Cutler 04 - Midnight Whispers

Lynchburg passed far more quickly than it otherwise would have. He kept Jefferson busy counting cars or telephone poles. We all took a color and then accumulated points every time our color appeared. The rain that had followed us into New York had gone out to sea and for most of our journey, we had blue skies and soft, cotton-candy clouds. However, even though we left early in the morning, the stops and delays meant we wouldn't arrive in Lynchburg until early in the evening. We did with as little as we could for lunch in order to save as much of our remaining money as possible. Gavin claimed he wasn't very hungry and ate only a candy bar, but by the time we arrived in Lynchburg, we had only eighteen dollars and thirty cents left.
    Outside of the bus station, we found two taxicab drivers leaning against their cars and talking. One of them was a tall, thin man with a narrow face and sharp nose; the other was shorter, softer and friendlier.
    "Upland Station?" the tall driver said. "That's nearly fifty miles. Cost you fifty dollars," he declared.
    "Fifty? We don't have that much," I said sorrowfully.
    "How much do you have?" he asked.
    "Just eighteen," Gavin said.
    "Eighteen! Go on, you ain't gonna get no cab to Upland Station for that money." Disappointment almost put tears in my eyes. What would we do now?
    "Hold on," the other driver said when we started away sadly. "I live twenty-five miles in that direction and it's about time I started for home. I'll take you the rest of the way to Upland Station for eighteen."
    "Desperate Joe will do anything for a buck," the tall driver said sourly.
    "Thank you, sir," I said. We all got into the back of his cab. It was an old car with torn seats and dirty windows, but it was a ride.
    "Who you kids know in Upland Station? The place is practically a ghost town," the driver asked.
    "Charlotte Booth. She's my aunt. She lives in an old plantation called The Meadows."
    "The Meadows? Yeah, I know what that is, but that ain't much of a place anymore. I can't take you up that private road either. It would kill my tires and shocks. You'll have to walk from the highway," he said. He went on to talk about the way the small towns had been dying off; the economy in the changing South and why things weren't what they were when he was a young man growing up around Lynchburg.
    Although there wasn't a moon, the sky was bright enough with stars for us to see some of the countryside as we rode on, but a little over a half-hour after we left the bus station, dark clouds began to roll in, moving like some curtain shutting away the heavens from us. The farmhouses and tiny villages along the way became few and far between. I felt as if we were leaving the real world and entering a world of dreams as the darkness deepened and spread itself over the road before us. The deserted houses and barns retreated into the pool of blackness and only occasionally could be seen silhouetted against a small group of trees or a lonely, overgrown field, and those houses that had people still living-in them looked lost and small. I imagined children no older or bigger than Jefferson too frightened to look out at the shadows that seemed to slide across the ground whenever the wind blew over the roof and through each nook and cranny.
    Jefferson curled up closer to me. Not a car passed us going the other way. it was as if we were riding to the edge of the world and could easily fall off. The cab driver's radio cracked with static. He tapped it a few times and complained, but after a while he gave up and we rode in relative silence until finally a road sign announced Upland Station.
    "This is it," our driver announced. "Upland Station. Don't blink or you'll miss it," he said and laughed. I hadn't remembered how small it was. Now, with the general store, the post office and the small restaurant closed, it did look like a ghost town. Our driver took us a little farther and stopped at the entrance to the long driveway of The Meadows. There were two stone pillars each crowned with a ball of granite, but the brush and undergrowth had been permitted to grow up alongside the pillars, making it seem as if no one had passed in or out for years and years.
    "As far as I can go," the taxi driver said. "The old Meadows plantation is up this driveway about a half a mile."
    "Thank you," Gavin said, handing him the rest of our money.
    We stepped out and he drove off. Because of an overcast sky, he left us in pitch darkness. Night closed in