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| Prof. Albert Gruner's antler-handle walking stick. |
You ever heard the word tharn? That’s how the old-timers described
an animal frozen by fear. If you’ve ever seen a deer frozen in the middle of
the road at night as a set of headlights bears down on it, you’ve seen an
animal go tharn.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I went tharn that night when
the wooded clearing plunged into total blackness, and the baby in the stranger’s
cloth sack began to cry. The humid forest of Claiborne’s Sinks was so dark that
I couldn’t see my handcuffed wrists in front of my face. The stranger’s laugh
and the growling of the hellishly large hound by his side snapped me out of it.
My mind raced as I stood there by the giant ash tree. I was
unarmed, handcuffed and exhausted from the day’s long slog through the hot, snake-infested
woods. I had to take action, but what could I do?
The stranger’s old, rusty lantern snapped on and cast its
harsh blue-white light on Sgt. Bill Friemann. The police officer flinched in
its eldritch light and then he became wide-eyed as he stared into its ghostly beam.
The dark stranger chuckled, his black stovepipe hat bobbing atop his oversized head,
as the lantern light changed to a sick yellow that reminded me of the inside of
a rotten Jack-o’-lantern.
Friemann’s face contorted into an awful mask of grim agony,
and he threw back his head at an unnatural angle. The lantern pulled the
officer’s paralyzed body slowly toward the stranger like a powerful magnet. Beads
of sweat poured down my face as the baby cried louder.
What followed is hard to describe. The policeman’s flesh just
melted away, drawn into the face of the lantern. His skin, muscles and blood flowed off his
bones like melting red candle wax. Even his bones liquified and flowed from
where he stood into the lantern. I still dream about it some nights.
In all, it took less than 30 seconds for the officer’s body
to dissolve, and it ended with a loud noise like a slamming door. The oversized
hound at the stranger’s side loosed an unnerving howl, and its eyes flashed a
terrible green in the lantern light. The smell of brimstone filled the air.
The light grew blue-white again as the officer’s clothes dropped
to the ground like a bundle of limp rags. My Berretta tumbled down amongst his
belongings, and I wondered where the keys to the handcuffs were in that pile of
empty clothes and police gear.
By the light of the lantern, I watched as the stranger
stroked the head of his hound. “Quiet, Ol’ Shuck,” he said, his voice like wheels
on dry gravel. He sucked loudly at his teeth, tilted his head back and sniffed the air, his nostrils flaring.
Suddenly and without warning, the night-breeze shifted and
carried my scent toward the stranger and his terrible hound. In an instant,
their eyes snapped in my direction, and a half-grin spread across the stranger’s
dirty face, exposing an abnormally large, white canine tooth.
It was then that the stranger opened his mouth to speak, but
I didn’t hear what he said. A shiny, black beetle crawled over my left hand,
which was resting against the ash tree’s rough trunk. I glanced down at it, saw
the beetle and then saw the missing professor’s antler-handled cane propped
against the ash tree.
I grasped the old walking stick as best I could in my cuffed
hands and advanced toward the stranger. Fight or flight is a powerful force in
the heart of a man on his own in the benighted woods.
(All rights reserved. This
story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are
products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely
coincidental.)
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