Sleep Tight

Did it know what I had planned for it?

Our destination was not far, but the roaming hills through which our taken country road penetrated, rose up and diminished with regularity; a stark reminder of the ominous isolation of night. Occasionally on the way I could hear something from behind, but I refused to look for that thing in the dark. Patience; it would not be long before I would confront it.

The irony hit me, I was worried about scaring off the same thing which had terrified and tortured me as a child. I had to be resilient and so drove carefully and calmly through the countryside, swamped by darkness, hoping that my unearthly passenger would not suspect me.

I arrived.

The wheels of the car struggled and slid on the undergrowth as I headed off of the narrow country road. The landscape had opened up and as I looked at the broken and rotting trees around me, I felt that it was fitting to come to this bleak place in the cold night, to destroy that bleakest of things.

The land suddenly came to an abrupt end; a cliff etched out from an old quarry, looking deep into the black waters of the lake below. The cliff edge was relatively flat and had in fact at one time housed a road which had subsided into the lake decades earlier. The local kids would tell stories about the vengeful ghosts of those killed during the subsidence, but they were just stories. Or perhaps they weren't. In the past I would have disregarded such tales, but who would believe mine if I told it to them now?

I switched the engine off and parked several metres away from the cliff edge, switching off any lights and composing myself for what would come. I sat in that car for what seemed a lifetime, the only company given to me by the occasional splash of water against the cliff below.