Highway 24

Paranormal Ghost Story by Jeff Chapman

On a lonely country highway, a young travelling salesman runs down a teenage girl. It was an accident. Why she was wandering around on a highway in a pink, formal dress, he can’t imagine. There’s no doubt she’s dead. Fear takes over and he flees the scene, absently taking one of her shoes with him. An old memory, something familiar about that shoe, struggles to surface. As he speeds away from the accident, he thinks his nightmare can’t get any worse, until he sees a pair of green eyes in his rear-view mirror. The shoe and those eyes lead him to a small town where he meets an all too knowing preacher and a sheriff obsessed with the girl’s tragic demise. As Paul digs deeper into the mystery of the girl and her shoe, he comes face-to-face with a dark secret from his father’s past.

Highway 24© 2013 by Jeff Chapman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or events, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

MuseItUp Publishing

14878 James, Pierrefonds, Quebec, Canada, H9H 1P5

Cover Art © 2013 by Charlotte Volnek

Edited by Kat Huntley

Copyedited by Greta Gunselman

Layout and Book Production by Lea Schizas

eBook ISBN: 978-1-77127-341-1

First eBook Edition *June 2013

Production by MuseItUp Publishing

To Ada, Sophie, Bree, and Gigi.

Few works of published fiction are the product of a single person’s efforts. Critique partners contribute their thoughts and editors their words. “Highway 24” is no exception. Thanks to the members of the Mars Hill Writers Group who listened to early drafts and encouraged me to continue. Thanks to my editor Katie Carroll who polished away the rough spots until the words shone with brilliance. And thanks to my wife Tracy for putting up with a cranky, sleep-deprived writer.

Highway 24

Jeff Chapman

MuseItUp Publishing

www.museituppublishing.com

by

Jeff Chapman

A moonless autumn night loomed under a vaulted sky bristling with stars. Paul steered his car along a dark stretch of Highway 24, heading home from a sales trip. A straight, level highway lengthened before him, a thin gray scratch across a landscape of shadows. The road cut through miles of pastures and open farmland devoid of human dwellings. A few rolling hills interrupted the flat monotony, and tree-lined creeks carved ribbons across the expanse. In the primordial darkness, absent of man’s probing lights and rationality, every light flared like a beacon, a candle flickering for the lost soul. Dash after yellow dash glowed like a spark from a fire before fading into the darkness that folded in behind him the way black curtains close off the stage at the end of a play.

He had been driving for hours, trying to make time on an empty road. The words WAILING CREEK flashed in his headlights, emblazoned in reflective white across a green rectangle. Guardrails marked the bridge, and trees hugged the river banks, stripped of leaves by a relentless southwest wind. Paul didn’t pay much attention to the bridge, another unremarkable crossing over a minor tributary, but a speck of color etched the scene into his memory, a patch of luminescent pink beyond the creek and behind the trees. He leaned over the steering wheel, his mind rudely wrenched from its wanderings. Nothing should be glowing out here and definitely not bubblegum pink.

As he crossed the water, he observed it again and again. The aberrance bobbed as it grew larger. His eyes widened. His dulled senses roused. He had grown up with the stories of cattle mutilations and alien abductions spiced with gory details and told at lunchroom tables. He knew it was a bunch of hooey to titillate preteen boys, but out here in the dark, alone, those stories took on an unsettling sense of reality. He gripped the steering wheel as one would squeeze the handle of a club. His instincts prepared him to flee, to press the accelerator to the floor.

When he cleared the bridge, he spotted the source of the curiosity, a girl in a long-sleeved, pink formal, running along the gravel shoulder. She waved at him with one arm while holding up her dress with the other. It was just a girl. His hands slackened their grip. His shoulders relaxed. What sort of dumb high-school kid would be out here in the middle of nowhere? For a moment, he found her comical and chuckled at a spectacle so incongruous. He intended to stop. Maybe her car had broken down. What man wouldn’t want to help a pretty young girl in distress?

He pressed slowly on the brake pedal. She looked pretty from a distance—expensive-looking dress, coifed hair, and flawless makeup no doubt—the kind of girl that wouldn’t have given him the time of day when he was in high school, let alone go out with him. He figured she’d smell like a bottle of perfume. He remembered girls from high school who left an overpowering wake of scent as they passed.

She jumped onto the road. Paul’s thoughts jerked back to the present. Her eyes darkened to black dots as her face blanched in the blinding beams of the headlights. Her mouth gaped in a scream. She waved her arms in a flurry of pink and white, a crazy, spinning pinwheel of motion.

Paul slammed the brake pedal to the floor. “Shit! You idiot.”

His shout joined the screeching wheels. Not enough distance. He was going to hit her. Feel and experience told him the distance to stop, and only one rational answer came to mind. He lunged for a faint hope as a drowning man grasps at the tail of a rope. His analytical side was wrong. Had to be. The car would stop with inches—even a single inch—to spare. The girl would place her hands on the warm hood and glare at him. What else could he do?

He locked his elbows and threw his shoulders into the vinyl seat. With every muscle, he pressed the brake pedal into the carpet. The car lurched beneath him, an animal with its own volition, swaying back and forth.

