The Phantom Man

Five little heads brush past me in the foyer as I enter the house. I get a “Hey Daddio,” and “Love you Dad,” then a punch in the thigh, “‘sup dad,” from my two girls and little boy.

The neighbor's two girls are polite only in that they say their hellos but no one stops to give me the time of day. I hold the door open for the little band of miscreants and watch them make their way to the front yard. 

“Let’s play tag,” says my eldest as she stretches her hands out high above her head. 

I turn and notice my wife smiling at me, leaning against the kitchen island. 

“No, you always hide in the woods,” says one of the neighbors.

I kiss my wife on the forehead, tell her I love her, and say, “I’ve got dinner tonight. You had a tough day.” 

“Nuh-uh. I won’t. That phantom man is in there.” 

I wince and look at Jasmine to see if she had heard that. She did and says, “I didn’t want to believe it but I’ve heard them talk about it a few times already so I asked Tanner if he and Andrea had heard the kids talking about the man in the forest. They’re worried about it.” 

“Have you seen anything strange?” I ask. 

Jasmine steps up to the floor to ceiling window in the breakfast nook and peers at the forest across the cul de sac. She purses her lips and shakes her head, “No. You?” 

I say, “Nope,” as I pull out the ingredients I’ll be using for dinner tonight. “We’ve taught the kids well. They know not to go near strangers. I’ll see if I can maneuver the camera to keep an eye on the woodline. Yeah?”

“Yes, that sounds good,” says Jasmine, relaxing and settling into one of the breakfast nook table chairs. “I didn’t get the Letterman account.” 

I take out the chicken from the refrigerator and say, “I figured as much from the way you sounded on the phone. Look, all is not lost. You just need to get a hold of someone who knows him well.”

Jasmine crosses her arms and peers out at the kids outside, “I don’t know. I might have to take this one as a loss.” 

“No! You can’t give up,” I try to get her spirits up by reaching for a bottle of wine from the rack above the refrigerator. She smiles when I pour her a glass and puts a hand on mine to hold me for a while after I leave the glass in front of her. “You’re still in control. You can figure this out.” 

“Sometimes things are just out of our control David.” 

I stare back slack jawed, “Things are always in our control Jasmine. We didn’t get this far in life by pretending everything was predestined.” I laugh as I grip a handful air and say, “I’ve got life by the balls baby. Always have. That’s why we have such a splendid house, such a nice life.” 

“Don’t give yourself all the credit, big guy.” 

I turn back to the chicken with a smile and start preparing dinner. “Hey Google, play Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton.”

An upbeat voice from the little circular speaker on the kitchen island replies, “Sure, Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton.” Chris Stapleton’s classic four strums of the guitar echo out of the speaker and I dance as I marinate the chicken. I love the sound of the children enjoying themselves outside going along to the music; love the feeling of the chopped cilantro, salt, and pepper grind between my fingertips as I rub it into the chicken. The oil heats in the pan releasing a little wisp of smoke. The chicken sizzles in the pan and releases a hearty aroma. 

When I rise from the pan, I notice Jasmine is standing at the window again, cup of wine in hand. Twilight is settling in but the street lights haven’t kicked on yet. Jasmine is strangely close to the window, I figure she’s enjoying the sight of the kids as their shadows zip past in front of her like specters in the night. 

“David. I see something in the woodline.” 

I shoot to her side and peer out the window along with her. The kids' shadows stalk in the night but I can’t make out anything across the cul de sac. “I don’t see anything.” 

Jasmine plants a finger in the windowpane, “Right there. There, it's definitely someone out there. There’s a neighborhood on the other side of that treeline isn’t there?”

I strain to catch a glimpse at what she’s looking at and say, “I don't see anything. I, uh, I think there’s a neighborhood back there yeah.”

The street lights kick on. A man stands just out of reach of the street light on the far end of the cul de sac. “Holy fuck,” I say under my breath. 

“Kids, come inside please!” shouts Jasmine. 

“Aww c’mon mom. Just a bit longer,” calls out my son. 

“Zach, get inside like your mother told you,” I growl and take my gaze away from the man for a second to sneer at my boy through the window. By the time I look back the man’s gone. “Where’d he go?” 

Jasmine’s eyebrows raised, “He uh, just kind of vanished. Looks like he was never really there. Look,” She points at a tree shaped strangely enough like a man. “Maybe it was just that tree we were looking at.” 

I didn’t take any chances. I tell the kids to come in and I maneuver the security cameras to get a good vantage of the place where the man had vanished. The next morning I help the kids get ready for school and personally walk them to their bus stop. 

Still no man in the woods. 

