I didn't plan on posting this, I wrote most of it down the week
it happened because the details were crowding each other in my
head and I was forgetting what came first, what came next, what
belonged to which night. It's been almost a year now and
the order is still clear to me. Not because I've gone over it
100 times, but because it sits in me like a bruise you keep
bumping into by accident. If you've camped the River Hills
in late October, you know the smell I'm talking about.
Cold leaf rot, damp iron in the air would smoke from some other
sight you can't see. That's what the weekend was
supposed to be, a last trip before winter.
There were four of us, me, my buddy Aaron, his girlfriend
Kayla, and her older brother Matt.
We took two vehicles so we could split gear and leave one at camp
if we wanted to poke around the old bunkers over in Mason County
without tearing down the tents. We set up in Wayne National
Forest on the Ohio side, at a primitive spot off a rutted spur
that drops toward the river. It wasn't deep Backcountry, but
once the leaves were down, it still felt empty.
The main road was up the Ridge, and after you cut your engine,
the silence was the kind that starts ticking in your ears.
I grew up with that quiet, and it never felt like a threat to
me until that weekend. Weather was Gray and steady, the
kind of daytime where it feels like evening.
By late afternoon we got to camp while there was still enough
light to pick a flat pocket between sycamores and set the
two tents. You could hear geese on the
water somewhere, and the occasional coyote yipping far
off normal fall sounds. We had a small fire going by the
time the light bent down into the trees.
The plane, stupid as it reads now, written out was to eat and
then drive over the bridge to check out the igloos in the
Mcclintic Wildlife Management Area, The old World War 2
explosives bunkers. Aaron had read about them and
Kayla wanted photos. I'd been once in daylight years
back, concrete domes and weedy fields mounded over with earth
and brush. Doors open to cool air and
graffiti echo like a gymnasium. People party in them.
Teen spray paint names and band logos, urban legend baggage all
over the place. I wasn't hunting ghosts.
I figured we'd poke around, get creeped out, come back, sleep.
We ate hot dogs and a pack of brats.
Burned the first ones, ate the second round anyway.
By the time we put the great aside, it was already dim enough
that headlamps showed white floats in your breath.
We piled into my truck, left my cooler chain to the picnic
table, and took the Ridge Rd. out.
The drive over felt normal. Small towns with porch lights, A
gas station with a flickering open, then the Ohio River,
Green, black and heavy under the bridge.
West Virginia on the other side. Flat floodplain first, then low
hills. The WMA roads turn to gravel
pretty quickly, old berms and ponds, fields cut by straight
lanes of saplings and cattail. It looks like any abandoned
military ground you've ever seen.
Uniform, uncomplicated, quiet in the wrong way.
We found the first bunker easily.
You can see their rounded backs from the road when the leaves
are down. The one we parked at had the
metal door thrown back and the interior was cool enough that
condensation filmed my lips. Footsteps sounded behind you
after you stopped walking, the echo rolling back and forth.
Kayla did a quick spin with her phone light and laughed at a
spray painted moth with big red eyes on the wall.
Classic, she said. Aaron clapped once to hear the
slap come back. The air in there tasted like
battery acid. We didn't stay long.
The second bunker was the one that set my teeth on edge.
The door on that one looked newer, the paint less peeled.
There were two fresh padlocks hanging open but latched through
the hasp like someone was locking up but didn't finish.
No obvious reason for it. Weird.
Matt said. He's shown his headlamp along
the jamb where the metal meets concrete, and there were dull
streaks on the edge, like something scraped through.
On impulse, he knocked on the door.
Not hard, just a knuckle rap like you'd give at a friend's
place. Something answered.
Not a knock, more like a short drag from inside, the sound of
something light sliding on grit. All four of us heard it, because
all four of us stopped breathing at the same time.
Kayla whispered. Did you?
And then didn't finish the sentence, because the sound came
again. A sliding step, a pause, a faint
scratch. I was closest to the opening,
and without meaning to, I took one step back and felt gravel
settle under my boot. There are a lot of ways to
explain noises in an empty structure.
Rats, a raccoon, even a person, maybe a person trying not to be
seen. That's what I told myself as my
heart hammered. Aaron asked in a normal voice if
anyone was inside. He said we didn't want trouble,
we'd leave. Sorry.
Nothing answered in words. The sliding stopped.
The new silence pressed the sides of the bunker until the
shape of it was all I could hear.
The hair on the inside of my elbows lifted.
Kayla said she wanted to go. No one disagreed.
Back at the truck, I laughed, and I remember how fake it
sounded in my own ears, the kind of laugh you throw out to end
something. We drove a few more lanes,
looked at 2 igloos without getting out, then turned around.
When you come out of those straight cuts and back onto the
longer gravel, there are ponds on both sides that hold the sky
like mirrors. We passed 1 past the other and I
saw a ripple cross the surface like a fish rolling.
I thought nothing about it. 10 seconds later, something large
and dark stepped through the ragged heads of cattails on the
right berm and took three long strides into the lane, and I had
to brake to keep from hitting it.
The beam from the truck washed over it and pinned it there, and
for a beat my brain went blank because the shape didn't match
anything I knew. It was as tall as the doorway of
the bunkers, thin through the chest, and the head wasn't a
head in the way I'm used to naming things.
It was a wedge that sloped back and the first feature I saw were
the eyes. 2 red discs that were not glowing on their own like
some cartoon but catching the light and throwing it straight
back like Rd. reflectors. The rest of it ate the light
instead of reflecting it. It lifted 1 long arm like it was
putting a hand up to block the beam and I saw struts of bone
under tight skin and something like a claw or hook where a
thumb should be. The mouth, if that's what the
lower part was, was a beak or something beak like that looked
wrong on the body underneath. It stepped once to the side and
the top half of it opened. I don't know how else to say it.
The shape of it changed from tall and narrow to wide and
taller. Wings.
Not bird wings with a million feathers.
You want to name canvas sheet wings?
Jointed wrong. Stretching from shoulder to well
past the knee like a kite frame bending, the first downbeat was
strong enough to push dust along the gravel.
I know this because it hit the hood and came in through the
vents and I could taste it. I dropped the truck into gear
and we crawled forward around it and it turned without moving its
feet so it kept facing us and those red circles never blinked
once. No one screamed.
We made the tiny human noises you make when your body doesn't
know which reaction to pick. Aaron said my name calmly once,
like he was in the passenger seat of a driving test, trying
to remind me about a turn signal.
I accelerated. We went past it at walking speed
because the lane was narrow and the ditch would swamp a tire.
The thing pivoted again and tracked us with the light in its
eyes. It didn't follow.
Then we got around the curve and I brought the speed up and we
didn't talk until we hit pavement.
We crossed the river with all four of us staring forward, like
maybe looking down into the water would be an invitation.
Back at camp, the fire was Gray and the wind had picked up.
We didn't say did you see that because there was nothing else
we could have seen. We said raccoon and crane in
person because we were supposed to say something.
The dark doesn't get friendlier because you explain it.
We sat too close to the coals and made the wind in the Pines
into normal wind by saying we were tired and we were going to
sleep. I zipped my tent and lay down in
my bag and listen to my pulse and then to the little sounds
you get on a still night. Mice under leaves, a twig
falling, a distant freight horn. Kayla and Aaron had the other
tent. Matt slept near me.
I asked him if he was awake. He said yes, like it hurt to
admit it. And then he said stop, and I
realized I'd been going through the same breath again and again,
like my body forgot how to do it without keeping score.
Sometime after midnight, I woke to a sound.
I felt in my back. First a short, heavy thump that
rolled into the ground. Something had hit near the camp.
Another followed it, softer. The wind had died to nothing,
and without it the forest felt pinned.
I checked my watch out of habit, saw the digits and immediately
forgot them. A slow scrape, then not far.
Gravel or bark. I reached for my headlamp and
left it off. Light sometimes makes things
worse. Kayla whispered my name through
the tent wall and I nearly answered out loud until I heard
how close her voice was and realized she was standing just
outside the fabric. She wasn't.
I knew that before the zipper, tooth by tooth, started to lift
by itself just the smallest bit, then let go and settle.
I'd locked it through both poles like I always do.
It couldn't slide on its own. I wasn't breathing by choice.
I was withholding breath like you hold a cough in church.
Matt lifted his head next to me and the mat rasped once and
stopped. A quiet, fast tapping circled
the tent like fingertips on nylon.
