On the night this happened, I had been in town, and I had agreed to go home with my friend, mostly because I’m a bit of a weirdo and don’t like getting taxis on my own. But on this particular night my plan backfired as it turned out she had brought her bike to the night out. So rather than manning up and just enduring a ten minute social interaction with a stranger, I ended up having to walk my ass home with her, which takes about an hour-ish.
Now, she lives at the very bottom of a hilly area, so whenever I’d end up walking home with her I’d usually try to puppy dog eyes my way into a sleepover for three main reasons. (A) I was tired (lazy) and didn’t want to have to walk all the way up to mine, which was at the very very top of the biggest hill. (B) sleepovers are fun, and (C) the further up my hill you go, the weirder people tend to get. Down where she lives is pretty nice and well off mostly, but up around my house things can get a bit rougher, so walking up there alone at night wasn’t my favourite thing to do. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, either I wasn’t able to stay or I decided that I just needed to get home to my own bed that night, I ended up not staying and I set off on my journey back to my house.
The first half of the hill isn’t that bad, really. The streetlamps illuminate pretty much everything, albeit in an off-putting orange glow, and the roads are wide. There’s not many places where people could hide, and although there are almost never any cars around that late at night, the presence of the main roads gives a sense of security; you could almost convince yourself that someone would miraculously drive by right in your hour of need. Failing that, at least if you were to be stabbed or beaten to a pulp, there’d be a CCTV camera catching all the action from nearby, hopefully catching your good side in the process. All this means that when I walked through this section on that night, I didn’t feel particularly on edge. I zoned out while I walked, aided by the white noise of the wind, the buzzing of the old streetlamps, and the soft roar of the cars in the city far away.
This ambiance carried me all the way to the foot of my hill. Here walls and houses close in on the road, making it feel narrower and muffling the sounds of the night. There are far fewer streetlamps to give off that comforting buzzing sound, and the wind doesn’t make it down to street level. The tall trees along the paths on either side create dark passageways that you can barely see into from outside, and there are numerous dark alleyways that run off into other estates along the road.
The silence always forces me out of my thoughts and focuses me on my walk. It’s just completely quiet, you can barely hear the wind, and something about that silence always feels off-putting to me, almost predatory in nature somehow. My mind always circles back to the feeling that SOMETHING is there, that SOMETHING could hear me if it were listening. To that end, I always find myself focusing on my footsteps, which sound heavy in the quiet. I chose to walk on the right hand side of the road, along the path most heavily shaded by the trees. There’s a section of the path that dips down a bit, bringing your head just a bit above road level, and it was right as I reached that point that I turned my head to the left and saw him.
There was a man standing right in the middle of one of the side roads, facing me. My shoes made a scuffing noise against the ground as I stopped almost involuntarily, like a startled animal. It was so odd that I was more intrigued than anything else. I mean, a person standing in the middle of the road is excusable enough, we’ve all done it, but he was standing in the EXACT middle of the road, on his own, and he wasn’t moving. I looked at him for a while and he just did not move at all, he was completely still. And the way he was standing was strange as well. He was ever so slightly hunched, his legs just a tiny bit bent, shoulders forward, elbows out, hands in. It seemed an unnatural way to be standing. I tried to make out his face or any other details about him, but he was backlit by the lights in the estate behind him, and he appeared to me just a black silhouette. Just the outline of a perfectly average looking person, a bit broad shouldered, but really nothing out of the ordinary.
I realised that my position within the darkness of the trees might be preventing him from seeing me. I mean, surely if you were a normal person with any normal reason to be doing what he was doing and somebody walked up, you would stop and move on. And If he was looking for somebody to jump then he probably would’ve called out or come over, but he just stood there. I didn’t feel like he could see me, but the longer I looked the less sure I became of that, and the more I felt like it really didn’t matter. Any normal person, whether they were aware they were being observed or not, would’ve given some sort of clue as to what they were doing by now, I was sure of that. I suddenly though that maybe he might be a mannequin or a cardboard cutout left there to scare people, something like that. I looked a bit closer, focused on his shoulders, but sure enough, they were perceptibly heaving. Like he was taking deep heavy breaths. At this point I started to get a bit disturbed, so I started walking again and continued up the hill.
The interaction made me nervous and I kept looking back over my shoulders the whole way up. I’d look over my right shoulder, then my left, then turn around fully and scan for a second, then continue walking. I continued this routine for a while, but by the time I reached the top of the hill and started into the estate where I lived I had mostly calmed down. There were plenty of weird people around, and he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. A bit strange, sure, but not really a big deal. Something about being in my estate always makes me feel safer, like nothing could happen to me on my home turf, so I settled back into my thoughts as I walked this last stretch.
I was still always aware of places that could be hiding potential danger, so as I approached one of the small darkened alleyways I was about to turn my head to look into it, as I always did every time I passed. But I was stopped by the sound of heavy, laboured breathing coming from within it. I didn’t look, but I could see the same shape from down the hill in the corner of my eye. Hunched the same way, facing me again. My heart skipped a beat. How could he be there? I had left him behind me on the hill, he would’ve had to walk right past me in order to get here, there just wasn’t any other way to get here. I was so shocked and scared that I just kept walking, as if my body didn’t even register what had happened. After I had passed him I sped up, walking at an almost comically fast speed walk. My ears were on overdrive, attuned to every single sound around me. If I heard ANYTHING behind me, I was going to start full on sprinting back to my house. I had reached my limit for weird occurrences for the night, I just wanted to get home without any further incident.
And I almost did. I made it to the very final stretch, a maybe 100 metre section of road with houses all around it, my house at the end, and the same figure standing right in the middle of the road between me and it. I felt a cold feeling creeping through my veins like syrup, and the sweat on my body suddenly began to chill me. I simply stood there, staring at him, just like when we first met maybe fifteen minutes ago. I was utterly terrified, I couldn’t think of any possible rational explanation for what was going. I had passed him TWICE now, he hadn’t moved, hadn’t passed me, and yet here he was again. Standing just as before, breathing just as before and looking right back at me. I was there for quite a while, thinking about what to do. I would begin to approach, back up, try again only to become too scared and retreat once more, I paced back and forth and all the while he watched me. He never made any attempt to move towards me or speak or do anything other than simply breathe and watch.
I decided I would simply walk past him, that I had no other choice, really. So I started towards him, but I couldn’t bring myself to come that close to him, to come within arm’s reach of him. More than that I didn’t want to see his face, to be able to make out his features. Everytime I had seen him the lights behind him had made him appear pitch black, his features indistinguishable, and I had begun to feel like that was merciful on the part of the lights. So I walked to my right, into the gardens of the houses alongside the road. I clung as close as I could to the houses, being careful not to crush any plants or flowers growing there, stepping up on to doorsteps to squeeze past the cars parked in the driveways at points. As I came up alongside him it took a great deal of willpower to stop myself from turning to look at him and see him in greater detail. But I turned my head only enough to keep him in my peripheral vision. Every muscle in my body was ready for him to suddenly break from his near motionlessness and run at me, but he didn’t, and suddenly I was past him. I continued on with my walk through the gardens for another few metres and then I broke and ran, all the way to my door. I wrenched my keys from my pocket and shoved them into the lock. I heard the click and I burst through at top speed, slamming the door shut behind me and locking it again.
After a few moments, I slowly made my way to my bedroom, got ready for bed, and went to sleep. The experience had made me, above all else, bone tired, and I quickly fell asleep. Shockingly, I had no dreams that I remember and I woke feeling pretty much fine, I wasn’t bothered by my experience at all, really. As quickly as he had entered my life he had left. I had gotten an angry text from my mom about slamming the door the night before, but she, nor anybody else ever asked me why I did it, and I really never felt any immense desire to tell them, or anyone. Until recently. I somehow felt that I should recount this story, as I’ve been thinking about this encounter more and more often, and it disturbs me a little bit more each time.