This is the third part of things I’ve experienced in Montana over the course of a summer.
It had been two weeks since those things had begun to watch me. Everywhere I went I felt their eyes. They were always watching. Always listening.
I had started to find bones on my property. Some on my porch, in the garden, on my car, anywhere that I frequent in my yard. My boyfriend Luke thought I was going crazy.
He thought I was spending too much time in my house. When they started watching I couldn’t bring myself to leave the yard unless it was for work. I couldn’t tell him why. I didn’t want to burden him with those things. I didn’t want them to watch him too, he shouldn’t have to feel the fear I felt.
It was July. June had finally passed but all of the events stayed heavy in my thoughts, they still do at the time of writing this. I’m sure they will continue to stay even until my death.
Luke dragged me out of the house that night. Forcing me to go on a ride with him. When we first started dating about a year ago we used to take late night rides all the time. We would talk about everything and anything while driving 60 down a back road in the pitch black. I wonder if they were watching then too. I wonder if they had always been watching.
30 minutes of silence went by.
“Just tell me what’s wrong Jessa.” Luke didn’t take his eyes off the road to look at me and I didn’t take my eyes off the trees. They weren’t there.
“Nothings wrong.” I sighed. I couldn’t tell him.
“You went into the woods with Sarah one day and it’s like you didn’t actually come back. Even Sarah is acting weird!” He turned his head so he could stare at the side of my face.
“I’m sitting here aren’t I?” I returned his stare, meeting his eyes. That was the only argument I could think of. He was right.
“Not mentally.” He muttered, glancing back to the road. I wanted to tell him. Tell him that I was seeing things in the woods, and that there was a hole full of goddamn bones, that the man from work didn’t die of an overdose despite that being what the tox report said.
Then I saw them, those shadow people with the cloaks, lining the woods, more than I had ever seen.
I pulled my phone out to take a picture for proof that I wasn’t crazy.
“What are you doing?” Luke took his eyes off the road to stare at the phone in my hand.
“You don’t see them?” I took the picture.
“See who?” He thought I was crazy.
I looked over at my boyfriend and then back to the trees, they were gone.
“Are you doing drugs?” Luke interrogated. I can’t believe he would ask me that. He knows I would never do drugs. He knows that drugs have taken almost everyone I love from me.
I went to say something, to chew him out for asking, but then It happened.
One of those things ran out in front of the truck. Luke swerved, sending his old truck off the dirt road, towards the trees.
The only thing I could hear was my own scream.The truck smashed into a tree and my head hit the dash.
They said I was lucky, surviving that crash with minimal injuries. That I could have been hurt much worse or even killed.
According to them I was lucky that my boyfriend was dead because of those things. Those things that they said were just a deer.
I couldn’t even bring myself to cry. He was gone. I didn’t want to believe it but he was gone.
I remember staring at the photo for hours after being released from the hospital. My phone screen had cracked because of the crash but even then I could tell that there was no one in the picture. Just an empty dirt road illuminated only by headlights at 1 AM on July 5th.
They weren’t there. Maybe Luke had been correct in his final moments, that there was nothing there and I was starting to go crazy.
I didn’t think I was crazy. He swerved for a reason. They killed him for a reason.