One day, perhaps, people would remember him not as a monster, but as the hero who saved them against a darkness much greater than their puny minds could comprehend.
Then, his power restored, the Long Man would return home.
He would show the Father.
Around Christmas, the Long Man decided it was time. A part of him wedged into the brain of a traveling salesman stopped at a pay phone alongside I-44. That piece of him fished out a fistful of quarters and fed them into the decrepit device, listening as each one clunked into the near empty coin box. Then he dialed the number burned into his memory from years of using it. It rang and rang and he began to wonder if Joe would bother to pick up the phone only the Long Man had ever called.
And then . . .
"How?" Joe asked. That one word held a multitude of questions the Long Man didn't feel like answering.
How was he still alive? How was there enough of him left to make this phone call? What did he want?
Instead, the Long Man smiled. "I just wanted you to know, I'm still out here."
The Night Marshal's voice crackled through the line like a blazing whip of rage. "Where are you, motherfucker?"
He tutted into the phone. "Such language. Don't worry, you won't be seeing me again for a while. Maybe we won't ever cross paths again. You did give me quite a beating last time, didn't you?"
The Long Man relished
the echoes of pain from that fight. More than that, he loved to relive the moment when he'd outsmarted the Night Marshal one last time. This hadn't been his plan, but it proved to be more successful than he'd imagined.
"Where?" The Night Marshal's voice cracked with rage and something else. Fear? "Let's finish this. Tell me where you are."
The old monster laughed, a long, loud peal that sent a flock of birds screaming into flight. "I'll tell you where I am, Joe. Listen carefully."
He looked at the pay phone in front of him. He watched a long string of unbroken highway unspool under his headlights somewhere in the heart of Montana. His eyes fixed on the clouds below him as she soared in a plane headed for Tokyo. He watched juicy bugs splatter against his motorcycle's windshield as he roared down a strip of gravel road somewhere on the edge of Kansas. He sipped from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag and watched children playing in a park outside Seattle. In a thousand places, in a thousand different bodies, he smiled as the world ticked on around him, unsuspecting.
The Night Marshal's voice creaked through the phone line, frayed with fear and anger and confusion. "Where are you?"
The Long Man took a deep breath, and smiled so wide his cheeks ached. He whispered, from a thousand mouths, "Everywhere."