The Old Woman
Short Story : The Old Woman.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2018
I was driving down the road, in the middle of a cold and desolate dawn, at that time I was going through difficult situations in my life, changes, debts, anger, breakups, then everything seemed easier to send flying, I was going 120 kilometers per hour in my car, when the speed limit in the area indicated that one should not exceed 80 km/h.
Suddenly I remembered my children, who had stayed with my ex-wife, but who I could see once a week, I remembered my parents too, I remembered some good things that I had left in life, which made me take my foot off the accelerator a little and slow down to where the signs indicated.
My name is Lucas, that night six years ago I was driving to the state of Puebla, Mexico, I was moving there temporarily for a job offer, but as I mentioned before, I had little desire to continue forward, it's funny that what happened to me on that road was at the stage of my life where I was most vulnerable, at times I was sure I would not live to tell the next story, but perhaps I should be here so that my story is proof that you should not let strangers into your vehicle, no matter how harmless they may seem from a distance.
In the middle of the road, on the Hidalgo – Puebla highway, at around 11:00 in the morning, I was driving fast, because the road was lonely and there was a strange indifference in me, the depression of that time won me over at times, but after a few moments of introspection I managed to remain calm and slow down.
At the edge of the dark road, I began to make out a silhouette, it was a person walking right next to the road, there, in the middle of nowhere, alone, slowly, with a famished step , I soon realized that indeed, it was a person who was moving forward without any kind of company and with a step that was not at all hurried.
As I got close to her, I noticed that she turned her head to look at my car, but I passed by too fast, so I couldn't make out her face. She was wearing a shawl covering her head, a wool sweater and a long, dark skirt, with boots that covered her ankles.
Her presence there puzzled me greatly. What was an old woman doing in the middle of nowhere? I hadn't seen any cars stopped, a sign that her transport had broken down and she decided to continue on foot in search of help. Besides, the nearest town was still too far away to walk to; it was easily an hour before I saw any traces of civilization, apart from the road.
Something told me to continue, but I didn't, I stopped and waited for that woman to pass by me again.
I don't believe in ghosts or paranormal things, I don't usually attribute the "inexplicable" to spirits or things beyond our understanding, so the old woman didn't strike me as being something supernatural, I was convinced that she was simply a woman who had suffered some mishap on her trip and was on her way to someone who could help her, at that moment I hoped I was that someone.
The old lady passed me by the passenger door of my car immediately, and stood there as if she didn't know what to do. She looked normal, she didn't seem to be hurt or dirty, her clothes were clean, and her presence didn't cause me any surprise.
I unlocked the door, then she opened it and bent down a little to look me directly in the eyes and ask permission to enter.
Can I come in? - He asked me in a deep but calm voice.
I said yes, she got into the vehicle, next to me, and I continued driving.
I was surprised by that woman, because she was actually quite a charismatic person, she talked a lot and her sense of humor was peculiar to say the least, there was something about her, I don't know how to describe it, a strange feeling of familiarity, it was as if I had known her before, her look was changeable, her eyes dark, the only thing perhaps strange, was her smile, because for any reason she smiled too much, her teeth and gums were totally visible when she did it, it was the only thing about her that I found relatively disturbing, because her eyes when she smiled remained the same as when her face was serious, her eyes did not change, which looked strange, her features were somewhat rough, she seemed to have some scars around her face, so I assumed that she used the rebozo to hide them.
She told me that she ended up in the middle of the road after an argument with her husband, who forced her to get out and abandoned her there. I couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible to me that a person would do that to another person, much less when it was a married couple. I was about to tell her that she had married a heartless man who cared little or nothing about her safety by leaving her stranded in the middle of a dark road. It was horrible, an extraordinary situation that I didn't think could happen to someone.
She just laughed and made a joke of everything, sometimes she used words that were not related to what she wanted to tell me, as if she did not fully master Spanish, and was trying to understand the way of expressing herself in this language, which began to seem strange to me.
As we walked further along the path, her answers began to become more archaic, stranger, and I began to get the feeling that the charisma I had seen in her was nothing more than a speech she had already practiced for the moment when she would meet a stranger, me in this case.
I asked her several times what her name was, to which she would reply something like “oh no, my name is not important on this occasion, my name is something that can be overlooked, forgotten, distinguished differently depending on who sees it”, her answers made no sense and she seemed to be philosophizing strangely about concepts like names, age and occupation.
By that time, my perspective on her had already changed drastically, I found her suspicious and I even came to think that she had escaped from some nursing home, which kept her medicated so that she could lead a relatively normal life, my hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly and I didn't know how to end the tension of the moment, I couldn't just stop the vehicle and ask her to get out, maybe she was a woman with dementia, whom they were looking for, but in any case, I thought she was an old woman who needed help, but I didn't know what to do with her, and her attitude was starting to scare me.
