Ask the Author: Kevin Cady
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Kevin Cady
When I was fifteen, my cousins and I were driving across rural New York. Darkness had the countryside, and an old farmhouse existed in the distance with an antiquated, circular floodlight at its front; it lit the gravel drive, a massive tree with a swing, the road, and a harvested cornfield opposite.
As I was by far the youngest, I was in the rear seat leaning up between cousins, talking about nothing as the car rolled along, musing on North Country whatever, but we went silent approaching the farmhouse and its spilt light.
We stared transfixed from the passenger side window because—to this day, we all swear—an apparition stood beside the road, lit tenuously by the floodlight, pale horror, nearly opaque, and covered in blood. The girl's nightdress was soaked. Her eyes were dead, and her head turned languidly to watch us drive by.
And drive by we did, silently, heedlessly into the night until the cornfield wasn’t visible, all of us stupefied from the sight we could no longer see.
None of us looked back, though I wish one of us would have.
Would she still have been standing there?
We didn’t talk for a long while—I must assume evaluating our separate psyches. We drove silently, the dark cut by our headlights, but then my cousin asked a question I’ll never forget:
“Did we all see the same thing?”
We had.
So despite the impossibility of it all, despite us knowing that we couldn’t have seen what we saw—it was just an empty cornfield directing the night’s breeze across its landscape—we knew we’d experienced something awry. We all saw it the same. Knew it the same.
Somehow, we all knew it was real.
Our memories remain unchanged.
So who was the dead girl outside Madrid, NY?
When I was fifteen, my cousins and I were driving across rural New York. Darkness had the countryside, and an old farmhouse existed in the distance with an antiquated, circular floodlight at its front; it lit the gravel drive, a massive tree with a swing, the road, and a harvested cornfield opposite.
As I was by far the youngest, I was in the rear seat leaning up between cousins, talking about nothing as the car rolled along, musing on North Country whatever, but we went silent approaching the farmhouse and its spilt light.
We stared transfixed from the passenger side window because—to this day, we all swear—an apparition stood beside the road, lit tenuously by the floodlight, pale horror, nearly opaque, and covered in blood. The girl's nightdress was soaked. Her eyes were dead, and her head turned languidly to watch us drive by.
And drive by we did, silently, heedlessly into the night until the cornfield wasn’t visible, all of us stupefied from the sight we could no longer see.
None of us looked back, though I wish one of us would have.
Would she still have been standing there?
We didn’t talk for a long while—I must assume evaluating our separate psyches. We drove silently, the dark cut by our headlights, but then my cousin asked a question I’ll never forget:
“Did we all see the same thing?”
We had.
So despite the impossibility of it all, despite us knowing that we couldn’t have seen what we saw—it was just an empty cornfield directing the night’s breeze across its landscape—we knew we’d experienced something awry. We all saw it the same. Knew it the same.
Somehow, we all knew it was real.
Our memories remain unchanged.
So who was the dead girl outside Madrid, NY?
Kevin Cady
I am currently finalizing book three in The Warren Files Trilogy, Truth's Illusion. It will be available summer of 2018!
I'm also working on some sneaky side-projects!
I'm also working on some sneaky side-projects!
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