Cars

5 Dec 08… 0700h…

It occurred to me, as a car wound its way around a dark corner of the road ahead of me this morning, headlights blazing, what a terrifying and beastly sight such a thing would be to a person of a past age. I am talking a couple of centuries or more ago, before industrialisation, before electricity (or at least before its mass domestic use), before railroads even, to a time when “horsepower” was literal and it was deemed impossible, or at least indicative of demonic possession or somesuch, to travel in excess of 20mph… Imagine being a person from the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth century, who witnessed what I have witnessed…

A dark road on a cold winter’s morning… The road itself is strange – eerily flat and smooth, with a silvery sheen barely visibly in the misty moonlight… A distant rumble… approaching… and then… before you have had time to discern the source of the sound… the light!… The corner of the road is illuminated – a bright incandescence; brighter than anything you have ever seen, short of the brightness of day… The rumbling rapidly increases… and then… the fiercely dazzling, pinpoint eyes, racing at a phenomenal speed around the corner; their luminescence so intense, they blind you utterly to the inhuman form of the body which contains them… You are transfixed… You cannot comprehend what you are witnessing… As the eyes approach (so fast! How can anything of this Earth move so fast?), you fear a demon itself, one of Lucifer’s minions, has come to collect your mortal soul; to drag you – kicking, screaming, pleading – into the very bowels of Hell… and then… the infernal creature passes… and you are plunged into darkness once more…