I noticed that he began to rock slowly and calmly in his seat, from front to back, as if he was starting to get anxious about something, his hands always together, rubbing one against the other, and suddenly stopping this gesture, it made alarm bells go off in my head.
It was even stranger when I saw that she began to pinch the palm of her right hand with her fingers, as if searching for something under her skin. I didn't want to see her too much and be discovered watching her. I began to think that I had gotten myself into trouble simply for getting that woman into the car, because I didn't know what she would do once we arrived in the city of Puebla, since she couldn't tell me exactly where she was going, and like all my questions, her answers were vague and meaningless.
“Oh no no, I’m going straight there, you can drop me off but go ahead, go ahead is my destination, I’m going to the place where the buildings are, they are tall buildings, there is a person there who knows me and will receive me, I already spoke to him, but it has to be today, it is night time for the arrival, tonight is an exact night, it is a place where there are exact people.”
That way of answering began to make my skin crawl and I became more and more convinced that this person needed psychological help or the attention of a nurse. I was afraid that something would happen to him/her in the middle of the road, that he/she would faint or have an episode of hysteria. I couldn't tell whether what he/she had was dementia or something similar. I had a grandmother who confused people, changed their names, became disoriented and suddenly jumped from conversation to conversation due to her mental health, which had deteriorated over the years.
But she, the old woman from the road was different, she seemed to be nervous, she seemed to have a plan, she gave the impression of not wanting to be discovered by me, and that I would take her to the city, I was terrified to discover if she had a hidden intention behind that facade of a harmless old woman.
I didn’t know if it was the silence that made me more nervous, or the conversation with the woman, so the conversations were punctual, and sometimes they were interrupted by long silences, then I would try to calm myself down again by asking something simple and casual, like if she had children, but the answers, as I already mentioned, were meaningless. “Oh yes of course, dependence, ancestry, what is available here and there, what we can see with our senses, what we can do at the moment we have the opportunity, reproduction is necessary, it is what keeps us here, reproducing is enough for life here, life here is fine.”
After that I didn't know what to do, I decided not to ask anything else, but the silence tormented my nerves, it made me feel an indescribable anxiety, the only thing I thought about at that moment was getting to the city and talking to the police so they could help that lady find where she should be.
After a long silence, I decided to ask a question, which would trigger the point of no return of the trip, without knowing it I would ask a question that almost cost me my life.
And… where does it come from? – I asked.
The old woman looked me straight in the eyes for the first time on the entire trip. She remained silent, observing me. I couldn't see her, as my eyes remained focused on the road ahead, out of caution, but also because I was insecure about turning to look at the woman.
Ah, I come from here, from this planet, I am a person, do you think I am not someone like you? It is necessary to know that people are like that, we always come from here, we are born here, we grow up, this is the place where we are from, we cannot go beyond here, the planet is our place, we cannot travel beyond it, it would be absurd to come from somewhere else, the question is not I understand, I don't understand, because the answer is always like that -. The old woman answered me with her gaze fixed on my face, I could not see her, but I felt her deep, black eyes on me.
I just nodded after that archaic answer, I didn't know what else to do, she kept watching me, then I connected my gaze with hers, and I discovered that her eyes had turned completely black, her forced smile was frightening, her skin was starting to hang, not like that of an elderly person, but like false skin, like a costume, her eyelids were starting to hang, and something pearly gray could be seen under the skin of her dark circles. At that moment, she hissed in my face and lunged at me, making me lose control of the steering wheel, I left the road and advanced a few meters along the dirt road full of bushes and weeds, until I crashed into a light pole.
The woman grabbed my shirt very hard, but the inertia of the crash made her crash into the dashboard of the car. She wasn't wearing a seat belt and I was, so her blow was more spectacular than just the jerk that the impact had caused me, which took her hands off me, and I was able to get out quickly while she got up.
I didn't know what to do. The light from the pole where we collided was shining on the roof of my vehicle from above, and it was the only clear, illuminated spot several meters away. In the distance, the lights of Puebla were already visible.
I climbed onto the roof of my car to see where the old lady was going and to make it harder for her to catch me. I saw her crawl out of the passenger window like a lizard and hide under the vehicle.
I waited to see her again, because I knew she was still there, I couldn't go anywhere else, but I think that, in turn, she was waiting for me to come down so she could catch up with me and do something to me.
Minutes later, I started hearing a strange sound, like a slow, measured, cautious chewing sound, like raw meat being stirred, a wet, patient sound coming from under my Nissan Versa, which had a completely dented hood.
I waited a few more minutes, and I saw his legs sticking out of the back of my car. I picked up a piece of broken glass, got out, and cut him on the calf.
