SO EP:715 Bigfoot Country: Part One

was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through the window now and I don't see anything. I don't want to go outside. Jesus Quice, you better hello, get somebody out here. Quin. I'm out there. I thought of a bit about Tech forty nine. I don't know easy out there. Yeah, I'm walking right head.

of narration. So I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes, and honestly, I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited and a little nervous to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I want to take a minute just you and me. What you're about to hear is loosely based on my life. Some of it happened exactly the way I tell it, no embellishment, no polish. Other parts are rooted in real experiences, real people, real moments, real emotions, but maybe stretched a bit or

reimagine to help the story breathe. And then there are parts where, well you get to decide what you believe. I also want to be upfront about something early on you might find yourself wondering where this is all headed. There's a lot of groundwork, family, childhood, personal history. Just know this, it's going somewhere. This book is about Bigfoot. That's the destination, I promise. Just trust me long enough to get there. At its heart, this is a story

about my earliest experiences with the strange and unexplained. It starts with something that happened to me when I was twelve years old, and encounter with what I believe was a sasquatch. That moment stayed with me. It shaped a lot of who I became, and for years I struggled with how or even if I should ever tell that story, because how do you talk about something the world insists isn't real? How do you open yourself up like that knowing people are going to judge you, doubt you, or

dismiss you entirely. But these stories have always mattered to me. This book has always mattered, and at some point I realized I was done keeping it all tucked away. Here's the thing, though, I didn't just write about Bigfoot. I wrote about me, all of me, my childhood, my parents, my failures, my struggles, and yeah, Danny, I know that part isn't going to sit well with everyone. I get that some folks are going to have opinions, and that's their right, But for me, leaving any of that out

would have been dishonest. I can't ask you to trust me with these experiences and then hide pieces of who I am. I can't tell my story with that, including the person who stood beside me through the hardest parts of it. That's just not how I live, and it's not how this book was written. Believe me. I thought about sanding down the rough edges, making it cleaner, safer, easier to swallow, cutting out the parts that might make

people uncomfortable. But I couldn't do it. I've spent too much of my life holding back, and I'm done with that. So this is me. This is my story, all of it. Some of what you'll hear happened exactly as I describe it. Some of it is how I imagine things might have gone if the timing had been different, if I'd pushed harder, if the world worked the way I think it sometimes should. And one last thing before we start. This is book one. There's more coming, a lot more. This is just the beginning.

I hope you enjoy Bigfoot Country as much as I did writing it. Bigfoot Country based on a true story, well sorta. Part one, the hollow Chapter one, the Road to Nowhere. The truck rattled down the dirt road like it was trying to shake itself apart, and I pressed my face against the window, watching the trees close in around us, Georgia pines, mostly tall and straight as telephone poles, their branches starting way up high, like they couldn't be

bothered with the ground between them. The hardwoods were just starting to turn, splashes of orange and red mixed in with all that green. It was September of nineteen eighty four, just a few months before my twelfth birthday, and everything I'd ever known was disappearing in the side mirror. Daddy's hands gripped the steering wheel like he was strangling it. He hadn't said more than ten words since we'd left the old place in Somerville, and that suited me fine.

When Jerry Patterson got quiet, it usually meant the storm was building. Better to let it build than to be the one who set it off. Mama sat between us, her hip pressed against mine every time Daddy took a curve to fast. She smelled like the Jurgen's lotion she rubbed on her hands every night, and the faint sweetness of the doctor pepper she'd been nursing since we stopped for gas an hour back. Jean Patterson was a small woman, barely five foot two, but She had a way of

taking up space when she wanted to. Right now, she was trying to make herself invisible, same as me. How much further, I asked, not really expecting an answer. When we get there, We get there. Daddy's voice sounded like gravel mixed with cigarette smoke. He reached for the pack of Winston's on the dashboard without taking his eyes off the road. Mama put her hand on my knee and squeezed. That was her way. She couldn't fix things, couldn't make Daddy any different than he was, but she could let

me know I wasn't alone. In the silence, the road narrowed. What had been two lanes of cracked asphalt became one lane of packed red clay, and the trees pressed in even closer. Spanish moss hung from the branches of the oaks, like old gray ghosts, reaching down to touch the truck as we passed. I'd seen plenty of woods in my twelve years, but nothing like this. This felt old, This felt like the kind of place that had been here long before people came, and would be here long after

we were gone. Then the trees opened up, and there it was. The house sat at the end of the road, like something that had crawled there to die. It was white once, I think, but years of Georgia weather had turned it the color of old bones. The porch sagged in the middle, and one of the upstairs windows was covered with a piece of plywood that had started to warp. A rusted propane tank squatted in the sideyard like a beached submarine. Home, Sweet Home, Daddy said, and laughed. It

wasn't a nice laugh. I climbed out of the truck and stood there in the dirt driveway, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Behind the house, the land rose up in a gentle slope before disappearing into woods so thick and dark they looked like a wall. Eighty acres, the landlord had said, eighty acres of woods and howlers and creek bottoms, and all of it was ours to use, as long as we paid the rent on time. Daddy was already carrying boxes inside, his boots

heavy on the porch steps. Mama stood beside me, her arms crossed over her chest like she was cold, even though the September heat was thick enough to chew. It'll be all right, she said, I couldn't tell if she was talking to me or to herself. Yes, ma'am, she turned and looked at me, really looked the way she did when she wanted me to hear something important. Brian, I know this isn't what you wanted. I know you had friends back in Somerville at your school, had your life,

but sometimes we got to play the hand. Where dealt you understand? I nodded, even though I didn't understand, not really. I didn't understand why Daddy couldn't hold down a job for more than a few months at a time. Didn't understand why we had to keep moving, keep running from landlords and creditors and all the messes he made. Didn't understand why Mama stayed with him, why she kept believing things would get better when everything I'd seen in my

