Headlights from the road painted just enough of the inside of the truck for Tom to see the shoulder of a silhouette, a pair of white eyes.

He felt tears swell up in his own. He thought he was going to piss himself. He wanted badly to be home, on that couch, eating pizza, pounding beers. He wanted help. He wanted someone to pull him out of this situation.

But it was his own feet…his own legs…that took him to the edge of the truck bed. The rain didn’t “wake him up.” He wasn’t asleep. It crashed against him like it would a windowpane. A flowerpot. A stone.

Numb in this way, Tom leapt from the back and pulled the door down quickly.

The box was still strapped in, wasn’t it? It hadn’t been opened. Had it?

So why did it feel like the owner of that voice had not sneaked into the truck at all? That, rather, Tom had dollied him inside himself?

He hurried back to the cabin and got behind the wheel.

He merged.

He drove.

At eleven forty-five he reached the Goblin city limits. Both hands were trembling white piles of dust on the wheel.

Tom didn’t know who the two leviathan topiaries were that greeted him, but they were George Carroll, Goblin’s founding father, and Jonathan Trachtenbroit, the man who brought all the owls so many years ago and who was later strangled on Pride Hill, strangled by the ancestor of the very man who trimmed these bushes. Lit from below with giant floodlights, the pair were as intimidating a welcoming committee as Tom had ever seen.

Why did you drive? Why didn’t you run? Why did you listen to that voice?

As he entered the city, he couldn’t answer these questions other than to imagine himself abandoning the truck and being tracked forever by whatever was inside it.

“I got a better question than why,” Tom said, wide-eyed and shaking as the traffic increased, as the landmarks and cityscape came into view through the rain-obscured windshield of the truck. “What have I brought to Goblin tonight, Tommy my man? What?”

But whatever it was, its white eyes must still shine in the back and the echo of its timeless voice must still be back there, too.

Tom was too late. He knew that, whatever was back there, he was too late in keeping it from Goblin.

He wondered when it began, this unforeseen route, hidden in the bigger route of delivering a package. Was it when Jerry called him into his office? When he agreed to make the run?

Or was it long before then, sixteen years ago, when he applied for the driver’s job in the first place?