Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
You see, my wife, Melissa, loves corn mazes. So, around Halloween, she always gets very excited. It's difficult getting to a corn maze when you live inside a huge city, however, so we had the yearly drive out of the city to Terraceview county to get to the nearest corn maze.
This, of course, was always a huge gamble. The annual Terraceview corn maze loved to move around. Since we weren't near the area, we never knew where it was going to be next. We always ended up finding it and having a great time though, so it was worth the trouble.
This year went a little differently. Unannounced to us, the people who ran the maze went broke and couldn't afford it; the Terraceview maze was never set up. Melissa and I drove from noon until midnight trying to find this place. At about 12:30 in the morning, we gave up.
We had visited every year for eight years, and sadly, we couldn't continue the tradition.
It would appear that in our wild frantic search, we drove off our map. We were stuck out in the middle of endless, empty, rolling hills with no idea where we were or where we were going. All of that plus the fact that we had no phone service was just the tip of the unlucky iceberg.
We drove, drove, and drove for 100 miles before our tank ran empty. We were still in the endless hills. We got out of the car, and we walked. We walked for at least 30 minutes before we found any sign of life. At about 2:30, we found a beaten down old red farming house. It looked incredibly old, at least 70 years old, but there was a light on inside.
We decided to ask if we could stay the night, or at least get some directions. We knocked and waited, then knocked again, and again. Since there was no car there, we decided that this person must not be home. Melissa and I debated for a while, then considering the time, the situation, and the dangerously low temperature, we decided to break in then explain it all later.
However, it would appear that the "breaking" was unnecessary. The front door was unlocked and opened right when I turned the knob. Part of me new that something was off here, but I was too cold and tired to care. Melissa and I walked inside. The room was dark, which didn't make sense. I took a few steps in to look around, when I heard a loud "CRACK!"
I heard the sounds of sticks tapping against a rock, then turned around to look at Melissa. Her face was pale with eyes, "CRACK!" , we heard it again, "CRACK!"
The wooden floor below me collapsed.
Almost seconds after I regained consciousness, agony overtook me. I could see my femur sticking through my skin near the knee. Blood, blood was just everywhere. I looked up and saw Melissa in the doorway. She was crying and screaming at me.
"JOHN!" I heard her yell.
"M...Meli...Melissa..." I could barely choke my words out.
"Oh God, John," She whimpered, "I'm going to get help!" With that Melissa ran off. I surveyed my surroundings, and this situation was very grim. I had fallen into a basement with concrete floor. The place looked very old, and the broken floor kept anyone from getting in without falling to their doom.
Next to me lay a mirror. It was old and wooden, and the glass appeared broken, but it was good enough to see. It reflected light off the moon, and I figured that the mirror must've been the light I had seen. I picked it up and looked up at the cloudy sky through the tiny window above, and saw the moon shining through a hole in the clouds.
This would be my lifeline.
I angled the mirror to reflect light around the area like a flashlight to try and see what was down here. Mostly just empty shelves and dusty old boxes where revealed by my idea. Occasionally though, I saw a mouse or a tiny spider. So, all in all, nothing frightening. Suddenly, my light cut out.
The entire basement went black. I could barely even see my own hand in front of my face. Panic stricken, I looked out the window to see if there was any light coming in at all. The clouds passed over the moon, and my source of light was gone.
My eyes attempted to adjust but I knew it was no use; the basement was far too dark to see anything at all. The darkness always creeped me out. No, not like a kid trying to fall asleep and needing a night-light kind of thing. My fear was more like, the dark was unknown and a playground for my imagination to torture me. It never seemed sinister in and of itself, but, more like a "bearer of bad news". So of course, my fears were limited to just the musings of impossible fears.
Until I heard the whisper.
"Plllllaaaaaaay..." a hoarse voice came from my side. It sounded malevolent, forced, and raspy. Like someone with a burnt throat trying to scream. My body tensed and froze. I remember holding my breath but never feeling breathless for an instant.
The moon came out again and hit my mirror. The light shone just as bright as before, but showed nothing around me. I picked it up and slowly shone it around the room.
Not a single movement around the whole place. I relaxed a little, but I still unmistakeably KNEW I heard something. I gently sat the mirror down and took a deep breath. My injuries were frightening me, because of the adrenaline. The damage caused adrenaline to course through me making me feel no pain, but it wouldn't last forever.
There was so much blood coming from my leg that my pants were soaked and sticking to the wound. I knew that when the adrenaline was gone, I was going to feel the worst pain of my life.
A cloud passed over the moon again, and the room went dark. Not only was the black blinding, but the silence was deafening. I sat there, just listening to the white noise from my ears. There was an occasional skittering noise, from the mice I assumed, and the sounds made me jump every time.
