About a week ago, something happened that I still can’t fully understand. Even right now as I’m writing this, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. And because of it, I’m afraid. I’ve talked to a few people about it, and they’re not sure what to make of it either. I think it’s worth mentioning that I intentionally only talked about this with people I know to be open minded. And they’ve suggested that I write and post about it anonymously to see if anyone else has experienced what I have, or seen what I’ve seen.
A bit about myself; I served in the United States Army for about five years. For those curious, I was a mortar infantryman. More formally, that would be an “11C” (eleven charlie) or an “indirect fire infantryman.” And I would say it was ‘fun’ approximately one percent of the time. In those five years, I spent time overseas and was witness to some true horrors. I wish I could honestly say that every extreme act of violence I saw during those years were each caused by terrorism. But I can’t, because truthfully, not all of them were. Some of them were caused by fellow soldiers, and a few more than I’d care to admit, were caused by me.
Think what you’d like about it, I’m the one who lives with those decisions. I won’t really get into detail about any of them, because I’d like to forget. But needless to say, when the time for my enlistment came to an end, there was a lot of pressure to reenlist from peers and superiors. There was a lot of disappointment when I turned that down. It was an easy decision for me. After witnessing just how terrible human beings can be to one another, and seeing what even what I was capable of in dire circumstances, I knew that committing to more of it would strongly violate whatever is left of my ruined conscience.
On my last day, I had a surprising number of people come to where I worked on base and wish me the best. Even as I drove towards the installation’s exit, I kept getting texts and calls from almost everyone I’d ever worked with in the past five years, telling me to be safe and to call if I ever needed anything.
I can’t properly describe the feeling of relief that I felt as I drove off base for the last time, but an immense weight was lifted off my shoulders. I had no family to go back to, no jobs lined up or anything. Irresponsible I know, but prior to separating, all I could think about was getting out.
I asked SIRI to randomly pick a state, and then to name a small town in that state. And for obvious reasons I won’t say what town, but I can tell you that it is a tiny place in the pacific northwest. And I’ve been there for close to a year now.
Now the town I’m in is one of those small places that you can drive around in about five minutes. While there’s a fair number of people who live here, I do know everyone by name, even if I don’t know them too well on a personal level.
See, I work in the town’s only autoshop, and so everyone makes their way through there eventually. Atticus, the owner, kindly hired me after I explained my situation to him. I was a vet with nowhere to go, and though he’s never said anything about it, I suspect he might’ve been in that same position once himself.
I think just the fact that his name is Atticus should tell you how old he looks. The man is ancient, but easily one of the hardest working and kindest people I’ve ever met.
I should also mention, that his shop is on the edge of town. On one side of the shop is the two lane highway, leading off into the ether. On the other side of it, are a lot of woods, which make for surprisingly good hiking.
Occasionally, some unfortunate soul driving by the town at night will decide it’s a good idea to rob the place. They’ll see the shop, park a little ways down the highway, and sneak towards it just behind the tree line. Atticus’ house is next door to the shop, and so he’ll arrive on the scene quite quickly if I or one of the other guys call him. Anyone who ever tries this, barely lives to regret it. That man fights dirty and is made of steel. No other way about it.
Now, sometimes if the shop gets too full, he’ll have one of us work nights instead of during the day. Usually that person is me. I don’t mind it, because I often have trouble sleeping. And when I do fall asleep, I’m plagued by dreams about my deployments.
On those busy kinds of days, Atticus and the other guys that work there, Mike, Russ, and Cash, will get as much done as they can during the day, and I’ll come in around 9PM. I would try and get to whatever they weren’t able to finish during the day, and stop at 6AM, regardless of if I was able to get everything done or not.
While it’s not the perfect system, and I’m definitely no miracle worker, this will often help keep the shop from getting overwhelmed. As a bonus, I wouldn’t need to come in the next day, and still got paid as if I had.
