I was constantly thinking about the arm I saw last night. Spending time in school was incredibly weird that Wednesday. I’d be looking at the teacher explaining something when suddenly, I’d start remembering the cold November night, the terrified stray cat, and the dark monstrous clawed hand illuminated by the moonlight. Just remembering the thin boney structure of the arm and the tightly wrapped shriveled skin. The speed with which it appeared and snatched the cat and how the next morning I haven’t seen even the smallest evidence that whatever possessed that arm was there. There wasn’t a single drop of blood, no footprints, no nothing. It was like the arm belonged to a ghost.
I still didn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t know how to tell Caitlyn, I was taking a small pause with Elle, and my brother would just laugh and tell me that I’m imagining things. Maybe I was imagining things, maybe I was dreaming, but it all felt so real. Even Luna was wary of her surroundings when I woke up. But then, I thought about what my brother told me the day before. I can choose to act on it or ignore it. Whatever the outcome of trying is, it will be better than deciding not to try at all. I decided to talk to Elle during a break and reconcile. After that, I’d tell Caitlyn and Elle about it.
“Taylor,” my teacher called with her hands on her hips. “Are you following?”
“Yes… uh… yes. Of course. I’m following,” I answered as anxiety grew inside me.
“Oh, then you won’t have any problem solving this task,” she said holding a black marker and offering it to me.
Some of the people looked at me while most couldn’t be bothered to do so and barely managed to live through the class. Boredom killed them. I was bored to death every single other time, but this time… all I could do is think about the clawed hand. Nothing else came to my mind. I completely forgot that the teacher told me to get in front of the board and she needed to call me again.
“Oh, sorry,” I told her. “I just couldn’t sleep last night.”
“I don’t really care,” she replied. “Come here and solve the task.”
Shakingly, I got up and slowly walked up to the teacher. I gently took the marker from her hand and she crossed her arms waiting for me to start writing on the board. After taking a quick glance at the marker, I got closer to the board and lifted the marker. The tip of it touched the board when the bell rang signaling that the class has ended. All the students started packing and I put the marker on a shelf under the board. While passing by the teacher, I felt her eyes on me and I tried getting back to my desk quickly. I put the things in my backpack, put the backpack on my back, and left the classroom.
“You’re so lucky,” Caitlyn told me.
She was waiting for me right outside the classroom and together, we started walking toward the cafeteria.
“What did you want to tell us?” Caitlyn asked me.
“You and Elle need to hear it at the same time,” I answered. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to say it multiple times.”
The image of the hand appeared in my mind once more. I didn’t know if I was thinking about so much due to fear or if whatever it was, had that effect on people who saw it. When we got to the cafeteria, we got our food and sat down at one of the tables. Both of us kept looking around hoping that we’ll see Elle. She was nowhere to be found. After a few minutes, we got scared. We approached some of her classmates and asked them if they knew something.
“Her mom called in,” one of the girls replied. “Elle’s not feeling too good.”
Caitlyn and I looked at each other before thanking the girl and leaving. We returned to the table we were eating at before. There was only one thing left to do. Go to Elle’s house after school, or skip school and go there immediately. We decided on the latter.
“I can only hope she didn’t do something stupid,” Caitlyn told me. “She wanted to go to that forest really badly.”
“Do you really think she’d go into the forest alone?” I asked expecting an answer.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Caitlyn said.
“No that’s not… uh… It doesn’t matter.”
After we somehow managed to get out even though our plan was incredibly stupid. There were a few teachers ‘patrolling’ the hallways. We managed to sneak out through a window in a hallway on the ground floor. We ran to where we left our bikes and jumped onto them. After that, it was pretty easy. We could only ride to Elle’s house and hope that she was still there. Caitlyn was scared for Elle even though I haven’t told her about the hand. She still thought that it was an animal with rabies. Still extremely dangerous.
When we got to her house, we turned into her yard and dropped our bikes onto the grass. Caitlyn was in front of me so she was the first one who climbed the front porch and she rang the doorbell.
“Come on, come on,” she said ringing the doorbell a few more times.
“What’s going on, girls?” Elle’s agitated mother asked frustrated after opening the door.
“Is Elle home?” I asked her.
“She’s in her room.”
After hearing those words leave her mother’s mouth, both Caitlyn and I sighed with relief.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen at school?” Elle’s mom asked.
“No, no,” Caitlyn replied. “We… uhm… one of the girls just lied to us about…”
“…about her being in a car crash,” I finished Caitlyn’s sentence. “The way she said it seemed so real.”
“Yeah,” Caitlyn confirmed.
“Why would someone say something like that?” Elle’s mother continued the conversation.
“We have no idea,” I answered. “But can we go see Elle?”
