The whole thing starts with a stupid urban legend. I’ve found the term is a bit of a misnomer. Urban legends don’t often start in cities. They’re born in small towns where people are bored, where there’s no night life or diversity of dining options. Places where there’s just a diner and maybe a dark bar that only serves domestics.

At least that’s my experience. My family left the big city 3 years ago. My parents moved from Bellevue, Washington to a quiet logging town up near the Canadian border. Why? Oh, they decided, me, their daughter, would do better in quiet woodsy town. But really the reason was money was tight. But now our little town of Pinehurst was the wrong kind of quiet.

People don’t go out after dark. And if they do, they do so in pairs. Always. Teenagers drink in dank basements instead of the woods and their parents turn a blind eye. Everyone thinks it’s better to know where their sons and daughters are.

Apparently, this isn’t the first time our town has been silenced. The stories that caused our fears today are awfully similar to something that happened nearly 70 years ago.

In 1954, Gary Larson was driving back from an overnight shift at the lumber mill. It was 5am and still pitch black when a car sped up behind him on the highway. Its lights blinded him when he looked in the rearview and he rolled down his window and waved his hand furiously for them to pass. Instead, they did the unthinkable on a windy, wet mountain road; they turned off their headlights.

One second Gary was squinting so hard he was beginning to get a headache and the next moment the car and its lights vanished. Behind him was suddenly, thick, black nothing.

He said it rose the hairs on his neck. Something was off. It was an odd hour for a teenage prank. He gently hit the brakes, hoping his taillights would be enough for him to see if the car was still behind him but they didn’t shine bright enough.

Now he had a decision: did he drive home with the possibility of this creeper being right on his tail the whole time? He said he mulled it over but ultimately, he was tired from his shift and went home.

Gary lived on his own little plot of land. Nothing fancy, just 5 acres of wet woods. But he supported a wife and three daughters with a 1950’s sawmill wage. His house wasn’t on the highway and he took a turn onto the gravel county road he lived down and then stopped completely. He held his brakes hard this time, squinting at the rearview mirror. But there was nothing but darkness.

At this point, it had been fifteen minutes from when the car shut its lights off behind him. He assumed the prankster pulled over or turned off or anyhow was now long gone. But he said his heart hadn’t stopped hammering. Something just felt wrong. Like he was prey and there was a predator lurking, waiting.

He kept driving all the way to his back door. He parked, got out, and for long time he just stared at the road. At first it was too dark to see, but I could only imagine how his eyes welled and his hair stood on end as he saw what he described. Eventually he noticed a black car rolling down the county road, it’s lights off. All he could think to do was run inside and lock the doors.

This is all known because he didn’t sleep the next day and when the sun rose, and he felt a little better he went to the diner to tell the morning crowd what he’d seen. They all concurred: teenagers. Gary finally took their view and went home to get some shut eye.

He didn’t show up to his shift at the mill that night and immediately they knew something was wrong. His wife was good at waking him up if he ever overslept. This was a close-knit small town and the well bearing of Gary took precedence over mill production, so they sent two mill workers to his home to check on him.

They got to his house around midnight and went inside after knocking got no response. They found… nothing. No one. A family of five had just vanished.

It wasn’t until the next morning when the place was swarming with police that they found something. A trail of blood started just at the tree line on Gary Larson’s property and led into the woods. It took them to five bodies. One woman, three little girls and a man.

The girls and Gary’s wife, Lisa, were stabbed to death. But Gary himself, the one who had seen the car, had been nailed into a Douglas Fir with railroad spikes. His eyelids were stapled open, so his eyes stared crazed and his mouth was open in anguish.

From the amount of blood he had lost it was clear, the coroner said, that Gary had been alive for a while. He was tortured and made to watch the stabbing of his family.

But that was the end of it. There were no leads. No fingerprints. No DNA testing that they could use. Nada. It was cold just like that. There was nothing but the story Gary told at the diner of the car. Pinehurst had been a safe town and a lot of people moved. There were rumors and whispers of devil worshipers. The townsmen for months would get drunk and plod into the woods together with flashlights looking for some cult’s camp but found nothing but ferns.

