I am a dog groomer, working on the road in a mobile grooming van. The vans are self-contained grooming salons, including a tub, a table, shampoo cubbies, a vacuum hose built into the wall, a 50-gallon water tank and a big generator in the back to run it all so clients don’t have to worry about us tripping breakers by trying to plug the van into their house. The last time one of the generators died I tried to plug into someone’s garage, and the second I turned on the dryer their whole house went dark, as did the van, and the dog had to go home sopping wet and unfinished.
The company that I work for is very small, just three vans and three employees, we all commute to our boss’s house where the vans are parked in their driveway, the shed in the back yard serving as our “supply shed” where all of the extra shampoos, cleaners, RV antifreeze and various tools and extra parts for the interior of the salons, are kept. Our boss’s house is set back into the woods, the road they live on is quiet and untraveled, the only noises once the sun goes down are the trees rustling in the wind, the neighbor’s cat prowling the bushes, and the seasonal bugs and animals of the Pennsylvanian forest.
As the company’s longest employee, I am sometimes tasked with training new hires to use the van, get them used to the daily ordeal of existing in a vehicle, getting them acquainted with the vans show them what all of the buttons, levers and switches do, run them through cleaning and prepping for the next day, stocking, filling the water tank, and filling the propane tank for the heater for when it’s cold outside.
During one of these ride-along days, I was showing the new hire how to work the vents and how to tell which direction the fans were pointing when I felt the van shift a bit. I didn’t think too much of it, sometimes we had to parallel park on residential streets and a delivery van going a little too fast can sometimes cause the van to shift with the force of the wind.
The new girl braced herself a little, “is that normal?” Her eyes were wide, like she had forgotten that the room we were standing in was being held 7 inches off the ground by flexible suspension and rubber wheels.
“Yeah, you’ll get used to it, every road is different, and the different towns around here have different amounts of traffic, so you’ll figure out the best spots to park as you go along.”
She nodded, still looking a little like she was about to lose her balance, but she pushed on, leaning against the wall and changing the subject to ask more questions about what certain buttons did on the wall behind me, and how to check the water level throughout the day. She asked questions like, “have you ever run out of water before?” I had, and I explained that water conservation and a certain routine for bathing the dogs was important to making sure you had enough water to last the day.
A couple of houses later and I had her drying a dog in the back while I sat in the driver’s seat and made a phone call, the back of the van was separated from the cab with a wall, and between the driver and passenger seats was a door that went into the salon area. The door was essentially just a frame with a large plexiglass window, and I could watch her through the door to make sure everything was running smoothly back there while I returned a missed call I received from my grandmother.
Usually, she would leave me a voicemail, and it was generally something simple, asking if I needed to use the washer and dryer any time soon, or if I wanted to come over for dinner, but today was just a missed call and a text that just read “Call me back.” It was very unlike her to not tell me what it was she was calling for, my grandmother is a very straightforward woman, making her opinions and her needs immediately known, and not beating around the bush. For her to be as vague as she was, something must have been wrong.
I dialed her number, and she picked up right after the first ring. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?” I was confused, her tone made her sound panicky and nervous. “I don’t know, but something was telling me I needed to call you and tell you to be careful tonight.” She let out a sigh, “I don’t know what you need to be careful of, but just… be careful.”
I assured her that, while I was in the van, I was always careful, I was, after all, cruising around in a 5 ton, 10-foot-tall vehicle, and that wasn’t exactly the nicest thing to drive on the narrow, windy, pothole filled roads of rural Pennsylvania. Too many times I have had to purposefully run red lights because the yellow light only stayed yellow for a split second and I didn’t have the stopping power to make it, or I had missed a road because the curve was too tight and I was sure that if I tried to take the turn, I would surely end up toppling over.
This didn’t mean that I didn’t believe her that some force had pushed her to call me, she was an intuitive person, taking lessons and warnings from thin air with seemingly no rhyme or reason, but she had never steered me wrong. If my grandmother told me to be careful, then I better be goddamn careful.
Her intuition had predicted so many things in the past, she always said the universe gave her gut punches. Anyone that knew her knew that if she had a prediction for you, it would most likely come true.
When I was in high school, I worked at a pizzeria about a mile’s walk up the road, my shift was from 4 to 9 and my boyfriend at the time would usually come pick me up so I didn’t have to walk a mile home through the woods in the dark. One afternoon, I was getting ready to leave for work when my grandmother knocked on my bedroom door.
