I was one of those people. The ones who tell you, "There are no such things as ghosts" and that "everything has an explaination." After years of having my mother tell me that there was no monster under my bed, no one hiding in the closet, I had finally begun blocking my belief in the paranormal. I was wrong.
I was thirteen years old, right at that age where I thought I was an adult, though no one else could see it. The age when you buck against anyone telling you what to do, coming back with the fierce reply of "I'm not a kid anymore!" That must have been why I ignored my mother when she told me to stay away from the railroad tracks.
Don't get me wrong. She wasn't worried about anything supernatural. She was worried about the occasional hobo who slept under the bridge and the high school kids who hung out getting high.
Whatever the case, the small country road behind the highway and under the tracks was the fastest way to school because it meant we didn't have to wait for the long morning train to pass. Though every day I promised Mom I would not go that way, whenever my older brother was sick for the day, off I went in that direction with all of my friends.
One fall morning my brother was taking a field trip and would not be accompanying me on my trip to school. Unfortunately, my best friend was sick that day, so I would be making my walk alone. I had woken up late and had a quiz in my first period class, so my day wasn't going to well so far.
In my haste to get to school I decided, of course, to go ahead and take that back road and save myself a few minutes. The morning air was very quiet, I remember that much. If you walked down that road that day and didn't know it was one street over from the highway, you would never have guessed it was.
I walked along, kicking up dirt. I could see the bridge ahead of me when I heard someone yell, "Hey!"
Over to the right up ahead I saw Mr. Thompson leaning out of his doorway yelling at me. He was a fairly old man and, according to everyone in school, a little bit crazy. His wife was an invalid and he often needed help getting her in or out of bed or into the car, and we were all happy to oblige, mainly because we felt sorry for them. The house was old and almost falling down, and a nasty rotting smell invaded your nose when you got inside.
He called to me again and asked if I could help him with his wife. I lifted my head up to say, "Okay," when I saw it.
Directly under the bridge I saw a large, hulking creature. It wore some sort of black garment, and I have no other way to describe it except as a void, totally lacking in color, kind of like the black spots you get in your eyes when you rub them a little too hard. It was more like emptyness than material. Under its large black hood it revealed a skeletal-looking face, grinning, and the eyes were made of the same material as the "cloak". One arm was held up, and I squinted to see what it was doing. As soon as I figured it out, I 180'd and ran along the sidewalk next to the highway all the way to school, Mr. Johnson's yelling be damned. You see, when I looked closely at that hand, I saw the long bony index finger wagging and wagging. It was beckoning me.
Now, many people have seen the Grim Reaper (at least that's what I assume I saw that day). I can honestly say that although it scared the hell out of me at that time, I was already doubting my sanity by the time I reached school.
Until a few days later.
You see, a few of Mr. Thompson's neighbors finally started complaining about the smell.
A local police officer came over to the house as a favor to the neighborhood to ask Mr. Thompson if he could please clean up whatever was producing the ungodly stench. As soon as he pulled up in the driveway, he heard a gunshot.
Upon entering the house, he found Mr. Thompson slumped on the living room couch and a little of Mr. Thompson's head all over the room. They began searching the house for Mrs. Thompson and, after a search of the basement, finally found her. Or what was left of her, anyway.
In addition, they also found five other bodies, all in various stages of decay, and all so badly mutilated that even their gender was not discernable. After a little investigating, they pieced together what they believed happened, and it went something like this:
With Mrs. Thompson virtually trapped inside her small bedroom on the very far end of the house, Mr. Thompson must have started getting a little bored. One day, about five years before, a young girl was on her way to school, taking the backroad and very alone. Mr. Thompson called to her, asking her if she could help him get his wife into the car. Having been inside the house several times with her friends, she complied. No one ever saw her again.
This happened four more times in the next five years. Most of the girls were thought to be runaways. At any rate, the reason no one had ever suspected him of anything wrong had to do with the fact that the girls' parents never knew they were taking that very backroad I used to sneak off to. Indeed, my own mother wouldn't have known if my brother hadn't told her.
Eventually, Mrs. Thompson got wise to what Mr. Thompson was doing, and she must have threatened to turn him in because he killed her, chopped her up, and hid her in nooks and crannies in his basement, along with all of the other bodies.
I don't know for sure if he had the same fate planned for me that day, but I have to guess that he did, because Mrs. Johnson had already been dead for a week when he asked me to come inside his house, and that was the only time I had ever been there alone. After I ran off screaming he must have gotten very nervous, because he pulled the trigger the moment he noticed the police in his driveway.
As for the thing I saw under the bridge that day, I'm pretty sure that I know what it was, but I'm not too clear on why it was there in the first place. Was it there to warn me, or was Death just doing his job when I went and screwed everything up by running? Until the day I actually do die, I'll probably never know for sure.
But after having come that close, I'm definitely sticking to the main roads.
