by Darcia Helle
Another of the signs went by outside, and Eliot tried to resist looking at the death count – but wasn’t that number one higher than last time?
Annoyed with himself he looked back at the road ahead. Much safer - the signs themselves were a distraction, Eliot thought; more tax payer’s money wasted. The road was designated a ‘Red Route’, deemed especially dangerous, and regularly spaced signs showed monthly death figures, for this year and last. This year’s figure was higher, already.
On average one person a day – Eliot could see why the road was considered dangerous, for those who didn’t know it as well as he: the route cut through the flat Lincolnshire countryside, but unlike the Roman-straight Fosse to the north, this road curled and snaked its way around the landscape – the signs lining its sides were written in a continuous language of zigzags, exclamation marks, and suicidal pedestrians, not to mention the ubiquitous casualty stats. And it was single carriageway all along, encouraging blind overtakings, and it ran east/west, so the sun was always in somebody’s eyes.
Eliot was heading west, although through the bright fog of tiredness he was finding it hard to remember the route more than three junctions ahead. He didn’t know why he felt so fatigued, he was used to the driving, but he felt curiously light-headed, not able to concentrate, not quite present. Outside, the flat countryside stretched for miles, and despite how far the eye could see the land seemed empty too, devoid of anything for the eye to catch hold of except the stubby hedges, the arrangements of the fields, squat churches. It was summer and so sunset was slow, and Eliot found himself looking forward to the darkness that would smother the oddly desolate views around him. Only the road seemed alive, insistent, twisting itself into curious bends and curves.
Eliot sighed for what felt like the thousandth time as he approached a car dawdling in front – tourists, no doubt, meandering back from the coast. Eliot didn’t slow down but sped up – after here there wasn’t another overtaking opportunity for miles. Best to go for it, to get it over quickly. He pulled out as he was thinking about whether to do it, and the white car he was overtaking seemed to speed up, as if chastened. Idiots, he thought as he passed, glancing left at them – two old dears, both looking half-dead, the old man gripping the wheel as if he daren’t let go, the old woman’s head slung back, asleep?
When Eliot looked back at the road there was a car coming straight at him, lights on even in the dusk-light, blazing. Eliot screamed as it filled his vision - he flung his hands up in front of his face, and futilely shut his eyes.
He opened them – nothing had happened to him, and the road ahead was clear. Shaken, he pulled back into his own lane, slowed to a speed less than that of the car he had overtaken. Was he so tired that he was hallucinating? He could picture the car coming towards him, how in that last second it has looked like it was made of light... Another of the Red Route signs went past and he felt angry – it was those ghoulish signs that had unnerved him! They didn’t make him feel more cautious, but more fatalistic – one a day and it was dumb luck whether it would be you, years of experience and knowledge of these roads notwithstanding.
God, I can’t wait to get home, Eliot thought, with only a slight mental pause before the last word. Get me home. The comforts of his destination seemed hard to visualise, for he had been on the road all day. His limbs ached and there was a tight belt of pain across his chest. I just want to lie down in the dark, he thought, as outside the cat’s eyes lit up in his lights. It was that time of evening when the sun was so low that it seemed brighter than at midday. And there was nothing in the flat landscape to impede its glare – no wonder people have accidents here, Eliot thought, your eye is drawn outwards, looking for some elevation, some landmark to let you know that you’re not somehow still where you were ten minutes ago.
The white car behind him had switched on its headlights too now, shining in his rear-view – the old man who was the driver was nudging forward impatiently. Eliot refused to speed up for them. His near accident, or hallucination, or whatever in hell it had been, had left him even more tense. He went past a junction with a minor road, going god knew where in this countryside, and mentally ticked it off his list – past that left turning, then past a right turning a few miles later, also leading to Nowhere, then the crossroads... He couldn’t follow the route home any further than that without losing track. But he knew this road; he would remember when he got there.
Feeling more confident again, Eliot sped up so as to lose the bag of bones driving behind him; but the white car behind kept pace. Someone has got a bit of blood in them after all, he thought, and he looked in his mirrors expecting to see the weak eyes of the other driver peering over his steering wheel. But all he could see was that damn light, sunlight and headlights both, glinting and reflecting across the whole of the vehicle, and his car too. At least dip them you old fool, Eliot thought.
The sun was equally as blinding to the front, but he still saw the red numbers as he passed them – one a day, he thought, is it really so much as that, for a single stretch of road? Three hundred and sixty-five ghosts a year added to the tally; this road must be thick with them, if only you could see them. Maybe those lights, he thought, that you think are gnats and flies in the dusk, are really the pinpricks of all the souls that died here... – Eliot wasn’t normally given to such brooding, but it made sense. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be those who died suddenly, with deeds undone, their life’s tasks incomplete? And which deaths were more untimely than those that happened at seventy miles an hour: one second routine, hand drumming along to the stereo maybe; the next your body slammed to a stop with all the bloody energy you had thought you were in control of?
