Shades: Eight Tales of Terror

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  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?”

  “I’m not sure.” She came to a stop, her eyes darting from one end of the junction to the other. “But she never haunted people, did she? Just this spot, right?”

  “I guess.” I folded my arms and realized the temperature had decidedly dropped in the past minute. I also noted with despair the night sounds had ceased once again. That strange deadness to the air reasserted itself. We were now back on the very edge of the…manifestation, or whatever it was. “I never heard any stories about her anywhere else.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Carol took a deep breath, and another long look across the junction.

  She looked deeply frightened, and I flirted with the notion of simply grabbing her and leaving with her over my shoulder. I really did. She would have never forgiven me, but seeing her so scared conjured every protective instinct inside me. She intended to do something crazy—of this, I had no doubt—and I knew I was going to have to choose between dragging her away or going along with her.

  In the end, I made the choice I always ended up making.

  I trusted her, and I followed.

  “Here we go.” She clenched and unclenched her hands, then stepped into the intersection.

  I followed one step behind her, and it felt like stepping into maelstrom. A silent maelstrom devoid of sound or motion.

  Imagine a storm you couldn’t feel, or see, or even hear. Physically, the world seemed to deaden further and the temperature continued to plunge. But behind the silence…behind the deathly stillness of the air and flat blackness of the sky…something screamed. A great cyclone of nothing seemed to shriek around us. I couldn’t hear it, or even feel it against my skin, but every emotional nerve I had sang like strings pulled tight in a hurricane.

  “Mike?” Carol’s voice sounded faint and distant, despite her being right by me. “Mike, I want you to start walking toward that side road. Can you do that, please?”

  “What?” I squinted off to the side, where the road leading to Collinsdale ran off into the darkness. “Why? I should stay with you!”

  “Listen,” she called back through the silent typhoon, “I want you to go out the side of the intersection, then climb through the fences and go around to the road in front of her. She’s watching that way, so that’s where her victim is probably coming from. You can head them off. You can save them!”

  “Good idea!” I started in the indicated direction. “Come on! We’ll both do it!”

  I made it about fifteen feet before I realized she wasn’t coming. I stopped and turned, to see her watching me go.

  “No, Mike.” Her eyes were wide and somber…her face white with fright. “I have to do something else.”

  “What do you mean?” I looked at her, then over at the dreaded shape that still stood with its back to us. “What are you going to be doing?”

  “Trying to save her.”

  “What!? Are you crazy?”

  Leave it to me to ask the obvious long after it was…well…obvious.

  “I have to Mike.” Her eyes pleaded with me to go on. “I have to try. We can’t leave things like this. This isn’t right.”

  “There’s nothing you can do for that thing, Carol! It’s beyond help! It went beyond all help over twenty years ago! Now let’s go!”

  “No.” She shook her head and turned back toward the phantom. “I have to try.”

  ‘Carol!”

  She just shook her head and impatiently waved me onward.

  I backed away, a couple of more steps toward the Collinsdale road, reluctant to leave her. I had started to get an inkling of what she planned and I wasn’t terribly thrilled with it. If she were lucky, the thing would just ignore her. If not…

  “Melissa!” Carol called o
ut through the raging silence. “Melissa Meyers!”

  Nothing.

  The thing neither moved nor acted in any way as if it heard her.

  “Melissa! Can you hear me!”

  No change. No response.

  The figure remained so still, I wondered if it could move at all. I began to think it might be some mindless phenomenon—perhaps some kind of psychic event using the image of a dead girl as part of its show. If that were true, then I could hurry and get around it to stop whoever was coming while Carol safely wasted her time shouting at a mirage.

  “Melissa! Damn it all, listen to me!”

  I started for the Collinsdale road again, but I only got about twenty feet.

  “Oh shit…”

  I don’t know if it was the words, or the sudden catch in her voice that hit me first. All I know is my stomach sank straight through the asphalt. I turned, and for one second felt relieved to see the wraith still stood in the same spot. But then I realized it was facing back into the intersection. Its features blank, utterly devoid of any human emotion, it now looked straight at Carol.

