When I was a baby, my father left me and my family, never once in over eighteen years did I ever hear from him. Around the time that I had graduated high school, one of the many insignificantly significant moments of one’s life was when we first made contact. I remember it being a rather cold October evening, amber sky with accents of fire and blood cast its glow upon the town in the fleeting moments of what was left of another simply monotonous day.
I knew it was him almost instantly because of the worn out picture I had of him in my wallet from what had felt like a lifetime ago. I had to get my mom a pack of smokes from the gas station and was driving back when I spotted him heading towards the tracks out of town. I pulled up next to him and got out, running towards him, completely blown away that he had come back.. but when I called to him and he turned to look at me, he looked like a shell of the man I had thought he’d be.. sickly, almost twisted and hollow, torn clothes, dirty and presumably homeless. He recognized me and screamed at me to go away and that he’d come find me when the time was right and to not tell anybody that he was here.
Being that we had recently passed the wide but slanted bridge into adulthood, my friends and I (who we all considered to be adults as far as any teenager with access to alcohol is concerned) had spoken earlier and decided that we should go out into our local forest preserve that evening, where we had previously spent much of the finer moments of adolescence pondering some of life’s greatest questions like who’s going to bang the captain of the cheer team, who’s going to be the one to catch the next monster fish, who’s brave enough to get naked and run through the town bar and try to grab a bottle on a dare? We all talked a mighty game about willing to do it (none of us ever did).
There were four of us who went out that night, aside from myself, there was James, a wild and loving guy who partied like every day was his last and also fancied himself to be a comedian. David, who was brave and aggressive, yet always took care of those of us he was close to. Then there was Michael, my half brother, two years younger than us and full of charisma, always trying to prove he was better than us at everything despite the fact that he’d broken multiple bones failing to prove so, the most recent of which being his left arm.
We all told our parents the usual story that one of us will be staying over at the other’s house, and so on, which always worked back then. It was a simpler time back in ‘89 in northwestern Indiana, we all felt like gods among men, that we could get away with whatever we wanted to and it would never come back to bite us in the ass. Of course, it was much easier for Mikey and me since mom was a lush, and my step dad worked his life away, we simply grabbed our packs and left, it was always one of those don’t let the door hit ya on the way out kind of deals.
We stopped by our local liquor store on our way to the woods, Mikey kept his ass out back in the alley after his last encounter.. James stocked up on Slim Jims and chips, Dave grabbed a carton of reds, and a case of budweiser, I grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two bottles of Mogen David, just in case we ran into any girls on the way (that’s a lie) then we all made the mile and a half long ride into the forest preserve where there was a trail that branched off and led to our hideout.
It was around 6:00 by the time we had gotten out there and the light was fading fast. Fortunately, we all had flashlights and were all very familiar with the area, as we had spent many years hanging out at the same spot. I remember reading Stephen King’s: IT when I was younger, and I suppose we fancied ourselves to be comparable to the loser’s club hanging out in our own kind of barrens.
By about 6:30 we had gotten to our hangout spot with the massive fire pit dug almost 8 feet deep and ten feet wide and our awesome bunker we had spent countless summers building and improving which was almost a little cabin at this point (if you can consider dirt, sticks and branches to be the pinnacle of teenage building). Something had felt off about our journey so far. Usually, we’d see a few deer, hear some birds, or at least a bunch of bugs.. oddly enough, the only sounds we had heard were our own so far. Regardless of that, nobody else seemed to notice, or at least nobody else had said anything, so we just went about setting up for our wild night.
By 7:00 we had a magnificent fire going, I was blasting some Zeppelin 4 on my Philips D8478 with some Appetite For Destruction ready to rock next, James was pulverising some of his Slim Jims after just finishing a cheech and chong sized joint, Dave was double fisting budweisers, I was marinating my liver in some ol’ Jasper and Mikey was sipping on his MD. On my way out the door earlier, I slipped a couple ribeyes into my pack from the freezer and grabbed some onions from the garden, we shoved sticks into them, except for James who stabbed it on to his fancy knife he never left home without, we then roasted them over the flames and feasted like the drunken barbarians we all were.
By about 7:45 we were all pretty blasted and none of us had even noticed that “when the levee breaks” had been over for a few minutes, we were all just laying back sort of mesmerized by the colors of the fire, locked in an eternal tango with each other, and the power of the full moon that seemed to shine down on us like we were just ants and there was a big kid with a flashlight pointing down at us.
It was then, somewhere between the slurred words and the almost ritualistic passing of doobies that I heard it.. a low guttural sound that seemed far off but felt so close all at once. Obviously it wasn’t a bear or wolf, we’re 10 miles from the border to Illinois, our biggest fear out here was getting shot from a stray bullet from Gary… “Damn Josh!! You could’ve warned us before you decided you were gonna shit your pants!” James said. I told him it wasn’t me and that if anybody was gonna drop a brown bomber it was definitely him, Captain Slim Jim.
Dave and Mikey were laughing their asses off when it came again, louder than before and followed by the most putrid smell similar to pennies and rotting meat. At this point, Dave got up and ran off to the side and started throwing up all the beers he’d been putting back over the last hour, it was the last time any of us saw him alive, for moments later he disappeared into the bushes at an impossible speed, all of us immediately jumped up and began arguing if we should go after him. We heard sticks snapping and presumably small trees breaking at an alarming rate going away from us. We told Mikey to lock himself in the bunker and hide in the trap door, I gave him my 1911 just in case, then James and I set out to find Dave.
Almost instantly we knew something was very wrong when we looked down to see these huge tracks leading away from our camp, unlike anything we’d ever seen before, it was about 100 yards out where we found him, completely ripped in half, I tripped over his lower half and most of his upper half was completely gone, just part of his head connected to half an arm stuck to a tree was all we saw.
It was then that we heard the screaming and the gunshots followed by the most horrifying howl I’d ever heard.” What do we do? Should we go back?!” James asked. I told him “I don’t know about you, but if that were me I’d definitely want some help, even if that is some kind of bear or something.. and he’s my little brother, I can’t just leave him”, James shrugged and said that settles it we have to go back.
As soon as we started walking, that smell came back creeping through our nostrils and violating the very fiber of our beings, it all happened so quickly that I hadn’t even noticed this thing had bitten me. One moment its just us walking, the next, James and this giant wolf like creature are rolling on the ground, James is stabbing this creature and this thing is ripping him apart with it’s claws.
Just as this monster sunk its jaws into what was left of James, I ran up grabbed the knife he had dropped and I shoved it through the back of it’s neck paralyzing it instantly. Then as the creature lay there howling in pain, I noticed something.. its howls turned into screams, which turned into cries, and this 9 foot creature slowly shrinked into the remnants of a much smaller man. When I turned him over I was left with complete shock and fear as I realized that this man was my father and that he had killed the only people I had ever loved. Overwrought with grief I carried what was left of my friends back to our bunker, which was completely covered with what was Mikey.. I then decided all I could do was collapse the roof on them and bury them all. I threw my horrible father’s remains into the fire pit and burned him until there was nothing left to find..
I ran away that night and have never come back, I live far away now and every time there is a full moon I chain myself up in my basement, there are no windows and no lights. It’s been over 30 years since I last saw the beauty of the moon and I hear this one is going to be especially lovely, perhaps I’ll just take a peek.