I was sitting on the roof of my faded chipping red sedan as Charley's massive arms wrenched. The sky was getting blue now, and the pine needles were dripping tiny droplets of dew onto my upturned face as though it were raining again.
"Charley," I said. I looked at him. I tried to speak plainly, but I didn't know how. Emotion filled me, and I said, "thank you."
Charley, stolid and dependable, didn't speak.
That night, as I lay sleeping in the dewy grass beside the car, while Charley sprawled out in the front, I found myself standing in a thick fog in the night, on an empty highway. To either side, there was endless dry earth, and the single-lane highway was flat and smoothly paved, as though paved once and never used again. Far away at the end of the highway, there was a solitary black cuboid monolith, towering over the flat earth and piercing the sky.
The red sedan, oddly shimmering and gently sparkling in the moonlit foggy atmosphere behind me, was sitting in the middle of the road, motionless. I turned away, toward the monolith, and began walking.
The sky was grey, and there was no sound. I heard my feet touch the blacktop lightly, and watched as the monolith loomed darkly. As my feet padded on, in the airless, motionless nothing-scape, my eyes blinked.
And there, high above, blinked back.
My feet quickened. What had blinked? I looked up, and saw no noun. Nothing at all.
With a start I saw that Charley wasn't there. I stopped, looked around, screamed "Charley!" But there came no reply from the void. I felt my sinuses grow heavy…
I slowly woke to the sound of the engine of the car. The void slowly left my consciousness, as large, heavy fingers drummed against the fraying and faded steering wheel, and my eyes gradually caught onto the sun, striking my face.
I sat up. I tried moving my fingers. My joints cracked from the disuse. I closed my eyes and saw a color that didn't exist. Phosphene. I looked into the face of the driver, and saw nothingness. I looked to my wrist. The dial was eight-fold.
I sat up. The hands that had held me down to the backseat scraped my arms and still gripped my waist painfully. It was a dream. Just a dream. I tried to imagine Charley.
The light from outside the car, my car, was so bright that I couldn't see forms outside. The emptiness of the driver was not Charley. Nor were the hands, the dozens and dozens of hands that reached clammily for my body to pull downwards. I tried to raise my arms but the hands in the roof of the car fumbled and snatched hastily and then gripped. The glass of the window started reaching for my head.
I thought the name. I tried forming the name with my mouth, but a sweaty palm was suddenly blocking airflow. I gasped, as a finger hooked my nose as the seat behind me slowly caved backward. My hair and face were being pulled back by tens of overlapping palms and a thumb and forefinger was pulling my ear. Now hands were pushing me from the front…
A new hand, startlingly different and contrasting, was suddenly underneath me. I felt the seat lose its suction as an arm went behind me, firmly between me and the mountains of other hands. The car was suddenly spinning, as vertigo made me rethink everything… The large, warm arms lifted me out of the car…
My eyes opened; and there was Charley, carrying me to the faded, chipping red sedan.