I heard something click, and saw a knife reflected under the streetlamps. ![]() Footsteps of boots clomping on the pavement and a scuffing sound darting toward us. Facing the road ahead was still a blur, but I could see another figure was approaching us. I pressed myself to get up and make a run for it, maybe I could grab something to at least protect my buddies. I could see dirt and grime covering her hands they were oily from just touching it. “Oh Simon, you love us so much, don’t you?” Nicole said again, petting his head. His smile widened impossibly, as if the slit of his mouth began to open from behind his ears, that’s when it produced an unnerving guttural cry it sounded like that of a newborn baby. I wasn’t seeing a fucking cat, or anything even resembling one. In my own head I didn’t know what this smiling thing was. Simon loves us, and he follows us home sometimes.” “Wow, you really do have a fear of cats?” Luke asked slurring his speech. I could hear my own hyperventilating, and I’m sure they all could too. All I could see was this set of intense and inhumanly oversized burning eyes staring at me, with a wide smile baring a row of unnaturally large and canine teeth. With that, she began to pet the man’s head, running her fingers through his matted and oily looking hair and smoothing him down. “I never knew you had a fear of cats.” She said gently. Nicole didn’t bat an eyelid and wore an expression as perplexed as mine. “What are you doing?! Get away from it, Nicole!” Her next reaction, I just couldn’t comprehend at the time. “Who the Hell are you?!” I shouted, panicked. I forced myself up from the ground and he started to take tiny steps closer to us, his bare feet not making any sound on the hard road. His oddly dark-grey skin was matted with pieces of coarse hair, and his eyes locked onto mine. He couldn’t have been more than three feet tall, but he was wiry, slender, and proportionate. Less than ten feet away, the dark figure of a tiny naked man stood watching us from the middle of the road. ![]() I turned around to point and show them where I saw the person, and my heart jumped into my throat. “Man, I swear, there is someone following us.” I said with every bit of solemnity I could pass. When I focused my eyes central to the road, the person was gone again. As I turned my head around, my peripheral vision picked up a person standing in the middle of the road less than thirty feet away from us. I checked on them walking ahead of me, and some inner thought made me turn around again. Just less than a kilometre and we were home. They carried on their jaunt facing the road ahead. “No, behind that old house there, there was somebody poking their head out from the side of it just looking at us.” I said, my voice giving away a discomforting air. Nicole smiled and asked: “Is it a baby fox?” “Man, I think there’s somebody following us.” He asked: “Why are you so far behind us? Something got you freaked out?” Even while the two of them were laughing and talking foreign jargon to each other, Luke must have had some idea something was bothering me. Nicole and Luke carried on walking, well, stumbling ahead of me. Just when I thought I was regaining something, the person had gone. I tried to focus my eyes on the shape, but it was no use, my perception was still whitewashed. Now, normally I couldn’t care less, we lived in a small town where everybody kind of knew each other, and we were quite close to home, but every time I turned around to look behind me and converse with Nicole and Luke, I was convinced I could see someone leaning out from behind this old house watching us, and as if their head was tilted to one side. I only started not having fun when I was convinced there was someone following us. Nights like this were always a good time. We were still having fun the alcohol still chugging us along like trains about to be derailed across the road at any moment. We were two full streets away from the bar, and faintly heard the last of the rattling yellow cabs collecting the final patrons leaving. ![]() Just humid air, mosquitoes, and the faint sound of electricity humming from the streetlamps. ![]() Anyway, for all the fun we had that night, the three of us ended up walking home shortly after 1 am trashed out of our tree, and it was silent outside. Several hops to the resin-coated bar for whatever shots were on offer and we were all but seeing stars. At Derry’s, all you could smell was sweat and sour beer, not an open window to be found in the place! It was the middle of July and the air conditioning unit had all but fizzled out. The Irish-Newfoundland band brought the house down that night this was before the pandemic, of course. A couple of years ago, I walked home from a bar with two friends, and we were all loaded drunk.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |