THOUGHT

I woke up to the sound of the train whistling by. Starlight slanted vaguely through the curtains of my window, and my body was lined with sweat. With a groan and a pounding headache, I shifted over on my side, grappling vaguely for a phone on the other side of the room.

My mouth had transformed into the Sahara Desert, and as I forced myself into a sitting position, I felt every granular of dry coursing through it. Like a Labrynth of miniature obstacles, my clothes were spread around the floor below me, charting the course towards the miniature stand on the other side of the room, whereupon my phone currently slept. I stared emptily for a few moments, desperately attempting to get all of my thoughts in-order.

Things… Hadn’t been going well. I’d been hopeful at first, when I made the decision to move into the country. There’d been too many things happening where I’d been, too many pains that accrued like mucus down the back of my throat, choking and clogging, blocking every chance of escape. Here, where the world moved in slow motion, and fossils still roamed at the outer edges of mind and thought, I’d been hopeful that I could escape it; or at least spend enough time amongst the weeds that it might catch on something and leave me.

I wiped away the last of the grit blocking my vision, and slowly pulled myself up. The lamp light in the corner of the room flickered briefly, as I moved across, and tapped the screen on. One in the morning, was the time. My hand twitched briefly, to throw the phone towards my bed, but I stopped when I remembered what happened the last time. Instead, I turned towards the door leading out of my mess of a room.

The house was small, but it would never let you know it. Rooms were built adjacent to another, and each felt like it was built at a different point in the house’s lifespan. Oddly enough, the living room looked to be the most recent; my bedroom appeared to be the oldest. If you spent any significant time studying the architecture of the building; my room was one of the newer additions, having started out as a sunroom, and steadily evolving into your run-of-the-mill bedroom. There was no heating nor conditioning; had I the choice, I would’ve slept elsewhere.

Rustic metal pans sat adorning the space beside the stove; hooks built into place by one of my uncles. Deeper into the dining room, the fridge hummed a steady cadence, and a small frog-clock ticked ever closer to two in the morning. Repressing a sigh, I moved down towards the fridge, and rooted around for a bottle of water.

I didn’t have work in the morning, luckily, so I spent a few idle minutes staring towards the vague mass of dark beyond the window. Leaves swayed like vague green pales, and branches brushed in a steady tap, tap, tap against the glass. Beyond that, it sounded for all the world as if all life had simply ceased; the train having crested the horizon.

After a time, with the water dredged down to the bottom of the plastic, boredom and curiosity left me wandering towards the front door. The front porch was riddled with thousands of holes, where plants and insects alike had made themselves a home. A thriving community of arachnids had branded the top of the patio with their webs; something none of the residence here, nor I, had bothered dusting away. Moonlight trickled more like a promise of itself, and less like the actual silver-body, and even here, the stars were diluted; strained to the point of near nonexistence.

With the door open, the sound of chirping crickets and hooting owls could be heard all around. And maybe, if you strained, you’d manage to make out the screaming foxes deeper into the woods behind the house. I stepped out beyond, and towards the stone walkway, cracked as much as the patio. Here, the grass was thick, having long overgrown into a mess of a weed-like interface. Daring to venture beyond the stone would no doubt lead to a multifold journey of tripping and cursing; as I had learned earlier this year. Someone needed to mow, and that someone would likely end up being me.

Tonight, I stuck to the stone-path, walking up towards a thin and sporting gravel road. Many people had made it their objective to speed as fast as possible down the gravel, and it most certainly showed. In multiple places, it very much looked like the ground was more callused dirt, and naught much else.

Beyond even that, there stood true the miniature pit of vipers and garish waters, with then the steep incline up to the tracks; currently hidden by trees and bushes. I moved on to the road, thoughts moving through nothing more than the motions of my own exhaustion. Nobody traveled across this late at night, anyways; I’d stayed up enough times to know that fact well.

I caught sight of it, standing there and staring vaguely towards the one and only streetlamp on this side of the town. There a brief collusion of thought; the sort of intersection that happens only when you, as a human, suddenly remember that you are an animal. That twisted recollection moving through the very depths of consciousness.

In an order of facts; I was very suddenly, very awake. Then, when the world built to a crescendo of too bright and too aware, the feeling grew in my gut. Every instinct fired like the blast of a fully automatic rifle, as I became fully aware of the fact that, here, I was prey.

It moved, but not like an animal should. Almost as if the entirety of its being was tangential to reality. Chrysalis formed through my thoughts, and with that, the thing shifted; blurring rapidly into place here and there, like mere suggestions of itself. Each suggestion became, and with that becoming, it got closer.

When it got to the point of the house next door, the fact that I had legs was once more remembered, and I ran as hard as I could. The sweat from earlier came back with a vengeance as I bowled through the front-door and slammed it shut, frantically flipping the two locks available to me. Breathing heavy, I stared at the door, then rushed over to the window.

Through the bramble… There was nothing. The night winds whistled a merry tune alongside the ancient boards of wood, but not a single being revealed itself through the amassment of the night. I didn’t dare to move, all the same, waiting for that creature, animal, monster, whatever, to show up.

When it wholly refused to once more reveal itself, I took multiple steps back, practically tripping over one of the dining room tables. As quietly as I could, glancing at every particle of shadow that dared show itself to my gaze, I pulled out a chair.