It went around twice, and then it stopped at my head and
pressed in the way a face presses into a window to see
whether anyone's home. I turned the lamp on because the
not seeing was killing me, and the beam lit the fabric into a
pale Dome and the shape on the other side came into relief.
Tall, not hunched, the way you picture an animal up on its hind
legs, standing. The two bulges where the eyes
were became bright and the nylon glowed red in perfect circles
without any spill. Something slid down the fabric
slowly, deliberately, and the tent wall moved with it like
plastic on glass. It drew a long line to the seam
and then the pressure withdrew. 10 seconds later, 2 long lines
ran the other direction like claws gently parting hair.
I said no, and I didn't recognize my own voice.
I said it again, and it sounded stronger, like saying a word
could put my feet back on the ground.
The tapping didn't come back. A single downbeat of air pressed
the tent wall in and made it slap back.
After that, nothing, only our breathing and the tiny tick of
ash settling in the ring. I don't know how long we lay
there, but at some point a barred owl called far off, and
the ordinary sound of it was such a relief I almost cried.
We waited until the sky in the east turned to a lighter kind of
black, and then we unzipped and walked straight to the truck
without talking, each of us stepping where we'd step when we
were trying not to wake a house at 3:00 in the morning.
The ground around the tents had scraped patches that weren't
there before, not like boot prints, more like someone took a
big rake and combed the top layer in half moons.
On the picnic table there were two shallow dents at the edge,
like something had perched and the weight had pressed the wood
down into a shape it didn't like.
We drove to the gas station at the junction and sat under the
canopy while the coffee machines chugged and clicked.
The old guy behind the counter asked if we were up early to
hunt. No one answered him and to his
credit, he stopped trying to chat.
We refilled and went back to camp because we didn't want to
admit we were thinking about leaving.
It felt like quitting at a race you didn't sign up for.
The day took the sharp angles off the night.
We ate late breakfast and pretended to argue about stupid
stuff. It almost worked.
Mid afternoon Aaron said he wanted to go back across and see
the bunkers in daylight because whatever we saw had to live
somewhere and it might be easier to explain with the sun up.
I said no in my head and then I said OK out loud because it was
worse to sit and wait. We left Kayla at camp with the
excuse of guarding the gear. She didn't correct us.
It was after three when we took the bridge and the floodplain
again. The WMA looked like a public
park in October. Light ducks on the ponds, deer
moving like deer deep in the lanes.
We parked at the second bunker, the one with the hanging locks,
and I felt fine right up until my boot hit the ground.
The stillness there wasn't the same as the other places.
I could hear a line hum like you sometimes hear under big power
corridors, but there aren't any towers out there.
It was low enough that I wasn't sure I heard it until it cut out
and then started again, and I knew I had.
The open padlocks were gone. The door stood wide like a
mouth. The streaks on the jamb had more
of them, clear arcs where metal met metal.
Aaron said my name and pointed at the ground where the gravel
met the concrete lip. There was a dead Robin there, in
pieces, not torn the way a dog tears a bird laid open from
throat to breastbone with nothing messy around it.
The head sat upright 3 inches from the body, like someone
propped it to face the door. We didn't go inside.
We backed away together without turning around because the open
dark was worse than the idea of seeing something by accident.
In the truck, Aaron fumble the keys and they fell into that
place between the seat and console that eats everything.
When he came up with them, he was laughing in that same empty
way I'd laughed the night before.
We pulled out quick and hit the long gravel and then the longer
one in the pond slid by. That's when the hum came back
louder and the radio fuzzed with white noise even though I had it
off. The windshield, which was clean,
picked up a smear like oil and water right in the center that
moved toward me like a slow drop.
I wiped at it with the back of my hand and my palm came back
dusty like fine ash. When the shadow crossed the lane
in front of us, my foot went to the brake without me doing it.
It wasn't a silhouette like a hawk or a goose.
It was the absence of light in the shape I'd seen the night
before, moving faster than it had any right to move, low
enough that the brush on both sides bent toward the center as
it passed. It came down in the gravel 3 car
lengths ahead and the impact puffed dust up to my bumper.
The red reflectors turned in the same motion and hit us exactly
and I heard Aaron say Nope, clear as a bell like he'd been
rehearsing that one word all day.
I threw it into reverse, cranked the wheel, then back into drive
and the truck shuttered because the transmission hated being
treated that way. The thing took one step and was
keeping pace with us at 20, then 30, and when we hit the end of
the lane and the ditch and the embankment that meets the road,
it pushed off and cleared it without touching the top.
My mouth was open and nothing was coming out.
The windshield filmed darker. I could smell hot metal, like an
overworked alternator. We hit pavement and I floored it
and the engine went to a note I didn't like.
The shadow followed high and then low, and when it came down
alongside us I saw for the first time how much larger it was than
the space it took up. That doesn't make sense unless
you've seen something that makes air feel crowded.
The wing nearest me, past the window, and the glass flexed
inward like someone set a palm against it and pressed.
I swerved without meaning to and corrected hard.
The shoulder was wet and the back tires snaked.
There was a sound of claws or hooks on metal, the scraping of
metal at the bunkers, but louder, and my roof dented right
above my head with a hollow boom that made my teeth hurt.
We weren't alone out there. Far down the straight I saw the
reflected lights of another car, and with that stupid human hope,
I leaned on the horn and kept it there.
The shadow went up, hung, then slanted off toward the fields
like it was going to cut us off 2 turns ahead.
I kept the horn alive until we hit the intersection and the
minivan with the soccer sticker braked so hard the back end
dipped. I flew past and caught a glimpse
of a woman's face with her mouth open like she was yelling.
Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. The shadow didn't drop again, it
moved in parallel with us 2 fields over like it was waiting
for the next blind stretch. When the road tipped toward the
bridge, the wind off the river caught us and air filled the
truck and washed the ash smell out for a second.
I don't know if that mattered to it.
It veered once, twice, then went up and was gone against the low
ceiling of cloud, like it decided to bleed into it instead
of fight the cross wind on the bridge.
Every Truss and cable felt too thin.
I had both hands on the wheel, hard enough that my fingertips
ached. The shaking in my legs didn't
stop at the guardrail. It climbed into my throat.
When we slit back into Ohio, I didn't slow until the 1st gas
station. We rolled under the lights like
a boat to dock. Kayla ran out of the store when
she saw our faces. She'd been there the whole time
with a cup of coffee going cold in her hand because she didn't
want to sit at camp alone. Her first words to me were
where's the blood? Not a question You want to hear
from someone who's looking straight at you.
It took me a second to understand.
The hood and windshield were speckled with Gray, black dust
and streaks like a smear of charcoal.
But at the roof line over my door, there were 4 long tracks
spaced like fingers raked through wet paint that had
cooled into a dull brown. The lines ran to the back window
and ended where the cab meets the bed.
Above them, dented into the metal, was a shallow V shape,
like the start of another set. Kayla touched one of the tracks
with the tip of a finger, smelled it, and went white.
She didn't tell me what it smelled like.
She didn't have to. I could still smell it in my
throat. We didn't go back to the site
for gear that night. We didn't argue about it.
We crowded into a motel room in town that had a carpet meant for
men in work boots and a heater that banged every 10 minutes,
and we lay on top of the covers without undressing and stared at
the ceiling grout while the TV played three rooms away.
In that shallow sleep, you get aftershock, I kept thinking.
I heard tapping in the wall over the headboard.
I sat up once, and the quiet felt like it was waiting for me
to commit to it. I lay back down and watch the
red of the motel sign bleed through the curtains and make a
square on the floor. When Dawn finally did the thing
Dawn does, Kayla was already sitting with her back against
the wall and her eyes wet and raw, like she'd been crying.
Carefully, to avoid sound at first light, we drove back.
I was sure the cooler would be gone, that the tents would be
slashed, that the sight would look like a hand had pulled it
through a keyhole. The cooler sat on the picnic
table as we'd left it. The tents were unzipped but not
torn. The ring was cold as stone.
The only difference was that the gravel where we parked in the
path around the tents had those same combed arcs, like a rake
had drifted. The top layer in the marks here
and there were the points where something harder than a boot had
pressed. Not deer, not bare, not a
person's shoe. Long, narrow, with a side spur
that bit deeper at the end of each step.
Left, right, left. We worked in silence, rolled
tents, threw them into the beds, grabbed the trash.