twelve years told me they never would. But I was twelve. Understanding wasn't my job yet. My job was to keep my head down, stay out of Daddy's way, and wait for the next storm to pass. Go on and pick out your room, Mama said, top of the stairs. Take your pick, Just leave the big one at the end of the hall for me and your daddy. I grabbed my duffel bag from the truck bed and headed inside. The house smelled like dust and old newspapers and something

else underneath, something sour and wrong. I tried not to think about what might have happened here before we came, what kind of people might have lived and died within these walls. The floorboards creaked under my feet as I climbed the stairs, and I swear I could feel the house shifting around me, settling into its bones, like an old man easing into a chair. There were three bedrooms upstairs. The big one at the end of the hall had two windows that looked out over the backyard and the

woods beyond. The one next to it was barely bigger than a closet with a single window that faced the driveway. But the third room, the one at the front of the house that one called to me. It wasn't much to look at water stains on the ceiling, wallpaper peeling at the corners, a closet door that hung crooked on its hinges, But the window, the window was something special.

It looked out over the front porch roof, and beyond that I could see the dirt road stretching back through the trees, toward the highway, toward civilization, toward the world I'd left behind. I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and sat down on the bare mattress that someone had left behind. Springs poked through the fabric in places, and it smelled like mildew, but I didn't care. This was mine now, this little room at the top of this dying house, at the end of this dirt road,

in the middle of nowhere mine. From downstairs, I could hear Daddy cursing at something, a box he'd dropped, probably, or maybe he'd found the bottle he'd hidden in the truck and was just getting started on his evening. Either way, I knew better than to go back down, better to stay up here where it was quiet, better to wait until Mamma called me for dinner. I laid back on the mattress and stared at the water stains on the ceiling.

If I squinted just right, they almost looked like a map, rivers and mountains in vast empty spaces where anything could be hiding anything at all. Outside, the sun was going down behind the trees, and the shadows were getting long. Somewhere in the distance, a whipper wheel started calling over and over, like it was trying to tell me something. I closed my eyes and listened. This was home now, for better or worse. This sagging house, these endless woods,

this family that was coming apart at the seams. This was all I had. I just didn't know yet how much it would cost me. Chapter two, The Woods Have Eyes. The first few weeks lyrely passed in a blur of unpacking boxes and learning the rhythms of a new place. School started, and I found myself sitting in the back of classrooms, surrounded by kids who'd known each other since birth, kids whose families went back generations. In this little town

that didn't even have a stoplight. I was the outsider, the new kid, the boy from somewhere else, who didn't know the history, didn't know the stories, didn't know which

families had been feuding since before the Civil War. I kept my head down and my mouth shut, answered questions when teachers called on me, ate my lunch alone at a table in the corner of the cafeteria, and every day when the bus dropped me off at the end of that long dirt road, I walked home through the trees and felt something in my chest, loosen something that had been wound tight all day, finally letting go. The

woods were my salvation. I started exploring them that first weekend, when Daddy was off somewhere doing god knows what and Mama was too tired from unpacking to notice I was gone. I took my bb gun, a daisy that Daddy had given me for my tenth birthday, back when he still did things like that, and I headed into the trees behind the house. It didn't take long to realize that eighty acres was more land than I'd ever imagined. The woods went on forever, or at least it seemed that

way to a twelve year old boy. Hardwoods gave way to pine thickets. Pine thickets gave way to swampy bottoms, where the creek ran slow and dark, and everywhere everywhere there was life. Squirrels chattered at me from the branches. Birds I'd never seen before flashed through the underbrush. Once I came around to bend in a deer trail and found myself face to face with a dough and her fawn, all of us frozen in surprise before they bounded off

into the trees. I started making maps, crude things drawn on notebook page with a pencil that I kept sharpening with my pocket knife. I marked the big landmarks, the lightning struck oak that had split down the middle but kept on living, The boulder field where granite pushed up through the red clay, like bones breaking through skin. The swimming hole where the creek widened out into a pool deep enough to dive into. I gave them names, the Sentinel,

the graveyard, the baptism. And I built forts. Lord, did I build forts. The first one was simple, just some fallen branches leaned against a big oak to make a lean to, But it got more complicated as the weeks went on. I found an old tart behind the house, half rotted but still mostly waterproof, and I stretched it over a frame I built from saplings I cut with my pocket knife. I dragged logs over for seats. I dug a fire pit, even though I never lit a

fire in it, because Mama would have killed me. I stashed supplies out there, a rusty coffee can full of matches, a canteen i'd found it, a yard sale, some beef jerky i'd stolen from the kitchen. That fort became my home, my real home, and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll be right back after these messages. The place I went when Daddy was drinking and the tension in the house got so thick you could cut it

with a knife. The place I went when I needed to think, or when I didn't want to think at all. The place I went to be Brian, just Brian, not the quiet kid in the back of the classroom, or the boy who flinched when his father raised his voice. Mama knew I was spending time in the woods. She didn't say much about it, just made sure I was home before dark and that I had something in my belly before I went out. I think she understood in her way. She knew what it was like to need

a place to escape to. She just didn't have one of her own. By October, I thought I knew those woods pretty well. I'd mapped maybe forty or fifty acres, criss crossing back and forth until the trails were worn into the dirt from my footsteps alone. I knew where the deer bedded down, I knew where the squirrels nested. I knew which trees were good for climbing and which

ones would snap under your weight. But there was one section I hadn't explored, one corner of the property, way back at the far edge, where our land butted up against the National forest, that I'd been avoiding without really

knowing why. It started with a feeling. The first time I got close to that area, maybe two hundred yards from the property line, I felt this wrongness wash over me, like walking into a cold spot in a warm room, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, when the air gets thick and electric and every hair on your body stands up. I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart pounding for no reason I could name, and I turned

