Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (24 page)

Of course, it never occurred to any of us to be concerned.

To the teenage Texans of our town, the snow and ice offered a grand new challenge to rise to. It came as a novelty we
only ever witnessed on TV. Any perils it contained only existed as some abstract we might have acknowledged if pressed, but immediately dismissed once allowed. I realize now the adults mustn’t have been much better…

B
ecause they didn’t cancel the basketball game between Pritchard Hill and our rivals over in Collinsdale.

Heck, the only reason I didn’t go was because I chose to visit Carol in the hospital. She had come down sick with what would later be diagnosed as an ovarian tumor. The doctors removed it successfully, and she recovered well, but it marked the beginning of her lifelong relationship
with the Big C. Yet that night she said she was glad I stayed in Pritchard Hill, and if it took her getting sick to keep me from acting like a fool then so be it.

Of course, anybody who knows anything about small town Texans and their relationship to high school sports (especially back then) wouldn’t be surprised. Those aren’t fa
ns up there in those bleachers. They’re a congregation. And while high school football reigns supreme, high school basketball holds a respectable second. So even though it had already begun to sleet that January evening, a rowdy caravan of teens set forth for Collinsdale to attend a game any person in their right mind would have cancelled.

Proving Heaven’s mercy
toward drunkards and fools, the entire train of cars made it without incident and the big game took place. Great plays were made, mighty deeds were accomplished, and a game winning shot at the buzzer insured Brian Gossberg of local hero-hood… and most likely a tryst or two with a couple of the more enthusiastic members of the Pritchard Hill Pom-Pom squad. It was a game which would be long remembered in the annals of the rivalry.

But while this battle raged in the Collinsdale gym, a nightmare was forming outside.

The ice falling from the night sky ceased to melt on impact, and now began to glaze every surface it touched. Icicles formed on eves and power lines. Store windows that had never sported even a border of frost now shimmered under a distorting sheet of frozen water.  That night, when the Pritchard Hill kids came celebrating their way out of the little gym, they stepped into a world they had never experienced.

Of course, they were delighted.

They played and shouted as they slid around on the way to their cars in the parking lot, and the pair of inevitable fender benders occurring afterwards were taken in stride and good humor all around. Even the defeated locals were entranced into a better mood. Motors revved, wheels spun, and catcalls were traded as the line of cars weaved and skidded its way out onto the empty town streets and started the journey home.

And the wonder of it all is they almost made it without incident.

Twenty-three miles of dark, icy, back-country highway twisted and coiled over hills, between cow pastures, and across creeks with but a few lonely farm lights to mark the way. They made twenty-one of those miles without a single accident. They were almost home.

Then the divine protection covering drunks, fools, and rowdy rural teens came to a disastrous end at the crossroads known as Junction 402.

You have to remember this was south central Texas in the nineteen seventies. as insane as it sounds these days, most of these vehicles were pickup trucks with kids huddled together under blankets in the cargo beds. It was just the way we did it back then. And most of the time people didn’t think a thing of it. Until something bad happened...

L
ike Jeffrey Crawford hitting the brakes too hard when he attempted to slow down so he could make a left turn at the junction, and sliding sideways into the intersection instead.

It wasn’t really his fault, other than deciding to drive under these conditions in the first place, because he simply didn’t know how to drive on ice. He didn’t understand he needed to allow himself more time to do things, and he possessed all the confidence of the typical boy his age. So he hit his brakes far too close to the intersection and went straight into making his turn. After that there was nothing he could do but react to a situation he had never been taught to deal with.

Once he started to slide, he compounded his error by mashing the brake to the floor. And as he started to lose control he made matters worse by attempting to turn even further to his left. It was a desperate attempt to make the corner when he should have been turning the wheel into the spin, as anybody more experienced could have told him. This resulted in him not only entering the intersection sideways, but drifting to the left…which left no chance of him sliding unharmed out of the crossroads on the other side. Instead he hit the gravel shoulder going sideways at an unknown speed.

The truck flipped, and screaming kids flew into the late night ditches.

A second later, another truck driven by Delroy Coffey slid into the ditch behind him. Delroy somehow managed to not only keep his vehicle pointed forward, but to keep it upright as he smashed through the highway sign before floundering to the ditch below. It was a miracle he didn’t run over a single wounded kid in the grass before coming to a stop against the corner post of Judge Mayhew’s cow pasture. But even his gentler departure from the road resulted in three more kids from his own truck being bounced out onto the frozen ground.

The other three vehicles in the little convoy managed to slide to a stop in the int
ersection. Although James Seafield slid into the back of his brother’s truck and busted out both of his headlights. Then, less than twenty seconds after Jeffrey first hit his brakes, the entire thing was over. A few seconds later the uninjured teens stepped out into a frozen night filled with the screams and cries of their hurt classmates.

But that was when being a group of small town, country kids stood in their favor.

Self sufficiency was so ingrained in who they were that most of them weren’t even consciously aware of the concept. They just understood something bad had happened, people were hurt, and they needed to get off their butts and get to fixing it. Since they also knew they would have to drive almost as far as the hospital to reach a phone to call for help, they never even considered it an option.

So while ice fell from the late night sky, chains were hooked to the vehicles in the ditch while others started helping their friends back out of the grass and up onto the road. Tears were shed, comfort given, and in three cases blankets were turned into impromptu stretchers for those who were unable to be helped to the cars. It was chaos, but for a bunch of kids it was a remarkable feat.

Inside of ten minutes, both stricken vehicles were pulled back onto the road and judged to be serviceable while the injured were spread out amongst the different cars and trucks for easier transport to the hospital. Nobody was in charge—nobody even tried to take charge—it just all got done in a single minded effort to get their hurt people back to where they could get help.

