(D4)[S] Dark Drive II: Solo Mission

[David Young Henning]

Time: Day 4, Late Afternoon
Weather: Cloudy, verging on rain
Warnings: A disturbing phone call.
Characters: David Young Henning [CLOSED]

Henning was in his car when his cell phone rang.

He'd spent the whole morning cleaning. He didn't know what else to do. He woke up roughly four hours later than he had in years- it had been almost 10:15 AM- with only a blurry, half-digested series of impressions of where he was and what had brought him there. Had he been drugged? What... And then his eyes had adjusted to the sunlight pouring through the crack in the curtains, and he knew he was in her hotel room. In bed, fully clothed. With a note on the pillow next to his head that was signed "<3 Charlotte".

A good ten minutes had passed with him sitting on the side of the bed with the note in his hand, as if trying to absorb some clue to her whereabouts through osmosis. She had written something to the effect of "Sorry I left, you were sleeping so soundly I didn't want to wake you, promise I won't be gone long..." followed by some quip about there being no need to send out a search party. He could almost hear her voice in his head as he re-read it again, that lop-sided smile of hers emerging clear and vivid out of his morning haze.

He went to put the note in his pocket and felt another piece of paper in there... and something else. A clothespin from the darkroom, and the supernatural photo that had somehow been taken of Charlotte in the lumber mill. He clipped the photo and the note together with the clothespin and stuffed them inside his wallet. The clothespin made an awkward bulge in the leather that made him laugh, out loud, for no reason. Then he went downstairs to ask Polly about cleaning supplies.

[David Young Henning]

It only took about half an hour to make Charlotte's room look spotless, so Henning wandered up to his own quarters and repeated the same procedure (this took considerably less time). By then it was only about 12. He showered and tried to make it last as long as possible... He didn't know why he was stalling... He was usually more productive, more efficient with his time. But Charlotte wasn't here, and he as much as he wanted to know where she was, a nobler part of him was attempting to quell his instinct to track her down through any means necessary. She obviously didn't want to be followed, and she said she'd be back soon... How soon was soon? A few minutes? A couple of hours? Henning even resisted the urge to call her... What was he, a teenager? His own behavior depressed him.

He ate lunch at the A&G Diner in the vague hopes of seeing the two oddballs at lunch again (the wheelchair-bound man in the gas mask and the rhymer in white), but no luck. That word, PENANCE, that Charlotte had mentioned in her sparse account of last evening was still bothering him, but it too refused to resurface. Perhaps he didn't really want it to.

After lunch he drove aimlessly through town, relishing in some strange way the cushiony sac of air where his mind's activities usually took place. He felt enjoyably empty, all by himself, just wheeling around without purpose or care... He was tangentially aware that he had planned to visit the graveyard at some point, being that it was the only location Charlotte had mentioned by name that might hold a clue to this Smoking Man business... But he was suddenly very tired of trying to Figure Things Out. And from the casual tone of the note, hopefully Charlotte was as well...

[David Young Henning]

Her call finally came at around 3:30, as Henning was coasting down January Way. He snatched up the phone, which had been lying on the passenger seat, and flipped it open with barely contained eagerness to hear her voice... It was indeed Charlotte's voice he was hearing, at first... But the warmth of his expectations quickly hardened into a dark, icy lump in his chest as he continued to listen. He had not even had time to say hello.

Quite without realizing that he'd done so, Henning pulled over to the side of the road. Anyone passing by who happened to glance over at the stalled Crown Vic would have seen, through the driver's side window, a man with a cell phone held to his ear and an expression as if he was hearing his own death sentence being pronounced on the other end of the line. At some point during this apparently one-sided conversation, the hand not holding the phone slowly rose to cover his mouth... His eyes above it were very wide... A few moments later and the hand had become a fist, dropped abruptly to his leg as he sat trembling behind the wheel. Now the eyes were closed, and tears were perceptibly streaming from them. At that point, no sensible driver would have stopped to make inquiries, and none of them did. The black car sat by the side of the road with its lone occupant, and the clouds crept slowly across the face of the sun.

If one were able to listen in on just a fraction of the mysterious exchange which was holding the black car's driver so enraptured, they might have caught this catalyst for the change in demeanor that was about to transpire. A female voice, raised in anger, and a faint crackling sound in the background as if someone was continuously clenching in their fist a handful of candy wrappers:

[You played with my fucking mind. Terrified me to the point that I fled, directly towards the Shadows that you supposedly want to prevent me from becoming one of. And now you drove me up the Clock Tower with flames and smoke. No. Help. At ALL.]

The driver's eyes flew open, wide and staring. The silent air was wrenched with the sound of tires screeching against asphalt, and the black car shot forward like a bullet from a gun. It soon disappeared down a seldom-traveled road where it was quickly swallowed from sight by trees. Where it was headed, and its purpose for going there, remained obscure to those few that had witnessed this abrupt exit, but it wouldn't be a mystery for much longer. Soon, all of Greenvale would see the black smoke rising above the tree line as if a beast were emerging from the pits of Hell, its sulfuric heartbeat counting the seconds like the tick-tocking of some infernal mechanism.