The He of the Night

I keep having this dream. I'm in an old house that I had visited a couple of years ago, that belonged to some old friends of my mom. In the dream, I'm about to fall asleep (I know, weird) on this perch at the top of a staircase. It's right up against the slant of the roof, and there's a window there that looks out on the woods. I don't know if anybody else here has ever gazed upon a mountain forest at dusk, but it's absolutely terrifying. Something about everybody else being asleep (in the country, people don't stay up nearly as late as they do here) and having that feeling that something up there in the woods is watching you, looking straight into your eyes (from such a distance, I know, it's incredibly unlikely) that you can't see, because it's cast in shadow.

I don't know what happened the first time I had it, but it seemed really vivid then. Here's how it went:

After falling asleep on the perch, I realized with a start that I was cold all over. In an effort to inspect the issue, I turned over and slapped my hands on my thighs, only to realize that the blanket had been torn from me, leaving me naked up there. I looked around for my younger brother, but not finding him or the blanket, I decided it was best to go looking. I climbed down the ladder to the first floor, only to find that the whole place is deserted. I go looking in the bathrooms, in my mom's bedroom (which is where I thought he'd be, but oddly that's deserted too) and find nothing.

Stumped, I decided that they were all outside enjoying some marshmallows or something. I doubted that they had a fire pit, or even any marshmallows, but tired and alone and out of other options I had no choice but to go outside to see if there was anything worth checking out.

When I got outside, my heart sank. There wasn't anything. Nothing. It was all quiet, a bad kind of quiet. You would normally hear crickets, but out here it was absolutely silent. I was about to turn back around, go back up to my bunk or find a closet to hide in, and wait for morning when all of a sudden I heard it.

A crunch of gravel behind me set my mind and my heart going a million miles an hour. I stopped in my tracks, and held still. The crunching stopped. For what seemed like an eternity, I just stood there, not knowing what to do. Then, slowly, I turned around.

And that's when I saw him. Or it. Or whatever it was. I'll describe him as best I can to you.

The thing was at least ten feet tall, scaled the same as me so he was as thick as a tree. He wore tattered old jeans, stained brown-redish from the knees down. An old blue hoodie, in the same condition as his jeans, but with a lot of small holes in it around his torso, like he had been shot about the same place a lot by a small-calibur pistol. His face was obscured by long, black hair that hung about down to his nose. His lower jaw was missing, and his tongue and various other mouth-veins and muscles hung limply down from his skull, and a few of his upper teeth were missing. He carried an axe, stained with blood that had some brown hair stuck in it, making loops that I can still picture in my mind.

And the most terrifying thing about him was how still he was. I know it was a dream, but nothing can be that absolutely still.

He took a step toward me, moving easily and making no sound besides the crunch of his bare feet on gravel. And the drip of his axe.

I can still remember feeling my heart racing and my feet aching and the edges of my peripheral vision blacking out so that I could only see the trees in front of me as I ducked and weaved through the woods, trying to find my way onto a road or into a ravine or someplace, anyplace, where he couldn't follow. I couldn't hear anything above the beating of my heart and the crunching of branches and the very real sound of my desperation whispering go go go as fast as you can. It continues on like this until I find either the house again, which I hide in, or a small abandoned shack filled with a few corpses I don't recognize. Which ever ending my mind chooses, it always ends the same.

I'm propped up against the door, doing my best to keep him from shoving it open. He's strong, and just as I'm about to give I wake up.

And I'm at the top of a ladder, below the stars, at the foot of that mountain. My blanket is missing. But this time, I turn over and decide I'll just have to sleep with the cold.