The Yellow Car

Everyone’s got one of those stories. A ghost that visited a childhood bedroom, a near-miss on the highway that should’ve killed them, a moment that never quite made sense no matter how many times they turned it over. I’ve got mine too, and for twenty-six years I’ve kept it mostly to myself, because the one time I told it, nobody believed me, and I stopped trying after that. But something happened this morning that dragged the whole thing back up, and I think I finally have to tell it properly, start to finish, before I lose the nerve again.

It starts in the summer of 2000. I was fourteen, on a scout camp somewhere in upstate New York, though I couldn’t tell you the exact spot even now. I was the kind of kid who didn’t quite fit anywhere in the troop, the type who got left standing when everyone else paired off, and by that point in the trip I’d mostly stopped expecting otherwise.

So when it came time for the orienteering exercise, compasses, maps, the whole thing, I wasn’t surprised nobody wanted me, not even the older kids who usually got stuck with the stragglers out of obligation. What I didn’t expect was one of the dads stepping in as my partner. We set off together, plotting points, checking bearings against the map, and for a while it was genuinely fun, the most fun I’d had all trip, right up until about an hour in, when I really had to pee. I told him, and he peeled off to give me space while I ducked behind a tree.

That’s when the forest went silent.

Not quiet. Silent, completely, all at once, like someone had reached out and switched it off. No birds, no insects, not even wind moving through the leaves. I cut myself off mid-business, yanked my pants up, and went looking for him, already feeling that first cold drop in my stomach. He wasn’t there. I called out. Nothing came back but my own voice, swallowed up by trees that all suddenly looked wrong, unfamiliar, like the path I’d walked in on had rearranged itself the second I wasn’t looking. He had the map. He had the compass. And somewhere in the middle of all that silence, it sank in: I was lost.

I tried to backtrack anyway, some stubborn refusal to accept it, but every direction looked the same as every other, and the quiet just kept pressing in, until I wasn’t walking anymore, I was running, scanning for anything I recognized, right up until the ground disappeared under me and I went down hard into a ditch I never saw coming. I scraped myself up pretty badly, but the fall did one useful thing: it snapped me out of the spiral. Panicking wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I stood, brushed the dirt and blood off my hands, and made myself think, actually think, until something one of the scoutmasters had said during orientation surfaced in my head, clear as if he were standing next to me: “If any of you get lost, pick a direction and just move. This whole campground’s ringed by roads. You can’t walk far enough in one direction to not hit one eventually.”

I laughed at myself for how stupid I was for panicking. I could just find a road and either flag down a car, or follow it until I hit something.

So I picked the direction of the sun in the sky, and started moving toward it. A while past and I had to move around a few large hills and through some dense bushes. But eventually I saw what looked like asphalt ahead. I jogged forward and sure enough, a road came into view. I slowed my pace and walked up to the side of it. One way was straight, the other had a slight bend that went around some trees so I couldn’t see where it led. I decided I would wait there for a solid while before attempting to move anywhere, even at that age I knew better than to keep wandering, if people noticed I was gone, they would look for me, better to sit and wait than to get more lost.

Eventually after listening to the freaky silence around me for around 10 minutes, I heard a car approaching in the distance. I stood, it was the first sound I’d heard aside from my footsteps and own breathing. But shortly after hearing it get closer, I heard other footsteps, fast ones, coming from the direction of the bend, the same way as the car.

My heart started thumping, they were human definately, the unmistakable clap of shoes against asphalt, one after another.

After staring at the corner for only a few moments, a man rounded the bend, it was hard to see him in detail, but I remember his face looked strange, big bushy eyebrows, so massive it nearly formed a unibrow, his face was super round, he had a large nose and dark eyes. His face had an expression of absolute terror written all over it, and he waved his arms above his head as he ran.

I didn’t know if I should run or hide, what was I supposed to do? A strange man was running at me in the middle of nowhere, and apparently he was yelling as well. I tried listening to what he was saying, but it was… unintelligible nonsense, like a different language, the only thing I could decipher was the tone. Absolute panic. Just as I was about to turn and run back into the forest, I saw the car round the bend. The first thing I noticed about it was its colour, a sickly yellow, almost like the colour of sick vomit, or a playground slide that had long faded in the sun. The next thing I noticed was its shape, it was unlike any car I’d ever seen, boxy, and strangely luxury looking. It’s grill reminded me heavily of a rolls-royce, and its overall demeanor screamed it too.

I remember being so incredibly relieved, but that didn’t last long. Something was very wrong.

The car had no driver.

