One night on a camping trip with some of my friends, my friend Dave told us this story about what happened to the cousin of one of his sister’s boyfriends.  Her name was Autumn—not the sister, but the cousin—and she was driving home from college all by herself for spring break.
 It was a dark and stormy night.  Hey, I’m not just beginning with such a cliché sentence because it fits the mood of the story.  This was the way Dave told it to me and he says it took place on a dark and stormy night, so there.  Anyway, because of a stressful midterm week and a test late that afternoon, Autumn had a late start on the long five-hour drive home.  If the weather hadn’t already made it dark out, the sun would have set by then and the light of dusk might have given her a temporary shimmer of sunlight to help her see the road.  The rain had just started shortly after she drove out of town.  It was a cold March rain; spring would come soon but the earth was still gripped by the lingering spirit of death.  A cold, threatening wind howled its ghostly scream out in the darkness.
    Hey, how’s that for setting the mood, anyway?  Ooh, I just love telling ghost stories!  Anyway, Autumn’s tiny red Geo Metro skated along the wet interstate at a borderline reckless speed.  The rain fell harder and harder, and it became harder for her to see more than a few feet ahead.  Still, she wanted so much to be home, so she passed every car she approached on the road.  Autumn gripped the wheel a little tighter every time the force from passing the larger trucks nearly lifted her little car off the ground, and she winced slightly when the rain kicking off the cars in front of her blinded her view almost completely.  Nice, eh?
    The rain began to lighten up a bit eventually, and by this time Autumn had less than an hour before she would be home.  Cheered by this thought, she sang along to a mix of songs she had taped off the radio, relaxing her grip and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel.  She began to think about the road.
     Life is kind of like a road, she mused, you drive along and think about getting to your destination…but what if there is no destination?  What if life means driving on and on without stopping, and if you do stop, is that when you die?
     Hmm, I wonder what Jack Kerouac would have to say about that.   He wrote about life on the road, you know, but I don’t think that he thought that you could die from not being on the road, but he’s dead now, isn’t he?  So I guess you never know.  Where was I?  Oh yes—
     Autumn was surprised by this sudden revelation, but without other distractions in her car she brooded over the ideas of life and death—whether this included Kerouac I do not know—in connection with driving down the interstate.
     The road curved toward the left.  As she turned with it, she casually wondered what would happen if she suddenly let go of the wheel.  I would just go straight into that ditch, she thought.
 The visibility was so bad that Autumn didn’t see the dead dog on the road until it was only twenty feet ahead.  Ew, I forgot just how sick this part of the story is.  She missed it, but she really had to swerve out of the way.  Her heart rate soared at the near miss, combined with the horror of seeing the decaying corpse of what had once been a beautiful creature.  Who wrote this line, anyway—Ed Wood??
     These morbid thoughts left her feeling estranged from the upbeat, happy-go-lucky music playing on her tape deck, and she began to flip through radio stations instead.  Now that she was closer to home, she could pick up some more familiar stations, and settled on one that played mostly jazz.
     She listened to the sounds of saxophones, trumpets and basses carving strange, almost eerie music into the infinitely dark night.  It had been quite a while since she passed a car, and what with her philosophizing and meddling with the radio she had slowed down to only five miles above the limit.  Although the speed limit was more of a minimum than a maximum to her, Autumn was finally relaxing into the peace of driving a long, familiar road.  Her eyelids even began to droop a little, and she bugged her eyes to keep her from falling asleep.
     Don’t you fall asleep on me, too!  Come on, this story isn’t that bad.
     As she looked at the blackness in her rearview mirror, she noticed the headlights of an approaching car suddenly appear from over a hill, which seemed weird because she hadn’t seen any cars on the road for a long time now.  Autumn did not know why, but this car gave her an unusual feeling of dread.  She unconsciously sped up.  Simultaneously, the rain fell with increasing intensity.  She listened to the jazz music wailing on her stereo.  It was starting to creep her out, as it would to me too, and now she thought the high-pitched screeching of the saxophone even sounded kind of like a banshee.  But she reasoned that it was only music, and tried to ignore the uneasiness it made her feel without bothering to change the station.  You go, girl, you show that music who’s boss.  I’m rooting for you.
     The car behind her edged closer.  Despite the intensity of the rain she continued to accelerate, unaware that she was now going more than one hundred miles per hour, if a Metro can even go that fast.  (Yeah, Dave, are you sure that can happen?)  A road sign told her that her home was only thirteen miles away.  She could now see the lights of the city reflected off of the cloudy night sky in the distance, glowing like the light at the end of a dark tunnel.  But the peace she had found in simple driving had dissipated, and her inexplicable dread of the car was really starting to bother her.
     You know, this girl’s really starting to sound like she has problems other than driving like a moron.  Maybe she should go in for counseling.  Anyway, she somehow knew that she did not want that car behind her to pass her, no matter how fast it was going.  Increasing her speed even more, her hands grasped tightly around the steering wheel and her pulse raced.  She was afraid that her speed in this weather was dangerous but she couldn’t bring herself to slow down.
     The music was really freaking her out new, with the saxophone screeching at pitches that could possibly have broken glass.  (Only they didn’t, or else her windows would have broken, right?)  But she turned up the volume on the radio.  She wanted more noise to cover the wailing of the wind and the rain.
     The car behind her came closer and closer until it was right behind her, and she could almost make out the shadow of the solitary figure in the driver’s seat.
     The turnoff for her home town was now only a quarter of a mile down the road, and Autumn knew she had to slow down.  She was still afraid of the car, but she had to go home.  She gave up her speed and surrendered reluctantly to the ominous presence behind her.  Oh, don’t you just love that word?  Ominous!  Ominous ominous ominous!  This story would be much scarier if it only had the word “ominous” in it a few more times.  Moving on…
     The other car had already moved into the left lane and Autumn looked curiously at the black car which had defeated her.  Maybe it was the creepy music, the stormy darkness, the roadkill, or her morbid thinking which played upon her superstitions—or maybe she was a total psycho!—but when she looked over to see the driver she saw the figure of Death, visible from the light of the headlights.  It turned towards her and grinned, a grim skull bearing cruel teeth and showing only the sockets where eyes should be, while a skeletal hand held the steering wheel.
     Autumn missed her exit.  Horrified by the apparition, she slammed on her brakes.  At her speed, the tires squealed and skidded on the wet, slippery road.  She tried to turn into the skid, but did not notice that the road began to turn to the left.  Autumn’s tiny Geo Metro skidded straight off the road and flipped two or three times before it finally stopped in the ditch, a crumpled, flattened piece of metal and plastic.
     It wasn’t until the middle of the next day that anyone took notice of this mess.  Sure, a few people saw it as they drove by that morning, but they were all in a hurry and assumed that it was just a wreck someone had left by the side of the road.  Finally some policemen found it and called a tow-truck.  The little Metro was towed away to a scrap metal company and the girl’s family was contacted based on the information on the license plate.  The accident was ascribed as a casualty of bad weather conditions for driving, or possible falling asleep at the wheel.
     Ever since, drivers passing along that section of the interstate at night tend to feel a little uneasy, and some of them admit that they have heard jazz music playing from somewhere off in the distance.
     Dave swore to us that this story is true.  But, now that I think about it, he didn’t explain how he could know it if Autumn died and didn’t tell anyone about what happened.  Or how he would know that other drivers could hear jazz music on the road.  You know, Dave didn’t explain a lot of things.  After he finished telling us this story he said it just goes to show that Geo Metros are scary little cars to drive, and he would never ride in one.  Oh well—it’s a dumb story anyway.  What’s on TV?