A Stranger in the Night

When I was a kid we moved around, a lot. My mom left my dad because he was abusive but the courts didn’t believe her because she had a drinking problem. Couple that with the fact she had issues finding and keeping work and the result was dad got partial custody.

She didn’t trust him not to hurt us, so she bolted. Every few months we would just pack up everything and leave.

When I was about eight we moved into this place outside of Nelson, BC. It was down a dirt road on a side of a mountain and the house itself was a ramshackle cabin. There were literal holes in the timbers at points where they weren’t joined right or where they’d shifted and on cold nights you could feel the wind coming through them. There was no running water, just a hand-pump outside and an outhouse. When I say this cabin was rough, believe me, it was rough.

We had one neighbour, and he lived a few miles up the road, an elderly man named Bill Hoskins. Old Bill was a cranky bastard and he always smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. He normally had one dangling out of his mouth, his fingers were stained yellow, and he stunk of tobacco and smoke.

Well, one day old Bill is over, he had helped repair our hand-pump and was having a cup of coffee, he told us to be careful at night.

When mom asked him why, he said that there were strange mountain folk that lived in the area. A family or a tribe, he couldn’t be sure, but at least a handful of them. He saw them from a distance sometime, and they left things for him to find on his property and in the woods; effigies, stacked stones, that sorta thing.

Mom laughed it off and told him to stop trying to scare me and my brothers. I was the oldest, and the two younger were 5 and 4. We were all listening raptly to Bill’s story about the mountain folk.

Bill insisted it wasn’t a tall tale and that he was legitimately warning us. He suggested we use a bedpan at night, or at the very least that we go out in twos. Mom again got mad at him and said that he was scaring us and if he kept it up he could leave.

Well, he quiets up, muttering into his cup that it wasn’t meant to frighten, just to warn and he lights another of his hand-rolled cigs.

A few nights later, as luck would have it, my youngest brother, Paul, wakes me up out of a dead sleep.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he says.

“Okay?” I reply.

“Can you come with me? I’m scared.”

I try to wake my other brother, Tim, but he was always a sound sleeper and dead to the world. Mom had been drinking whiskey and was sawing logs,  so I decided it had to be me.
We dressed haphazardly and meandered out into the starless night. It was unseasonably warm for late autumn and eerie quiet too. No wind, no animal noises, just the crunch crunch of our unlaced boots on the gravel of the path to the outhouse.

Paulie goes into the outhouse and closes the door, and I stay outside. I’m just sitting there, when I think I hear something moving around to the right of the outhouse, on the side that goes up to the mountain.

“Who’s there?” I say.

No answer.

I hear more movement, and the bush right beside me starts to shake.
I pound on the door and tell Paul to hurry up.

He comes out of the outhouse and says, “What?”

“We have to get back right now,” I say. I just have this awful feeling of foreboding. Every hair on the back of my neck is standing at attention.

Paul hurries to me, but then we heard the laugh. It was like a real slow chuckle, with every ha punctuated by silence, we freeze. Paul is shaking. I am straining my eyes in the dark and think I see a figure rising up behind the bush.

We turn and start running back to the cabin, but now there is the crunch crunch crunch of another set of feet on the path, chasing us. The sound of those footfalls is getting louder and closer, and I know we won’t get to the door of the cabin before whoever is chasing us catches us.

Just then, a light flashes, and sweeps over us.

“Who’s out there?!” Mom shouts

Paul and I run to her, both of us sobbing. “Someone was chasing us!” I cry.

She is keeping her light trained on our pursuer. The footfalls stopped, and I think he stopped his chase.

“Get the hell out of here,” Mom shouts. “I have a gun.”

I know she’s bluffing about the gun, we couldn’t afford that.

That slow chuckle comes again, “Ha… ha…. ha.” I hear the crunch of the gravel as he retreats.

“Get inside, boys,” Mom orders.

I sneak a peak at our pursuer before I go, and the sight still haunts me to this day. He was a gangly man, with wild hair, and clothes that were little more than tattered rags. Every square inch of him was dark with grime, and he wore no shoes. In his right hand, dragging along the ground beside him was an axe.

The next day, there is a little stick man hanging from a string nailed into the outhouse. Mom borrowed a gun from Bill, we used a bedpan at night from then on, and we moved away from there less than a week later.

I don’t know exactly what the stranger in the night planned to do with us, but it couldn’t have been anything good.