Pump Thirteen

The stranger walked into the petrol station. When it came to petrol stations, visitations by strangers were not at all unusual. This was a place that a person passed through without leaving very much of themselves at all. Familiarity was mostly earned elsewhere. Nothing was familiar about this stranger and that was not right. That was decidedly unright.

The stranger walked into the petrol station and the world turned as though this were the very centre of it. Time slowed and a change made ready to dance to the tune that the stranger was about to give voice to. This was the stranger’s show now. The rehearsals were long gone and forgotten.

The audience stilled itself and settled into its surroundings. The surroundings shifted and fell into an unquiet restlessness.

The sun crashed down into the horizon as though a bell had gone off and it’s shift was over. Late for a party it deserted its post and the darkness washed over the quiet countryside. Through the green grasses and patches of chattering trees a road wound its way, mistaking itself for a meandering river. 

In the midst of this sleepy idyl was the decrepit petrol station. The place had seen better days and those days were now far gone, at first glance the fuel stop seemed to have been a long time shut, inactive and abandoned. The windows had been amateurishly and carelessly painted with grease and grime so they now resembled hazy, well-worn sun glasses, but through those glasses leaked a faint glow. To the side of the building, nuzzling undergrowth gone wild, was a battered VW Golf that gave the game away. Each and every body panel on the car had knocks and scrapes, but the tyres were new and closer observation would show the vehicle to be in good mechanical condition. 

The petrol station, like the car, was in deceptively good working order. The place had a lived in feel. There were public houses like this. The landlord would never admit it, but the weathered and worn exterior added to the ambience and told the punters all they needed to know about what was in store for them, and how to behave.

Trade was slow and always had been. The location of the petrol station was a mystery, as was its ongoing life as a business. The road came from nowhere and led to little else, and yet the little fuel stop lived on in its quiet, unremarkable and unremarked way.

Unexpectedly, the door to the small shop, with its malfunctioning till, opened and a bell rang loud and clear. The trill of the bell was out of kilter with all else, too loud, too clear and too rude, it broke the sleepy spell and the man behind the counter jerked into an anxious wakefulness for which he was not prepared. He watched the steady and relentless progress of the stranger and his disoriented anger at the unannounced intrusion turned to a liquid fear. He felt it simmering in his middle and threatening to sluice from him. He wanted to check outside for a car, but two things stopped him. One was that he did not want to take his eyes from the stranger, to look away felt like a grim and deadly invitation. Prey never lost sight of the stalking predator, that was a mistake that was only ever made once. The second was that he knew there was no car, the weight of the car’s wheels would have set the buzzer off, besides which, he would have heard the engine and seen the beam of the headlights as they swept into the forecourt. To confirm the absence of the car was too much, far too much. He should want to, but the presence of the stranger burnt his curiosity away.

The dark clad stranger stopped at the counter. He wore a wide brimmed hat and a long coat that might be a cloak. The man had not taken his eyes off the figure, but only now did he figure out that the stranger also wore his own shadow. The lights in the old shop had flickered and dimmed as he approached and brightened up some after he stepped out from under them. The effect now was that he was illuminated from behind, a halo of light shrouding him and managing to obscure him even further.

Pump thirteen.

The man heard the words but could not be sure that they had been spoken. The absence of a visible mouth did not help matters. 

The man was presented with an awful dilemma. There was no pump thirteen. The pumps on the forecourt numbered six, but that was not to say that their identifying numbers ran from one to six. The original owner of the petrol station had been both religious and superstitious. There were some that would say that amounted to the same thing. In the fervour of his beliefs and his desire to make a go of his business, he insisted that there would be no pump six. Six being the number of man and of the devil himself. Instead, the sixth pump had been denoted pump seven.

Pump seven had always been the lucky pump. Pump seven earnt the station the most money and despite it being used more than any of the other five pumps, it had never had any downtime. That pump never broke down, it was as reliable as the day was long.

At one time, there was a local farmer who insisted on referring to pump seven as pump six. He may have been one of the only people ever to have been barred from a petrol station. Some people had a knack for that sort of thing, seeing a way to rub another up the wrong way and never backing down. The proprietor of this petrol station was never going to back down. He’d been dead the best part of three decades now though, so no one would know what he would have made of the situation with the stranger, but the chances are he would have dealt with it head on as he had with everything in his life.

