Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave. – Joseph Hall

  “Do you have a pulse?”

  “No. There’s no way she survived this.”

  “We don’t say never until the official TOD is called. Get the jaws of life and get her out of there!”

  For a moment my world was just noise. Sirens, the shriek of metal scraping against metal, rain hitting the road, it was all a mess inside of my head. But as the seconds ticked by, I began to get a better picture.

  It wasn’t quite like being in a movie. No, it was more like I was suddenly teleported to the most elaborate stage production I’d ever seen. The vignette around me had an impeccable setting, with the flashing lights of both an ambulance and multiple cop cars, as well as the blinding headlights of far too many cars. And yet there was something almost… illustrated about it. Like it was soft around the edges or like someone had gone over it with a wet paint brush. Everything sort of blended into each other and echoed around itself. Not so badly that I couldn’t tell what was what, but it certainly took some extra effort to discern it all.

  “Got her out!”

  My gaze drifted over to the side, where I saw what might have once been a car but now looked like a crumpled can of tuna. Twisted steel and shattered glass, it was a sobering reminder of the power but also the fragility that came with driving around two-ton death machines. Even if I could afford a car and the monthly insurance, the sight made me a bit happier with my constant biking.

  “I still can’t get a pulse!”

  While what I now recognized as paramedics placed a mangled, bloody mass on a stretcher, two police officers walked through me like I wasn’t even there. Again, it probably shouldn’t have been something I was surprised by, but it was rather disconcerting to be just… physically interrupted like that.

  “How’s the other driver?”

  “Got a black eye, cut on his forehead. He’ll be right as rain.”

  The other officer let out a stream of curses, but it was the most defeated chain of expletives I ever heard. Not as much an angry exclamation as a resigned sort of mourning. “It’s a sick joke, you know? He’s walking away with a couple of scratches and we’re going to have to tell a mother that her daughter was dead while some guy who was drinking and driving walked away practically unharmed.”

  Oh…

  Like usual, several pieces all snapped into place at once, and the blurry, somewhat watercolor scene around me solidified. Suddenly I was out of the painting I had been in and launched right into the real world, the setting expanding out around me like reality loading in during a video game.

  Except I wasn’t in the real world. I was in… the past? A memory? I wasn’t quite sure until a truly awful, awful sound rose from the stretcher as it wheeled by me.

  I didn’t want to turn and see what that noise could possibly be emanating from, and yet I had to. It was like I was compelled.

  And so I did. My feet slowly shuffled until I was facing the stretcher and I realized that everything else had frozen around us. No more movement, no more wail of sirens. No more sounds of cars on the other side of the highway rushing by. It was eerily silent except for the strange growl mixed with wailing mixed with weeping mixed with the most rageful scream I’d ever heard.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  It started with just a bit of smoke over the mass on the stretcher. The mass that had been covered by a blanket that had bits of red already bleeding through it. I watched, captivated, as more and more smoke appeared out of nowhere, rising into the air like its own insidious curse.

  And then fingers emerged, long and spindly one second, tipped in dagger like nails, before reforming into almost tentacle like appendages, then shifting into the blocky palm something Gollum like. After the fingers, came the hand. And then after the hand, an arm. Always changing. Always morphing. But also always a dead Gray, like every single tiny bit of life had been leached from the skin.

  And of course smoke. So much smoke.

  Everything around us remained completely frozen as the phantasm that had just been chasing me emerged from the dead girl's covered body, still making that truly haunting noise. It seeped right into my bones, and I knew that no matter how long I lived, I would never forget that sound.

  I wasn't entirely sure what I expected once she fully emerged, her image flickering rapidly through dozens of forms, all of them more hideous than the last. But it certainly wasn't for her to stand there, craning her head this way and that as if she was looking for something. What could she possibly want? What could any spirit in that position want? Perhaps revenge on the man who had killed her all for the sake of a beer or two? Was she going to attack the closest human to her, eager to feed on their spiritual energy or whatever it was that phantasms wanted?

  The smoky creature didn't do any of those things. It—she—didn't even float in the direction of the drunk man who was sitting on the side of the road with two police officers watching him. Instead, she turned around and headed for the long line of cars that was backed up on the highway.

  So I followed her.

  I hadn't even been aware that I could move, everything around me had been so abstract for most of the... vision? Dream? Memory? But somehow, I was indeed able to take steps on a road that wasn't actually there, trailing after the still rapidly flickering spirit.

  We walked between cars, most people wearing bored or irritated expressions on their faces, no doubt never having stopped to give thought to who the wreck had happened to and what possible fate could have befallen them. But the dead girl paid them no notice. It was like she was being drawn to something that I couldn't see, a sort of lighthouse beam that was guiding her through the dark of the night.

  And then we reached it.

  Even if her form hadn't suddenly solidified into a spider like, large creature, I knew it the moment she stopped next to a truck. Making no noise, her beastly form climbed right up the side of it before pouring through the cracked window as more smoke. When she regained her shape inside, it was the closest to human that she had ever looked.

  She just sat there for a moment, unmoving, and my curiosity got the better of me. I had to know why she chose the trucker to attach to and not the man who had selfishly ended her life, or even anyone that she knew and loved. But how to get there? Could I even open the door?

  My answer came when I blinked, and suddenly I was sitting right next to her in the cab. Or maybe we were even occupying the same space, it was impossible to tell. All I knew was that the three of us we're in the shared instance of what once was, the crossroads where a death had become some sort of twisted, cursed version of a birth.

  I glanced at the driver, who was just as frozen as everyone else, but I noticed tear streaks down his face, and the way both his eyes and nose were red. Did he know of the accident? That didn't make sense. He was much too far back in traffic. But then I glanced to the pile of papers sitting in a basket between the two front seats. Life insurance. Funeral home pamphlets. Grave stone estimates. College discharge papers. Death certificate.

  Someone had died.

  Someone young.

  Once more, I had the strange feeling of so many puzzle pieces effortlessly sliding into place when I finally saw what was in his hand closest to the door. It was a picture of him… and a young man who was his spitting image in a graduation cap.

  His son.

  …could it be?

  As if to answer my question, the spirit beside me finally turned to face the man, drawing so close I thought the teeth beginning to emerge from all over her face would sink into him an devour him whole. But instead, she simply rested her oily, smoking, intangible and yet entirely real head against his and spoke.

  “I… see… you…”