For decades the black car lived on as urban legend. And like many urban legends it was taken over by teenagers. If you were a high schooler in Pinehurst it was an age-old prank to pull behind someone when they were driving on a mountain road alone in the dark, ride their ass, and then turn off your lights.

It was mostly done by teenaged boys with girls being the target. Some sick sense of humor. But all that stopped when four football players crept up on Clarise Morgan, who was driving back from a late shift just like Gary. She was understandably sick of being harassed by teenage boys. So, she brake checked them. Of the football players, the driver and passenger survived, while the unbuckled boys in the backseat, did not. And that was the end of the black cars. No one pulled the prank since, and that was 20 years ago.

Until, well… two weeks ago.

Since then, even the cafeteria was more quiet than usual. I was there in the cafeteria of Pinehurst high listening to the seniors talk excitedly about their summer plans with my junior envy. Seniors in Pinehurst were almost always excited. How could they not be? They were almost free. I still had a year left on my sentence. And sentence isn’t an exaggeration.

It wasn’t the shitty food they slopped on my plate that made Pinehurst a prison, or even the windowless classrooms; it was the people.

Many rural areas didn’t get the whole “bullying is bad” memo. My parents have gone to PTA meetings and I’ve been told that some of the “tough” lifted truck dads have protested that bullying is simply a way to weed out the weak.

I was alone in the cafeteria, which made me an even easier target. My best friend, Sam, had been kept home by her dad ever since the black car returned. He was the Sheriff and feverishly paranoid to begin with. Now he wouldn’t let his daughter so much as leave the house.

I bent over my sandwich when I felt a spitball slap the back of my neck. I turned around to watch Ruth Jones set a straw down innocently next to her tray. She laughed with her friends. I got hit with spitball’s often. Spitballs. When I was still in Bellevue, I thought spitballs were an extinct tool of the bully. A relic of the 80’s, as antiquated and fabled as the swirly.

Ruth shook her chin at me. “What are you looking at, slug?”

I gave her the finger and went back to eating my lunch. I was going to pay for that. I had only recently started talking back. It only resulted in more bullying, like dead slugs in my locker, my hat being yanked over my eyes or even a punch to the gut.

When I first got to Pinehurst, I wasn’t just the new kid, I was the city kid. I had a hard time fitting in, and on one of my first days I made the fatal mistake of going on a rant about how cool it was that there were Banana slugs in Pinehurst half the size of my arm.

If you don’t know, Banana slugs, are big, bright yellow slugs. Creative name huh? But they’re huge and just super cool in general. They only have one foot and one lung and can be found all the way up in Alaska. Ok, sorry.

I could go on, and I guess I did in front of the class that day. I was excited because I didn’t see them in Bellevue, and they were HUGE here. But apparently the locals of Pinehurst aren’t very interested in their fauna.

From there on out I was Slug. And if that wasn’t mean enough, every so often, I’d find Banana slugs burned to death or pulled in half in my backpack. The first time I quietly cried, but I swallow my tears and go stone-faced now, because Ruth and her posse thought my tears were hilarious.

Our school was so small we only had one lunch for every grade and when it was over, we were supposed to report to the gymnasium for an announcement. It was probably Sam’s dad again. He’d been pleading with students to follow a 7pm curfew ever since the death of Cody Jackson and the hospitalization of his wife, Kaitlyn.

It was the event that made our town quiet again. Cody had been driving home from the bar when a car started tailgating him on the highway. Sure enough, for the first time in decades, it’s lights blinked off.

Cody was a notorious hothead, and even I knew that he was probably drunk when this happened. Apparently, he had told his brother that he pulled over and got out of the car to go looking for the “son of bitch playing a prank” but there was nothing in the dark.

The next morning, he was found dead. Kaitlyn had escaped, beaten and cut but alive. However, she’s hasn’t been able to help the investigation. All she was able to tell the police was that there was a gap in her memory that night.

