The Crossroads Read online

ordeal or had walked a long distance. Apart from that, it also looked old-fashioned with rims and fringes, like Carol Ann had walked straight out of a historical fiction novel. And those stains…They reminded Angela vaguely of how pig’s bloodstains looked, something she gathered from working at the local butcher’s store during as part of a summer job. She hadn’t noticed that at first in this darkness, but now the moon was at its highest point, she could swear the stains on Carol Ann’s dress were blood.

  Angela tried to keep an expressionless face. “Don’t you want to go home then?” she asked Carol Ann.

  The woman’s expression saddened. She looked grief-struck, and Angela almost felt guilty for asking, especially considering the fact that she now thought the woman to be some sort of serial killer, whereas Carol Ann had been nothing but nice to her. Bloodstains? What kind of twisted imagination did she have? Now she looked at those stains again, they looked more like wine stains. “I can’t go home,” Carol Ann replied eventually, her voice the epitome of sadness.

  “Why not?” Angela asked.

  “They’re still there. And they won’t let me come home,” the woman answered, sniffing.

  “Who? Your husband and his mistress?” the young woman asked, immediately feeling sorry for the older woman, who might have been chased out of her own home by her cheater of a husband.

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” Carol Ann said, shaking her head. “My sons. My boys. They won’t let me come home.”

  “What? Why the hell not?” Angela asked. For some reason, the way Carol Ann had described her twin boys, she thought the two of them were still young children, maybe five or six years old. Children that age don’t decide if someone can come home or not, especially not when that someone is their own mother.

  “Because of what I did to them,” Carol Ann replied, too lost in her own suffering to notice the confused look on Angela’s face. “So even if I get someone to drive me home, they won’t let me come in. They won’t even talk to me. They’re so furious, but they don’t understand that it’s not me they should blame, but their father…He made me do that, it wasn’t…otherwise, I would have never…”

  “How old are your children?” Angela asked, feeling a mixture of different emotions inside her. The most prominent one was anger at the children of this grief-struck woman, for being such stuck-up brats that they wouldn’t even talk to their own mother. The second emotion she felt was still confusion, because half of the things Carol Ann told her still didn’t make sense. But she easily classified that as being normal due to the stressful situation Carol Ann’s in, with her husband’s obvious betrayal and her children’s as well.

  “Six. They’re six years old,” Carol Ann answered, sniffing even more.

  “But then, how can they keep you out of the house? Just walk in, and tell them to behave or something. I’m sure you’ll be able to explain to them then about what their father did to you. Eventually they’ll understand.”

  “You think so?” Carol Ann asked. “Even after what I did to them?”

  “Yes,” Angela replied, not paying much attention to Carol Ann’s last question, but instead forming a plan in her mind. “I can come with you, if you want. You shouldn’t have to face your cheater of a husband – sorry to put it so crudely – on your own. Where do you live?”

  “Welsh Street, 12,” Carol Ann replied.

  Angela, who was already doing as she always did whenever she had a plan of action – walking around nervously to work out all the details in her mind – stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Welsh…Street?” she asked slowly, barely cloaking the fear in her eyes.

  Welsh Street was barely a street. It was a long, rocky road with only three or four houses along it. The last house in the street was number twelve. It was a notorious house to say the least. Old and abandoned, with wooden shelves pinned to the half-rotten door so intruders couldn’t get in, all windows broken and the roof only covering half of the property anymore. Although the ideal place for local kids to break into or to hold illicit parties, hardly anyone actually dared to enter the old Welsh House. It was called ‘the old Welsh House’ by all village people, like it was the only house on Welsh Street to begin with. No one dared to enter it because of two reasons, and the fact that the roof might collapse wasn’t one of it – teenagers looking for a thrill don’t usually stop and bother about that kind of immediate danger. Reason one was that the place had a particularly awful atmosphere. It was one of those few places in the world where people instinctively felt the urge to stay away from. It looked like a decaying corpse of the house it had once been, and it gave off the same vibe as well. The vibe of things rotten, things decaying, of an evil so great and overwhelming that walking inside that house alone was enough to awaken the slumbering evil again. The second reason was the local legend. The legend of crazy Ann and her axe.

