“Via De La Valle”

Tessa ground her teeth, her cheeks still stovetop hot from her argument with the boy sulking in the passenger’s seat beside her.

I’m not adventurous enough.

She repeated his words to herself.

I’m not spontaneous.

Hadn’t they just spent a weekend hiking around Southern California’s cliffs? All this steam from him just because she wanted to get back the day before work rather than spend
another day and have to rush back the night before. All because she needed a perfectly necessary cool-down day.
Interstate 5 flattened out in front of Tessa as she accelerated. Nothing illuminated the freeway but dim running lights and a deep indigo tucked away behind the mountains flanking
San Diego.

She glanced down at her Highlander’s built-in GPS system and studied the map ahead of her. Off to the west, a blank, black space tore a straight line through the digital map, cutting
off little side roads, cutting through the names of closed stores and sleepy neighborhoods. Just a glitch. She recalled that there was a military fort just off the coast; it had been a decade since
she last visited. It would have been consumed by the glitch if she had correctly deduced theirlocation.

The black space gnawed at her. Just another annoyance on top of everything else. Her fingers tapped all over her steering wheel in an involuntary flurry and her leg bounced up against
the center console between them. I am me, I’m okay. Tessa grounded herself.

Finally, he turned to her.

“Can you stop with all the noise?” he groaned.

She snarled at him. “You know I don’t like being cramped in these tight little spaces, especially when you’re being such a big baby about everything!”

He scoffed and turned away.

Maybe that was the last straw. Tessa twisted the wheel and pulled across the road, tearing through lanes.

“What are you doing?” the boy cried.

“Oh, you suddenly don’t like adventures?” she snapped back.

“Yeah, I wanted to go on another hike, not die in a crash.”

“Come on, dear; your boring girlfriend is taking you on an adventure!”

She ripped down the curve off a ramp exit named “Via De La Valle” and pealed onto the main street, heading towards the glitch in her map. The void looked nice this time of year.

“Tessa, you’re taking my words out of context!” he roared. “I hate when you get pissy like this! The fact is. . .”

She tuned him out.

Greenish-white streetlights dimly illuminated the little town. Not a car on the road other than the few parked here and there, against the sidewalk. A few closed businesses appeared around and about, interspersed with small beach houses. No one was home, not in the whole town, apparently.

She furrowed her brow at the road ahead. No lights after a point, just darkness. Right about where the glitch appeared on her GPS. The boy pontificated relentlessly. Who knew what he was saying now; Tessa had found a more curious fixation and as her eyes darted in the blackness, his voice became a low and distant drone, like tire noise on a faraway freeway.

A hand shoved Tessa. She whipped her head around and snarled at the boy.

“Were you even listening to me?” he barked.

“No!” she yelled back. “Why should I have to listen to the same stupid spiel over and over again? To stroke your ego?”

Blackness overwhelmed them.

She gasped and slammed on the brakes. They lurched forward in tandem.

“What? What happened?” the boy demanded.

Tessa peered around her through the windows. Her headlights revealed nothing but a small crown of light that peeked out over the hood.

She spun around to look back and her heart dropped.

The little sleepy beach town was gone.

Tessa cursed as sweat beaded out of the pores in her hands. She pushed the shifter into reverse and plowed her foot down on the gas pedal, though no matter how far she seemed to
travel, nothing appeared through her rear window but that all-consuming, ubiquitous night.

She slammed on the brake pedal again.

Tessa gasped for air, her flesh tingling, icy cold and stiff.

“Baby! Look!” the boy pointed just ahead of them. Tessa turned to see, in the distance, a flickering dot of light just off to their left.

“Let’s get out of here. This place is creepy.” The boy shook her shoulder and she swatted him away. “Come on, we just got turned around. We can talk more about us once we get
out of here.”

The dot of light burned in her periphery.

“I don’t want to talk more about us,” she trembled in outrage. “I want to go home. And to be honest, I don’t ever want to see you again.”
To punctuate her statement, she wiped her freshly leaking eyes, put the car in drive, and stomped the pedal. They sat in silence for a moment. For once in the last seven years, she felt she
could breathe without gasping, like she could wiggle her fingers and stretch her limbs with weightless ease. Even in the crushing darkness. Tessa spun the wheel towards the dot of light.
In mere moments, it enveloped them, swallowed the darkness, extinguished it. It burned Tessa’s eyes.

What now filled her field of view made even less sense than the darkness. An endless room of spiraling crystal mirrors, like a kaleidoscope, but with no pattern, no
order to the reflections. She smashed the pedal. The images twirled, incoherent and inconceivable, blurring. Over the hum of her engine, something else roared, an ocean wave crashing against the
shore, but there was something uncanny about the sound: it filled their cabin, which split away into reiterations like shattering glass. The sound fissured into harmonies, not one sound, but
thousands all at once. It roared again, forming a word.

Help.

The throng of voices bellowed, sonic ebbs and flows crashed against her ear drums. She  glanced out, unable to discern where was out and where she was in relation to it. The thousands
of faces broke into millions of doppelgangers, billions, trillions of visions of herself.

Help, The mob cried again.

“Let me out of here!” Tessa cried, but to her horror, the other voices entwined with her own, calling out her exact demand in chorus.

She impulsively reached for the boy, but he was everywhere, broken into shards. He surrounded her, beside her own image, which blinked frantically back at her, dumbstruck with
shock and terror. She glanced down at her hands. Her hands were everywhere.

Before she could release another cry of desperation, her mind split.

Every thought and memory burst apart all around her, only to rush back into its singularity again. Consciousness heaved like a lung, like a heartbeat.

Herself.

Not herself.

Herself.

Someone else.

Herself.

Everyone else.

Herself and everyone else.

Everyone.

Slater Garcia has a short horror-comedy story published with Samfiftyfour and a ghost thriller novel published with Mischievous Muse Press. He takes great delight in his peculiar life with his wife, his dog, and his small armada of weird vehicles that he hopes to get running properly someday.