“Hey, can I talk to you?” I told her to come in and she opened the door cautiously, “So, don’t walk home from work tonight, okay? I don’t want you out in the woods tonight.” This wasn’t an unusual request, though it usually had to do with weather or bear sightings in the area, but it was a clear spring day and there was no rain on the horizon. “I don’t know why, but I want your boyfriend to bring you home, I’m afraid that if you’re out there tonight, you’re going to get hurt.”
I agreed, though I had walked home every night for the past few weeks since the weather had been so nice and nothing bad had happened yet, and headed into work.
At the end of my shift, my boyfriend came and picked me up, we had gotten a calzone and some fries to share for when we got home, and we started the short drive down the dirt, tree lined road back to my grandmother’s house. There is one spot on the road that was always my favorite spot to stop when I would walk home, and I would smoke a cigarette while sitting on the guard rail with my headphones on. In this spot, the road towered about 20 feet above a small creek that, on a clear night, sparkled with the reflection of the moon, a guardrail was the only thing separating you from the drop off the side of the road, and on the other side of the road was a cliff face, standing about 10 feet over the road, the moss-covered rock faces were always wet, and they glistened green in the darkness.
On a normal night I would sit in this spot for a good 30 minutes sometimes, depending on how into an album I was, but on this night, as the headlights of my boyfriend’s Ford Escort Wagon shown around the corner and illuminated my sitting spot on the side of the road, what greeted us there was not the peaceful overlook I would normally revel in.
Instead, what greeted us was a crushed and jagged SUV, on its side, the dirt road glistening with broken glass and a puddle of oil mixing with transmission fluid draining from the cragged edged of the smashed-up hood. The car’s rear fender was crumpled and folded over the guardrail, which was also twisted and warped, and instead of the moon reflecting off of the creek, this time, it was reflecting off of the driver’s side window, which was aimed at the sky.
A faint crying was coming from the inside, and we jumped out of the car, spotting a woman sitting, clutching her 3-year-old son in her arms, sitting on what was left of the passenger side door, the woman was crying, but the boy was kissing her face assuring her that “it’s gonna be okay mommy.”
We ended up having to break the left back window with a rock to help lift the woman and her son out of the car and safely get their feet back on the ground. Neither of them were hurt, just a bruised ego, and a totaled car. She had swerved to miss hitting a deer and lost control of the car, flipping it onto its side and it slid into the guardrail.
Odds are, had I walked home from work that night, I would have been sitting in that exact spot where the guardrail, now contorted and sagging, had stopped that car from going over the side of the road. I would have been sitting, blissfully unaware of the danger coming up behind me, enveloped in my headphones, smoking a cigarette. Odds are, had I walked home from work that night, I would have died.
Now, here my grandmother was, nearly 10 years later, telling me again, to be careful, a warning I learned a long time ago to head without question.
I had to take the new girl back to the boss’s house early that day so she could go get her son from school, and I had one more dog after that that I would take care of by myself. It was late November, and I worked 10-hour days, so it was usually dark by my last dog at this time of year, especially this client, their house was set way back in the woods, off of a long dirt road. I’m convinced that, even if it were the middle of the summer, it would look dark back there, the thick canopy of trees blocked out any glimpse of the sky.
I finished up with Tuffy the terrier, he usually took me about an hour, and packed up the van to head back for the night. As I was reversing down the driveway towards the road, I kept my eyes on the side mirrors, making sure I didn’t scrape any trees or the stone wall that line the right side of the driveway. I glanced up at the backup camera screen for a quick second and slammed the breaks.
I only saw it for a second, but it was clear as day, a face in the camera. It looked like someone wearing an ill-fitting Halloween mask where the face holes didn’t quite fit correctly.
One eye socket was pulled slightly up on the outer corner, while the other was scrunched in towards the nose and drooped down into the cheek and the eyes were set deep, deep into the folds of skin. The nose was straight until the very tip, which was upturned and jutted out to the side, the mouth hanging loosely, the lower lip falling below a set of crooked, plaque encrusted teeth. Small tufts of black hair stuck out in patches on the scalp, the bald patches were white and scaly.