The only sound was gear and gear zippers, the hollow slam of a
tailgate. When we pulled onto the Ridge
Rd. I looked in the side mirror and
saw the campground table with the chained cooler sitting there
like someone else's problem. And for an instant the chain
looked thinner than it should be, as if something had worried
at it and smoothed it down. That may have been my eyes and
nothing else. I'm telling you everything I saw
without trying to sell you on it.
There's a statue across the river.
If you live there, you know the one I mean.
People take photos with it, smile, lean a shoulder against
the leg for scale like it's a joke, a local flavor thing.
I've done it. I was 20 the first time and
drunk and thought being scared of a story was proof you didn't
have the right kind of brain. The four of us didn't drive past
that corner. We took the long way around and
when we crossed the bridge again, the wind was up and the
river was all that metallic green that looks like muscle.
I drove with my shoulders up by my ears without meaning to.
At the first turn past the water, the trees closed over the
road and the sky disappeared in a way that felt like someone
setting a lid on something. We made it home by early
afternoon. We didn't talk in the group chat
for three days. When we did, it was short work.
Sorry busy, my phone was acting up.
I'll upload pics later. We never did upload anything.
After a week, Kayla texted me a photo of her forearm.
There were 4 long bruises in a line that curved toward her
elbow from her wrist. She said she woke up with it and
didn't remember hitting anything.
She didn't ask me what I thought.
I didn't ask her to measure the span from the outer mark to the
inner. I didn't ask because I didn't
want a number I'd have to carry around.
If you need a name for what stepped out of those reeds, I
know the name people use. I grew up hearing it.
I'm not trying to convince you. I know what 2 red circles look
like when a light finds them and throws back too much.
I know the sound of something heavy coming down on gravel and
the way a tent wall bows when air moves wrong over it.
I know the dent in my roof and the streaks I couldn't wash off
for months no matter what I used.
That's what I have. That's all I have.
I sleep fine most nights. The river wind comes and goes in
my head like a truck passing on the highway.
Now and then in the middle of making coffee, something will
press into that quiet behind my eyes and I'll think I hear a
slow dry tapping on nylon from a place that isn't here.
When that happens, I stop what I'm doing and stand and wait for
it to go flat again. I don't tell anyone I don't go
camping near there anymore. I don't drive those roads at
night. I don't cross that bridge unless
I have to. That's as close as I get.
I bought the cabin outside Marshfield because it was the
last place on that old class 4 Rd. you could still get to with
a regular truck and the 1st place where the cell bars went
to. Nothing.
And the noise from Route 2 was just a memory.
It sat above a shallow ravine cut by a cold brook that ran
nine months of the year, with a sugarbush climbing the hill
behind and an old Stonewall zigzagging through the maples
like a sentence you could almost read if you knew the farmer's
hand that wrote it. The porch faced a small Meadow,
and beyond that a narrow skirt of Birch and Beech and the
darker line of spruce that marked the start of the real
woods. It wasn't fancy.
Two small rooms, a propane heater, a black pipe, chimney
for the wood stove, tin roof that rattled the way it should
in rain. I came up to cut and stack, to
clean stovepipe, to check lines, to shovel snow off the roof when
the winters threw weight at it. I worked in Montpellier and the
cabin fixed a part of my mind that the office couldn't.
I paid cash for it because the man who had it before me didn't
want a second winter of climbing the road, and he was done.
I took his deal and his advice. Keep food and metal bins, park
facing downhill when the forecast hints at ice, and don't
fight the mud. I added one thing to his list
later. Watch the tree line.
That first fall I was there most weekends.
I put up a plastic tank to catch roof water, replace the screen
door and cut in a walking loop down to the brook so I wouldn't
beat a single trail into muck. On the second weekend of
October, I noticed a doe in the Meadow at last light.
That's not rare. I saw deer along the road and in
the neighbor's pasture, but this doe planted herself square with
the porch and didn't graze. She didn't flick her ears at
black flies. She held her head steady like
she was reading something. I stood inside with the lights
off and watched through the sill of the front window.
When I moved to the right, her eyes followed the movement
through the glass as if she had me, not just the motion.
She held like that for minutes. When I shifted left, she
tracked. When I crouched, she tried to
adjust her angle without stepping.
There was a notch missing from her left ear, a deep V like it
had been torn years ago. When the light failed and the
Meadow closed to Gray, she turned not to go back to the gap
in the Stonewall where the deer usually step, but toward the
corner of the cabin, as if she wanted to see the side windows,
too. I told myself she was curious.
I'd heard people say deer get used to houses and people, and
some even come close for gardens.
This wasn't a garden, and I didn't put out salt or scraps,
but I was new to the place and maybe the last owner had.
I let the theory sit until morning, then checked for
prints. The ground was damp and the
grass laid flat where she'd stood, but where I expected a
mess of Oval slots, there were only two clear sets, A pair of
hind legs set too wide for a normal stance and tracked along
the edge of the deck, and then nothing.
The dew was heavy. Any step would have brushed it.
I found a rub line on a young Maple along the wall where
Buck's work off velvet and claim.
But no Buck had been in that Meadow the night before.
It was a hole in a pattern. I couldn't explain it, so I left
it alone. That winter I only saw her once,
at a distance near the big posted sign on the next
property. She stood on the rise and
watched until the snow started again, then dropped back into
the cut. In March when the sugar line
sagged under late ice. I was in the sugarbush with a
friend's nephew tightening drops and pulling taps, and we found
hair caught under a length of lateral line.
Long white guard hairs like you'd pluck off a winter coat.
That happens. You get deer pushing through and
moose too if they come low. But the hair was at chest height
and the line had been eased under it, as if something had
passed 1st and the line had been moved to fit, not the other way
around. We shrugged, put in a new hook
and moved on. Spring brought bear sign claw
marks on the beach. A feeder at a neighbor's place
ripped off its hook because he forgot to take it down early.
The doe came again that June. She didn't linger.
She stepped out, looked at the cabin in full daylight, and
slipped away. The notch in her left ear was
easy to see. I started to call her the Deer
that watched. It wasn't imaginative, but it
was accurate and accuracy mattered because there were
other deer and they didn't behave like this.
When I ate supper by the window, I started turning off the inside
lights to kill the mirror on the glass.
It made no sense to invite that feeling.
The 2nd fall, the porch light began to snap on after midnight
and I could never catch what tripped it.
I'd go to the window and see only the whiteboards and the
dull silver of the water tank. I put up a trail camera on the
spruce that stood at the corner of the Meadow facing the cabin
in the sweep of grass, and another pointing down the steps
to the brook path, the cards filled with wind and crows and
me. I got a Fisher trotting like it
had an appointment. I got an owl dropping into the
grass and rising with a vole, wriggling.
I never got her. Three times I got a burst of 10
white frames, like the camera had lost its mind or had been
stared into with a mirror and the sun.
The first two bursts were at 1:00 in the morning, two nights
apart, and the third was at dawn when I was still in the loft.
In each sequence, the time stamps were smooth and nothing
else changed in the settings, just those bright blanks, like a
flinch. When you say these things out
loud, they start to sound like stories you've heard and think
you don't believe in person. They are smaller and you talk
yourself down. There are explanations.
Maybe the porch light sensor was going.
Maybe the camera hit do Maybe I was making more of the dough
than she deserved because I had given her a name and that stupid
notch made it easy to know her. But your body believes before
your head does. My shoulders went stiff when the
sensor clicked. I started carrying a flashlight
with a focused beam. I kept the axe in the wood box
and the rifle unloaded but nearby.
I didn't need it for her. It was for the thought of a
person. Because sometimes that's what
you fear in the woods where you're alone.
I checked the lock on the door twice before bed, even though it
was a hasp I could break with a boot.
I thought about replacing it and then didn't because it felt like
a dare. The October morning I saw her
walk on 2 legs was the kind of morning where sound doesn't
carry. The fog was down and moving in a
slow way across the Meadow that made the grass look like it was
breathing. The cabin smelled like last
night's wood smoke and coffee grounds damp in the trash.
I stepped out to knock ash from the chimney cap with the hook I
keep hung by the frame. I was barefoot because the porch
boards don't hold cold like the ground.
The fog made the air bead on my forearms.
When I looked up from the cap, I saw her at the edge of the Birch
line. She stood half a body into the
open, the dark of her eyes clear.
Even in that light, I expected the same compliance.