around and walked back the way i'd come. I told myself it was nothing, told myself, I was being stupid, being a baby. There was nothing in those woods that could hurt me. Bears maybe, but I'd never seen sign of any snake. Sure, but I knew to watch where I stepped. There was nothing to be afraid of. But I stayed away. Weeks passed, the leaves changed and fell. Daddy came and went, sometimes gone for days at a time, and when he was home, he was either drunk or

getting there. I learned the signs, the way his eyes went flat when he was two drinks in, the way his hands shook when he needed another one. I learned to make myself scarce. I learned to be invisible. Mama tried, she really did. She cooked dinner every night, even when Daddy didn't come home to eat it. She helped me with my homework, asked about my day, did all the

things a mother is supposed to do. But there was something fading in her, something going dim behind her eyes, the light that had always been there, the spark that made her gene instead of just daddy's work. It was getting harder to see. I escaped to the woods whenever I could, and that section i'd been avoiding it started calling to me. I don't know how else to describe it. It was like an itch. I couldn't scratch a song

I couldn't get out of my head. Every time I was out in the woods, I'd find myself drifting in that direction, getting a little closer, before that wrongness pushed me back. It was like the world's worst game of Chicken, me against whatever was back there in the dark. Finally, on a Saturday in late October, I decided I'd had enough. I was twelve years old, almost thirteen, too old to be scared of the dark, too old to let my

imagination run wild. I was going to go back there and prove to myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. Just trees, just woods, just another part of the property that I hadn't mapped yet. I grabbed my bb gun and headed out after breakfast, telling Mama i'd be back before lunch. She barely looked up from the dishes. Daddy was still asleep, sleeping off whatever he'd been doing the night before. The house was quiet in that heavy way it always was on weekend mornings, and I was

glad to get out. The walk took about half an hour. I followed my usual trails past the sentinel and around the edge of the graveyard until I hit the deer path that led back toward that forbidden corner. My heart was already beating faster, and I made myself slow down, take a breath. There's nothing out here, just trees. The wrongness hit me when I was about one hundred yards out that cold spot, feeling that electric tingle. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to turn around, to

go home, to stay away from this place. But I gritted my teeth and kept walking fifty yards. The trees were thicker here, older, less underbrush, but more shadows. The ground sloped upward toward a ridge I couldn't quite see twenty five yards. The hair on the back my neck was standing straight up. My hands were sweating on the stock of my bb gun. I could hear my own breathing, ragged and fast, and underneath it the woods had gone quiet.

No birds, no squirrels, nothing moving, nothing making a sound. That should have been my warning. That silence should have sent me running, But I was twelve and stubborn, and I had something to prove, so I kept going. I pushed through a thick patch of briers that tore at my jeans and scratched my arms. On the other side was a small clearing, maybe thirty feet across, carpeted with dead leaves and ringed by trees so tall I couldn't

see their tops. In the center of the clearing, there was a depression in the ground, like something big had been bedding down there. And the smell, God, the smell like a wet dog mixed with a dumpster behind a butcher shop, thick and organic and wrong. I stood at the edge of the clearing, frozen in place, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, what I was smelling, what I was feeling. And then I heard it. Footsteps, heavy footsteps, not the delicate step of a deer or

the scrabble of a squirrel. These were big, These were bipedal. These were something walking on two legs, something that weighed as much as a man. And then some They were coming from somewhere behind me, from the thick stand of trees and briars i'd just pushed through. I spun around, my bb gun raised like it could do anything against whatever was making that sound. But I couldn't see anything.

The underbrush was too thick, the shadows too deep. I could only hear it, hear it getting closer, Hear those footsteps, those impossibly heavy footsteps, crunching through the dead leaves. Then it stopped. For a long moment. There was nothing, no sound, no movement, just me and the silence and the pounding

of my own heart. And then it huffed. I don't know how to describe that sound, except to say it was the most primal thing i'd ever heard, Like a horse snorting but deeper, like a bear, growling but not quite. It was a challenge, a warning, a get out of my territory that needed no translation. Another huff closer now, maybe forty feet away, hidden somewhere in that wall of green and shadow. And then a growl that started low and built until I could feel it vibrating in my chest,

vibrating in my teeth, vibrating in my bones. I wanted to run. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to run, but my legs wouldn't move. They felt like they'd been planted in the ground, like four by four fence posts, driven deep into the red Georgia clay. I couldn't run. I couldn't even breathe. More sounds now, snorting, heavy, breathing, something that sounded almost like words but wasn't Runts and clicks that rose and fell in patterns that seemed to

mean something, even if I couldn't understand what. And underneath it, all those footsteps again, circling, moving around the edge of the clearing, getting closer. I couldn't see it. That was almost worse than if I could. I strained my eyes against the shadows, tried to catch a glimpse of whatever was out there, but the underbrush was too thick. All I had were sounds, sounds, and that god awful smell, and the absolute certainty that something was watching me, something big,

something that could end me if it wanted to. Then it charged. I heard the explosion of movement through the underbrush, branches, snapping, leaves, scattering, something massive coming straight at me through the trees. The sound was like nothing I'd ever heard, like a freight train, like a landslide, like the end of the world. It stopped, maybe twenty feet away. I still couldn't see it, and the shadows hid it from view, but I could hear

it breathing heavy, ragged breaths. I could smell it stronger than ever now, that rank animal stink, filling my nostrils until I thought I might gag. We stood there like that for what felt like forever, me frozen in the clearing, clutching my useless BB gun, It hidden in the trees, breathing and watching and waiting. I don't know what it was deciding. I don't know why it didn't finish what

it started. All I know is that. After a long, terrible moment, I heard those footsteps again, but this time they were moving away, fading into the distance, getting quieter and quieter, until they were gone. For another long moment, I couldn't move. My legs were still fence posts, my lungs were still locked, my heart was still trying to beat its way out of my chest. And then all at once, something broke loose inside me.

let me go. I ran until I saw the house through the trees, ran until I hit the barbed wire fence at the edge of the backyard. I didn't stop to find the place where the wires were loose enough to slip through. I just jumped, catching my leg on one of the barbs and leaving a piece of my jeans and a streak of blood on the rusty wire. And then I was in the yard, falling to my knees on the patchy grass, gasping for breath and shaking so hard I thought I might fly apart. Mama was inside.

