Ben (9:49)
See the girl. She lives in Spring Prairie, Wisconsin, a small settlement which at the time of our story only boasted about a thousand residents. Her life is spent driving up and down the rural roads between her home and in the city of Elkhorn, where she and her neighbors and all of her friends go to school. She is the prototypical young Midwestern woman, living in the glory of her youth at the tail end of the previous century. Clothes are more important to her than they were to her parents. Technology is new, and she puts herself in situations of great risk on a computer that she won't appreciate until much later in life. Her acne gives her anxiety and her maturing frame gives the boys that live near her even more. Her father more than any of them, but for very different reasons. She is an American girl to the core, hardened, but without any knowledge of it, by her sheltered life on the prairies and farms off the coast of the Great Lakes. Not only sheltered, she's fed and clothed, too, by a family that loves her. Her education is ongoing and going well. Her hopes and dreams in life are myriad. A mistake many of the young people in her generation made undaunted by the dangers of such unsatisfying delusions. But none of them come into this tale. She knows the roads around her home impeccably well, for it does not take much to know them. They are flat and straight, with ditches on either side that grow menacing and cold and dark of winter months. Seldom do trees cover the roads over more often than not she can see a thousand miles in any direction, on any part of any one of them, far ahead to the horizon where the bent world curves too deep and becomes an upside down place, foreign to her and therefore not real. It is these roads that concern us, these stages of life, so mundane but capable of holding terrible things. It was Halloween in 1991. The girl's name was Doris Gibson. She was driving down Bray Road toward the larger settlement of Elkhorn to attend a party and later to pick up a friend to take back home. The weather was crisp and cold. Days had already grown short in that part of the world, such that, though it was only just after suppertime, it was full night. Bray Road was never exactly busy, but it being well into trick or treating time meant that virtually nobody was sharing the road with Gibson. Her high beams were on, and she was certainly grateful for them. Before her on the tarmac lolled a layer of muggy fog that gave the already mystical air of Halloween a theater of wonder and timidity. It was thick, too, as it wafted sometimes up and over the windshield as she drove on. Because of its thickness and its proclivity to occasionally cloud more than just her vision of the road underneath it, she got into a mode of sensory focus that I'm sure we can all relate to. She sat up more in the driver's seat and put her hands right at the 10 and 2 position. That was after she turned the volume on her radio down, though she wanted to see better, so naturally the music couldn't be too loud. In this way, pushing like an icebreaker on Superior through the dense and undulating layer of vaporous moisture, she steadily drove down the almost arrow straight Bray Road, watching keenly for the dim sight of the yellow lines through the thinner sections of fog and slowing down many times until she was crawling on at a steady state of about 30 miles per hour. The thud sent her into a gasp. She knew she had not drifted near to the road's edge, but the sudden jolt from her passenger side tricked her into thinking for a moment that she had. But she recovered quick enough, straightening out the wheel and calming herself down for the push to her nerves. It was, after all, her dad's car. She didn't want to wreck it if she ever wanted to take it out again, and that she did. It took her about 60ft to come to a full stop. She figured it was the neighborly thing to get out and move whatever stone or stick or roadkill she had hit to save any other nighttime driver the risk of suffering something far worse than she had. Besides, the fog was getting worse and most drivers later that night would not be as sober as she was then. As Gibson walked back to whereabouts the impact had occurred, she struggled to find anything that could be the culprit. Given the state of the fog, this didn't concern her much at first, but it soon started to. The night was so quiet and the fog was so otherworldly and thick, it seemed to her that she was the only person left in the world at all, living out an endless nighttime drive over and over again in some post apocalyptic hellscape. There was nothing and no one, and she thought this frightening. But what came after was the true fright, the sound of a hulking frame pounding its feet over and over on the road, the dim red light from her car's brakes casting her long shadow like a tentacle into the night. From the hallway of that shadow came the black form of a massive beast with a heaving chest running towards her, blowing two tubes of hot breath out of a snout that was inhuman but also in animalistic something demonic and fueled by fear. She saw its approach and her legs started to numb with the shock. She demanded they lock up and she turned with all the speed she had to run back to the safety of the car. The fog felt like a syrupy air that is in a dream which makes one feel incapable of running away from a threat. The beast, this monster from Dis, was catching up. She screamed as she ran in a blind panic and only just made it back in time to slam the door shut and lock it as the mass of thing grabbed on to the rear bumper and began to lift with an uncanny scream that was more akin to the yowl of a cat, only much, much deeper and louder. She slammed her foot on the gas and prayed that the car had not lifted too much already. It hadn't. She sped off into the night, no longer caring for the density of the fog. She trusted her adrenal instincts to know where the road would be, and she didn't slow down until she came into the well lit streets of Elkhorn I full five minutes later. In that time she did nothing but try to calm down. It wasn't until she parked that she began to collect any thoughts whatsoever about what she'd seen. And what she'd seen was, well, she had never seen anything like had been dark, but the immense surge of fear had given her a clear enough picture of this grotesque monster that she was sure wanted blood. It was massive and covered with a thick pelt of grimy and matted hair. Its legs were like a dog's with the hocks pointed backwards. But it wasn't a dog. For starters. It was too big, far bigger than Gibson, but it also only ran on the two legs that were twisted the wrong way. The bulk of its chest stuck with her nearly as much as the raving maw, a bloody thing, scarred and weathered as though the monster had rubbed its face on a wall of barbed wire. It opened to what she would sure were rotted teeth that somehow never died, and