An Account of the Traveller

Some houses are haunted by the spirits of the dead while others are haunted by the wickedness of the living. There are some houses, however, that play host to forces unaccountable to the human mind, forces that exist outside of space and time, reaching from somewhere beyond reality’s veil to slowly close around your throat.

When Marsha left the house that day in 1999, she didn’t expect to return so quickly. But, because she had forgotten her car keys, she found herself opening the front door and climbing the steps to her bedroom. Something else, something terrifyingly inexplicable, was also not expecting her to return.

“I never had any trouble in that place,” Marsha tells me. “I was happy there.”

Marsha’s house in Oakland, California was, in her opinion, happily unexceptional. She had lived there with her son and daughter for three years without incident.

On the day everything changed, Marsha was on her way to work after having packed the kids off on the bus. In the morning’s never-changing mayhem, Marsha had forgotten to grab her car keys, something she had done numerous times without consequence. 

“When I put the house key in the lock and turned the knob,” Marsha recalls, “it just felt different – I don’t know – like a current was running though the door or something.”

The car keys were upstairs in Marsha’s bedroom and, as she turned to the staircase, Marsha heard a faint crackle, like a bad radio connection, from somewhere upstairs.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time,” Marsha tells me. “I thought it must be coming from outside or something.”

The noise grew stronger as Marsha climbed the steps. Turning to her bedroom, she saw a dim blue light frame the half-closed door. It was difficult to see in the morning light, but then Marsha realized that the sound was coming from her bedroom, too.

“I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave and call the cops?” Marsha tells me. “I should’ve left, I never should have gone in there.”

Marsha slowly pushed the door open and stared into her bedroom. The room was bathed in a strange blue light, as if the whole room were underwater, but Marsha couldn’t see where it was coming from.

But what she did see, what immediately arrested her attention and never let it go, was a hand, an arm outstretched, reaching from a point in the empty space above her bed.

“This thing – an arm – it was just hanging in the air,” Marsha remembers, “like it was reaching through a hole in the air.”

The arm was covered in a white plastic-like material, and Marsha could see a blue pulsing light deep within it. It twisted and turned, the fingers splayed and clenched as if seeking something blindly.

The upper arm terminated at a hazy, blurred point that was anchored in the air and seemed to define a plane, a boundary that marked a division between reality and something else.

“It looked like that part of the arm was fuzzy, the part where it just stopped,” Marsha recalls. “It reminded me of the heat coming off asphalt on a hot day.”

The arm’s movement was uncanny; it made strangely fluid-like movements but at the same time it was almost too rapid, too precise to be human. The arm pitched about, grasping the empty air. It swung around and hit the lamp on the bedside table, knocking it to the ground.

The arm seemed intrigued by this contact and it carefully searched the air where the lamp had been. It found the clock radio and the fingers gently explored its surface and Marsha thought she could see the hand express a kind of exotic wonder at the small upraised buttons.

Suddenly the fingers closed around the radio and the hand jerked up, retreating into the hole. Most of the arm disappeared into the invisible hole above the bed.

“There was an awful racket when that happened,” Marsha tells me. “It was a noise like a big pressure – an earthquake or a sonic boom.”

The clock radio, however, was still plugged in. Marsha could still see the radio as the hand tried to pull it through the hole but the angle of the cord kept it securely in the socket.

As the hand struggled to take the radio through the hole, Marsha could hear another sound behind the pressure wave – voices. Was it the voice of the owner of the strange arm? Or one of its controllers? 

“I couldn’t make out any of what they were saying,” Marsha recalls. “But it sounded like a roomful of people shouting from very far away.”

There was a moment when the hand stopped pulling and a silence fell over the room and Marsha realized she was standing in her bedroom staring at half a clock radio stuck in the air and she almost laughed.

Then the arm moved again and the full length returned to the room. It twisted toward Marsha, reversing the angle that had caught the radio’s cord. The cord popped free and at first the arm disappeared into the hole and then the hand with Marsha’s clock radio and then the intransigent cord spiralled and vanished.

There was a flash of white and blue and a sound like a steel beam cracking and echoing in a space vast and empty and then it was all gone.

Although the incident left Marsha with a deep fear that the strange traveller will return, we are left with important questions we cannot answer. 

Did the traveller breach the inky gulfs of space to reach Marsha’s home? Or did it somehow overcome the arrow of time and reach across years, centuries, millenia to recover an artifact? Or, more bizarrely, did it penetrate the barriers between dimensions, between realities? Was the arm that Marsha witnessed attached to a living thing? Or was it designed to look as human as possible so it might not unduly upset those from whom it took its souvenir? 

Marsha’s question, however, is much more pressing. “I don’t care about my damn radio,” Marsha tells me, “but what if one of my kids had been there, what if it had grabbed them?”

Back from beyond!

Next Week on Scary True: Where did it come from? What did it want? When will it return? All the answers can be found in "An Account of the Traveller." 
And check out last week's scary story "The God of Winter Returns."

The God of Winter Returns

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, winter has a way of coming that brings to mind ancient myths of primal powers and unstoppable forces. Many people who live in Michigan, however, welcome winter’s arrival as a time to celebrate the changing seasons and the economic opportunities it brings.

For twenty years, Anne and her family have sold and rented snowmobiles to the thousands of visitors who come to Houghton, Michigan to enjoy the winter-time fun. The start of winter was an important event for Anne, and she had spent the summer preparing for it.

Now, however, it was November and Anne was not yet ready. “There were a few trails that weren’t cleared,” Anne tells me. “And the weatherman said a big storm was coming.”

Anne took the ATV out along the northernmost trail. Small trees – downed in late summer windstorms – had to be cleared from the trail before they were buried in snow.

