I panicked. Having no clue what was happening, and being unable to think straight, I ran out of the forest, back towards my house. All I could think about at the moment was getting home, the urge to feel safe in my most familiar surroundings overwhelming any other logic.
When I began to approach my driveway, though, I hesitated. I was supposed to be at school now, wasn’t I? And how could I possibly explain the-
My thought process ground to a halt as I raised my hands, seeing that my fingernails had gone back to normal. I checked to make sure, and the fang-like teeth in my mouth were also gone. My hands and face were still covered with Cliff’s blood, though. I spent a few minutes trying to think of a cover story, then tried to spread the blood around on my clothes and smeared some dirt on my face, pants, and shirt. I even found a sharp rock and cut a few scratches into my skin near the bloodiest areas… it barely hurt, and none of my own blood emerged, but it did make it look like Cliff’s blood had come from me. Finally, I headed inside.
I managed to convince my mom that I had fallen on the way to school, and just barely made it back. She tried to insist on taking me to see a doctor, but I told her that I didn’t have any serious injuries and was just sore and needed rest. She eventually gave in, but she insisted that I had to visit the doctor tomorrow.
I spent a lot of time in the bathroom washing off my hands and face, and wondering what the hell had just happened. I managed to convince myself that the claws and fangs were just a hallucination, but I was unable to do the same about Cliff’s dead body. Then it hit me.
Cliff was dead… and the number one suspect was going to be me. As soon as they found his body, they could do DNA tests and stuff, right? If I had really bitten him, they’d find my DNA in the wounds, wouldn’t they? I was only 14, I didn’t want to go to jail!
I briefly entertained the idea of heading back out and trying to hide the body, but wouldn’t that just fall into a typical cliche, namely, “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime?” If someone caught me over there, that would just make me look more guilty. I had no idea what to do, and I eventually just decided to go to sleep. It was a rare opportunity for me to get to sleep through a school day, even though I always felt like I wanted to. Maybe this whole thing would turn out to have been a bad dream…
I woke up to the sound of my parents’ voices drifting in from the kitchen. I could tell that they were trying to be quiet, but my hearing had always been extremely good, so I could clearly pick up what they were saying. I glanced over to the clock on my bedside table and saw that it read 6:34 PM.
“He was covered in dirt and blood. He said that he fell and hurt himself, and I did check him over but he didn’t seem to have any major wounds, just a bunch of bruises and a few cuts, so I thought it would be okay to just let him rest and skip school today.” My mom said.
“And he’s been asleep all day?” Came my father’s voice.
“Yes, I went in to check on him several times. I was just about to wake him up and ask him if he wanted dinner.”
“I’m glad to hear he’s okay, after what happened to that Ransom boy.”
I nearly choked. Ransom was Cliff’s last name. Had they found the body?
“Why? What happened?” My mom asked.
“Apparently he didn’t show up for school today either. His parents said that he left this morning like usual, but the school says he never arrived. They’ve had search parties looking for him for hours, they’ve covered the route the kids normally take but they haven’t found anything yet.”
That was odd, I thought. Cliff’s body wasn’t that far from the edge of the street, and it seemed unlikely that a search party would just miss it like that. Maybe I had hallucinated his dead and mutilated corpse after all? But he was still missing, though… this just raised more questions than answers. I quickly closed my eyes and pretended to still be asleep as I heard my father’s footsteps approaching my door.
He opened the door and stepped inside, not turning on the light as he knew that I didn’t like that.
“Nate? You awake, son?” he asked.
“I am now,” I grumbled, acting as if he had just woken me up.
“I heard you took a nasty spill today. Are you okay?”
I made a show of stretching my arms and sitting up in bed. “Yeah, I think so. Just a little sore still. Sorry that I missed school.”
“It’s okay,” my dad said. “I’m just glad you’re alright. But I do have a question for you.”
“What’s that?” I asked, trying not to sound nervous.
“Did you happen to run into Clifford Ransom on the way to school? He usually takes a similar route as you, doesn’t he?”
‘So he can stalk me and beat me up,’ I thought to myself. “Yeah, I saw him this morning, but I didn’t talk to him or anything,” I half-lied. “Why?”
“Well it turns out that he never made it to school today either, and the authorities are out there looking for him. Do you remember the last pace you spotted him?”
“Uh, I think it was near the Post Road a block or two away from the high school,” I said. This was actually fairly far from where Cliff and I had had our confrontation, so I hoped to throw the search parties off the trail… I was still panicking internally, though.
“Did anything seem off about him? Did it look like he was heading in a different direction than usual?”
“I don’t think so. He was pretty far away when I saw him and I didn’t pay him that much attention.”
My father seemed satisfied by that, and invited me to dinner, which I accepted. Throughout the meal, I kept thinking that my parents would say something about how nervous I was acting, but I guess they just attributed it to the aftereffects of my ‘fall’.
That night, after my parents had both fallen asleep, I slipped on my socks and shoes and decided to head outside for some fresh air. Spending time in the yard at night was one of the things that had always helped me relax whenever I was stressed out.
I sat on a stone bench in my mom’s garden for what must have been nearly an hour, looking at the starry sky and listening to the calming sounds of animals and insects.
At that point, I heard a faint rustling from the nearest edge of the yard.
As I said before, nothing had ever been able to sneak up on me before. Even with my eyes closed, I could identify and mentally trace the path of pretty much every animal in the area just by the sounds they made. I had already heard a small family of deer, a raccoon, and several owls. But this new sound came from something large, and it originated from a spot where I was sure there hadn’t been anything just a moment ago. It was close too, only a few yards away from me.
I snapped my head around to face the noise, but I saw and heard nothing. As I was beginning to think that it was just nerves, I nearly jumped a foot into the air as I heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice.
“That was sloppy.”
“Who’s there!?” I called. For the first time in my memory, I was feeling unsafe in my own yard at night, which was usually my sanctuary.
A tall, thin figure stepped out of the shadows. I could barely make out enough detail to see that it was a middle-aged woman, maybe a bit older than my mom, with short, dark brown hair. “You can’t just leave a body laying out in the open like that,” she whispered. “You were lucky that I was there to dispose of it before the cops found it.”
“Wha - who are you? What are you talking about?” I asked, now standing and starting to back away.
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Nate,” she said, pronouncing my name with a bit of a sarcastic hiss, as if flaunting the fact that she knew who I was and I couldn’t say likewise. She approached closer, and as she stepped into the moonlight, I could see that her fingers ended in long, black claws, and her sinister smile revealed a mouth full of sharp, fang-like teeth.