a demonic tongue like a serpent coiled itself up and waved around, inside and out of the teeth. And the speed. When she first saw its shadow, the figure must have been 50 yards away from her, and she was only about 50 yards from the car. But they both arrived at the car at more or less the same moment. What's more, she became convinced that it was the thing she had somehow hit. Had it used itself as bait? Had her car run over its leg or arm? Had the speed done anything to hurt it or slow it down? In her moments of silent debrief, Gibson decided not to tell anyone about her encounter. She was worried no one would believe her. Besides, even if they did believe her, what would anyone do about it? What would she do about it? She would never go and look for it. She would never let anyone else go and look for it either, as far as she could. It became a thing solidified in her mind, as a horror beyond her comprehension and therefore beyond her ability to linger on. The fear of the memory would never petrify, but even that night she felt as though she began to remember it as a dream and nothing more. She drove on through Elkhorn until she came to her Halloween party. The small packs of candy crazed children dressed as goblins and fae comforted her her as her car rolled slowly through the winding rows of houses. When the party was over and she walked back out to her car with the friend that she was to ferry home, those same rows of houses were sound asleep. The sodium vapor street lights hummed their tune in warm candescence just above the heads of the partiers filing out. There were no other sounds save the crackling noise of crickets, like a bed of nuclear energy glowing beneath everything Gibson marked the serenity of the moment. It contrasted sharply with her earlier experience. And yet the monster was already a wisp to her, a thing she wondered at the truth of. Even she herself as she stepped carefree to the driver's side of her car. The fog had cleared hours earlier. The two friends closed their respective doors and sat back with a sigh of satisfaction at the night gift. Gibson pulled herself up and after some searching for her target, drove the key home to the ignition and turned it. The blue Plymouth shuffled to life. She pulled the E brake up and then pushed it back down with a squish. Her foot was on the clutch and the car had been parked in gear, but into the piece there came the sound of a sharp inhale from her friend on the other side of the car. When Gibson turned to her, she was already looking out the window with wide eyes back toward the front of the house. They had come to. The friend exclaimed, look at that thing. Gibson did in there, standing as embodied shadow that was immovable, as if to remind her that it had not all been a dream, was the creature. It was giant, and all of what she thought she'd seen from earlier was confirmed in the stillness as the creature stood on the horizon of light cast down by a lamp across the street. What she had failed to notice before, though, were the eyes, piercing coals of vibrant bronze, staring back from their beds of black and gray and bloody blue. Just as the monster opened its mouth, she slammed on the gas and lifted the clutch and peeled away into the night. The next morning, under the sun's protective warmth, Gibson examined the rear of the car. She found claw marks and jagged silver cut into the blue paint of the trunk. In the 1820s, a Cree man walked alone through the deep northern snow of Saskatchewan. It was night and it was cold. The man was journeying to a fur trading post that he knew plenty more people would be at. It would be warmer, fires would be raging all over the camp. He just needed to get there before the cold took him. Saskatchewan's southern half is entirely dominated by plains. Gentle hills wave on like a calm ocean for miles all around. Seldom does one see any trees there, and so the wind whips like a maelstrom. All year in the winter that wind comes heavy from the northern arctic forests and blows over the plains until the air over it hardly breaks the single digits in Fahrenheit. The Cree man knew this, but walked on nonetheless. He knew all the more that two foolish decisions don't make a single wise one. He had been a fool to leave when he did, and that by himself, but he had done it. And so, as the open heavens held none of the earth's ambient heat back for him, he had nothing else to do but press on. The ground was already deep with snow from the previous week's storms, and he found himself post holing more frequently than he found solid footing. It was the most despairing thing he had ever done before, running on little food and only burning snow for water. The man withered and felt akin to a reed near to being uprooted by a summer thunderstorm on the shore of a lake. But all the lakes were frozen and the rivers that fed them, and he was no reed but a man dying and leaving his family to pay dear for his own folly. His feet became numb and he was forced to stop every couple of steps to catch his breath before continuing on with wobbling dizziness in the night through a world pitched completely white. As the hours passed, the man grew despondent at boiling clouds rolling in to cover the moon's light. Soon it was much darker and the wind had somehow grown stronger, and snow began to fall like pellets all around, stinging his eyes anytime he dared to glance upwards to find a line through the prairie. He was a broken shell of a man in an entirely inappropriate moment of reflection. He marveled at man's ability to be so resilient in some moments while being so fragile in others. He was being broken to death by a single night of hardship, though he had endured days of what he could swear had been harder living before. But those days were warmer, and the cold is a sink that sucks in everything. Finally he collapsed and could not get up again. He shuffled up to a drift of snow. He couldn't perceive any protection from the wind it may have been offering, and he closed his eyes to die. He could not tell how much time had passed when he woke up again. His mind had picked up on the heaving grunt and heavy steps that shook the ice his body stowed on. He saw through the snow and night a black bulk of something approaching him, like a dog, only more or perhaps somehow less. He regarded its eyes aflame like oil candles and penetrating, seemingly full of life and malice. Alongside, he complained to the gods as one who had been ready to die from the cold, must he now suffer the pain of death from this monster? He couldn't move, and so he didn't try to. The beast carried itself up to him and rolled off of its feet so that its mass of fur and muscle pressed down on the man. He wailed with a strained face for the devouring to begin, but it never did. The thing just laid on him, warming him with its own heat and soothing, or so it seemed at the time. 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