  Angela didn’t usually listen to scary stories, but even she had heard of crazy Ann and her axe. As the legend has it, one night crazy Ann went crazy and chopped her two twin boys, both age six, to pieces with her axe. When she realized what she had done, she ran all the way to the crossroads at Lincoln Street and Faraday Lane, bloodied dress and all, and hung herself from the nearest tree. It is said that every day on her death day, she still haunts those crossroads and waits until some innocent driver offers to give her a ride home. Although a legend, five years ago they did discover the body of local football player Darren Miller was found at the Welsh House, bitten and stabbed several times.

  Although a rivaling football player, Christian Fames, had been arrested for the crime, the latter had always insisted that he had nothing to do with it. And if she recalled correctly, three years prior, the body of Harry Jones had been found near the Welsh property as well. Drugs overdose, the local newspaper had said, but Harry’s friends had testified that he didn’t do drugs.

  Angela knew all those legends and stories, but she had always thought they were just that. Stories. And because they had conveniently left out the “Carol” part of the name Carol Ann, she hadn’t made the link with crazy Ann from the urban legend.

  She gasped as she gazed at the woman, who still regarded her with the same, sad look, and nearly fainted as she realized what exactly was going on. If this woman really lived on Welsh Street 12 and really was crazy Ann with the axe, that meant that she was talking to the ghost of a woman who had died here, on this exact spot…over twenty years ago.

  “You’re…dead,” Angela managed to say, as she put a step back. She could slap herself for not noticing before. The old-fashioned dress, the weird comments, the bloodstains, the coincidence of also being stranded here in the dead of the night, the location and especially the rope marks around her neck which became all the more visible when Carol Ann put a step forward, into the soft light of the moon. Worse than that, she was even partially see-through, like an actual ghost.

  This was not Angela’s mind playing tricks on her, although she desperately wished it was, and this wasn’t something induced by alcohol or drugs. This was real. She had been talking to a real, actual spirit. And an evil one, at that.

  “Yes, I am,” Carol Ann replied, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Wait…” She then continued, raising her eyebrows as she glanced at Angela with the most menacing look she had shot at her so far. “You mean that…you’re not?”

  Angela shook her head, as the vengeful spirit advanced on her. She was glued to the ground, so terrified that she was frozen. The ghost looked at her with a threatening and murderous glare. Angela was pretty sure the ghost of Carol Ann was ready to make an exception to its ‘I don’t hurt women’ rule for her, considering that it might regards this as a breach of trust as well. But it didn’t matter. Angela couldn’t move anyway. Fear paralyzed her, and all she could do was wait there until the ghost made its move.

  The thing that saved her was a car horn. The sound was really close to her, and really loud, and it startled both her and the ghost. She was no long
er paralyzed by fear now, she only looked startled at the car of her ex-best friend parked roughly beside her.

  “Get in!” Abigail urged, her eyes glancing at the ghost in pure terror. “Get in, Ang! Now!”

  Angela didn’t need any more encouragement. She pulled open the car door, threw herself into the car, and shut the door again as Abigail speeded off, leaving a most unhappy ghost behind.

  “Why…why did you come back?” Angela asked, as she pulled herself up from the backseat of the car and breathed heavily, both due to adrenaline and fear. She quickly looked behind her to see if the ghost was following them, but the road behind them was empty.

  “That’s what friends are for,” Abigail said grimly. And that day, Angela swore that, no matter what, she would never hurt or betray Abigail on purpose again. Because it takes a real friend to rescue one from the claws of a vengeful spirit.

  “The Crossroads”

  “The Crossroads” is a horror story loosely based on the popular urban legend of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” or “The Phantom Hitchhiker”. I’m pretty sure most of you have heard this urban legend before, as it’s one of the most popular ones and was already featured in various television adaptations over the years, a notable one being episode