“Have fun, but be in before dark, or else Tall Betsy’ll get ya.”
The warning of Clay’s father, along with a signature whiskey-scented laugh, reverberated through the boys memory as he wandered back home, the broken-egg yolk sunset mocking him as it shrank and shrank into oblivion. He could feel the back of his neck start to electrify and the collar of his shirt was damp with anxious sweat.
“Tall Betsy. Heh. Nothin but an old wives tale. Speakin of wives, where’s yours old man? Huh? She run off like the other one did AND my mom did?” Clay thought to himself. The most genius comebacks are always conceived several hours after you need them most.
After dinner, Clay had gone out with the other neighborhood boys over to the Nelson’s huge backyard for a pickup game of baseball. Clay had the reputation of being the best hitter in his class, and that night, he’d been on fire.
“Don’t you think it’s about time to wrap it up, Clay? You’ve already hit five homers on us…and don’t you wanna get home quick?” Terry Nelson, pitcher for the losing team, had hollered at Clay from the mound.
“Nah, just a couple more Terry…seven is a holy number!” Clay had yelled back, squatting into a hitters stance that had already become notable to the high school baseball coach.
“That’s fine…but we’re all staying here tonight, and you gotta run all the way home before dark! Aren’t you worried?” Terry’s voice seemed understandably annoyed, but also had a twinge of concern as well.
“Bout what?” Clay had asked condescendingly.
“You know…” Terry had looked around to the other boys, who all showed wide eyes, shaking heads, and all in all a silent message of ‘don’t even bring it up’.
“You know…Tall Betsy…t…taking your head off?” He had spat out weakly.
Clay had laughed, making sure to use a little extra bass than normal. “Don’t worry bout me. I don’t believe that crap anyway. Throw the damn ball.” He had definitively made up his mind.
“Okay buddy…just know you’d be able to stay with me too…if your dad would ever let you.”
Clay resorted to a slight jog as he navigated through the streets from the Nelson’s back to his house. His baseball bat bounced on his right shoulder to the point of pain, so he switched it over to his left shoulder. He crossed through the very few downtown streets that existed in his community, the old brick buildings looming over him. He glanced up at a couple of second story windows that had been shattered, and they glared back at him like sore, black eyes. The clock tower on top of the bank read 10:26.
“No way that’s right.” Clay whispered to himself as he jogged through downtown and over the railroad tracks that marked the beginning of the poorer side of town, where he lived.
Soon the only light was the orange glow from the bulbs on the power poles, which really only helped Clay see tree limbs, about twenty feet up, that needed to be trimmed. The streets were dark and deserted. As he jogged by trailers and old shotgun houses, he could see residents closing front doors and throwing down window blinds, their shadows backlit by living room lamps.
“What is their deal.” Clay thought to himself. He really didn’t believe in old folktales like Tall Betsy. Parents just want their kids home before dark because they worry about terrible accidents and bad people, the real monsters of everyday life. Clay was old enough to understand that, and not just give in to superstition. He thought it was childish for his buddies to still believe in it.
But as Clay came within about a mile from his house, where he was almost certain he would be feeling the wrath of his father’s worn out leather belt, something suddenly felt wrong. Clay stopped and took a breath, as he had been jogging nonstop over two miles at this point. He looked around. The residual orange glow from the light poles just barely lit the small, impoverished houses on this part of Oak Avenue. Even the slits between the blinds and the windows had gone dark. Clay swallowed a mouthful of spit. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples as he scanned around the street in front of him. Then, suddenly, he had reason to feel frightened.
From way down the street, a maniacal, cackling laughter erupted up into the night. Clay froze. It had the timbre of a rusted, serrated blade. It continued on for several seconds, before the ghostly echoes dissipated around him. Clay felt his jaw clench as he locked his attention down the street where the horrible noise came from. His eyes darted all around any points of light, trying to find the source of the laughter.
After a breathless moment, a new noise announced itself to Clay’s ears. The ditches hugging both sides of the road were piled high with fall leaves, and a heavy, thunderous thumping, mixed with tell tale crunching, began. A couple seconds passed between each heavy thump. Clay shot his eyes to both sides of the road, repeatedly. Which side was it coming from? The left? The right? BOTH?! He couldn’t tell. His legs were cemented, even though his calves were flexed to the point of pain.
He passed his eyes between the tops of the two nearest poles, quickly itemizing everything he could dimly see. Branches, branches, dead leaves, dead leaves, darkness, darkness, moss, no moss. Wait…moss??
Clay stared at the small canopy of orange light under the pole on the right side of the road. Suddenly he noticed the thumping had stopped. About five feet under the bulb hung two veils of pale moss, swaying every so slightly in unison. Clay hadn’t noticed it before. In fact, he couldn’t recollect any moss he’d seen every growing that high and hanging that low. He couldn’t even see the bottom of it. It just swayed side to side even though there wasn’t any noticeable wind. But then it started swaying back and forth and Clay noticed something else. Emerging into the hazy light, from right between the top of where the moss hung, was the down-curved hook of a nose, easily as long as Clay’s forearm. In an instant he realized he wasn’t looking at moss at all. He was seeing white hair, falling dead from the summit of a head at least fifteen feet off the ground.