  It seemed the apparition could hear after all.

  “Carol!” I took a step back toward her.

  “No, Mike!” She pushed a halting hand in my direction, but continued to face the specter. “Melissa! It’s me, Carol Tanner! Do you…HOLY SHIT!!!”

  The yellow light blinked out, then flashed back on to reveal the horror now standing three feet in front of her.

  Carol had definitely caught its attention.

  And not in a good way.

  It stood directly in front of her, face to terrible face, while the silent maelstrom howled in the night around us. The temperature fell again. That’s when I realized the ghost stood at the epicenter of the frigid atmosphere, like some kind of gray flame radiating lethal cold. And we were both dressed for a warm July night.

  “Carooolll…” I started toward her again.

  This had gone too far. Carol had started something she now had no control over. I guess, in hindsight, it counted as a testament to how much I loved her that I never stopped to think I was walking back toward the apparition as well.

  “Mike, no! Don’t interfere!

  I stopped again…helpless…only eight feet away. I didn’t know what Carol was thinking, but I could tell she must have been terrified. The entity stared at her from a range she could easily reach out and touch. And at this distance, the true tragedy of Melissa Meyers’ last hours were plainly revealed on her face.

  Her features still showed no emotion, or anything at all. The right side remained pristine, a porcelain sculpture with an eye so blue it almost seemed violet in the yellow light. Seeing it reminded me of how much beauty we took for granted as youth, and how pretty this girl who only existed on the periphery of my teenage existence had been. But the other side…

  The other side had been reduced to a blackened ruin.

  From the midline of her face back to her hairline, frostbite blistered the skin into a lifeless mask of dead flesh. It looked inert, almost like some kind of blackish gray stone. And the eye in that wreckage was ruined as well. It had been so charred by cold the socket looked empty—a stygian hole from which black tear trails ran down the stained cheek.

  It was into that terrible visage Carol now looked. She hunted for any sign of humanity in its blank stare. The invisible gale around us strengthened, now punctuated with the definite impressions of silent screams that seemed to swirl in the night air.

  “Melissa?” She swallowed, recovering from the shock of having it appear right up in her face. “It’s me, Carol. We used to sit next each other in Mrs. Barkleys’ English class, remember?”

  Nothing.

  Nothing but the temperature falling further, and the sense of a storm gathering strength.

  “Melissa! Look at me! I know I’m older now, but you knew me!”

  The storm around us intensified. It grew in strength to the point I thought it might be beginning to seep through into the real world itself. Now, just on the edge of my hearing, I thought I could make out the shrieks of injured people. Something very bad was about to happen, and we were standing right in the middle of it.

  “Melissa, stop it!” Carol yelled at the thing, “You were more than this!”

  It didn’t respond.

  Its empty eyes locked with hers, the phantom continued to stand in the eye of the psychic cyclone and seemed to draw even more life out of the area. Tiny crystals of frost now appeared and fell in the air around her. A faint hint of motion caught my eye, and I looked down to see tentacles of black ice begin to spread out over the asphalt from where dead girl stood. They crackled and forked, like frozen roots growing across the pavement. Then I felt the sting of tiny ice pellets against my cheek.

  Sleet in the middle of July.

  The intersection was having its own isolated ice storm. The ice, the silent screams, it felt as if that night from long ago had started to force its way into the present, and the apparition acted as the gate.

  At the same time a distant pair of headlights appeared on the road from Pritchard Hill, then winked out as they disappeared into the shallow valley of Potter’s Creek. They would be back soon, though.

  Too soon.

  “Caarrrooolllll…..” I warned.

  “You had friends!” My wife ignored me, still focused on the wraith before her. “You had family. You had people who loved you…and you loved them too! You were more than this!”

  The intersection began to feel like part of the arctic, and I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. The footing became treacherous beneath my feet. I realized if a car hit this surface at any speed it would have no hope of control. The revenant seemed to grow colder as well, and small tufts of mist rose from the ruined side of its face.

