The Journal of Anne Harper: the curse.

Oh, yes, the curse. That whole thing began on the night when I was driving my Mercedes up through Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. For those of you who aren't familiar with Mulholland, it's a dizzying, winding road, and at night it's as dark as staring behind closed eyelids, save for the shine of headlights searing bright against the tall wrought-iron gates in the shapes of giant harps, where behind are hermetic homes hovering darkly in mystique with long, long driveways extending into the pale hours of tomorrow.

I've driven through Mulholland a million times, but it was different that night. The road seemed smoother, frightfully so, as though I were a passenger traveling on the surface of a thought, not a thought of my own, but a thought threading through the darkness of a devious mind. The arched branches of trees lining the soft shoulder of the road sprang ghoulishly before my headlights, and as I drove higher and deeper into the hills, the floating lights of Los Angeles far below broke into a series of glamorously bright flashes in between the thickening trees, until every last light of the city was crushed from sight.

I roughly navigated a sharp bend of the road, and then saw a pair of headlights looking like two distant stars at the top of hills, and then they were gone. But the headlights reappeared momentarily, closer now, blinking their way down Mulholland. I thought nothing of it. I was more concerned about how the bends of the road were unusually sharp, causing my nerves to tighten, as though I were sensing intuitively the nearing twists and turns that my own life was about to take -- I wasn't wrong. A minute or so later there was a splay of light from headlights unseen from around the bend, the same headlights that had been descending the hill, and now they erupted into blinding lights blurring through me nightmarishly, and I screamed to the drowning out of the wild car's roaring, skidding tires.

My imagination crashed through my windshield and thumped against the carhood as I braced for a crushing impact. But the wild car slid past me impossibly close, separated as though from some divine intervention, and when I realized that I wasn't going to be smashed, my imagination reversed its trajectory and settled back in my mind, the explosion of starry glass collecting back into a flawless windshield again. I slammed on my brakes and jerked around, seeing the wild car spinning in distress along the soft shoulder of the road, in great swirls of dust. It was all so dreamlike as the wild car seemed to dissolve in the swarming dust, only the bright red taillights burned in duress through the haunting darkness.
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The full moon glittered with some eerie premonition along the broken pieces of windshield glass on the dark street, as if those fragments of glass were proof of the premoniton having come explosively true upon the incredible impact of the two cars. What Amy had said was true. Her boyfriend did die in a car accident, as one of those two cars was a BMW, the same car that Amy said her boyfriend had just died in. It was impossible for her to know of her boyfriend's accident. I was with her miles away when she said he just died in a car wreck, literally at that very moment. The bodies of her boyfriend and the other driver (a drunk driver) had already been taken away, and all that was left was the wreakage of the two cars, mangled, and staring at me like two huge mangled faces without blood.

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Keep this for later draft -- The yellow stripes dividing the traffic seemed like yard sticks measuring the distance between me and the murderer of my family. The faster I drove, the quicker the yellow stripes shortened, one after another, in blurs of yellow, indicating the rapid closing in of time toward the big moment. I dialed Rex on my cell phone. He didn't answer. My breath was taken away as I drove faster now. Anxiety shot through my heart in rapid beats, and the harder I pressed my foot on the gas pedal, the faster my heart pumped eagerly as if I were connected to the the thumping valves of my car engine fueled by great duress. I was hitting every red light and each it took an eternity for them to turn green. I pounded the steering wheel at one point, at a red light. Pedestrians crossing the crosswalk met my urgent breath rushing from the grill of my Mercedes in tremendous waves of heat.
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Include later -- I was so frightened I stayed behind the tree for at least an hour, listening so intently for any sound of Joseph that I could hear a civilizaton of insects humming from deep in their grass kingdom. I finally worked up the courage to step lightly away from the tree, not wanting to so much as bend a single blade of grass.