___
After dinner, Samuel quietly did the dishes and left them to dry in a rack on the counter. He said good night to his mother, who sat on the couch watching the news, and went to his room. The shame of being called out today and the fear that Miss Gordon would be visiting his mother was part of the desire to go to his room. The other part was spending an entire day at school, bored and annoyed. He was exhausted.
Samuel got undressed down to his boxer briefs and climbed under the single sheet on his bed. The night was unseasonably warm and muggy, but sleep came easily.
He slept soundly until the sound of sweeping woke him. Opening one eye, he zeroed in on the red digital display of the alarm clock that he never set the alarm on and read 2:17. Samuel closed his eye and rubbed the side of his face into his pillow, consigning himself to sleep once again. But the moment he closed his eyes, the sweeping began again.
Samuel sat up, and struggled to open his eyes while he listened for the noise. It sounded like it came from outside. He rose quietly from his bed and walked slowly to the window. It was open wide enough for him to poke half of his head through. Looking down the wall at the back of his house he saw it.
It was the black thing he thought was a bigfoot, he was sure of it. It was maybe as tall as him, but oddly proportioned. It did not look like a sasquatch from where he stood. Whatever it was, it was about as wide as a man, with a much wider and stockier head. There were shapes protruding from the top of its head that Samuel could not make out in the dark. Nor could he see below the thing's waist, as the tree line cut off the moonlight at that point. But the thing lumbered oddly, as it dragged its shoulder against the side of Samuel's house. The shoulder-dragging emitted the sweeping sound until the thing got to the end of the house, turned and walked off into the darkness of the forest.
Sleep didn't come so easily after that.
___
“You're Cynthia George's boy, aren't you?”
Samuel was stirred from thought. He'd reluctantly begun attending school regularly and coming home to work on assignments he had missed. He supposed he wanted to graduate to make school a thing of the past, but that was secondary to his desire to drop out completely. It weighed on him for the past week; it didn't help that he couldn't stop thinking about the black thing he saw outside his bedroom window. It was clear to him that whatever it was, it knew where he lived.
It was Dale that asked the question. Normally, he found Dale painfully annoying, but today it was a welcome distraction from the polar monotonies and terrors of his life.
“Yes, Dale.”
Dale was a drunk. He was a family friend his mother preferred Samuel stay away from in his drunken state, which usually meant all the time. Samuel assumed it was because he reminded her of his father.
Dale was skinny, looked much older than his thirty-odd years, and wavered when he stood. A faded black Harley Davidson T-shirt and a very dark blue pair of cheap jeans rounded out his particular fashion sense.
“Marnie said your mom told her you saw a bigfoot.”
Samuel panicked, not out of memory of the black thing, but out of the lack of interest in discussing bigfoot sightings with a man he'd known since he was a baby, but who was always so drunk he didn't remember him. Samuel pitied him.
“Nawww...” Samuel said. “I was just messing around.”
Dale blinked, twisted up his mouth and stared at Samuel.
“Oh, 'cause you wouldn't be the first around here. Used to be an old white man lived up the hill. Know the place?”
Samuel nodded. He'd seen the place. It wasn't any more than a foundation today.
“People used to say he made friends with strange creatures. Fish men, bigfoot, other things they ain’t got a name for. Used to meet them at night on the other side of the hill.”
“Cool,” Samuel said. “I got to get home. See you.”
Samuel began walking.
“Don't go out there at night,” Dale called after him.
Samuel knew a bullshitter when he saw one. It takes one to know one, after all. He couldn't shake, however, that there was some truth to it.
He'd grown up hearing the legend. A weird old white guy who built his home on their traditional land. No one minded because no one went out there. Stories of surgeries, weird creatures and disappearances kept them away. He had always chalked it up to a boogie man story.
___
“Can we get him in some courses that would be easier for him to finish next year?” Samuel's mother tried not to sound desperate.
Samuel sat beside her, head down, lightly scratching the kitchen table with the nail of his index finger.
“I put him in Creative Writing this semester because it's one of his strengths, but he's only attended nine times.” Abby never liked telling parents that their child was not likely to graduate on time. It felt like she did it a lot, but she always tried to keep things hopeful.
“Yeah,” his mother said looking at Samuel again, “he's good at making up stories.”
“Well,” Abby said, “I think with some very hard work, Samuel can make it happen next year. It is up to him though. We have a deal?”
Samuel looked up and nodded with one corner of his mouth turned up in mimicry of a smile.
Abby smiled genuinely and excused herself. She picked up her copies of the graduation plan she laid out for Samuel and his mother and collected them in a manila folder.
“Thank you, Cynthia,” Abby said as she made her way to the front door, short heels clicking on the thin linoleum floor. The rain, which began spitting after school ended, had picked up considerably since she showed up. The sound of it oppressively beat on the roof and walls of the small, poorly-insulated house. She also wanted to get home before it was too dark. Living out of town ensured that she was able to leave her work at work, which became more important when she began dealing with more sensitive cases. In her first six months on the job, she had reported three instances of sexual abuse, taken part in a half dozen drug and alcohol interventions and overseen countless referrals to an ever-increasing load of mental health diagnoses. Cases that made Samuel George look like an Honors student.
