THE COTTAGE ON THE CORNER

Got time for a short story?

I have a great group of Facebook friends who have organized themselves specifically into a FB group because of a common love of photography. It was a chance to share ideas and information and, of course, the pictures we are most proud of!

We recently began doing weekly 'challenges'....each one actually a succession of 5-7 days of posting our photos following a 'theme' of sorts. We've done trees, bodies of water, and birds, for instance, among other things.

This week, during our CEMETERIES AND STATUARY challenge, I posted a picture of a cottage in the Outer Banks; a cottage which has a couple of little statues in the front yard; a cottage which, every time I ride by, and I've ridden by a lot of times, has always made me want to write a scary story about the place. When I revealed this to the group in the post, my friend, Dawn challenged me to go ahead and write a story! So I thought, sure! Why not?!

THE COTTAGE ON THE CORNER

 

It was late evening, just at dusk…not dark, but not very bright either. As he turned down the lane, the wind seemed to begin to blow almost immediately, shaking the Spanish moss in the scrubby trees and drawing his attention toward the little white cottage. A sick feeling came over him suddenly….a deep fear; no...a terror...a soul-shaking terror. The cottage was immediately familiar. He’d been here before. But when? How? He had no recollection of even having been in this region, and yet, this familiarity was unmistakable and unrelenting.

He had to pull the car over to get control of himself.  He turned off the engine. He gripped the wheel and took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, then open, then shut, then open again.  He rolled down the passenger side window from his armrest and slowly turned to look at the house again, now directly to his right.  The porch; the concrete Chinese dog statues; the trees! His eyes darted back and forth across the lawn and the façade of the house as he grew more full of dread by the second. His head throbbed. How could he know this place?

His heart was pounding now as he was both trying to absorb and analyze what lay before him, and retrieve whatever deep dark mystery was hiding in the recesses of his mind.  At exactly the same moment his gaze landed on the concrete angel on the lawn, a skull-splitting pain hit him, a flash of light seemed to illuminate the lawn, a far-off scream could be heard, and a splash of red seemed to appear across the angel, as if someone had thrown paint on it intentionally.  He jumped, so startled and panic-stricken and then closed his eyes tightly, almost afraid to open them again! He had to look though, to figure this out, to understand. Slowly he opened his eyes. The wind had died almost completely. The Spanish moss was motionless. The angel statue had returned to its weathered gray…no trace of red. There was a profound silence. 

“Bob.”  A whisper. Vague, even nearly imperceptible.  He craned his head around, both directions. He quickly looked in his back seat. He looked back at the lawn, and at the angel. In the stillness, he heard it again, this time a little louder.

“Bob. Bob” It was still a whisper now, but much louder, and more urgent.  Still no one in sight in any direction.

He fumbled with the ignition as he tried desperately to start his car. It took longer than usual for it to turn over, and he was shaking now,  and pouring sweat, and pounding the steering wheel with one hand and cursing. Finally the car started, and he put it into gear and peeled away from the house, sending dust, gravel, and sand flying in all directions.  As he pulled away, he was also fumbling with his armrest to find the buttons to roll up the windows. When he reached the end of the street, he’d come to a cul-de-sac. There was no outlet. He was going to have to turn around and drive by the house again.  

He swung the car around but drove a little more slowly up the street toward the little cottage. As he approached, he couldn’t take his eyes off the angel. It beckoned him, taunted him as he got closer.  And just as he was about to reach the edge of the property, he suddenly accelerated very rapidly again, as if he was afraid something would reach out and grab him. His eyes were still on the angel, sadly, as he charged forward, and straight into the cross street at the intersection. It all happened so fast, he couldn’t have known what hit him. Timing was such that he was right in the middle of the intersection as a large tank truck struck him directly on the driver-side of the car, while a very large pickup truck hit the passenger-side fender area, effectively blowing apart the entire front two thirds of the car. 

Of course, he was killed, mercifully, instantly.  By some miracle, the tanker driver and pickup driver were both spared, but suffered at great length, both physically and spiritually. Emergency personnel who were on the scene say they are still haunted by the body fragments they found all around the scene, especially in the lawn of the little cottage.  If you can get them into a conversation about the accident, many will relate how, as they cleaned up the area and the lawn, they had to use special chemicals to get the blood off the angel statue.

It's the stuff of legends, the making of a campfire story. It's fodder for generations of emergency personnel to distort and romanticize. It's the power of suggestion; the power of the mind to drive us to do strange things. It's the bent of a house to draw in and destroy helpless victims. It's the remote possibility of a life lived before, of a visit in another body, another time. It's a timeless mystery.