My heart had not calmed. A steady, almost soothing, drum-beat played beside my lungs. As I sat there, still shaking, I tried to understand, to wrap my mind around, what I had seen. There were many words, too many words, to describe it. Nothing about it had been angular, and yet at the same time, it was too sharp. Fractalized and smooth, skin a blank canvas of absolutely everything. I tried and practically begged for a box to fit it in, eventually deciding on the one word that kept propping itself up in my mind. Wendigo.

It hadn’t moved. During the entire time that I had stared towards it, its muscles had not contracted to give way for movement. Yet, invariably, it had drawn closer, appearing closer with each individual second.

When my heartbeat had finally calmed, and the usual noises of the night were the only thing to meet my ears, I moved into the small kitchenette, and grabbed a knife. From there, I flipped on the light on my phone, and with a deep breath, slammed my bedroom door open.

Silence; nothing beyond the roaring of blood in my ears from the feigned courage. I stepped in carefully, keeping my eyes peeled, even flipping my head back towards the kitchen a few times. After stepping deeper, and confirming once more that there was nothing, I idly walked backwards, and placed the knife back in its drawer.

It couldn’t be real, I decided, as I closed the door behind me. I didn’t want it to be real. It, that thing, being real, would throw everything I knew of the world into the garbage bin. As I slowly laid my head back down onto my pillow, staring towards the light of my phone, I decided wholly and utterly, that it was not real.

Even with that proclamation, I couldn’t find sleep. Sounds heard beyond the thin walls of my room took lives of their own, steadily roosting into the background of my thoughts. Each snap or bang or groan that played through either the house, or out in the backyard, became a destined doom, some impossible monster waiting to break through the walls of the house.

When the morning dragged itself across the horizon, bringing through it the death of any mystery that shrouded what might be making any sound in particular, I once more stood myself up, and moved into the kitchen. Remnants of other life were stashed here and there; an uncleaned pot on the stove, the leftover dishes in the sink. One of the cars that populated the driveway had long since left its confinements.

Hesitant, but determined, I pulled the front door open once more, and marched directly back towards where I had stood last. Birds sang loudly overhead, propping themselves up on the single telephone wires that stretched along the length of the street. Dust had been kicked up along the road, and was slowly falling inert once more. But not a single monster that defied imagining remained.

But that wasn’t enough. Maybe it would be enough for the partial observer; the sort to leave a scene without any questions, not because they were solved, but simply through the act of no longer wanting to solve them. I didn’t want to figure out the problem; I just wanted to confirm that there wasn’t a problem. That the monster had simply been the work of my own fatigue playing against me.

So, I moved towards the originating sight; the place where I’d first scene it, about two houses down. There was nothing there, which emboldened me slightly. No hints of some strange cryptic monster’s presence. Just a dilapidated house, with boarded up, or broken, windows. I shined a light into the house, tensing to run… Nothing.

I was grinning a bit madly when I stepped back; the monster hadn’t existed. Frowning, I remembered that it had moved. Not in the way that an ordinary animal would, with limbs flailing into the typical arrangement of forward-momentum. But it had moved.

Backtracking, I pushed off towards where the monster had appeared at its second movement; the middle of the street. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing there. I stepped towards its third spot, heart beating in steady anticipation towards the middle of the foliage it had appeared within.

Cracked branches littered the ground. The leaves were desecrated, as if they’d been violently thrown out of place. As if something’s mere existence had shunted them wildly about the surrounding area.

I swallowed, unable to compartmentalize what I was seeing, what I was being forced to acknowledge. Maybe, maybe it was an animal. They got into violent spouts all the time, right? My mind could’ve latched onto that, seen that, and in the midst of its hallucination just moved the monster there. That wasn’t… Impossible. I wasn’t certain hallucinations worked like that, but it couldn’t be impossible for something like that to happen.

Letting a shaky breath out, I took a step back, moving counter-clockwise around the destruction. If there was a spout between two animals, there should be blood, or fur, or some sort of hint towards their violence. After moving around the entire scene, making sure to avoid each individual branch and leaf, lest I contaminate what I was studying, I concluded that there was not a single trace; no hint of the byproducts that might come from two animals colluding with the typical laws of nature.

So, I was supposed to conclude… What? That a wendigo, or some logic-defying representation of a wendigo, just, exists? If that were true, people would’ve seen it before, there would be some basis of fact around what a wendigo is, and how to avoid one; no matter how rare…

I dismissed the flicker of thought as fast as it came. People had believed in Wendigos, sure; during a time when the world was still young, and the laws weren’t known yet. It was a superstition, a fear built around cannibalistic individuals, the cold, and starvation. They were a myth; if they existed, they would be documented, existent within the modern times, not just folklore.

There had to be some other explanation; maybe it was a coincidence, this was only one sight out of the multiple it had randomly appeared in. I shook off my unease, and slowly moved towards the third sight; another area in the middle of the road. The fourth, beside the second, more overgrown house, I found more disturbance. Here, the branches and leaves of a singular bush were practically exploded into the surrounding thorns, weeds, and overgrown grass.

Steadying myself, I moved towards the fifth, and final sight I’d seen it appear. Here, there was grass. Reasonably, there was no way for most ordinarily animals to displace this grass unless it was done purposefully. In a small patch of ground, there existed nothing more than dried dirt, as if the green had been wrenched from the ground the monster had appeared upon.

I could do nothing more than stare at that patch of the ground, before leaning down. If it were a wendigo, the ground beneath it would be cold to the touch. The folklore probably didn’t state that, but that didn’t matter. Because when I touched the dirt, it was freezing.