from A Ghosthunter's Journal by Mason Winfield

V

I arrived at Sandy’s house, still chuckling at myself over that comical little standdown. I had probably outfaced a dyspeptic groundhog. Young Parker let me in and showed me the downstairs shower, looking like he had something on his mind. When I came out, Sandy and other members of the brood were back, rushing around like they were battening hatches against a storm. “Don’t go anyplace,” she said, ushering her youngest up the stairs.

“Parkie shot a ‘woody’!” chirped the little one.

“You shoulda been there!” crowed Parker, but he looked like he was covering his feelings. An hour before the young fellow (babysitting his little sister) had fired a shotgun at some suspicious bushes. The resultant bellow and heavy bipedal running had them believing that he had winged the Bigfoot. I wondered if that was the stalker I had envisioned on my run. Its scrub-haunting style was certainly the same, and we had our explanation if it had turned nasty - unusual, but not unreported, Bigfoot behavior. Parker even believed he had some blood samples and hair from the scene, which he seemed about to retrieve.

I raised my hand before he could spring up the stairs. “Can it wait? I have a signing to get to.” Sandy, however, was distressed at the idea of Bigfeet on the warpath and the house with only one adult. I almost said, “What am I gonna do? Stick ‘em with my ski poles?” But, reflecting on how recently I’d been offering to do just that, I held my peace and considered options. There was no telling how long I’d have to wait until Bill Pascarella returned, but I was determined not to stand up that little bookstore. They’re the ones you want to show respect. A signing can be the high point of their year.

The cops wouldn’t stay here all night on suspicion of Bigfeet, but another idea came to me. I called Jim Lynn, a retired civil deputy who lived nearby. He had attended a couple of my talks and even helped me track down a ghost story in these parts a few years back. He arrive in or forty-five minutes with his brother-in-law Bob Gorski, a State Trooper, and Ed Gunther, a friend, hunter, and curiosity-seeker. They were brawny, middle-aged men armed for game, and I had no more fears for the family. Parker seemed to have some new heroes, and when I left he was on the porch with them chattering about law enforcement.

Signings - like lectures - are usually great opportunities to make research contacts, and this small one in the shop of a Black Creek woman was no different. I inquired about the local paranormal as well as the “mystery critter” population. I didn’t mention the word Bigfoot for fear of getting whoppers delivered to order; but a few stories from the last century did offer themselves, and word that recent digging in the cellar of an old home on Sandy’s road had turned up giant bones. Sandy had kept that from me, or else she hadn’t known. It was also pointed out that this was “the Valley of the Lost Nation,” the region from which a small Native American group just vanished from history with barely a trace, as if something had snatched them into the sky. What the Hell was going on around here?

I got back to Sandy’s by nine-thirty to find Jim Lynn and his pals jawing with husband Bill at the kitchen table, praising Sandy’s coffee and whole-wheat cookies. The three guardians had been all over the ridge with the family dogs and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone s spirits had lightened. I felt as if I had gotten swept up in Sandy’s mood earlier that evening, and that my haste to get to the signing had tag-teamed my normal reasoning processes. I was even questioning my experience in the woods. I’d seen nothing, really. It was generally believed that Parker had sunk buckshot into his own bogeymen, and that our suspicions were the stuff dreams are made of.

I delivered something like a vernacular Puck’s address (at the end of ‘Midsummer Night’) to the lawmen, filled with genial remorse for wasting time in their busy lives. Veterans of many a fruitless material stake-out, they were good sports about this failed paranormal one. It had even become the fashion of the evening to scoff at Bigfoot rumors. Some comedian among the bunch - I can’t embarrass Bill Pascarella by revealing who - screamed upon opening a closet as if a werewolf were inside. It was so far from his normal manner that everybody laughed.

The evening now seemed so innocent that no one noticed when Suzie walked with a couple of the dogs out to the barn for an errand. She was taking her sweet old time about getting back, though. The others were hot into some topic, and I decided to see what she was up to. The minute I stepped from the house I knew something was wrong. The dogs were in full throat behind the barn. How could we not have heard them? I had two choices: turn back into the house and sound a warning or rush over immediately. For some reason I chose the latter.

