Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (25 page)

Two young, upwardly mobile professionals, we dallied through the eighties then settled into the nineties like a comfortable couch. Once a month we drove down to Houston to meet up with friends from college, eat steaks and tell old tales of campus life. Lately, we noticed the get-togethers w
ere getting shorter and smaller. It seemed more of us had babysitters to get back to, and others moved on to pursue careers out of state.

Our youth wa
s falling further behind us. An era was ending. Truthfully, it had already ended, but at the time we were still hanging on. We knew there wouldn’t be many more get-togethers to attend, so Carol and I didn’t want to miss even one.

And that’s
how we ended up at a lonely, four-way crossing in the middle of the night with the deadliest phantom in the history of Cole County.

***

Ninety feet can vary a lot when it comes to the definition of near and far.

That night it didn’t seem like very far at all. Trust me, in my opinion it wasn’t near far enough.

The silent figure staring back at us stood in the middle of the intersection, directly beneath the blinking yellow light. I knew her the second I saw her. Even after twenty years, the figure with the grey cap and white blonde hair couldn’t have been anybody else. My eyes weren’t what they used to be, but I still recognized the face…or at least the part of it I could see. At that distance, the other side of her face appeared to be masked by shadow. She stood there as still as a tombstone, not even a strand of hair moving, and it seemed like the world stopped moving with her.

It was so quiet.

No crickets. No frogs. Just the slow, muffled click of the traffic light as it cycled in the dead night air. My breath sounded loud and ragged in my own ears like we were under some sort of giant bowl, as did the soft swallows and gasps of Carol beside me. Her nails dug into my arm with a grip that conveyed her fear more than any scream.

The figure under the light neither approached nor made any gesture in our direction. She just continued to stand there.

And then she vanished.

I blinked, not trusting my own eyes, but she had disappeared. The flashing light cycled through again…went dim, went black…then flooded the intersection with yellow light again, only now it stood empty.

“Wait…what?” Carol inhaled beside me. “Where did she go?”

For one awful second I scanned the night around us, wondering if the wraith had somehow reappeared out in the darkness beside us, but we were still alone. The night still felt…wrong, though. There were no crickets, or other nocturnal sounds, and instinct told me we weren’t
out of trouble yet.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Maybe…maybe
it was just some kind of freak...thing. Maybe it’s something… unrelated…and I just got us to thinking about it when I mentioned her earlier. Or maybe…aw hell!”

“Mike!” H
er grip tightened on my arm again.

After the third flash, the pale yellow glow revealed the ghost had returned.

Only now she stared at us from a spot beside the highway sign, at an angle across the intersection. Her gray figure seemed faint and washed out standing next to the bright white reflecting surface of the sign. Only the jet blackness behind her made her possible to see. She now stood further away than before, and as I squinted at her dim form I realized she didn’t face us directly either.

“Mike?” Carol breathed.
“What’s going on? What is she doing?”

“I don’t know,” I sotto voiced back.

I wanted to tell her this couldn’t be real, that it must be some kind of hoax or mirage. But the gray figure out by the traffic sign couldn’t be denied. I still could only make out half her face, a fact for which I felt deeply grateful. But the visible half looked in our direction with an utter lack of expression far more frightening than any scowl or evil smile. It was as if she stared right through us.

And then she disappeared again.

“Crap!” Carol squeaked when the light flashed again, revealing the spot next to the sign to be empty. “What the hell?!”

I wondered the same thing myself, and noticed how the hush blanketing the night around us remained in effect.
Something
was going on here. Something really bad. It built up in the night time atmosphere like a gathering storm, and not the one off on the horizon. I even got the hint of cooler air from the direction of the nearby intersection.

“Oh shit! There she is!”

The specter reappeared, once again coinciding with the rhythm of the traffic light. This time she faced down the road toward Collinsdale, standing in the left hand lane and facing off to our right. And then she vanished once more in the very next cycle.

It was frightening, and disorienting. Unable to move, we stared transfixed at the scene unfolding before us. The wraith appeared twice more in the next four flashes of light, in a different spot each time. It seemed the tempo of her vanishings and reappearances were increasing. The air around us still seemed dead and still, with nothing but our breaths and the click of the intersection light to disturb the silence. But at th
e same time some form of charge, some potential, seemed to be building in the air.

Building…gathering…approaching…

And then I understood.

“C’mon!” I snapped out of paralysis and grabbed Carol’s arm. She still stared in open mouthed incredulity at the intersection until I forcibly turned her around and pushed her back up the road behind us. “Don’t look back! Just pay close attention to everything around us, and head for that tree we passed back there.”

“Mike, what are we doing? What’s going on?”

“She’s not here yet,” I grunted and urged her back up the dark road. “She, or it, or whatever is going on back there is still materializing…in the process of manifesting…or coming, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Huh?” she started to halt and look back but I wouldn’t let her.

“Don’t stop!” I hustled her onward. “Not yet!”

“Okay! But what do you mean?”

“I mean she’s not here for us,” I continued while trying to catch my own breath. The oscillating yellow glow around us started to fade as we put distance between us and the intersection.  “We just happened to show up when she decided to…uh…come around and haunt the place. I think we just got very, very lucky.”

I got vague with my theory at that point, and worked toward moving her onward. I wanted as far away from there as possible, and I reached the sudden conclusion I really didn’t want her thinking about this. I had the definite feeling she wouldn’t be happy with the answer I just came to.

