There was an accident ahead, and it looked like a bad one.
I had been driving along I-95 North, heading up to Bangor, Maine, where my sister was throwing a housewarming party. That doesn’t really matter anymore, since I won’t be making it there tonight, but I had been caught up in thinking about it. Leah had been through a really hard time for a few years now, ever since her scumbag of a boyfriend ditched her after the diagnosis, and I was so glad to see her getting back on her feet again. He’d abandoned her to cover all of the medical bills on her own, and she’d been on the edge of affording rent for a while before her pitch broke through at the studios. This was the result of backbreaking years of work for her. I couldn’t wait to share in her excitement of finally owning a place of her own.
The unfortunate consequence of this was that I was cruising along at 85 in the left lane. It was early morning, the sort before the has even broken the horizon and the only light is a dull gray throbbing up from the horizon. The roads were as quiet as could be. It was just my 2014 Chevy Malibu, the leafless, snow-capped forest, and myself.
Until, quite suddenly, I had the company of a vehicle that had smashed itself against a telephone pole so completely that I couldn’t even guess at the model or make. It was sprawled out along the road right at the crest of a hill - thankfully, along the right side, or I would have plowed straight into the mess of broken glass and shattered metal strewn across the road. By the time I had registered what I saw, slammed on the brakes, and come to a dead stop, it had already faded in the rearview mirror to a crumpled dot of smoke.
I clutched the wheel, breaking out into a sweat, and frantically tried to decide what to do. The highway was truly near-abandoned at this hour: I didn’t think that anyone would have been able to call in the wreck yet, and from the state of their vehicle, the drivers inside probably hadn’t either. Calling them an ambulance had to be my first priority. I pulled over to the side of the road, trying to shake away the thought of what must happen to a person when the space around them is crushed up like an aluminum can. My phone was on the dashboard and I picked it up, only to find, with a nauseating wave of defeat, that it had no signal. Cursing, I set it to airplane mode and back again, hoping to change over the tower. ‘No Service’ stared back at me.
At this point I had two options - drive further along in hopes of picking something up, or going back to the wreck and seeing if I could help them at all. I was no paramedic, and there was no way that the people in that smoking heap of metal could require anything but professional help. Still, I couldn’t just abandon them there! I was torn between the decisions and knowing that they might be dying while I just sat here - when I came to the sudden realization, far overdue, that there were not usually telephone poles along the side of the highway, and certainly not along this stretch of I-93. I was surrounded by the shivering pine forests of the northeast, thirty miles out from the last town and a dead forty to go before the next. Even looking at the side of the road now, I saw nothing but swaying trees and low rock edifices.
There was no way that there had been a pole back there. I shut my eyes tightly, trying to remember exactly what I had seen - had there been cables attached to it? Yes - I had seen a glimpse of something sparking across the ground - unless that was just a fragment of the car’s electronic system. I couldn’t be certain.
Suddenly worried that I had hallucinated the whole thing, since I had woken up five hours earlier than usual, I turned the car around and cautiously made my way back up the road. I approached the smoldering heap, hoping that somebody wasn’t about to come barring up through the right lane and collide with the both of us. The details of the wreck came closer and closer into view. At about twenty feet away, I slammed on the brakes and sat forward, nose pressed against the windshield, disbelieving everything that I saw.
The driver certainly had not survived the crash. They had been ejected partially through the windshield, with only their lower torso remaining inside the vehicle - but that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. The exposed part of the driver had been picked clean to the bone. The shattered skull hung at an odd angle from the spine, jaw broken open, eye-sockets scored with rough claw-marks. The arms had fallen from the exposed ball-and-joint shoulder-sockets and lay across the twisted hood, one with the bones still clasped in a fist, and the rib-cage shone white as ivory, spotless as a Halloween decoration. Inside the vehicle, however, the low legs remained very much intact, and the grayish worm of their intestines were still accounted for, strewn in loops across the steering wheel.
My blood rushed to my ears and I vomited. Hardly aware of what I was doing, I released the brake, spun the wheel hard to the right, and accelerated with nothing but the half-though of escaping from this horrific scene. My vision had gone nearly white, and I remember thinking that if I had chosen flight, I might have at least been better at it. As it was I could barely register anything more than the squealing of rubber and the feeling of swift acceleration. I was dimly aware of the prospect of crashing my own vehicle.
When I struck something, it was not the guard-rail, nor the ditch, but a telephone-pole, dead in the center of the road. Miraculously it was not as head-on of an impact as the other vehicle had fared. It shaved along the passenger’s side, scraping off my mirror and wailing against the door, and the shaking of the vehicle jolted me back to myself. As my car drifted sideways to a stop, I looked out of the vomit-strewn windshield and made out exactly what the pole was.
For all appearances, it was just a telephone-pole, at first. There was the towering column of poorly-maintained wood, stuck through with staples and misaligned iron rungs for climbing, and a rusting transformer box mounted to the top. All of the wires that you would expect were sweeping down from the two horizontal bars, and with nowhere else to attach to, they lay strewn across the roadway, dangling and overlapping like the tentacles of a freshly-killed octopus. As I watched, a sole wire rose from the mess, entirely of its own accord - it reminded me of a snake rearing its head before it struck. It turned towards me and I saw that the end, rather than a fray of severed cables, was an intact human eye.
I had the horrible suspicion that that eye had been plucked out of the broken skull of the driver. I will never be certain, but the very possibility of it is what haunts me the most out of the entire encounter.
The eye was very much active. The pupil locked onto mine and the wire carrying it rose even higher. A host of the others followed suit, quivering back-and-forth above the pavement, and I saw sets of mouths lined with rows and rows of human canines, mixed with the fangs of various animals. The elongated yellow front-teeth of beavers crowded the outer edges. Other wires ended in the snouts of deer and dogs, working furiously to catch my scent.
All of this I noticed in a heartbeat, and in the next I was driving in reverse, furiously accelerating as the horde of flailing wires turned to follow me. Several of the nearest ones struck against my side-window, the teeth at the end of one working furiously at the glass, the nostrils on another flared wide open, but they slipped away as I swerved the wheel. There was suddenly enough distance for me to turn hard around and dodge past it all. As I did, I watched the wires fasten themselves to the ground, pushing down and lifting the central pole upward. It rose until it was held horizontal to the ground and then the wires lunged forward and launched it toward the back of my car. The engine sputtered as my foot touched the floor and I rushed forward just quickly enough to watch it slam into the ground behind me.
My Malibu raced down the interstate, pulling me further and further from my hunter, and after a few more seconds of pursuit, the wires seemed to accept my loss and shuffled their pole back into the forest. I didn’t break below 90 until I saw the next exit, and I am sitting now in the very center of town, in a parking spot as far away from the telephone-poles at the edge as possible.