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Me and a co-worker had finished work for the day pruning hedges and mowing lawns in a remote community some 10 english miles (15 km) away from our home office, and were on our way back. The road we were driving along (in a Volkswagen mini-bus) went through a quite rural area, fields and scattered bits of pine forest. There were (and still is) only a few, separated farm houses and cottages along the road, which is the only tarmac road in that area – all roads that connects with it along that stretch are either gravel roads or dirt paths. That summer alone, we must have driven along that road at least a hundred times, so we knew it quite well by that time.
After driving approximatively 5-7 kilometres along this road, my co-worker (who was driving) happened to notice that we were running low on gas - in fact, the needle of the gauge didn’t even move from its bottom position. The car was still running smoothly, but we doubted we could run on petrol fumes for another 10 km or so. At this point we had entered one of the few places along the road where it was flanked by woods on both sides (the area is otherwise fairly open, mostly farm land).
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As I mentioned, we’d both travelled along this road many times, but never noticed this strange-looking gas station before. However, there were no eldritch feeling of strangeness or anything – we simply wrote it off as a trick of the mind that neither of us had seen it before, or had thought about it earlier. After all, sometimes you fail to notice mundane things until you actively search for them. I certainly didn’t reflect much over it at the time, just feeling relieved that we’d be able to get some gas and get home.
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When we drove away, I lent forward and looked in the side mirror, seeing him in the distance, still waving and rocking to and fro.
We didn’t really speak a lot on the way home, but there was no feeling that something was amiss or anything. The only strange thing that happened was that the car started to run raggedly just a few kilometres after leaving the gas station, the engine misfiring in the manner it does sometimes when one or more cylinders fail to ignite (anyone who’s owned a Volkswagen will recognise the phenomenon). We commented on it and said that the old guy probably gave us diesel instead of 96-octane petrol. Indeed, the car’s exhaust gradually turned into a thick black smokescreen trailing behind us, like it does when you pour diesel into a petrol car.
By the time we arrived at our home office, the car coughed and spluttered constantly, so we took it to the civic department’s repair shop, by now convinced that we had been sold diesel instead of petrol, and rather pissed because we’d have to empty the gas tank by hand (which is quite messy). A guy at the repair shop helped us out with a hand-pump, emptying the gas tank into a large plastic tub. The stuff we pumped out of the tank was neither pinkish (as petrol) nor clear (like diesel oil), but a milky, opaque orange. It didn’t smell right, either, but almost sweet, like turpentine.
The repair guy (an old fox who probably knew everything there was to know about mechanical stuff) commented that the fluid looked like something called “war-time gasoline”. Apparently, during WWII, petrol was scarce, and an alternative needed. The solution was produced by a crudely refined fuel oil mixed with turpentine (or perhaps ethanol), on which old petrol engines could be run, albeit not very smoothly.
The guy asked us where we’d got the gas, and we told him, chuckling, about the strange gas station, even adding that we’d never noticed it before. Now, I really expected the guy (as he was really familiar with all the strange people of the area) to laugh along with us and tell us all about this strange old guy we’d met. Instead, he looked totally confused and said something like: “What gas station?”, and it was like a bubble had burst.
All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by how strange it was that we’d never seen this gas station before, and I became increasingly certain that, on every previous time we’d driven along that road, it hadn’t been there at all! Glancing at my friend’s face, it was obvious he was thinking the same thing.
We started asking the repair guy if he was really certain about this, and so on, but he maintained that, as far as he was aware, there was no gas station on that stretch of road. He actually began to look quite spooked as my friend and I became more and more agitated.
Eventually we left to change out of our work clothes and decided to take my friends car, drive back the way we came from and see if we could find the gas station. We actually drove the entire way back to the town we´d worked in that day, and back again, without ever coming upon the small open area where the gas station had been. It´s difficult to describe the feeling we had when we returned, we both were spooked, scared and exhilirated (sp?) all at the same time, you know? I sat in the passenger´s seat with the reciept we´d got from the strange old guy, and to me that mundane piece of grubby paper just seemed to emanate an almost palpable strangeness. I had some serious trouble sleeping for several nights after this, spending lots of my waking time going over this in my head...