Night Walk

Eyes on me.

That's the sensation I was feeling at that moment. Eyes from somewhere else following my every step through the neighborhood. It was the one up near the primary school, the one by the suburbs off the side of where the highway feeds into my town. They're big houses there, all of them packed together just far enough away to have an actual property line. Not one of them had a single car garage. It would look fine during the day, as I knew from experience, and, depending on whether you went through there during a school day or not, it could even be peaceful with all of its high, single trees.

Not so here, because that only applies during the day. At night, when I most like to walk my town, the only remnants of those big houses with their double door garages are their silhouettes, looming as high as those same high, single trees littering the small squares of green between driveways. The streetlights glow orange, sitting on the old road like baked clay, highlighting all the little dimples and cracks of the asphalt that the township hasn't filled in yet.

The road is the only issue here, really. The road and the eyes, the latter of which I have yet to see as my pace began to quicken.

I'm used to walking by night. I feel suited to it more than the day. The day is far too loud and crowded. I need my peace of mind and, typically, I find it when the moon hangs fat above wisping, translucent clouds.

There is one key issue with night walks, and that is the part where the night seeps into places you know. All the little offshoot paths and unlit places between those big, looming houses. Those might give me pause some nights. Briefly. Nothing like this though, nothing like the feeling of my chest shrinking around my lungs and heart, or of my stomach clenching in misfired warning, prompting me to turn my head as fast as I can to look behind myself. I would see only the curve of the sidewalk as the neighborhood began to turn. It's a lazy sort of S shape, and that leaves so many corners to eye, like my own eyes would dispel any notion danger.

Danger, I think. There is no danger here. This town's only major crime is the occasional lost dog or cat. It's a town of elderly people, more than anything. People come here and they wait to die, peaceful and away from any real stress. The good death. There can be no bad deaths here.

My body trembles as I catch sight of something huge on my left. I can't move, my muscles felt like they had locked around my joints at the order of my rapidly pumping heart. The angle of the huge thing is odd, behind me and on the left. It was standing in the dull driveway littered with toys, the most prominent being a bulky, red tricycle sitting on its side. The thing was as tall as the garage, and thin to such a degree it looked almost frail. It was topped with a huge, fanning head.

It's a basketball net.

The sensation of my heart twisting into itself became an annoyance after that revelation. I almost had a heart attack over a goddamn basketball net. I take a breath. I am no calmer than I was before.

There are still eyes on me.

Automatically, I look a little further to the left of the net, finding the large porch of the house. The front door is illuminated only by the orange streetlight in front of it. Between those two is the yard, and in the yard is a huge maple tree, its branches thick with age and green with its summer foliage. There's something hanging down from one of the thicker branches, which juts up toward the house. The thing at the end of the rope is an old tire. I can see the faintest hint of a pale white behind it. I am on the other side of the street, on the other sidewalk, so I paid it my full attention.

It darted past the tire, leaving it swinging. The pale white took a more concrete shape. It was a man that was sprinting at me, bare feet slapping the sidewalk as he hurried across the road, naked of anything but an enormous meat cleaver swung with his pumping arms.

I ran and the man started to unleash his noise. I can't call it anything but noise, it wasn't words, or threats, or even howls of rage or glee or agitation that I was running as fast as I could from him. It was just noise. Ear splitting noise. I didn't look back once as he chased me, the sound of his noise and of my shoes clacking against the sidewalk only being drowned out by my own panting as I ran the winding, lazy S path of the neighborhood. I couldn't tell how close he was getting, and there was the misfiring synapse in my brain telling me to look back and see how close that cleaver was to swinging into my head. I couldn't though. The thought of him back there was enough to keep me moving forward.

The sidewalk veered off to the right at the end of the neighborhood and I meant to turn down it. I tripped. The feeling of my palms grinding against the dirt was like a burn. I only really felt it later, though, because I was scrambling up and running like nothing had happened. In hindsight, I didn't hear the guy behind me after I left the neighborhood. I didn't stop running, though, because there were too many dark corners and offshoot paths and unlit places around me for safety to even be a distant glimmer. I ran until I got back home, and I told my family what had happened.

From there, it was all very procedural. I gave a statement to the police, and they did the requisite nothing about it aside from publishing the story ('local resident' they called me, thank God). I never go up by that neighborhood again even during the day, so I've had time to think about just what I had seen. More specifically, where I had seen it.

Why was he beside a house that clearly had children living in it?