The night sounds had gone quiet atop Kill Devil Hill. The nocturnal birds and insects were silent. I took my eyes off the antique Ouija board and glanced at the strange sky. There were no stars, only somber blackness.
I first thought that our campfire
had screwed up my night vision. When I looked down from the blank sky, I looked
at Brooks Paget. My mind was unable to make sense of what I saw.
In the time it takes a dose
of adrenaline to dump into your bloodstream, I realized that his head was
missing. There was nothing but a bloody, ragged stump where his head once sat.
His body sat upright, his fingertips still on the planchette. The garnet stone
in his Claiborne High class ring reflected the campfire’s eerie flames.
Unspeakable panic swept the rest of the group. Meghan – Brooks’ girlfriend – screamed. She was sitting beside her now headless boyfriend. There was blood on her pale cheek.
Jimmy Creason was the first to stand, and it cost him his life. When he jumped to his feet, something unseen snatched him into the black sky. His kicking legs disappeared upwards and out of range of the fire light. He too screamed, but not for long.
There was no time to think. There was barely time to react. I got to my feet and stepped back from the campfire.
My feet then became entangled in the nylon tent behind me, and I pitched clumsily towards the camp fire. As gravity drew me towards the flames, I twisted to avoid the fire and became further entangled in the fabric of the tent. An instant later, I landed on my back in the shallow trench that runs along the top of the hill. The tent and all of its contents came down on top of me.
The bottom of the ancient trench was filled with all manner of craggy debris – stones of different size, rotted tree limbs and years of old pine straw. I landed on my back, and the air whooshed from my lungs. My right temple struck a rough stone, and I was knocked senseless.
When my head cleared, I froze at the sounds of terrible screams and other sounds that I could not identify. I was locked frozen in unnerving shock, somewhere in the middle of flight or fight. From the sound of things, one of the girls – probably Kara – put up a heck of a fight, but suddenly and without warning the screams of the girls were silenced.
A few seconds later, the uncanny silence was broken by dismal footfalls, crunching in the dry pine straw, growing louder as something loathsome approached my hiding place. I was struck tarn, like a coyote in the headlights of an oncoming car. I shut my eyes tightly, like a cowardly child alone in a dark bedroom, afraid of the hungry monster in the closet.
The creature stepped right up to the edge of the trench and inhaled loudly through its nostrils. My mind called up the image of a minotaur, snuffling around the corners of his fabled labyrinth, probing for prey. "Ph'nglui… Cthulhu… fhtagn" uttered a vulgar voice so low and guttural that it couldn’t have been human.
I dared not move. I knew that this was the thing that had taken the head of Brooks and killed the rest of my friends. I lay there, under the tent, as dead, impenetrable silence descended on the camp. My heart raced and I began to shake uncontrollably as I wonder how long would it be before this unseen thing jumped down into the trench to pull me from my hiding place.
(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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