The False Caller


# The False Caller

## 1

Driving home from Erica's house, in my minivan, I was alone on the road.

I paid attention to my positioning between the lines, thinking about being with Erica. I sang along with the radio. Thought about making ramen when I got home.

Not meaning to, I turned onto a road I'd never been down. A right turn, down a road with no street sign. I thought at first I’d turn around, but then, _What if I don't? What if I keep going?_.

The yellow smudges on the road blurred together and my van hummed and chortled, bouncing me in my seat. I didn't care. _Just a little farther,_ I remember thinking. _Just a little longer._

I came around a curve doing seventy miles an hour and there was a man standing in my lane. Tall, abnormally so, a hundred yards ahead.

_I'm not going to be able to stop. He’s not going to move._

The man watched my headlights with dull disinterest.

Fear, panic. I only remember a rough jerk forward as the van skidded to a stop fifteen feet short of him, I skidded to a stop.

The man didn't flinch.

He stood twelve feet tall. Engulfed in my headlights, he was pale, dressed in a light grey suit. His hair was long and white, swept like corn silk around his head. His hands were at his sides, his feet bare.

He looked past my headlights, through the windshield, and made eye contact with me.

_Don't go any farther,_ his ashen expression said. _Leave._

I put the van in reverse and hit the gas, head whipping forward. I accelerated backwards, still watching the giant man in front of me.

He didn't blink.

I wrenched the wheel to the right, pumped the brakes again and shifted into drive, the quickest three-point turn I’d ever done. Back the way I came, a puppy with its tail between its legs.

---

My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I got in the shower, turned the knob to scalding, and sat on the tub floor with my head between my knees. The rhythm I don't usually notice, the slight pulses of stronger water through the shower-head, put me in a trance as they beat their notes into the back of my skull.

I was safe in the water.

When I stepped out a half hour later, dizzy from dehydration, muscles weak, my skin was red. I stumbled to my room and felt in the dark for my bed.

I slept without dreaming.

When I woke, I saw I hadn’t changed positions from when I’d fallen into bed, naked and steaming.

I lay blinking, going over what happened, trying to determine what was real. The time in the shower the night before was a second in my memory, a vague second, but the image of the man in the road burned like a brand.

_Why?_

He hadn't menaced me. Hadn't shouted or demanded anything. Simply stood there, big and barefoot, mouth shut, face set. Stoic.

_The feeling._ That internal magnetism, what made me turn in the first place.

The man didn't want me to end up where I was headed. A warning? But he wasn't waiting for me, he was just there. Standing in the road like a lunatic.

_Too bizarre to think about before breakfast._ I made myself eggs.

Half an hour ago the sun's light spilled through the sky a dirty crimson, then a brighter orange. Now it's risen above the trees.

I need answers. I have to go back.

## 2

I call Erica's phone. She doesn't answer. I leave a voicemail telling her I'm going for a drive and to call the police if I don't call again. Leaving the voicemail makes me realize trying to find the road again might kill me.

I start my van. Put it in reverse and let my foot off the brake. _Go back in the house,_ I think. _Forget about the man. You don't have to do this._

But I do have to.

I pull out of the driveway and now I'm on my way back there, to the road where anything seems possible--if only I could see its end.

No one is on the roads, and my headlights bounce along the yellow dashes between the lanes. The radio is off. My stomach is in a knot.

I find the road easily enough. A familiar pull catches me, telling me to turn. Stronger this time--I don't want to resist. I think of a junkie sticking a needle in his arm, knowing his actions will kill him eventually but not wanting anything else.

I flip my blinker on and make the turn, feeling suddenly as though everything has brightened. The knot of tension in my gut releases and a relaxing relief tingles through me. _All I have to do is reach the end of the road. There, all things will be answered._

The needle on my speedometer crawls higher, now forty, now forty-five. My heart beats hard. I crack a smile.

This is it. My destiny.

The needle shows sixty miles per hour. At the end of this road the meaning of all things, ripe for discovery.

Seventy-five miles an hour.

I'll be the one to do it. The lone explorer, with glory to gain and nothing to lose but the rest of his life.

Ninety miles an hour.

Trees and fields blur past. I don't care. Everything I ever wanted is waiting here for me.

I’m going one-twenty and I can't contain my joy. I make a whooping holler. It’s the fastest I've ever gone in the minivan.

I see a winking red light up ahead. The light takes shape inside a face, and I'm looking in the eyes of a man on the road. Here he comes, sliding up the road at an incredible rate.

_Too fast._

The brakes. I pump them with two feet. It barely seems to help, I only slow down a little bit. I press harder, against a pedal that pushes back.

The man doesn't move, doesn't do anything but stare at me.

_Turn the wheel,_ I think. _Go past him._ I wrench the steering wheel to the left, both feet still on the brake pedal.

CRACK!

