by Adam Colton
The Observer
“Do you ever get a feeling that you know things are going to happen a split second before they do?” asked John, as he placed the playing cards back into the box and pocketed the handful of pound coins he had won.
“Like déjà vu, you mean?” replied Tim.
“Kind of. I often get it when I am driving. I get a gut feeling that there is a hazard or something around the corner and sure enough, there is. It’s happened several times with accidents, once with a traffic queue and even with a herd of cows crossing the road. Every time I got this compelling urge to brake, so I did, and just a moment later the hazard comes into view. You could say I have had at least five of my nine lives if I were a cat!”
Tim didn’t believe that his best friend of fifteen years was psychic, but he had once seen a TV programme where scientists showed people a series of pictures; some pleasant, some horrible. It was proven that whenever a horrible picture was shown, the subject’s pulse rate had increased a split second before in anticipation.
How?
Nobody could explain.
Tim found this strange, but merely put it down to the fact that even in this enlightened age we cannot possibly understand everything, and that in a few hundred years time science would offer up a quite rational explanation for this time defying anticipation. Maybe our perception of time is actually different from reality or something like that.
Following a conversation about poltergeists, the 26-year-old pondered again on his friend’s premonitions. ‘Just coincidence,’ he thought, but as he mulled over John’s tales of highway clairvoyance, an image flashed into his mind of a man standing in the middle of a road, striking a confident pose, with his legs slightly apart. The vision was a silhouette in a night-time scene and it was somewhat disturbing, like a subliminal intrusion so quick that Tim couldn’t quite grasp the gravity of what he’d seen. And with his usually logical mind rendered slightly askew from their discussion on paranormal phenomena, he actually felt a little uneasy about the ten-mile journey home from the seaside town of Folkestone to the village of Lympne. For having climbed the long hill out of the pretty town of Hythe, the last few miles were along a spooky country lane which ran along the top of a barren hillside known as The Roughs. He imagined the spindly branches of the bare, winter trees overhanging like spiders’ webs. He could even envisage swinging around one of the bends to find himself stunned by such a figure standing in the full glare of his headlights.
Whilst this was clearly ridiculous, as he stepped from his friend’s front door out into the cool night air, Tim made a decision to take the longer route home to the village, famed for its zoo and castle, via the M20 motorway. There could be no such supernatural shenanigans on such a major road.
Climbing into the car, it was just a couple of minutes before he was cruising down the slip road onto the motorway, leaving the orange glow of the street lights behind, plunging at 70 miles per hour into the cool darkness. Tim mused upon how an hour or so of chatting about ghosts, premonitions and other such phenomena can make a normal brain susceptible to all kinds of irrational ideas. Even so, that brief flash of an image kept reverberating around the young driver’s mind. As a distraction he focussed on the cat’s eyes on either side of his lane, which seemed to pass by his eyes in a strangely staccato fashion, like flicking through a series of still photographs.
The journey was unusually quiet tonight; Tim had passed two lorries when he first came onto the motorway and these had now dropped out of sight in the rear-view mirror. Rounding the gentle curve of the road, having passed beneath the rail bridges leading to the Channel Tunnel, the familiar long, empty hill came into sight. Tim could see about a mile of road in front him. He knew that there was a concrete motorway bridge leaping across the cutting at the summit, and he suddenly had a strange notion that he was not going to reach that point, for the strangest thought had now entered Tim’s head. He imagined what would happen if he was to just open the door, and step from the small, brown hatchback, out onto the carriageway.
This notion reminded him of a puzzling question his friend John had once posed at the end of a game of poker:
“If you were to fire a bullet at 70 miles per hour backwards out of a train that is moving at exactly the same speed, how would the bullet appear to somebody standing still beside the railway track at the point of firing?”
The answer is, of course, that a bullet travels at much faster speeds anyway, but Tim had often wondered if it would appear to an observer to just hover in mid-air for a bit and then drop to the ground. Sometimes the illogical seems logical.
His thoughts with regard to stepping out of a car at the same speed were now very similar. He seemed absolutely certain that, should he attempt this madness, there was no chance at all that he would hit the carriageway at 70 miles an hour and roll along chaotically to a certain death. No, instead, he could visualise calmly stepping from the speeding vehicle onto the road and walking away unscathed - pure insanity, of course, but all of a sudden a strangely compelling idea. In fact, so strong was his certainty that Tim surmised that this was akin to having a surreal religious experience – no amount of logic could deter the subject from his belief, be it in a miracle or whatever.
The road was still empty and Tim’s mind was strangely blank, save for this bizarre compulsion. He pulled the handle on the door and forced it open. This took considerable effort because of the pressure the passing air was exerting upon it. Once the door was fully open, he unfastened the seatbelt whilst maintaining his grip on the steering wheel to keep the car on course. He dangled his right foot over the doorsill, placing his left foot on the accelerator to maintain a steady speed.
It was around half a mile to the top of the hill now – a summit that it seemed he was not destined to reach. Indeed, Tim suddenly realised that he was the man in the road in the vision!
With that thought, he freed his left foot also, swung round in the seat and pushed himself forward.
He gazed down for a second or two at the grey surface, which was whipping past him at such a speed that all the stones and joins in the concrete were just a blur. Tim knew that he had to get this exactly right for it to work. In his head this was similar to when a bird lands upon the electric rail on a railway line. If it lands with one foot before the other, the juice has nowhere to go for that split second and the bird becomes Kentucky Fried Sparrow. But if it lands simultaneously with both feet, the juice can flow right through the creature, which remains blissfully unaware of the potentially lethal current running through its body. This was exactly the same with Tim’s leap of faith, but here it seemed that the current that could destroy him was the nature of life itself.
Yet, Tim was 100% sure he could put both feet down together - and live! So with one final movement, he calmly lowered his feet until he could feel the friction upon the soles of his shoes. The surface was wearing away the rubber, but once he applied the force of his whole bodyweight onto those soles, the friction would simply disappear. With one almighty leap of faith, he let go of the steering wheel and pushed himself up out of the seat.