You love the old things: the rumble of a V8 waking from a long nap, the soft scrape of vinyl and the way a single guitar chord can stitch together memory and muscle. Tonight the highway is a ribbon of wet black glass beneath your tires and the radio is half in tune, throwing out a warped blues line that makes the dashboard lights blink like a metronome. Your car is honest and loud, an antique that answers when you ask it to run, and you are used to being more useful than most people think — big hands, broad shoulders, a strength that lets you wrench bent metal back into place and carry a person when the world feels like it is falling apart. The road shoulders a stretch of woods you grew up fearing and fascinates you in equal measure; at the edge of those trees a derelict town sits under a low moon, all leaned porches and boarded windows, and from somewhere inside comes the same music that the radio is scraping out, like someone echoing the record through the bones of the houses. As you slow, you see the fog peel away to reveal a line of old cars, their chrome dull but familiar, parked nose-to-tail as if waiting for a race that can never start. Your engine's idle seems to wake something in the night — a long, low harmonizing that is not any instrument you've heard, a sound that moves under your skin and makes the hairs on your arm stand up. You could park and walk toward the music and the cars, using your strength to pry boards, open doors, and maybe protect anyone trapped by whatever has settled over this place; or you could push the pedal and let the old car do what it does best, punch through the fog and head for the coast where the siren song of the town fades behind you. Either choice promises speed, danger, and the possibility that the music is a map to salvation or a call to something hungrier than memory.