LJ Idol Season 10 Topic 10: Take a Hike
Time to Take a Hike
I’d always sort of looked after John, but not in a serious way - he hadn’t particularly needed it. Ever since we were young, he’d looked up to me like an older brother, and I’d played that part; that was all. Then about a year ago the accident happened, and I was all he really had left. He was physically capable, but the knock he took to his head left him sort of vacant.
Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge, but it helps to explain my surprise on that cold Autumn evening, when I arrived at John’s house to help him with some of his harder weekly chores. Just things like bringing up more firewood from the cellar, checking the heating oil, keeping on top of bills. Simple enough things for me, but most of the time now impossible tasks for John. This week I was also enlisted to help him clear up after a wall in his basement had collapsed.
When I arrived, the door was wide open. There was a pile of leaves near the porch, so he’d obviously tried to do some of the work alone. Normally this would be a good sign, but I could see 5 light score marks where he’d dragged the rake over the porch and through the door to the hall. I followed the lines in, shaking my head - at this time I admit my main thought was that they’d be hell to polish out of the hardwood flooring.
At the left side of the hall, the carpeted stairs leading to the first floor were unruffled by rakes or any other inappropriate garden implements. Under the stairs though, was a doorway that led to the basement; this was also open. The 5 light score marks, of course, led into it.
I called out to John, but was met with silence.
Outside the light was already fading, and the sad yellow glow from the single naked bulb at the head of the cellar stairs did very little to help. The whole thing was starting to take on an ominous vibe, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t just leave him down there if he’d had an episode.
I could understand why he’d be in the cellar. One result of his injury had been a tendency to develop obsessions - the sort of obsession that wouldn’t allow him to leave the cellar alone until the wall had been returned to (exactly) its previous state. But why had he trailed the rake through the house like that? Even for him this was odd. It seemed like he’d been in a trance, and hadn’t noticed the rake in his hands as he’d made his way into the cellar. He’s never done anything like this before, and I hadn’t noticed any deterioration in his behaviour recently.
Anyway, overcoming that childish fear of the dark that I choose to believe resides in every sensible adult (regardless of what they may say out loud) I started to descend the stairs. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, in deference to the blown bulb I knew from experience should be about 6 feet to my left I took out my phone and tapped on the torch function. This merely served to illuminate a small area directly in front of me, and make the remainder of the dark seem deeper, more tangible somehow. Shit, this is ridiculous. I’m a 40 something, successful professional - why am I shaking and perspiring like a child in the face of a little darkness?
I called out again, and received the same response.
I did a 260 degree turn in an attempt to scope the room with the pathetic LED in my old HTC, but it was like trying to paint a skyscraper with an artist’s brush. I edged forward, guided by the rake marks directly in front of me; illuminated six inches at a time.
Suddenly, my light hit the rake head and I don’t mind saying my heart nearly gave out and I’m sure I jumped clean in the air. All my hairs were standing on end, and my heart was fighting my ribcage to escape, and was almost certainly winning. The angle was wrong, and I knew why - it was still vertical. Not a naturally tenable position for a rake.
Shaking harder now, I said “John? Is that you buddy? Come on, stop fooling around.” Nothing. Chilling.
As I spoke, I swept he light upwards and in turn caught the back of his boots, legs clad in the usual worn blue jeans, checked shirt, and hair.
Still, he didn’t turn around. He just stood there, as if the light were invisible to him. In front of him was the hole in the wall, and although every rational bone in my body knows, just knows that it was a trick of the light, every other part of me swears the very darkness shimmered when the light hit it and didn’t recede immediately. But recede it did, and I told myself once again it had been a trick - like how the second hand on a clock seems to hover guiltily for more than a second when you first look at it, almost like it hadn’t been moving and was slow to react to being caught out.
John shuddered, the only movement I’d seen him make (at all, come to think of it - including breathing) since I lit him up.
As John rounded on me his dead eyes took a second to come alive, and they did so in a most disconcerting and un-John-like way: like those of a starving wolf rudely awoken by the sheep that's just tripped over it. It was a mix of greed, hatred, worse. In the second it took me to register this change I had missed my window of opportunity to run.
I could see him calculating, sizing up options in a way I wouldn’t have thought him capable of since his accident. He moved, circling around me in a predatory dance, while I stood aghast, turning on the spot to continue to face him. Although I didn’t realise it until too late, he was shepherding me away from the stairs, insinuating himself in the space between me and escape.