“Of course, of course,” Elle’s mom completely opened the door and moved to the side to let us pass through.
We got in and run upstairs to Elle’s room. As we burst in, we saw her laying on her bed and looking at her phone. Her head jerked towards us as soon as the door opened and the expression on her face was one of surprise and relief instead of fear. Caitlyn jumped on her bed and hugged her while Elle kept her eyes focused on me. There was sadness and regret in them, but when I smiled, they changed.
“What’s going on?” Elle asked us.
“We heard that you weren’t coming to school today,” Caitlyn released Elle from her hug. “We thought that you went into the forest alone, and we got scared.”
I saw a smile appear on Elle’s face. She was glad to hear that we still cared for her even though we had a fight.
“No, I didn’t. I would never go do something like that without the two of you,” Elle replied as her eyes teared up.
Caitlyn hugged her once more, but this time, Elle returned the hug. While in the hug, Elle motioned with her arm inviting me into the hug. I climbed onto the bed and hugged them.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was just scared and angry.”
“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” I told her. “You’re still my friend.”
After telling her that, she hugged us harder to the point Caitlyn and I couldn’t breathe for a second. We gently pushed her off of us and were met with the sight of her smiling.
“Hey, now that we are all together, you can tell us what you wanted,” Caitlyn said looking at me.
I froze in place as the joy and happiness turned into fear and disgust. I stood up, took a look through a window, and sat down on a chair next to Elle’s desk. I took in a deep sigh. I glanced at Caitlyn and Elle before looking down at the floor.
“I saw…” I stopped for a few seconds. “I saw something yesterday.”
“Something?” Elle replied. “Can you maybe, I don’t know, elaborate?”
“It was an arm,” I answered. “An arm that snatched a cat.”
Elle and Caitlyn just sat there. They were silent and didn’t know how to react. Even laughing at what I said wasn’t on their mind since they knew I was telling the complete truth.
“I woke in the middle of the night and saw Luna looking outside. I saw a stray on the street and thought she was just looking at it. I went to the bathroom and after returning, I had this feeling. You know how when you have to walk home when it’s dark outside and you constantly have a feeling that someone’s watching you?”
Both of them nodded.
“It’s like that but instead of believing that someone’s there, you know it. The fear also feels like it’s something primal like it’s a fear of a natural predator and not of another human. It wasn’t the first time I felt it but I’ll get to that later. After I returned to my room and experienced that feeling, I walked up to the window and saw the stray hissing at something that was obscured by the fence in my yard. Out of nowhere, a hand appeared from behind the fence, grabbed the cat, and pulled it behind the fence in only a second. This morning, I saw nothing. No footprints, no blood, no nothing.”
Once more, Elle and Caitlyn were silent. They had their eyes on me and were waiting for me to tell them that I’m joking.
“Please,” I said. “Please, can you say something?”
Caitlyn and Elle looked at each other and then back at me.
“We don’t know what to say,” Elle told me. “It sounds like complete bullshit, but judging by how you were speaking, I know you were telling the truth.”
I took in a breath. Some hair fell over my face so I pulled it back with my hand and leaned back into the chair.
“Why didn’t you tell me immediately?” Caitlyn asked me.
“You were sleeping and I wanted to tell the two of you at the same time,” I answered. “It was really important since I don’t know if I’ll be able to speak about it again. That fear I described before… I feel it whenever I remember that hand.”
“Sorry I ask, but did you get a good look at it?” Elle asked. “Maybe we can recognize who it was.”
Both Caitlyn and I looked at her weirder out, but after hearing what Elle told me, I realized something I didn’t realize before. It was such an obvious thing, but somehow, I was so stupid that I didn’t even come to that conclusion. I started to breathe faster as my heart started to accelerate.
“It…” I tried saying. “It wasn’t human.”
“Wasn’t human?” Elle asked. “What the hell are you saying?”
“The… the hand… it was… uhm… very thing with long fingers and claws like… like talons,” I stood up and started to walk back and forth. “I don’t get how I didn’t realize it before but…” I inhaled. “…it was too… too big to be a human hand. The arm it was attached to was too thin.”
“You know what,” Caitlyn said. “Calm down a bit. I’ll bring you a glass of water. After that, you might be able to draw the hand to show us what it looked like. Is that okay?”
“I… I’ll try,” I replied.
Caitlyn got up from Elle’s bed and left the room. Elle sat and pulled herself to the edge of her bed. She was close enough to grab my hand with one of hers.
“Hey, hey, hey. You can calm down,” she told me softly. “You’re safe here. Nothing will happen here, okay?”
I nodded.
