It was a dare easy to agree to. Walk the mile of Sunk Road at midnight – ghosts and demons be damned. Something sixth grade boys could talk themselves into at a backyard campout when the tent’s too hot and smells of sweat.
The battery was low on Ernie’s laptop. We were bored talking about summer ending, school starting, girls, and the mysteries of a small town. So we stood on the upslope where Sunk Road met East Street. There were four of us, Ernie and Kyle, Johnny and me, Randy, beneath the last streetlamp.
“Want to?”
“Maybe.”
“You scared? Johnny?”
“Naw. Just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“How we get back.”
Ernie shrugged. “Same way. We turn around and walk back. Jeez, you are scared.”
“Shut up. I don’t see you starting.”
Ernie laughed.
Sunk Road was a local legend. Its history heavy with rumor and stories – death, accidents, and just plain weird stuff. Scared people swearing they saw something and it didn’t come from no bottle. Two lanes, straight mostly, narrow. It wasn’t much of a road. Flooded most springs, half buried in snow most winters, it was a crumbly stretch of asphalt east of town crossing low, wet land people called the bog. If it didn’t offer a short cut to the highway, there wasn’t any reason for it to be there at all.
Close to Ernie’s house, though.
“Ready?”
We nodded whether we were or not. None of us liked the idea of walking down a haunted road at midnight. But then, no one wanted to hear Ernie’s taunts heading into school either.
“Let’s go!”
We followed Ernie from the pool of light past where the sidewalk ended, down onto Sunk Road. My stomach churned.
Crippled trees, bent like old men, crowded the road, limbs tangled overhead. It felt like walking into a tunnel. At the far end we saw a distant smudge of light. On either side, solid ground slid into long grass and cattails, patches of black water. The air smelled of wet dirt and something else, something dead. Frogs belched, insects chittered. Moths, gnats and squeeters circled the smelly repellant we had on our skin.
It creeped me out. But I wasn’t going to let my friends know that. “We hardly need these flashlights. The moon’s so bright.”
Weak, yellowed patches of light pierced the leafy canopy, hardly illuminating the road at all.
“A school bus went off the road here one winter – sixty years ago. Rolled over and sank just like that. Nobody got out. They only found half the bodies, so the rest are still out there. That’s why buses don’t use this road.”
Ernie was a BS’er, but this place sure felt like that could be true.
“People seen the Goatman crossing this road. Lots of times,” Kyle said. “They say it’s the devil.”
“Boo!” Ernie laughed. “I hear it’s a mutant. Some weird family kept to themselves too much. Know what I mean?”
“Old drunk tales,” I said, trotting to keep up. Fear filled me like steam, trying to burst through my skin.
“Some high school kids got killed here on prom night back in the seventies. Car went off the road. When they pulled it out, the kids were gone. Never found them. The Goatman ate them, I hear.”
Kyle wasn’t bright enough to make up a story on the spot so I kind of believed him – except the eating part.
“There was a massacre. Couple hundred years ago. Indians got trapped in the bog and the settlers cut their throats and scalped them. It’s in a book. You can look it up.”
Ernie wouldn’t lie about something you could look up in a book.
“Shut up. All of you.” Johnny said, his flashlight scanned the dark enclosing us.
Ernie and Kyle giggled. They sounded nervous, but then, I was big time nervous.
We were halfway through the road when we heard the first noise.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, trotting again to catch up.
The noise stopped my friends. I almost plowed into Johnny’s back. Frogs and bugs had gone quiet.
We turned, pointing flashlights the way we had come. The splotchy dark swelled like a living thing. Wind touched leaves around us, but nothing seemed to move on Sunk Road.
Kyle pulled out his cell phone. “No signal! How come there’s no signal? We’re hardly out of town.”
Ernie checked his phone. “Must be the trees,” he announced. “Come on. We’re almost through.”
The night seemed to breathe, hot and foul.
“Keep moving.”
We hurried on, closer together. Johnny kept turning, walking backwards, flashlight bobbing back and forth, the light swallowed whole, useless.
“Something’s there,” Johnny whispered to me. “I feel it. Don’t you?”
I looked back. The dark was way too close. Something snapped, loud and sharp.
“A branch,” Ernie said too quickly. A moan, low and long, like an animal, spiraled out of the night.
The dark pounced.
Like deer, we bolted.
“Run!”
Ernie and Kyle sprinted ahead. Johnny not far behind. Gasping in the thick air, I followed best I could. Ernie leaped up the road’s soft incline to the lighted highway. Kyle then Johnny scrambled beside him. Their flashlights turned to me, shrinking beads of light I barely saw. Looking up from Sunk Road, I felt the dark swallow me.
“Faster, Randy, faster!”
“Run!”
“Raaandyyyy …”
*****
The next day, they found my flashlight in the road, broke like something stepped on it. For days they searched. I was impressed. They tried so hard to understand.
I watched all this with the others left behind in this place of gathering. That’s all we can do now … watch … wait for others to join us … wishing we could go home.
_________________________
©2010 David J. Rank
David J. Rank is a working journalist in Wisconsin who also enjoys peering into shadows and reporting what he sees. His short fiction has been published in regional literary publications, and online in The Absent Willow Review, AlienSkin, Apollo’s Lyre, Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror, and later this year Bewildering Stories. His Flash Fiction piece placed fifth in the Mainstream short story category of the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll for best stories published online in 2009. He is vice president of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association.
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