The woman hissed and ran out from under the Nissan, her appearance had completely changed, her skin hung off her like a robe, the creature had apparently very tough, grey and shiny, pearly skin, which shone even more under the streetlights in the area, a huge tongue protruded from her mouth which she dragged along the ground, while she crawled on all fours towards the road, her joints had changed direction to facilitate her movements like those of a quadruped animal, she moved away from me apparently to look at me closely, which allowed me to perceive the details already described.
Then it roared at me, opening its mouth, from which small, pointed teeth protruded, and began to run towards me at great speed.
I ran to my car, I didn't know where else to go, I had left the door open when I left, so I quickly got in, and closed the door behind me.
That monster crashed against the door, while scratching it desperately and euphorically, making strange guttural sounds, hisses and growls. At that moment, when she was right next to me trying to gnaw the door that separated us, I could see her face up close, it was a small head, the skin of the old woman had already been left lying on the road, her eyes were huge, her teeth, and her tongue were disproportionate, her look did not resemble anything I had seen before, it was something inhuman, it lacked any animal feature that I could recognize, apart from crawling like a lizard, her anatomy, her way of being did not make sense, it was something totally alien to what I knew.
My car wouldn't start, which was normal after the hit I had given it, there was smoke coming out of the hood, and if it stayed there, the monster would soon break the glass that separated me from it.
Miraculously I was able to get the Nissan started, then I noticed the cracks in the window after so many hits and scratches from the entity, I reversed and went back to the road, the monster stood in front of me, then started running in my direction.
I ran over it, drove over the thing, and in the rearview mirror, I saw it lay on the road for a few seconds, then it got up on all fours, becoming disoriented and hiding in the undergrowth at the side of the road.
I kept driving, and a few minutes later I arrived trembling at the city, at a gas station that remained open late at night. I called a tow truck and stayed at a hotel. I didn't know what to do, whether to tell someone about what had just happened to me, or just keep quiet.
Keeping quiet seemed the prudent thing to do then, because maybe people would think I was on drugs, or that my perception of reality had been altered in some way, but it was all real, I was totally sure of it, I didn't want to draw attention to myself with my strange story, so I tried to calm down, I got used to the idea that I had crashed when I fell asleep on the way, I convinced myself of it for a while, but I could not help but remember that encounter every day after it, I told myself that it was a nightmare, I had to tell myself, a part of me believed it, another was totally convinced that it wasn't like that, but both stopped asking questions to allow me to live in peace.
It took me a while to realize that it wasn't a dream, and there was physical evidence: scratches were on the driver's side door and window, the passenger seat had a strange iron smell, and I was able to find the shawl that the "woman" was wearing on her head in the back seat of the sedan.
I've been thinking too much about what that was, what that strange entity was that seemed to ignore the physical laws of the world, but at the same time tried to pass itself off as an old woman.
The question that brought her out of her human role was Where are you from?, so I have come to consider that it is not from this planet, that perhaps it is a strange race that comes from somewhere else, between her jumbled words and broken sentences, she mentioned that reproducing is important, and that humans cannot leave the planet, perhaps it is a species that came from beyond the stars, from a totally strange place.
I also doubt that he is the only one of his kind, there are surely more out there like him, taking on the skin of people and getting under them, pretending to be just like us, it disturbs me to have already seen some of these beings without realizing that he was one of them, to have lived in a normal and carefree way with a being that uses a person's skin to camouflage itself in society, to go unnoticed, to learn from people, from how we speak, from our customs, ideas, reasons, nature, behavior, I don't know, this is sometimes too much for my head and I prefer not to delve into what I saw on that road that night.
It was also very clear to realize that that thing did not die after I ran over it with the car, because it got up and fled off the road, it disturbs me to know that it is still out there, waiting to find someone to snatch the skin from and use it as a suit, I don't know what would have become of me if it had managed to sink those sharp teeth that surrounded its mouth into me, I also don't know if that entity will continue to haunt the same road, or if it will go to a far away place to start its hunt again, to learn about its future victims, to refine its responses, it terrifies me to think that there will come a time when beings like this will perfect their methods of infiltration, and will sneak in among people if we notice, if there aren't some that are more advanced that already do it, I should have known it from the beginning, since I saw that strange grimace that tried to resemble a genuine smile, which was only a failed attempt to emulate something that that entity does not understand, perhaps the reflection of emotions It is the weak point of these things, at least of those who have spent the least time studying their prey, that is, us humans.
What I know for sure is that I will never again pick up someone on the side of the road, no matter how harmless the person may seem. From now on, I don't know if what is hiding under the skin of an individual is really a human being, or something unknown trying to pass itself off as an ordinary person.
Copyright © 2018 Prabir Rai Chaudhuri
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