It was just the four of us. We did it every summer so we didn’t really think anything of it. Sitting on the decaying wood, we thought this would be like any other night we had spent up here. Maybe it was the first day of the summer…or it was the last. I don’t know, all the first and lasts are significant when you’re fifteen so it was one of those. I remember that much.
The old fire tower had been abandoned so long that it looked more like a platform than a place anyone might live but that was fine because no one had lived there for years. It wasn’t safe but we all believed ourselves to be indestructible as all kids do. Death is decades away and even though you know it will come, you don’t really believe it will. So we hiked through the forest in the dark with only our flashlights and beers to scale the fire tower. A tradition.
We were one of those groups where everyone likes everyone but no one exactly liked the right person so we all managed to remain best friends for years. We would drink, getting glassy eyed and breathless in each other’s faces, lips almost touching but never kissing because we knew it would change everything. And that was the only scary thing then. This was one of those nights. Chris was laughing. Kelly was touching his leg. I was leaning back into Ryan so he could keep me warm. If it was a different night, that might have been the night where we changed everything but instead everything changed us.
Chris had his flashlight sitting light up on the rotten wood which threatened us with splinters and groaned every time we moved. He was laughing and the ground was a sea of black. If not for the flashlight, we would have been in a void with only the stars to tell us up from down. They were talking in a circle. Kelly finishing Ryan’s sentences while Chris talked over the both of them blending their words together until you couldn’t understand anything except the joy of the moment.
I heard it and I froze. My hand was on Ryan’s leg and I instinctually tightened my grip. He didn’t notice, none of them did. But I heard it as much as I felt it. Wrong. The wrong spread through my body catching my breath in the back of my throat. I heard it again a little closer. They weren’t paying attention. They were missing it. The buzz of the summer and the beer and the potential of the night drowning out the sound. But I can hear it and the panic is setting it. I tell everyone to shut up and listen, I fumble for Chris’s flashlight. I don’t know what it is or where it is but that flashlight is like a beacon. He laughs and holds it over his head for a second. But then he hears it, they all do.
The guttural screech coming from the woods below us. Whatever is making the sound is maybe a couple miles in front of the platform in the darkness buried in the trees…but the noise feels like it’s all around us. You can feel it moving closer. The sound…you just never know how to describe these things. It’s like you don’t know you don’t have the words until you hear it but you’re not so much hearing it as feeling it. Something that is so unnatural that you know you need to run even if it means you run right off a 60 foot platform because you’ll have a better chance of surviving that then whatever is coming for you. Humans don’t make that sound, they can’t. It was reverberating off the trees. The pitch…so high with excitement. The primal urgency of its searching as it came closer. I had thought there was only one but when Chris stopped laughing abruptly, I could suddenly hear the chorus. They were celebrating.
I grab for the flashlight but Chris drops it. It hits the deck with a thud and rolls to the edge. I snatch it before it goes over and fumble for the switch. The flashlight goes off, plummeting us into darkness but not before I see them in the woods. We can hear them all around but it’s too late to try to go down. We’re breathless and glassy eyed now, waiting to see if they’ll find us. If they know how to climb the fire tower. We have no breath to hold. They know I saw it, I can feel them asking me in the dark. I’m glad they can’t see me because I don’t know what my face would say. People. They were people rushing towards us. But the way they moved was wrong. It was like they didn’t know how to run or walk. Like their limbs were too rigid to know how to do either. Like they didn’t know how to do anything because they weren’t capable of thinking. It was just hunger I saw. And when the light flashed over the trees, they stopped just for a moment and looked up at me. They saw me but they couldn’t have. They didn’t have faces.
It’s black. The screeching is all around. I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Ryan is gripping me so hard, and Kelly keeps picking her hand up from mine to wipe her tears, and I can feel Chris rocking back and forth through the wood panels. I keep thinking how can it be hungry without a mouth? And then I realize I don’t want to know what a kind of hunger I don’t understand comes from or how it gets satiated. We’re 60 feet in the air…maybe it’s even higher. How could I even see them? I keep thinking that none of this makes sense, it can’t be happening to me, or us. We’re invincible. All teenagers are and this doesn’t happen. I think I must be going crazy but I feel like crazy people don’t wonder if they are and I just don’t know what I think. But the sounds are getting closer. I don’t think they’re at the fire tower yet but it’s only been three minutes since we heard them and I don’t need to see them to know it shouldn’t be long until we find out.
I open my eyes and I can’t tell you if it was a dream or a memory…only that when I dream it, it feels like a memory. Something I know to be true even if I can’t tell you how or why or where it happened exactly. I don’t remember Chris, or Kelly, or Ryan after that. I know they existed though. Maybe I just saw them through someone else’s eyes. Maybe I was someone else for a moment.
We’re working through it in therapy. I know she doesn’t believe me so I don’t talk about it anymore. She has lots of names for what it could be but I’ll always know what it was. And when I close my eyes, I’m back there in that sea of dark waiting for the hunger to find us. To stop screeching.