That afternoon, like every other after school, Michael Lark began the walk back to his house. He shook his head as he reflected on his day. He had dished out a ton of insults. He’d made one boy cry in gym class—what a baby. But what happened in the cafeteria, the way June had shoved him—how was she so freakishly strong? It must have been a fluke. The meatball was just the beginning of his revenge. He would make her life, and that dork Brendan’s life, hell.
Michael’s walk home involved a trail that passed through several dense, lonely stretches of woods. Seven Falls was surrounded and intersected by a large national forest, so walking through woods was a fairly common occurrence. But as Michael started down that same familiar trail and entered that same familiar forest, something unfamiliar stepped out behind him. As he pulled out his cellphone, he heard a growl and turned around, expecting to see a big dog. What he saw instead made his stomach feel like he was falling from the side of a building. He whipped around, his phone went flying into the underbrush, and he bolted in the opposite direction, off the trail and into the thickness of the forest. Too terrified to yell, too panicked to pay attention to where he was going, he ran with blind abandon.
All he could hear now was the thumping of his own heart. Plunging into a ravine, he was surrounded by a sea of pine trees and bushes with thorns. Open space was hard to find, and he had to lunge through walls of green needles to avoid the bushes. The pine needles were only marginally better, as they scraped him like thick, itchy blankets. He ignored the pain on his skin and the occasional tearing sound from his clothes and pushed onward. At least the bottom of the ravine was dry. He gasped for breath as he reached the other side and started to run upward.
As he ran, he dodged standing trees, fallen trees, twisting roots, tree stumps, and thickets. It was a terrible obstacle course. Except for his own heavy breathing, the forest was eerily quiet. He stumbled often and hoped and prayed that the monster behind him had trouble getting through the underbrush too. He dared not look back. Then a black shape streaked into his peripheral vision. Fresh terror turned his stomach into ice water.
The upward slope of the ground grew steeper, and his pace slowed. It was getting harder to breathe and Michael’s stomach roiled. Bullying didn’t require being in the best of shape physically—it just required being physically big. But he couldn’t stop or the monster would kill him. He had to keep running. Branches whipped across his face. His feet were wet. Somewhere along the way he must have stepped in water; every step he took made a squishing noise.
He ran on. His difficulty breathing became a painful fire in his chest. His nausea developed into stomach cramps. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know what to do. His only hope was to keep running until he found another human being—if another person could even help him. Looming ahead, and blocking his path, was a dumb old fallen tree, too large to jump over easily, too long to run around. Uh oh.
Michael decided to jump over it. He leaped as he approached, hoping to catch the top and scoot over. Instead, he caught the tree right in his chest. He made a noise like air escaping a flapping balloon as he stuck to the side of the tree for a moment before falling backward. Gasping, he tried climbing it this time and managed to slowly and awkwardly make it over. Before he dropped down to the other side, he snuck a glance behind him and immediately regretted it. Not more than twenty yards behind him he saw the face of the monster, staring at him through the patchwork of branches, bark, and needles. Bright yellow eyes, flaring like two suns pierced by narrow black slits, burned into him.
He heard a low growl as he dropped to the ground on the other side of the tree. Michael always thought he had bad luck—after all, he had gotten a Saturday detention just for throwing a meatball after June attacked him. And here was more proof: he was being hunted by a bigfoot. Or maybe it was a chupacabra. Or a werewolf—the one werewolf in the world that didn’t need a full moon.
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Michael pushed the thoughts aside and struggled to move faster. He just wanted to get away, to live, to go back to a world where things like this never happened. He reached a hilltop and the trees began to thin out. Tall grass brushed his knees. He stumbled, unused to being on flat ground after running uphill for so long.
He reached the other side and the ground sloped downward, still covered in long grass and free of other obstacles. Michael’s speed increased dramatically. He risked looking to the sides and saw nothing. He peeked over his shoulder and saw no sign of a monster behind him. Hope surged in his chest. The ground leveled out and he entered a tree line, but these trees had space between them and left him room to run. As the thought entered his mind that he would live, the unthinkable happened. He didn’t see where it came from, or how it caught him, but Michael fell forward. His arms had barely moved to brace his fall when his chest and face slammed into the leaf covered ground.
Michael Lark could no longer breathe. A trickle of blood ran into his eyes and a numbness settled over his body like a warm blanket. A slurred sob burst from his throat, and he tried to move but couldn’t. Surprisingly, this didn’t scare him. There was a strange serenity in accepting he was helpless, and suddenly he was outside his body watching himself in a movie. And movies were safe. No one watching a movie died, and even the actors weren’t hurt—they just used special effects, costumes and red corn syrup, and it was all pretend.
While Michael lay on the ground, paralyzed and thinking of movies, the hairs rose on his arms and the back of his neck. His insides turned to oatmeal. He was no longer alone; in fact, something was right next to him, and he could feel its breath now. All traces of serenity were replaced with overwhelming, all-consuming panic. The terror gave him control of his body again, and he rolled onto his side to look at the figure looming next to him.
It was standing on two legs and looked, as his brain struggled to classify it, a lot like a massive, grotesque cat. But this was much larger than any cat he had ever seen, much larger than any of the lions or tigers at the zoo. It was at least as high as three tigers standing on each other’s shoulders, and as wide as two lions side by side. And this cat-thing was jet black, like some kind of panther out of a nightmare. Muscles bulged and rippled under its fur, claws that seemed too thick and long extended from its colossal paws, and rows of huge, cylindrical, knife-like teeth jutted out of its mouth. It was no bigfoot, no werewolf—it was a gigantic, horrible cat monster. And those yellow eyes, with the black slits so close to his face—the fire inside them threatened to melt his brain.
The monster dropped down to stand on four legs and growled. The sound was deep and vibrated in Michael’s chest like a passing train. The thing’s paw shot out and stopped suddenly, the nails like swords just inches from his face, like the beast couldn't make up its mind. It inched closer to him and its mouth opened wider, saliva dripping and coating its fangs so they glistened hungrily. Then the monster suddenly lurched backward. What was it doing? Tears filled Michael’s eyes, which blurred his vision, and he lost control of his bodily functions. The monster paused, sniffed the air, snorted, and shook its head. It stared down at him. Seconds crawled by as the creature eyed him. Why hadn’t it already ripped him apart?
Then a low, guttural noise came tumbling out of its mouth, but not a growl, which only served to frighten him more. Why wasn’t he already eaten? However, to someone observing the situation and not convinced they were about to die, the noise might have sounded like some kind of unnatural laughter. The swords on its paws retracted.
After the noise died away, the monster turned around and walked back into the woods, and in a flash of movement—ghostly, silent movement—it disappeared. Michael lurched to a sitting position, trembling, and held his legs close inside his arms, chin on his knees like a child. After a few minutes of staring in every direction and jumping at every noise, the shaking stopped and he realized he was really and truly alone, but also utterly lost. He started walking in the direction he hoped pointed home. Thirty minutes later Michael felt the hairs on his neck and arms rise again, then everything went dark. He was never seen again.