Blood was running down the front of the refrigerator when I returned to the cabin that afternoon. When I came closer, I found the red liquid was coming from the freezer, the small aluminum door already permeated by the scent of decay. I yanked the door wide open but was not greeted by the rush of chilled air that I expected. “Shit” I cursed. The power had gone out while Phil and I were over the ridge, causing the meat from our first buck to spoil. Worse yet, the Jaeger was lacking that lovely white mist that always chilled around the glass bottle. It didn’t help that the rickety old cabin we had rented in the woods was no better than a dream catcher at keeping out flies. The flies out here were humungous and their black skin flashed turquoise in the sunlight. Already the smell of rotten meat had attracted a whole circus of the damn things. I opened the fridge and touched my fingertips to the sides of the Coors Lite cans on the middle shelf. Warm. Phil was going to be awfully disappointed when he returned. I tested the radio on the kitchen counter and got nothing. Great, I thought. Three days in the steaming hot woods of southern Indiana in Augustus with no power. I would have called the land owner that rented us the cabin to complain, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good even our cells got signal out here. The old bastard told us he hadn’t rented out the place in over five years and warned us ahead of time that it was no resort condominium. Besides, what could I do? Write him a bad review on Yelp? He was just an old fart that was letting a friend of a friend of a friend stay in a rundown shack on their hunting trip. I cracked open the tab on a warm Coors Lite and sat on the dusty old couch. Kicking my feet up on the table, I took in the charming terror of the décor. Cob webs galore, animal heads that had been mounted on the walls by the hand of a clearly amateur taxidermist. The windows were caked with dust and speckled in black splotches. Somewhere in the tiny cabin there was a slow but steady leak that could be heard in every room, though our attempts at uncovering the source turned up nothing. For some reason, someone had decided to display a large, yellowed bone across the mantle. It must have been a foot and a half long, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what animal it could have come from. I checked my watch: six thirty in the evening. The sun would be setting in an hour or two, but when I split the inseam of my pants earlier and decided to call it a day, Phil resolved to stay out and try his luck. We had each bought a tag and I had bagged an eight pointer the very first morning, so we still had one open. Phil was determined to get his kill. And he was determined to do it with his new RedHead compound bow. He spent the whole three hour ride out here bragging about the damn thing. This isn’t the 1800’s, so I’ll stick with my rifle. I couldn’t cook on the electric range since we were currently without power and it was far too hot to start up the old wood burning stove that lay dormant in the corner of the kitchenette. I shrugged and grabbed a bag of chips and crunched down the salty crisps with a couple more hot beers. Time passed slowly, but eventually the night settled outside and the dirty old shack started to cool down. I opened the windows and the shack was flooded with the sound of bug calls. I checked the time again. Eight forty-five and Phil was still out there. I stepped out onto the porch and leaned against one of the columns, staring out into the complete black of the woods. An owl hooted in the trees. I took another sip from my Coors then chucked the can off into the woods. “That fucker’s probably got himself lost” I said to myself. When the can bounced into the bushes, something in the brush rustled and retreated away from the spot. Probably just an animal, but I called out Phil’s name in case he was stumbling around in circles just out of sight of the cabin. When I shouted, the movement abruptly stopped. Raccoons, I thought. They were crafty little things, but we had ensured that all of our food was sealed up tight. I went back inside and returned to the couch, set to kick my feet up and wait. Half an hour must have passed when I heard the warped boards of the porch creak. I sat up, expecting Phil to come galumphing in with his stupid bow hung over his shoulder in defeat. But no one came in. I walked over to the door and peeked through the small rectangular windows on either side of the door frame. Nothing but darkness outside. Animals fucking with me, I groaned. It was admittedly a tad creepy just hanging out in a cabin by yourself in the middle of nowhere. This was compounded by the flickering fire light of the many candles I had lit around the living room, since there was still no power to the lamps. I turned to head for the kitchen and continue my lukewarm bender when I spotted something staring into the open window across the room. It was the head of a deer, its beady black eyes staring blankly into the room while its rack of antlers swayed from side to side. The deer was completely silent and not looking at me, so I wondered if it was even aware of my presence. My rifle was leaning against the corner where I had left it when I first got back to the cabin and I thought I might try to creep over and grab it. Imagine Phil’s face when I told him that I got a second kill when a dumbass deer just wandered