00 - Prologue: Your Greatest Fear

Little Miles Holoway pressed his cheek against the cold glass and watched fingers of breath spread across the backseat window. Beyond the foggy pane, the forest outside was a blur. Heater vents nestled that cozy feeling into his bones in that way only a long winter car ride can. The hum of the engine lulled between each curve, rocking him until he drifted steadily into that place between consciousness and sleep.

For Miles, this was the most comfortable place in the world. A place entirely his own. A place where he was free to explore the infinite edges of his imagination. To go along for a ride directed by his subconscious.

A gap in the trees opened a view to a small clearing in the forest. A lone tree stood at the center, its trunk darkened, swelled with the streaming sleet. A moment later and the tree was replaced again with a blur of white, black and green, but Miles’s mind was still with the lone tree. His spirit had already stepped out of the car and approached it. He smelled the musty odor of the bark. His senses filled with the sound of a million blades of grass catching the snow and rain. He looked up and followed a single melted drop as it raced down the maze of bark. He raced with it and his vision filled with the undulating complexity of the tree’s surface. Caves and crevices. Deep chasms of unexplored wilderness. A microcosm of the world above. As he wondered what creatures might dwell in these places, a glow of eyes sprouted from within their depths. Darkness hid their full features, but what little light penetrated their cave-like dwellings gave him the impression that their skin was alive. That it crawled with life. Swarming with millions of inky carapaces like the backs of beetles mixed with the rainbow hues of an oil slicked puddle.

The imagery scared him back from the edge of sleep. The monsters reminded him of the cards traded at lunchtime by the boys at his school. Passed from hand to hand in the nook where the bathrooms met the janitor’s supply room door under a broken lamp long ago shattered by a stray football. A huddled clump of sixth-grade boys exchanging images of viscous creatures and magic wielders on horseback, each holofoiled treasure protected by hard plastic sleeves. Between trades, they talked about R-rated movies they’d managed to sneak a watch of while their parents were out. One boy swore he’d seen a nipple.

Miles never tried to join them. He didn’t have any cards. Didn’t want them. Didn’t care about monsters or pretending a swing was the cockpit of an X-Wing fighter soaring through trenches on the Death Star. He was drawn to books about suspension bridges and cutaway diagrams of the Titanic. But while his eyes drifted over the pages during lunchtime, he listened to them talk.

“Man, imagine if this one crawled through your bedroom window in the middle of the night,” one boy had said, holding up a shimmering beast with more teeth than face.

“I ain’t ‘fraid of that. I’d take my baseball bat upside its head!” A boy opposite the first spat back.

“Oh yeah, then what are you afraid of? What’s your greatest fear?”

Miles had heard this from just around the corner where he sat cross-legged against a concrete wall, a turkey sandwich in one hand, a Capri-Sun in the other, and a book on ocean pipelines, dissected and labeled into component parts spread across his lap. That moment was the first time he’d asked himself the question. In it, he found something strange. It wasn’t a question with a quick answer, like “Do you like KitKat or Snickers?” or “Why do you like books so much?” No, this was something entirely different. He wasn’t sure he knew the answer. Wasn’t sure there was an answer.

He listened to the response of each boy as they went around the circle. He was surprised at the change in their tone. They dropped their fake macho attitude and spoke in a sudden breath of honesty. They revealed intimate feelings, giving a bit of themselves away in the process. By doing so, it seemed to bring them all closer together. One side in the giving, the other in the receiving, and all of them reveling at their newly discovered loot chest of stories.

“I don’t like spiders,” one boy said. “I had a dream about them coming up from the carpet one time. They just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then there was a wave of these dark creepy crawly things that climbed to the top of my room and then… ughk! I hate spiders.”

Miles knew there were questions he wasn’t supposed to ask, like the ages of older women or why a man jumped from the neighbor’s window clutching his pants. He found it strange that he couldn’t ask these things, yet it seemed acceptable to request someone reveal their deepest, most hidden emotions. It seemed to him that by giving this piece away, he could never get it back; his secrets revealed forever to the universe. He wondered what the universe would do with this information. If he ever told anyone, he knew they would have to be very special. Someone he trusted with his life.

Though timid at first, he soon found that most people didn’t mind his asking. He asked his teachers, other kids, and even the principal when he was sent to detention after discovering the joy of firing spit-wads through straws like an Amazonian hunter with a blow-dart. He hadn’t hit anyone on purpose. It was the way the spit sealed the paper against the tube and created an air-tight valve that interested him.

Kids gave simple answers, like spiders or evil dogs that resembled the pit-bull living next door. “Drowning,” said a younger kid who was only allowed to hang with the older boys because his parents gave him all the best cards as an apology for their divorce. “I almost drowned in our pool. That was really scary.”

Kids said things they had experience with. Adults seemed to have more abstract ideas, like “Being alone in the middle of the ocean.” Miles wondered why they added the word ‘alone.’ As if being with someone in that situation would make it any better. He thought it actually might make it worse. It made him wonder if their real fear had nothing to do with water at all.

“Being trapped in this place forever…” his principle had said under his breath before covering it up with, “Kidding, of course. Heights. I don’t like high places.”

Miles’s eyes regained focus. A dense cloud of fog had descended upon the forest in his absence. His father was keeping rhythm on the gear shift while “The Thunder Rolls” played over the radio. For some reason, it reminded him of his school principal, and of his favorite question.

“Dad, what’s your greatest fear?”

His father Martin stared ahead in deep consideration, his hands now locked at ten and two. Miles wondered if he had heard the question at all, and then…

“Well, honey, what is it?” His mother’s voice was laced with a hint of concern, perhaps due to her husband’s thousand-yard stare while behind the wheel, but her inflection was lined with genuine curiosity. She fixed her eyes on him before upturning a nearly empty bag of Ultra-Cheesy Poofs into her mouth.

Martin lined up Miles in the rearview mirror till their gazes met. A thin layer of wet covered the surface of his pale blue eyes. Martin turned the radio down and let out a long breath he seemed to be holding in.

“The more life I live, the more I come to realize that the single most frightening thing in the universe—is the passing of time.”

A cloud of cheesy dust erupted from his mother’s mouth along with a silence-shattering cackle. “There’s the philosophy major I met in college!” she roared, before loosening her seatbelt to loot the floorboards for a wet nap. “All those years behind a metal lathe, I thought I’d lost him for good.”

“I have my moments,” his father said with a dimpled smile.

“Well, my greatest fear is that I’d lose either one of you!” she said, flipping down the visor mirror to wipe her mouth.

Miles giggled at this perfect moment. At the simplicity of it all. He flopped back against the seat and popped a handful of chocolate malt balls onto his tongue. He swirled them, melting the chocolate shell, then the malt into a jagged, then soft, then jagged surface until his mouth was filled with a slurry sea of sweetness. He stared back out the side window and thought about his father’s answer.

In the dense fog, the hazard lights weren’t visible until it was too late. He never saw the lights of the cars crumpled together on the bridge that rapidly filled the eyes of his father. He never heard the brakes seize as their car skated over black ice towards the wreck. All he would ever remember from what happened was the sudden feeling of a tornado churning in his belly.