Route 9, Three Times

The watcher sat in the parking lot and tried to construct an explanation. The simplest one — that she had simply looped back for some ordinary reason, forgotten something, changed her mind — had a seam in it that didn’t hold. There was something in the quality of her stillness at that map rack. Not the stillness of someone browsing. Not the stillness of someone thinking. It was the stillness of someone who was trying very hard not to show that they were frightened.
She left again heading north on Route 9.
This time, the watcher followed more closely.
The road did what it always does — climbed, curved, narrowed, the trees asserting themselves on either side with the kind of density that makes you feel the forest is a presence rather than a backdrop. Rosamund drove the same pace. Same lane position. The cracked taillight pulsed with each brake tap on the curves, an irregular rhythm like a heartbeat that can’t quite settle. At a certain point — the watcher could not say exactly where, because the landmarks on Route 9 at night are difficult to distinguish from one another — she stopped again. Same stretch of road. Same duration. Two minutes, maybe slightly more.
She turned around.
The watcher felt something shift in the chest. Not fear, exactly. Something more precise than fear. The recognition that the rules of this situation were not the rules that should apply.
They passed the hollow with the rusted swing set. They passed the collapsed barn. They came back down out of the ridgeline and the town appeared below, the Texaco sign burning white against the dark. The watcher slowed without quite deciding to slow. And there was the silver Subaru at the pump. Rosamund filling the tank. Not looking up.
The watcher pulled into the far end of the lot and sat with the engine running and tried to think clearly about what was possible. The simplest explanation was gone now — she had done this twice, identical in every observable detail, including the four minutes at the map rack, which the watcher timed on a phone. The next layer of explanations involved her: a woman in a fugue state, a woman replaying a compulsion, a woman so disoriented by grief or medication or something else entirely that she was cycling through the same actions without awareness of it. These explanations were uncomfortable but not impossible. What made them harder to hold was the look on her face when she came out of the gas station the second time — because the watcher was close enough now, parked near the entrance, to see her face clearly as she walked to the car, and what was on it was not the blank absence of a fugue. It was recognition. She knew she had done this before. And she was afraid of what that meant.
She left heading north on Route 9 a third time.
The watcher did not follow immediately. Sat in the Texaco lot for perhaps five minutes, watching the road where her taillight had disappeared into the dark, and thought about the nature of loops — how they appear in dreams, how they appear in trauma, how they appear in certain kinds of stories that people tell around fires when they want to describe something that cannot be described in daylight. Then the watcher pulled out and drove north after her, not because there was a plan, but because the alternative was sitting in that parking lot alone with the fluorescent light and the question that had no answer.
Route 9 was empty. No taillight ahead. The watcher drove the full length of it — up through the ridgeline, past the swing set and the barn, past the hollows and the bare-branched trees — and there was nothing. No car pulled off. No one standing at the roadside. No sign that Rosamund Ashcombe or her silver Subaru had come this way at all, which was not possible on a road with no exits for the first seven miles heading north, but which was, nonetheless, what the watcher found.

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About the Author

Marcus Rennford — a former investigator who reads a crime scene the way most people read a room. Where something for you is trash or dirt, for him is new clue.

— Marcus Rennford

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August 24, 2026

10min-stories