Then, just as suddenly, his demeanour completely changed - he took on the apologetic, slightly embarrassed expression I’d come to expect over the many years of our relationship. He sagged noticeably until he was stooped over; and he looked smaller, less solid than before.
He half coughed, half growled at me. “Get Out. Go NOW and never come back. I can’t hold it off for long.” The last word only just came out, and sounded strained, as if something were tugging on it, willing it back inside.
He was right though. I could see the toll that one sentence had taken on him, and could also see that this wasn’t a battle he’d win.
He’d bought me enough time to get up the stairs and out of the door. As I ran to my car and fumbled the key into the ignition (wishing that I’d taken that offer to lease a newer, keyless model) the doorway filled with a twisted distortion of what had once been the friendly sight of my friend John.
The engine stuttered as the thing (I knew there was nothing left of John as I locked eyes with that dark, somehow partly canine face) leapt off the porch and landed with a splash on the rain-soaked gravel driveway. The starter motor forced the engine to crank, but nothing happened. It had closed the gap and now leapt up onto my bonnet on all fours, hands (I couldn’t help thinking of paws) clamouring at the windscreen.
It can only have been seconds, when I look back on it - the thing was so fast that anything longer and I wouldn’t be here writing this - but finally the engine caught, and I slipped the old BMW into reverse gear and gunned it down the track towards the main road. It tumbled off the bonnet as I turned hard left and spun the car around so I could get some proper forward speed.
I was physically clear, but even now I’m still unable to drag my mind away from those cold, dead eyes and the impossible speed with which the thing formerly known as John had crossed the driveway and leaped onto my car.
The ferocious, animalistic hunger in its eyes that left no uncertainty about what it intended to do to me. What’s worse is that I can’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me? Who wouldn’t laugh at me? Or worse, send me for ‘evaluation’? No, I’m on my own now. John was all I had, and he’d died soon after he gave me that chance to escape. Of that I was certain. Perhaps he’d really died long before that, when he first stared into that hole in the cellar, and those words had come from his ghost; the last remnants of his soul as they were ejected mercilessly from his body.
I’m alone now and I can’t rest. I have to find it, destroy it before it finds me or anyone else to consume. I don’t know if it’ll track me, or if it’ll just find the easiest source of food it can, but I can’t take the risk. The hunted becomes the hunter.
I’d always sort of looked after John, but not in a serious way - he hadn’t particularly needed it. Ever since we were young, he’d looked up to me like an older brother, and I’d played that part; that was all. Then about a year ago the accident happened, and I was all he really had left. He was physically capable, but the knock he took to his head left him sort of vacant.
Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge, but it helps to explain my surprise on that cold Autumn evening, when I arrived at John’s house to help him with some of his harder weekly chores. Just things like bringing up more firewood from the cellar, checking the heating oil, keeping on top of bills. Simple enough things for me, but most of the time now impossible tasks for John. This week I was also enlisted to help him clear up after a wall in his basement had collapsed.
When I arrived, the door was wide open. There was a pile of leaves near the porch, so he’d obviously tried to do some of the work alone. Normally this would be a good sign, but I could see 5 light score marks where he’d dragged the rake over the porch and through the door to the hall. I followed the lines in, shaking my head - at this time I admit my main thought was that they’d be hell to polish out of the hardwood flooring.
At the left side of the hall, the carpeted stairs leading to the first floor were unruffled by rakes or any other inappropriate garden implements. Under the stairs though, was a doorway that led to the basement; this was also open. The 5 light score marks, of course, led into it.
I called out to John, but was met with silence.
Outside the light was already fading, and the sad yellow glow from the single naked bulb at the head of the cellar stairs did very little to help. The whole thing was starting to take on an ominous vibe, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t just leave him down there if he’d had an episode.
I could understand why he’d be in the cellar. One result of his injury had been a tendency to develop obsessions - the sort of obsession that wouldn’t allow him to leave the cellar alone until the wall had been returned to (exactly) its previous state. But why had he trailed the rake through the house like that? Even for him this was odd. It seemed like he’d been in a trance, and hadn’t noticed the rake in his hands as he’d made his way into the cellar. He’s never done anything like this before, and I hadn’t noticed any deterioration in his behaviour recently.
Anyway, overcoming that childish fear of the dark that I choose to believe resides in every sensible adult (regardless of what they may say out loud) I started to descend the stairs. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, in deference to the blown bulb I knew from experience should be about 6 feet to my left I took out my phone and tapped on the torch function. This merely served to illuminate a small area directly in front of me, and make the remainder of the dark seem deeper, more tangible somehow. Shit, this is ridiculous. I’m a 40 something, successful professional - why am I shaking and perspiring like a child in the face of a little darkness?
