Previous installment: The Wheel: Part 10, The Upper Peninsula
Start at the beginning: The Wheel: Part 1, Jack Colby
Where we left off: Jack and Justin arrived at Ryan’s cabin in the U.P. In sleeping and in waking, the horrific deaths of Sheila and Megan continued to plague Jack. In the middle of the night, Jack heard a strange scratching noise coming from Justin’s room. Justin didn’t seem to be doing the scratching, but the sound ceased before Jack could fully confirm this. When Jack returned to bed, he had a familiar nightmare of the incident on the wheel.
Voiceover narration: Andrew Thomas
Art: Jenelle Thomas https://alovelygiraffe.com
A Footprint, A Cave
Jack woke with a start, covered in sweat. He sat up and shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes as if he could push them back into his head and have them pop back into place, having unseen the horrors of the night. He parted the faded yellow curtains next to the bed and looked through the trees. It was just after five, and the sky had already begun to turn pink.
“Fucking hell,” he complained as he continued to rub the sleep from his right eye.
Sleep was not likely to visit him again, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to. He began to try and massage the dull ache out of his forehead and begrudgingly got out of bed. Before putting on new clothes, he wiped the sweat off his back and chest with a used shirt and threw it in the corner.
Yesterday’s coffee had been quite strong, so today he took his time with the pour-over contraption, considering what he might do to make a better cup. Afterward, he settled into the ancient recliner in the living area with his Kindle and a slightly improved cup of coffee. Reading, again, turned out to be an ill-fated endeavor. Something about his nightmare was just too familiar, and he couldn’t put it out of his mind. Surely he had lived through this same incident, but that wasn’t it; the details weren’t right. For one, Megan had fallen first, but in the dream within a dream, it was Sheila plummeting to her death while Megan screamed above. Two, the wheel had kept turning even after they had both fallen. Three, hadn’t the gondola swung to the left, not right? It bugged him more and more as he shook off the early morning brain fog. With his coffee finished, he decided a walk to the lake was what he needed. It was getting lighter out, but it would still be hours before Justin woke.
Once outside, he found it was already warm enough for just a T-shirt. It would be a very hot day.
Gonna have to get that kid in the water one way or another.
Invisible birds chirped and sang all around him, and somewhere in the distance, a loon was calling. The familiar smells of the forest lay upon his shoulders like moss on a downed tree. He meandered slowly to the lake, taking it all in; the walk was short enough as it was. Several Adirondack chairs stood watch along the grassy shore, covered in dew. He did his best to wipe off one with his hands before taking an inevitably damp seat.
The lake was pure glass. It was broken once by the ripples of a small fish jumping to catch a bug, millions of which could be seen skimming over the surface. Occasionally, a bullfrog belched somewhere along the shore to his right. Jack leaned back into the chair to survey the patch of sky above the lake. It was awash in morning pastels with small pink puffs of clouds scattered about, catching the first rays of light. Breathing deeply, he closed his eyes and relaxed with the world around him.
Moments passed, and Jack’s thoughts strayed until a little fish of a thought jumped through the surface of his consciousness and came crashing back down with a splash, sending uneasy ripples throughout his body. Of course, the slightly wrong dream was familiar; it was exactly the same as one of the scenes that had played out in his imagination in the minutes before his wife and daughter had died.
Jack sat forward abruptly and stared into the water in front of him, not seeing the minnows as they darted about. Many scenarios, each worse than the last, had gone through his head on the wheel that day, and he had thought about this often since then. Out of all the people who probably had similar crazy thoughts on Ferris Wheels throughout history, why did he have to be the one to see his fears come to life? Or to death, for that matter? Until now, all of the various anxiety-driven visions he had on the wheel that day had coalesced together and melded with the details of the actual event to form one malignant memory. But this new revelation that he had seen the death of Megan and Sheila almost exactly as it would happen seconds later filled him with confused fear. Had he actually premonished his wife and daughter’s doom? Primed the pump of fate?
Suddenly, Jack needed to be close to his son, and he leaped from the chair. Halfway back to the cabin, he heard the snap of a branch and froze; the hair on his neck trying to flee. He thought of the picture of Bigfoot he had seen at the store and turned sharply back the way he had come, slowly scanning the wilderness around him. The same serene view of the lake was all there was. That and the solitary bullfrog.
He called out weakly, “Hello? Anyone there?”
The trees weren’t so thick as to conceal anything of substance, but he continued a slow panoramic scan regardless.
