Down by the Valley

She left the diner around a half past five in the evening and began walking back to her car down the open stretch of road which led down to a nearby valley. She had only had her back to the cars for a second when she heard it slow at first, then all at once. The sound of glass shattering, the squelch of metal on metal, the shards rupturing, tearing and the way the road burned in your ears as tyres left skids upon the dirt. And finally, a loud thud, followed by more breakage and the collapsing of thick materials - designed perhaps not to collapse at all. It felt as though it were lasting forever, but within ten seconds it was all over. She turned around cautiously to see that a red car and collided with a white one. The red car was beaten up and old whereas the white car was a brand-new shiny sports car, possibly on the way back from the dealership on the other side of town. The shattered windows of the now upside-down white sports car dripped finely with blood.

She ran up to the white car and pulled out the only person within - a man in his early 40s. His tie was strangling him and she pulled it off, getting him out of harm's way by dragging his limp and unconscious body to the side of the road. His neck was bleeding and had left a crimson trail along the floor. She called an ambulance and the police and with them on the way, she tried to perform CPR on the victim. She then raced over to the red car and saw... nothing. No driver, no passengers and strangely enough - no evidence that there was ever anyone inside the vehicle at all. She sat on the roadside as the ambulance worked on the unconscious man, performing life support until they had to pronounce him dead at the scene. The police stalked the red car but they too, found nothing and nobody, not a sliver of evidence there had been someone in the car.

But that was impossible wasn't it? She saw the red car coming down the road? Didn't she? She heard the two cars collide in a way which meant they were both moving. She could see, like the police, that there were marks underneath the red car which means it must have been moving when it crashed. The doors were locked and nobody had got out of it. There were no keys in the ignition and yet, there was every piece of evidence that the car was going somewhere. As the police got into heated arguments with one another over the state of the red vehicle, the white one was removed from the road and the woman eventually went home in her own car, being overtly careful considering the circumstances she had just witnessed. The events were both explainable and unexplainable and all she knew is that she had definitely seen that car moving.

The police would conclude that the red car was, in fact, moving at a high speed and was possibly the one that instigated the crash. When she spoke to them though, they were scratching their heads over the scene. The photographs taken only an hour after the accident, as the white car was being removed from the scene not only had shown that the red car did not have a driver, but that there was no trace of a red car ever being in the area. It was as if a collective delusion had crept up on the police, had washed over her, had made its way into the minds of the paramedics and ambulance drives trying desperately to save the life of the man in his mid-40s laying supine and sprawled out on the side of the road. An overwhelming sense of anxiety came over her as she saw the photographs, the very same look that the first responders state they had when they got up and found the red car was nowhere to be seen. The police scratched their heads again and not a single person would believe them. Apparently, it was a well-known urban legend and in fact, people went out there to die. A few months would go by and the man's death would be ruled a suicide. Everyone moved on.

Fifty years of strange events up until that day had occurred. The woman looked through folklore books of the deserted highway with its diner, its small bookshop full of Bibles lost on the sides of the city. Scorching suns never touched it and winds blew through the valley, fizzling out at the top of a steep incline where perhaps, nobody would see the red car coming if they were driving in the opposite direction. Or, at least, nobody would suspect it. Back in the 1970s, there were reports of a ghost-like car driving in the late-night hours, but instead of speeding it was slow - as if (as reported by bystanders) it was searching for something, or someone. By the 1990s, there were reports of this car seen near the valley, this time at top speed and according to one witness, having run over a teenager. But the car was never seen again and the teenager died at the scene with injuries that 'concluded' that they had walked into on-coming traffic.

Setting up cameras in the 1980s though was no good because it had practically proven that there was no on-coming traffic. The teenager themselves was not even visible on these tapes. But the whole thing was dismissed as an early hoax of the internet even though this child did exist, and they did die and they died on that stretch of road in the exact same place this driver of a white sports car had also died. She felt as though she was losing her mind and finally snapped the laptop shut. Her research would have to wait until tomorrow morning. In the depths of 3am, she would sleep off the annoyance and want to prove herself. Maybe it was no use at all.

It would be a year before she decided to return to the site of the crash to set up her own investigation seeing as nobody was listening to what she had found about the folk stories surrounding the 'accidents' and 'suicides'. They had of course, heard it all before by people pretending to be detectives from the comfort of their own homes - the armchair ones. They laughed at her and fobbed her off and so, she drove up to where the she saw the white sports car flip over and parked her car by the lay-by. The bookshop selling Bibles had disappeared and the diner was shut on Sundays. She told herself she would wait and see, capturing the footage on a live feed so that people could tell it had not been altered.

She waited for hours, and hours turned into a day. Nothing. After two days, it was almost here. She caught site of something red on the horizon, flipped on her phone and started streaming. There were ghostly white hands in the drivers seat and so, she got closer to it. She held out her arm as the car came speeding down the road and snapped several videos for her stream. She was still streaming when the sound of the bumper crushed her legs, sending her flying and skidding across the floor. Her skull crushed, her bones broken, her back bleeding out on to the road.

And thus, they would rule whatever happened down by the valley, yet another self-infliction on the suicide highway.