Please Don't Leave Me Here

Chapter 1: Road side

The first strange thing happened three days after the football game, when my sister found an old photograph beneath the passenger seat of my car.

It was a small black-and-white picture with curled edges. An elderly man stood beside a narrow country road, one hand raised as if he were asking the photographer to stop.

On the back, written in faded blue ink, were five words:

**Please don’t leave me here.**

My sister carried the photograph into the kitchen by its corner.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

I was seventeen then. Old enough to drive, young enough to believe every bad thing had a reasonable explanation.

I told her it probably belonged to the car’s previous owner.

But we both knew that was unlikely. Dad had bought the car new.

Neither of us said that the road in the photograph looked exactly like the place where we had seen the old man.