I could see her through the kitchen win standing at the sink, washing dishes or peeling potatoes, or doing one of the thousand things she did every day to keep our broken little family running. I could have gone to her, could have told her what I'd heard, what had happened, what was out there in those woods. But I didn't. I couldn't. How do you tell someone that you've heard a monster? How do you explain that everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong, that there are

things out there that aren't supposed to exist? But do how do you put that into words that won't make you sound crazy? So I didn't say anything. I sat there in the grass until my breathing slowed, until my heart stopped racing, until my hand stopped shaking. Then I got up, brushed myself off and went inside. Mama looked up from the sink. You're back early. Everything okay, yes, ma'am, I said, just got tired. She nodded, accepting this. Why

wouldn't she It was just another Saturday, other day. She didn't know that everything had changed. She didn't know that her son had heard something impossible, something that would live in his nightmares for years to come. I went upstairs to my room and closed the door, sat on my bed and stared at the wall. Tried to make sense of what had happened. I couldn't, so I did what I'd learned to do with all the things I couldn't

make sense of. I buried it, pushed it down deep, locked it away in a box in my mind, and told myself it didn't happen, told myself it was just a bear, just my imagination, just the wind playing tricks on me. But I knew, deep down, in the place where the truth lives, even when you don't want to look at it, I knew what i'd heard, and I knew I'd never forget it. Chapter three, What Darkness Knows.

After that day in the woods, something shifted, not just in me, though that was part of it, the whole world seemed different, like I was looking at it through a lens that had been slightly out of focus my whole life and had suddenly snapped into clarity. Everything I thought I knew was wrong, everything I'd been taught about what was real and what wasn't wrong, And I couldn't tell anyone about it. So I did what kids do when they can't talk about something. I read about it.

The Chattooga County Library was a small brick building in the middle of Somerville, about fifteen miles from Lyarly. Mama took me there on Saturdays when she went to do her shopping, and while she was at the Pigly Wiggly loading up on groceries we could barely afford, I was in the stacks hunting for answers. At first, I didn't even know what to look for. I wandered through the sections, running my fingers along the spines, waiting for something to jump out at me, And then I found it. A

book with a dark cover and yellow letters. The title was simple Bigfoot. I pulled it off the shelf with shaking hands. The first chapter talked about sightings going back hundreds of years. Native America tribes had stories about these creatures. They called them different names, Sasquatch, Ti, Zamech, west oh Ma, but the descriptions were always the same. Tall Harry walking on two legs, incredibly strong, incredibly fast, and incredibly good

at staying hidden. I read until Mama came to pick me up, and then I checked out the book and read it again at home. Then I went back for more books about the lock Ness Monster, books about the Yetti, books about creatures that science said didn't exist, but that people kept seeing, kept reporting, kept swearing were real. I devoured them all. The librarian, a gray haired woman named

missus Hendricks, started to notice my interests. She'd save books for me, set them aside behind the counter with a little sticky note that said Brian on it. She never asked why I was so interested in monsters. Maybe she thought it was just a phase. Maybe she underst stood more than she let on. And stay tuned for more sasquatch ot to see. We'll be right back after these messages. But here's the thing about reading those books. They didn't

make me feel better. If anything, they made me feel worse, because now I knew I wasn't the only one. Now I knew that people had been encountering these things for centuries, had been reporting them, had been laughed at and dismissed and called crazy, and nothing had changed. The creatures were still out there, and the world still refused to believe. Meanwhile, life at home was getting worse. Daddy's drinking had always

been bad, but that fall it got dangerous. He'd switched from beer to the hard stuff, bourbon, mostly though he'd drink anything with alcohol in it if bourbon wasn't available, and he'd started taking pills downers, I learned later quaeludes, pain pills, anything that would slow down the world, make it soft and fuzzy around the edges. When he was on that stuff, he was unpredictable. Sometimes he'd go quiet, sitting in his recliner for hours, staring at the TV

with glassy eyes. Those were the good times. Other times he'd get mean. He'd pick fights with Mama over nothing, the way she'd cook the potatoes, the fact that I'd left a light on, the noise the floorboards made when we walked across them. He never hit her, not while I was around, anyway, but he came close. I saw him get right up in her face, screaming so loud that spit flew from his lips. I saw him punch holes in walls. I saw him throw a plate of

food across the kitchen because it wasn't hot enough. Mama took it. That's what kills me looking back. She just took it. She'd clean up the broken dishes, patch the holes in the walls with spackles she bought from the hardware store, and go on like nothing had happened, like this was just the price you paid for having a family. I hated him for it. I hated him so much it scared me. Sometime I'd lie in bed at night and imagine all the ways I could make him pay,

make him hurt the way he hurt us. But I was twelve years old and he was a grown man, and there wasn't anything I could do. Not yet, so I escaped to the woods, not to that corner of the property. I never went back there, but to my forts, my trails, my secret places. I'd spend hours out there alone with my thoughts and my bb gun and the animals that didn't judge me, didn't expect anything from me.

It was the only place I could breathe, and sometimes late at night when I couldn't sleep, I'd sit by my window and look out at the tree line and wonder if that thing was out there, listening, waiting, if it knew I'd stumbled into its territory, if it remembered me the way I remembered it. I never heard it again, but I never stopped believing. November came, and with it the cold. Not cold like up north, where the snow piles up the temperature drops below zero. Georgia cold is different.