She would hold, then turn. Instead, she took a step forward
without the head Bob. Deer make one fluid lift and
set, and then another. And as she advanced, the front
legs didn't work. They didn't touch.
They hung and tucked. And what she moved on were her
Hinds placed heel to toe in a way I've only ever seen in
people. I didn't call out, I didn't
move. I let my hands drop and the hook
knock once against the cap and then hang.
Useless. Her ears turned flat and then
forward, listening, but her eyes stayed on mine.
The distance was 30 yards, maybe less.
Her breath didn't plume. The fog made a wet line at the
tips of her guard hairs. She didn't Bob or stamp or blow
like a deer. That's nervous.
She was not testing wind. She was not struggling.
She stood up the way a man stands up from a Crouch when he
decides he's going to speak, and she walked like that for four or
five clean steps, each one quiet, each one placed until she
reached the darker strip where the grass gives to Moss near the
brook path, and the fog lay thicker.
And then she was gone. Not gone like she ran, gone like
the line of her neck and back was erased.
And when I took the four strides it took to reach the edge and
look down, there was nothing. The Moss didn't show a bruise.
The grass behind where she came from had no trail beating it.
The only marks were my own on the porch and the drip off the
cap. I looked for the rest of that
day because you can't Unsee it and you want the trick exposed.
I took the path down to the brook.
I walked the wall. I checked the far fence where
the neighbors line runs by the posted sign and comes back.
I found scat and tracks for mother deer.
I found a place where something had bedded on the edge of the
spruce stand, a dry form pressed into last year's needles, and in
that bowl I found a single hair as wide as thread, white as the
belly on a snowshoe hair, and longer than any hair I've
plucked off a hide. I put it in my pocket and kept
it until spring. The way people keep nails they
find on their own drive until their tire goes flat and they
can match the cause. That hair never matched anything
else I saw, and after a while I threw it out because holding on
to it made me feel foolish. After that morning, something
changed that I could measure. I started to catch smudges on
the glass on the high panes of the front window.
Not the greasy nose prints you get at dog height, but faint
long streaks at a level you'd get if you ran your wrists along
the glass and let your fingers touch.
Once. I kept a rag under the sink for
it. I replaced the bulb in the porch
light, then replaced the sensor, and it still clicked on when fog
gathered thick in the hollow. The trail camera, which had been
reliable, started throwing that same white sequence when the fog
was low, like it didn't like to look into it.
I moved it and added another and borrowed 1/3, and there were
nights where all three would blank at the same minute and
then work fine on either side. When I told my neighbor Lyle
about it over coffee at his kitchen table, he shrugged
without smiling, the way he does when he listens and isn't ready
to say where he stands. He's 60, grew up less than 10
miles from the cabin and has a face that remembers every winter
he's plowed. When he spoke, he kept it
simple. You got a thing likes you, he
said. Or likes what you built, dear'll
do that. They'll post up and act like a
stump all day if they think you ain't seen them.
But that moving, you say? He shook his head.
I don't like it. I brought him up the following
week. We walked the ravine in daylight
with a little marker tape in our pockets so we wouldn't get
turned around in the fog if it laid in again.
We found old logging roads and a stone foundation with the old
square nails still scattered near a wall.
We found a Flat Rock with a crust of lichen that had been
scraped clean in two long lines, as if something sharp had been
dragged across it and then wiped.
We found prints we could read and prints we couldn't.
I don't say that to be dramatic. I mean, there were hooves where
hooves should be, and then there were pairs of Oval slots that
weren't paired, staggered in a walking pace with a distance
between strides, like what I'd make if I were trying to keep my
feet close to one line. The ground admitted what it
wanted and erased the rest. That day was hot for October and
there was no fog and nothing else came of it except that
Lyell, who doesn't spook easy, asked me if I had my phone and
when I said no because there was no service and I didn't see the
point, he said bring it anyway because sometimes the point is
the clock. The 3rd fall I stopped sleeping
through the night up there. I'd bed down and try to let the
stove tick and the owls call and the brook move, settle me, and
it would work until the point where the light wants to come
and isn't here yet, and I'd wake with the feeling that I had
gotten up and moved and come back and I couldn't account for
the minutes that had passed. Once I woke with the rag from
under the sink in my hand and I hadn't left a light on or put on
shoes. Another time I woke and smelled
wet hair and leaves and a bright iron smell like blood, the way
it smells when it's on your fingers, and there was nothing
in the cabin that could have made that odor.
I cleaned the traps, checked the bins, open the windows, and
nothing came of it. I tracked mud into the cabin one
morning from the porch and didn't remember going outside.
I told myself I had, because with a coffee can for a chimney
ash, I step out half awake sometimes without thinking.
I blamed myself, like you do when a thing doesn't fit.
October bled into November and rifle season came.
I don't hunt there. It's too close to the line and I
see hikers in the hollow sometimes, and the last thing I
want is to scare someone who cut in by mistake.
But I wear orange and I keep the radio on for the noon forecast
because when snow comes on that road, you make choices.
Early on the second Saturday, I had friends up for an afternoon.
We grilled venison from another freezer and split wood and told
the same stories about the same storms.
At 4:00 they left to beat dark. I stayed because two darks for
me was the whole point. When I was alone, the porch
light ticked on, ticked off, ticked on again.
I looked out and saw the wet boards and the night insects.
Then I saw a line move in the grass at the margin of what the
light could carry. It was not the clean path you
get when something walks and pushes with its chest.
It bent and straightened like a knee moves.
I said her name in my head, even though I never named her
anything but the deer that watched.
I felt stupid for giving her a shape before I saw it.
When the line reached the flower pots I leave turned upside down
for winter, one flipped quietly and then was set up right again.
It didn't fall. It didn't roll, it came up from
the ground into its spot like a hand had placed it gentle.
I stepped back from the glass and found the rifle and held it
without chambering around because I didn't want to make
the sound of the bolt. I kept the light off and let my
eyes work. Nothing else moved, and after a
while the fog took the porch back and the night was just
night. I could end this at that October
morning when she walked the way she walked and vanished, and
that would be enough to carry the main point of what I've
lived with since. But that's not how it ended.
When what you fear starts at the margin of a Meadow and keeps to
the edges, you can convince yourself you're safe inside your
four walls. You check the latch and you go
to sleep. But the 4th October broke that
boundary. It started with small things.
I woke one Wednesday with the high window in the kitchen
cracked open half an inch. It sticks.
I use a butter knife to help it along when I want to draft.
The knife was on the counter and the window had no smear on the
inside, but the outside had a new long mark on the upper pane,
like a finger had streaked it from above.
I checked for a ladder I don't own and for scuffs on the
siding. I found nothing.
On Friday, the wood box which lives on the porch against the
wall was pulled out two feet and at an angle like someone had
looked behind it. The boards showed 2 parallel
marks where it had slid forward without rocking.
There were no boot prints alongside Saturday morning.
The metal bin where I keep flour had a dent that hadn't been
there as if it had been squeezed, not hit.
That Saturday afternoon Lyle came up without calling.
He is not a man to waste gas or time.
He stood on the porch and let his eyes work and then he came
inside and sat and didn't drink what I poured him until he had
the words right. I seen your dough, he said, and
used my plain word for her down below the lower wall.
Yesterday she walked out when I come by and I set to walking
away. She kept to the trees.
I don't make a habit of staring dear down, but I checked her the
ear. He pointed to his own gone at
the tip, same as you said. She held stupid and didn't feed.
When I turned to go, she done a thing I never saw with my eyes
before. She went up on the Hinds and she
stepped like a person steps. No hop, no little run.
She just he stopped. He set the cup down like the
table might move. I ain't going back down in your
hollow with you, not in fog. We went that very day because he
said that, and then looked at me to say with his face that if I
was going to drag him anyway, do it before he changed his mind.
We went with radios, even though they'd be chatter to each other
at that range, and nothing else. We went with orange and
headlamps because fog falls early and fast in that cut.
We started at the brook and worked upstream to the place
where the bank rises and there's a blow down that's been there
since before I owned the cabin. The air held that wet iron smell
again. When I pointed it out, Lyle said
yes without turning his head to breathe it on purpose.
Something dead, he said. We looked.
We found no carcass. We found bones all right, but
they were clean. Deer femurs craned up in the
roots of a cedar, a coyote skull tucked under a rock ledge, a
line of ribs from something small hung on a branch.