Almost as if it was reacting to my thoughts, the entire car suddenly turned to face me, unnaturally quickly, so fast it made my adrenaline spike. There was no squeal of the wheels, no sharp turn of them either, just a quick jerking motion to face me.

I screamed and dove out of the way as the car raced past me, I felt the wind smack me soon after, and I scrambled on the ground to turn back and look, the car had fully turned around to face me again, so unnatural it made my skin crawl. It hadn’t lost any speed, I was done for, surely this car would slam into me, ending it all. But thinking on my feet, I stood and jumped as fast and as high as I could. I put my hands out to shield my face, and I felt the sloped windscreen smash into every part of me except my head. I still remember the pain, it shot up my arms and legs and I just remember all the air from my lungs being shot out.

I rolled off the car and onto the floor, that also hurt like hell, the asphalt was so solid my whole body shook.

At this point adrenaline carried me through what would’ve been immense lasting pain, the initial impact quickly faded as I fought to stand back up. The car had already turned 180 degrees and was racing toward me again. That’s when I noticed something, the door handle was on the front end of the car, the opposite way it should’ve been. If I could get inside the car, it wouldn’t be able to hit me.

I put my plan into action, gritting my teeth, I waited for the perfect moment, not half a second later, I jumped to the side, and the car began to follow me, turning so unnaturally fast, but I was faster, I just reached the door handle, grabbing it tight, and the cars own force of turning whipped the door open, but threw me to the floor again. It drove over my fingers, and I don’t remember feeling any pain, just numbness growing from my hand. I didn’t care, as long as that wasn’t my body.

The car turned around again so quickly, but this time, the door was wide open, and as I had thought, it was backwards, I had heard the term “suicide door” from my father, where doors opened the opposite way for some cars, usually old ones, not that this one looked very old at all.

It sped towards me once again, and I grimaced before doing the same motion I’d done before to open it, but this time, I dove toward the interior, my body twisting mid-air, I reached out and grabbed everything, the console, the seatbelt, a fistful of upholstery, anything that wouldn’t let go of me. The car dragged me half in, half out, my legs still hanging out the open door, scraping against the road as it spun. I remember screaming, not words, just noise, as I hauled myself the rest of the way in.

Even inside, it didn’t stop. It spun in place, fast, impossibly fast for something with no tire squeal to match, and I was thrown sideways into the door, then the dash, then the door again, over and over, weightless for half-seconds at a time. I reached back blind, found the handle, and pulled. My arm screamed at me. The door felt like it was bolted to the earth, like closing it meant closing something that didn’t want to be closed, and for a second I didn’t think I had the strength left, adrenaline or not. Then it gave, all at once, and slammed.

Silence.

Not the eerie kind from the forest. Just… silence. The spinning had stopped mid-turn, like someone hit pause. My whole body was still buzzing with the motion even though the car wasn’t moving anymore.

I turned my head, slow, because some part of me already knew what I’d see before I saw it. The driver’s seat was empty. Not just unoccupied, empty in a way that felt wrong, like the space itself had never been meant to hold anyone. The wheel wasn’t even turned. It just sat there, dead straight, like the car had never needed hands on it at all.

That’s when the tiredness hit. Not normal tired, not adrenaline-crash tired. It came in from the edges, first my fingers, then my arms, then it was pulling at the inside of my skull, and I remember thinking, distantly, that I should be more scared of that than I was of the car. I tried to grab the handle again, tried to get out before whatever this was finished happening to me, but my hand wouldn’t close properly, my fingers were numb and screaming at the same time. My eyes kept sliding shut and dragging back open, slower every time, the empty driver’s seat swimming in and out of focus, until one of those blinks just didn’t come back.

The next thing I knew, I was somewhere else. Jersey City. Where I lived, inside the car. My heart began to race, but I calmed myself, the car wasn’t yellow, instead it was a crimson, shiny.

For a moment I just sat there, letting it sink in. I was home. That much I was sure of. But nothing after that made sense. How had I gotten here? Was this some kind of dream, one of those unbearably vivid ones you wake from still convinced it happened? Had I eaten something out in those woods, some mushroom that fried my brain into imagining all of it? The mental spiral stopped hard when a man’s voice cut through it, yelling from somewhere outside the car.

I jerked upright and grabbed for the door handle before my brain caught up with my body, and the second my fingers closed around it, pain lit up my whole hand, sharp enough to make me gasp and yank back. That settled it, at least. Dreams didn’t leave marks like that. Whatever had happened, it had happened to me, for real, in a body that could still feel every bit of it. The man outside kept shouting. I gritted my teeth against the ache and forced the door open anyway.