My eyes began playing tricks on me. I thought I saw the glint of an eye every so often, and became paralyzed every time it happened. The blackness lasted what felt like hours, and my paranoia was intensifying by the second.
The moon shone on the mirror again. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let out a long sigh of relief.
I tilted my head back up and opened my eyes to meet with a pair of milky white eyes staring intently back. There was no pupil, no iris, just white.
Then, the creature smiled an unnaturally wide grin. Its teeth, dear God, the teeth, they were sharpened black fangs, rotten all the way through with enormous cavities. It's teeth were most likely the cause of it's foul breath.
Involuntarily, I let out a shriek and tried to move away, but the stinging in my leg stopped that quickly. The creature jumped back quickly on all fours, and looked just as frightened as me. After a second, it grinned wide again and sat cross-legged in front of me.
"Oooooh, oooh, oooohhhh...What 'ave we got heeereeee?" it whispered in the same raspy voice as earlier.
"What....the hell....are you?" I chocked out.
"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," the creature crawled up and put a nasty finger on my lips, "Don't speak, friiiend. We mussst fix your leg first, no?" The creature's pale form scattered away into the darkness for a few moments as I heard it digging through boxes. Then, after a few moments, it scampered back over carrying a box.
"This will only hurt for a second," it comforted me, "Nahhhhh Jax is only joking, this is going to be incredibly painful hahahaaaaa." It attempted to laugh, but instead only ended up coughing.
It reached into the box and pulled out some gause, a needle, and a bag filled with various things I couldn't see at the time.
It opened the bag and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and handed it to me with a smile.
"Bottoms up, friend," he said. I took an enormous swig and felt the warmth sink down my throat. It was well aged, that was for sure. I looked down at the thing and wasn't so afraid of the pale monster anymore.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"I forgot my name a long, looong time ago friend," it whispered. "Just call me Jax, it's what I started calling myself. Now shush, Jax need's to work." With that, he took the bottle of whiskey from me (after I took another hearty swig) and dumped some onto my leg.
It stung at first, but alcohol does WONDERS for pain tolerance. Slowly but surely, the pain faded into the background and I never noticed it for the rest of the time I was with Jax. After his little procedure, he did something that deeply scared me.
He looked at the pool of blood around me, and lapped it all up with his tongue happily drinking it. I was frightened, and stared at him very scared.
"I'm sorry," Jax apologized. "It smelled so, deliciousssssss Jax couldn't help it..."
"It, um, it's fine," I lied to him.
Jax looked at me and smiled again. He was creepy, gross, and disturbing, but he had just saved my life and behind his exterior seemed nice enough.
"That favor won't go unpaid you know," Jax whispered almost threateningly.
"What do you mean?" I asked timidly.
"Jax tasted you, friiieeend. Jax knows where to find you. This was a laaarge favor on Jax's part. The favor will be repaid long after you forget about Jax," he said with a twisted look in his milky white eyes. "Jax must leave you now. Jax can smell the other one nearby, just remember, I know everything about you, friennnd," he rasped into my ear. Quickly, he scampered up the wall, out the door, and disappeared from my life.
Melissa came a few moments later with a few other people and a ladder. If Jax hadn't patched me up, I would've bled out. It took a while for them to get me to the hospital, but I was fine. My leg was indeed broken but the doctors were absolutely fascinated by the first-aid done on my leg. I tried telling Melissa what really happened, but she never even believed me; it was so far-fetched.
I ended up saying I did it with a few supplies I found down there. People believed me, even though I knew absolutely nothing about first-aid. In my dreams, I see Jax sometimes, rarely, and we talk. I'm sure its just a dream but sometimes, sometimes, it feels like it really might be that weird monster.
Melissa and I split up a few months after the incident. She got tired of dealing with a crippled man like me, carry a cane around at such a young age. It shocked me deeply; I never thought Melissa was that shallow. Nonetheless, I make a living now and am happy.
Three times now, something strange has happened. One morning, a month after Melissa left me, I woke up to my face being entirely wet. I thought I must've drooled and smeared it in my sleep, and just blew it off. Two months after that, I cut myself with a kitchen knife. The next morning, the cut was better dressed, but all the blood was gone and the spot was moist.
This morning, I woke up to something truly frightening. I woke up with a gash in my arm, not bleeding, but very wet that I didn't have the night before. When I got up and ran to the bathroom mirror, I saw a sticky note:
"I'm sorry, friend, but sometimes, I miss your taste. I keep getting hungrier and hungrier for you, and when that hunger grows immense, you shall repay your debt. The debt of saving a life."
I'm writing this in case Jax comes to reclaim his debt anytime soon. He saved my life, so my debt IS my life. I just don't know how long it will be before I will have to fill his stomach.