The Screech

He walked forward into the woods until the vines strangled the path so that he had to duck and dive through briar-littered lengths of new growth, and dying leaves fell from the sky in slow lazy pirouettes, and the world lost all luster, and the grey bark of towering trees threatened to overtake the horizon, and deer leapt past him and ignored him, and the sun set behind the hills, and it grew dark, and the brook burbled, and frogs splashed as they jumped into cool depths and out of sight, and there was a screech on the horizon he could not place – was it some strange breed of owl or mountain lion? – and he did not know, nor did he care, and the world went on and on and on without him, and the world did not know anything of him or that he was missing from the cradle of civilization, and his boot tracks were a twin trail behind him sunk in wet red clay, and he kept walking forward on a trail long overgrown, and the briars scratched and ensnared his tattered clothes, and he ignored the tiny cuts, and the trail turned upwards, and, despite the chill, sweat beads rolled down from his forehead, and his shaggy hair plastered to his clammy forehead, and he breathed heavily with his exertions, and the sky grew a pale salmon then a deep purple then faded to black, and stars peeked out of the blackness overhead, and a pale orange moon smiled down on him from between the boughs overhead, and he lost himself in shadows, and he heard another screech – this one was closer – and he looked around and tried to make some sort of sense out of the nonsensical ideas which filtered through his head, and he remembered bogeymen and vampires and werewolves and zombies and men in masks carrying machetes and other oddities remembered from the television screens of his fractured childhood, but then he remembered who he was – what he was – and he smiled, and he touched the blade of the knife sheathed in his pocket and found it sharp and hungry, and he walked down the hill and towards another quiet little suburb of another sleepy town just waiting for a wake-up call, and he could see the lights through the windows where silhouettes of families dined together, and he imagined how they would react to his sudden entrance, and he laughed, and he realized that the screech had only been the echoes of his own twisted laughter all along.