The forest seemed to have grown much darker the eerie silence all around was broken only by the sound of my feet.After a while I heard hushed sound. I turned back. Complete the story
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I’m still alive, I think, unless I’m a ghost. I was hitching from Leipzig to Paris. He was a Frenchman, a somewhat dirty and unshaven driver, small and shabby.
He agreed to give me a ride; a ride with him the rest of the way to Paris where I needed to pick up my paintings from an exhibition I had there. It was October.
He spoke broken English. I spoke no French. I really didn’t have a clue who he was.
* * *
The day was sunny and blue.
It was a warm and comfortable French day; a great day to hitchhike. It was around 4:30 pm when I met him at a gas station somewhere in France. I hopped into his little old car, happy to have scored a ride.We drove off to Paris on the main highway. After some small talk, mainly about me and where I’m from, he reached over my lap and opened the glove compartment. He pulled out what looked like a bunch of passports.They were, indeed, passports. He handed me all 4. The first pretty girl was his girlfriend who died falling off the back of his motorcycle, he said. The second, his girlfriend who died in a car crash, he told me. The third girlfriend died from a brain tumor, and so on…
He said, “I’m such an unlucky man.” I agreed he was. The uneasiness started then and only grew as the miles rolled on. He was in possession of 4 young women’s passports.
Soon after showing me the passports, the man said he wanted to take a shortcut to Paris. It wasn’t really a question to me. Excellent, thought I, get me outta here ASAP.
I assumed we would cut through some charming Normandy villages on secondary roads. Instead, we turned off onto an implausible dirt road off the main highway.
No, I thought. Not good. But I kept silent.
Why we keep quiet is a mystery, perhaps because of our manners.
At first the road was out in the open, through a field. We rolled over the typical vivid green French hillsides until we finally reached the heavy woods.
There was an inescapable perception that the road narrowed. It grew instantly darker as we entered the forest on the dirt road and drove on. The interior of the forest reminded me of spooky Hollywood woods; Wizard of Oz spooky.
The woods looked like the perfect place to hide something. I still found the woods to be beautiful. In the face of my situation, I thought how humans don’t deserve such beauty. Strange.
Odd silence, darkening forest, tense ride: "I started to feel a ... I was hitching from Leipzig to Paris. ... The uneasiness started then and only grew as the miles rolled on.