I hit him. I have to have hit him.

I'm hanging upside down in my seat, blood dripping into my nasal cavity from my lip. Blades of sawgrass growing through the windshield. I'm slashed with glass, clutching the steering wheel. Still pumping the brake.

I've flipped the van. When I see my reflection in the rear-view mirror (now perfectly in front of me) I cackle. This isn't right.

Embedded in my forehead is a shard of automotive glass. In my skull so deep it moves with me when I turn my head. I touch it, try to wiggle it, but there's no give. It occurs to me wiggling it might kill me, so I stop.

No pain, how you'd think. Only an ache, radiating outward from the impact point of the shard of glass.

I'm upside down and the gravity reversal is filling my head with blood. I fumble with the seatbelt mechanism, I'm trying to push the button but it's not working. I'm pulling, shaking, pressing and grunting without success.

A hand appears from my left, reaching in through the shattered window. A hand, large and pale, with fingers that look more like branches than phalanges. It touches me on the arm, then moves to the seatbelt mechanism, pushing once on the release.

The seatbelt opens.

I drop to my stomach on the upholstered roof of my van. I'm looking out the window at him.

At the tall man in the gray suit.

His lips are drawn thin, pulled down in an expression more disappointment than menace.

He blinks, knocking me out of my observation. Then the branch-fingered hand, his hand, coming toward me. He touches me on the shoulder, then grabs the crunched door of my van and pulls it away easily.

I'm no longer trapped.

He holds his hand out to me. I put my much smaller hand inside. He pulls me out and sets me down. I lay, panting, bleeding, with a shard of glass in my skull, on the grassy edge of a ditch.

"You shouldn't have come."

## 3

Light from somewhere seems to break through his skin, casting a creamy glow making his nature more obvious. He has skin like birch bark. It peels in places.

"What are you?"

The man looks away. The glow from his skin deepens, making it harder to see.

"Many. Tonight a guardian, a keeper. You were brought by the road.

"This road is less a tangible place than a being. Like an ant lion luring prey into it's pit, but a slightly different shape. A interdimensional being with a mouth in your dimension. The road is falling sand, and you try to outrun it. I intervene when you can't, if I'm able."

He motions behind, further down the road. Where I'd been headed before I swerved to avoid him.

There are cars there. Lots of them. A few semi trucks. Piled up, blown to bits from impact at high speed.

I stand up. His hand moves to my face and when he touches me my mind is deafened by the brightness.

> Calm. Consider the lifecycle of the road being. How it lives between the dimensions, reaching into some at different scales, connecting them. How it eats beings from the physical dimensions it attaches to. This person is transported to one of their worst possible alternate selves: a dead one, or one obsessed with something that'll cause death. Understand: choices are how you move between dimensions. Your choices sidestep you into other dimensions. Some of those dimensions have different rules. Histories. Your choices change things. Choose a different dimension. Don't let a interdimensional worm make your choice.

His hand leaves my face. The vision is gone. He holds a shard of glass from my windshield, the one from my forehead. He closes his palm around it.

"This would have been you in the road."

He opens his hand to reveal a pile of white dust. I feel my forehead, touching for the place the shard had been. The cut I'm looking for isn't there.

"This road is a false caller, and would devour many who have yet to make their mark on the world."

"A false caller? What does that mean?"

"It means you would never have driven down this road on your own. Yet, here you are. You've been back twice."

"I have, huh. Shows what I know."

"A false caller is an interdimensional organism whose appendages evolved in this form to appear familiar. Once a path in the wood, then a dirt road, now the asphalt you stand on. The only way to defeat it is to make it leave or ignore the urges and go back out. Or kill it."

He motioned to the graveyard of cars that had mounted in the time the road had been in this dimension. Eight, nine? In less than a day. There were police cars. An ambulance.

"These are people I couldn't save."

I look again at the cars. One of them...is that Erica's dad's? Or someone else with the same green station wagon, the same "Proud Dad of Honor Student" bumper sticker? _This is bad._

"I should go back," I say.

The man bows and brushes past me. He lays his hands on the crumpled bulk of my van. Reaching under the front hood for a handhold, he drags the three-ton vehicle out of the ditch and back onto the road, then turns it upright.

"You can drive it," he says to me.

"Really?"

He nods. I get in. My cell phone is lodged in the center console, still intact. Several missed calls from Erica.

"I'd hurry," the man says. "I'll have to ward off the next driver soon. You may have to dodge them driving back out."

"Yeah. I'll hurry."

Before I put the key in the ignition I listened to the voicemails Erica left me.

> "My dad didn't come home last night and then you left me this strange message."

> "Are you home? I want to come over there, I'm scared. I couldn't sleep."

> "I'm coming, I know I don't know how to drive but I have the keys and I know how to get there."

I call her back, hoping she'll pick up the phone, so I can tell her to go back. She doesn't answer. I try twice.

