A (22:02)
as directed Once again, not even a blink and the street corner was back to normal. What is going on? A little shaken and extremely confused, I quickly got back down the street and back to my place. When I got home, I was met with the same confused look that I had a few weeks prior, and my wife peeked her head out the door and down the stairs. Did you forget something? What is happening here? I live in southern Ontario, just off the north shore of Lake Erie in farm country. Nobody who still lives here can say it's the best place on earth to live. It's small, quiet and everything is far away. There aren't many jobs there, and if you want to stay there, your best bet is to pick a trade and commute to the nearest city. Although life here is kind of lackluster, I've always cherished those quiet drives through the Norfolk county countryside, especially on an autumn night as the sun sets shining low and casting its final light over the picturesque landscape. The roads wind through fields of golden corn dotted with wood, lots of pine trees and lined with rich thickets of sumac that line the route seemed to whisper secrets to the colors in the sundering skies. One night I decided to take one of my late night commutes. The air was crisp and the harvest moon cast this eerie silver glow over the fields of corn and the trees that lined the road. I knew these roads well, every twist and turn like the back of my hand. When we were younger, we would bike up and down the concessions and in and out of the trails, passing through the nearby conservation land, sometimes even walking it. We would often lock our bikes up to the trees alongside the road and hike into the forest and walk among the trees, trudging through thickets of brush and burdock, only to come out covered in burrs and mud. You could spend all day and night out there without a worry. There are no predators here, aside from the odd coyote, and they aren't likely to come near you in groups. We have lots of animals, sure. Foxes, badgers, lynx, possum. But nothing big. Nothing that is very likely to pose a threat walking out in the woods. In fact, out here you are far more likely to be mistaken for a deer by a hunter than you are to be attacked by an animal. We have no bears, no wolves, the odd mention of cougars, but these accounts are rare and heavily contested or given little thought. Even then, you would never see one even if they were here. On one particular night I found myself with downtime. I had the next four days off and I had just settled into a house to myself. My brother had moved away to Toronto a couple of months earlier and my parents were away for the weekend. My plans for this weekend were to have no plans. I was just going to chill on my own, buy a bunch of snacks and bask in the cool darkness of the basement and play Diablo. I had everything I needed at home, but I had elected to make a snack run and get some chips, pop and maybe some ice cream from the grocery store in town we lived out in the country north of a small hamlet called called Vanessa. The nearest grocery store was in Waterford, south of us by a few minutes drive. It's a nice drive into town if you take the back roads, and that was my plan. The roads were thick on either side with a tall ancient canopy of trees, light breaking through the tops of the trees to illuminate the road in golden stained glass, layers of green green fading into the deep shadows of the canopy. The lowering light of the sun at this time shows just how immense these particular woods are, a never ending sprawl of fallen leaves and mud lined with fiddlehead ferns and skunk cabbage fenced in by the trees along the roadside. On my way back from the grocery store, as I was heading down one of the more remote stretches of road, something in the distance caught my eye. At first I thought it was just a trick of the light. It seemed to race along behind me in the trees as I drove down the forested road. Upon further inspection it seemed to be running on all fours and it was starting to catch up to me. It moved with a sort of unsettling grace, as if it were on the hunt. As it got closer, my heart started to race as it began to overtake me as it jumped out in front of me, I slammed on the brakes and sent myself forward in my seat, looking up. It was about 10ft away from me, upright in the middle of the now moonlit road. There was no denying it. I was looking at a crowd creature, a creature that should have only existed in stories. This thing was massive, hulking and covered in matted fur. I Couldn't believe what I was seeing. My eyes locked onto this creature. It seemed so out of place in our world. It looked like a big black dog, but it was upright on its hind legs like a dog and had wide paws with opposable thumbs. They looked more like a human hand, with long sharp claws, gray like an elephant's hide, covered with fur among massive forearms. At first glance, it looked a little like a primate, were it not for a wiry canine tail and a snarling snout laden with countless sharp wolfish teeth. It stared with a bloodthirsty ferocity I have never encountered in my life up to this point and never again since then, and gave a deep booming growl that overtook all sound in the now still standing wilderness along the silent country road. I didn't even perceive the music that I had on at the time. Nothing really registered, aside from the horror I was witnessing. Ahead of me on the road. The moonlight revealed its eyes, which glowed with