It was one of those nights where I found myself walking into the shop at 8:45PM, just like any other evening shift. I was pretty happy about coming in that night, because Atticus had asked me to come in on a Thursday. This meant that not only would I have Friday off, but Saturday and Sunday as well.
Taking a quick look at the list of tasks Atticus needed done before 6AM, I remember being initially daunted by the long list. But after reading more closely, I was happy to see that most of it was relatively uncomplicated. I thought it would take me five hours at most, and then I could maybe be in bed by a decent time. I got to work quickly, grabbing all necessary tools from my locker and reviewing the list one last time.
Like I said, most of it was relatively straightforward. Being that I was still learning, that is usually how it was. Just basics, nothing too complicated. It wasn’t until I read the last item on the list, that I stopped. It read:
25. Hey kid, change the transmission fluid and the oil on the Vanidestines’ black SUV. I let the transmission fluid drain all day, so all you gotta do is close the bottom cap and pour that new shit in. It needs to be driveable before you leave.
It caught my attention, because for one, Atticus’ policy, for as long as anyone could remember, was that anything that needed to stay overnight, would not be ready for pick up the next day. He believed that anything that needed that much time to get done to begin with, should not be rushed. And no one argued with him about it. Maybe part of it was because of his age, maybe another part of it was the quality of his work. But also, as far as anyone knew, his shop had been there before the town had. Everyone treated him with at least some level of deference, even if they didn’t like him. So yes, it was very out of place for him to make an exception like that for anyone.
And that was the second thing: the name, Vanidestine. I didn’t think it was even a real surname at first and googled it on my phone seconds later to confirm it. But the thing was, there are no Vanidestines that live here, and definitely not any I’d ever heard of. I found it particularly unusual that Atticus would break his own rules for someone who clearly wasn’t from around here.
I remember walking over to the car to take a look at it, instructions still in hand. It was raised slightly off the ground at an angle, to allow for the transmission fluid to drain. It had no plates on it and there wasn’t a single part of it that wasn’t painted black. Even the windshield was tinted illegally dark. The only things that weren’t, were the headlights. And as I stared, I began to feel my skin crawl. There was no rational explanation for it, but I almost felt as if those headlights were staring back at me. I know it’s silly, but I looked away quickly. And this did nothing to shake the feeling that I was being watched. A sense I’d acquired and almost honed during my deployments.
I don’t know if it was due to the dim lighting playing tricks on my eyes, my general fatigue from not sleeping well over the last few days, or just the complete silence, but the second I turned my back, I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned quickly but was only met with those headlights’ dead stare.
After a few seconds of glancing around the shop and confirming no one was there, I took a deep breath, and decided to hurry up. Maybe I was more tired than I thought, and I wasn’t about to leave that creepy car for last.
The closer I got to it, the less at ease I felt. I reluctantly opened the driver’s door and caught my breath. Sitting in the driver’s seat was, well, nothing. I blinked, confused, because I could’ve sworn that for a fraction of a second, I saw a shiny and dark silhouette of a man sitting in the passenger’s seat, head turned in my direction.
I inhaled deeply and then laughed at myself. Of course there wasn’t anything there, why would there be? I popped the hood of the car and closed the door, mentally chiding myself for getting jittery over nothing. I ducked down to screw in the bottom cap for the transmission fluid’s tank, only to find that it was nowhere in sight.
I looked around for a few minutes, cursing myself for probably having kicked it somewhere when I’d had my little jump scare. After looking in every possible nook and cranny that it could be in, I decided to come back to it after knocking some other things off my list. That would take my mind off things, and I’d probably find it in some painfully obvious place that I’d feel silly for missing.
I checked the list again, trying to see which of the other four cars I could get done the quickest, before going back to the Vanidestines’ vehicle. Tasks one through twelve pertained to the Johnson’s white Chevy, tasks thirteen through eighteen were for the Anderson’s green Subaru outback. Nineteen through twenty two were about the Appleton’s red Ford ranger, twenty three and twenty four about the Price’s gray jeep. Then of course, twenty five and twenty six were about the Vanidestines’ black SUV.