But supposedly she’s not a suspect and the cops think a killer is still out there. The only lead they even had was the fact that Cody Jackson had mentioned the car that turned it’s lights off was black, just like the one that tailed Gary Larson.

The bell rang and I emptied my tray in the trash and hugged my books against my chest. I made for my locker quickly, trying to be both invisible and too brief of a presence in the halls to bother. But I didn’t succeed. In fact, I heard my name.

“Hey, Hannah.” I just about sprained my neck from how quickly I turned my head. The only voices that called me Hannah were adult. But this was a student. A boy student. It was Eddy Clausen. Senior, tall, normal.

My brow sank into a deep-v and I almost pointed at my chest as if to question if he were actually talking to me. Instead, I stuttered. “Oh—" I looked right and left to make sure this wasn’t some sort of trap. “Hey,” I said and smiled.

“I like your kicks,” he nodded down at my feet.

I looked down at my stained Converse. I had stitched some cool patches onto them. Trees, rainbows, a cat in a spacesuit. “Thanks.”

“So,” he started walking slowly the way I’d been going, and I went at the same pace next to him. “Seattle huh? I was thinking of applying to UW. What’s it like in the city?”

I froze, I wasn’t that awkward when I lived in Seattle and had friends, but my lack of proper social interaction had turned me into some kind of feral child. “Um. There’s a lot more to do.” I laughed and flung some hair out of my face.

He tilted his head up and laughed like I told a great joke. I hadn’t really looked at him before, but Eddy was cute. He was tall but not all that athletic. I knew he only made the football team as a kicker because I’d heard him get teased about it. Everyone apart from the most popular four or five students at Pinehurst was bullied to some extent.

“Right on,” he said.

Two other guys from the football team brushed past us. They looked at Eddy with stupid smiles. “Groom, groom,” said one of them while he reeved his wrist like he was on an invisible motorcycle. The two howled at that and slapped each other’s back but thankfully kept walking.

Eddy looked after them with a smirk. “Anyway, I was wondering if you maybe wanted to tell me about living in the city sometime?”

He already had me when he said Hannah. It’d been forever since I felt like a human being in these halls. And attention from a cute, older boy? I felt like I stumbled into an alternate universe. “Yeah!” I said a little too enthusiastically. “Yeah,” I said a second time, only cooler.

“Wanna grab burger’s tonight? My brother works at Tony’s, I can get us a discount.”

“Uhh tonight…” I pretended like I might be busy. “I guess I can make that work. Sounds nice.”

“Cool, I can pick you up. Take this, though,” he stopped, pulled a pen from his pocket and clicked it. He took my palm gently and started writing his number. Smooth. My heartbeat however was not.

It fluttered in my throat. I welcomed the cool tip of the pen. It meant so much more than the moment. It meant someone had been thinking about me before they fell asleep. It’s all an invisible girl could wish for in the world.

“Talk to you later,” he started walking again but I stayed still. I didn’t even say anything. I just smiled. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was still expecting a spitball to hit my back any second.

I was embarrassed by how excited my parents were for me before I went out that night. They were so glad I was getting out that they didn’t give a damn about the curfew. My family had gotten priced out of Bellevue. The transition has been hard for all of us and I knew from their somber faces at dinner that they felt guilty. But I never said a word of the bullying. As much as I wanted to blame them, my mom and dad were gentle people. I do love nature. I like quiet places. It was a good bet I could be just as happy in Pinehurst.

Eddy pulled up a little after 6:30. I had to resist skipping to his car. He didn’t open the door for me, but I’d never really been on a date. Maybe that was just in the movies.

“Hi!” I beamed.

“Hey,” he said all cool with one hand perched atop the wheel.

“I passed on my parent’s spaghetti for this. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to write home about.”

“Oh,” he tilted his head back quickly and started to drive. “I thought we’d skip the burgers. I got this sweet view I want to show you. Ever been up to Wheeler’s Pass?”

“Um,” I stuttered. I was starving and debating whether to try to get us to Tony’s for greasy, bacon-topped smash burgers. But I was a Junior. He was a Senior. I’ve never been on a date unless you count an 8th grade dance and I relented. “Ok.”