It swung out backwards, same as before, and I half-climbed, half-fell out of it. My legs barely held me. Every part of me ached in that deep, bruised way that told me the pain wasn’t going anywhere for a while. I was standing on a driveway I didn’t recognize, in front of a house I’d never seen, and when I looked up, a man was watching me from the doorway, sunglasses on despite the hour, a hat pulled low. I couldn’t quite place his expression. Fear, maybe. Or confusion. Or something closer to sympathy, like he already understood more about what was happening to me than I did.

“You best get outta here,” he said.

I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I had no idea where I was, how I’d gotten there, what that car had been or why it had tried to kill me, and the weight of all of it finally caught up with me at once. I broke down completely, sobbing in a stranger’s driveway with no explanation I could even begin to offer.

Whatever he saw in that, it changed something in his face. He crossed the driveway and put a hand on my shoulder, and the second he touched me, the panic just drained out, more than it had any right to for someone I’d never met.

“You best get going,” he said, gentler now. “Down that road, then take a left. Your house is there.” He pointed.

I stopped crying, hit with a gratitude so sudden and so strong I couldn’t get a single word out. I didn’t know this man. I was sure of that. And yet some part of me trusted him completely, like he already knew exactly who I was and where I belonged.

I walked away from his house on legs that barely cooperated, and I made myself look back once, at his car sitting in the driveway. Same shape. Same unmistakable grille. The same car that had spent the last hour trying to run me down, just not that same sickly yellow.

I followed his directions down the street, wiping my face, cradling my ruined hand against my chest. Everything around me looked both familiar and subtly off, like a memory redrawn slightly wrong. Then I hit a gap in the houses where the skyline opened up, the same view of Manhattan I’d grown up seeing nearly every day of my life.

There was a building that didn’t belong there.

It rose above everything around it, sheathed almost entirely in glass, catching the morning light in a way that made the whole thing look like it was on fire. I knew that skyline. I could’ve drawn it from memory with my eyes shut, every silhouette, every rooftop, and none of them looked anything like this. I stared, waiting for my eyes to adjust, for the shape to resolve into something familiar. It didn’t. It just stood there, finished, gleaming, impossible, exactly where I was certain there had only ever been an empty lot.

I didn’t have room left in me for one more impossible thing, so I turned away and pushed forward, faster now, toward home. The street was mine, I recognized every curve of it, but wrong in small ways, houses swapped for newer ones, unfamiliar cars parked in driveways, trees missing or standing somewhere they shouldn’t be. Small wrongnesses stacked on top of each other until the whole street felt like a photograph of itself taken from a slightly different angle.

By the time I reached my own front door, I was running on nothing but momentum. I lunged for it, ready to pound on the wood, but the same drowsiness from before rose up and swallowed me before my hand ever landed.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in my own house, my body still screaming with pain, everything around me exactly as I’d left it before the trip. My mother stood over me, crying.

Apparently I had disappeared from the scout trip, and the dad who was with me alerted the officials as soon as he realized I was gone. They searched for two days and couldn’t find a trace of me, scent dogs tracked me to the road where I was and then lost the smell. And then all of a sudden, I show up curled on the front porch of my house all the way back in Jersey City completely passed out and in my scout gear with injuries all over.

I told the police everything. They didn’t believe a word of it, and after enough rounds of the same skeptical looks, I stopped telling anyone at all, even myself. For a while I almost managed to convince myself none of it had happened, that a lost, panicked kid’s brain had just filled in the gaps with something easier to explain away as a fever dream.

Then, a year later, they demolished a crumbling building in Manhattan, and began construction on a replacement.

I stood at the edge of Jersey and watched the first steel go up, and I didn’t need to see one more beam of it to know exactly what it would look like when it was finished. I’d already seen it. Glass, all of it, catching the light like it was burning from the inside. I watched that building rise for two years, floor by floor, into the exact shape I’d stared at from a street corner a year before it existed. Nobody builds a memory before the thing it’s a memory of. I had. That’s when I stopped needing anyone else to believe me.

Fast forward to today. I’m thirty-nine, still living in Jersey City, just a few streets away from my old house. I have a job in finance on Wall Street, and I walk past the view of that building most mornings if I take the long way. A few years back I finally bought the car I’d wanted since 2014, the year I first saw one at a car show, a Rolls-Royce Wraith, crimson colored.

This morning I came downstairs, made coffee, and looked out at my driveway like I have most mornings since I bought the thing.

Someone was in the car.

Credit: E.H.J