I squeezed my eyes shut and held them closed for a moment; I’d clearly remembered there only being twenty five tasks written on the list. But when I opened my eyes, there was task twenty six, plain as day, in Atticus’ handwriting, and even in the same shiny, black pen ink he usually used. It read:
26. Check the drip pan under the Vanidestines’ SUV; the missing cap might be at the bottom.
What the hell? I thought. I knew I was tired, but I knew I wasn’t that tired. There would have been no way I’d just missed an item on the list like that.
I glanced over at the SUV, avoiding looking at the headlights and looked at the drip pan. The cap was nowhere in sight, and the pan was both deep and full enough to easily hide it. As I walked over to it, my heart jumped up into my throat when I saw a face staring back at me from the shiny black surface of the drained fluid.
I stared for a few seconds before laughing at myself once again; it was my own face I was seeing. I walked over to it relieved, again feeling extremely silly for scaring myself. And yet, a small part of my inner voice kept telling me, that it hadn’t been my face I’d seen at first.
I shoved that voice down as quickly as the thought came to me, as it didn’t need to be entertained. I put on some gloves which came halfway up my forearms before reaching in to fish for the cap. I certainly didn’t want or need that shiny black stuff all over my hands. And seeing just how dark it was, it was no wonder they’d stopped in town to get it changed; the need for it clearly was overdue.
I felt around, looking for the elusive cap for what seemed like more than a few minutes, before finally giving up. I slapped myself on the legs and stood. Then swore as I realized I was still wearing my gloves, and had gotten the black fluid all over my pants.
“God!” I shouted, and thoughtlessly kicked the drip pan as hard as I could. The expired transmission fluid splattered everywhere. A lot of it was on the floor, a fair bit had splashed the underside of the Vanidestine car, and a surprising amount shot up at me, soaking the front of my shirt and spraying me in the face.
That didn’t help. Next thing I knew, I was punching the front of the SUV, gouging out its left headlight while yelling at the top of my lungs and cursing. That only served to slice up my glove and hand, which didn’t help either. I stormed out of the shop, yelling loudly as I ran down to the far end of the parking lot. My knuckles screamed at my brain to stop doing whatever was causing them pain as I began bleeding steadily.
I shouted some very loud and viscerally colorful obscenities into the night, which I don’t think need to be repeated. But it took only a few seconds of them before I saw Atticus throwing open his front door, white hair standing in every which way direction. I’d never seen Atticus without a shirt on before, but the only things he had on were his boxers and work boots. I think I felt my soul leave my body for a second. The man’s body was covered in nothing but huge slabs of striated muscle and scar tissue, and he was making a beeline for me while holding an automatic shotgun loaded with a large drum magazine.
“What the hell is going on?” Atticus barked, keeping his firearm pointed at the ground. He stopped a few feet in front of me, his dark blue eyes scanning me up and down, scowling as he took in the complete mess I was.
“Hey kid, what’s going on?” he asked again, his voice taking on a much gentler and fatherly tone, “Bad night?”
“Yeah,” I said as I tried wiping some of the black transmission fluid from my face with my sleeve. This only served to get some of it in my eye. Atticus took a step closer, looking up at me with concern.
“Hey kid, you been sleeping okay?” he asked, any hints of anger were now completely absent.
“No, not really, I said, “Haven’t been able to fall asleep easily this week.”
“Hmm,” was all the old man said. He glanced at the open shop door and then back at me.
“How much you got left son?”
“I started on that goddamn SUV, but I didn’t get much else done. Made a mess in there and felt like I was seeing things.”
“Okay,” said Atticus, placing one of his hands on my shoulder, “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go in there and clean up whatever mess is on the floor. After that, you’re going to lock up the shop and run over to the gas station. Tell Maggie that you need some sleeping aids, and that I’ll pay for them. Go the hell home after that, and get some good rest this weekend. You’ll come back next week, on the condition that you’ve gotten at least sixty hours of sleep between now and then. That sound good?”