an unnatural amber light. It had a snout full of sharp, glistening teeth. Fear surged through me, but I could not tear my gaze away. The world felt suspended in that moment, like everything else had disappeared. And then the impossible happened. The creature turned its head to look at me. Our eyes met and a wave of terror washed over me, primal and raw. I was sure I was done for, that this thing was going to leap at me. Every bone in my body was frozen as time and space stood still. My blood froze as I awaited what was sure to be my doom. I was locked in place. I know what you're thinking. You're in a car. Why didn't you just hit the gas? But I just couldn't will my foot into action. There are three human reactions to exterior threats. Fight, flight and freeze. And I guess in that moment, my body chose to freeze. But then the unmistakable flash of high beams from a distant truck now speeding towards us broke the tension and the thing reacted, lifting its snout up in the air and sniffing as it turned to see the oncoming truck. As suddenly as it had appeared, the creature turned away and bounded off into the night, vanishing into the shadows of the trees. I could not believe my luck. Awestruck and still shaken up by what I had just seen, I sat there in the road, still struggling to come back to reality. As the truck approached, it slowed to a stop before it passed, me and the driver got out, apparently thinking something was the matter as I was parked in the middle of a concession at the at this point, just sitting there. Kid. Hey, kid, are you all right? The man shouted out from just Outside of his driver's side door. I jerked up and nodded at him. I tried to pull myself together as he walked up to my window and I rolled it down and looked out to him. You good? Should you be driving? The man clearly thought I was drunk or maybe too stoned and couldn't drive. I mean, I don't blame him. What am I supposed to say? I just saw a werewolf. I told him I was fine and that yes, I could drive. I quickly made it up that my engine had stalled and I just got in after fixing it and he nodded and got back in his truck, heading on his way down the road and out of sight. As soon as I got in, I tried my best to shake it off quickly, get my head together, and I slammed my foot on the gas pedal, putting as much distance between me and that terrifying encounter as I could. I drove back home that night, shaken to my core. I couldn't stop thinking about what I had seen. Norfolk county had always been a place of beauty and tranquility for me. But that night I had come face to face with something I have since never been able to come to terms with. Something straight out of some German fairy tale from Grimm. When I got home, I hit the desk straight away and started looking up anything I could find that even remotely described what I saw. The closest thing I could find was a reference to something called the Loup garou or werewolf of Quebec City. But I couldn't find anything about anything of the sort in Ontario. I still can't explain what happened that night, and even now, most people don't believe me. But for me, the memory of that encounter with whatever was stalking cars in the middle of the country will always be etched in my mind. A chilling reminder that sometimes there are things we cannot explain or just are not ready to try. Explaining that there is more to this world than perhaps we know, and that maybe, just maybe, something, maybe even someone is lurking out in the woods of Ontario that for better or for worse, will never discover. When I was five, me, my mother and sister moved for the first time. My mother had divorced my father and decided to live someplace nicer, as she called it. After a 30 minute drive, we ended up in another town. We got settled in the house and started adjusting to our new life. The first weird thing I noticed in the house was the energy. There was just this off feeling to it, like something would be watching your every move. I would always quickly run upstairs when I would get ready for bed in order to not feel too scared before I would sleep. After A few weeks weeks. At the bottom of the wall, there was this weird face painted. It was no bigger than 1.5 inches, but it looked really off. The next day I told my mother and she said she had no idea where it was coming from. Even my stepdad didn't know, but no one ever dared to remove it. A few months later, me and my sister had our second encounter. We were laying in bed in our shared room. While we were both trying to get rest. In the distance, we heard some weird sounds. My sister, being the curious one, went up to the door and opened it slightly. The noise had gotten louder as she stood there listening. Eventually, she closed the door as she turned to my bed. There's a toy in the attic going off, she said. My sister was not scared easily, but I could tell she was getting nervous. We eventually saw the light turn on and heard our mother come upstairs. She went to the attic and the sound stopped. My sister laid back in bed and our mother actually got angry with us, assuming that we had gotten out of bed and secretly continued playing. The third encounter I experienced was by myself. I was laying in bed as it was a school night and because my sister was older, she had the privilege to go to bed later. My room had been really cold, despite the thick comforter and blanket I had draped over my body. I remember being in a light sleep before my eyes shot open. I had felt