Bev Vincent

In 2000, I was just getting underway as a writer. I was a member of an online critique group and starting to gain enough confidence to submit my short fiction. I heard that an online magazine called The Harrow was having a Halloween contest with $50 and publication as prizes. A few days later, I saw an episode of 60 Minutes or 20/20 when I saw a segment about an obsessive compulsive disorder called “harming obsession.” While I watched, all I could think was: What would happen to a person with this disorder if he was out driving on Halloween night? And thus was born the story that follows.

The story took first place in the contest, and was published online with a neat illustration by GAK. It was later reprinted in the anthology Octoberland (Flesh and Blood Press, 2002) and was my first fiction appearance in Cemetery Dance magazine. It’s one of the stories that has generated the most response from readers of all my short works. I thought it was time to share it for Halloween.

Without further ado, here is “Harming Obsession.” A podcast version, read by me, is also available at Podango. Comments appreciated.

Harming Obsession

By Bev Vincent

It had been a gentle bump.

A small jolt.

Surely too minor to have been caused by a child.

So many small children were running around on this dark night, though. What if it had been a child and not a pothole or a cardboard box?

It could have been a child. In the darkness, the trick-or-treaters were well camouflaged by their black vampire and witch costumes.

It could have been.

What if it was?

What if?

This wasn’t the first time Victor thought he might have hit someone with his car. Every time—and there were days when it happened on a dozen or more occasions—he had to go back to the scene to convince himself it was only his imagination.

His compulsion.

Sometimes he spent fifteen or twenty minutes combing through ditches and hedges, adrenaline rushing through his veins, awash in guilt at the possibility that he might have carelessly caused a death. Often he returned a second or third time to reassure himself that he hadn’t overlooked something.

Victor stopped the car in the middle of the road. He had never struck anyone. Every time he went to look, there was no evidence of an accident.

What if it had been real this time? All those other times didn’t matter. What if a child cloaked in a dark costume, too preoccupied with tricks and treats to pay attention, had gotten too close to his car? What if—even now—he or she lay in the road behind him, a small body surrounded by candy that had tumbled out of a plastic orange jack-o-lantern?

Bleeding, suffering, dying?

The more Victor thought about it, the more convinced he became that it hadn’t been a simple bump in the road. It felt different.

It must have been a child.

So many of them out tonight, and they weren’t paying attention. They never did, but especially not tonight. It made driving nerve-racking.

He swore under his breath as his heart throbbed in his ears. Why was he out here on a night like this? It was crazy. Eleanor knew how he got when he was driving, but she had insisted. They were running low on candy, and it was up to him to get more.

His hands clutched the steering wheel while sinews stood out on either side of his neck. Sweat beaded on his brow, even though it was one of the coldest autumn nights yet. Risk of frost, the forecast had said, and here he was sweating in his car.

Resigned to the inevitable, Victor opened the door and stepped into the brisk night. His flashlight was in a pocket on the driver’s door where he always kept it. This wasn’t the first time he had needed to search the roadside in the dark.

It probably wouldn’t be the last.

It’s just my OCD talking, he chided himself. His therapist encouraged him to stop fighting the obsessive-compulsive disorder by talking back to it to remove its power over him, but that hadn’t worked. “Harming obsession” was the official diagnosis. “Hit ‘n Run” disease. He knew that a chemical imbalance in his brain was responsible for his feelings of guilt over something that hadn’t happened.

Probably hadn’t happened.

But what if? It was possible, wasn’t it?

And the bump had felt . . . different.

It could easily have been a small child, crushed beneath his back wheel, now lying mangled on the roadside.

Victor turned on the flashlight and swept its intense beam back and forth across the street. He looked under the car to make sure that the child wasn’t trapped beneath, caught in the muffler or the axle.

Nothing.

Nearby, a gaggle of costumed kids trick-or-treated from one house to the next, a jumble of legs, candy sacks and laughter.

No one paid attention to him as he continued his search, flashing the light over the median strip, which was covered with bushes and plants. The deep shadows among them could easily hide a child’s crushed figure.

No blood, no body.

He pushed his way through the hedges to the other side of the median for fear that he had struck the child hard enough to throw him or her all the way across the street.

Nothing.

He searched the same places again from the opposite direction, in case he had missed something. Back at the car, he looked underneath again.

Nothing.

His heart rate gradually returned to normal and a chill seeped into his bones. He chuffed a lungful of air and watched his breath vaporize.

Another false alarm. He got back into the car and slipped the flashlight into the door pocket.

An automobile horn beeped gently behind him as lights flashed across his rearview mirror. He was blocking the lane. Victor waved into the mirror, started the engine and continued down the street toward the convenience store.

The return trip was excruciating. Children scurried everywhere. Victor drove at a crawl, trying to focus his concentration on the street and his driving, but was continually distracted by the small people milling around on the sidewalks and at street crossings. They were so close to him. The exterior of the car chassis felt huge while at the same time the interior constricted around him.