The way kids hang fish bones when they are proud of being
wasteful. I wanted a person to blame for
that, because that would be a Direct Line from cause to
effect. But there were no beer cans, no
fires, no soft places in the ground where you could imagine a
pair of boots standing for any time.
We moved careful. We marked the spots we cut off
from so that we didn't circle over ourselves.
When the light started its early fade.
We turned back, and that's when it started.
I heard the first step, the way you hear the shift of a weight
on a new porch board when you've lived with it.
It wasn't large, it wasn't a crack.
It was a precise set, and the little lift that comes after it
was behind us and off to the left at the line of the wall.
I put my hand up and Lyle stopped.
He heard it too. Then it came again to the right,
like a step placed in answer. That can be a person shadowing
you in the woods, and that's not a superstition.
That's a thing that happens and is in the news when it goes bad.
I reached for the radio and then didn't bother because we were
six strides apart. We moved to the nearest big tree
and put it to our backs so that we could take what came in
front. She came then to prove that
words are small. She was a darker cut within the
fog first, and then she was a shape at the margin of the
headlamps reach that decided that the light didn't concern
her. She stepped into it and through
it until the edge of the beam was against her chest and the
rest of her was the animal I'd known from the first night,
except for the plain wrongness of the way she held herself and
the stillness in her head. She rose on her Hinds and made a
walking man's approach deliberate and balanced.
The hooves didn't scuff leaves, She put each down gentle and
sure, and used them like feet with the toes long and clever
inside. Her front legs were tucked and
folded up tight against the chest.
And I tell you what I saw, because if I don't say it, then
I didn't say what had to be said.
The joints on those four legs bent longer than they should,
like there was more in them than bone, and when she let them out
once in a test, the hoof didn't touch ground but hovered and
curled like there could be a hand at the end of it if you
slid the glove back. We held.
I lifted the rifle. Lyle said my name once, not soft
and not loud. The deer, or the thing that wore
her as if she were its coat, watched the barrel and then
looked up past it and held my eyes.
I do not put feelings on that look, because feelings are your
business and not facts. The fact is she took two more
steps, stopped and let her mouth open and close twice without
making sound like she was fitting her jaw to a word she
didn't need the air for. Then something struck the head
of my lamp, not hard enough to break it, but enough to shake
the beam and there were two more steps that came from the right
and behind and a wet brush against my pant leg as if a
ribbon of fog had weight. I swung the gun and the beam and
the horn of the blow down scraped the back of my knuckles.
Lyle said back and we did 1 pace, then another, then
another. Keeping the tree to our spine
and not letting the light go off her chest, she LED us.
That's how it felt. She didn't rush.
She ate the space between US and the wall by standing still and
letting the fog do work for her. The smell of wet hair and
pennies and old leaves grew until it was so large I thought
I had it inside my mouth. When we cleared the wall, we
didn't run yet, because running in that kind of light is a good
way to break an ankle or put your eye into a branch.
We walked fast with the gun at low ready and the lamps spilling
in the fog, bright and dumb around the beams.
She kept to our right and piggybacked our pace, always
where the beam met the limit of its throw, never closer unless
we fumble to step once. I heard claws on bark.
A fast climb and I flashed the lamp up and the white of the
Birch scrolled by and something dark shot down the other side
like a rope. We lost her at the big white
pine stump near the split in the trail because the fog was thick
there with the brook below, and a cold lay in it that you could
feel on your wrists. That's where she moved.
She came in not to my right but straight, rode the beam and
stepped through it. And the eyes were wrong against
the light, not reflecting like a deer's but flat and taking it
like the lens of a camera. I learned what fear does to aim.
It makes you think of the reasons not to shoot, and those
reasons pile up atop your trigger finger like a weight you
can't lift. I didn't shoot.
I don't know if the shot would have done anything except make a
sound we'd have to live with. We hit the porch without
agreeing that we'd go for it. We both made the same call, and
a call like that just means you have the same kind of chicken in
your bones. I kept the lamp steady, Lyle
worked the latch, and I shouldered the door.
We got inside and set the bar I'd made for storms, and we
stood there with our boots on the good rug and listened.
The smell came through the walls.
The porch light ticked on, ticked off, ticked on again.
Something leaned into the glass and let weight travel through
the pane and into the frame and into the wall studs.
It is not a house's job to keep that kind of weight out.
Cabins are for weather and time and people.
It held because the nailers in the sheet and the siding wanted
to hold. Then something slid along the
glass from high to low, and a sound came through it, like a
breath held too long, released at last.
A hand would make that sound if it were long and you let each
finger go its own way down the pane and left the print for me
to wipe later. A hoof would not.
The porch boards didn't squeal. There was no scrape.
When the wait left the house, it left all at once.
We slept none. That's a clean sentence for a
knight that you taste when you say it.
We stood a long time, and then we sat with the rifles at our
knees and the lamps off and the stove dying because I wouldn't
get up to feed it. When the first color came and
the fog lifted, we opened the door.
The porch was wet but not marked, the grass was beaded
with dew, and the beads were all intact, as far as I saw, except
for a single path of dry between the steps and the edge of the
Meadow. Like a sash had been drawn
across the wet it ran 5 feet and then stopped in the middle of
the open, as if whoever had walked there decided to rise and
go. The flower pots were as we'd
left them. The wood box was against the
wall on the higher pane of the window.
There were 5 long faint streaks like fingers set wider than mine
apart. I wiped them with the rag and
didn't show them to anyone because I was done with that
kind of conversation. We tried to leave right away and
learned what panic does to trucks.
I backed too fast and dropped a wheel off the edge of the little
shoulder and had to rock it and lay spruce boughs to get grip.
The road down is narrow and the gullies drink trucks when you
misjudge a soft place. Lyle got out and walked ahead
and spotted and kept talking so I didn't move the wheel where I
shouldn't. Twice he told me to stop and
twice I ignored him by a foot and he swore without moving his
feet. We got down and when I hit
pavement and the truck stopped trying to slide into the ditch,
I let out a sound I don't ever make and didn't want him to
hear. He didn't look at me and I
didn't look at him. He got in his own truck and
followed me to town and didn't peel off.
We didn't talk in the Cumberland Farms lot when we got gas.
We nodded and he went his way and I went mine and nobody asked
us why. Our hands shook like we had low
sugar. After that night, I changed how
I used the place. I put in better locks because I
had to do a thing with my hands. I stopped sleeping there in
October unless someone else was with me, and even then I watched
the windows more than the stove. I kept the trail cameras up
longer than I needed to and brought fresh batteries every
weekend because the cold eats them and the cabin eats them
worse. The cameras didn't catch her
anymore. The white blank sequences came
at odd hours and in no pattern I could draw.
I still saw her some years when the fog laid low on a late
afternoon. I'd be splitting kindling or
closing up the tank for the season and I'd lift my head with
a feeling I didn't summon, and I'd see the notch in her ear at
the line of the spruce and the Birch and she'd hold while I
counted to 10 and then she'd go sideways into the trees without
breaking a twig. Some years I didn't see her at
all, but those were the years the porch light ticked without
anything to walk under and the rag under the sink got more use.
I kept telling myself that a person who wakes in the night
and wipes a window is making the problem worse by naming it too
much, but I did it anyway. In the 5th fall I thought about
selling the place. I put it down and took it back
up. I told myself that what happens
in a hollow happens there, whether you are present for it
or a mile away. I told myself that fear is a
small dog that learns tricks if you feed it.
I told myself a lot and none of that touched the one truth.
I couldn't dress up. I did not want to be in the
ravine below that cabin in the fog ever again.
When I say fog, I mean the kind that does not move, that sits
and holds and feels like it has hands.
There are fogs that lift quick and show you that you were
silly, and there are fogs that hide what hides in them and are
proud to do it. That day in the hollow,
something decided we didn't get to have the ground.
I believe in maps and lines and stone walls, but whatever stood
up in front of me has its own boundary that runs right through
mine. Last October I brought my
brother up because he asked to hunt birds and because I thought
the sound of another person's boots in the leaves and the
rough talk would anchor the place to the ordinary again.
It worked. All day.
We saw grouse and mist clean and laughed.
We drank coffee and cursed the cold and made plans for the
winter repairs. We didn't go down to the brook.
We stayed on the old roads and the dry.
At 5A fog came fast and thick. The porch light clicked and the
pail by the door rolled once and then stopped.