up to me to be shot. My feet shuffled towards the weapon, but the moment I took my eyes off of the deer’s dull stare, it vanished. I rushed over to the window and stuck my head out. About ten yards off, the buck’s head was protruding from the top of a blackberry bush, still staring blankly at the cabin. “The hell is up with this deer” I muttered. But I soon left the window and returned to the kitchen to start in on the Jaeger. I poured a shot of the sticky molasses-thick liquor and went back to raise a toast to the brain-dead deer in the bushes. However, he had moved on while I was at the freezer. I shrugged and swallowed down the shot. Not five more minutes had passed when I heard a crash in Phil’s bedroom. I went to investigate, grabbing a candle from a nearby table. Phil’s room was pitch-black before I thrust the flame of the candle ahead of me. The window was wide open and the curtain blowing in the night breeze, but I had opened it myself earlier. I bent down next to the window and found a clump of brown fur that had snagged in the splintered window frame. That damn deer, I laughed to myself. It is determined to come in here and get blasted. When I turned to leave the room, I stepped on something hard and crunchy. Looking down at what I had trampled, I found Phil’s handheld GPS with a splintered screen. The screen was my doing. And we had left the GPS here at the cabin since we brought mine out and assumed we’d be fine with just the one. But how did it end up on the floor? And how did the power turn on, I asked as I picked it up and increased the pale green brightness of the screen. There were no locations marked, so I just shut the handheld down and set it back on the foot of the bed. I wondered how the hell a deer managed to turn on an electronic device with such small buttons. One by one I shut all of the windows in the cabin and made sure they were locked. All this quiet was starting to creep in on me and my head was filled with eerie what-ifs and beyond-worst-case scenarios. I grabbed my rifle and thrust my feet down into my boots. Phil was still nowhere to be found and, according to my phone, it was very quickly approaching midnight. I noted that the battery was at only 10%, but with no signal out here in the hills, it didn’t matter much anyways. I put on my head lamp and grabbed an extra flashlight and my rifle and started back off into the woods towards where Phil and I had set up our tree stands. That idiot was probably lost out here or fell asleep in his stand or something, so I had to find him. It was about two miles from the cabin where we had set up. Hiking at night entails a laundry list of problems that you don’t have to worry about in the light of day. Roots trip you, you could plummet into any ravine that you happened across, and the maze of trees was even more unnavigable than it was during the day. I had the foresight to bring along Phil’s GPS, but it was hard to distinguish the topographic lines through the spiderwebbing cracks in the screen. The red cone of my headlamp swept back and forth ahead of me and I didn’t want to lose my night vision by turning on my flashlight. Whatever creepiness I felt in the cabin was amplified a hundredfold out in the open woods. The insect chirping echoed all around me and my heart froze in my chest every time some nocturnal animal shuffled about nearby. About a quarter of the way to the tree stands, I heard what sounded like a thick branch snapping off to my left. I turned to look. The dim red light of my headlamp caught the antlers of a big stag wandering through a patch of tangled bramble. What the hell, I thought, all the deer should be bedding down by this time of night. Another rustling sound startled me. It must have been no more than twenty feet behind me. I turned just in time to catch another deer’s beady eyes shimmer in the red light before disappearing into the underbrush. My grip tightened on my Remington 700. No way in hell was I going to come out here and get jumped by a herd of insomniac deer. But I had to continue on. Unfortunately, my presence captivated the attention of the herd. Every hundred feet or so I heard branches snapping or waxy leaves hissing across one another as another buck meandered along nearby. I counted half a dozen times that I would spot some curious stag lift its head out of the cover of bushes to watch me, only to sink back out of sight. A mile and a half later, I began to hear them chatter. But they sounded nothing like the usual grunts and bellows of white-tails. The sounds they made almost reminded me of words, though this communication was orchestrated through a series of barks and clicks and moans. When one would chatter on my left, others would respond ahead of me or at my flank. What in the hell was going on with these deer? The nearer I drew to the clearing where Phil and I had set up our stands, the more the forest began to sound like some guttural, animalistic call-and-response congregation. Halfway through the hike I had noticed a taller buck with twelve pronged antlers that had now taken the de facto role of the initiator. It called out a series of groans and barks and the rest of the congregation would repeat them back. I knew I was nearing where I had last seen Phil, so I called out his name into the trees. I got no response from my friend, but it seemed to frenzy the chatter of the deer. There must have been fifteen or more of them at this point, judging by the replies that sprouted up all around me in the dark woods. The sounds arose from the slopes of the tall ridges that rose up in the rolling hills of the Hoosier wilderness. I swore I heard one of the deer call out from the top of a nearby walnut tree, but it was silly to think that deer had learned to climb. When I did look up at the canopy, however, I managed to find the tree stand where I had left Phil. It was empty. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and began to climb the metal rungs that Phil drove into the trunk of the tree. When I reached the small plastic and metal folding stand, the red light of my headlamp revealed that a pool of blood had settled in the bowl of the seat. I turned on my flashlight and traced the white beam down the trunk of the tree where blood was smeared across the bark. I descended to the base of the tree where I found a large splatter of blood and, in the center of it, one of Phil’s carbon Easton arrows broken in half. The black shaft was smeared in red ooze. Had Phil injured himself with his own equipment? If so, he must be desperately crawling around in the dark, searching for the cabin as he loses blood. I swept the beam of my flashlight across the forest floor, keeping an eye out for the telltale glint of blood shining in the white light. I found the trail headed west, away from the cabin. I consulted the handheld GPS. To the west was a tall, long ridge that rose up a hundred feet, and at a pretty steep incline. So why, I asked myself, would an injured man head towards the biggest obstacle in sight? I guessed that Phil had his phone on him and had headed to higher ground to try picking up a signal. Maybe he had called for help and was already bedded down in some small-town clinic. But maybe he was still lying up there, off the network. I checked my own cell to see if I was in range. Not only was the signal as dead as a rock, my juiceless battery made my phone’s usefulness about as much as said rock. And to make matters worse, the cracks on the screen of the GPS had gotten so bad that the screen was becoming nothing more than a fuzzy green glow. Despite the failures of technology, I could still manage a search on my own. With the ray of the flashlight bouncing around ahead of me, I followed the trail of blood towards the west. The ridge was steeper than I had gathered from the topographic lines. At times I found myself clawing my way up the loose soil of the slopes on all fours. The deer that had been pursuing me seemed to have no issue with the terrain, though, as their calls had grown louder, more frequent, and revolved around me in every direction. I spotted their long faces floating through the dark; sets of beady eyes flashed in the passing illumination of my flashlight. I crested the ridge and the indiscernible grunts and barks of the herd became refined into a hushed conversation. As if they were gathered in a sitting room, discussing the weather over tea. I shouted Phil’s name down into the next valley. The deer emulated me, raising a guttural mimicry of the name in unison. I shivered, despite the humidity of the summer air. I called louder, as did the deer. Needless to say, I was freaking the fuck out. I was near hysterics when I began to shout and curse and scream at whatever white-tail groaned next. One buck bleated not fifteen feet from me and so I turned towards the sound and charged towards the bushes like a madman. When I burst through the undergrowth, I found the bushes empty apart from a torn pair of pants hanging on a low branch. They were camouflage print and darkened by a bloodstain. I held the pants in front of me, staring in disbelief. These were Phil’s pants. Well, I wasn’t sure that they were, but who else’s could they be? Ten feet ahead, I spotted the emotionless face of a deer facing me. Its eyes reflected the red light of my head lamp, but they seemed… dead. You can tell the stare of a dead man’s eyes from that of the living and this was no different. The skin and fur of the buck’s head was loose. Icy tendrils of fear took root in my every muscle and adrenaline had flooded my system so thoroughly that my shaking hands could no longer hold the flashlight. It dropped to the forest floor and sprayed its silver light like a drive-in movie projector onto the trees. Those faces. Nine, maybe ten of them, peering back at me in the cone of light. Their dead eyes locked on me. Their antlers rattled against the branches and leaves as they began to hoot and bark in feverish discord. My stiff legs suddenly unlocked and I darted off down into the valley. After only a few steps I lost my footing and began to somersault down the slope. My body bounced off of tree trunks and logs. I hit a rock hard and my body tumbled like a rag doll. Eventually I landed with a thud on the dirt and slid down the rest of the way on my back. I heard the metallic clang of my rifle as it bounced off of a rock and dropped off somewhere into a dry ravine. When I finally came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, my ribcage burned with pain and my shoulders ached. I was conscious long enough to grasp at the back of my head where a warm wetness had matted my hair. I awoke again upside down and with a pounding headache. My thighs burned. My shoulders were too shaky to lift my arms, which dangled down towards the ground. I weakly lifted my head and discerned that I was hanging by my ankle. The