So I shut my mouth and marched us further away from intersection as fast as I could.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

“Mike, stop!” S
he dug in her heels…both literally and figuratively. “
What
is going on?”

“Carol, not now!”

“Yes…now!” she snapped. “Listen. The crickets are back! We’ve gone far enough.”

In less unreal circumstances, I’m sure I would have conjured some fantastic remark about female logic and the absurdity of basing your survival on the sound of crickets. But as I paused long enough to hear their chirping, I knew she was right. Whatever we almost stepped into back in the intersection, we were out of it now.

I stopped on the roadway, still panting from the recent exertion, and looked at the pale form of my wife. Carol had already turned and now peered back at the intersection. She held her hands on her knees as she fought to catch her breath. But the look of fear from earlier had been replaced by one of acute concentration.

“Is she still there?” I didn’t want to turn and look for myself, just in case that was a bad idea and one of us would be needed to drag the other onward.

“Yeah.” Her breathing slowed and she straightened. She tilted her head while studying the scene behind us. “She’s just standing there in one place now. She’s stopped moving.”

“Is she looking at us?”

“No,” Carol shook her head and squinted, “Actually she has her back to us. She’s at the other side of the intersection, and she’s just watching up the road that way.” She stared down there a few seconds longer, then turned to me with a look of wonder on her face. “My god, Mike…she’s real! That’s a real ghost down there! The stories were true!”

“Yeah, well, we’ve seen her. Hooray for us. Let’s get out of here.”

I started to urge her further up the highway but she resisted. I really wanted to have her further away from the intersection before she thought things through further. Just another couple of hundred yards up the road, and it wouldn’t matter if she figured it out. Then we could just walk back to the car and wait for help.

It wasn’t meant to be.

“But, then… if she’s real… and the stories are true…” Carol frowned at the scene behind us, “Then…this means somebody’s going to die tonight, doesn’t it.”

Dammit!

I suppose the way I stopped and exhaled came across as good as a confession on my part, for she gave me a reproachful look in the darkness. She knew I had already figured it out. And while I’m sure she understood I only meant to protect her, it still wouldn’t get me spared the lecture about honesty later. But at the moment, her mind lay elsewhere…at exactly the last place I wanted it to be.

“Oh, Mike,” she moaned.
“What are we going to do?”

“Do? Honey, there is nothing we
can
do! We’re over our heads here. We don’t even know if there is anything
to
do. Heck, maybe she’s just down there hanging out.”

That earned me a look reserved for only the stupidest of comments.

“Mike, look at her. It’s obvious she’s waiting for something. Somebody is going to come down the road soon and there is going to be an accident.”

I relented and turned to look back down the road. The intersection still flashed like a lonely yellow island in the night, but at this distance the feeling of threat subsided…not gone away entirely, only subsided
…because the dim, still figure at the far side of the circle of light remained. Even this far away, knowing what it was gave me a sick feeling that went from my stomach to the back of my throat.

But Carol was right.
The phantom was waiting.

Somebody would die tonight.

“Mike,” Carol swallowed but then set her chin. “We can’t let this happen. We just can’t.”

“Carol, think it through…”

“No!” Her voice firmed and her hands went to her hips. “This has to stop. This is wrong.  This whole thing is
wrong
!”

And there came the word I feared the most.

I could tell she was still scared. It showed in the wideness of her eyes and the pallor of her skin, but that didn’t matter now. Now something
wrong
had crossed Carol’s path. And that meant it must be set right. My wife didn’t consider herself a crusader, and she possessed little patience for people who constantly hunted causes to justify their existence to themselves. But when something she defined as truly wrong crossed her path, she didn’t back down.

Ever.

“Mike, we have to do something. We can’t just let this happen.”

“Honey, what? What can we do? We don’t know what we’re up against.”

“Yes we do,” she replied softly. “That’s Melissa Meyers down there. A girl we went to school with.” She started to walk back toward the intersection.

“Is it?” I pleaded as I fell into step beside her. “Do we know that’s really her?”

“You saw her, too. It’s her.”

For the life of me, I will never understand how somebody could look so scared yet so determined at the same time. We were walking back
toward something awful—something deadly—and we were doing it by choice. Her choice, mainly, yet it never occurred to me to let her go alone. But at least I could appeal to her sanity while I went along.

“Honey, we don’t know that! We don’t even know what she
is
anymore.”

“Yeah? Well I’m starting to get some ideas about that too.”

Whatever those ideas were, they certainly didn’t appear to comfort her. Now past her initial panic, I could tell Carol’s sharp mind raced far ahead of mine. At the same time, whatever conclusions she drew seemed to be scaring her even worse than she had been before.

“When she was moving around earlier, she never left the intersection, did she…”

“Huh?” I wondered what she was thinking, while at the same time wracking my brain over how to talk her out of whatever insanity she planned to try. “Ummm….no, I don’t think so. Not exactly. She was a little off the shoulder of the road a couple of times. But why would she?”

“True,” she breathed. The fear in her face now became more evident as the light from the intersection grew close. “Still, I think it’s always been about here.”

“Okay, honey…” I fretted at the proximity of the crossroads, and the gray shape standing with its back to us on the other side. “You’re losing me here. What do you mean?”