We packed up to go and my brother walked to the steps to
take the last bag and I was behind him and I was looking not
at the yard but at the reflection in the glass because
that's what the dark makes you do.
And I saw behind our shoulders a long narrow white shape at the
height of a chest pass by the window like it was inside
already. I turned and the room was empty
and my brother said my name and the bag slid forward out of his
hand and off the step and set itself down without the thump it
should have made. We didn't pick it up, we didn't
speak, We locked the door and left and fog followed the truck
down the first half mile of Rd. like a low white dog before it
fell back where it lives. People have asked me if I have
pictures and I tell them I don't because I don't.
I had cameras up for three years and the only thing they gave me
were blank frames and more questions.
If you want a video to explain a thing that doesn't want to be
explained, you will stay up late watching a lot of nothing.
If you want belief, you can have mine without proof and you can
keep it. I have no story that ends with
me laying down rules to keep you safe because if rules worked I
would have put them on the door with a marker and slept easy.
I don't have a tidy end. I have a house I still own and a
hollow I do not go into. I have a doe with a notch in her
ear that sometimes stands up like a man and looks through
glass like glass is nothing, and remembers me the way I remember
her. And I have a promise I keep
because it was made for me when I backed off that wall with a
man who has plowed more bad nights than I've seen.
And we kept our feet because the ground decided not to tilt.
I won't go down in that spot again.
Not in fog, not in October, not with company, not alone.
I retired from emergency medicine last spring after 32
years in a county ER. I still keep a jump bag in my
trunk, gloves, trauma shears, a headlamp, A tourniquet, gauze, a
pocket mask. Old habits don't go anywhere
just because you hand in a badge in your last set of scrubs.
I tell you that so you'll understand.
I don't panic and I don't embellish.
I've seen what happens to the human body when steel folds and
glass breaks. I know the smell of coolant and
burnt brake pads. I know how a person looks when
they're still in there versus when they're not.
This happened on an October night a few days ago on A2 Lane.
I've driven a dozen times to cut across the hills between towns.
It's the kind of Rd. with a white church at one end and a
diner at the other. Posted at 45.
No shoulder maples crowding close.
It was just after 9. The fog was that early fall kind
that collects in low spots and then slides without warning.
Clear one second, the world narrowed to a tunnel the next.
My radio was low. Coffee in a stainless Tumblr.
A stack of quilts in the back seat because I was bringing them
to my sister. 2 miles past the quarry, the road bends left
around a ravine. There's an old guardrail in a
Creek below, more a drainage than a Creek rank with leaves
this time of year. I know the spot.
The grade tightens right after the bend, and if you're not
paying attention, you drift into the opposite lane.
I ease down to 30 and tapped the defrost.
That's when I saw the hazard flash.
One slow amber blink cutting through the fog up ahead.
The rest of the world looked poured out of chalk, but that
blink had color and timing. Then, as I crept forward, the
beam of my headlights caught the shape a car on its roof, halfway
off the pavement. The rear end hung on the lip of
the ditch, the nose down toward the Creek.
The undercarriage was exposed, wheels still, 1 tire shredded to
ribbon. The back hatch had popped and
something soft spilled out of it, like laundry, maybe a
blanket or a bag. Steam drifted in a low white
drift around it. A person stood in the road
beside the overturned car, waving both arms over their
head. I went to neutral hazard on I
pulled onto the thin gravel edge where the ground dips and the
grass gets fat with runoff, set the brake and clicked on my
headlamp. Hey.
I shouted as I opened my door. Are you hurt?
Don't move your neck. They kept waving, not panicked,
steady. Their silhouette looked wrong,
coat too thin for the cold, and the legs didn't look bent the
way legs look when someone's been thrown or crawled upright
after a hit. Just straight, like a
mannequin's. When I got closer I could see it
was a woman, late 30s maybe, hair stuck to the side of her
face. Her mouth moved, but I couldn't
hear her over the hiss from the car and the wet ticking of metal
cooling. I used my doctor voice, the one
that cuts through noise. I'm here to help hold still.
Up close, I smelled antifreeze and damp leaves.
The passenger window had spidered and fallen inward, the
airbag had blown and now lay collapsed like a deflated
throat. The interior light was on.
My headlamp caught the silver of a child's car seat and the
corner of a paperback. The license plate style was old,
not antique old, just a few designs back.
I stepped to the woman first, hands up to show I wasn't going
to grab her. Where do you hurt?
Please? She said in this thin flat voice
that sounded like someone speaking in a big empty room.
Help us, please. OK, I said.
How many are in the car? Anyone trapped?
She didn't answer. She kept looking past me at the
bend, like she was watching for something else to come.
I back toward the overhang of the car and crouched.
If you can tell me your name, I called as I peered into the
opening where the passenger window had been.
There was someone inside, a man upside down in the driver's
seat, seat belt locked, face turned toward the roof.
He had blood in his hairline. I could see the slow lift of his
chest, alive. His eyes fluttered when my light
hit him. I switched to my low beam from
habit. Sir, don't move.
I'm a doctor. I'm going to call for help.
Are you having trouble breathing?
He made a sound that could have been no, or could have been all
the air left in him leaving at once.
I stepped away and dialed 2 bars 911.
I said when they answered, giving the route number.
The mile marker at the church 2 miles back, the bend near the
ravine, details about the car, dark crossover, roof down.
Male driver with unknown LOC, one female ambulatory.
I described the hiss and said I couldn't smell fuel, send fire
and EMS access is tight but possible units are on route.
The dispatcher said she asked my name.
I gave it. She asked if I could stay on
scene. I said I could.
She asked what I was driving and told me to put my flashers on if
they weren't already. I said they were.
Ma'am, she said a second later. I'm showing your phone location
in the next county over. Are you sure of your mile
marker? I'm sure, I said.
I just passed the quarry and the white church.
There's a Creek copy, she said, but her voice got the strained
edge dispatchers get when the map and the report won't match.
Stay on the line. I slid my phone into the chest
pocket of my jacket and snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves.
The woman still stood in the road.
Her hands had fallen to her sides.
Now where's your pain? I asked again.
Can you feel your fingers and toes?
She blinked and raised one arm like she was about to show me a
scrape. Only the light caught her skin,
and it didn't shine the way wet skin shines.
It looked dull, like paper. Please, she said.
We went over. He stuck.
It's OK, I said. Help is on the way.
I ducked under the rear of the car to see if the exhaust was a
risk. The muffler had bent.
The pipe didn't look crimped. No visible fuel leak.
I could see the Creek just beyond, black and slow, with
damp leaves clotted along its edge.
Frogs made that dry clicking sound they make when the
temperature drops. No other cars.
No footprints except mine. When I stood and turned, the
woman wasn't where she had been. She stood at my passenger door.
She hadn't walked. There weren't prints.
She was just there, hand on the glass, like she was trying to
look in at my seat. She didn't leave a mark on the
window. Her breath didn't fog.
Ma'am, the dispatcher said in my ear.
The trooper is coming down Route 7 now.
He's passing the quarry. He doesn't see a crash.
Can you flash your headlights? I'm on Route 27, I said.
Not 7. Two different roads.
Tell him. The ravine with the old
guardrail. A pause.
We're not showing a 27 in that direction.
I turned my headlamp toward the bend to make myself easier to
spot. The beam caught the reflective
paint on the guardrail posts. In the blink of my own hazard
lights, the hazard on the overturned car had slowed.
It wasn't the steady factory pattern anymore.
It was long, short, long, short, with a drag in between, like the
battery was dying. The man inside made a soft
choking sound that pulled me back under fast.
I reached in through the window hole, careful not to shift
weight against the car. Sir, I'm going to support your
head. Don't try to turn.
Can you squeeze my hand? His fingers moved, weak but
there. Good, that's good.
Can you tell me your name? He made a syllable.
It could have been H. His lips were pale, there was
blood in his ear. I slid 2 fingers to his carotid
faint but present. Rescue is coming, I said, even
though the road beyond the bend was still empty and wet and
there was nowhere to put a truck.
And no sound but that distant frog clicking in the dry tick of
the car cooling. My left knee started to ache
from the angle. My gloves made a faint squeak on
the plastic of the collapsed airbag.
The smell changed and got colder.
Not the sweetheart of antifreeze anymore.
A flat mineral. Cold, like wet stone, Ma'am,
said the dispatcher. You said you're at a Creek.
Do you see a sign for cold water?
Cold water wasn't the name of anything I knew out there.