Like I said, Atticus is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. I couldn’t hold back my smile as I agreed, and he gave me a reassuring slap on the shoulder.
“Before any of that though,” Atticus said as he reached into his boot and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, “We’re gonna have a quick smoke break.”
I accepted the offered cigarette, and he lit it for me before handing it over. Smoking is one of those habits that nearly everyone picks up in the army, regardless of their job. I smoke a lot less these days, but haven’t quit either. While it’s a habit that I’ll never encourage, I can certainly say that I felt a lot calmer as I slowly inhaled it.
“So, what’s—” Atticus began but then stopped. His face had twisted into a scowl as he stared behind me.
I turned to see what he was looking at, but all I saw was the open shop door and the dim light emanating from within.
“Who you got here with you?” asked Atticus sternly. He had a strict, ‘no friends at work’ rule, especially if it was after hours.
“N-no one,” I stuttered, “I don’t have anyone over.”
“Then who the hell did I just see watching us from the shop?” the old man aimed his shotgun at the entrance.
I didn’t have an answer for him. And after staring for a few moments, he told me to stay put and to call our local Sherrif Hartman if needed. Wordlessly, I took out my phone and watched him walk towards the shop, weapon trained on the open door.
On the one hand, it was rather comical to see a heavily muscled, old man wielding a shotgun in just his underwear and boots. But at the same time, I felt an acute sense of dread building in my stomach as he got closer to the building. I can’t quite tell you what I felt in that moment, only a gut feeling that told me something terrible was about to happen.
The last time I’d had that feeling, was when Martinez had been killed. He was a new private I’d had under my command during my last deployment before separating, and he’d met a most untimely end. While we were clearing a neighborhood, he’d gotten just a little too excited and moved ahead on his own. He wandered close to an open door, and next thing we knew, several sets of hands shot out of the dark and pulled him inside. The door slammed shut behind him and was locked. The whirring of an angle grinder and Martinez’ screams were the last thing I heard moments before my entire platoon and I brought hell’s wrath down on that house. And now, that same, creeping sensation of subconscious dread was building in my stomach.
“Atticus wait!” I called and after a few quick steps I began running to him.
But Atticus, being as old and stubborn as he was, either ignored me or just didn’t hear me. He stepped through the doorframe and I could no longer see him. As I reached it, he turned around and opened his mouth to say something.
But before he could speak any words, the door to the shop suddenly swung shut and I heard the lock click.
“No no no no no,” I mumbled, as I tried with all my might to kick the door down. But the door, like Atticus, had been made to be unbreakable. I kicked and kicked, but I might as well have been trying to kick the earth itself aside.
“Atticus!” I yelled, after I finally stopped to catch my breath. I then heard him shouting in alarm, and presently the thunderous booms from his shotgun from inside. I just stared helplessly, knowing that this door was the only way in or out if the bay doors were closed. There were no windows I could smash in, no backdoors I could run to.
As I stared at the door, my heart suddenly stopped. My shadow, which had been on the door this entire time, began growing. It steadily grew wider and taller, filling the surface of the locked door and spilling out onto the surrounding wall.
An audible drip from behind me reached my ears, quickly followed by another and another. I slowly began to turn around, not quite sure if I wanted to see who or what was standing behind me. I hadn’t gotten halfway turned around before my vision was plunged into darkness. All I could see was black, and all I could feel was viscous cold on my face.
A strong force slammed my head against the shop door, creating stars in the darkness that I knew weren’t there. My eyes stung, my body tingled as I grabbed at what I could only describe as a bar of thick, sticky liquid. Some of what was on my face got in my mouth, and I barely remember my head being slammed into the shop door a second and third time before I passed out.
