I thought it all started with a phone call, but, as usual, I was wrong.
It took me a minute to get up to speed, because my buddy Bruce was talking fast and I had no idea what had fired him up.
"Is this what it comes down to, you keeping secrets from me?" he demanded. "Don't go off on another one of your tirades about hidden functions in phone apps! I told you the app would report back to Mark. If you would have written it for us, you would have known it sent us summaries. Mark says he's never seen readings as high as you encountered. Why didn't you call me? Tell me the truth! Tell me you saw it!"
"Dude, what are you talking about?" I asked. I really had no idea what he was harping on about.
"Don't fuck with me, man!" Bruce insisted. "Mark says we should verify the ID in the app, and then confirm the readings from the log. You know he's more of a hardware guy, and he probably messed something up when he kludged the app together. If you saw something, you gotta tell me!"
"The app?" I questioned.
It was starting to make sense, but I think they had the wrong friend. The three of us had known each other since we had met in the Air Force twenty years earlier. Even back then, we all were interested in bizarre and occult things. Over the years, I had concentrated on history and secret societies, while Bruce and Mark had pursued measurable phenomenon.
Mark was always inventing crazy gadgets to detect ghosts and sasquatches, and I usually got suckered into writing software to support them. I also humored them when they told of their latest finds, but I rarely got involved in testing or use. Our 'Fourth Musketeer' was also named John, and they probably had sent their device to him. The three of them all lived within an hour of each other on the East Coast, while I was living in the Midwest.
"Come on, man, wake up!" Bruce practically shouted. "Just get your backup phone out and give me the damned numbers!"
"Hold on," I answered. I reluctantly moved to retrieve my secondary cell phone from my briefcase, just to prove him wrong.
In spite of what the advertisements claim, cell phone service is touchy in this area. My phone that works great in Southern Wisconsin gets hit hard with roaming data charges when I go down into Illinois. My phone that works great in Illinois barely gets service when I'm home. I travel back and forth between the two areas, so I carry two phones.
There was definitely something fishy going on. I was shocked to pull my other phone out and discover some sort of device plugged into it. It sort of looked like a USB flash drive, but it had strange aluminum fins sticking out the side like little fingers. I had never seen it before in my life.
When I swiped the screen to wake the phone up, there was an odd icon that I had never seen before as well. It was simply labeled "Finder". I tapped it, and the app opened. The display had a big number, a small graph, and some buttons. The number was hovering around zero, and the graph seemed to update in real-time. Overall, it was far too simplistic to be one of my programs.
"What the fuck," I thought.
I must have said it out loud as well. Bruce replied, "Just hit the setup button and tell me the ID code."
Even as I tapped the button, my mind was going a million miles an hour in several directions. I had no idea where the device had come from, and I had no idea how the app ended up in the phone. As my mind raced, my fears made me do something I had never done before. I lied to my best friend.
"S-X-2-1-4-5," I read out the number.
"2-1-4-5?" he repeated. "2-1-4-5? That's not right! You told me 2-1-5-4 yesterday!"
"What do you want, dude?" I answered, sounding annoyed. "I'm not the one with lysdexia. You wrote it down wrong!"
"Don't do that!" he shouted. In a more reasonable tone, he added, "Yes, I have dyslexia, and you know how much I hate when you make fun of me for it. I swear to god I'll never talk to you again if you keep it up. And I made you repeat it twice while I wrote it down twice. Dammit, you better not be fucking with me!"
For the record, I will say I was tempted. It's a long story, but my wife was the main reason he and I had ever become friends in the first place. She would never have forgiven me if I truly pissed him off, so I am forever stuck with him for her sake. On the other hand, I was still weirded out by the device and the app.
"Dude, I must have been tired, or something," I replied. "I didn't even go out last night, so whatever Mark was seeing, it wasn't me."
"Huh," he grumbled. "You promised you would go." He paused for a moment, and then cried, "Wait a minute! You didn't go out, or you don't remember going out? Maybe you went out and you saw it! Dude, tell me the Bray Road Beast didn't fuck with your mind!"