I don't see any signs, I said. It's fogged in.
Another pause. OK, stay with me.
Can you tell me the make of the car again?
I looked at the steering wheel badge.
Only it wasn't the badge I'd seen a minute ago.
The logo was older. I recognized it only because you
learn to recognize them in the ER when you do paperwork and
have to put make and model on the incident report.
The interior wasn't right either.
The climate controls were sliders, not a touch screen.
The fabric was that coarse stuff that pills with age.
The child seat wasn't the one I'd seen.
It was an older style, faded. The branding tag sun bleached
white. I drew my hand back.
Not fast, because you don't move fast under a car, ma'am, the
dispatcher said again, grey in my ear.
Stand by, I said. Something brushed my elbow.
Not metal, not fabric. Cold.
The kind of cold that bites through a glove.
I jerked and bumped my head on the frame.
My headlamp shook and the beam swung across the man's face.
His eyes were open and looking straight ahead at me.
He was conscious now. He was trying to speak.
His lips moved and moved and no sound came, and then he made a
rushing grunt, like a person who's had the wind knocked out,
and drew a long breath that whistled at the end.
Don't try to talk, I said. Squeeze my hand if you can feel
this. He didn't squeeze.
His fingers twitched. Behind me, on the road, someone
said help us. In that same flat empty room
voice the woman had used, only there were more of them now.
I didn't turn right away. Training drills into you.
What needs your eyes and what doesn't.
I held the man's head, kept his airway aligned as best I could
in that position, took inventory.
Breath present, pulse faint, pupils responsive.
I listened for the siren I knew I should have been hearing by
now, if a trooper truly was at the quarry, and I heard nothing
but that low steam in the frogs and the soft wet sound of leaves
settling in Water. Please, said a second voice.
Please help us. I turned my head.
There on the road were three figures, spaced like fence posts
along the center line. The woman in the thin coat, a
man in a windbreaker. A smaller figure, teenager
maybe, hair to their jawline, standing with arms hugged around
themselves like people do when they're trying to keep what's
inside from spilling out. None of them looked injured.
None of them moved except their mouths and their hands when they
raised them to wave. They didn't mist in the cold.
The fog passed right through them.
Behind them, the hazard light blinked, long, short, long,
short, and the timing for all three turned in unison, like
cheap clocks set to the same channel.
Where's the child's seat? I asked, because the question
pushed itself out of me sideways, wrong, like a hiccup.
I hadn't meant to say it, I hadn't even been thinking it
until my mouth made room for it. The teenager's head turned
toward me, slow, and even from that distance I could tell their
eyes were wrong. Not bloody, not glazed, just
wrong in the way eyes look on a person who's fallen into that
depth where they're still replaying the last clear moment
while everything else sloughs away.
He said we can't get him out. I don't scare easy.
I do get angry. Back up.
I said louder, working to keep my voice even.
All of you back away from the road.
I need to get the driver stable back up so the truck can get in
when it arrives. They didn't move.
The man inside the car whispered don't, and I could tell the
don't was for me, not for them. I leaned closer.
Don't what? He used a tiny little breath,
the way people do when they're trying not to make their chest
move. Don't let her take you down.
Who? I said.
Who's her? The woman in the thin coat
raised her arm again and motioned to me with this jerky,
childish little scooping motion. Come on, come on, come on.
My phone made a sound like a recording played backward, and
the dispatcher's voice wobbled and said, Ma'am.
The trooper returned to the station.
He checked both routes. We have no crash at your
location. Do not approach an unsafe
vehicle. If you feel unsafe, remain in
your car. I'm not in my car, I said.
I'm under the vehicle with a live patient.
Static hissed. Then, clear as a bell, a second
female voice came on the line and said, you were supposed to
stop. I did stop, I said, Who is this?
My headlamp flickered. A shadow moved across the beam
like a hand, but there wasn't a hand.
Behind me, something tapped the trunk of my car. 3 taps, slow
and spaced, knuckle on metal. OK, I said, because you have to
give yourself instructions, sometimes out loud, like you
would give them to a junior. What's next?
What's the next safe move? We're going to try to release
the belt. The upside down man's eyes went
huge. He shook his head minutely, then
stopped and made a noise. Pain or warning, I couldn't
tell. I reached for my trauma shears
anyway and slid them under the belt.
If I timed it with his breath, I could make the cut without
jostling him. There's risk doing that with the
car on its roof, but there's risk leaving a belt locked and
letting it compress vessels. I cut the belt, parted with a
dry little crackle, and his body settled half an inch deeper into
the collapsed foam. I braced his head in my palm.
I've got you. Please, the woman said behind
me. Please help us.
We went over on the bend. There were more voices now, far
off and then close, echo against fog.
Some sounded like they were down in the ditch.
One sounded right at my ear, a child's voice saying, Mom says
to hurry. My phone died, not a fade to 1%
and then out dead. The headlamp dimmed.
I smelled water where there hadn't been any.
The sharp iron wet of Creek water that's been sitting under
leaves and the ground at my knees went from cool to cold to
bone cold. The man inside tried to grab my
sleeve. His hand slid off my glove.
OK. I said out loud to him as much
for me. OK, we're going to pivot you.
When I say I tested the way he'd give, he wouldn't.
The roof had collapsed enough that his shoulder was pinned.
I would need a bar. I would need another set of
hands. I would need 30 seconds of time
where the world stayed where it was instead of shifting Gray.
Tap, tap, tap the trunk of my car again.
I turned my head a fraction. The woman stood there with her
palm on my trunk lid. She hadn't walked.
She hadn't crossed the distance, she was just there.
Her hand didn't press down on the metal, it hovered like
paint, and when she lifted it, there was no smear, no oil.
She looked over her shoulder at the bend and then back at me,
like she was waiting for someone else to arrive.
You need to move now, the upside down man said.
The words came out whole. His breath frosted my glove.
She wants you down. The Creek made a different
sound. Not frogs, not leaves.
The sound of something big shifting in slow water.
The car creaked at its resting point like weight had crawled
onto it. My lamp flickered again and
steadied. I got small, then tucked, arms
tucked. Legs slid out the way I had come
carefully. No sudden push that would rock
the frame. Gloves snapped off and went in
my pocket. I stood, and the world stepped 1
notch closer to me all at once, like a row of theater seats
folding up. The three figures in the road
were closer than they had any right to be in the time I'd
taken. The teenager stood nearest.
He didn't look like a teenager up close.
He looked like every face you've ever seen.
The second after the worst thing happens to them.
He lifted his hand. There was no palm, not really.
Just the idea of one in fog. Please, he said.
Help. The woman's mouth opened.
Her face didn't change. She didn't blink.
She said we have to get him out. And the way she said it, flat,
exact, like something memorized so tight it became a tunnel, put
ice in the marrow of my arms. I wish I could tell you I did
something brave. I didn't.
What I did was run for my car. I kept my body angled, not
giving them my back because every cell in me screamed not to
let them. Behind me, gravel slipped under
my shoes. I got to my door and yanked it
open. The overhead light came on and
made a yellow cone that looked solid enough to stand inside.
I got in and slammed, and the sound of the door closing was
the first real sound I'd heard since the hiss.
I locked the doors. Keys were in the cup holder.
I grabbed them and the engine caught on the second turn.
The radio screamed static. I shut it off.
The woman's face was at my window.
I don't mean her nose pressed to the glass and breath fogging the
pain. I mean her face was there as if
there'd never been glass, like a reflection that doesn't match
you. She didn't blink.
She didn't breathe. Her mouth made that flat,
memorized shape and said he's still breathing.
And when she did, cold poured through the cabin like someone
had opened a walk in. I dropped the shifter to drive,
rolled, and the tires spun on the wet leaves before they
caught. I barely missed the rear end of
the overturned car. I threaded past it, mirrors
inches from dead metal, and the world beyond my beams looked
empty. I hit the bend and the grade
tried to throw me left toward the low rail and the black mouth
of the Creek, but my hands know that fight.
The steering wheel shuddered, the rear end fishtailed, and I
brought it back. The fog on the other side of the
bend swallowed my view. In that fog, something ran
beside me. I didn't see legs.
I didn't see a body. I saw the shape in my side
window move faster than a person can move, right at the edge of
the glass, keeping pace. And I heard that flat voice at
my ear again saying you were supposed to stop.
And I said out loud to the empty car.