It's wet and raw, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and stays there. The old house had no insulation to speak of, and the heating system was an ancient oil furnace that rattled and coughed and barely put out enough heat to keep the pipes from freezing. We wore layers inside. Mama knitted me a sweater from yarn. She'd bought it a yard sail, and I wore it over my regular clothes every day after school. At night, I piled every blanket I could find on my bed

and still woke up shivering. But the cold wasn't the worst thing about that November. One night I woke up to voices, not Daddy's voice, not mama's. These were different, whispery and indistinct, like someone talking in another room. But my room was at the end of the hall, and there was no one else up here. I lay in bed, perfectly still and listened. The voices seemed to be coming

from the walls. From inside the walls, I could hear them murmuring, chattering, having conversations in a language I couldn't understand. Sometimes they laughed, sometimes they cried, sometimes they screamed. I pulled the covers up over my head and told myself it was just the house settling. Old houses made noises, That's what Mama always said. Old houses had stories to tell, and sometimes they told them at night. But this didn't

feel like a house settling. This felt like something else, something alive, something that was aware of me, that knew I was listening, that wanted me to hear. The voices stopped around dawn. I got out of bed, with dark circles under my eyes, and went downstairs to find Mama already up making coffee in the kitchen. You look tired, she said, couldn't sleep. She nodded, understanding she'd been having trouble sleeping too. I could see it in her face,

in the way she moved. The house was wearing her down, same as it was wearing me. I didn't tell her about the voices. What was the point. She had enough to worry about without adding her son's nightmares to the list. The voices came back the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. But that wasn't the worst of it. No, the worst was what started happening around the end of November. I woke up one

night to the feeling that I wasn't alone. You know that feeling everyone does, that prickle on the back of your neck, that certainty that someone is watching you. I felt it, and my eyes snapped open, and there it was a figure standing at the foot of my bed. It was tall and dark, darker than the darkness around it. I couldn't see its face, couldn't see any features at all. It was just a shape, avoid a place where the light refused to go, and it was staring at me.

I knew it was staring at me, even though I couldn't see its eyes. I tried to scream, nothing came out. I tried to move. I couldn't. My body was locked in place, frozen like it had been in the woods that day, like those fence posts I'd become when I heard the thing charging me. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything but lie there and stare at this

impossible figure at the foot of my bed. It stood there for what felt like hours, just watching, just waiting, and then without any sound or movement, it was gone. One moment it was there, and the next moment I was alone in my room, gasping for breath, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might crack my ribs. I didn't sleep the rest of that night or the next. The figure came back, not every night, but often enough. Sometimes it stood at the foot of my bed. Sometimes

it stood in the corner. Once I woke up to find it looming over me, so close I should have been able to feel its breath on my face. But there was no breath, no heat, nothing but that impossible darkness, that void where a person should have been. And I could never move, never speak, never do anything but lie there and wait for it to go away. I know now that there's a name for what I was experiencing. Sleep paralysis, night terrors. The medical explanations are very tidy,

very scientific. Your brain wakes up before your body, and you hallucinate, and it's all perfectly normal. But here's the thing. Those explanations assume that what you're seeing isn't real. They assume that the figure at the foot of your bed is just a trick of your mind, a remnant of a dream, a misfire in your neurons. They don't account for what happened next. It was a week before Christmas

when I heard the scratching. I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, despite the cold and the fear and the weight of everything that was happening in that house. Mama had been tired lately, more tired than usual. She'd been having headaches, been feeling weak. Daddy was gone off somewhere for three days now, and part of me hoped he'd never come back. The scratching started in the wall next to my bed. At first I thought it was mice. We had mice. Every old house in Georgia had mice.

I'd heard them scurrying in the walls before, their tiny claws clicking against the wood. But this wasn't the sound of tiny claws. This was bigger, heavier. Something was in that wall, something that was scratching at the plaster like it wanted to get out. I lay perfectly still, holding my breath, listening. The scratching moved from beside my bed to the corner of the room, from the corner of the room to the closet, from the closet to the

other wall. It was circling me, moving through the house like it owned the place, like I was the intruder and it was just trying to scare me off. And then it stopped. I waited one minute, two five, nothing. I just started to relax when three loud knocks shook my bedroom door. I shot up in bed, my heart in my throat. Mama wouldn't knock like that. Mama barely knocked at all. She'd just tap lightly and call my name. These knocks were heavy, deliberate, demanding Mama. My voice came

out as a whisper. No answer. I got out of bed and crossed to the door on legs that didn't want to cooperate. My hand was shaking as I reached for the doorknob. I turned it, pulled the door open. The hallway was empty, but not dark. There was a light coming from downstairs, a flickering orange glow that threw shadows on the walls. I could smell smoke. Something was burning. I ran down the stairs to find Mama standing in the living room, staring at the fireplace. We never used

the fireplace. Daddy had said the chimney was blocked, that it wasn't safe. But there was a fire burning in it now, a big fire, flames licking up toward the flue, casting dancing shadows across the ceiling. Mama, she turned to look at me, and her face was pale, paler than I'd ever seen it. I didn't light it, she said, Brian, I didn't light it. We stood there together, mother and son,

watching that impossible fire burn in our block chimney. And I knew then, with a certainty that went beyond reason, that there was something in this house, something that had been here before us, something that didn't want us here, something that was just getting started. Chapter four, The slow Fade. Christmas came and went without much fanfare. Mama did her best, she always did her best, putting up a small tree in the corner of the living room, wrapping a few presents,

in newspaper because we couldn't afford real wrapping paper. I got a new pocket knife and a pair of jeens that actually fit. Daddy showed up on Christmas Eve sober for once, and for a few hours it almost felt like we were a normal family. Almost. But January brought something we weren't prepared for. Mama had been scratching at her arms for weeks. I'd noticed it, the way she'd dig at her skin when she thought no one was looking, the red marks that appeared on her forearms and stayed there.