Abby made a concerted effort not to let the less severe cases slip through the cracks, though. Which is why she often did home visits after school. Actually going into the community did wonders for her outsider status as a white counsellor of First Nations students.
Unfortunately, it also meant that she often did not get home until eight o'clock at night. She wouldn't be that late tonight, but it was still dark early and raining heavily, not uncommon in a valley on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
She walked to her car with the manila folder over her head. She turned on the squeaky windshield wipers and pumped up the defog, turning the temperature more definitively to hot. For the thirty foot walk to her car, she was surprised at how wet she got.
Abby backed her Chevy Cavalier slowly onto the street. The reservation was an illogical web of streets all laid out and paved at different times and in various states of disrepair. She took the drive slowly. The area was poorly lit, and the wipers did little to clear her view.
Her car crested the small hill putting her at the centre of the web of streets. She continued forward from memory as the rain and dark made the area look almost completely different from when she arrived. The car dropped from the pavement to the gravel of the downhill road. As her rear tires did the same, the car slid to the right.
Abby gasped sharply and slammed on the brakes, the car sliding a little more. She laughed out loud when she stopped sliding. She took her right hand off the wheel, put it to her chest to feel the pounding of her heart. She stuck her tongue out and exhaled, laughing once again. Even though it did feel like the gravel road had been tilted more than it was earlier. Taking her foot off of the brake, the car began to inch forward.
As she accelerated, something smashed into the front of her car over the front driver's side wheel well. Abby screamed, stepped on the gas and tr
ied to turn the wheel to the left, but it was too late. The Chevy was knocked almost sideways before the tires gripped the gravel beneath them.
It was far too dark to see, but Abby knew that she had driven off of the road. The air bag deployed when the front of the car smashed down on the steep embankment. Abby's face crashed into the airbag, and her head snapped back against the headrest. She was thrown in all directions as the car tumbled and rolled sideways down into the roiling river below.
If she was conscious, she would have felt the cold water pouring through the broken windows of her car.
___
Samuel was stirred from sleep by another noise outside his house. He felt a stinging in his forehead, like he'd only just closed his eyes before waking up again. He rolled over and looked at his alarm clock: 10:48 PM.
“Shit,” Samuel said. I did just close my eyes!
He blinked several times and focused on the sound. It was another sound of something being dragged along the outside wall of the house. He wasn't sure what it was, but it was loud enough to be heard over the rain beating down on the roof.
Moving toward the window, he arced to the left to try and see. The window was closed, so he didn't want to risk opening it. From his angle, he saw movement, but it was unclear. Dark on dark. And it felt as though he was not seeing the whole image.
Samuel pulled the window up from its resting place. He did it almost silently except for some minor squeaking when it got to the top of the frame. Sticking his head out, he saw the shape of the black thing from before, only something was different. There was something on its back. It took a moment for Samuel's eyes to get used to the dark, but he could see the black thing did indeed have something slumped over its shoulder. He knew this because the thing scraping against the wall of his house was a woman's leg with a short, pointed heel on her shoe.
It took a moment to process, but who else would the black thing parade by his window than his counsellor? Samuel slipped on track pants and a hoodie before bounding from the window. He hit the grass behind his house in bare feet, tiptoed behind the black thing before diverting to grab a pair of gumboots off of his front porch. He stuck his wet feet into the gumboots and looked up to see the black thing disappear behind the tree line up the hill. Samuel picked up the pace, following the path the black thing had taken, and headed up to the old white man's house.
He continued up the hill, hearing only the gravel crunching under his boots and his own breathing. The higher up he got, the trees began to thin out. More moonlight was able to punch though the heavily clouded sky, lighting the ground before him.
When Samuel reached the clearing at the top of the hill, he turned. On the ground were the cracked foundations of the old white man's house. The old concrete had not crumbled from age. It looked as if it had been smashed. Large chunks taken out of it littered the empty bottom of the pit that used to be a basement. Even in the dark, Samuel could see that the chunks of concrete were larger than his head and that the holes left in the foundation looked like clean breaks. He wondered what could have made that damage; he wondered where everything else that remained of the house went.
Remembering the place Dale spoke of, Samuel took a guess and took a slight angle down the other side of the hill. He knew it led to a tree-covered, slow-moving shady area of the river. Samuel had been by it before while floating on an inner tube. It always felt creepy there.
Though his eyes had adjusted to his surroundings in minimal moonlight, this side of the hill was darker. He had long lost track of the black thing, but he had some idea where a cave was. It could barely be seen from the river, so he imagined it was not too far down the hill.
He heard the sound before he saw the cave opening. It was a low moan that turned into an incessant buzz. Disorienting. So much so that Samuel, in trying to follow the sound, walked right by the cave. He only stopped when he saw moonlight reflecting off of the river in front of him. Having gone too far, he turned around and looked up the hill. A faint glow could be seen emanating from exactly where Samuel knew the cave to be. And yet he spent minutes walking right by it.
