The Coastal Road Went Dark and Something Walked Out of the Sea | Alien Encounter Story Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-coastal-road-went-dark

The Coastal Road Went Dark and Something Walked Out of the Sea | Alien Encounter Story Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 29

The last thing I remember before two and a half hours vanished was a figure on the road thirty feet ahead of me, standing still in the dark, turning its head slowly toward me before I had made a single sound. How did it know I was there? My name is Mike. I am twenty-eight, a marine diesel engineer o

Chapters:
0:00 The Road Went Black
1:47 Lights on the Water
3:31 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
3:56 The Hum in My Chest
5:41 The Cut
6:47 Damp Boots, Dark Silver
8:25 Pete Remembers Nothing
9:59 Carol Tells Him About His Father
11:23 📣 Like & subscribe

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

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The last thing I remember before two and a half hours vanished was a figure on the road thirty feet ahead of me, standing still in the dark, turning its head slowly toward me before I had made a single sound. How did it know I was there? My name is Mike. I am twenty-eight, a marine diesel engineer on the south coast of England, and Shore Lane is the road I take home after every late finish.

Three miles of unlit tarmac. I had never once felt watched on it until that night. It was a Wednesday in October, just after nine. I had fuelled up on Shore Road, paid, and pulled back onto the lane. My mother Carol keeps the hall light on until she hears my key, that small warm square of window is the deal every night.

I had three miles of dark between me and it. I was about a mile in when I noticed the fuel gauge. The fuel gauge was the first odd thing. I had just filled the tank on Shore Road, so the needle should have been sitting at the top. Inside the first mile of Shore Lane it had dropped a quarter.

Now, I work diesel engines for a living. A sensor fault reads erratic, not steady-low. Vapour lock does not happen at sea-level temperatures on a full tank. There was no mechanical reason for that drop. I noted it, touched the fascia once, and put it out of my mind. I should not have done that.

I was doing about sixty along Shore Lane when I noticed a cluster of pale blue-white lights sitting on the water, roughly half a mile out. I know the local fleet. I know the ferry schedule and where every buoy sits. Fishing boats were ruled out immediately. The lights were too bright, too still and too evenly spaced.

The ferry runs two miles further east and I can hear its horn on quiet nights. These lights made no sound I could detect. I slowed right down. My radio cut out completely. Not static, not interference, just silence. The coastal area has good signal and I had never lost it on that road before.

Then I saw two rabbits on the verge, both sitting bolt upright, both facing the sea. They did not move when the headlights touched them. I know rabbits bolt from headlights. That is what rabbits do. These two just sat there, rigid, staring at the water. I pulled in at the passing place.

I stepped out to get a better look at the lights. The moment both feet touched the road, the engine cut dead behind me. No cough. No splutter. Just silence, as if someone had thrown a switch. I turned back and every dash light was out. I am a diesel mechanic. I know every sound that engine makes when it gives up.

This was not a stall. This was something else entirely. The lights over the water were closer now. Maybe three hundred feet out. One thing before we carry on. There's a story I've never told on the channel. A woman was paid four hundred pounds to be filmed while she slept, and on the seventh night the camera caught someone sitting on the edge of her bed.

It's in a free book of Kettleby Archive files. Go to LouLouBooks.com slash scary. That's LouLouBooks.com slash scary. Standing there on the road, I felt a vibration rise through the soles of my boots and settle into my chest. It was not a diesel note. It had no cylinders in it. The closest I can describe it is pressing your ear against a very large transformer, except felt through your whole body at once, not just heard.

The air seemed thicker. My arms grew heavy without warning. I remember trying to lift my right hand and feeling real resistance, like moving through water. Then something moved in from the sea above me. I only saw it because it covered the stars. Jet black, flat underneath, hard straight edges.

No running lights. No exhaust. Roughly the length of two large lorries placed end to end. It came in slowly, one flat face always toward me, no banking, no rotation, just a rigid straight-line pass about a hundred feet up. The hum was already there before it arrived, as if the hum and the object were two separate things.

