The Road Home

The very first time was an accident. A momentary lapse of concentration, a slip of the foot, clammy hands slipping on the wheel. My journey rapidly turned from a relatively quick commute home down a quiet country lane to something most would consider horrendous and that I considered an awakening.

It had been a long day at work and I was exhausted. Slipping out of the office and into my car had brought me nothing but thoughts of home, of Julia and the meal she’d be cooking, a glass of wine and, if the mood took us, upstairs to bed for dessert.

Breaking out of the city was as mind numbing as you’d expect. Stopping and starting, stopping and starting until I finally reached the open road that would bring me to Mill Lane, a road barely wide enough for two cars and lined with trees on either side, but which would bring me home.

The mists has closed in as I hit that home straight but it was rare to meet any other traffic on this road so I pushed the motor maybe just a little harder than I should. I tried a slurp of coffee from my hastily bought service station coffee but missed my face entirely, pouring lukewarm latte down my shirt.

That is when it all went wrong. What had at last glance had appeared to be the silhouette of a tree poking out into the road turned out to be a hitcher with his thumb in the road hoping for a good Samaritan to pick him up.

With my attention more focused on a cardboard cup and a sodden shirt, it was too late by the time or saw him. I stabbed wildly at the breaks but only managed to clip it while my wet hands tried feverishly to get purchase on the wheel. I only managed to send the car into a massive slide, smashing the rear end into the poor fellow who happened to be sharing the road with me.

Time shifted and I was at a standstill, the mists pooling round my car. Shock and adrenalin were distorting my perception making it seem that I was trapped in a little white bubble round my car, illuminated only by my lights.

I managed to calm my ragged breaths, to focus my shattered mind and opened the car door to see what I had done and what I could do for the poor fellow I had hit.
What I found will stay with me forever. To see a human form so battered and torn, rent beyond recognition was at once sickening but also strangely fascinating. He – for I presumed it was a he – lay in the ditch at the side of the road. Between my car and the trees he was in bad shape. His limbs were twisted and broken, his face had scrapped the road leaving one side a hunk of mangled flesh and bone and the other bloodied and misshapen, his nose hanging loose to one side.

A voice said I should act but the overriding impulse was to watch, watch the fragility of life cling to its existence, afraid and alone save for me, a seeming casual observer.

Between short and bubbling breaths, a voice so tinged with pain and weakness that it almost never came forth said “help me”.

Two words, so simple and human but they had a profound effect on me. Most people would have dashed to his side. Phoned an ambulance or administered what first aid they could. Ran for help even. Not me. Not today. Time seemed to stop while something inside me mulled the pros and cons of my next decision.

What came next was not me. It was as though I was sat at home, comfy and warm, watching a bad detective show on the TV. However, there was no sleuth hell bent on catching the despicable killer, there was just me, a dark road and a near human hunk of flesh in a ditch.

I drew my mobile from my pocket as words, incomprehensible at first listening, spilled from my mouth. Cold words, words I’d never once dreamed I’d utter.
“I’m sorry my friend, my phone has no signal and I don’t know where I am.” came my easy lies “I’d offer you first aid but I don’t think it would help. You’re in a bad way down there.” I said, scanning the road left and then right, lightly treading my way toward him. “It doesn’t look like a busy road but you can only hope that someone comes, someone who can save you. A paramedic maybe”

A cool, cold rushed up my spine filling me with an effervescent thrill. What was this that was happening to me? His pleas now turned to quiet moans and sobs as I crouched down next to him, closing the gap, smelling the scent of blood and flesh, relishing my proximity to one so near death.

“I could see what I can do.” Hope blossomed in what could be seen of his remaining eye. Did he really consider me his saviour? “But, and I hate to tell you this, what I can do is nothing. You see, right here and right now, I’d really like to watch you die.”

That is when his hope died and true panic was born. He twitched and thrashed and moaned and did his very best to call me all the names a dying man would call a twisted man like me but, it was to no avail.

In the ten minutes that passed, I watched a myriad of emotions come and then go in that one eye, that one portal into mind of the man in front of me. I watched at his weak breaths became more laboured, as the blood pooled on the floor around me, watched as the last traces of life slipped from his body leaving only meat behind.

The experience of watching that man die, however remotely connected to my hand, was both electric and calming. It is an inexplicable thing unless you hold that power in your hand.

What I do know is this. On that night, at the edge of a quiet misty lane, a monster was born.