Generations of owners had more or less connected the old farmhouse to the barn by an assortment of structures - a stable, pens, a tool-shed - that seemed afterthoughts: walls without roofs, workspaces without walls, interlocking to produce jagged passageways and open-air spaces. I cut around the buildings from the outside and the front of the house, following the hubbub to the left of it. Expecting to see Suzie as I rounded the corner, I was readying a phrase, “What’s all the racket?” I never used it.

It felt like I ran into a tree branch. I flew and fell in an awkward position, on my back across a stack of old doors beneath a low overhang. My hips were higher than my head, which may have been what kept me conscious. In the odd, crowded confines of the barn entrance there were wooden fixtures and heavy items at all angles, and only moonlight pouring in. The shadow that loomed over me looked as wide as a refrigerator. It reached for me with an astonishing peace.

Everything was slowed, as if the air had thickened into molten glass, and time into an invisible, permeating medium that even bogged thought. I had the impression of fingers thick and blunt as twinkies groping or me in my awkward perch. Several of them brushed past my eyes, inches away, as if expecting to fingerpaint into a palette of human features, as if reaching for an image a foot closer. Whatever it was was easily within reach of my legs or my waist and could have hauled me from my space like a wheelbarrow; but it seemed to prefer my throat, and to have trouble finding it in the half-lit jumble of flat planes, of table-edges and reclining doors. Its spatial awareness was not that of a human being.

From where I lay, I put my feet high against the figure above me. Its torso felt hard as wood. It leaned into me as if amused, sensing something it readied to grab. I’m not a big man at all, but I’m fit, and my legs are strong. Even as my knees flexed, bringing the figure closer, I had the absurd memory of a similar move in college, when I got my back against a guard rail outside Denison University’s Bandersnatch and pushed a ‘67 Chevy out of a snowbank. The things that flash through you in the most desperate, speeded-up, slowed-down moments... The few life-and-death situations I remember have all been like that.

With the same motion, but viciously and faster, I gave a perfectly-timed shove with all I had when the figure was most unbalanced and my leverage was the best. The huge form shot back and up, hitting its head on the edge of an overhanging open attic-floor beneath which it had been leaning to reach at me. The impact had to be awful.

I was on my feet so fast it surprised me. As if it had been left there for me to grab, the haft of a tool on the edge of a bench came into my hand. It was an axe. I swung it sideways like a bat at a pitch and felt the hammer-end land with a sick thwack on a neck and jaw and carry right through. It made me remember a discovery from an ancient battle, some guy's jaw found a hundred feet from his body, doubtless slung off him by a single handy blow. As I say, the things that flash through you... I was sure something like this had happened in the barn in which I stood, and that the form that had to be at my feet would spell the mystery for good.

The tool fell from my hands, and I stood back stunned against the wall, the impact of the brushing blow I had taken either starting to tell for the first time, or really settling in. I came to at the incredible sound of a shotgun from five feet away, and the insane din of several dogs too afraid to do more than stand and yap.

Jim Lynn had fired at something toward the treeline and stood next to me staring in its direction. Whatever instincts the old lawman had had been good ones; he had left the house within seconds of me, out a different door, and come around from the other side. He may have saved my life. Suzie Pascarella stood frozen beside us, having witnessed everything from behind a waist-high partition. I looked down and saw nothing but scuffed dirt. Amazing. That blow was the most vicious thing I have ever done. I think it would have dropped a bear.

Others arrived, Bob Gorski with his pistol and Bill Pascarella with a baseball bat. Sandy and the older children followed. We stood, staring out into the night suddenly weirder than we had ever accepted, staring as if the field and trees beyond it was a screen upon which we had seen a film so moving that we could not rise from our seats until we had read all the credits. It had to be minutes before any of us spoke.

"Bigfoot at Black Creek" is one of the many tales from Mason Winfield's "A Ghosthunter's Journal" -- now available from buffalobooks.com.
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