Then I saw something on the road. Centre of Shore Lane, thirty feet ahead of the car. It was a silhouette against the faint glow coming off the sea, and the proportions were wrong in a way I could feel before I could name. My eyes could not settle on it the way they settle on a person.

It was completely still. Then I focused directly on it and it turned its head toward me. Slowly. Deliberately. The way someone turns when they hear their name called. My legs stopped working. Not pain, just an absence, as if the signal between my brain and my knees had been cut. The hum peaked hard.

My vision went white at the edges and kept going until there was nothing left. The last thing I felt was the bracelet on my left wrist going warm, then burning hot against the bone. Then a cut. A film jumping a frame. Gone. My mouth tasted of cold salt, the kind you get standing at the tideline in winter.

The inside of the car felt wrong, too warm, still air, and somewhere beneath the engine note I could hear a tone fading, very low, the way a tuning fork dies if you stop it with your palm. Then I looked at the dashboard clock. Eleven forty. My phone confirmed it. I had pulled over just after nine.

I counted it back twice. Two and a half hours. On a three-mile road. Gone. I noticed I was parked correctly: wheels straight, handbrake on. I had stopped in a hurry. I had not done that. My boots were damp from the ankle down, though I had only stepped onto dry tarmac. I caught my reflection in the dark windscreen, dark auburn hair pushed flat on one side as if I had been lying down, face I barely recognised.

When I turned my left wrist over, the silver bracelet was darkened on the inside face, as if it had been very hot. I photographed it before I moved. I drove the last two miles in a kind of careful, deliberate calm. Carol opened the door before I knocked. She said she had been calling for over an hour.

I did not tell her anything yet. Her hall clock agreed with the car clock. She made tea and I sat at the kitchen table and checked my phone. Her missed calls began at eleven twenty. I just stared at that number. The next morning I found a small curved mark on the inside of my left wrist, just above where the bracelet sits.

A smooth pale crescent, about an inch across. Not a burn, not a blister. Over five days it faded evenly and on the sixth morning it was gone. The bracelet kept a faint discolouration on the inner face that never fully polished out. I showed it to a colleague at the harbour. He said it looked like a heat mark, the kind a hot fitting leaves on alloy.

He was not wrong. I told my friend Pete Brooks within a week. He works the same harbour, drives Shore Lane most evenings. He listened patiently and then said I was probably more tired than I realised. He said he drove Shore Lane that same night at around eight forty-five and saw nothing.

No lights on the water, nothing in the sky. He had come through well before my encounter began, which made his blank account harder to argue with. That certainty made me doubt myself badly. Seven years later, Pete called on a weekday evening, voice flat and careful. He described pulling over on Shore Lane because of lights on the water.

He described something blotting out the stars. He told it as though nobody had ever reported it before. I listened without a word. When he finished I asked how long he thought he had been parked there. He said maybe five minutes. But his watch said it was longer. The week after Pete's call I woke at three in the morning with my left arm heavy and the bracelet warm against my skin.

The same warmth I had felt on Shore Lane. When I checked my phone I found a photograph in my camera roll I had not taken. A blurred pale light through the bedroom window, the sea just visible below it, timestamped at two fifty-one that morning. Carol was staying with her sister that week.

No one else had been in the house. I told Carol the full story that same week. Then she said my father used to leave the house in the early hours sometimes and return with his trousers damp to the knee and no explanation. I asked her directly: did he ever mention lights on the water?

She looked at her hands and said yes. Blue-white lights, she said, sitting too still to be boats. She had never connected it to the Shore Lane nights until I said those words. Last month I tried to open the photograph on my phone. The file was completely blank, pure white, as if it had never held an image.

The backup was the same. I still wear the bracelet. Some nights when the sea is flat I find myself slowing at the passing place and watching the water. But I do not get out of the car anymore. The thing that stays with me is not the object or the missing hours. It is the moment that figure on the road turned its head toward me, slow and deliberate, before I had made a single sound.

I keep asking myself how long it had been standing there before I noticed it. If you drive a coastal road at night and something on the water catches your eye, it is probably nothing. But I slow down every time, just to be sure.