I couldn't stop from laughing. 'The Beast of Bray Road' was an alleged wolf-man that haunted a stretch of road up by Elkhorn, Wisconsin. It was featured on an episode of "Mysteries of The Unknown", and Bruce had realized that it was only twenty miles from my house. It didn't surprise me at all that he and Mark would have come up with some gadget to go investigate. I still had no idea how it ended up attached to my phone.
"The Beast did not fuck with my mind," I answered.
"Holy fuck!" he gasped. "Tell me you're not the Bray Road Beast!"
"Dude, you and I were stationed in Louisiana when that story first came out," I reminded him. "It's not like I could run off for a couple of hours to drive fourteen hours up here and scare the crap outta people and still make it on base each day. Look, I gotta go. I'll catch up with you again tomorrow."
"Okay, I'll let you go," he answered. "But click the 'Send Log' button and forward the log data to me or Mark!"
"Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Goodbye!"
I guess I felt bad about lying to him, but it still didn't make any sense. He knows how much I distrust cell phones and internet providers, and there was no way I was going to send anything to him and Mark without knowing what I was sending. I used the app to send the log data to myself.
According to the log, I had started the app at 6:30 the evening before. The numbers had hovered around zero until around 8:45. Starting at 8:45, the numbers had quickly shot up, going from zero to over two hundred in the course of fifteen minutes. The numbers had stayed high like that until 9:20, when the log abruptly stopped. There was no data after that until the point where I started the app to get the number for Bruce.
Absolutely none of that made sense. I am almost certain I hadn't left the house. All I could think was that whatever it was, it had come to me. Or maybe Bruce was right. Maybe I was 'The Beast of Bray Road'.
I guess there was one way to find out. If I assumed that Bruce and Mark had sent me the gadget, and if I assumed that Bruce wasn't lying when he said that I had promised to go look, then I could assume that I left the house and headed out towards Elkhorn. I decided to see if I could retrace the route, based simply on where I would have gone if I were investigating the Beast.
If finding the device attached to my phone hadn't weirded me out enough, getting into my car made things worse. I have a cell phone holder on the dash of my car. Although it is adjustable, I have it set so I can put my regular phone in it. My backup phone is smaller. When I got in the car, the phone holder was adjusted to fit the smaller phone, with one of the supports swung back to make room for the gadget. I swear I didn't do that!
Call me paranoid, but I was freaked out. I knew I had to press on, but I impulsively put the backup phone in 'Airplane' mode, but then checked that the app was still getting readings. Everything looked good, so I headed out.
If I were in a hurry to get to Elkhorn, I would have taken the county highways up to the expressway, and I would have been there in under twenty minutes. That didn't feel right.
As I left town, I started taking side roads that would weave through the farmland between the local lakes and eventually lead up to Bray Road. As I drove I considered the timeline of the data. From 6:30 to 8:45 was more than enough time to get to Bray Road, drive up and down it a couple of times, and maybe head out toward the hospital where sightings had also been reported. In that amount of time, I probably would have decided to head home.
From the area east of the hospital, I would have done a nostalgic drive down past the house where my wife had lived when we first started dating, and then swung past the first house we had owned, eventually making back home.
Although it would be backtracking a bit, I decided to follow that course in reverse and see what happened.
I would have to assume that nothing happened. The evening seemed to zip right by, and when I made it home, I went straight to bed.
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When I woke up the next morning, something was wrong. It felt like it should have been obvious, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't until I sat by the window to read the newspaper that anything jumped out at me. Even then, it didn't exactly jump - it just sort of crept up on me.
There was a painting on the wall that was nagging at my thoughts. Done in grays and browns, it featured a single, dead tree on a forested hill over a lake. Almost as an afterthought, there was an owl in the tree. There was something odd about the owl's eyes. It was almost as if they had just opened, and yet they could see right into your soul. Somehow, that one tiny feature was the true focus of the whole painting. It was almost unnerving.
Of greater concern was the fact that I knew two solid but conflicting facts about the painting. First, it had been on the wall for years. Second, I had never seen it before. And then third, my wife would never have allowed such a painting on her wall.
