Night hangs heavy over the road and the rain shows no sign of stopping. Drops strike the windshield with a steady, almost hypnotic insistence while the wipers sweep back and forth in a rhythm that barely manages to keep the glass clear. On either side of the asphalt there is nothing but darkness and the uneven silhouettes of trees appearing and disappearing in the reach of your headlights. The road feels endless, a tunnel of rain and shadow stretching toward a destination that, at this moment, you are not even sure you remember.

A song plays on the radio, one you recognize immediately. Sweet Dreams, by Marilyn Manson. The deep, metallic voice fills the inside of the car as you drive with both hands resting firmly on the steering wheel. You had not been paying much attention to the music until a moment ago, but now every word seems to echo with unusual clarity inside the quiet of the night, as if the song had chosen this moment to make itself known.

Then your phone vibrates on the passenger seat.

The sound is brief, but enough to break the monotony of the drive. For a moment you glance away from the road and look at the glowing screen. There is no name attached to the message, only a few words standing alone in the dim light of the car.

"Come. We're waiting."

You frown slightly, more puzzled than concerned, and lift your eyes back to the road ahead. That is when you notice it in the rearview mirror. At first it is only a distant white glow cutting through the rain, a presence approaching quickly from behind on the same stretch of road. It takes only a few seconds before you realize it is a truck.

Its headlights grow larger and brighter in the mirror until they flood the interior of your car with harsh light reflecting off the rain-streaked glass. Instinctively you ease off the accelerator, trying to keep control on the wet asphalt, but the truck does not slow down. If anything, it comes closer—too fast, too close—until its lights seem to swallow the darkness of the road entirely.

You press the brake.

The tires respond with a faint screech against the wet pavement as you try to steady the car. For a brief moment you glance at the mirror again and think you see a silhouette behind the truck’s windshield, a still figure watching you through the storm. You barely have time to register the thought. The truck’s horn tears through the night with a violent blast and, an instant later, the world erupts into metal, glass, and blinding light.

The impact hits like a brutal shock that shudders through everything around you. The steering wheel slips from your hands, the car spins, the sound of twisting metal fills the air and for one endless second the world fractures into white flashes and deafening noise. Then, as suddenly as it began, everything disappears.

Silence.

When you open your eyes, you are no longer on the road.

The smell of gasoline and asphalt is gone, replaced by the damp scent of earth and plants. You are lying on the ground, and it takes several seconds before you realize you are still breathing. Slowly you push yourself up, expecting pain, broken bones, or at least the lingering shock of the collision, but there is nothing. You touch your arms, your chest, your legs. You are whole, uninjured, as if the crash had never happened.

You try to remember what you were doing before driving down that rain-soaked road, where you were going or why you had left in the middle of the night, but your mind returns only silence. There are gaps in your memory, strange empty spaces that refuse to fill no matter how hard you try to reach them. Even your own name feels hidden somewhere just beyond your grasp.

You lift your head and look around.

There is nothing but a field.

A vast field of rye stretching as far as you can see, the tall stalks moving gently beneath a light that seems to belong neither to day nor to night. There is no road nearby, no wreckage from the car, no trace of what should have remained after an accident like that.

For a moment you wonder if the crash was nothing more than a dream.

Then you hear it.

Far away, somewhere among the rye, the sound of youngers laughing drifts softly through the air, as if someone is playing not far from where you stand.