She said it was dry skin, the winter air, nothing to worry about. But it kept getting worse. The scratching became constant, the red marks became welts, and then the welts became something else entirely. I came home from school one afternoon to find her sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her arms. The skin was raised in patches, red and angry, like something was trying to push its

way out from underneath Mama. She looked up at me, and I saw fear in her eyes, real fear, the kind of fear I'd only seen in my own reflection. After nights, when the dark figure visited. I need to see a doctor, she said. The doctor and lyrely, took one look at her arms and sent us to a specialist in Rome. The specialist took one look and sent us to Atlanta. And the doctors in Atlanta a whole team of them. It seemed like ran test after test

after test. I remember sitting in the waiting room of Emory University Hospital, watching Mama disappear through door after door, coming back looking more tired and more scared each time. Daddy was there for the first visit, but after that he started finding excuses not to come work. He said, bills to pay, couldn't take time off. We both knew it was lies. Finally, after two weeks of tests, a doctor sat us down in a small room with no windows and told us what they'd found, myacosis fungoids. I

didn't know what that meant. The words sounded foreign, clinical, like something out of one of those medical shows Mama liked to watch. The doctor explained it in terms I could understand, but even then it took a while to sink in skin cancer. Mama had skin cancer, a rare kind that started in the white blood cells and showed up in the skin it had been growing for a while, he said, maybe years. By the time it showed itself on the surface, it was already everywhere underneath. How long

Mama asked? Her voice was steady, but I could see her hands shaking in her lap. The doctor didn't want to answer. I could see it in his face, the way he looked away, the way he shuffled his papers. How long, Mama asked again? Six months? He said, maybe a year. With treatment, the world stopped. I know that

sounds dramatic, but it's true. In that moment, everything I thought I knew about my life, about my future, about what would happen next, all of it just stopped, like someone had hit pause on a tape player and forgotten to hit play again. Six months. My mama had six months to live. They admitted her to the hospital that day, started treatment immediately, chemotherapy. They called it poisoned to kill the cancer, but the poison killed everything else too, her hair,

her appetite, her strength. Day by day, I watched my mama fade away, watched her become someone I barely recognized. I was fourteen years old. My birthday had come and gone in December without much celebration, fourteen years old, and I was losing the only person in the world who'd ever really loved me. Daddy disappeared.

they're too much of a coward to face reality. But at the time, all I knew was that he was gone, just gone, like I didn't matter, like Mama didn't matter. And stay tuned for more sasquatch ot to see We'll be right back after these messages, like we were just problems he could walk away from. I hated him for it. I hated him more than I'd ever hated anything in my life. But I didn't have time for hate. I had to survive. The Henderson saved my life. Brad Henderson

was my best friend, my only friend really. We'd met at school a few months after we moved to Liary, bonding over a shared love of comic books and a shared hatred of the bullies who made our lives miserable. He was a skinny kid with red hair and freckles, quiet like me, the kind of kid who faded into

the background and liked it that way. His parents, Bill and Angie, were good people, the kind of people who went to church on Sundays and actually meant it, the kind of people who saw a kid in trouble and stepped up without being asked. When they found out about mama. When they found out that Daddy had vanished and I was living alone in that house at the end of

the dirt road, they didn't hesitate. Angie showed up at our door one evening with a casse role in her hands and a look on her face that said she wasn't taking no for an answer. You're coming to stay with us, she said, just until your mama gets better. I wanted to argue, wanted to say I could take care of myself, that I didn't need charity, that I'd

be fine. But the truth was I wasn't fine. I was fourteen years old and terrified and alone, and the house I was living in had something wrong with it, something that came alive at night and whispered in the walls and stood at the foot of my bed with no face and no mercy. So I went. The Henderson house was small but warm, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that always smelled like something baking. Brad gave up his room for me and slept on the couch, even

though I told him he didn't have to. You need it more than me, he said, And that was that. I went to school, I did my homework, I ate dinner with the Hendersons every night and pretended that everything was normal. And on weekends Bill drove me to Atlanta to visit Mama. Those visits were hard. The chemotherapy was brutal. Mama lost all her hair within the first month, and she was so weak she could barely lift her head

off the pillow. The cancer was everywhere now. The doctors talked about it in hushed voices, using words I didn't understand, spreading, aggressive, resistant to treatment. But Mama fought, God did she fight. I'm not going anywhere, she told me one Sunday afternoon, her voice barely more than a whisper you hear me, Brian, I'm not leaving you. I held her hand so thin now, the bones standing out like sticks under paper, and I

believed her. I had to believe her, because if I didn't, if I let myself think for even one second that she might really die, I would fall apart completely. Yes, ma'am, I said, She squeezed my hand. That's my boy. The months crawled by. Spring came, and with it the first signs that maybe the doctors had been wrong. Mama's numbers started improving. The cancer wasn't growing anymore. It wasn't shrinking either, but it wasn't growing. The doctors called it a plateau,

a holding pattern. They said it was rare, but not unheard of. They said we shouldn't get our hopes up. We got our hopes up anyway. Summer came. I turned fifteen in a hospital room, eating cake that Angie had baked, and watching Mama smile for the first time in months. She was still weak, still bald, still a shadow of the woman she'd been, but she was alive. She was fighting,

and she was winning. Fall came. The leaves changed outside Mama's hospital window, and she watched them with something like wonder in her eyes. I didn't think i'd see another fall. She said, you'll see a lot more. I told her. She smiled. Promise. I couldn't promise. I couldn't promise anything, but I nodded anyway, because that's what she needed, That's

