#the way I don’t go in the yard until it’s 9pm/ sunset in summer

[lilidawnonthemoon]

[puppymidnight]

The Night Stalker.

A short horror story I wrote based on this piece of artwork created by the amazingly talented @dappermouth!

I grew up living in a small town, population… I’d say about 15000 roughly. Give or take a few people. The whole place had a very bright and mellow charm about it growing up, everyone was slightly reserved but polite. I guess everybody just liked to keep to themselves. Despite the rumbling of small earthquakes now and then and the common deer collisions with cars it’s very peaceful most of the time. The town is enveloped in a very beautiful scenery, so I can thank mother nature for giving me a good home. We were surrounded by tall mountains which would be washed with an orange glow from the sunset on a clear days evening, and west of the town was a big forest that panned out to a big lake.

I used to go swimming in the lake during every day of spring and summer as a kid, which was probably my favourite thing to do, sometimes with my classmates and my best friend Jimmy as well. The best part had to be when I would sit at the deep end  and let my legs dangle over the edge, that’s where the all the stringy moss would brush against the bottom of my feet. My parents always told me to come back when it started to get dark because of two reasons, the first being general safety for your child as parents do. The second being the town curfew. This pretty much applied to everyone who lived in the town but the rule was made clear regularly in school and community centre meetings; Never go outside when the sun has set.

For a long time during my childhood I never really understood why the rule was there, or how none of the grown ups would talk about it. The only other rule they really enforced was to drive slow to shorten road accidents with the wildlife, but that’s understandable.  My mother would tell me tales about this creature that lurks around the streets at night called the Night Stalker, and that it would eat all the naughty kids that disobeyed their parents. For the longest time it gave me chills and was definitely some good nightmare fuel for a while, but like most childhood things you grow out of that stuff eventually. It wasn’t until I was about 12 years old that I started getting curious about this curfew and what it really meant.

It all started one day when this girl called Nancy in my maths class didn’t show up, which was weird because she never missed a day of school, or even turned up late for that matter. None of the other kids really knew what was going on until a few days later when the head teacher announced to everyone that Nancy had drowned in the lake. Apparently she tried to go swimming at night without any arm bands, and because of her carelessness she couldn’t stay afloat. At first I didn’t think of it much because only a handful of people would go missing every year, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. But the more I thought about it the more it didn’t make any sense.

For starters, Nancy would never break any rules whether it was school rules or the curfew. Not even the grown ups would go out at night. Also she was a great swimmer, I’ve swam with her in the lake a few times and she could swim far out to the deep end and back again without breaking a sweat. I’ve never seen her use arm bands or pool floaties ever. The only thing she really did apart from swimming and doing homework was have sleepovers with her best friend Beth so the whole thing was very confusing. I tried talking to her about Nancy and what happened but she wouldn’t speak about it, which made sense because she just lost a friend.

I asked around some of Beth’s close friends to find out more but all I got from them was that Nancy sneaked out of her home to have a ‘super secret sleepover’ that they were planning, but never showed up. Which was odd considering Nancy and Beth lived only 2 blocks away. One thing that I did find unsettling was overhearing some of the older teenagers talking about it, apparently one of them saw the body when it was being pulled out of the lake. They said that the body was completely crushed and broken like it was hit by a car or truck, which is weird because the town never really gets that much traffic. Over the following weeks I contemplated the whole thing over and over in my head, everything was a blur because my mind was always somewhere else.

Eventually I told Jimmy about everything that I overheard and the thoughts I was having, and we ended up talking about it for hours. He theorised that Nancy’s death was somehow connected to the town’s curfew, which I was sceptical about at first but made sense the more I thought it over. Soon we hatched a plan during lunch break to figure out what really happened. I invited him to a sleep over at my place the following Sunday, my mother made lasagne and we stayed up watching cartoons. After going to bed at 9pm we slept for roughly 5 hours until we were sure that my parents were asleep. Jimmy had set an alarm on his watch so he could wake me up. We got dressed into our outdoor clothes and grabbed some flash lights that he had packed the day before and I pulled back the curtains, slowly opened the window and quietly jumped into one of the hedges below. Jimmy soon followed and we both turned on our flash lights.