So it’s remembered as something of a wonder how a group of kids came together in a scene of frozen chaos and rose to the occasion. And with those circumstances in mind, most people back then considered it a tragic but fo
rgivable mistake that in all that confusion…nobody did a head count and realized one of them was missing.

Two hours later, Bob and Mary Meyers, unaware of the scene now unfolding at the hospital, finally conceded something must be wrong
. First they tried to contact their daughter’s friends. Since all of them were at the hospital, call after call came back unanswered. Then they gave up and called the Sheriff himself. Finally learning of the crash, they were forced to navigate four miles of icy roads of their own before reaching the hospital. There they spent a futile half hour trying to find Melissa.

Even then, they took heart in their initial failure. They thought it meant she must have walked away from the hospital with a few scratches and was hiding out at a friend’s house
. Probably in that typical teenage fear of getting into trouble because of a disaster she had no control over. Only after another hour and half of visiting family and friends in vain, did they truly begin to panic.

So it wasn’t until nearly dawn that Sheriff Les Patterson, assuming the wors
t, started to thread his way back down the icy roads to the scene of the accident. Over his decades of law enforcement he had been forced to pull a lot of young bodies off the road.

B
ut the scene he encountered at Junction 402 would never leave him.

Sometime during the night, Melissa Meyers must have regained some semblance of consciousness and pulled herself up to the road from wherever she had been lying. Suffering from a concussion, broken ribs, a fractured femur, and internal injuries, she
had still managed to drag herself through the icy darkness and back up to the intersection. There is no telling how long it took. The injured girl probably used the blinking intersection light as her guiding star through the whole ordeal.

But once there, and finding herself alone, she had passed out on the crumpled highway sign
lying on the shoulder of the road. According to the doctor back then, if she wouldn’t have died anyway, then that is what killed her.

The night had been brutally cold. A
nd her gray knit cap and sweater hardly amounted to real protection against that kind of freeze. But even worse, she passed out with her head lying atop a metal sign that was itself lying on ice…and that doomed her.

When Sheriff
Patterson found her, he couldn’t believe she still lived. If only barely.

The left side of her head had frozen so tightly to the sign he was forced to remove it from its post and put it and h
er in his trunk for transport back to the hospital. Only at the emergency room did they manage to remove the offending piece of metal with a steady flow of warm water.  Dr. Kingman did what he could, but warned her parents not to get their hopes up. Much of the left side of her head had frozen almost solid. Even if she managed to beat the odds and survive, the brain damage would be severe. As it turned out, she lingered for eight hours before slipping away without ever regaining consciousness.

So what became known in the area as the Big Ice Storm Wreck ended in eight hospitalizations and one funeral.

Except it didn’t end there.

On a rainy A
ugust night later that year, Sheriff Patterson pulled sixteen-year-old Phyllis Cordell from the wreckage of a two-car collision at the junction. She was the only survivor, and badly hurt herself. But what grabbed everybody’s attention was her hysterical insistence that Melissa Meyers, her face half blackened with frostbite, had stood at the edge of the road and stared at her while she hung upside down in her dead boyfriend’s car.

Two years later, it was Delroy Coffey himself who
got pulled from his totaled pickup after a single vehicle accident that killed his sister and her boyfriend. He screamed Melissa had appeared in the intersection, once again with a face half black, directly ahead of him and caused the crash. Since he also boasted a blood alcohol level of epic proportions, the judge wasn’t impressed with his claims of a supernatural cause for the accident and sentenced him to seven years in the state pen.

But now the crossroads two miles east of Pritchard Hill s
tarted to get an evil reputation. Locals began finding alternate routes home if returning to Pritchard Hill at night. Two other fatal accidents happened at the crossing over the next five years, but no survivors lived to tell if a grey clad girl caused the wrecks. Then came one of the more infamous incidents of Junction 402, if for no other reason than it was recorded on audiotape.

At three o’clock on a brittle February morning, Deputy Kelly Gunther called in over his radio to the Sherif
f’s office. The recently divorced young deputy had been depressed, but everybody thought he was on the mend. Apparently they were wrong. For in the wee hours on Feb. 12, 1986, the radio dispatcher received the following message…

“Hey, Millie…this is Kelly. It looks like I’m done. Vanessa’s gone. The kids are gone. And now I’m parked here at Junction 402 and you won’t believe who is standing in the middle of the intersection staring right at me. You know what? I’m just going to go ahead and give her a freebie...see if it’s any better on the other side. Tell the Sheriff I said, ‘Sorry for the mess.’ Adios.”

Both the Sheriff and the Police Chief of Pritchard Hill were at the scene within five minutes, but Kelly Gunther was dead. The found him lying next to his squad car, parked by the highway sign. He had gotten out, closed his door, and fired a single bullet into his head with his service revolver. The intersection lay empty.

And so it went.

As ghosts go, Melissa Meyers was seldom seen and widely scoffed at, at least in public. But Junction 402 still featured a higher than normal fatality rate. So when a survivor occasionally made it through those crashes, nobody acted surprised if the distraught victim reported the sight of a gray clad young woman with whitish blond hair and a damaged face. They would snort and blame it on shock or hysterics, but I think they would have only been surprised if no claim of her presence surfaced.

By this time, Carol and I had already married, left town, scraped our way through college, then moved to a small East Texas town to raise our three Siamese cats. We
had discovered early on that Carol couldn’t have kids, and adjusted accordingly. We proclaimed ourselves lucky because we would have both been awful parents, and I’m sure the cats agreed. Then we got on with getting on with life.