Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25458443-20190620214321

There’s a day when we all discover it. It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from, someday you’ll be walking down some rain-soaked back alley path, or standing by the sidewalk waiting for the school bus, or even just sitting in your home minding your own business, and suddenly, without warning, the thing will make itself known to you. The grotesque, awful thing that’s been around forever, and which gnaws away at all of us, silently.

Maybe you’ll hear its voice on the TV, or maybe, one day, it will call you on the phone. Maybe you’ll just be in the kitchen and you’ll spot it staring at you from outside the window. We all encounter the thing sooner or later. It’s just a matter of when.

I still remember when I first encountered it. I was with my friend Ted on a cold, dark night, hanging around the local post office, sitting on a fence by the street. We were talking about whatever, nothing terribly important, when we saw it. Something weird and strange caught our eyes, just across the street.

There was something in the air that night. It clung to the breeze like a bedsheet left to dry, sweeping in the wind. Warm wind blowing through cold air in faint, lurching chills. The moon above was beating down on us with an aloof authoritarian glare, illuminating tall weeds which shifted in the breeze. A weird shadowy motion was always present, but what we saw then was different. Bizarre.

Barely visible in the dark, there was, across the street from us, a small field of turnips. The dirt clumped together and clung to the grass, and the turnip roots poked through to the surface every now and then. The ground was uneven and strange, but familiar. And there, on that ground, we saw something crawl up out of the field, and stand up on the edge of the dirt. All conversation ceased.

We couldn’t make out any of its features in the dark. Only a vague outline of color was visible, wrapped around its pitch black silhouette. All it did was stand there for a moment, staying as still as possible, as if trying only to make its presence known, and it worked. For the entire silent eternity that it stood there, my friend and I just stared. Its haunting figure beckoned our gaze, until eventually, just as quietly, it slunk back into the turnip field, and vanished.

“That was weird,” I said.

“Probably some homeless guy,” replied Ted.

Suddenly I didn’t feel safe anymore. I told Ted that we should leave. It was late, and we should’ve hung out somewhere else. He agreed, reluctantly, but neither of us felt the push to get off the fence yet. We just sat there, quietly, barely saying anything at all, until suddenly it appeared again.

Yet again, it scrambled out from the turnip field, but then it walked halfway across the road, and stopped. Even though it was closer now, we still couldn’t make out any of the finer details. Its figure, though, was raggedy, and for a few moments it stood, silhouetted, facing us, before it turned around and went back into the field.

That was all it took. A new wash of uneasiness coming over us, we got off the fence and began walking in the direction of our homes. We didn’t say a word to each other. We just started walking. I remember feeling uncomfortable about putting our backs to the field.

That’s when we heard a scrape behind us, and turned around to see the thing hastily rustling from the field for the third time. It started toward us. Its movements were awkward and stilted, but quick, and a new onsetting panic flooded over us. We ran. Eventually, a few blocks away, we stopped, confident we had finally outrun it.

After a few moments to catch our breaths, Ted realized he forgot his bag back at the post office. I didn’t want to go back at first, but after a little bit we almost started to feel silly. Now that we were safe, we realized we weren’t even sure what exactly it was that scared us. The two of us decided to go back and see if it was still there, to get a closer look. For all we knew, there was nothing to be scared of at all.

Slowly, we began the trek back. Streetlights intermittently lit up the sidewalk, and us as well, as we passed underneath them. Eventually, as we walked, we began to talk more and more, our confidence slowly coming back. And then we saw it. We were only halfway to the post office when we noticed it ahead of us in the center of the road. A small few more details were visible from the streetlights, and it stood facing us in an oddly inviting way. It had an eerie presence, as if it weren’t actually real. It was wearing black pants and a white shirt, with suspenders.

"I'm going to try to touch it,” said Ted. “Then we'll know if it's real."

Slowly, he walked up to it and peered into its face. It had bright glimmering eyes, sunk deep into its head. They peered back out at Ted with a terrifying lucidity. Its skin was worn away, and soft, and it looked as though sloughs of it had fallen off with time. There was no gore, though; it was more like it was turning into dust, or simply fading into the air.

I watched from the sidewalk as Ted stood, staring at the thing, and then suddenly he screamed and scrambled away from it. The two of us ran away again, but this time the thing kept following us. It chased us all the way to Ted’s home, where we ran inside and locked the door.

Building up the courage, the two of us went to the window to look outside, and we watched it. It stood, outside, just at the sidewalk at the edge of Ted’s lawn, bathed in darkness, staring at us. It stayed out by the road for a while. Then it disappeared. I thought that would be the last we saw of the thing, but a year later, Ted got very sick, and he died. Toward the end, I would sit up with him every night, and we’d talk. Talk about whatever. I can still remember his face before he went. On the night that he died, he looked exactly like the thing that crawled out of the turnip field. 