Suddenly Clay felt his legs spring to life after being concrete for several minutes. He heard a high, prepubescent scream escape his mouth. He didn’t dare look back under that light pole. His focus was dead ahead, into any shred of light that could help guide him home. As he sprinted past, that same cackling laughter from before pierced his hearing like a swarm of bats. It rang sharply behind him as he ran down the road, slowly growing faint as he covered ground. Clay’s mind had been completely turned off. His muscle memory and a desperate reserve of energy were in charge of him now. He scurried the final mile home in about five minutes, which he would’ve noticed as being way faster than he had ever ran a mile, if he could even process a single thought not pertaining to survival.
He slowed up as he approached his small, dark house that sat at the end of a poorly underdeveloped street. In fact, their closest neighbors lived several houses down, the units in between abandoned and boarded up. Clay caught his breath in the shadows, the nearest orange light pole bulb hundreds of feet behind him. He quickly looked back down the road. He heard no thumping, saw nobody. His frightened instincts began to relax as he rested his hands on his knees. It didn’t even occur to him that his baseball bat was gone, having been tossed as soon as he started running. He let out a long sigh…but then quickly inhaled as he realized his next horrifying showdown…with his dad.
He had forgotten all about the fury of his father. Oh man, he was in for it now. He had escaped getting murdered by Tall Betsy only to get murdered by the back of his dads hand. Clay thought for a moment. Lately there had been several nights where he had been able to sneak in right at sunset, his father passed out on the front porch next to a brown bottle. If his dad was indeed asleep, perhaps Clay could sneak in and convince him that he had arrived home right before sunset, and in a hungover stupor maybe his dad would believe him. It was worth a try.
Crouching low, Clay began to sneak close to his house, his senses ultra-heightened, listening for his dad and looking for any slight movement in the shadows. He crept around the left side of the house, avoiding the front porch, where his father routinely sat in watch. He couldn’t make out any chairs or tables or his fathers outline in the deep dark, but he could, however, hear a very slow rocking sound. It was his dad. He was sitting in his favorite chair on the front porch, and the slowness of the rocking made it apparent that he was indeed knocked out. Clay felt a surge of relief as he made his way around the back of the house, silently approaching and opening the back door, having lifted up the mat and grabbing the key.
Even in the profound darkness of the house, Clay had memorized where every creak and groan in the floorboards were, so he was able to blindly navigate the hallway into the living room. The good news was that a short candle from the kitchen scattered a very dim yellow glow, helping Clay further navigate his way through the house to his bedroom. The bad news was that he had to pass right by the front door, and therefore be well within earshot of his dad on the porch. Clay prayed to God that he wouldn’t wake him up.
With the grace of a ballerina Clay worked his way through the living room and ever-so-slowly moved past the screened in front door. With the minuscule candlelight he was actually able to make out shapes from the porch so he paused as the slow creak from the rocking chair once again came to him. He could see the shape of a bottle on the table next to a shadowed mass that leaned slightly back and forth and could only be his father, except something was strange. He could tell the chair was occupied given the thickness of the outline, but the shadow stopped after the back of the chair. He could even make out the shoulders of a man, but after that…nothing. Nothing at all. No. No way. It had to be the dark playing tricks with him. Had to be. Had to be.
This was Clay’s unhinged belief in the moment he had snuck by the front door and analyzed the shadows on the porch. It’s amazing what you will believe in the most frightening moments of your life. It’s also amazing how quickly beliefs can be shattered in similar moments. In this case, Clay’s belief that the dark had played tricks on him was quickly annihilated when, from behind him, he heard a dense, cumbersome thump. It seemed to come from the hallway that led to the living room. Clay had left the back door open. After a couple of seconds, another thump. Then another. Then silence.
Although his lips were closed, Clay’s jaws were open wide, trembling with realization. He felt himself slowly turning around toward the sound, shuddering almost to the point of collapse. He got a look at the living room.
The dwindling candlelight was more than enough visibility for Clay. There, right there in the room with him, was an enormous, old, old woman. She was drastically oversized for his house, her back bent forward as she crouched at the ceiling to even fit. Long, wispy flows of white hair hung to the floor. Disproportional to her seemingly thick torso, two skeletal arms branched down to her bent knees, with strange, outstretched fingers twisting back up toward her head. Her face was shadowed. Clay was paralyzed, body and mind.
Thump…thump……thump…….thump.
All at once she was standing right over Clay, who craned his neck up as far back as it would go, as he looked into the black nothing where her face would be. A laugh fell down at him. This time, a much lower, slower laugh, almost a horrible coughing. With each audible wretch her shoulders lurched. In his final moment of consciousness, Clay could feel long, ice cold fingers cradling his head, sharp nails digging into his scalp and cheeks, with damp, stinking white hair falling all around him.