Shortly after I return to the house I kiss my wife goodbye and wish her good luck at work. Just as she pulls out of the cul de sac, as I am walking to my truck, I notice a figure in my peripheral vision but I don’t turn knowing I might scare him away. I halfway sit in my truck and shift the rearview mirror to where I’d seen him. There he is. The man stands several feet inside the forest. Greenery conceals him up to his torso and I can barely see his face in the shadows of the forest, but his figure is clear. 

I consider calling the police, no, they won’t make it in time. I take a deep breath, count down from three, and burst out of my car into a sprint toward the man in the woods. The man doesn’t move an inch as I approach but somehow it seems as if the forest deepens around him. As I get closer his relative position from me grows further, but the man doesn’t take a step. It's as if the world around the man grows further and further out of focus the closer and closer I get. 

I hear the leaves crushing beneath my footfalls and I look back for a second feeling as if I’d been running on a treadmill for the past few seconds. My house is barely visible through the foliage. I whipped my attention back at the man but he’s gone and I grind to a halt. I scrutinize the woods, the man has vanished. 

My breaths slow, nearly holding my breath I listen intently for the sound of crushing leaves. The crunching leaves come from behind me at an alarming pace. Whatever is approaching is running fast. I turn, ready for someone to tackle me, but there is no one there, the footfalls go silent. I curse under my breath and peer back at my house. It's hard to make out now that I’m so deep in the woods, but it looks like the neighbor’s kids are out in front of my house. I shake my head and look down at my watch wondering how much time I’d wasted chasing the phantom man. I wince at the readout on my watch, five pm. Maybe I hit one of the program buttons while I was sprinting into the woods? 

There’s a whisper in the wind, “Must of hit..”

I turn to the whispers. 

Another whisper behind me, “One of the program buttons.”

I turn. I feel light in my own skin. There’s nothing behind me, no one around me, but I continue to hear the voice whispering. 

“Five PM. Five?” 

I’m literally beside myself. I know it's my own voice I’m hearing but I’m not sure if it's my thoughts or an illusion, just the wind blowing. Maybe it’s the shifting tree branches and my paranoia. The sun is bright, blinding. Suddenly, I’m seconds behind myself. 

I saw my hand shifting in the sunlight. Perhaps it was the fatigue from a sleepless night having been worried about the phantom man lurking in the forest outside my house. The disconnect in time was jarring as every movement jolted like a violent tectonic shift in my head. I felt like a witness to my own reality as it had just happened. 

I looked around and a sound off in the woods drew me deeper. The deeper I went, the dimmer the sunlight became. I ran faster and faster in chase of the sounds with the hopes I’d at least catch another glimpse of the phantom man. 

Then, my foot caught a taproot and I slammed into rich dirt, but my descent did not stop. The dirt splashed about me as if I’d fallen in a lake of darkness. The grains of dirt filled my lungs in my panic.

A squirrel watched me trip and if only the gentle creature understood the mechanics of the universe he would’ve known where I had disappeared to. Unlike the squirrel, the tree on top whose branch it sat did not have the sense of sight to have seen me fall but it did encounter a minty sensation when it absorbed the nutrients of my being. I hadn’t granted the beings of its kind the sense of emotion, but somehow it still knew the sensation was good. It exhaled the vapors of me and enriched the atmosphere for the humans of that world. These little kinds of discoveries excited me. A design had led to an outcome I hadn’t thought possible and I saw that it was good. 

The cosmic specs continued their spread before me and it suddenly occurred to me I hadn’t paid much attention to the adjacent place. There it was still only nothingness, phantom echoes of my self reflection. All was good, but was it best? I’ve created many things, breathed life into endless inanimate things yet most of my existing universe still lingers motionless, pushed only by the initial momentum of the beginning. The life that has existed has worshiped me, prayed to me, cursed me, forgotten me and found me, but is it best? 

Perhaps I’ll never know until I compare it with another. So it is. From my word bubbled a new momentum from unfathomable depths. All possibilities confounded and reverberated and again there was an atmosphere charged with my essence, what would these new humans do with it?

The tree inhaled my essence and it was good. The squirrel watched a man disappear into the earth and it was good. Grains of dirt filled my lungs and dispersed from my nose and it was good. I was spat out from the depths of the universe and on my feet I chased the phantom man in the direction of my home. The sun had receded into the horizon and time had regressed to a moment. 

Beyond the foliage I see my children play with the neighbors. Their laughter is alarmingly delicious to my ears as if I hadn’t heard that sweet sound in an unfathomable expanse of time. There I am in the window, looking this way. Then suddenly, the street light kicks on. 

“Holy fuck,” says David under his breath. 

I shout, “Kids, come inside please!”