I can't drive back to my house in this crumpled minivan and pretend like nothing happened. Not with Erica on her way.

"Hey," I say to the man with the birch skin and branch fingers, "You said there was a way to kill it? Kill the false caller?"

The man smiles.

"How would you imagine killing an interdimensional being?"

"I don't know."

"The road is like one of the false caller's fingers. It has fingers in many realities simultaneously, including this one. Once in a while it chooses new realities for its fingers to touch. When it does, the false caller climbs across the dimensions, from the outside. The inside outside."

I don't understand any of this. I'm running out of time.

"My girlfriend is on her way here, she doesn't know how to drive, she could be coming down the road right now, how do we kill it?"

The man smiles wider.

"You won't be able to kill it. You have to convince it to leave. So, convince me."

## 4

My head spins.

"Wait, you? You're saying you're the road? You're the false caller?"

He nods.

"The mindful part. Its conscience. I like to give people a chance."

"You said the road was like a finger. Do each of your fingers have a conscience?"

"Many, not all. Some worlds I've found...unpersuasive."

I'm vibrating with adrenaline. I have to save Erica and the rest of the people in town from this psychic pitcher plant, but I don't know how. What's the right thing to do? What if it's lying to me? Playing with me?

"Could you give me an example of something unpersuasive?" I ask.

The false caller's conscience considers.

"One man, in one reality, had a gun in his car. He pointed it at me. I allowed him to shoot me with it. It appeared to him I was killed, defeated. But I remained, feasting on his city."

"So, if I tried to do something to get you to leave by force, you'd come back. If I chopped off this finger, you'd replace it with another one, to punish everyone else for what I did."

The false caller raises an eyebrow.

"You are considering this?"

"No, I'm just thinking."

"Think. Cars are turning down this road now, with more following.”

I imagine Erica behind the wheel of her mom's car, hunched forward squinting through the windshield. Putting her foot heavier on the gas, going faster and faster.

“The people that crash here. You eat them?”

“Not me,” he says, pointing a finger at himself. "But me," he says, pointing behind him, down the road.

"My girlfriend. You've already eaten her father. Last night. Do you have any children? Or parents?"

"I have a mother. I am a mother. But if you're asking whether this matters to me, I'm afraid it doesn't. Every living thing strives to reproduce, and every living thing grew from another."

"Please don't kill her," I say, thinking of Erica.

"You seem to care more about this one person than all the others. Erica, is it?"

I haven't said her name. Any thought I have to trick it, to buy more time, I abandon. If it can read my thoughts as well as influence them, what options are left?

"I do care about her more. She's my...she's supposed to be my future."

"What choices have you made to ensure she's your future?"

I look down.

"Not enough. I haven't told her I love her yet, but I really do. I hope she feels the same way."

The man doesn’t say anything.

“If you can read my mind, you must be able to read the minds of the people you kill, before you eat them?”

“Usually they’re thinking about going faster.”

“You make them think that.”

“They could think otherwise if they wished.”

“You expect your victims to actively fight the delusion?”

“Yes, like in a dream, the choice to become lucid. Many have taught themselves to do it. I only cull the ones who can't.”

“What was Erica’s dad thinking about before you killed him? What was he thinking about before going faster, you have to know that, right?"

The man-looking thing says nothing.

"Can you imagine being one of us, from where you look? Can you imagine not manipulating for fun helpless beings at a smaller scale?"

"Manipulate? I helped you."

"You lured me. Them. You act like some pure moral guide but you're manipulating the whole thing. This part of you might look somewhat human but you don't know what that is. You know what I think? This is just you trying to make yourself feel better about what you know you are."

"I can see you thinking this."

I'm running out of time and not getting anywhere. I feel so small in comparison to the mental image of the false caller, this organism with tentacles feeding from multiple slices of different physical realities. This mind with free will exposing itself to me.

I think to it.

_Do you have friends? Maybe you have some, others like you who can laugh and joke with you._

"Some, yes."

_Humans make great friends, have you ever tried?_

"Why? Each of you have convinced yourself you're more than a mouth and eyes on one end of a tube."

"Is that all we are?"

"Yes."

_Can you think back into my head?_

No answer.

The man in front of me looked indifferent.

_Do tubes with mouths and eyes normally communicate with thoughts?_

The man shape before me shook its head.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re trying to make me think you’re like me, but you’re not. You’re insignificant. Your family is insignificant. Your species. Your world.”

_And yet you’re here, feeding on us. Like a parasite._

"Does prey consider a predator its parasite?"

_All I know is, you’re only concerned with yourself. You’re convinced I’m inferior. You’re convinced there’s no value in anything I might do in the rest of my life._

"Your life is very short. It can end now, or in fifty years. In either case, a blink."


Adam Holwerda, Story Peddler

Adam Holwerda,
Story Peddler