There was a painting on the opposite wall, one that I feel better about claiming we have had for years. It shows a bright colored cat sitting in the sun. It was sort of funny that I had always felt the same intensity from that cat's eyes that I did from the owl's eyes. You could tell the cat had just looked up from the mouse hole it was watching, and its eyes could see right through you. The entire painting was done in the bright colors that my wife preferred.
The wrongness of the morning jumped at me in a way that could not be ignored. Almost simultaneously, I noted that the signature on the bottoms of the paintings was the same, and it dawned on me why I was feeling odd. My wife and I had briefly met the artist when we bought the painting of the cat and the signatures made me think of the pretty, middle-aged artist. I couldn't even begin to say why, but thinking of the artist's pretty face made me realize that I was sore between my legs.
The feeling between my legs was unmistakable, and I only knew of two ways to end up with that feeling. You might end up with this sensation if you forced yourself to masturbate a couple times too many in one sitting, and you will definitely end up feeling this way if you forced yourself to have marathon sex. The previous day's conversation with Bruce raced through my mind, and I suddenly realized that somebody had to have been fucking with my head.
As near as I could tell, I had two problems. First, I had no evidence or memory of sexual overload, and second, I had somehow managed to wake, shower, and eat breakfast without realizing what my body was feeling. I don't do drugs, and I hadn't been drinking. Somebody had been fucking with my head to make me forget.
I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon trying to decide what, if anything, to do. I almost called Bruce. I was pretty sure that he wasn't behind whatever happened, and I wasn't sure telling him would help. Almost belatedly, I remembered something else I had done the day before. I quickly retrieve my main cell phone and hooked it up to my computer to download some hidden files.
There's a long story about how Bruce and Mark got into a bunch of trouble on a ghost hunting misadventure. They barely escaped a legal mess that they blindly stumbled into. To protect them on their subsequent adventures, I had written an app for them that quietly takes a picture and records the GPS data on it. It would record a hidden picture every few seconds, even if the camera was in use. Their version had already saved them some trouble once by proving that they had been where they claimed they were. I had set up the app to run on my phone and I had activated it before I left the house the night before.
The pictures I found from the previous evening were just about useless. I had dropped the phone into the center console in my car, so every frame was black. The GPS data was a lot more revealing. I had trekked around a bit until ending up at an address near one of the smaller lakes. I had stayed there for more than four hours, and then driven straight home. If I wasn't wrong, which I usually am, that address was the studio/home of the artist who had signed both paintings.
My course of action was obvious.
--------
I sat in my car in her driveway and tried to reign in my thoughts. On one hand, it had been more than fifteen years since my wife and I had visited the cottage to pick up the painting of the cat, and I knew I hadn't been there since. On the other hand, her late model car was parked exactly where I remembered seeing it. I knew that only one of those memories could be true, and I was afraid to find out what else had been taken from me.
Her studio was a modern looking wing attached to a much older cottage. It had its own business-like entrance with an inviting sign that said, "Please Come In". With some trepidation, I accepted the invitation.
A little set of chimes warned her of the door opening, and as I walked in, she called out, "Welcome to my studio! Feel free to browse around. Give me a minute to put things up and I'll be... right there."
Even I couldn't have missed the flash of recognition in her eyes, or the hesitation it caused. She tried to pretend it hadn't happened as she turned her attention to what she had been doing. She considered the palette of paint and the brush in her hand and the painting before her, but then she shook her head. She decided to give up on painting, and she turned to clean up her tools.
"I wouldn't mind looking around," I said as she worked. "I get the feeling that I didn't get a chance to see your work the last time I was here."
She concentrated on cleaning her brush as she nonchalantly said, "I seem to recall that you knew what you were looking for. Didn't you pick out one of the landscapes of the lake? What was that, two, three years ago?"
"Not so long ago as that," I insisted. "If you would like the painting back, I will gladly return it in exchange for what you took from me."
She had the grace to almost look guilty as she asked, "And what was it that I took from you?"
"You did something to my memory, and I want you to undo it," I answered.
"Memories are notoriously unreliable in most people," she said with a gentle smile. "What makes you think that yours aren't true?"
"My memory says I have never been here since before you built this new wing," I explained, "but I remember seeing the wind-blown branch that is on the drive behind your car and thinking that the maple tree in my yard drops the same size branches. I've never been here before, but I recall how you said the sculpture by the door isn't your work."
