The Black Cadillac

It was a cold, rainy night. Mark and Angela were driving back home from an office party. The long, narrow twisted road in front of them seemed to stretch for eternity, and the sides of the road were lined with a thick, deep forest. The clouds high up in the sky tore apart and were hailing raindrops, which were making a continuous rumble on the car roof.

Mark could barely see five feet in front of him. The high beam headlamps swept through the forest and the road as Mark swerved a left. He was anxious and his right foot twitched momentarily towards the brake as if he was ready to slam the brakes if he saw the slightest sign of danger in front of him. Angela, his wife, was sitting beside him in the passenger seat, placidly going through her texts on her phone, unnerved by the storm raging around her. The stereo was playing "Songs of Joy", which ironically, was a song about a sweet, happy girl unknowingly marrying a serial killer, and then found him killing his daughters, and then the girl herself got killed by him. Mark felt uneasy and tried changing the song. The stereo started emitting weird, static noises and eventually went into complete radio silence.

"What's wrong with the radio?" Angela asked, looking up from her phone. "No idea.", he replied with a look of pained concentration on his face, his eyes darting over the road. The car was only a few months old, and this type of malfunctioning was unusual. "The reception must be bad," Mark said aloud, in a bid to comfort himself. "We're in the middle of a forest after all." He continued to drive carefully, not letting the speedometer needle cross 60 km/h.

The car engine suddenly turned off. It just went completely silent, as if it was never on in the first place. The car started losing its momentum and slowly rolled to a halt. All the other electronics were working. The stereo still emitted the annoying radio buzz, the headlamps illuminated the falling raindrops in front of them and a small part of the road. Everything was on and running except for the engine. Mark looked around nervously, trying to figure out what happened. He tried turning the key to ignition. There was absolutely no sound from the engine, not even a whirr. "What the hell?", Angela exclaimed, staring at Mark. "I have no idea what's going on.", Mark replied, still trying to restart the engine. All of a sudden, the lights and all the electronic components in the car shut down. Mark was positively trembling with fear now. He tried pressing every button he could, but there was no response from the car. He sat in silence, groping for his phone he kept in the cup holder. "I'll try and call for a tow truck", Mark said, switching on his phone. He noticed that he had no reception."Crap!", he exclaimed. Angela was anxious now.

"Can you try and fix the engine?" Angela enquired

"Nahh, it's raining like hell outside, and we forgot to bring an umbrella."

"So what do we do now?"

"We wait till the storm passes."

Both of them sat in their seats, not making a sound. The clatter of the raindrops on metal on the roof was even more pronounced now, as the engine wasn't on. Out of nowhere, the hazard warning lights on the car started blinking. The amber warning lights blinked 10 times and then there was total darkness again around them. Mark hadn't touched a single button on the dashboard, yet the hazard lights turned on. Mark was frozen. "Mark... did you press anything?", Angela asked in a meek voice. "N-n-n-no, nothing.", Mark replied shakily. Then, an eerie whirring sound came from under the bonnet, and the windscreen wipers swept the water falling on the windshield without any warning. They wiped the windshield 3 times and then fell motionless again.

"H-h-how?"

"Mark, don't play any tricks. It's not Halloween." Angela's voice turned from meek to stern and she was glaring at Mark. "You played a similar trick on me last year on Halloween when you made your drunk friend, Trent to dress up as a ghost and tried to scare me when we went on a drive. It's not funny."

"B-but honey, I'm not playing any tricks right now. I have no idea what's happening." He said, trembling from head to feet.

"Then, how the hell--"

A roar of an engine sounded in the distance. It seemed to be coming from the forest alongside the road. The roar was followed by an explosion. Mark and Angela both stared out of the window. They couldn't see anything. It was pitch black out there. They couldn't see fire or anything in the distance. Mark turned to look ahead and he saw something he would never believe unless he saw it with his own eyes. "Angela....". Angela looked at Mark's horrified expression on his face and trailed her eyes towards the point where his eyes laid, transfixed. Her mouth fell open.

At a distance of about 3 meters from them, they saw the outline of a car appear out of nowhere. It was stationary, and it stood diagonally towards them. The unusual thing about the car was, it wasn't just parked there. It was hovering...

It was hovering at a distance of about 12 inches from the wet ground. It hovered there like a dark sentinel. Suddenly, the headlights of Mark's car flooded the whole scene in front of them. It was a black 1970 Cadillac DeVille. The car had no wheels and the interiors of the car were pearly white and ghostly. In fact, the whole car looked ghostly. It was completely dry. Even with the heavy downpour of rain, the Cadillac didn't have a single drop of water on it. A ghostly white glow emanated from the car's headlamps and there wasn't a single soul sitting in the car.

Mark and Angela sat rooted to their spots, unable to move. They just stared at the car, transfixed, like statues. It emitted a low pitched buzzing sound, like an electric motor, amplified by about a thousand times. The car turned 30 degrees in midair, towards them. Mark gasped and clutched the gear stick of his car tightly. The buzzing sound seemed to be coming from the Cadillac. The sound intensified and the car whooshed past them and went off speeding in the cover of darkness behind them.

Angela was the one to speak first, "Sh-sh-should I call 911?". "Yeah,....th-that would b-be a g-g-great idea.", Mark replied, still staring at the empty road in front of them. The car suddenly kicked into life. Mark let out a little squeal as the car engine started rumbling. The radio started playing again, this time, a different song, but without the radio buzz. The headlights flooded the area with light and the heater in the car blew hot air out of the AC vents. Angela frantically punched in the numbers 9-1-1 into her phone's Numpad. 2 minutes later, two patrol cars came speeding towards them and screeched to a halt in front of Mark's car. The sheriff guided Mark towards the police station.

Mark and Angela described every detail of what happened to them and the hovering car to the sheriff. He looked at them with an intrigued expression on his face. After fifteen minutes, when Mark finished his story, he spoke,

"My grandfather used to work as a sheriff in this police department fifty years ago. That car is a legend in this town. About 40 years ago, on this exact day, a young man by the name of Randall Fitzgerald was driving his Cadillac down the highway. It was his and his wife's wedding anniversary. His wife was also sitting next to him in the passenger seat. It was raining heavily, and he was speeding down the highway. He lost control and drifted off the road and fell down the ditch on the side of the road. A trekker was hiking near the spot where the crash happened. He saw it all. The car rolled down the ditch at least ten times until it halted down on its roof. The car's wheels fell off during the crash. The car fell into a nearby stream. The trekker called the police but by the time the trekker and the police reached the crash site, the car had vanished. Only the car's wheels were found. No bodies were found, and there were no vehicle tracks, footprints or a trace of anything that might have whisked the car and the bodies away.

Do you know why your warning lights blinked 10 times? It's because the car rolled down the ditch 10 times. The wipers moved 3 times because the car was registered on 3rd March 1973. The car fell into a stream, so when you saw the car's apparition, it was totally dry. Also, the ghost car had no wheels, because they were the only parts of the car that were found. The trekker who was the eyewitness to the whole accident vanished a few days after we brought him in for questioning. No one had heard from him ever since. Once every 10 years on this night, we get the same complaints from people who encountered the same Cadillac. We even set up a patrol car on lookout last year on this date, but we couldn't find anything or anyone. At exactly 11:13 pm, the Cadillac shows up on the road, hovering, because the alleged crash of the Cadillac happened at around 11 pm. Everything from aliens to time travel had been blamed for the disappearance of the Fitzgeralds and their car."

When the sheriff ended his story, the only thing that could be heard was the chirping of crickets.