On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 172, of 240 so far.

Need a Lift

I was seventeen when I made the stupid mistake of trying to hitchhike across the country to see a girl I’d met at a gig a few weeks earlier.

The weather was cold but dry, the sky was dark, and the hour was not long past midnight. I don’t even know the name of the road I stood beside, only that the last driver had pulled his truck onto the gravel and said that this was the end of the line for me because he had to find somewhere to park up and sleep for a while, and this road was my best bet at finding another lift.

So I walked. I think I was walking for more than an hour, though it might have been less. I wasn’t really worried, because I was young and stupid. I think I spent most of the time just thinking about how I’d tell the girl what I’d gone through to get to her, like she’d find it romantic or something. Such are your thoughts when you’re a young man, and the whole world is laid out at your feet, with risk just a number and death just a legend.

A car came along eventually, and time has blurred my memory of it, but it was a damned flash thing. Like something out of a TV show, but with dirty wheels and windows that could use a wash. It slowed as soon as the driver saw me, and then rolled to a halt. The window went down, and I heard a man’s voice ask if I needed a lift. I didn’t have any other options, so I said yes, and he told me to get in.

We’d gone almost a mile before I realised that he hadn’t asked where I was going, and so I told him, and he just nodded. I didn’t think much of it because I was looking at the car’s interior. The guy must have been rich, I remember thinking, because everything was leather and texture, and little subtle lights. It rode quiet and fast, and I couldn’t feel a single bump from the road.

I turned to look at him at one point, and he looked at me. I caught my only good view of his face. He was old, and he had a fresh scar at his temple, like something an animal had made. There was a weird look on his face, like he was trying too hard not to stare at me. It creeped me out a little, because it felt like he could see right through me.

I waited a few minutes in silence, then I told him I’d changed my mind about my destination, and I asked if he’d just let me out at the next decent junction. But the guy shook his head without even glancing at me. He said that it was late, and it was dark, and you could never know what kind of strange or dangerous people were around. It was safer to stay in the car until we got back to civilisation.

I thought about waiting for a corner where he had to slow, then just jumping out of the car, and a second later I heard a little clunk from the door at my side, and I knew that he’d locked them all. Then I felt really scared.

He sped up then, and the miles rolled on. I didn’t even know the area, so I didn’t know if he was taking me where I’d asked to go or not. I thought about punching him, but we were going fast, and I couldn’t drive, and he was old. For a while there, I forgot all about the girl, and instead I just wondered if I was going to die that night.

But a little bit later we reached the town I’d mentioned, and its lights, and its people. He pulled into a petrol station, but not up to a pump, and when the car stopped he pressed a control on his door and then all the doors unlocked. He said that we were here, and I could see that it was true. I opened my door and put one leg out, just in case, before I turned to look at him and say thank you. His face was in shadow, though, so I couldn’t see him. I got out, and shut the door, and almost immediately he pulled away.

Two days later, when I was watching the local news in a bus station as I waited to go back home — the girl had been freaked out by me suddenly turning up, and wanted nothing to do with me — I saw the report about the triple murder of hitchhikers on that same lonely road, all three during the past week. There were no witnesses or leads. My hands started to shake.

That was fifty years ago.

I thought about it often over those long decades, as I lived my life. I wondered if I was meant to be victim number four. I wondered if I was being unfair, and it was just a grisly coincidence. But mostly I wondered what had happened to the old guy, surely long dead by now, and I thought about his face. I never forgot that glimpse; it was always in my mind as clear as day.

I saw his face again, just the other night. I saw it in the bathroom mirror.

Something about the light and shadow, and the off-centre angle, and the rip in the side of my head that the damned cat gave me when I sat down in my armchair without realising she was already there. My hands started to shake again. Then I went out to my car. I’d owned a lot of cars in five decades, but yes, it was the same one. How had I not realised?

So I got my keys, and I drove away.

It wasn’t too far; less than an hour back to the lonely road. I was coming from the same direction, of course, and as I rounded a bend I wasn’t too surprised to see the figure up ahead, thumb held aloft. I slowed, and I rolled to a halt.

Sure enough, there I was.

I wound down the window, and I looked out across eight feet of gravel and half a century of time, to the face that used to be mine. And I knew that there was someone else out there, somewhere in the darkness, taking people’s lives under the cold, long-ago moon that rode high above both of us. Both of me.

“Need a lift, son?” I said.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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