“We… we don’t have a pump thirteen,” said the man, doing his best to keep it together sufficiently to speak to the dark form before him. His mother had taught him his manners and right now he didn’t want to end his life having not done her proud. Old habits had a habit of dying hard.

The stranger grunted into the ensuing silence. The grunt was ominous and interlaced with a deeper growl. It made the man feel like he was on the menu for the stranger’s dinner. Ice crystals formed in his veins and try as he might, he could not suppress a shudder.

A dark hand reached out onto the counter and slid something towards the man. The sound of it was jarring, setting teeth on edge and sending pain through eyeballs. The man stared at the hand, hoping that what he was seeing was a leather clad fist, but knowing that it was leathery and unnatural skin. Skin like a shark’s only darker and more deadly. He watched as the awful hand slithered back into the darkness of the stranger. 

Take it.

The man was dumbfounded. The words not making sense to him initially. Then he saw it, as his mind reluctantly caught up.

A coin.

The surface of the coin shifted as he stared at it. This was a terrible hypnotic movement, as though the disc was alive. Upon the surface was the number 13. The number itself pulsed.

“I don’t want to…” the man squeaked.

And the man really didn’t want to, for within him was a bottomless well of fear and trembling cowardice. He’d used his fear to form anger, and he had used that anger, but when it all came down to it, he’d been running scared for as long as he could remember. Only running from fear wasn’t living. He’d opted to exist instead of living. He was too afraid to live and so he had chosen to take a dark path of miserable existence instead. He’d rejected all that was good in favour of a life of deceit and pain, taking petty revenge out on the world around him. Vengeful punishment for what he was and the bad choices he had made. 

Presenting a benign, and harmless exterior, charming those nearest to him in order to draw them in and then trapping and hurting them. This existence was his addiction and his supply was the weak and trusting people who crossed his path, those too blind to see him for what he was and the danger he presented to anything and anyone who crossed his path.

Every dark step he took made him worse and he hurt all the more. The fires of fear-fuelled rage burnt within him and his campaign against the world had become darker and more gruesome with each passing day. 

Now, in the shadow of the stranger, those fires were no longer his. The truth of it was that those fires had never been his. They were the fires of hell, and they had been burning his humanity away. Never completely. They would never burn him completely away. There needed to a piece of him to bear witness and to fully experience the torment and pain that he had earnt throughout his tawdry existence. He would be ever present to understand the truth of his sordid and pathetic existence.

He'd lied and lied, and he’d lied to himself most of all. He’d hidden what he was doing and what he was under layer upon layer of lies, denial, deceit and deception. He’d tried to convince himself that it wasn’t his fault. That it had never been his fault.

But then, who’s fault was it?

He blamed others. He blamed anything and everything. He blamed the world. But the truth of it was that he’d created that world in his own image. In the end, it was him. Always him. 

Only him.

“I didn’t do it…” he wheedled.

The stranger stood silently before him. The ultimate challenge. Lies would not work here. The man’s reign of lies was over and his times was done. Now began another era of terror.

“I thought that you…” he cocked his head to one side and tried for a smile, “you understand right? You get it? Isn’t this what you are all about? Isn’t this what you wanted from me?”

Still nothing from the stranger. The silence intensifying around him. The darkness deepening and threatening to extinguish the last of the pathetic light. The prospect of that racking the man with pain-filled fear.

“I’m sorry…” the meaningless and awful words of a bully who has heard those words but is as far from comprehending their meaning as it is possible to be. A desperate lie intended to curry favour and avoid the consequences of a litany of dark acts.

If the stranger could laugh, he would do so.

Take it.

The man finds it within him to show a modicum of uncertain defiance, he shakes his head unconvincingly and regrets it even as he does so.

It is yours.

The man feels the unseen eyes of the stranger upon him. Boring into him and piercing right through him. Somehow he knows that the stranger sees everything. That baleful glare strips him of all his defences and lays him bare. His discomfort doubles down. He wants it to stop. He has never wanted anyone to see him for what he is. There is perhaps only one way to make it stop.

His trembling hand hovers over the coin before he attends to the movement. He sees where his hand is and he wants to snatch it back, but too late. The coin slaps into his palm as though it were a magnet and his hand were made of metal. The coin connects with him and he feels the cold heat of it. It is burning him, but that is not the worst of it. The coin is a promise. The promise of burning beyond measure and beyond time.

