside impossibly black even under the illumination of the GasCo’s pink and purple lights. The engine whined and clicked off, engine settling audibly, like the last death rattle breath of a soon to be corpse. I stared at the popped hood, and it dawned on me. Something was wrong with the Volvo and it wanted me to fix it. I shook my head. ‘I know your game. The second I stick my hands in there to unlatch and lift the hood, that's where you strike. Do I look stupid?’ I shook my head harder, thinking of every corny horror movie I’d ever seen. The echoes of DUEL reverberated my mind. Of every stupid teenager that bumbled into a place they shouldn't have been, stuck their hand where it shouldn't go and paid the price. But I’m not gonna lie to you, Listeners. (music starts again) At that moment, I kinda got it. I was compelled. Curiosity and the threat of never having a moment's peace for the rest of my life hung over me and I took a hesitant step forward. You’re yelling at me right now, I can feel it. I crept closer. As they say, curiosity killed the cat. I could feel my heart pounding underneath my coveralls, a cold sweat breaking out across the back of my neck and chest. The long chained necklace I always wore beneath my shirt was glued to my skin with the moisture. I was painfully aware of every detail of my body, every hair on my arm, every cell, every molecule, the thin disk of pendant silver sticking to me, one of my socks had slipped down in my sneaker. I stuck my trembling fingers into the crevice of the hood, and pulled them back quick, like that slap game you played when you were a kid. Nothing happened. I realized I hadn't been breathing and took a deep breath and stuck my hand in there again, feeling around for the hood latch to unhook so I could lift the hood fully. Somewhere in the depths, the innards gave a low groan. I lept back again. Just the engine settling. I sucked in a breath, held it, and tried one last time. It was cold, the metal and the air beneath the hood, damp and cool on my fingers, which was saying something considering I’m already cold as it is. I Found the hood latch, pulled it and shoved the heavy metal up and over my head. I had to stretch onto my toes to push it all the way. I quickly pulled the prop rod up and latched it to keep the hood open and jumped back, trembling, expecting the slab of metal the slam back down and crush me. It didn’t. Curiosity killed the cat, but as they also say, Satisfaction brought it back. I stepped forward. The engine was rusted and covered in moss and grime. There was the remains of a dead fish fried on the battery casing. A large amount of lake crud and gunk had built up around the belts, so much that I'd guess it was preventing the car from being able to do much without overheating, hence the urgency of the honking and light flickering. The battery likely would have given out eventually in theory, and then not only would the car before a haunt, but a stranded one that couldn't even cruise and terrify people like me, and what kind of life is that for a ghost car, really? ‘I need tools, ok?’ I said, stepping backward again. ‘Don’t start honking or whatever, I’m coming back.’ I ran back around the GasCo, to my innocent little Datsun and pulled the trunk open, rummaging for the simple repair kit I had gotten from Jeb. Jeb…ugh where are you when I need you? For a split second I wished his haunt was real and not residual, ghost mechanic for a ghost car, but then, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone truly. So it was up to me. I hauled the toolbox out and made my way back around, dropping it with a loud clunk on the sidewalk. I pointed my finger at the Volvo. ‘If I save you, you gotta promise not to kill me ok?’ The complete lack of reaction did not make me feel better about this, but I dug in my box, pulled out my phone and loaded up a video on belt repair and replacement, and got to work. I gotta tell you, kneeling on the bumper and sticking both arms into a mossy dark deathtrap with possible sentience is not recommended, it took me about an hour and a half to clean out the nasty gunk and reattach the belts. Luckily I worked out all the time cuz frankly, those rusty parts gave me a lot of trouble, but in the end we got it done. I cannot explain to you in a way you could comprehend just how FAST I gathered my tools, and jumped off the car, yanking the prop rod down and slammed the hood as hard as I could. I jumped back as the engine fired up. Huh. Less clunky. Maybe I’m not so terrible at mechanics. The engine revved and the lights flickered, a slight hesitation, as if assessing me, and then with a screech like the devil being cast into the depths of hell, the tires spun out, sparks flying and the Volvo peeled out of the parking lot and into the night, leaving me to drop to the curb, adrenaline racing through my body, knees weak and trembling, vibrations in my fingertips, catching my breath and watching watery tail lights disappear into the dark. (ominous music starts) Huh. Places to be I guess. I turned and went inside, and pulled out my notepad, and on it, I scribbled the 6 numbers from the bent and rusted metal plate, barely legible before I forgot. Ever curious, dear listener. (ominous music shifts into the synth theme song) Thanks for joining me for this episode of Mil-Liminal! be sure to follow social media or subscribe for updates. Want to know more? This podcast is actually based on a webcomic, and you can read it right now for free on Tapas and Webtoon, just search for Mil-Liminal, a horror romance about me, Caro, my podcast and my desperate attempt to win a grouchy barista's heart, or for Seemingly Dark. A long running Supernatural comic full of ghosts, mysteries and of course I'm there too! Follow the Creator Raptorjules on Instagram or Twitter or follow SeeminglyDark on Tumblr for art and stuff! Logo and music design is by snakepixel on Twitter. A special shout out and thanks to my patreons and hopefully I'll see you soon.