Ere Christmas

It was a bitter evening, with the wind whipping off the Sierra Mountains and a threatened snowstorm trailing in its wake, as Mary and I made our way to a Christmas Eve party. Pyramid Highway stretched before us, bleak and desolate save for the dancing snowflakes caught in the headlights.

The wind tugged insistently at the car, nudging it like an impatient toddler. The conversation was light, as it often was when Mary and I traveled together.

I glanced at her, a warm smile forming as I reached for her hand. Before I could grasp it, her voice rang out, sharp and startling, “Look out!”

I snapped my eyes to the road just in time to see something pale and indistinct rushing toward us. Two shapes—white as bone and fleeting as shadows—flitted past the car, just beyond the windshield.

My hands jerked the wheel instinctively, and the vehicle veered slightly before steadying. The tires crunched against the icy surface, but there was no sound of impact.

“You hit her,” Mary said, her voice tight and edged with disbelief. She turned in her seat, craning to look back.

I gripped the wheel and frowned. “There wasn’t any thump,” I replied, though my voice betrayed an uncertainty.

Still, I slowed the car, pulling it to the shoulder. The howling wind, if you’ll pardon the term, seemed to surge as we stepped out into the freezing night, its unseen fingers gnawing at our coats.

Together, we retraced our path on foot. The headlights of the car, now dim in the distance, cast long shadows on the snow, but nothing else revealed itself. No sign of a collision, no footprints, no debris—nothing but an empty stretch of frosted highway.

“I think they were plastic bags,” I ventured after a moment, though I hardly believed it myself.

Mary shook her head, her brow furrowed. “They looked like teenage girls to me,” she said, her tone low and uneasy.

The disquiet between us lingered as we returned to the car. The road stretched ahead once more, and though neither spoke it aloud, I knew we both stole glances at the spot as we drove home later that evening.

The following morning, the event took an uncanny turn.

On my way back from an early shift, I found my gaze drawn to the hillside near where the encounter had occurred. The snow had cleared somewhat, revealing the landscape beneath it. There, against the muted brown of the desert earth, stood two white crosses, simple and solemn. They leaned slightly in the wind as though bowing to it.

The sight was unremarkable in itself—such crosses dotted many highways in these parts, marking lives lost too soon—but I felt my heart skip. The memory of those fleeting shapes, so pale and ephemeral, rushed back with a chilling clarity.

Two teenage girls had died on that stretch of highway years earlier. I had been there. What struck me at that moment was not their fate but the eerie feeling that their presence had reached out to me and Mary that night.

The thought prickled at my skin, and I felt a cold not from the winter air but from some deeper place. Then I remembered the old newspapers I had stored away. Something about that memory, triggered by the sight of the crosses, compelled me to dig out the book and see if it held any clues.

Back home, I rifled through a dusty box in the attic, finally unearthing the news articles. I sat in my study and opened the pages, carefully scanning the entries.

One headline in particular caught my eye, dated September 20, 2004: “Two Sisters Dead After Collision on Pyramid Highway.”

My breath caught in my throat. Cassandra and Jessica.

The newspaper slipped from my hands, landing with a soft thud on the floor. The room seemed to grow colder, and I could almost hear the whisper of the wind outside.