something hold my left hand softly, but my left side was the wall side, meaning no one could have been there. There was also no toys or stuffed animals that I could blame. I stayed up until my sister got upstairs to go to sleep. The energy in the house seemed to have shifted the last years of our stay. Our usual nice and funny stepfather had changed into an angry, narcissistic man doing everything to make our lives miserable. And our neighbor, who loved kids and was always happy, started to become creepy, staring out the window whenever we would play outside. She started complaining about us being too loud while we never slammed any doors or screamed inside the house. She even tried to attack my mother once with a broom. Our mother was less happy as well. Eventually, it all became too much and my mother and stepfather broke up. We started living somewhere else and everything seemed to instantly become better. We were happier and there were no weird, unexplainable things happening. When I went to high school, I. I started becoming best friends with this girl. I knew her from my childhood because we actually lived in the same street. She lived eight houses down, but I never actually played with her at home. When I was younger, when we were in high school though, we started hanging outside and inside. She was home alone, often living with a teen brother and a little sister and her mother. Her mother had two jobs, so she was barely home when we got out of school. When we grew closer, we started opening up about our pasts. She admitted that her father was a narc, an alcoholic and had anger issues. He came by their house every once in a while to bring home her youngest sister from school. Then he would eat with them and leave when her mother would come come home. My friend also started opening up by the weird things that were happening in her house. Eventually, she also told me that this wasn't the first house that they had had these experiences before me and my family moved there. My best friend had lived somewhere else about five minutes from their current place. She told me that there was an off vibe in the house and her mother actually invited a medium to look at it. My friend told me that when the medium arrived, she stepped in the hallway and had all the color drained from her face. She refused to go further in the house and left. After some digging, they had actually found out that there used to be a farm where the houses were standing and there had been an accident. Children were supposedly playing a movie the land and the farmer had not noticed them in time, running them over with the agriculture equipment. I honestly was freaked out by this, but nothing ever happened to me in that house, so I didn't refrain myself from coming there. Wrong decision. The day this following situation all went down started calmly. Me and my friend had actually gotten out of school early. So we decided to go to her house and watch American Horror Story upstairs. We got into the house and locked the doors behind us, heading into the living room where we hung out and ate something listening to the radio. When we were ready, we went upstairs putting on the show. After about two episodes, we heard the radio being turned up from downstairs. We both looked at at each other completely terrified. We were basically trapped upstairs as there was no safe way down from the house. My friend tried to convince me and herself that it was probably just her father trying to scare us. However, the music had not gotten turned down. I grabbed a blow dryer and made my way towards the hallway. My friend followed with a coat rack backhanger. We slowly went downstairs and I remember I was sweating bollocks. When we were almost down the stairs, I stopped in my tracks. Till this day, I don't know why. My body just would not move like an instinct. After about 10 seconds, the downstairs hallway door was thrown closed. We both stood there in of front shock, not knowing what to do. My friend had forgotten her key in the living room so we couldn't go through the front door. All of a sudden an anger came washing over me. What the heck does this thing think it is? I thought as the rage built up inside me. I stormed down the stairs, throwing open the door. The music from the radio was so loud it rang in my ears. When I was almost at the radio, I couldn't even hear the music anymore as the adrenaline was beeping in my ears. The world around me was spinning, almost like I had to physically fight whatever was doing this to us. I turned off the radio and there was a deafening sound of silence. My friend had chased behind me, looking at me with big eyes. After a moment I felt like I could breathe again. We were both standing frozen in our spots and eventually I told my best friend to check the doors. She nodded, hurrying to the front door as I hurried to the back. They were both locked. Her key was still sitting on the dining room table where she left it. My friend then quickly hurried upstairs checking if her brother was there. He wasn't. We went upstairs to grab our stuff and then stayed downstairs trying to calm down from the situation. My friend texted me later on saying her father and her brother had gotten home an hour later, both not knowing what she was talking about. We didn't hang out in her house for a good two months months after that, only slowly introducing the idea when it was raining outside. I don't know what is wrong with this neighborhood, but it is not natural.