I slammed the car into park, clutching my chest. Who was that? And why were they standing behind a large truck going in reverse?
That’s when it hit me. The backup camera’s location. It was on the top of the roof of the van, at least 9 and a half feet off the ground. Whoever that was was close enough to the camera to where I could only see their face, which means they were either nine and a half feet tall, or they were climbing up the back of the van. I didn’t like either one of those options, but weighing the two of them, I suppose I would take tall over using the van as a jungle gym.
The van swayed, the same way it had earlier when the new girl was with me. But I was parked, in the woods, in a driveway, there were no trucks to drive by and push the van around. I thought back to where I was parked earlier in the day and realized, the odds of a truck driving by with enough speed to move the van on that very narrow one-way street were very, very unlikely.
I quickly hit the lock button on the door, locking all of the doors, and put the van back in reverse. I just wanted to get out of the woods, it was too dark, and the van had a headlight out, and I could barely see through the thickening November fog. I stared at the backup camera as I made my way out of the driveway and onto the road, at first, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, until I looked closer. From the angle of the camera, I could see most of the back doors, and one of the hinges on the top of one of the doors didn’t match the others, it had too many ridges. And then it moved, unfurling into fingers that were wrapped around the side of the door and the pulled up onto the roof and out of sight.
The van swayed again, but this time it was more like a jolt, and I threw the van into drive and took off as quickly as I felt comfortable on this road with no streetlights. There was a thudding on the roof, a rhythmic ‘boom boom boom scrape scrape scrape’ coming from the top of the plastic air conditioning vents. Thats all that was keeping it out of the van, a thin black plastic hood, a plastic fan and a screen. That was all there was between it being outside the van… and it being inside the van with me.
I skidded around the last lightless corner, feeling the uneven weight on the top of the van shift with the turn, and made it to an intersection, the light was green, and I sped through it, finding the first brightly lit parking lot. I tore the key out of the ignition, jumped out of the van and ran for my life.
I stopped when I reached the road, there were tons of cars on the road, a few drivers even staring at me like I was crazy, I was, after all, running like hell away from a work van with no jacket on in November. I turned back towards the van. There was nothing on the roof. I walked a very wide circle around the van, looking from all sides to see if there was anything on, or in, the van. There was nothing, and no one.
I put my keys between my fingers and slowly walked back towards it, opening the back doors first and peering around the storage area, then the front doors, checking under the dashboard and seats, and then the sliding door to the salon, even checking in the tub and inside the tiny cubbyholes where we store the towels, knowing damn well no one would fit in the foot and a half tall, little cabinet.
I stood outside the van, breathing, watching my breath steam in the cold night air, and grabbed my jacket from the front, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t usually smoke at work, but dammit I needed this.
After it took what felt like an eternity for my heart to stop racing, I got back in the van and headed back towards my boss’s house. I was only about 5 minutes up the road at this point, and I just wanted to be back so I could get in my own car and go home.
The closer I got to my boss’s house, the darker the roads got as streetlights became more and more sparse, and soon, my high beams were the only thing lighting the scenery. I passed a corn field, and out the passenger side window, I saw it.
It was the height of a child, probably no more than 5 feet tall, its body was lumpy and misshapen, again, like it was wearing skin that just didn’t fit. I wasn’t wearing clothes, but it had no defining genitalia or and hair other than the black tufts on its head. It started at me out of its eye holes, and lifted one arm, the skin hanging in lumpy sacks off of it and pointed one spindly finger at me. It took a step back into the corn field, and then it was gone.
When I pulled into my boss’s driveway, I didn’t even take the time to fill the water tank, I ran the antifreeze through the lines to winterize as quickly as possible and then I threw myself into my Prius and took off as quickly as I could, texting my boss that I wasn’t feeling well, and I would finish prep when I got back in the morning.
The next morning, when I pulled into the driveway, my boss was standing outside, looking up the side of my van at the air conditioner vent.
“Hey, I just noticed the vent is cracked a bit on top.”
I started at him, speechless, and then glanced at the vent, there were marks on the top and sides of the vent, it looked like some large creature had been gnawing on it.
“It’s probably from low tree branches, just be careful if you see any and take it slow when you do, I’ll buy a replacement for the front, but try not to crack the back one too.”
I nodded, apologizing, of course it was low hanging tree branches. What else could it have been?