When I came to, I was laying in a hospital bed. I looked around and immediately saw a police officer, passed out in one of the room’s two arm chairs, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. I sat up carefully, noting that the IV threaded into my hand was one of many needle connected tubes attached to me. I’m no medical expert, but I was pretty sure that one of them was there for a blood transfusion.
One of the monitors close to my bed started beeping rapidly, prompting the officer to jolt awake and focus her piercing green eyes on me. She wasted no time in explaining to me that I had been attacked at my work. When I’d been found the next morning, I’d been taken to the nearest hospital, which was well over a couple dozen miles from where I live. That morning had been two days ago.
She introduced herself to me as Officer Blackwood and asked me how I was feeling. Of course I told her that I felt like shit. I then asked what they’d found at the shop, somewhat dreading her answer. As soon as she opened her mouth to speak, a nurse came into the room to see what was causing the hospital equipment to make as much noise as it was.
The officer waited patiently for the nurse to do her work, most of which was detaching a fair number of the tubes and wires hooked to me. She didn’t say much, aside from telling me what the officer had already told me. After checking to see how I was feeling, she informed me that she was surprised I’d made it. Apparently, I’d lost a lot of blood. And by a lot, she told me close to a gallon.
Not feeling terribly reassured by this, I told her that besides my head feeling like it’d been hit by a freight train, I had little pain anywhere else. Satisfied, the nurse told me to take it easy and to get some rest. I asked her how long I’d have to stay, and she told me that assuming everything checked out, I could be discharged later that day if I wanted.
The moment she closed the door behind her, Officer Blackwood turned back towards me, saying nothing.
“Soooo, do you know what happened that night?” I finally asked, not wanting to continue just staring at her. And don’t get me wrong, she was tall, red haired, and very pleasant to look at, but there was something about her expression which told me I wasn’t going to like what she had to say.
“What do you remember about that night?” she asked after a few seconds, “Maybe what you know can help me fill in some blanks.”
I recounted to her the night’s events, but decided to leave out the parts about me seeing things. I would say ‘things that I’d imagined seeing’, but given what had happened, and where I was now, I’m entirely unconvinced that I didn’t see something that night.
I basically told her that I’d been having a bad night, made a bit of a mess, woken up my boss who lived next door, and he’d calmed me down. I told her that he’d given me the next week off, and that we had been smoking when he thought he’d seen someone watching us from the shop. He went to go check it out, and had told me to stay put. Next thing I knew, the door had slammed shut unexpectedly and I ran to go see what had happened. And that’s when I was attacked by someone I regrettably didn’t get the chance to look at.
She frowned when I finished telling her, and I couldn’t tell if it was because my side of what had happened wasn’t helpful or if it was because she thought I’d left something out.
“Hmmm,” she said, turning to the window and scowling, “That hardly helps.”
She turned back toward me and pulled up one of the room’s chairs, positioning herself so that her face was only a few feet from mine.
“I’m not sure how else to tell you this, but your boss is dead.”
Over the next hour, she described in great detail that one of my coworkers had found me, covered in burnt transmission fluid and blood outside of the shop. He’d gone to get Atticus, only to find that he wasn’t home and the shop was locked. In a state of near hysteria, he’d called the police right away.
When the dozen or so officers who’d culminated in the shop’s parking lot had finally managed to break down the door, she told me that the inside looked like something out of a horror movie. Atticus’ body, or more accurately, pieces of Atticus, had been scattered all throughout the shop. All manner of bodily and mechanical fluids were splattered over everything. Dozens of empty shotgun shells littered the ground, bullet holes from slug rounds could be found on nearly every wall and ceiling. As could smeared black and red handprints. All the cars in the shop had been absolutely trashed.
“They’d been trashed?” I asked, interrupting her. I’m not sure why, but some small (and admittedly petty) part of me wanted to hear what had been done to the Vanidestines’ SUV.
“Yes,” she said, as if surprised by my question, “And that to me is what’s confusing. You’ll have to forgive me, because I’m not a detective yet. But if I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed that someone had picked up each one and thrown it at your boss. Not driven, but thrown. All four of them were sideways or upside down, leaning against the walls, and completely smashed.”
