Flash

A Crazy Story Like That

"A car in the woods?" Erwin's mother said in her know-it-all tone. "That's impossible! There isn't enough space to drive between the trees."

Erwin sighed. His mother was a pretty good one, as mothers go, but she had an iron grip on her own reality and refused to listen to anything that challenged it. He would have to solve the mystery himself.

He made a few tactful enquiries around town. Nothing. Old Joe Parker said that people often abandoned cars in weird places. Erwin asked how it could get between the trees, and Joe riposted testily, "Maybe a helicopter dropped it. Or a space ship."

Hmmm. Erwin pondered. Could this be a landing vehicle from a space ship? But why would they leave it behind?

The car was no old clunker. Its streamlined shape was covered with a seamless silver sheen. It had no make, no model number, no license plates. Only a large, black number 13 on the driver's side. The windows were opaque and there were no door handles, no hint of doors at all.

Erwin was itching for adventure. He had never traveled more than fifty miles from his home town of Liberty. He had grandiose dreams, but no way of fulfilling them. A close encounter with the owners of the exotic vehicle might change everything.

He brought his second-best sleeping bag out to the car when his mother wasn't looking, and spent as much time there as he could, hoping against hope. Since nobody knew anything about the car, he was safe from interruptions. He was a fairly popular person around town (although Anne-Marie Henderson kept calling him a stupid slobovnik), but there were times he just wanted to be alone. And there was always the intriguing possibility that the owners of the car might show up.

One balmy Saturday afternoon, Erwin's eyelids grew irresistibly heavy while he was watching over the car, and he drifted off to sleep. He dreamed that he was on a high mountain, overlooking a vast panorama of forests and farms and a beautiful city that glistened in the light. It was a normal pastoral scene, except for the flying cars that swooped and circled through the air like eagles. When he woke up, he was lying on the ground. snuggled into his sleeping bag. The car was gone.

After he made his way back home, he was afraid to tell anyone what happened. The population of Liberty had lost all inclination to trust crazy stories after the episode of the three-headed calf which turned out to be a fraud. If Erwin's own mother could not believe that there was a car in the woods, what chance did he have of being taken seriously now that all proof had disappeared?

He tried to forget the whole thing, but there was always a little voice inside, demanding answers. His search for an explanation led him to become a world-renowned expert on alien encounters and paranormal phenomena. He unearthed a wealth of accounts of incidents involving the unexplained appearance and disappearance of motor vehicles, but none matched his experience exactly.

When he was eighty-six and had given up all hope, he retired to a posh long-term care facility in the city of Doverport, global headquarters of of Astrologic Motors. He made friends with Annie Ming, who had just celebrated her hundredth birthday and had many stories to share. While they were enjoying a coffee together, she started rambling on about her work on a top secret Astrologic project: a flying car. She claimed to have designed an invisibility cloak for the prototypes so that they could be tested in secret. "A lot of time, effort, and money, but those vehicles never made it to the assembly line. They crashed far too easily. Any flying object, even a flock of birds, could disrupt the guidance system."

"Did any of them ever crash near the town of Liberty?" Erwin asked, as casually as he could manage.

"Mine did," Annie said. "In a clearing in the bush."

"Really?" Erwin asked, trying not to squeak.

"Oh yes. I got into a lot of trouble, and was never allowed to fly cars again. I should never have let them give me the number 13 vehicle. I'm not the superstitious sort, but it's better not to tempt fate."

"Did you ever recover it?"

"It took months to get it out. A kid kept hanging around it. Finally we tranquilized him and did what we had to do. We had quite a discussion about whether we should take him with us, just to be on the safe side. But his disappearance would have caused a bigger media circus than any stories he might tell. As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. The kid never said a word."

Erwin leaned back, a wistful smile on his face. "I don't blame him. Who would believe a crazy story like that?"