“Ever been up there?”

“Nope,” I laughed a little. “I’ve heard of it. I don’t have a car and I’m not about to bike a mile uphill.”

“Well,” he patted my knee and let his hand linger for a second. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

I just nodded, nervous. I was unsure if this was conventional. I had been so excited for this date, but honestly now I just wanted a burger.

“So,” I said after about a minute of silence. “What do you want to know about Seattle?”

Eddy chuckled. “You know, I’m not so set on UW. You know Seattle. Bunch of—”

He used language I’d only heard uttered by my drunk aunt at Thanksgiving. I widened my eyes and leaned back in the car seat. “Well, you might be surprised. There’s a lot of really cool people there. Nice, too.” I added as a little slight, but I don’t think he caught it.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Eddy said sarcastically. “But if the girls there are as cute as you, I suppose I could be convinced.”

I didn’t want the flattery anymore. Compliments are a lot cheaper when they come from an idiot. I didn’t say much the rest of the drive to Wheeler’s Pass.

There were some diagonal parking spots with a nice western view of the Cascades. I thought we might hike out to a lookout point. But when Eddy parked the car, I realized he wasn’t planning on us getting out. I sighed. “There are some nice trails around here. It’s not too dark yet,” The sun was about to dip under the tip of a mountain. “We could get out and watch it.”

“Who needs a sunset,” he peered into my eyes. “You’re so much more beautiful.”

For the first time I was glad I didn’t have that burger. I might’ve barfed.

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Yeah. You know, Pinehurst doesn’t have many prudes. You’re pretty much the only clean girl left.”

Ok, I definitely would’ve barfed. “Huh,” I said and opened the car door. “Your filthy windshield is blocking my view.” I got out and he did too. I walked to the guard rail. It was a nice view of the mountains. Evening fog settled like soup in some of the valleys. It got dark quick in Pinehurst. The sun set behind the mountains long before it sank below the horizon.

I crossed my arms knowing what came next. Eddy put his arm over my shoulders lazily. I almost laughed. He was so much worse at this than I thought. But my smile faded. I would have to make things awkward to get out of here without kissing him.

“Hey,” I said. “This view’s great and all but I’d kill for a burger. I mean, if a man brought me to Tony’s he’d have my heart.” I just wanted to get back to civilization.

“Come on. You don’t want to eat that crap. You’ve got a great figure. If you keep an eye on it now, there’s no need to worry about the freshmen fifteen. My sister—”

I cut him off by slinking my shoulder away from his arm. “Look, Eddy, I was under the impression we were going to get some food and have a discussion about Seattle. Can we still do that please? It’d be nice to get to know you.” I lied. I knew this fucker in five minutes already.

He rolled his eyes like a frustrated child. “Really? I know you don’t get many chances like this. You,” he said condescendingly. “With someone like me? Don’t toss your shot.”

“Eddy, it’s a no. To everything you’re thinking. It’s not a maybe or an ‘I could be convinced.’ Hard no, bro. Not now,” I said cautiously when really it was not ever. But I was alone with him in the woods and needed to keep his feelings somewhat intact. My father taught me to be firm with boy’s advances. The only downside was it made them act like little boys all mopey and angry.

“Fucking whatever,” he said predictably. But then he did what I wasn’t expecting. He huffed and started walking off down the road and toward a trailhead.

“Hey,” I called after him. “Where are you going?” He shrugged and kept walking.

“Piece of shit,” I muttered to myself. It was getting dark, and not many cars passed this place. Nor would I want to hitchhike with a stranger with the shit that has been happening. “Eddy!” I called and he flicked me off over his shoulder and disappeared down the trail.

I wished I could beat the shit out him and take his keys. Sometimes being a girl… Ugh. I sat on the guardrail watching the road to wait out his tantrum as the view darkened behind me. It was getting dark. And cold. Really fucking cold. I realized I could freeze to death with what little I had on.

Fifteen minutes of sulking later, sure enough he came back out just when it was really getting dark. I perked up as he walked towards the car. “We good?”

“Just get in, Slug.”

I really didn’t have a choice. I weighed the odds in my head. Walk down a freezing mountain pass with a murderer driving around or get in the car with a brooding, douchey teenage boy.

I chose the latter, but it wasn’t until I got in the car and Eddy started driving again that I realized something. My peach fuzz began to prick to attention. Eddy’s car was black. Wasn’t that the same color as what Cody Jackson had seen? But a quarter of all cars are black. I was being ridiculous, but in the dim light I could see a grin on his face. My heart starting racing. There was nothing to say so I kept quiet.

“This was just a bet. Some of the boys said I couldn’t even get into Slugs pants. You at least owe me money. I put up $50 bucks. You’re going to get that to me, or I’ll tell the whole school you actually keep a slug in your pants.”

I have a temper. A bad one, actually. I was in the principal’s office far more than my GPA would reflect when I was younger. But I’d learned to keep it bottled up since high school. It didn’t do me any favors. But the one night I thought things were turning around had been a sick joke. The one night I thought I finally had something good going for me. I was pissed and it just came out. “Suck my dick, loser.”

I saw his hand flash, I thought he was about to hit me when suddenly lights lit up in the rearview mirror. He paused mid-swing and frowned. It might be a cop and I thought of ways I could flag them down. But the car quickly closed the distance to us. It was inches away. “What kind of asshole… Pass me, dumbass!”

The second Eddy was done talking, it’s lights flashed off. Blackness behind us. Our sudden silence was thick. My pulse raced in my neck, but we said nothing.

“Some…” Eddy’s eyes were peeled in fear. “Some, stupid joke. Pfft. The boys knew where I was taking you. Just a prank. Bastards.” But Eddy was talking to himself trying to remain cool. I didn’t respond. I just looked in the side mirror and into the darkness.

Eddy craned his neck to peer in the rearview and tapped the brakes. “I’m not afraid,” he snapped at me. “I’m pi-ssed,” his voice cracked comically but I didn’t have the heart to laugh.

“You should drive to the police station. It’s what they’ve told us to do.”

“I’m not driving to shit!” He hit the gas and his little Camry groaned in protest.

“Hey, slow down.” We were heading blindingly fast into a curve. The yellow roads signs warned to take it at 35mph. “Eddy!” He slammed on the brakes and the car slid, the back of the bumper hit the guard rail and taillight burst. He kept slowing to a stop. “Get out.”

“What?! You can’t be serious?”

He raised an angry fist at me and shouted. “GET! OUT!”

We were much closer to town now. I still wouldn’t have service but I could probably walk home in an hour. But freezing to death was no longer my concern. “No,” I said steadily.

Eddy’s eyes had become wild, dangerous. He was in a panic. The lights turning off had scared him so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if I smelled shit. He brought his fist down and threw open the center-console. When his hand came back up it held a small black knife, the blade glinting as it caught the lights from the dash. “Out, now.”

I had to take my chances. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out without a word. I shut the door and he tore off.

I was against the guardrail, cliff on the other side. To get into the safety of the woods I’d have to cross the road, which felt like a good way to get hit by the maniac who turned their lights off.

Honestly, I wanted to cry. Instead, I stood as straight as possible and watched the road. I heard Eddy’s car puttering away in the distance, but in the direction we fled from there was no sound of an engine or whish of wheels on the pavement. There was nothing.

I stayed perfectly still, my pulse finally beginning to calm when my hopes evaporated. My heart sprang like a startled cat as a big black car suddenly appeared before me on the road. It materialized soundlessly. Ghostly.

It was an old car, one of those 1950’s sedan’s the size of small boat. It slowed as it passed me, and two red orbs peered out at me from behind the glass. Suddenly one of them blinked and the car speed off towards Eddy without a sound.

I stood there until the cold forced me to move. I didn’t know where to go, because I knew according to the legend whoever was behind the wheel didn’t kill you on the side of the road. No, he waited until you got home.

And it seemed like he was telling me that, too. After all, when those red eyes had looked me, I was certain now that one had winked.

He knew I had nowhere else to go but home.