“Hello? Justin, are you trying to scare me?”
If Justin was playing games with him, which Jack doubted, he was certainly doing a good job of it. Finally convinced he was alone, he quickly covered the rest of the distance to the cabin.
Once inside, Jack turned around, peered back through the ratty screen door, and studied each distant tree with intention. His heart fluttered once when he caught some movement out of the corner of his eye, only for it to turn out to be a bird alighting on a low branch.
“Dad?”
“AHHH! SON OF A…” Jack exclaimed before stopping to exhale deeply. “Whoa, bud.”
He looked over at Justin, who was standing just outside the hallway that led back to the bedrooms and bathrooms. Justin looked confused and somewhat scared.
“I’m sorry, pal, you just startled me.”
“What were you doing?”
“Huh?”
“What’s outside?”
“Ohhh, I was just…” Jack hesitated, trying to think of what to say. Then he thought of the bird he had seen shortly before he had jumped out of his skin. “I was just watching a bird…that I saw out there.”
Justin didn’t reply. Whether it was because he didn’t know what to say or because he didn’t believe the story, Jack couldn’t tell, but he didn’t want him dwelling on it.
“Well, it’s time for breakfast. Do you want to learn how to scramble eggs?”
Jack and Justin took the morning slowly, enjoying each other’s company and the lack of a schedule. They ate a simple breakfast of sausage and Justin-scrambled eggs (which meant they weren’t scrambled all that much) before returning to the living area to relax. Justin decided to read some of the books he had brought, and Jack grabbed his Kindle, finally able to read without his own mind distracting him.
In the late morning, they ventured out to find that the day was indeed heating up. Jack briefly returned to his early-morning fears but forgot them almost as quickly—it’s hard to hold on to any sort of anxiety when you have a young boy goofing off by your side. Justin seemed more eager to explore today, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
“Do you want to walk around the lake again?” Jack asked.
“Mmm…” Justin thought. “Not really. Those trees over there look cool, can we go that way?” Justin was pointing off to their right.
“Sure!”
So they headed off in the direction of the sun, which had risen over the tops of the trees sometime while they were reading. There was no path, so they trekked through the carelessly shed clothing of last year’s autumn, clambering over fallen trees and their limbs. The tall, conservatively spaced trees made the larger area surrounding the cabin feel expansive, considering they were in the middle of the woods. Up ahead, maybe fifty yards away, the trees changed, and this is where Justin had been drawn. Amidst the larger forest, there seemed to be another smaller, more dense wood existing within. As they drew nearer, they discovered, to their delight, that the border of this area was struck through by a small creek.
“Dad, is this the same river we found yesterday?”
“Of course it is, ya dork.”
Justin laughed.
They stood for a moment, tracing its path from the lake on their left, then turned to watch as it trundled quietly off into the woods, drawing the cedars along with it.
“Let’s go this way,” Jack said and turned toward the lake. “It looks like we can cross somewhere over there.” He pointed about fifty feet ahead of them along the creek.
Sure enough, a tree had fallen across and was thick enough to hold them easily. Jack stepped out onto it and was on the other side in two strides. He leaned back over the stream and took Justin’s hand to help him across.
Now that they were across, the pines and the cedars seemed to close down around them. After spending all their time under the towering verdant cathedral of the maple, the smaller cedar trees seemed to beckon as if Mother Nature was inviting them to come play in her cozy living room.
Here, the ground was more certain, coated with closely laced needles instead of voluminous layers of leaves. Justin took off running, ducking the occasional branch and leaping over those that had fallen. Jack stood and watched as his son began climbing over a rock formation some distance away. It appeared to consist of several massive rocks sticking up from the earth. One solitary tree grew up from within them, and a couple more had fallen down, raising their shallow root beds up as walls to enclose one side of it.
Ryan had been right; this was exactly what they needed, and despite the ritual nightmares, Jack was happy. Justin hadn’t acted this freely since before everything happened. Jack stood there, smiling slightly in Justin’s general direction, and chuckled when his son’s grinning face popped up over the edge of one of the rocks. He waved with big arm motions, and Justin waved back eagerly before retreating to his new abode. A smile still on his face, Jack turned away and searched the ground for a branch that would serve as a walking stick. It didn’t take long. He found one that came up to his chest, busted off several smaller branches protruding from it, and set off at a slow stroll along the creek. He was fascinated with the swirls and eddies that sprang up any time a boulder or fallen tree stepped in to bar the water’s natural progress and leaned over one particularly deep and shadowed area, searching for fish. No luck.
