§965

‘I was fifteen, and my family [British tourists] and I were in holidays in our old family house, in a town of the French Southern Alps. We had seen in the newspapers that a little festival was taking place in a village nearby we had never been to. The festival was on in the evening, so around eight we left the house and went on the road. First, we recognized the road, because we also often followed it to go to another town we knew, and then following the road signs to go to the village, we continued on another road we absolutely didn’t know. My father continued to drive ten, twenty, thirty minutes across the fields on a dirt track, and there were no more road signs. We began to worry, as it was written on the last road sign that the village was ten kilometres away. The night began to fall (which was strange, because we were at the beginning of August), and we saw lights. We reached a small gathering of houses, and a barn where people were coming from, apparently leaving a sort of family or neighbour’s dinner. It was too late anyway to see the village. We were all freaking out and we wanted to go back home. So my father stopped the car and my mother asked directions to our town, and a very kind man showed us the road to follow. There was absolutely nothing weird about the people, they looked like normal humans in the French countryside leaving a celebration, and they even were quite taken aback when we said that we had driven around half an hour to reach them, because our town was maximum ten minutes away. So we left again, and we followed the road the man had indicated, thinking we were out of the woods. But again, time was passing and we weren’t seeing any light from the town. We had entered the high mountains, there was rock on our right side and a stream on our left one, night was pitch black. Only the car headlights were guiding us. Suddenly, my father hit the accelerator, in the middle of a succession of turns, and said to my sister and I: ‘Girls, don’t look behind.’ My mother was as white as a ghost and looking in the rear-view mirrors. We spent nearly fifteen minutes driving at ninety kilometres per hour speed on a one-way road, high in the mountains, and then my father pushed the brakes. We had driven for an hour in total, on a single road with no intersections, for a journey that was supposed to be twenty minutes max, and we had reached our town by an old bridge crossing the stream we were going along, a bridge we had tried and we knew that it led only to a small part of the town with a dead end. Later, my parents told us they had seen a giant silhouette running behind the car at our speed, and glowing, red eyes as high as our car, which was a kind of SUV. We still don’t know what happened to us, and how that was possible.’ ‘Giant silhouette with glowing red eyes.’ Why a fairy? ‘Lost track of time and space, as we were totally lost. It never happened with an angel.’