The Car

“You’re in Mellington, Mr Andersen, so you should know that you're very unlucky. And you should also know not to look out your window at night.”   

This was the advice given to me by my first official interviewee, local resident and cleaner Patsy McCraw, aged fifty-five. We were standing in the empty courtyard of my empty B&B as Patsy rinsed her disintegrating sponges under the outdoor tap. Her fingers were blue and cracked but she wore bright red lipstick that matched the scarf wrapped around her hair.

“People aren’t lying about the car. It’s not a rumour and it’s not a hoax. I can’t count on my fingers the number of people who have been taken in the past year and a bit and no one has done anything much about it. You don’t even see their faces on the evening news.” 

I boarded the train at Edinburgh station soon after five in the morning. I travelled alone, carrying the pastrami sandwiches my daughter had packed for me. My leg was bothering me but it always did when I sat still for too long. The doctor said there was nothing more to do except keep the paracetamol dosage high. I took my notebook out from my leather suitcase and started listing out the questions I intended to ask.

When I arrived in Mellington soon after quarter past seven in the evening, the first thing I noticed was the petrol spills on the cracked roads and the heavy smell of smoke in the air. There was a ginormous American truck waiting for me by the curb and behind the wheel sat former police officer Bryan Locke. He helped me into the passenger seat and he put my cane into the boot.

When I asked him whether the truck was legal in Cornwall, he snorted. “I thought you were here about the car.”

He pulled a toothpick out from between his yellow lower incisors.

“I wouldn’t drive anything smaller than this,” he said. “It isn’t safe.” 

I plucked a small piece of lint from my slate-blue blazer. It was a strand of my own greying hair. 

Mr Locke drove me to the B&B on the edge of Mellington. The church spire was crumbling. Fences had fallen and stayed that way. Windows were blown out and patched over with damp cardboard, blue duct tape stretched tight and sagging in places. The town, when you looked at it on a map, was laid out like a crucifix.

When I asked Patsy McCraw why she hadn’t left Mellington yet, she told me that she would if she had the money but she didn’t.

“None of us do,” she said. “And those who did are long gone—just like you’ll be, Mr Andersen.”

I’d arranged to meet a local farmer, John Ashbeck, at his property just past the ridge. He claimed he saw the car driving across the very field we stood in on the last day of January: “It was red,” he told me, “I couldn’t see the driver and it drove slowly, maybe ten miles per hour. The windows were rolled down and there was music playing, classical music, I couldn’t name the piece. I’m no good with that sort of thing. The lights were on full beam.”  

Mr Ashbeck pulled at the grey bandage that was twisted around his left hand.

“I went to fetch my shotgun from my bedside cabinet but, by the time I was back at the kitchen window, the car was nowhere to be seen.”

“Where did the tracks go?”

“Further than me,” he said. “I got scared following them.”

That night, on the last day of January, Susie Enys, aged seventeen, went missing. She was last seen walking from the faded local corner shop where her mother said she’d gone to buy a single packet of chewing gum.

“It’s always the smart ones,” Mr Ashbeck said. “It’s taking them to a better place. There’s nothing here anymore. The people who live here age quicker and die quicker. This place isn’t what it used to be.” 

Mr Ashbeck pulled again at the grey bandage.

“Sometimes I wish it would take me.”

Susie Enys’ mother declined to comment on the car or the disappearance of her daughter.

Others, including school teacher Jane Maltby, claim the car is linked to government corruption.

“None of it makes sense,” Miss Maltby, aged twenty-eight, told me as she cleared white letters from the blackboard. “The police never come, it’s never on the news. Tell me that’s not the politicians. Twenty gone and not one body. Not one case of any of them showing up anywhere.”   

I told Miss Maltby that others had blamed the disappearances on the town’s poverty.

“A lot of places have poverty, Mr Andersen,” she said.

There was a stack of spare plastic chairs in the corner of the schoolroom.

“It’s the communists,” former miner Tony Jago, aged forty six, told me as his wife served us mugs of tea in their green-beige living room with a lopsided ceiling. “We’re conservatives here mostly and they’re picking us off one by one. Give it another eighteen months and Mellington won’t be on the map no more.”    

“They’re choosing to leave,” said a young man who asked to remain anonymous. We’d agreed to meet outside the old library which was boarded up and covered in barbed wire. An old wicker pram had been abandoned under the front porch and its two back wheels had been taken. 

The young man pulled the neck of his cable knit jumper up over his nose. He wore thick-rimmed glasses with the lenses pushed out. Gray light filtered through the low clouds onto the empty street and painted a silver line across his dark hair.

“They can’t stand to be here anymore but maybe their families wouldn’t approve if they knew it. Susie Enys was ambitious. So was Sam Drago, in his old age. Lucy Amble always loved the pictures, before the cinema closed down. I took her on a date there once and we shared popcorn. I reckon we’ll see her again one day, in a film, on the big screen.”       

I asked the young man if he could name any of the others.

“Not anymore,” he said. “No, not now. I don’t remember.” 

There have been over sixty reported sightings of the car over the past eighteen months with all reports generally concurring with the description of the car given by local farmer John Ashbeck. The only significant discrepancy in the accounts is the type of music heard from the car’s rolled down windows. Some say it’s rock, others say it’s blues, classical music, folk, country, metal. Though no one can ever put a name to the song.

* This article was written by Peter Andersen and published after his disappearance in March of this year (1966). Eyes Wide Magazine thanks Andersen’s family for allowing the article to be published. Only grammatical edits have been made to his first draft report.        

Rachel Makinson is a UK-based writer and editor, with a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from Newcastle University. Her work has been featured by several magazines and journals, including Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal, Marrow Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tabula Rasa Review, and the London Independent Story Prize.