Jack turned back to look at the boulder formation. He peered through the trees and, after seeing no sign of Justin, shouted, “Hey, Justin! You doing good?” His voice shattered the silence and pinballed through the trees.
Justin’s came wafting back, almost too quiet to understand, but he was pretty certain it was a simple “What?”
“You doing good?” He repeated, even louder.
This time the response was clearer: “Yeah! This is fun!”
Jack smiled again and returned to his examination of the creek. About twenty feet ahead, he spied another area that was likely to house fish. As he drew closer, he noticed the edge of the creek was particularly mucky here. He was testing the area with his foot, making sure he wouldn’t sink in and lose his shoe, when he saw something that set his brain alight. There was what seemed to be a footprint—large, heavy, and bare—in the mud, several feet in front of his own.
He stood there, riveted. All at once, the sound of the stick snapping loudly that morning and the scratching during the night rushed back into his brain and brought with it the Bigfoot flyer and its two remaining phone number strips at the convenience store. It grinned at him again with its sinister and ironic fangs. Heart racing, he squinted at it as if this would give him a better look, yet he was too afraid to get closer and confirm its reality. Instead, he began to search the ground for more, always keeping the original in his sight. The strip of mucky earth was not large, and there was no clear second print. He thought the ground cover was disturbed in a few places, though, heading in the direction of the…
Jack whirled around and began to run frantically through the woods and towards Justin’s rock formation, walking stick forgotten. “Hey! Justin! Get out of there!!” He called several more times as he ran, but still wasn’t getting a response. Unable to take it anymore, Jack stopped his all-out sprint and bellowed, “JUSTIN, GET OUT! COME HERE!”
Finally, Justin appeared on top of one of the rocks.
“What’s the matter?”
His voice seemed small, even though Jack had covered half the distance between them.
“Just…come here!”
Thankfully, Justin began to climb down right away. Jack bent over to place his hands on his thighs and catch his breath, watching him approach.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” Justin asked as he jogged into proximity.
“Nothing,” he panted.
Suddenly, he didn’t know what the hell he was going to tell his son. That he thought Bigfoot was stalking them? That didn’t seem like a great idea to plant in a seven-year-old boy’s mind. And besides, was that what he really thought? Doubt filled him again, and he turned slightly, wanting to go back and look more closely at the “footprint” he had found, just to be sure.
Instead, he simply finished with a lame, “It’s just…not safe on those rocks.”
“Dad, it’s really cool!”
“I know, but you could get hurt.”
“No, I won’t! Do you want to come and play with me on it?”
“No…not right now. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Aww, man! It’s like a super cool fort or something.”
“I know,” Jack sighed. He was feeling more terrible about this by the minute. “I just want to head back to the lake for now.” Jack began to walk with Justin in his wake; images of a muddy footprint and Justin’s disappointed scowl alternated in his mind.
“Can we come back in a little bit with a flashlight?” Justin asked him from behind.
Jack stopped, wide-eyed. Justin almost ran into his back. “A flashlight? It’s daytime.” Jack turned to look at his son.
“Yeah, but there was sort of a cave under some of the roots. I didn’t want to go in it, though.”
Jack was staring blankly over Justin’s head at the collection of fallen trees and boulders. He pictured something terrible and prehistoric climbing up from beneath them, clawing through the roots and dirt, to grab his son by the ankle and drag him down to a slow death. He drew a ragged breath as this vision winked out of existence and was replaced by the original premonition he had had on the Ferris Wheel of what could happen to Sheila and Megan; the one that had again plagued his sleep in the early morning hours; the one that had turned out to be so close to reality.
“Are you ok?” Justin asked.
Jack blinked and looked down at his son strangely as if he was just noticing he was there.
“Um, yeah.” Then he tilted his head, gazing blankly back at the rock formation, and asked, “You hungry?”
He heard Justin say, “A little.”
“Ok.” Jack looked back at Justin and smiled. It was a stiff, fake smile, like he had bought it off a Walmart shelf and pasted it to his face for this prescribed situation. “Let’s go make some sandwiches.”
Man, this actually makes Bigfoot scary! Not that he wasn't scary at all--but honestly, I had always kind of viewed him as a kindly wood-ape. That said, this definitely gets my pulse going. Right on!
Plus, as always, you have an absolute knack for describing setting. I want to go to there, even with the risk of Bigfoot
Im interested to know—Do you believe in Bigfoot, Andrew?