I did something then that is completely out of character for me. She had finished cleaning up and had turned toward me. With a frown of concentration on her face, she had stepped closer to me to study my face as I spoke. I took advantage of her closeness to reach out and caress my thumb on her neck, right under her jawline.
"I can't imagine any situation where I would have seen you naked," I continued to say, "but I know that nibbling on your neck right here makes your nipples get hard, and even as you beg me to stop, you'll pull my face to your breast. How can I know that your breasts get extremely sensitive after you cum when I also know that we couldn't possibly have had sex?"
"Please, John, you have to stop," she moaned as a shiver spread down her body. There was almost pain in her eyes as she made eye contact with me and added, "What happened last night shouldn't have happened, and even though you're remembering some of the things you were supposed to forget, I can't bring back the rest. Nobody could."
I stared at her for several long seconds. The hardness of her nipples was evident, even though she was wearing a thick sweatshirt and a smock. I heard her warning, but I didn't want to stop. I could only imagine that she had used hypnosis to remove my memories, so there was no reason she couldn't give it back.
I think she saw everything that was going on in my mind. She ignored the lust, and went after my objections. Her eyes narrowed as she looked deeper into my eyes. Her eyes almost seemed to glow as she looked right through me.
"Do you remember the first time you met your wife?" she asked. Her face relaxed to a gentle smile. "You were late for church, and you were worried that your mom would be mad. Your wife and her sister and mother were new to the church and they had volunteered to be greeters. You were seventeen, she was sixteen, and you thought she was cute in her yellow sun dress and red sneakers. An older gentleman dropped his hat and you picked it up and handed it back to him. What was his name?"
"Uh..." I answered.
"All of those details and more are recorded in your brain," she gently insisted. "How much do you actually recall?"
"I only remember that we met at church," I answered. "I was too shy to ask her out then. We didn't start dating until a couple of years later."
"The spell I used on you pushed your memories of last night into those lost depths," she said. "Even if I tell you the man with the hat was Mr. Albereth, will you recall the memory? I'm sorry, but your memories of the last two nights are lost in the same way."
"Two nights?" I blurted out. She had the grace to blush. She also glanced at my hand and the fingers that were still gently touching her neck.
"Which is only one of the reasons you need to stop," she teased.
I gasped and pulled my hand away. I hadn't intended to act so familiar with her, and I should have stopped when she first asked. I ended up being even further confused by the hurt look in her eyes when I took my hand away.
"I'm sorry," I offered. "I should have asked..."
In my confusion, my hand had hesitated in its withdrawal, and it still hovered half-way between us. She smiled at me as she caught my hand with her own. She pulled the hand forward again as she dipped her head to rub her cheek against my palm.
"Your touch was welcome, but we can't share more, for two reasons," she said with a purr.
I cupped my hand to caress her face and managed to ask, "Can't?"
Her pleased smile turned to a smirk.
"Do you understand that we are not the same?" she asked. "When a woman of my race desires a child, she has two choices. She can face the power struggle and probable domination from one of the few men of her own race, or she can simply enjoy a willing man of your race and then send him home with his memories erased. Our DNA is very similar, but mine will be dominant and our daughter will be like me."
"Your race?" I asked. I don't think I am all that racist, and her mildly exotic look suggested that she wasn't of European descent like I was, but somehow I didn't think that was what she was talking about. She almost ignored my comment.
"I should have turned you away when you returned last night," she continued. "Somehow, our encounter the night before had left me quite satisfied, and yet it increased my lustful desire. When you returned, first I needed to know how you have found me a second time, and then I needed to take complete advantage of you."
She smirked and glanced at my crotch.
"I hope you aren't as sore as I am," she offered. "The same spell that erases memories can be used to make the male body forget that it had just achieved orgasm. Your lust takes over, and you get hard again in moments." She bit her lips together and blushed, and then added, "I lost count of the number of orgasms you gave me as I let you fill me four or five times. If lust were love, I would have you as my own."
She saw my lust start to take control of me, and she gave my hand a squeeze.