Leaning forward and using his hands and feet to climb the steep hill, Samuel perched on the lip of the cave's opening. The cave was odd shaped. It opened very wide right from the mouth. It was twice the width of his house and dipped very low immediately. While the width was impressive, the depth and height were almost impossible. Samuel imagined the cave went all the way back to the area under the foundations he'd seen at the top of the hill, and the cave's height seemed to climb as the hill rose. It essentially worked out to be the size of a small auditorium, which accounted for the sound.
The buzzing moan was far more prominent from the open mouth of the cave. Samuel was dizzied. The bizarre noise pulsed inside his forehead. He blinked and tried to take in everything he was seeing.
There were torches lining the walls of the cave, flickering and sending shadows jutting up to the centre where a woman lay on a raised stone slab. It was Miss Gordon. She wasn't moving. All around her were people in long, hooded cloaks. The black hoods hung low over the faces of the attendees. There were twelve of them that Samuel could see, not including the black thing that stood with its back to him.
From his vantage point, Samuel could see that the black thing was a thick beast. Its body was almost rectangular from ass to the top of its head. It was covered in a thick black fur, the individual bristles shimmering by firelight. It was built like a man from the waist up. Below its waist, two thick bovine legs stretched to the ground with cloven hooves spread upon the rocky floor. Two yellowed horns curled out of the top of the beast's head, sharp and gnarled.
Twelve men in cloaks and a goat-man. It took a long time to process for Samuel. The moaning continued to fill his head with confusion. His forehead throbbed.
One of the hooded men...people...things approached Miss Gordon and towered over her. The other hooded ones moved closer into a tight circular formation. Samuel fought the urge to gasp when the man closest to Abby removed a knife from his cloak and held it above her.
Miss Gordon began to stir. Her eyebrows rose before her eyelids did. When she opened her eyes, she screamed as two other hooded figures pulled open her blouse just below her neck, exposing her from throat to bra. Her eyes went wide and her mouth opened again to scream, but no noise came. No noise except for the buzzing moan of the cave and the wet thud of the blade punching a hole between Abby Gordon's ribs.
Samuel opened his mouth and almost screamed before sticking his knuckles in between his jaws. Miss Gordon, as much of a pain in the ass that she was, was always worried about him and seemed to actually like him. Now her body was jerking on a stone slab with a dagger in her chest. The hooded man who had stabbed her yanked upward on the hilt of the dagger, a grating noise echoing through the cave as the sharp double-edged blade scratched bone on its way out of her rapidly undulating chest. Blood seeped from the wounds in her chest and back, slowly spreading to hit the outside edge of the slab and flow to the ground, as her movements slowed and then ceased.
The cave began to shake as the moan was drowned out in favor of the buzzing. Shadows danced on the wall as the hooded figures surrounding Samuel's dead high school counsellor raised their arms in religious fervor. Samuel didn't know where the shadows were coming from, though it looked like someone was waving their thin fingers close to the light source.
There was clarity in Samuel’s confusion. An awareness of the situation flooded over his panicked mind, but something in him – perhaps it was his logic, or maybe it was his brain refusing to allow everything he knew of reality be corrupted. He did not know what was happening, but he was terrified. So terrified that he began to scream uncontrollably. He was seeing something, but he blinked in such rapid succession that what unfolded in front of him was some sort of macabre flip-book. He wasn't sure if it was that he couldn't comprehend it or if he couldn't truly see what was happening and his mind was making something up to fill in the visual void.
&
nbsp; He did know that, regardless of the volume of the buzzing, his scream had attracted the attention of the cave's living inhabitants. The Black Goat turned to Samuel, displaying its full, massive face to him for the first time, and bleated in what sounded like three terrible octaves before sprinting up the hill toward Samuel.
Samuel was confused and terrified, but he knew that if he were to run uphill, he would be caught in short order. Instead, he stood and backed out of the cave until he could feel the rain the upper lip of the cave had been protecting him from. He turned, took three huge loping steps down the hill and leapt into the river.
The water was a shocking cold. The heavy rain added to its torrent, so it was all Samuel could do to remain above water. He kicked and waved his arms to try and gain some control of his body. His left ankle slammed into a rock on the riverbed, but he didn't stop trying to swim. He reached stride moments later and moved through the river by floating on top of the water. He couldn't see anything, so he kept above water and hoped that he didn't hit any of the huge rocks that jutted out of the river.
Samuel had no plan for stopping. He knew that he would empty out off the small falls eventually. It would hurt, and he would be very far from home, but that didn't seem to bother him at the moment. Even if he could stop at the beach and get home, some of the hooded ones would probably be waiting for him there. He decided to ride the river until the falls dumped him into calmer waters.
The river snaked to the right, and Samuel got turned around. He was floating sideways very rapidly. His back slammed into a large rock taking all of his wind out of him and shooting sharp pain through his entire torso. He didn't see it coming. Opening his mouth to gasp for air, he swallowed river water. Lots of it.
A Mythos Grimmly Page 30