I did. And then louder I did, because
saying it made it real and made me less likely to do the other
thing, jerk the wheel hard and let the grade have me.
I took the next turn too fast, straightened, and then the
hazard light blinked in front of me again, the same amber pulse,
the same angle, like the car had picked itself up off the road
and set itself down half a mile ahead to wait for me.
The figures were there, too, spaced along the center line,
hands rising together in that steady school gym wave.
The teenager lifted both arms this time, like someone trying
to flag down a bus. The woman turned her head and
watched me come. I didn't stop.
I didn't even downshift. I kept my foot where it was and
I drove right through them. There was no sound, and there
was a sound. Not a thud, not a bump.
The closest word I have is a pressure change, like the cabin
lost air all at once, and a crack inside my ears and a taste
like pennies at the back of my tongue.
My headlamp still strapped there.
Useless flickered on my temple and went black.
The car's dash clock reset to 12.
The hazard blink on the road snapped off like someone blew a
fuse. I drove.
I didn't check the mirror. Somewhere behind ME3 slow taps
came again, separated by distance and time on metal.
I wasn't anywhere near. The fog thinned as if a curtain
had been dragged across the hills.
The road widened. There were utility poles again,
instead of just trees. A lit sign appeared ahead.
The gas station that sells bait and sandwiches and oil funnels,
the kind of place that stays open for hunters and truckers.
I pulled in, wide nose toward the door and brake to a stop so
hard the coffee Tumblr bounced. The motors idle sounded huge and
stupid. I turned it off, and for a
second I heard nothing. Not the station radio, not the
cooler buzz, like all sound came back in a thin strip of tape and
had to spool in from the edge inside.
The man at the counter didn't look surprised to see a woman my
age come in wild eyed, with gloves still hanging, half
pocketed and headlamp dead around her neck.
He looked how clerks look at closing time.
Hoping you'll buy. Not trying to talk.
I put my hands on the counter and realized they were shaking
so hard the nitrile snapped at the wrists.
He handed me a paper towel like we were in a kitchen.
You OK there, miss? Call the sheriff, I said.
There's a car rolled over at the ravine on the bend.
Driver breathing but weak. No obvious fuel, no fire.
You'll need extrication. Send a truck down through the
church side. It's tighter on the quarry side.
He didn't move to the phone. He looked over my shoulder at
the empty lot and then back at me.
You got turned around. I didn't.
He gave me a long look that wasn't unkind and wasn't
patronizing. It was practiced.
You came past that bend after 9, didn't you?
Yes. He nodded once, like he was
checking something off a list he'd run many times.
You said you saw hazard lights, Yes, and folks waving yes.
The shaking had settled into my shoulders now.
You'll send someone. He picked up the phone then and
dialed without looking at the keypad.
Like his fingers knew the numbers.
He kept his eyes on me. Trooper will be here in 5.
He'll drive you back if you want, but there'll be nothing
there. He said it like it wasn't
cruelty, like it was a recorded line in the back.
A cooler motor kicked on the radio behind the cigarettes
played a song I hadn't heard in 20 years and cut out mid
syllable. Nothing there, I repeated.
My voice sounded like the woman's had out on the road,
flat and memorized. He cupped the receiver and said
to me, every October, same corner, folks swear up and down
we go. Look, never nothing there but
wet leaves in a cold spot. Sheriff's daddy went out there
in 85, and his daddy before him. There was an accident back then.
Three dead woman and two kids. Man made it as far as the
hospital. I stared at him until the words
made meaning. What year?
He shrugged with one shoulder. Years go by, it's always the
same week. I talked to the driver, I said.
I cut his belt. He put the phone to his ear
again. Yes, Carl, she's here.
Uh huh. Same bend then to me.
You sit down, You want water? Your face is white.
The trooper came. He looked 20 and 50 at once, in
the way small town troopers do. He took my name and I gave it.
He didn't blink when I said I used to be an ER doc.
He offered to drive me back to the bend.
I said yes, he had that careful way about him, like he didn't
want to spook a horse. We went out into the lot.
The fog had climbed into the Pines on the hill like cotton
and briars. I got into the passenger seat of
his cruiser and found myself clutching my keys like a
Talisman without remembering picking them up.
He drove slow with his bar dark, just a little shutter click of
radio now and then, like the set was clearing its throat.
We took the turn past the quarry.
We took the straight where the little white church sits close
to the road with its painted sign.
We came to the bend. There was nothing there.
No scuffs on the road, no glass, no tracks in the wet verge where
a bumper might have scraped, no heat in the air.
The guardrail sat dented the way it's been dented for years.
The Creek made its small sound. The frogs clicked.
The fog watched us without a face.
He put his car in park and didn't get out.
He let the motor idle and set his hand soft on the wheel.
You want to walk it? He asked.
You don't have to. I didn't.
I knew if I put my feet on that pavement and saw nothing, the
part of me that keeps its lists and checks its boxes would
freefall. I kept my seat belt on.
I looked down at my hands. There were marks on my left
wrist where something cold had closed on me.
Under the car or at the car or not at the car.
Not bruises yet, just the early pale kind that bloom with time
into ugly fingerprints. He saw me looking and pretended
he didn't. My mom says to tell folks it's
the fog playing tricks. He said like that was a joke he
always made. I just tell them to fill up at
Phil's and go home the other way.
We don't close the bend. People still need to drive.
You ever stop to help them? I asked.
My voice was normal again. I don't know when it returned.
Once he said softly when I was green.
Saw a kid waving. Never touched ground when I ran,
you know what I mean? Like I wasn't quite in my body.
Got out there and there was nothing but my own breath and
the sound of my radio. Half a mile behind me.
I heard my partner Call My Name like it was coming underwater.
Last time I went out on foot on that bend, We drove back to the
station. He wrote down what I'd said and
didn't tell me. I imagined it.
He didn't try to tidy any edges. He asked if I had someone to
call. I said my sister.
He let me use the phone on the desk with the coiled cord while
I dialed the fluorescent light over the break room blinked
twice and then steadied. A coffee machine gurgled and
then held its breath. Somewhere a printer woke,
groaned and went back to sleep. I said I was fine and I would be
late and I would see her in the morning.
I checked into a motel that has carpets the color of old tea and
a front desk clerk who pushes the pen toward you with two
fingers like she's not trying to rush you.
But she is in the bathroom, under the light that makes
everyone look I'll. I took off my jacket and rolled
back the sleeve. The marks had come up 4 ovals
along the inside of my wrist, thumbprint deep on top.
I pressed them and they ached a little, like a bruise that's
thinking about blooming. I touched my head where I'd
banged it under the frame. There was a stinging scrape.
I washed it with hotel soap and patted it dry and watched the
water go pink down the drain before it turned clear.
I set my dead headlamp on the counter and it turned itself on
for half a second in that down out way electronics sometimes do
when they give up their last. The beam ran across the mirror
and caught my face for that half second in the glass behind my
shoulder. There was a smear on the tile,
like someone had lifted a wet hand there and let it slide.
I didn't sleep right away. I lay down with the TV on low
and watch the drawers of light move across the ceiling every
time a car went past on the highway.
At 12:17, my phone lit from where I'd left it on the night
stand. Dead.
It showed a missed call from unknown.
I picked it up out of habit. The log said the call had come
in at 917. That was the minute I first saw
the hazard light blink through the fog.
I put the phone face down and listen to trucks pull through
the lot and leave again. Somewhere a siren crossed the
town on the far Rd. Not close, no Doppler.
Just a line of sound going from one side of the night to the
other with no beginning and no end.
I thought about the way the teenager had lifted both arms
the second time I saw them, like a kid trying to make a bus
driver stop after they'd already pulled away from the curb.
I left the quilts in the back seat for my sister.
I left my headlamp on the motel counter in the morning.
When I walked past my car, there were three pale ovals of dew on
the trunk lid where dew shouldn't stay once the sun's
up. Three spots dry in the shape of
fingertips, and a fourth that had dragged a short distance
toward the edge, as if something had tried to climb on and slid.
On my way out of town. I didn't take the bend.
I didn't go past the church or the quarry.
I didn't look toward the notch where the fog pools when I hit
the main road. I kept driving until the hills
lay behind me and the radio stations changed to ones with
different call letters. The coffee and the Tumblr had
gone cold. I took a sip and put it back and
left it there, lid shut, the bitter taste still on my tongue
the whole next hour. Like penny water you can't spit
out.