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 intersection. 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 forgivable 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 worst, 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.
But 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. And 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 her 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 August 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 started 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 Sheriff’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.
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 were 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 was 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!” Her 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 the 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!” She 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 l
ess 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.
Shades: Eight Tales of Terror Page 20
