Grandfather’s stories were something highly anticipated. He didn’t tell them often, but when the urge struck him, we would all gather around the fire and listen with severe concentration. He would weave stories in the flickering lights, speaking of the ancient gods and creatures our ancestors worshiped and feared. Mother would grasp Father’s hands tightly when the tale became too frightening. I, on the other hand, was rarely scared. The stories fascinated me.
The day Grandfather passed away, I knew I had lost something irreplaceable.
One day, in the attic of our little house, I found a spiral-bound notebook. I’d been cleaning out boxes as a Saturday chore. Flipping through the blank pages, a thought suddenly struck me: what if I wrote down the stories? I remembered most of them, and the rest I could ask Father about.
And so I did. Compiling everything I remembered and then interviewing my parents for the missed details took weeks and weeks. I wrote as he had told them, trying to make my words as graceful as his had been.
Yes, wrote all of them.
Except for one.
I didn’t write down the only one I’d ever feared.
I didn’t write down the legend of the Skin-Walkers.
Now, I know my fear is irrational. These were myths, handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, for centuries. They were fictional, told only to entertain. Yeah, our ancestors believed in them, but they also believed that a locust had once cut off the horns of some monster in order to create the oceans. So, you can’t blame me for not taking their word for it.
But the Skin-Walkers were a different matter altogether. Even Grandfather despised telling about them, and he only did once or twice, since according to legend, even speaking of them can summon evil spirits.
“If you make eye-contact with one,” he would say in his rumbling, throaty voice, “even for the briefest of moments, they will seep into your mind…”
And the shadows would move. We were out in the open, sat on woven rugs around a campfire. There were no trees, so therefore, there should be no shadows, and yet, there were. I pointed them out to my dad, but he could never see them. He told me it was just my imagination.
But I could swear they would rustle, shift, move around. Once, I even saw a reflective glimmer, like a flashlight gleaming off a cat’s eye as it moved through the dark.
I had to shake myself to get rid of the sinking feeling of fear pooling in my stomach.
I was seven at the time.
0-0-0-0
By the time I had turned fifteen, I had nearly forgotten my childhood fear.
The morning of Saturday, July 18th, rose bright and clear. On television, the weather man promised a day of mild-temperatures, plenty of sunshine, and cloudless-skies. Didn’t do much good for me, seeing as I was stuck inside until my parents came home from their vacation the next day. Our little house on the outskirts of Regina, New Mexico, was deathly silent. Really, I didn’t exactly like being home alone, but they’d been saving for this vacation for so long…
During the day, I wandered down the skinny road that wound through the dark forest bordering our property. Rose, our little cow-dog who took her job far too seriously for such a small thing, ventured out with me, sometimes playfully nipping at my heels if I wasn’t walking fast enough. Other times, she’d dart off ahead to chase a stray bird, but she’d always dash right back.
