So, I had a bizarre childhood in that both my parents are empiricists, but I also grew up in what I would describe, for lack of a better word, as a haunted house. Everyone saw and heard things there that couldn't have actually been happening, absolutely everyone. I started sleepwalking while we lived there and never have since. Water leaked from nail holes in the walls without any kind of source to be stopped, no matter how many times my parents had contractors in tearing up the walls. I saw phantom shapes flying around my room at night that I was so sure were real bats, I woke my parents up to shoo them out of the house.
But that was just how life was for me from nine to about twenty-two. On top of that was the really weird shit. The strangest, creepiest, weirdest fucking thing that ever happened to me happened one night in the spring of 2009. I was walking home from a friend's house after a D&D session that had run a bit long, so it was dark already by the time I started the trek back home. From my friend's place, there were two paths that could get me home relatively swiftly. One was a forest path that only the local children who grew up in the town knew about. It cut through one of the last thicket of woods that hadn't been cut down in the middle of town and would take me straight home. The other had me cutting across the campus of a middle school that skirted the edge of the woods. There was a dirt path running between their football field and their baseball diamond and terminated in a hole in the chain link fence that would dump you out right in my neighborhood, maybe a few yards from my house.
Now, eager as I was to get home, something tickled the back of my brain and told me that cutting through the woods just was not a good idea that night. There was rustling I could hear back there and more than was usual for birds and squirrels. I thought I heard the sound of a twig snap underfoot and that was enough to make me decide that caution was the better part of valor. I took the Middle School option. As I'm walking along this path, out of the corner of my eye I see that there is a word written in the dirt. It's not a word in English or anything, but I stop and try to sound it out because I'm a writer and language is my thing. I think I've finally decided how it's pronounced and definitively say out loud.
And a voice from the woods whispers the word back at me. I freeze, my blood runs cold. My head begins to feel very strange indeed, screaming all sorts of panicky lizard brain nonsense at me while I try to decide what to do. The rustling in the woods is intensifying, but I don't feel completely menaced because I still have a chain link fence between me and the woods.
Like every chump in any horror movie you've ever seen, I go, "...Hello?"
Because when you're actually caught in that situation, you desperately want some non-threatening type of person to walk up to the edge of the fence and go, "Hey, sorry for scaring you. I was just walking along over here saying stuff. Have a good night, ok?"
And then for you to go, "Oh, well alright, then. That's obviously perfectly normal and I have nothing to be afraid about."
That...didn't happen. Instead, whatever was in the woods began laughing. Not in a happy, friendly sort of laugh. Not in a maniacal Joker sort of way either. But in a "I'm looking forward to hurting you a whole lot in the near future" sort of way. I bolted. Running along the open space between the two fields, I felt massively exposed. As I ran, the world went wrong. The trees kind of seemed to stretch...no, not stretch. It was like they were always impossibly tall, but I'd only just noticed? I often describe it to people as being like a forced perspective trick. That's what it felt like. As I made it through the fence and into my neighborhood, I looked up to see that the moon was easily twice the size it was supposed to be. It was huge and luminous and beautiful, but just completely wrong.
When I looked back down, I was not in my neighborhood anymore. I was in a full-on forest. The road was just a wooded path and everything was just trees and darkness. I felt like I was both completely lost and suspected that I'd totally lost my mind. But, with no real other choices available to me, I followed the path in front of me. The path terminated in a cave and beyond the mouth of that cave I could see nothing more that boiling movement in the darkness. Feeling like I was going to be sick, I approached the mouth and peeked in to see...
The inside of a truck. Like a light switch had been flipped, I was back in my neighborhood. The boiling shapes I'd seen? Yeah, that was some poor teenage couple making out in there after their date. They were staring, terrified at me just as I was staring terrified at them. Completely confused and embarrassed, I ran off before the guy could think to get out and yell at me or try to chase me off or something.
You can see the other pitch black mouth of the shortcut through the woods from my front door. My hands shook as I tried to get the goddamn key out of my pocket, into the lock and turn it. I could feel the woods watching me and it was hard to focus on the door when I just knew, knew that at any moment something would emerge from the woods and come for me. When I finally got the lock undone, I whipped the door open and sprinted full bore to my room where I locked the door, put a chair under the door and buried myself under the covers of my bed. I curled up into a fetal position and just shook until morning.
I don't actually expect anyone to believe me (I mean, this is the internet. None of you know me. I'd definitely think I was making this up if I read someone posting it.) but one way or another it did happen to me. For one thing, if I was writing this as a story, I'd make it make some kind of sense. There'd be narrative, not just me staring into the mouth of utter fucking madness for no apparent reason...Either I suffered a complete psychotic break that night or I encountered some next level inexplicable shit that I never, ever want to come into contact with again. To my relief, over the course of several years I've managed to put the word I saw in the dirt that night from my mind, but for the longest time, any time I'd look in the mirror, part of me wanted to say it again. Just to see what would happen.
Almost had a heart attack.
