Let's Not Meet: A Collection

dont take the back roads

I've lived most of my life way out in the valley countryside of Ontario. Given, that's not a whole lot for an 18-year-old, but for me it's the only place I can call home, and I like to think that I know the entire area (as far and sprawling as it is) like the back of my hand. Adventures across the long, cross-crossing roads, pastures and woods that made up the skeleton of my village were a common venture in my childhood. As a young kid I had a habit of biking extremely far out in hopes of finding new places, and sometimes, my dad or one of my friends' parents would toss out bikes in their pickup and take us way out onto a back road and let us explore for a few hours.

This was how a lot of us first found that on one of these crappy gravel roads surrounded by thin woods was a worn down old shack sitting just about twenty meters off of the path. Honestly, I never thought anything of it, except for the fact that it was creepy. It had no windows to see inside, and I never went anywhere near it, but one of my friends at the time said that her older sister had tried to go in it and that the door was always locked. We all had better things to be curious about at the time than that anyway, so I quickly moved on and it became nothing more than a mundane landmark of that area. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about it for a few years now.

Except last Tuesday, I was coming home from one of my very late classes at my University, and I usually take the back roads I perused many years ago, as they're more straightforward and scarcely ever have any sort of traffic. As I drove down the gravel path that would wind along the side of the country and eventually take me to the next street I needed to turn onto, I noticed a faint glinting coming from within the trees up ahead, maybe about 100 meters from my car. A flashlight? I thought, but as my car came closer, I realized what I was really seeing.

The light inside of the shack was on.

I should mention now that in all of the nearly 13 years I've spent living in my area, I have never seen the door open, and I've never seen a light on inside of that shack, ever. Not even once. I must have driven past that shack probably almost a hundred times in my life, but this was the first time I'd ever seen any sign of a person's presence having been anywhere near that thing. That, coupled with the fact that it was 10 o'clock at night and pitch black outside aside from my own headlights, and the faint, incandescent glow lighting up the doorframe up ahead, immediately filled me with what I can only describe as a weird sense of dread. It would be hard for most people not to be immediately unsettled by something like that, and I am someone who's easily spooked.

Fortunately, while my car approached the light, I was curious enough that despite the feeling in my stomach I slowed down as I was about to pass, hoping that I could see what was going on inside -- and this is probably the only reason I managed to spot the dark shape that burst out of the foliage on the side of the road, directly into my path. I wasn't going very fast at that point, but I still pounded the breaks rather hard in alarm so my car came to a crunching stop on the gravel. For a moment, I was just really confused and freaked out. What was that? Had I almost hit a deer or something? This far out in the country, a deer would have been the most likely and most reasonable assumption. But in the beams of my car I could see what had stopped me: a very tall, very lanky old man, with scraggly and balding gray hair.

Right away I got the impression that this man was very poor. He looked dirty and unkempt, and his clothes hung off of him. However, I'm generally used to seeing people who aren't that well-off in my town, and I don't like to judge people right away based off of that sort of thing, so I was mostly just extremely unsettled over what the hell this guy was doing way out here, and why he had walked out in front of my car. As I sat there confused, the old man came around to my window and knocked on the glass. Feeling my memories of "Stranger Danger" conversations with my parents kicking in, as old as those conversations were, I rolled down the window just a crack; only enough for someone to be able to hear me and for me to hear them. I was already creeped out enough as it was.