Come.

The man would cry if he knew how. He has not cried in such a long time. He has seen crying. He has caused others to cry and it has fed his addiction. But he filled himself with fear, and the anger that came with that fear, and he’s forgotten all the other emotions. He’s isolated himself from the goodness of the world and forgotten how to feel. He’s lost touch with his humanity. He sacrificed himself to his cowardice and to his shame.

His legs propel him away from the safe haven of the counter. He is no longer in control. Not that he ever was. He’s been out of control for such a long time. The fantasy he’s lived has been about inflicting pain upon others. He saw that as control. Tricking them and lulling them into a false sense of safety and security. Then taking them apart so they didn’t work anymore.

He is relieved to see the stranger moving before him. His immediate fear is that of contact with that awful creature. He is all too aware of what he is capable of. Of what he has done. But he knows that the stranger knows no bounds and no limits. That the stranger is what happens when all bets are off. The stranger didn’t lose his humanity.

The stranger was never human in the first place.

They leave the booth and walk out onto the forecourt. 

The man wants to scream when he sees the disjointed and foreboding pump thirteen, it sticks out of the concrete of the forecourt like a snaggle tooth, a comic book monolith that has no place here. A discarded film prop that needs tidying away. 

Pump thirteen.

A joke to which the man is the punchline.

The man can no longer refute this. Pump thirteen stands before him and the coin burns a little more fiercely and with the pain of the burning comes further realisation. The man understands now and he doesn’t want to know anymore. He tries to close his eyes in a desperate attempt at making it stop, or at least depriving this creature of its fun. Even now, when his dread game is up, he judges others by his own standards. 

“Please God, no!” he cries.

No God for you.

And of course there isn’t. He rejected all that was good. The universe itself called out to him constantly and reminded him of what was good and what was right, as it does to us all. He ignored it and he kept going into the dark, pretending to himself that it didn’t matter, that none of it meant anything. This was all a game and the people he drew to him were his playthings.

Now he sees that he was wrong. 

It mattered.

Those people were worth something.

And now he has to pay the price.

A price beyond imagining.

He lets go. He’s trying to propel himself to the safe haven of insanity, but something holds him in place. He’s lost it before. He’s lost it many times. But now he can’t.

There is no escape.

He has let go of something though. He feels a shameful warm, wet sensation and somehow it manages to make him feel even worse. The sensation isn’t stopping though. It feels…

Wrong.

It all feels wrong. 

His legs are saturated and now his midriff is damp, as though…

“No… oh no… noohnoohno!” his hands cover his mouth and nose muffling his pitiful cries and helping hold at bay the overpowering fumes. They cannot prevent the stranger from continuing to douse him in the fuel from pump thirteen though. 

Nothing can.

The man’s eyes go wide in the moment the flame emerges from one of those awful hands. The stranger brings his hand to the man’s cheek in a terrible approximation of a caress and that is when the screaming begins.

*

Off the beaten track, there sits a seemingly decrepit fuel stop. It lays amidst a sleepy idyl that calms a soul and encourages a smile to come visit a while. There’s a quirk to the six fuel pumps, because although there are six, the number six does not appear upon them. The original proprietor of the fuel station was superstitious like that. Some might say foolish. Others would say careful.

He was right to be careful, for on that forecourt is another pump. It isn’t the missing pump six, it’s much, much worse than that. 

Pump Thirteen is a little piece of hell. Beside it stands a man aflame. In life, he was an appallingly bad man. An abomination upon this land. That man created hell on Earth and one day, the devil himself visited him. Not to congratulate him, but to punish him for his impudent insolence. 

The devil let him keep the hell he’d created and now he is trapped in an ever increasing cycle of torture and pain. He replays every bad deed he ever enacted in life. All the bad things he inflicted upon his thirteen victims. Only this time, he’s on the receiving end.

This terrible man burns, burning forever and a day. Reliving the pain he caused others, only this pain is his and his alone, amplified in a constantly growing arc that will last for an eternity and beyond.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, there is the hint of a whisp of a sound that could be a scream. This is always after the last shift, when the petrol station is deserted. There are rumours that the place is haunted, but no one has ever seen a ghost.

Pray that you never see pump thirteen, that’s a one way ticket and there’s no coming back from the place in which it resides.