What deeds have I left undone? Eliot thought. If it should be me today, then what... But there was a myriad of things, he thought, not the horror-tale hokum of a secret untold or a will unsigned, but the normal stuff of existence left undone at the tail-end of a tired day. But then everyone, he thought...
He was distracted when the car being driven by the old man made a move to overtake him. They were about half a mile from the next right turning. What in hell is he doing? Eliot thought – he knew there were two tight bends before the junction. He slowed down, but when the white car pulled level it too slowed down to match, so that the two cars moved in parallel. Although they were side by side Eliot still felt dazzled by the lights of the white car; he still had to blink when he looked to his right to see what the hell...
He met the eyes of the old lady in the passenger seat, and they were dead. Open, certainly; malevolent, maybe, but obviously dead, as was the slack-jawed hang of her denture-less mouth, the crazy twist of her neck. She both blazed with light and was translucent – through her he could see the old man, arms stretched for the wheel, rictus grin tight on the bloody oval of his face.
Eliot slammed on the brake, and felt his body lunge forward sickeningly before the seat-belt bit. He didn’t slow to a full stop, but almost stalled, his hand automatically reaching to the gearstick to prevent this as his eyes followed the path of the bright car in front of him, still in the wrong lane and heading towards the tight corner. The light of the car was white, in contrast to the bloody glow of the low sun, squashing itself flat against the land. There was a screeching sound, whether of brakes real or remembered Eliot couldn’t be sure, and the car that he was watching jerked to a hideous and total stop, as if it crashed into something, although nothing could be seen. It crumpled as if the impact was real too, and as it did so the light that lit it from within faded, and with it the vision of the car itself.
He slammed his foot on the accelerator now, desperate to be away, to reach... home. He took the first bend at great speed but on the correct side of the road. At the point where the white car appeared to have hit something unseen, he could see nothing other than very faded skid marks. There, he thought, that’s where they died and what I saw was... The sharp turn of the next bend took all his concentration to manoeuvre around, and all he could think of was the crossroads ahead
. A car passed in the opposite direction, a reassuringly normal looking estate with no ghost light to it, and the driver didn’t even seem to notice Eliot’s mad speed as he passed.
Tiredness Kills! a sign hectored Eliot as he drove, and then the inevitable Red Route sign – despite his panic he still looked at the number of deaths as he passed. “Fuck,” he said quietly to himself, forcing himself to slow down to the speed limit. You’re just tired, he thought, taking his cue from the other sign. It was all just a hallucination. He just had to get to his destination, straight on at the crossroads that were coming up – straight on, he could remember that now, if nothing else. Straight on, and there was no point in stopping for those pissing little roads to the left and right that lead nowhere, and from which no one ever emerged. He knew this road. God my chest hurts, he thought; but then it had done all day.
He passed the sign that announced the crossroads but he didn’t slow down. Someone had scrawled something on the sign, even all the way out here, but he couldn’t see what the graffiti said. The whole of the road now seemed lit up as if he was driving straight into the half-submerged sun; the red glow and the white of his own lights. He slowed very slightly as he approached the junction, but then accelerated again, for he could see in this flat and horrible countryside that nothing was approaching from either of the dead-end village turnoffs...
But then something was, a blaze stronger than mere headlights coming for and engulfing him from the left, and all at once the answers to many things – why his chest had seemed to hurt all day even before the seatbelt had locked; why the last car he had passed had seemed not to see him; why he had been unable to remember anything beyond this junction – became clear to Eliot. But not the why, the unfinished deed, for in fact Eliot could remember very little about his life... He screamed as he remembered screaming, as the bright car hit him from the side and the world turned and toppled in the blood-red sunset. This is where, he had time to think; then that light too went out.
Another of the Red Route signs went by outside, and Eliot tried to resist looking again at the death count – but wasn’t that number one higher than last time?
Annoyed with himself, he looked back at the road ahead.
***
About The Author:
James Everington was born in 1976 in Nottingham, England. After writing somewhat dark fiction for a number of years, he feels it is time to send some of them out into the light... His collection of dark and surreal horror fiction 'The Other Room' (from which Red Route is taken) is available on Kindle now.
Connect with James at: https://www.jameseverington.blogspot.com/
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Make a Wish
by Susan Helene Gottfried
© Copyright 2011 Susan Helene Gottfried
