#m213

(11/02/95)

July 6 1997

We set off on our car journey as if it was any other. We were driving to a airport and it was around 10-o-clock. 2 of the children were asleep but one of them (the oldest one) had stayed awake. It was a long journey and we had only travelled for 2 or so hours (it was around midnight) when the child who had stayed awake (sam) started saying he could smell petrol. The tank was leaking. So we stopped at a laybye to fix it. It was a small laybey with only enough room for one car at the edge there was a small black and white sign, with the words M213 written on it. We heard a scream coming from sam at the back of the car. We asked him what was wrong he replyed theres something behind the sign. I went out to check and there was nothing there. When I got back to the car there were no children in the back just a group of green skeletons grinning away with blood dribbling down there chins they jumped at me. I ran.

Strangely enough, I have an extremely precise memory for this story’s origin, one of my most vivid from this period of my childhood. As mentioned on a Tumblr passim, every second weekend between the ages of 4 and 16 I would be taken by my parents to stay in my Gran and Grandad’s lovely house (long since sold, sadly) in Ayton on the Scottish border.

Ayton is roughly 100 miles from my house, so it was a two-hour drive, which would usually take a little over two hours. My Dad would finish work as early as he could, we’d have our tea, and then usually make a start for Ayton soon after 8pm. We’d drive from Allendale through Hexham to Newcastle along the A69, and then switch to the A1 for the long road north.

Me and my sister Heather would take up the back seats, until September 1995, when we were joined by our youngest sister Iona (the three children featured here providing more evidence in the favour of these stories being written in 1996, fact-checkers) who would be stowed in her car seat between us.

At that age, I was never really content unless either watching an old horror film or reading a book, preferably a horror book, and so my Dad had small reading lights installed on the door by my side, which switched on with the turning of a small brass pin. Angled downwards, they allowed me to read to my heart’s content without creating a glare to reduce the driver’s visibility.

Anyway, one such journey, our car experienced a routine problem, possibly the one described here if I wrote this story soon after and in response, and we pulled into a lay-by. It was dark, and Dad was out looking under the bonnet and generally fossicking about.

I was looking out of the window, playfully nervously, in that I was half-hoping to see some ghost, ghoul or revenant scarecrow flitting through the Northumbrian motorway night. And I didn’t. I’m absolutely certain I didn’t. But I did look at a large motorway sign, one of those blue ones probably, and imagine that I saw a horrible face peeping over it, red eyes, slimy jaw - just for a moment. And I scared myself, was scared, so badly that I had to turn off my reading light, close my eyes, and spend the rest of the journey thinking happy, un-monstrous thoughts until the car pulled into my Grandparents drive an hour later.

Whether writing it down in this book, which I do vaguely remember doing, cemented the event in my memory, or whether I really just was that scared of whatever ghoul I’d imagined spying on us in an M1 lay-by I’ll never know.

SP