I have written and re-written this post a dozen times. Whenever I get the story out, I realize how ridiculous it sounds, but it nags at the back of my mind. It’s maddening, and all I can think to do at this point is see if anyone else can possibly shed some light on what I saw, and what may or may not be lurking near my parents’ house.
I’m from the rural Midwest. Growing up, the closest neighbor was a good half-mile away, and the closest person my age was a fifteen-minute drive. So I spent most of my time outdoors, romping through the fields that surrounded my house. I never felt unsafe - and even if I had, I tended to have at least one of the family dogs hanging out with me, in the off chance I ran into something less-than-friendly.
I had a wild imagination at the time, and whenever I wasn’t playing outside I was writing in a series of notebooks that I still have to this day.
I was also plagued with horrible night terrors. More often than I care to admit, I’d wake up screaming and thrashing in bed, convinced that the ceiling was covered in spiders, or there was a tall, hairy-looking thing in my closet with red eyes. Once, I dreamed that the thing in the closet was getting ready to murder my parents, and I bolted to the kitchen and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. The next morning, my dad asked me what the butcher knife was doing on the living room sofa.
Luckily, the night terrors faded as I got older, and they were the last thing on my mind when I ran out of gas at the beginning of the two-lane county road that led to my parents’ house. Keep in mind that, at the time, cell phones weren’t largely used, so my only options were to wait for someone to drive by or try and hoof it back home.
I knew that particular stretch of road like the back of my hand. Hell, I’d lived just off of it my entire life. Two residential turn-offs on the east side, about a hundred yards apart, another one a little ways up to the west, and then a long stretch until I reached my parents’ driveway. No problem, except my working the late shift that night meant it was nearing eleven p.m. And, at seventeen, I had a horror movie habit and I was still very much in possession of an active imagination.
Even now, more than ten years later, thinking about that walk makes my skin crawl. I clenched my keys in my fist like claws, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it would come out of my chest. The only light came from the moon, which had just started to peek above the trees. It was just enough for me to keep from tripping over a fallen branch or a chunk of dislodged asphalt.
It wasn’t quiet. I think quiet would have been worse on my nerves, but there was a steady hum of cicadas, and I could hear the faint rush of cars driving along the interstate a few miles south.
I counted my steps, listening to the steady crunch of leaves and rocks and garbage beneath my feet. The first turn-off came and went, and up ahead I could just make out the gap in the trees that marked the second one.
Another handful of steps, and I stopped.
I’d been counting double, without realizing it. Two beats for each step. Which made no sense, unless I was hearing someone else’s footsteps in addition to my own.
I started walking again, and that time I actually noticed it: something moving, very quietly, just beyond the tree line to my right. I bit my bottom lip - I still have the scar today, where I bit down so hard I drew blood - and sped up, only to have my hidden companion match my faster pace.
I don’t remember when exactly I started running. But the moment I did, whatever it was in the trees came crashing towards me. The way it sounded, that explosion of dead leaves and low-hanging branches flung in every direction … God, I remember that in vivid detail.
Obviously, I made it home, but getting there is a blur in my mind By the time I reached my parents’ driveway, whatever it was that had been chasing me had stopped. Back then, I ran a couple miles a day before class each morning, but I was no sprinter – whatever it was, I’m certain it could have easily caught me, if it had wanted to.
The next morning, my dad and I went and re-fueled my car, and I drove it home. Being back on that stretch of road, in the safety of my car, made me feel like an idiot for what had happened the night before. It had to have been a dog, or a deer, or something else with a perfectly normal explanation.
And I probably would have kept believing that, if I hadn’t moved back in with my parents earlier this year.
It’s the usual sob story – nasty divorce that left me flat broke, severe depression during and after the process, with some suicide watch thrown into the mix. Structure was absolutely crucial for my emotional state, so for several months my life consisted of waking up at six-thirty, going to work, coming home in the early afternoon (I was lucky enough to have a boss who let me do any residual work at home, if for no other reason than to get my shitty attitude out of the office) and then puttering around until I could justify going to bed.
So I wasn’t actually out alone, after dark, until about a month ago. It was for a really mundane reason – I’d decided, on a whim, to visit a friend who lived about forty-five minutes away, and I was late getting back. I was in a pretty good mood when I turned onto the road that led to my parents’ house, and the last thing on my mind was what happened when I ran out of gas there more than a decade ago.
I was cruising along, windows down, when my headlights just barely illuminated something on the east shoulder of the road, just inside the trees. That in itself wasn’t strange; it could have been anything from a stray dog to a deer to a feral hog. It was a ways up, so all I could really see was the movement of it. I slowed down, just in case it decided to dart in front of me at the last minute.
A good idea, in retrospect. I was maybe twenty yards away when the thing scrambled in front of me. That’s the only word I can think of for it – it was hunched over, and for all the world it looked like a person walking on all fours, only using their feet instead of their knees. Besides its general shape, I couldn’t make anything else out. It happened so fast that, by the time the general weirdness had registered, it was on the other side of the road and I was passing it by.
I hit the gas, but not before I looked in the rear view mirror and saw it on the side of the road. Except it wasn’t on all fours anymore – it was standing, and its head was turned toward me.
So that was a month ago, give or take. At my therapist’s suggestion, I’m on sabbatical now, one of those long-term vacations where you “re-discover” yourself. It’s supposed to keep me from dwelling on the way my life has fallen to pieces in the last year. But instead of relaxing, I’m thinking back to all those notebooks I filled with drawings and stories, when I was little. I don’t know why, but I only just recently remembered how many pages were devoted to one particular drawing. When I Skyped my parents about it, they laughed and said I was convinced it was something I saw in the field around our house, and they’d chalked it up to me being a kid with a wild imagination.
The drawing was of some kind of tall, bipedal creature with long arms and pointed ears that reminded me of a German shepherd. Its eyes were always large and yellow, and its snout was pronounced, with jagged lines of sharp teeth.
Maybe I’m making connections where there aren’t any. Maybe everything I’ve written so far is just a series of coincidences with easy explanations.
But, even in semi-darkness, I know that thing was looking at me, while I drove by. It was watching me go.
And, God, I hope this is my imagination, but I am almost certain it was smiling.
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Credits to: unfortunatebees
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