Eyes at the door.
Footsteps on the porch.
The unmistakable sound of dripping blood.
A hand, black and skeletal, reaching down from the ceiling to pluck me up, to whisk me away to the place where toys go.
It was too much, all of it more than a nine-year-old psyche could handle. I lay there for what felt like hours, but somewhere in the haze of irrational panic, my body decided I’d had enough. So I slept.
I awoke to a nightmare. The room, previously lit by the hanging fixture in the kitchen, had gone as black as crow feathers. My bones seemed to lock at the joints, and my heartbeat pounded in my ears like native drums. I couldn’t hear or see a thing, and I gripped the cushion in front of me as if it would somehow shield me from whatever unseen horrors lurked out in the world. In a few long-drawn-out minutes, my eyes began to slowly adjust to the blackness, a fact that only heightened the fear. Every stray shadow felt as if it were glaring at me, every breeze against the windows felt like a breath against the sliding glass door, every swaying branch became a hand grasping at the handle.
Time means nothing in moments like that. It becomes an abstract thought, something impossible to understand, like imagining what comfort feels like when you’ve dropped a soup can on your toe. If you’d asked me then how long that span of darkness lasted, I would no doubt have told you I had been on that couch for months, maybe even years. But soon, the yawning black mouth of the glass door grew pink in the back, then gray, then blue as daylight spilled in.
I never knew who it was that turned off the light. Likely Dad or Andy stumbled into the kitchen for a drink of water in the middle of the night. Either way, the hunter had come up empty-handed.
The next week passed without much worth mentioning. For a few more nights, I kept my vigil, certain the thing would return, only to turn up sore and sleep-deprived for school the next morning. Sallie was more or less despondent about her doll for the first few days, and more than once I nearly broke down and told her the truth. Once, in the bathroom stall, I practiced what I would tell her, whispering into my hand so no one else would hear me. The sound of my voice explaining what had happened, while a line of little girls pissed next to me, convinced me it wasn’t the best idea. All I had was the feeling, that bone-deep terror of watching the thing slink up the wall like a liquid shadow. I don’t quite know if I have the words now, as a grownup, to truly relay that dread, but I’m certain I didn’t have them when I was a child. If it weren’t for Andy smashing the tape, I’d at least have had someone to share the burden with, and the thought made me bristle whenever I saw him stroll into a room.
“What’s your problem?” he would ask from time to time, whenever he caught me glowering at him.
“Your face,” I’d reply with characteristic self-satisfaction.
By Thursday, I gave up. I simply didn’t have much choice in the matter. My body just wouldn’t let me continue like that for another night. I resolved, even after retreating to my own bed for the first time in four nights, that my hunt was far from over. Even so, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite as snuggly as I did sinking into my own bed that night. I was out before the sun set all the way.
I felt better on Friday, but by the time afternoon rolled around, bringing with it an uncontrollable series of yawns, there was no doubt left in the matter. My late-night stakeouts were over for the foreseeable future, maybe even for good. The realization brought on a wave of disappointment, even despair, as I wrestled with the idea that I might never know exactly what the thing that slunk into our house had been. If there was some higher purpose, some hidden design to stealing a girl’s toy, I would likely never know. The memory of the tape would continue to turn hazy around the edges, blurring into something so unbelievable that eventually, my weak, human mind would stop trying to reconcile it. The image would change, transforming into something easily digested and understood, and all would be right in the world once more.
I took a long path home after the bus dropped me off, curling through the woods just outside of our neighborhood. Sometimes I would cut through the wide field at the edge of the subdivision, mainly because it was the closest route to Dee’s Food Town, a little market that Andy and I would stop at whenever we had gathered enough change to buy a Ring Pop or some candy cigarettes. I always settled on a Yoo-Hoo, and by the time we hit the curb out front, it would be gone. Inevitably, I’d end up having to squat in the shrubs lining the field to keep from pissing myself.
The field itself wasn’t much to see. The real tourist stop for all the kids in the area was a claustrophobic tangle of woods known rather ominously as the Trails. I’ve never seen a place quite like the Trails before or since, with the low-hanging trees that snaked over each other like something out of a twisted dream. There were scratchy paths within, made originally by deer and raccoons before being filed down by hundreds of sneakered kids over the years, and the trails seemed to run right over each other, doubling back, leading into dead ends and creeks, steep drops and gullies. In other words, the place was chaos made whole, and any kids in walking distance couldn’t stay away. It was a fine place to play hide-and-seek or capture the flag, and the low, gnarled trunks almost guaranteed that grownups would stay as far away as possible.
There was something magic about that place, about the realization that a small slice of the planet belonged to people too young to drive a car. But there was something dark there too, the promises of more complicated things that waited for all of us, the truth sneaking in. The used condoms. The syringes. The empty whiskey bottles, broken and jagged. Neighborhood kids, especially the older ones, talked about Devil worshippers holding court there at night, warning any in earshot to stay clear of that place when the sun went down. There was evidence too, proof that they weren’t just trying to strike fear into the next generation of kids who called Tristan Circle home. There was the pentagram spray-painted on the far side of the giant water tank on the hill past the woods. There was a dead possum, all but unrecognizable without its skin, that turned up in the alley behind Dee’s. And the cross, carved jagged and upside down on the back of a dead husk of a maple tree.
Everyone knew these things, and some of us had even seen them, but that didn’t do much to kill the magic of the Trails. It might have drawn us even closer. Even so, I refused to ever set foot in that place at night. But in the hazy hours between school and nightfall, I just wandered. I was tired, more so than I could ever remember being, but more than that, I was just plain bummed. There was something fascinating and big about the intruder, a secret that was mine, a mystery waiting to be cracked. Now it was clear that I would never know anything more than I already did. After watching the tape, I had kept my own special toy – the green bear from Mom – with me at every available minute to keep it from being stolen as well. I set it outside the shower, tucking it into my loose pajama pants whenever Dad walked in with dinner. I even packed it into my book bag, deep down underneath everything else. I wanted it, needed it even, but I didn’t want a soul to know that I had it.