what we both needed. December came, My birthday came and went, and then three days before Christmas, almost a year to the day after she was diagnosed, the doctors called a meeting. I sat in that same windowless room where they'd first told us about the cancer. Bill and Angie sat on either side of me, their hands on my shoulders like anchors, keeping me from floating away. The doctor who came in wasn't the same one who'd given us six months a

year ago. This was someone new, someone younger, someone with a smile on her face that I didn't dare interpret. Jeane's cancer is in remission, she said. I didn't understand. The words, didn't compute. I just sat there staring at her, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The tumors have shrunk significantly, the doctor continued. Her blood work is improving. She's not out of the woods yet. She'll need monitoring, follow up treatments, regular checkups. But for now the cancer

is retreating. She's going to be okay. My voice came out, cracked and strange. The doctor's smile widened. She's going home, Brian, your Mama's coming home for Christmas. I cried. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I sat in that windowless room and I cried like a baby, and Bill and Angie held me, and for the first time in almost a year, I let myself believe that everything might actually be okay. Mama came home on December twenty second. She weighed maybe

eighty pounds. Her head was bald and smooth, covered with the scarf that Angie had knitted for her. She was so weak she could barely walk, and Bill had to carry her from the car to the house while I held the door open and tried not to cry again. But she was home. She was alive. She'd beaten the odds,

beaten the doctor's predictions, beaten death itself. And the first thing she did once she was settled on the couch with a blanket over her legs and a cup of tea in her hands, was look at Daddy's empty chair and make a decision. We're leaving, she said. I thought I'd misheard her. What we're leaving, Brian, This house, this marriage,

all of it. She turned to look at me, and despite everything she'd been through, despite how weak and frail she was, there was steel in her eyes, the steel I remembered from before she got sick, the steel that had always been there, hiding under the surface, waiting for its moment. Your daddy isn't coming back, she said, And even if he did, I wouldn't take him. I spent a year fighting to stay alive, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend whatever time I have left

living like this. She reached out and took my hand. It's just you and me now, baby, you and me against the world. You're ready for that. I looked at my mama, this small, fierce woman who'd stared down death and won, and I nodded, yes, ma'am, I said, I'm ready. But I wasn't ready for what happened next. Nobody could have been ready for what happened next. Chapter five, Fire in the Night. The hospital had sent Mama home with

pain medication, strong stuff, oxycodone, morphine. Things I didn't know the names of Back then, she was supposed to take them for the lingering pain from the cancer and the treatment to help her sleep, to make the transition back to normal life a little easier. She never took them,

not because she didn't hurt. Lord knows she hurt. I could see it in the way she moved, the way she held herself, the way she sometimes stopped in the middle of doing something and just stood there with her eyes closed, waiting for a wave of pain to pass. But she'd seen what pills did to Daddy. She'd watched him disappear into bottles and baggies, watched him choose chemicals over his family. She wasn't about to follow him down

that road. I'd rather hurt than not be here, she told me once, when I asked why she didn't take her medicine. Pain means I'm alive. I can live with pain. So the pills sat in the medicine cabinet, a whole pharmacy's worth of narcotics, just waiting. Daddy found them within a week. I don't know how he knew we were back. Maybe someone in town told him, maybe he'd been watching

the house. Maybe he just got lucky but two days after Christmas, he showed up at the front door like nothing had happened, like he hadn't abandoned us for almost a year, like he hadn't left his wife to die and his son to fend for himself. He looked bad, worse than I'd ever seen him. His face was gaunt, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hand shook so bad he could barely hold his cigarette. Whatever he'd been doing for the past year, it hadn't been good to him, Jeane,

he said. When Mama opened the door, Baby, I'm so sorry, I'm so don't Mama's voice was ice. Don't you dare? I know I messed up. I know I shouldn't have you left. Mama stepped forward, and even as small and frail as she was, Daddy took a step back. I was dying, Jerry, I was dying, and you left. You left me alone, you left Brian alone, and now you show up at my door with sorry on your lips, like that's supposed to fix anything. I was scared. Daddy said,

I didn't know how to handle it. You were a coward. Mama said, You've always been a coward, and I'm done. You hear me, I'm done. She tried to close the door, Daddy stuck his foot in it. Just let me get my stuff, he said, I'll be out of your hair. I just need my stuff. Mama stared at him for a long moment, then she stepped back and let him in. I watched from the hallway as he moved through the house, gathering things, clothes, tools, a few bottles of boo he'd

hidden in place his mama hadn't found. And then he went into the bathroom, and I heard him rummaging around in the medicine cabinet. And when he came out, his pockets were bulging. He'd taken mama's pills, all of them, Jerry, Mama started, I need them more than you do, he said, And then he was out the door, climbing into his truck, disappearing down that long dirt road. We never saw him again. Well that's not entirely true. We saw what he did

with those pills. In a town as small as Liarly, word travels fast, Liarly was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody's business. Population maybe a thousand, no stoplight, one gas station, one grocery store, two churches, the kind of place where you couldn't sneeze without three people asking if you were coming down with something. Word got around quick about what Daddy was doing. He wasn't just taking the pills, he was selling them, trading them, using them

to buy more of the downers he really wanted. He'd become a small time dealer, operating out of whatever hole he was living in, feeding his habit by feeding other peoples. And word got around about us too, about Mama's cancer, about how the church had taken up a collection to help with medical bills, about how the community had rallied

around us while Daddy was nowhere to be found. People were angry, not at us, at him, at this man who'd taken their charity and their goodwill and thrown it away for pills, and booze, at this husband who'd abandoned his dying wife, At this father who'd left his child to fend for himself. I didn't know how angry until that night in January. I was asleep when the noise started. At first, I thought I was dreaming. The sounds were muffled,

