His footsteps pounded off the concrete, echoing through the thin, early morning air. Short bursts of steam shot past his lips as he dipped his left shoulder, preparing to make the turn. Rounding the blind bend, his heart leapt in his chest, seizing tightly as it threatened to implode.
There was someone else on the path, standing directly in front of him.
“Jesus!” Tim gasped, shocked, placing his right hand on his pounding chest.
The figure had his back to Tim. A long, tattered brown shroud hung limply from the wide shoulders, cascading down toward the ground, the frayed ends playing gently in the thin breeze. The hood of the cloak was pulled up over the head; the whole body bathed in the shadows cast by what little light filtered through the branches of the trees.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said to the stranger. “You startled me. It’s not often that I come across anyone out here this early in the morning. Do you live out here? You know, at the…”
He was trying hard to find the right words. Rest home certainly wasn’t right, nor was old folks home. His mind raced.
“… Assisted living community?” he finished, pleased with himself.
But the figure did not turn around. He didn’t move in the slightest.
“Uh, yeah. It’s been nice talking to you,” Tim said from beneath his lowered brow. He prepared to resume jogging.
Sliding to his right, he prepared to slip past this person on the thin path, bringing his lightly clenched fists up to either side. He could hear the person’s breathing, more like rasping really. It was a thin, almost wet sound as the air was dragged through the open mouth, rattling within the damp lungs before being released as a cross between a wheeze and a growl.
The acrid stench of decay resonated from this person, riding coarsely down the crisp breeze, accosting his senses. It was the smell of death. Tim recognized it from the days spent volunteering at a nursing home during his senior year in high school, trying to pad his references. It was the smell of stagnant urine and crumbling, flaking flesh. It was how they all smelled when the reaper neared, but none of them could tell.
Wincing and puckering his face, Tim looked down, attempting to dodge the scent without the overtly offensive gesture of covering his nose. His sole goal was to get upwind and leave that smell—that he had hoped never to again whiff—far behind him.
Something caught his attention. Something wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t immediately put his finger on it, but there was something wrong with the pictures he purveyed to his mind. He stared down at the virgin white snow. The swaying treetops cast dancing shadows across the ground. And then, all of a sudden, it just clicked.
There were no footprints.
His eyes raced up from the ground to look at the person, who had already turned to face him. Their eyes locked for one brief moment. Every muscle in Tim’s body fought to spring to life at once. His primal instincts ripped through his mind that wanted nothing more than to run away as fast as he could.
The last thing that he saw was the dry, yellowed eyes, cracking and peeling, with no visible iris, staring straight through him. A cold, dry hand shot from the man’s side, its crusted flesh seizing him by the neck, killing the scream in his chest.
VI
Sunday, November 13th
8:30am
The police had been of no help at all. After finally arriving more than an hour and a half after he called, they had seemed almost insulted that he had broken up whatever they had been doing that morning to come out for that.
“You called us out here for a hat?” the officer had asked, holding the cap on the tip of his pen.
“So let me get this straight,” the other had chimed in. “You found this hat in your house, but you’re sure that it’s not yours. Is that what you’re saying?”
He had tried to argue it the way he saw it, but they couldn’t grasp it. They did the obligatory checking of the house and doors, noting that there were no signs of forced entry and having a private chuckle in front of his security system, glancing back over their shoulders to leer at him every couple of seconds.
The bottom line was that there were no signs of even the slightest attempt to gain entry into the house and the security system, which was truly top notch, hadn’t been triggered. The fact that the hat had belonged to a friend of his that had died more than a decade earlier appeared to be of little consequence to them as they repeatedly asked him if he had been drinking.
The officers had seen themselves out, practically slamming the door behind them as they walked towards the car shaking their heads. Scott had sat at the table, hands clasped in his lap, staring straight down at the hat. He hadn’t even looked up in the half-hour since they had left.
Goosebumps crept up his forearms and onto the backs of his arms. The room felt as though the temperature had dropped ten degrees over the course of the last couple of breaths. The windows slowly frosted over from the inside. Scott finally broke his gaze from the hat and climbed to his feet. He glanced around the kitchen, checking out the thin layer of ice on the windows, his breath coming in plumes from his parted lips.
Crossing the floor and turning into the living room, he popped the faceplate off the thermostat and looked at the digital reading. Shaking his head, he pressed the “set/ temp” button again, but it still displayed the exact same thing.
72 degrees.
He stared down at his arms again, the hackles still standing at full attention. He blew a long line of steam from his lungs, dissipating into the thin air around him.
“Damn thing’s broken,” Scott said aloud, slamming the cover shut and walking towards the stairs.
He ascended to the upper level, turning down the hall and walking toward his bedroom.
Throwing back the closet door, he stepped inside and yanked a Colorado Avalanche sweater from the closet and tossed it across the room, landing on the bed. Yanking a pair of jeans off of another hanger, he tucked them under his arm and walked to the dresser. Producing a pair of boxers and some socks, he quickly slipped out of his pajamas.
Sitting down on the corner of the bed in preparation of donning his clothes, the scar on his right forearm caught his attention as though he was seeing it for the first time. It had been so long since he had been forced to think about it that sometimes it just surprised him. There had once been a birthmark there, a round, brown circle that had been removed for aesthetic reasons rather than medical. The scar was close to two inches long, lined with the small pink dots from where the sutures had once pulled the wound tightly shut to help it heal. Granted it was far better than the mark that had preceded it, but it looked almost Frankenstein-like in the dim light. Running a fingertip along the completely desensitized, purplish scar, he could barely remember the days when he had been embarrassed to wear short sleeves because of the unsightly mark. Snapping from his momentary trance, he rubbed his tired eyes.
Throwing on the underwear and hopping into the jeans, he donned the number nineteen captain’s jersey and sat on the siderail of the waterbed. He tugged on the socks and shoes and hustled out of the bedroom and through the hall.
Opening the closet by the front door, he grabbed the first jacket he could get his hands on. Throwing his arms into the sleeves of the black leather jacket, he passed beneath the archway of the living room and bounded down the stairs to the left into the family room. The darkened big screen reflected the early morning sun that slipped through the gaps in the vertical blinds covering the sliding glass door.
He grabbed his car keys from the corner of the marble wet bar and threw back the door to the garage, pressing the opener as he hopped down the two stairs onto the concrete floor. The wind gusted in from beneath the slowly rising panels, tiny flakes of snow scattering around his feet. Stacked cases of Pepsi lined the wall to the left, partially hidden by the boxes that filled half of the garage, stuffed full of the unimportant junk he had never found the energy to unpack.
Walking around the back of the forest green Grand Cherokee, he slipped up the side of the car and opened the driver’s side door, hopping up into the seat. Thrusting the key into the ignition, he pressed the pedal and brought the car to life, the engine revving loudly as exhaust poured from the back end of the car. Tossing the gear