  Whatever Carol had in mind wasn’t working.

  And time was running out.

  “Carol!” I put more urgency into it, something easily done as a faint glow became visible up the road. The car would be coming up out of the valley in a minute. Then it would enter an “S” turn that emptied out into the intersection.

  The one now full of ice.

  The one we were standing right in the middle of.

  The headlights came up over the hill then disappeared as they entered the first bend.

  “Melissa!” She now screamed at the thing. The woman who I used to tease about not being able to go to a horror movie without a stuffed animal to hide behind now shouted straight into the face of a truly deadly entity. “Stop it! You’re in there! You can hear me! Please!”

  “Carol! It’s time to run!”

  “No! Not yet!”

  “Dammit, Carol!”

  “MELISSA!” She screamed and, probably without thinking, she reached out and laid her hand on the ruined side of the dead girls face. The traffic light flared, the storm shrieked, and Carol snatched her hand back in an instant. She grimaced in pain as she used it to gesture at the intersection around us. “Is this what you want? Is this what eternity is going to be for you!? One long, cold forever of a night!?!? This isn’t who you are! It was one night, one horrible night, but it wasn’t everything you were!”

  I couldn’t wait any longer. The vehicle would be here within thirty seconds. Time to move. I started toward Carol with the intention of dragging her away.

  And then it happened. The very last thing I expected. I heard it just as I reached out to grab my mad wife’s hand.

  “Carol?”

  I stopped in mid attempt, and looked up at the pair of them with astonishment. This time the voice hadn’t been mine.

  I don’t know if it was the touch, or one of the last things Carol said, but the phantom had changed. I think it must have been the touch. The specter stood there, one hand now touching the spot where my wife so briefly laid her hand, with her uninjured eye wide and very…unterrible.

  The silent, raging storm around us paused, as if the entire night held its breath.

  “Yes!” C
arol whispered aloud. “Melissa! Yes honey, it’s me! Carol Tanner! You know me!”

  “Carol?”

  The voice didn’t sound spectral, or hollow, or ghostly in any other way I would have expected. It just seemed small.

  “That’s right!” Carol breathed. “That’s right. It’s over! You’re here, now. You’re okay.”

  “Over?” The voice sounded confused, like somebody just waking from a dream. “But…”

  “It’s over. I promise! It’s all over… Melissa!” My wife reached for her then hesitated, her hand hovering inches away from the blistering cold of the wraith, “Melissa? Do you remember?”

  “I… I…”

  The phantom girl struggled to speak, like she found words themselves unfamiliar. Yet, at the same time she became more…her. She stared at Carol in desperation, as if using her as an anchor to pull herself back from somewhere. Somewhere very far away.

  “I… They… They…”

  Her voice started to break and the single blue eye widened, then filled with tears. I could see the memory flood through her.

  “They left me…” Her face crumpled. “They left me all alone. And I…and I…”

  I don’t know how Carol did it. The phantom still blazed cold like some kind of icy flare, but she threw her arms around it just the same. And to my astonishment, the cry that rent the night wasn’t a scream of pain from my wife, but the final cry of Melissa Meyers. A wail that rang of grief, pain, fear, loss, and abandonment.

  It was the ragged cry of a little girl who had been badly hurt, then got very, very lost.

  That’s when light flooded the intersection around us, and I realized we were seconds away from disaster.

  I sprinted in the direction of the headlights, waving my hands over my head like a madman. It didn’t occur to me till later all the ice must have vanished. I yelled at the top of my lungs as they filled my vision, although at this point they couldn’t have avoided seeing me.

  Brakes screamed.

  I screamed.

  The headlights veered and two tons of steel and shrieking tires hurtled past me into the intersection. I whirled to follow its passage, and this time I did slip and hit the pavement, unbalanced by both my own adrenaline and the buffet of air from the passing truck. With events now out of my control, my eyes clenched shut and I held my breath as I lay there waiting for the thud I feared worst in the world.