And that is when my heart sank. All four, she had said. And I knew damn well that there had been five. I almost didn’t want to ask, but I did.
“Was one of them a black SUV, by any chance?”
She shot me a sharp look and said slowly, “No, they were in bad shape, but not bad enough to be unrecognizable. Why?”
“There were five cars in there that night.” I told her.
I then decided to tell her that I knew for a fact there’d been a fifth car there, because that had been the source of my frustration. I even threw in the part about me punching and breaking one of the headlights.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that last part of what you just said,” she said, placing a hand on her forehead, “because that just might be the missing piece of information we need for our investigation. Can you describe it for me?”
I described it to her in perfect detail, recounting that it had been completely black, without a hint of chrome or any other color anywhere on it. There’d been no license plates and the windows, including the windshield, had an extremely dark tint.
“Anything else?” she asked. Her intense eye contact made me a quite uncomfortable.
I thought about mentioning right then and there, about how much the car had unnerved me, but ultimately decided against it.
“No,” I finally said, “nothing else.”
“Okay,” she said, standing up suddenly and heading towards the door.
“Okay then.” I said as I watched her, and then something else came to me.
“Am I not a suspect?” I asked.
She turned around quickly, and I could practically feel her green eyes stabbing into me. “No, you are not. We concluded you couldn’t have been because even though you’d lost a lot of blood, there wasn’t anything suggesting you’d been shot.”
“Oh,” was all I could say, “Do you know what caused that blood loss then?”
She shook her head, “No, you can ask that nurse when she comes back. I need to head back to the station for now, but I’ll be in touch. Keep your phone on loud.”
And then she was gone, exiting the room quickly and closing the door behind her with surprising force.
The nurse didn’t come back until the sun was getting close to setting. She informed me that they’d be ready to release me within the hour. She also told me that my discharge papers would be ready soon.
“Oh, and I almost forgot!” she said on her way out, “Your car has been dropped off and is waiting for you. It’s just below you in the parking lot.”
“My car?” I asked, but she’d already left.
Carefully, I got up and walked over to the window to survey the parking lot. The sun was sinking quickly outside, and it took me a few moments before I spotted it.
Facing me, three floors down and across the parking lot, sat the Vanidestines’ SUV. Its headlight was still broken, and something black leaked from the empty socket onto the ground.
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at it, but it must have been a while. The nurse had come back again to inform me that there was an issue with my paperwork, and that I could sit tight if I wanted. I reluctantly agreed, because I really didn’t want to go out into the parking lot.
But when I looked back, the car was no longer in the parking space. All I could see in it, were five dark silhouettes facing me. And as I watched, all five of them simultaneously melted into the ground, leaving just a pool of black, shiny liquid, which began spreading in my direction.
As I backed away from the window, all of the lights in my room suddenly went dark, and I couldn’t see anything.
After a few long moments of utter silence, something cold and wet wrapped around my throat, and that’s the last thing I remember.
It’s been a couple days since the hospital. I woke up in my bed the next morning and have talked to a few friends about what happened since. Officer Blackwood has also left a couple of voicemails, most of which said that they haven’t found anything conclusive about my attackers yet, and to keep her updated if anything else happens.
And there have been a few developments. I don’t know how to tell anyone about without them thinking I’m crazy. I haven’t told anyone that I keep seeing shadows out of the corners of my eyes everywhere I go. I haven’t mentioned that I always feel like I’m being watched. When I’m asleep, all I see is darkness. And in that darkness, all I see are those same five shiny, black silhouettes I saw at the hospital. And one thing is for damn sure, I sure as hell haven’t told anyone about the letter. A letter I’d found when I woke up. It was waiting for me on my nightstand, folded in half. My skin crawled when I started reading it. It said:
“27. We’ll need more than a gallon by next month, kindly have it ready”