My blind embossed in autumn leaves and tall, brown tinted grass, smothered by rope and a wooden base with a camo sleeping bag slung about it for comfort. I breathe deeply, implanting the stock of my bolt action rifle to my shoulder, tucking it in the way my old man had taught me.
I have been here for hours, watching the rising sun now fade behind a curtain of grey, darkening puffs of cloud in the sky. The smell of pursuing rain swirls my nose.
The buzzing of my black watch blares loud enough to steal me from the hypnosis of nature. It is almost time to pack it in.
I take one last look through the scope, gliding the crosshairs over ferns, pines, brushes, and the skittering of black, grey, and brown squirrels up and down the thick brown bark of all matter of trees. My site zips past something odd nearly two hundred yards off. I steady my scope and work backwards till I see movement on a hill, rustling through the brush.
I see it.
It’s gangly, sickly, mane of mange. A tall, thin black deer with ribs protruding from its sides. Hip bones that shot out against its flesh, as if trying to rip free.
Above all its decrepit, grotesque features. The eyes were by far the worst.
A putrid white and yellow puss that oozed from its sockets, and blank white eyes with no iris. Just disturbingly white. Not like a cataract eye where the pupil is fogged by a green and grey tinge, it was all white.
The way its chest moved was even perverse in nature. Each shambling breath was followed by a puff of thin visible air, as if it was below freezing out here, out here in the dry heat of summer.
Its head perched up, neck sounding like each bone brittle, cracking and snapping from the movement. How could I hear it from this far out?
Then it hit me. Nothing else out here was making a sound. As if every other animal, critter or being was stuck in a panicked state of paralysis, devoid of the ability to move or speak, devolved into silent husks trapped in the horror that this being’s presence had created.
I wanted to rip that scope from my eye and run, do something, anything! All I could do was witness as two blotches of yellow rolled down from its eyelids and into where its iris and cornea should be.
It’s staring at me.
How? How could it possibly see me? How can it see anything? I try to pull the trigger but nothing. I can’t move.
It stands up on its hind legs, while the front legs droop to the side as if it were a bipedal being. That gaze locked onto mine, and it screams a terrible scream. A blood curdling, high pitched cry as if it was being murdered. My stomach turns to knots. I want to vomit but my entire body has betrayed me.
It walks towards me. Still on its back legs it slowly saunters towards me, taking its time as if it knows that I cannot move an inch. I can see its fur is caked with blood, pus, and God knows what else.
It’s smiling?
It approaches me, the smell is horrifying. Rotted eggs, burning flesh and the smell of body odor, like an intense, palpable stench of someone that has never bathed. A blend of the sourest of smells that overwhelms me.
I woke up. Three years later, and a hundred miles from home.