“It was always easier to get them off the trail now,” Anne says, “than wait for a few feet of snow to hide them.”

All afternoon, Anne worked to inspect the trail and clear debris. It was hard work, but Anne loved it. “To me, there was nothing better than being out there in the woods, in the stillness,” Anne recalls. “But after what happened, it’s different now.”

In the late afternoon as the sky was just beginning to darken, Anne was busy with what she hoped would be the last work of the day. “I was dragging a log and huffing and puffing so I didn’t hear it at first,” Anne recalls. “Barking dogs. A lot of barking dogs.”

Anne set the log down and listened. It seemed that the weatherman was a little off in his forecast because Anne could feel the wind begin to pick up. And just below the sound of the wind howling in the distance, the baying of a pack of dogs.

“I thought it was peculiar,” Anne tells me. “There really never is anybody up there at that time of the year.”

Through the nearly-leafless trees, Anne could see the horizon’s darkling line. She knew she had to hurry if she wanted to leave the forest before the light was gone. 

“It was time to go,” Anne recalls. “But, of course, my four-wheeler didn’t get the message.”

Anne’s ATV sputtered and smoked as she tried to start it. She cursed and slumped in the seat. The barking was getting louder.

“Whatever it was – a dog pack or some hunters,” Anne remembers, “they were definitely coming my way.”

Anne thought about what she could use to defend herself against a pack of wild dogs and decided that although a tree branch would not do the job, she felt safer with a solid length of pine in her hands.

Anne selected a stick from the trail-side and crouched beside her four-wheeler. She waited quietly, watching the treeline and the thick shadows gathering. She could hear the braying of the dogs and the crunch of small branches as if the darkness creeping toward the sun’s setting was a wave of force washing over the world.

Anne noticed that the air had a sudden sharp chill and she could see her breath in wispy puffs. The wind picked up again, sweeping up fallen leaves and raining them back down to the earth. It started to snow.

“It was getting dark real quick and I could still hear those dogs,” Anne recalls. “I had to get my ATV up and running.”

Anne began to inspect the machine. She didn’t know much about fixing it, but she could look for obvious problems and decide whether they the thing was salvageable or not.

“I was busy looking all over the damn thing and it was dark,” Anne remembers. “So, I didn’t notice that the barking had stopped.”

Anne looked up from the ATV to see an enormous black dog standing in the road. 

It looked to be almost as tall as Anne herself. Its pointed ears swiveled forward and its massive shoulders rose and fell with each sharp breath. Its great snout sniffed the air and beady red eyes shone like a fast approaching train.

“I swear those eyes were glowing,” Anne says. “I thought I was dead.”

The massive dog stood very still and Anne thought maybe it was just a hallucination until the dog was joined by five more just like it from the shadow of the trees.

The six black hounds began to growl and snort, their breath a fog that hung in the air, and Anne could smell them and it was the stench of wet cinders.

Anne was held in the hounds’ unearthly gaze and the only thoughts in her head were images of her body torn apart and covered by the slowly falling snow. How long would it take her family to find her?

From the woods there came a terrifying wail and Anne could not tell whether it came from some kind of horn or from the throat of a living thing. The dogs went quiet at the sound and turned toward the treeline, lowering their heads.

As if in reply, a horse and rider appeared between the trees and stepped out upon the trail. At the sight of them, Anne thought she was already dead, or that if she wasn’t, her final moments would be a lot more interesting than the previous forty-odd years.

The horse was black and grey and over-sized, like the dogs. The rider was massive and he sat upon his horse like a king upon a savage throne. He wore a cloak of mismatched hides and furs from animals that Anne couldn’t recognize. On his head was a helmet that looked like the skull of a great elk and curving away from the helmet were two black antlers and around his neck was a cracked yellow hunting horn.

The rider turned toward Anne and the horse trotted slowly up the trail. The rider’s face was hidden deep in shadow but Anne could see two orange lights like dying flames shining from under the bony helmet.

The dogs, tamed in the rider’s presence, began to follow. It seemed to Anne that the rider was watching her but she really did not know whether he had even seen her. As the rider approached, the black spreading antlers were framed by the twilit sky and the snow seemed to follow him in a swirling white aura.

Anne knew that what she was seeing was no earthly sight but a vision torn from the wild fabric of the universe, a manifestation of a still-unconquered power, a divinity of this or some other world.

The horse turned and took the rider into the trees. The dogs followed and the dark and the woods swallowed them all. In her final glimpse of the strange rider, it occurred to Anne that she could not now say whether the cloak and helmet he wore were clothing or the features of some inhuman body. 

Anne’s ATV started up when she tried it, just as she suspected it would. She rode home as quickly as she could from fear of the vision she witnessed and the fast-falling snow. “When I think about it now, it kinda warms my heart to know that things like that are out there,” Anne tells me. “But then I have to ask, What else is out there?”

Winter is coming!

Next Week on Scary True: A winter storm is fast approaching and its herald walks among us! When Halloween is over, "The God of Winter Returns."
And check out this week's ghost story "The Ghost of Halloween."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies. With Halloween over, Scary True would like to acknowledge the people who keep the spirit of the best holiday going. Some of my favorite Halloween creators and haunters can be found at Pumpkinrot, Something WicKED This Way Comes, Magikal Seasons, and Frog on a Pumpkin. These people work tirelessly to create the seasonal and the scary, the fantastic and the frightening, the things that remind us that Halloween is a holiday made by hand. So, if you find yourself wishing it were October again, check out these blogs. And if you're feeling ambitious and think you might want to try your hand at some Halloween creations, you've got about 360 days, so get to it!