The sky was an eerie dark blue and all of our surroundings were caked in a thick fog, we could barely see 5 yards ahead of us. Everything was completely silent, no birds chirping or insects buzzing. It was like we were the only two people in town. We decided to walk down the path way towards the blocks near Beth’s place to see if we could get a clue. The town seemed so ghostly and chilling, quite the opposite of the bright and mellow feeling you get during the day time. Every step I took was amplified by the deafening silence that cloaked the streets, even breathing seemed like a soft shout with every exhale. After about an hour of walking around the town we realised that we were nowhere near Beth’s place, Jimmy exclaimed that we were obviously lost and that we should keep walking around.

After a few more minutes we eventually made it to a small four way intersection around the centre of the town, the traffic lights softly glowing through the fog as if my eyes defocused everything I could see. I was trailing the light of my torch around the path when I noticed something rustling in a nearby bush. The sound was crisp and clear as both myself and Jimmy jerked our heads to whatever that sound was. We stared at the bush as it continued to rustle for another minute before something crept out if it. It was a cat, black and white with silver whiskers and eyes as blue as the sky itself. I immediately started to follow the cat so I could pet it, but it had no intention of slowing down whatsoever.

I followed it into an alleyway and behind a bin and started stroking its head as it started to purr. “Dude, come back I can barely see you!” Jimmy yelled, his voice echoing through the alley. I didn’t bother to turn round, or even respond. That was the last thing he ever said to me. In the distance a soft and subtle rumbling noise made the ground rumble. The rumbling grew louder and louder, faster and faster as the ground started to shake more violently. I held the cat in fear and buried my face into it’s fur as I had no idea what was happening. The rumbling got louder and closer until a blood-curdling scream pierced through the rumbles, followed by a crippling crackling slam, and then silence.

I let go of the cat as it ran off further into the alleyway and disappeared round the corner, my whole body still trembling with fear. All I could hear was the thumping of my heart pounding throughout my head and the heavy exhausted breathing escaping my lungs. I slowly turned round to see that I dropped my torch near the entrance of the alleyway so I walked over and picked it up. It flickered and died on me, cursing under my breath from the stress I placed the torch in my back pocket and stared at the ground in shock. Once my eyes were focused again, I noticed the beam of a torch was pointing at my chest. For a split second I was filled with joy, as if everything would be alright. But when I looked up, my body went cold and my hair stood up on end to what I saw in front of me.

A deer, with legs as tall as a truck and body as big as a house, with eyes glowing like headlights, antlers covered in stringy moss dripping with water, standing in front of the mangled crushed body of my friend Jimmy. The Night Stalker. It stared right at me, right into my eyes, as if our vision was locked together in a stalemate. My body was frozen with fear, cold tears running down my eyes and mouth wide open. I wanted to scream, but nothing would come out. For what seemed like an eternity the creature eventually turned its head away, grabbed Jimmy’s body with it’s mouth, and walked away.

Then everything faded to black. I was found unconscious in the alleyway the next morning by some of the locals and was immediately taken to hospital where I woke up. The months were a blur after that. I never really went outside any more, or even went to school. I did all my homework in my room, curtains closed and bedside lamp always kept on. My parents eventually told me the truth about the curfew, and the Night Stalker.

The town has been cursed for decades. Nobody knows how long, but the same event takes place every night. For every deer that is struck dead in the town, the spirits of the deceased deer comes out when it’s dark and takes a life in return. Those who venture out when it’s dark are crushed like a car and their bodies taken to the lake where they sink to the bottom, to be later fished out by the locals in the following days. That’s how the town used to dispose of deer corpses during the 1900′s. I still have nightmares to this day, every time I close my eyes all I see is theirs staring back at me. I don’t think I’ll ever leave my home. I don’t think the nightmares will stop…