distant voices, vehicles, the crunch of tires on gravel. But then Mama was shaking me awake, her hand on my shoulder, her face pale in the darkness. Brian, Brian, wake up, what's wrong. Something's happening outside. I got out of bed and followed her to the window. What I saw there is burned into my memory like a brand. The front yard was full of people, twenty maybe more, all of them dressed in white robes, all of them wearing masks

or hoods that covered their faces. And in the center of the yard, right in the middle of the dead winter grass, was a wooden cross, twenty feet tall at least, and it was burning. The Ku Klux Klan had come to our house. I'd heard of the Klan, of course everyone in Georgia had. They were supposed to be a relic of the past, something from the bad old days that didn't exist anymore. But here they were standing in our front yard, their robes glowing orange in the firelight,

their faces hidden behind white cloth. Get away from the window, Mama said. Her voice was steady, but I could see her hands shaking. Get down, Crouch beneath the windowsill, listening to the crackle of the flames and the murmur of voices outside. I couldn't make out what they were saying. It was just a low rumble, a crowd noise, punctuated by the occasional shout or cheer. Why, I asked, why are they here? Mama didn't answer for a long moment.

When she did, her voice was barely a whisper. Your daddy, She said, this is because of your daddy. I learned later what had happened. The clan in that part of Georgia, what was left of it, anyway, had gotten wind of Daddy's activities. They'd heard about the collection the church had taken up for us. They'd heard about Daddy abandoning his family, about him stealing the pain medication meant for his dying wife, about him selling drugs in a community that had shown

us nothing but kindness. They didn't approve. Now, I want to be clear about something. The clan is evil, always has been, always will be. What they did that night wasn't justice. It was terrorism. Burning across in someone's yard isn't a warning. It's a threat, a promise of violence if you don't fall in line. But I also understood even then that this wasn't really about us. Mama hadn't

done anything wrong. I hadn't done anything wrong. This was about Daddy, about his choices, about the shame he'd brought on his family, and a community that took such things seriously. We stayed huddled under that window for what felt like hours, listening to the fire burn and the crowd murmur, And then just as suddenly as they'd appeared, they were gone.

The headlights of their trucks were seated down the dirt road, the murmur of voices faded into the night, and we were alone with the smoldering remains of a twenty foot cross in our front yard. Mama called the sheriff. He came out, took some notes, shook his head a lot, said he'd look into it, but we all knew nothing would come of it. The clan protected their own and the law, and that part of Georgia wasn't exactly eager

to go poking around in their business. Y'all might want to think about moving, the sheriff said, before he left, might be healthier. Mama looked at the burned cross, than at me, then back at the sheriff. We're already planning on it, she said.

the Pattersons anymore. Well, I was still a Patterson. I kept Daddy's name because it was the only name I'd ever had, but Mama went back to her maiden name, Jeene Turner, like she was reclaiming something that had been taken from her. We couldn't afford much. What little money we had went to first and last month's rent on a tiny apartment in the low income housing complex over in Somerville. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, the size of a closet.

The walls were thin enough to hear our neighbor's TVs, and the carpet was stained in ways I didn't want to think about. But it was ours, and it was safe, and most importantly, it was far away from that house and lyrely, far away from the woods and the things that lived in them, far away from the darkness that had followed us for too long, or so I thought. The thing about trauma is that it doesn't care where

you live. You can move across town or across the country, but you can't outrun the things that live inside your head. I know that now. I didn't know it. Then the nightmares followed me to Somerville. The dark figure that had stood at the foot of my bed, and lyrely he came with us, appearing in my new room at random intervals, standing in the corner or looming over me while I

lay frozen and unable to scream. The voices in the walls were gone, and the scratching was gone, but the dreams remained vivid, terrible dreams of something chase seeing me through endless woods, something that huffed and growled and never quite let me see its face. I didn't tell Mama, she had enough to worry about. After we got settled,

she started looking for work. It wasn't easy. She was still weak from the cancer treatment, still bald under the scarf she wore, still dealing with follow up appointments and medications and all the aftermath of almost dying. But Jean Turner wasn't the kind of woman to sit around feeling sorry for herself. She got a job at the grocery store. First, part time, minimum wage, standing on her feet for six hours a day, bagging other people's groceries. It wasn't much,

but it was something. And then she got a second job, cleaning offices at night. And then, because apparently two jobs weren't enough, she enrolled in classes at the community college. I'm going to get my degree, she told me one night, her textbook spread out on the kitchen table while she drank coffee to stay awake. I'm going to make something of myself for you, for us. I wanted to tell her to slow down. I wanted to tell her that she didn't have to do this, that we'd be fine,

that her health was more important than any degree. But I saw the determination in her eyes, the same steel that had helped her beat cancer, and I knew better than to argue yes, ma'am, I said instead, And because I was my mother's son, I got a job too. I was fifteen years old and working at the Dairy Queen after school, flipping burgers and making blizzards and mopping floors at the end of the night. The pay was terrible,

but I didn't complain. Every dollar I earned was a dollar that Mama didn't have to worry about school, clothes, lunch money, the electric bill when it got too high. These were the things I bought with my minimum wage paycheck, and every one of them felt like a victory. I didn't have time for the woods anymore, didn't have time for forts, or maps or reading about cryptids in the library. My life had narrowed down to three things, school work and taking care of Mama. Everything else was a luxury

I couldn't afford. But I never forgot what I'd heard in those woods, back and lirely, never forgot the huffing and the growling, and the footsteps that sounded too big to be real. Never forgot the thing that had charged at me and stopped just twenty feet away, hidden in the underbrush, breathing and watching and deciding whether I was worth killing. I knew it was real. I knew it was out there, and someday, when I had the time and the resources and the freedom to look for answers,

I was going to find it again. But first I had to grow up. First, I had to survive