I called out again, and received the same response.
I did a 260 degree turn in an attempt to scope the room with the pathetic LED in my old HTC, but it was like trying to paint a skyscraper with an artist’s brush. I edged forward, guided by the rake marks directly in front of me; illuminated six inches at a time.
Suddenly, my light hit the rake head and I don’t mind saying my heart nearly gave out and I’m sure I jumped clean in the air. All my hairs were standing on end, and my heart was fighting my ribcage to escape, and was almost certainly winning. The angle was wrong, and I knew why - it was still vertical. Not a naturally tenable position for a rake.
Shaking harder now, I said “John? Is that you buddy? Come on, stop fooling around.” Nothing. Chilling.
As I spoke, I swept he light upwards and in turn caught the back of his boots, legs clad in the usual worn blue jeans, checked shirt, and hair.
Still, he didn’t turn around. He just stood there, as if the light were invisible to him. In front of him was the hole in the wall, and although every rational bone in my body knows, just knows that it was a trick of the light, every other part of me swears the very darkness shimmered when the light hit it and didn’t recede immediately. But recede it did, and I told myself once again it had been a trick - like how the second hand on a clock seems to hover guiltily for more than a second when you first look at it, almost like it hadn’t been moving and was slow to react to being caught out.
John shuddered, the only movement I’d seen him make (at all, come to think of it - including breathing) since I lit him up.
As John rounded on me his dead eyes took a second to come alive, and they did so in a most disconcerting and un-John-like way: like those of a starving wolf rudely awoken by the sheep that's just tripped over it. It was a mix of greed, hatred, worse. In the second it took me to register this change I had missed my window of opportunity to run.
I could see him calculating, sizing up options in a way I wouldn’t have thought him capable of since his accident. He moved, circling around me in a predatory dance, while I stood aghast, turning on the spot to continue to face him. Although I didn’t realise it until too late, he was shepherding me away from the stairs, insinuating himself in the space between me and escape.
Then, just as suddenly, his demeanour completely changed - he took on the apologetic, slightly embarrassed expression I’d come to expect over the many years of our relationship. He sagged noticeably until he was stooped over; and he looked smaller, less solid than before.
He half coughed, half growled at me. “Get Out. Go NOW and never come back. I can’t hold it off for long.” The last word only just came out, and sounded strained, as if something were tugging on it, willing it back inside.
He was right though. I could see the toll that one sentence had taken on him, and could also see that this wasn’t a battle he’d win.
He’d bought me enough time to get up the stairs and out of the door. As I ran to my car and fumbled the key into the ignition (wishing that I’d taken that offer to lease a newer, keyless model) the doorway filled with a twisted distortion of what had once been the friendly sight of my friend John.
The engine stuttered as the thing (I knew there was nothing left of John as I locked eyes with that dark, somehow partly canine face) leapt off the porch and landed with a splash on the rain-soaked gravel driveway. The starter motor forced the engine to crank, but nothing happened. It had closed the gap and now leapt up onto my bonnet on all fours, hands (I couldn’t help thinking of paws) clamouring at the windscreen.
It can only have been seconds, when I look back on it - the thing was so fast that anything longer and I wouldn’t be here writing this - but finally the engine caught, and I slipped the old BMW into reverse gear and gunned it down the track towards the main road. It tumbled off the bonnet as I turned hard left and spun the car around so I could get some proper forward speed.
I was physically clear, but even now I’m still unable to drag my mind away from those cold, dead eyes and the impossible speed with which the thing formerly known as John had crossed the driveway and leaped onto my car.
The ferocious, animalistic hunger in its eyes that left no uncertainty about what it intended to do to me. What’s worse is that I can’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me? Who wouldn’t laugh at me? Or worse, send me for ‘evaluation’? No, I’m on my own now. John was all I had, and he’d died soon after he gave me that chance to escape. Of that I was certain. Perhaps he’d really died long before that, when he first stared into that hole in the cellar, and those words had come from his ghost; the last remnants of his soul as they were ejected mercilessly from his body.
I’m alone now and I can’t rest. I have to find it, destroy it before it finds me or anyone else to consume. I don’t know if it’ll track me, or if it’ll just find the easiest source of food it can, but I can’t take the risk. The hunted becomes the hunter.