The Horror in the Driveway

We live in an age of pure rationality. Clarity of thought is prized, cold logic is admired.

By this point of view, all phenomena can be observed, measured, explained. All mysteries can be solved.

That is what we tell ourselves anyway.

But what then are we to make of the string of direful, perhaps malevolent, cars that made their way to the driveway just outside the door of the room where I write these fateful words?

‘One after the other,’ would be one way to say how they took over my life.

‘In horrific succession,’ would be another.

They replaced one another, you see, with regular and sad ritual, with no gaps of peace or sanity however brief in between, each of them with its own fatal faultiness of engineering, gross shortfalls of performance, spectacular records of fruitless repairs, and ultimate mechanical dysfunction as though they have made a bet, likely in the netherworld from which they spring, to see which one could rank worst in every measure of automotive excellence.

Explain to me with all the admirable precision that you possess how it comes to be that each vehicle was, in short…demonically possessed.

Or perhaps you think I overreach. Perhaps this is too much for your sunny world view.

Take care, my friend, my dear naive friend; you haven’t seen the things that I have.

You haven’t seen a car void itself entirely of oil in the dark of night, when the owl hoots and animals cry in the distance as if aware that a dark spirit is abroad.

You haven’t seen tires deflate spontaneously and simultaneously, all four at once, nay, nay, not the four only, but including the spare in the trunk.

What does your sunny optimism say to that?

You haven’t seen a car go so out of align, in a manner so contrary to the natural order of the world, that every day it seemed as if you were driving sideways down the road, sideways. You don’t know what that does to a man’s constitution.

You haven’t seen mufflers – new from the muffler shop! – suddenly detach themselves from the undercarriage of the vehicle, as a kind of sick joke I suppose, leaving you scraping down the highway trailing a bright path of sparks like a comet while people pull up alongside you to gesture frantically towards your rear end. Well, the rear end of the car, but you take my point.

Windows suddenly sliding down and staying down apparently for eternity for no good reason? What do you say to that? Reaching for an explanation, are we?

I have one: how about the relentless march of darkness upon the sunny precincts of mankind? That’s good enough for me.

Tell me that you have seen exterior and interior rearview mirrors both fall off of the same car in the same day, and I will cease my ravings.

Fuel gauges that lie, speedometers that approximate – badly – the current speed, odometers that seem to think they are altimeters, engine lights that tell you after the fact – casually, as if they had been meaning to mention it to you earlier — that your engine in burning up and you are now sitting in a blazing disabled metal hulk at the side of the road.

“Thanks a lot!” you want to say, “I already knew that!”

But I don’t, for I don’t want to anger the entity further.

Why resist the truth? Can’t you see that these and many another car demonstrated demonic possession, hauntings, poltergeists, unexplained phenomena, eerie coincidences, and flat-out horror?

Don’t take my word for it. I can put you in touch with the mechanics who worked on those cars.

Strong men of high moral fiber, not given to flights of fancy or midnight musings, men who approached, say, that ’72 Comet with full swaggering confidence, and then after one or two sessions under the hood withdrew, ashen-faced, hands quivering, unable to meet your eye.

I don’t know what they saw down there – they would never speak of it afterwards – but whatever it was it left them shaken. More than one put his toolbox down and walked away, simply walked away.

The Curse of the Electrical System, right here this is enough to make a man go pale with fright, as first one component is examined – and replaced – and then the next component upstream is examined – and replaced – and then the next one still, the next one still, the next one still, in an eternal cycle of despair.

“Well, I guess that part wasn’t the problem!” the mechanic gibbers maniacally each time he comes out to the Waiting Room of Hell to chat with me. Or maybe it is better put to say “he said.”

Come to think of it, it was probably me gibbering.

“Better try the next part! I gotta tell you though, this is when it really starts to get expensive. You own any real estate of value that you can cash in readily, or family heirlooms?” The mad delirium on his face had to be seen to be believed.

How exactly many pieces of equipment are involved in an electrical system anyway? It is like trying to think of infinity, the mental task immediately makes you dizzy and incapable of coherent thought.

You may as well try to measure the darkness at the heart of man.

These cars demanded ritual sacrifices, hundred dollar bills burnt as offerings in eerie ceremonies under the full moon. May as well spend them there for all the good they will do in the auto shop.

We lacked the tools then that we have today for teasing out these ghostly happenings.

No real-time gauges to monitor sudden drops in the ambient temperature, no motion activated video cameras set to capture the elusive movement of a battery pole suddenly crusting over with corrosion, or tape recorder to scrutinize unmistakable sound of a timing chain slipping off its track.

Such tools would have been handy. I could have reviewed the tapes and seen exactly when some spectral presence or other changed the caps on the windshield washer fluid and the transmission fluid, causing me the next day to ruin yet another transmission.

I leave it to your imagination to consider – if you dare – what happened when I next turned the windshield washers on.

Things would mysteriously disappear in the back seats of these cars too, it comes back to me now: homework, important papers relating to the purchase of homes and appliances, proofs of warranty, three half-finished novels, fully completed and completely unmailed job applications, eloquent letters of application to this college or that, also completely unmailed, the wedding ring for the boy I was best man for the summer after senior year of high school, two dogs, both of the peek-a-poo variety, a litter of newborn cats.

“Now where did that go?” I could be heard at the time muttering in a daze, half in and half out of the back seat of the car, looking fairly ridiculous if you want to know the truth, and continuing to look fairly ridiculous throughout the course of a long afternoon, which is what really gets to you, as though some dark creature had laid an Ancient Curse of Befuddlement upon me.

In reviewing this string of events, you can’t tell me that these are all the types of things that could have happened to a man of normal intelligence in the ordinary course of daily life.

No, no, something else is going on.

Don’t think I didn’t try to catch them in the act. Whether it was the Comet, the station wagon, the Datsun, that red Chevy, or any of the others, I had a plan.

It was my way to simply go about my business, inside the house or out, front yard or back, upstairs or down, casual as can be, casual as can be…and then whip my head around in a manner that I think you had to see to believe in order to level a soul-fixing gaze upon the cars to try to catch them in the act.

When I saw I am near certain that I was the only man in my neighborhood, zip code, county, state, country, or hemisphere walking around his house with studied casualness interrupted by a sudden whipping motion of my head directed to whatever car was in the driveway at the time….and I still didn’t catch them at their diabolical games….well, that only goes to show how practiced they were in the dark arts.

My recourses were limited. It’s only a mid-sized city, so at the time there weren’t any automotive exorcists in the yellow pages.

These fellows have a business to run after all, and prefer to set up shop in the larger metropolitan areas or university towns, but man, how I could have used one in those dark days.

I buy new cars now, with their clean souls and clear consciences. I’m through with trying to pull rogue used cars back onto the straight and narrow. Too much heartbreak. I leave that to younger men of steadier nerves. Mine are not so good these days.

That doesn’t mean that now and again when the wind blows chill and bleak, when the moon looks down pale and forlorn as ever, and there are the usual creaks and moans coming from the driveway, that I don’t feel the old shiver up the spine. At such times I make a point of not going into the garage alone.

Even though I always buy new, I always run them by the mechanic up the street, a Voodoo priest, a witchdoctor, the Seer of Sledge County, The Weird Woman of the Weir, the three witches from a traveling troupe of Macbeth, the Wolf Girl of Woodbridge Lane, The Headless Sacker said to haunt the abandoned A&P, and this old fortuneteller working out of the 7-11 on City Avenue I have come to know, before signing on the dotted line.

When it comes to buying cars you want as many professionals involved as possible.