The car slowed, reluctantly it seemed to Paul. The girl’s form grew larger. The moment before the grille struck her legs, her face came into view, lit from the headlights below, and she was pretty. Paul pitched forward with the impact, but managed to keep sight of the girl. She bounced off the hood and flew toward the windshield. Out of the headlights, her face appeared gray, but her eyes sought his. Paul turned his head aside, snapping his eyes closed after the girl struck the windshield with a squishing thud. An awful series of clunks rattled the roof of the car.

The car jerked to a stop. Paul’s breath came in raspy bursts. He stared ahead for a moment as the shock washed over him.
Please God, let her be moving.
A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him what he didn’t want to see. A pink bundle lay sprawled on the pavement in the red glow from the brake lights. He turned off the engine and flicked on the hazards. His hands shook. He hurried toward the bundle with no thought of what to do. Perhaps…no, not with that thud and those clunks. Surely, she was dead. He knew it the moment the car hit her. He was confirming the inevitable, the absence of any hope.

The toes of his shoes striking the pavement tore at the veil of dark silence shrouding the highway. The girl lay on her back between black skid marks that appeared and then vanished as the yellow hazards flashed on and off, a simple mechanical action with no sense of gravity or wrong or right. Wispy, white netting of a petticoat stuck out from rips in her dress. One of her shoes, a white pump with a low heel, caught under his foot and he stumbled. He picked up the shoe and looked down on her body. A halo of blood enclosed her brown hair. The delicate neck was twisted at a right angle. Her green eyes, drained of emotion, stared at her shoulder. The toe of a shoe and one bare foot poked out beneath the hem of her dress.

Checking for a pulse seemed pointless and his aversion to touching a dead person sealed his decision. Feel something, his mind screamed. He grew up as the good kid in school, the one who didn’t get in trouble. He shook his head at what he had done. He had killed someone. The realization soaked through him like rain spreading through the earth, seeking the bedrock that would block its descent. Paul’s bedrock shattered. He wanted to wash all the guilt away but his eyes wouldn’t water. Some emotional response would purge the weight from his soul, he thought, but only numbness seeped through his body and heart.

With one mistake, everything in his life had changed. He found no easy catharsis. Her death melded to him, her copper fusing with his tin to yield a tarnished brass. Numbness morphed to anger at the injustice. She was to blame. She’d jumped into his path. Not enough time and distance for the brakes. Nobody does that kind of shit, unless…

Unless someone was chasing her. A cold shiver coursed down Paul’s spine. He looked up the road, peering into the black void behind him, listening for a snapping twig or gravel crunching underfoot. Darkness weighed on him from the heavens and earth and every direction. His instincts told him to run, but his conscience refused to let him leave. Abandoning her seemed so final; giving in to fear and giving up without a fight. He had to do something, so he stooped over to pick her up. When his fingertips brushed the silky, pink fabric, reality struck him with the weight of a steel door. He stopped himself.

His stunned mind roused, forming predictions for the future, most of them terrifying. What would he tell the police and who would believe it? They would give him a blood-alcohol test. The two stouts he drank with his late supper wouldn’t help. Maybe his reactions would have been faster. Manslaughter. Vehicular homicide. Prison. Think. Think, he told himself.

He knelt on one knee next to the body. Blood oozed from the corner of the girl’s mouth and trickled in red rivulets across her cheeks.
There was no way to stop in time.

“This is a highway, you fool,” Paul said aloud to the girl. His voice was hushed, quivering.

Dead grass crunched underfoot somewhere in the distance. He jerked his head around to scan every direction.
I’m spooked
.

“Hello?” he called. No answer, which simultaneously reassured and unnerved him. A mouse, he convinced himself, gleaning for seeds. He shivered in the crisp autumn air. A chill rose under his skin. Rising fear of the law and the darkness made his decision easy. He turned back to the girl and her stiff eyes. “I’m sorry, miss. I’m really sorry.”

He strode the twenty feet to his car, fighting the urge to run, insisting his assumed demeanor translate into a real emotion. Terrified people make mistakes. He gulped deep breaths. Through a force of will he slowed to calculated inhalations. Open the door; key in the ignition; drive. He repeated the phrase again and again, imprinting the mundane instructions into his thoughts.

When he stopped beside his open car door, he found his hand still clutched her shoe. He raised his arm to sling it back at the body. Fingerprints. DNA. What more could forensics extract from a shoe? He flung it into the passenger seat, where it landed upright with the tapered toe pointing toward the body on the highway.

The car roared to life as he gunned the engine. He looked up and his hands jerked off the wheel as horror gripped him. A crack no thicker than a hair wove from the top to the bottom of the windshield, a fault line in the glass. A rock, he decided.
A rock hit it. That’s common enough
. Down the road he sped, just within the limits his shuddering hands could manage. Where to ditch the shoe? A memory hanging out of reach haunted him, something about the shoe, as if he had seen it before. Not that kind of shoe, but that particular shoe. But that was impossible...wasn’t it?