"The first reason we have to stop," she lamented, "is that my body couldn't take it. I'm not blaming you at all, because I was the one throwing spells around, but even my breasts are too sore to be handled today."
"And tomorrow?" I asked hopefully. Before she could answer, another thought slipped out, and I couldn't stop the words. "Why do you keep using the word 'spells?'" I asked.
She smiled, and then reached out and caressed my face the way I was still caressing hers.
"Do you know what happens when a woman of my race borrows a man of your race too often?" she asked. She didn't wait for me to answer. "Any minute now, your wife is going to gather up the other villagers and they are going to arm themselves with pitch forks and torches and then they'll surround the cottage, and if they don't tie me to a stake and burn me for being a witch, they will chase me out of town and burn down the cottage. Thus, another reason, and I must send you home."
My lust evaporated so quickly that it hurt, or so I would say. My knees almost gave out as I choked on the words, "My wife...".
The vanishing lust must have hit her as hard as it hit me. Her eyes looked inside me again, and then they flared at the memories that I struggled every day to avoid.
"Oh, dear man," she gasped, and suddenly she was hugging me close to lend me her strength.
"Two years," I managed to say through my tears, and then later, a single damning word, "Cancer."
I don't know how long she held me, but it was too long, and more than I deserved. When I nearly had control, I struggled to push her away. I was comforted to see that in her empathy for me, she was crying as hard as I was.
"Thank you, for everything," I offered as I gently used my thumb to wipe at her tears.
It was almost comical how her eyes seemed to turn in to stare at her nose, but she suddenly looked terrified as she cried out, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no!"
"Miss?" I begged, while in the back of my mind I almost laughed at myself for not knowing her name.
"No, no, no, no, no," she repeated. "You don't understand!"
She frantically tried to dry her eyes, and then she gave me a look that was half worried, half accusatory.
"A witch, a true witch, can only cry for the ones she loves," she explained.
I shook my head, and it took way too long for me to understand.
"You loved my wife too?" I asked. "She always loved the painting of the cat, but I didn't realize..."
"Silly man," she laughed, and her tear streaked face became radiantly beautiful. "I am in love with you."
I gaped at her for a long moment, which made her smile grow even bigger.
"This is where you're supposed to tell me you love me too," she teased, but then her face turned serious.
She took two steps over to a desk and opened the top drawer. Her face remained serious as she handed me Mark's gadget. I hadn't even realized that it was gone.
"If we're going to be in love, you're going to need this," she offered. She saw the questioning look in my eye, and she said, "It is rare that a witch and a human survives as lovers. I am far older than you can guess, and I will not age in your lifetime, and those are only the beginning of the challenges we have to face. By tradition, you must prove yourself worthy in trial against Cawharel."
I didn't recognize the name, which was sort of surprising, given my knowledge of the occult, and I couldn't even begin to repeat how she said it. I think it has a lot more letters in it than what I heard, and yet it was only one syllable.
"Carl?" I asked stupidly.
She smiled and shook her head.
"'The Hunter of Many Forms'", she answered. "You will know him by his eyes. I try, but none of my painting quite get them right."
"The owl, and the cat," I realized out loud.
"His favorite form when confronting humans is a large dog beast," she said in a worried tone. "If your phone-feeler-thing works the way I think it does, it will at least give you a warning when he is near. If you choose to be bold, he is often spotted near the hospital up in Elkhorn, and you can seek him there. Otherwise, he will come to you. Please, love, do your best. I am not ready to cry again for you."
"Love," I said, for it was the only word that I could say.
My mind was racing, and I hoped she didn't see all that I was thinking. First, I was thinking how fitting it was that Bruce and Mark had finally tricked me into doing an investigation for them, and I was going to die because of it. Second, I realized that they were both going to claim that I was lying when I survived to tell them 'The Beast of Bray Road' was named Carl.
I guess I wouldn't be too upset if the woman could read my final jumbled thought. It was obvious that she was even crazier than any of us guys, but she had an earthy warmth about her that made me feel alive for the first time in a long time. I would do whatever it took to face her beast, because the memories that I didn't have convinced me that she was worth it.
Hopefully, I wasn't wrong about that the way I seem to be wrong about everything else.