The convenience store was a little over two miles from Victor’s house—not so convenient as all that, he raged—and it had taken him fifteen minutes to cover only half the distance back home. Walking might have been just as fast. He had stopped four times so far to look under his car, to sweep the road behind him after feeling a bump.

His mind raced. Still another mile to go. He was tempted to pull over, leave the car where it was and walk back home. Eleanor could come and get the blasted thing herself in the morning. It was her fault he was out here, after all.

Damned candy.

Huge raindrops ricocheted off the windshield, increasing rapidly to a steady drizzle. Victor shivered as he imagined spending the next twenty minutes or more plodding home through the frigid rain.

The windshield wipers scraped and moaned as he reduced his speed further and continued down the dark street.

Ahead, lights gleamed. In the darkness, compounded by the streaking rain on the windshield, Victor couldn’t be sure of their color. They seemed to be flashing. Red and blue. An accident?

The lights came from the opposite lane, across the median. As he drew close, he recognized the surroundings. It was where he had first stopped earlier this evening to search for an accident victim.

He had been right!

Deep inside, he had known he was right this time. Vindication gave him a perverse feeling of elation. All those times, stopping and checking, searching, crawling under the car, poking in the bushes, were suddenly validated. He wasn’t crazy after all.

He pulled onto the edge of the road and sat behind the wheel with the engine running, his wipers dragging across the windshield.

A fire truck, an ambulance and a tow truck had gathered at the scene in addition to the two police cars. Automobiles were backed up as far as he could see in the opposite direction. It had been over half an hour since he’d passed by this spot, so traffic had been tied up for a long time.

What should he do? Part of him wanted to go to the police, turn himself in, proclaim his guilt. He could see himself doing that. He could also see the crowd turning on him. He had left a small child to die in the cold, dark street, rain pelting off her foam-rubber Halloween mask. He could picture rain puddled around her little body—he was sure it was a girl—as dissolving candy dyed the water red and purple.

He couldn’t see how he had missed the girl’s body, though. He had searched thoroughly. Three times, no less. Still, what was done, was done. He’d hit and he had run.

Now he needed to see if he was going to get caught.

Sitting on the roadside was probably not the best strategy to avoid the attention of the police. He put the car into gear and eased forward again.

As he drew even with the accident scene, he tried to adopt an appropriate mixture of interest and indifference. If he ignored the accident altogether, that would certainly be noticed and marked. If he showed too much interest, that, too, would be suspicious.

Only when the wrecker maneuvered to hook up to a damaged car did Victor realize that this was not a hit-and-run scene but rather a routine traffic mishap. One car had rear-ended another. Quite solidly, from the look of it. The hood of the rearmost car was badly buckled. Someone—perhaps the driver—stood on the roadside holding a towel to his forehead. In the brilliant beam from a police car floodlight, he thought he could see blood on the towel.

The scene gripped Victor’s attention. His mind raced. He hadn’t run anyone down!

He was so obsessed with the accident scene, a scene for which he was not responsible, that he wandered from his lane and brushed against the median curb. The front wheel scraped along the prominent concrete ridge, twisting the steering wheel in his hands. He fought to maintain control as the car jerked suddenly toward the ditch. Finally he straightened out, thankful that there had been no vehicles in the other lane. He had probably scraped the hell out of his front hubcap, but he was back in control.

He looked back at the accident scene, watching it as he eased along in the rainy darkness. The flashing lights reflected in his side and rearview mirrors, growing fainter in the gloom.

The car didn’t handle well on the rest of the trip home, but at least he didn’t have any more illusions that he had run someone down. The road was slick but smooth and there were no potholes or speed bumps to induce that gripping, inescapable certainty that he had hit someone.

He had likely inflicted significant damage on his car, though. Thrown the front end out of alignment, perhaps even ruined something in the undercarriage. His muffler, maybe, or the oilpan. He surveyed the array of gauges around the speedometer, but no warning lights were illuminated.

Tomorrow would be plenty of time to worry about that. He could take the car to the garage and get it checked out in the light of day.

He pulled into the driveway, slammed the transmission into park, grabbed the sack of candy from the seat beside him and locked the door as he got out.

The cold, unforgiving drizzle made Victor clutch his coat tightly around him as he walked the ten feet to the back door and its protective canopy. Jack-o-lanterns grinned back at him ghoulishly from the railing, the candles within fighting to stay alive against the rain and growing wind.

He opened the front door, stripped off his wet jacket and greeted the warmth within the house.

How good to be home after such an excruciating ordeal.

In the driveway, rainwater gathered around the wheels of his car.

The puddles on the driver’s side were slowly turning purple and green as candy spilling from the shredded pumpkin pail caught in the undercarriage dissolved.

On the passenger side, the water slowly turned crimson.