frayed old rope that I hung by seemed to go up and up into the distant treetops. I looked down and the muddy floor of the forest was seven feet below. The leg that hadn’t been tied was bent aside at the knee and hanging near my hip, clearly broken. Slowly, my blurry vision cleared and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The plants on the ground here were short and sparse. I quickly spotted the bucks’ heads circled around me. However, these heads were not attached to deer. They sat atop the shoulders of pale, gaunt human bodies. They were naked and squatting so that their skinny bodies were folded up with their arms hugged around their knees. There must have been twenty of them encircling me, all crouched there motionless, packed up in pale balls along the forest floor. Now and then one of them let out a low moaning call and the others would reciprocate. Strength was starting to return to my arms and so I flailed them. This made me slowly spin on the rope and I could see a field of emaciated, pale deer-men squatting all around me. Their shrunken bodies were completely still except for the slight sway of the antlers they wore. The smell of rotten flesh and dried blood choked me. As I spun further, I came face to face with Phil. He was hung by the ankle just like I was, about ten feet away. He had been stripped naked and his torso eviscerated. His wet entrails hung out of him like twisted fly tape. On the ground beneath him lay Phil’s skinning knife. The blade was painted in his blood. I vomited. The burn of stomach acid spread down my throat, as I was continued spinning upside down. When the bile splattered on the dirt, it seemed to awaken the interest of the deer-men. They rose—unfolded their thin bodies—in unison. The way they stood was uncannily smooth, as if their heads were floating up and their bodies simply rising up on puppet strings below. The whole congregation glided towards me. The nearest ones convened beneath, the dead deer’s’ eyes staring blankly into my face. They poured out of the forest in droves, numbering thirty, thirty-five, forty of them. Breath fled my lungs. My muscles were trembling like mad. I clenched my eyes shut tight and tried to wish this nightmare away. Sweat was streaming down my face and dripping onto the snouts of the terrible creatures gathered below. They were crowding in as tightly as they could, my broken body the very center of their world. “Mr. Wilson!” A man’s voice cut through the night. “Mr. O’Donnel!” The deer heads turned towards the voices coming down from the ridge. The dozens of them cooed and grunted and chittered at once. “Mr. Wilson!” This was a different voice than the first. “Mr. O’Donnel!” The call was followed by the crack of a gunshot that echoed down in the valley. Whoever was up there was calling to me. Firing into the air for my attention. They were looking for me. For Phil. “Heeeeeeeelp!” I screamed into the air. My lungs seared like hell from the effort. “Over here! Help!” “I heard something over here!” One of the distance voices called, “Mr. Wilson!” “Heeeeeeey!” I cried with every mote of air in my chest. The deer-men mewled in anger. They stamped their feet on the wet mud, still staring up the ridge. But someone in the search party fired their rifle into the air again and the clap of the gunpowder reverberated in the hills. The deer-men scrambled below and retreated from the clearing in every direction, snorting and howling as they vanished. “Mr. Wilson! Mr. O’Donnel!” The voices called again, much closer now. “Mr. Wilson!” I tried to yell again, but I was winded. My head was throbbing. I could feel the warm blood still dripping off the back of my head. The night air grew inexplicably cold and my world darkened. I awoke in a small hospital in Jasper, Indiana. My whole body ached and I was beyond exhausted. The nurse recounted to me what had happened while I was unconscious. Gerald Thorpe, the land owner who had rented us the cabin, had received a call from Phil around eleven that night. Phil was frantic and delirious and begging for help, but the signal was so poor that Mr. Thorpe could only make out the fear in Phil’s voice laced in the heavy static that crackled in the speaker. Mr. Thorpe tried to call us both several times, but there was no signal to reach, so he drove out to the cabin from his farm an hour away and found it empty, the inside completely wrecked. By some miracle, he and his sons had tracked my path through the woods and came across the grisly scene in the valley. The police were combing the woods for Phil’s killers. The FBI was getting involved. The nurse informed me that a special detective would be visiting soon to take down my story. When the nurse went on to her next patient, I shut the television off and stared out the large window of my hospital room. The sun glowed a bright gold and the sky was cloudless. The world was carrying on as if the terror of the previous night had never happened. A detective was on his way. But what could I tell him? How could I tell him about the shrunken, pale men with deer’s heads and not sound insane? How could I convince a detective that I had been tracked for three miles through the dark forest by deer-men? How could I ever tell the truth about what killed Phil Wilson in those woods?
Submitted October 03, 2015 at 02:04PM by RecoverinAlcoholic http://ift.tt/1L3MSOi nosleep
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