“Do you remember 2 years ago when we went into my grandma’s house and we taught that my grandpa’s ghost was haunting us?” she chuckled. “You remember how I couldn’t sleep that night? And how you calmed me down by hugging me and constantly telling me that ghosts aren’t real? We later found out that it was just possums in the attic running around and making those sounds. However, you still stayed my hero. You protected me when I was scared the most and you stayed with me when I needed you the most. I’ll never forget that, and will always return the favor.”
Hearing those words leave her mouth made me smile and calm down a bit. Still, that agonizing fear didn’t want to leave me. I was scared of who or what the stalker was before. It wouldn’t have been as terrifying if it was a human or an animal since I know how to deal with those. But whatever this thing was, I had no idea how to deal with it. Telling the authorities that a monster has been stalking me or just going to them and telling them that a monster is responsible for the deaths of all those cats. But the worst of all is that judging by the size of the hand, it was more than capable of killing people without even breaking a sweat.
By the time Caitlyn returned, my heart slowed down and I wasn’t breathing as fast. She handed me a glass of water and I took a sip holding it with both of my hands. Elle gave me a blanket even though I wasn’t really cold and was already wearing a sweater, but it made me feel safer. The warmth calmed me down and I could hear Elle and Caitlyn talking about the hand. They weren’t whispering or trying to hide something from me, I just zoned out while looking through the window.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The hand you mentioned,” Elle replied.
“Yeah, but what about the hand?”
“We’re trying to figure out what to do now,” Caitlyn told me. “We can’t go into the woods, it’s too dangerous. We can’t go to the police or our parents since they’ll just laugh it off at first, but if we’re persistent, they might start to believe we should be sent to a mental institution.”
“We could go to my brother,” I told them.
“I’m not sure, Taylor. I know you and your brother are close and that he’s a good person, but I don’t think that he’ll believe us,” Caitlyn argued.
We stopped to think about who we could turn to for help. After a minute or so, I remembered a name.
“Terrence,” I whispered.
“What?” Elle asked.
“Terrence,” I replied. “He’s a guy I met at Jessica’s party. I can ask her for his Instagram.”
“Why the hell would he want to help us?” Caitlyn asked.
“That’s the thing. Seeing the hand wasn’t the first time I saw whatever it was. In fact, it wasn’t the first time I felt its presence.”
I proceeded to explain the first time I felt the presence in the woods at the rock. When I explained what happened at and after the party, they agreed that the best thing we could do is to go talk to Terrence. I immediately texted Jessica asking her if she could send me his Instagram. She replied only 5 minutes later and sent me his profile. She kept suggesting that I liked him and I replied to a few of her messages before completely ignoring her. I sent him a message asking if we could meet him somewhere. He replied half an hour later and asked if meeting him at a McDonald’s was okay. I agreed and when he asked why was this so important, I told him it was about the presence we felt during the party. After telling all of that to Caitlyn and Elle, we decided to take Elle’s car and go to McDonald’s immediately. It was a bit further away from her house so it would take us just long enough to get there.
“So…” Terrence started. “What did you need to tell me?”
“I… I saw it again,” I told him staring into his eyes. “I saw it grab a cat.”
“Why do you keep saying it? It was just a bad person. A stalker probably. Why did you talk to me? You should have gone to the police,” he replied leaning back in his seat and eating one of his fries.
“Listen to me,” I said confidently. “It isn’t a human. I know it wasn’t. The arm was too thin, the hand too large, the fingers too long and it had huge talons instead of nails. I swear to God, whatever was the owner of that hand, it wasn’t human.”
He kept looking at me and took glances at Elle and Caitlyn here and there. We expected his response and slowly ate our fries.
“Okay,” he told me running his hand down his face. “I believe you, I guess. I felt the fear and I admit, it didn’t feel like it was just a human but I have to think logically.”
“Have you seen it anymore?” I asked.
He looked at me, then at his fries, and sighed. He nodded.
“I believe I saw it,” he told me keeping his head pointed forward but lifting his eyes towards me. “One evening I was doing something in my room. Since my house is next to a forest, I saw the woods after looking through a window. I saw a shape for half a second. It disappeared into the bushes, but I believed it was just me imagining things.”
“Did you feel that fear before looking at the forest?” I asked him.
“No, I felt nothing,” he answered.
“Then it wasn’t it. You either saw something else or truly imagined something. But that’s not what we’re actually here for,” I told him.
His expression turned to one of confusion.
“We need your help,” Caitlyn told him. “Now that we know that it’s not a human, we don’t know what to do. We can’t tell the police or anyone else. And we sure as hell aren’t able to kill that thing.”
Terrence stopped to think for a bit before a tiny smile appeared on his face. He leaned towards the table, chuckled, and ate the last of his fries.
“I think I might have just the right thing for you,” he told us.