Growing up in a small town was a boring freedom if that makes sense. I suppose what I mean is outside of your basic life advise about avoiding strangers and creepy guys in vans offering candy, the smalltown life was safe in its familiarity. Our only family rule was commonplace and simple and easy to follow.

Come home before the streetlights come on. Everyone born before the internet era understands that statement.

It was one our whole town followed, to an extent. My family though, they followed it religiously. Should we come home as those lights had come on. We got yelled at and grounded. Kiss your dreamcast and Super Nintendo bye for that tardy transgression.

My brother never told me the whole story about the time he came home late from his girlfriends. He was shaking, stammering his words. Pleading apologies before rushing off to bed. What was weird was that my parents never yelled at him. They talked to him in his bedroom, hushed voices behind the drywall, words spoken that I never heard. Even despite eavesdropping.

When I was twelve years old, I would understand why he never mustered up the nerves to tell me.

My closest friend, Reese, invited me over to a sleepover in the dead heat of an early July summer. We had sugary drinks, chips, chocolate, and an onslaught of horror and thriller flicks. We were set to have ourselves a good night.

It was around eight at night now when I gazed out of Reese’s living room window. I distinctly remember how the sun began to sink behind the mountains and the bright yellow light of the suns’ rays had deflected from the clouds and softened to an orange tinge, which barely beamed off the horizon.

It was there that I saw his dad pulling into the driveway. His truck ripping around the corner, side mirror cracking off the mailbox and the chevy coming to a jolting halt just before the garage door. Reese father, Mr. Holloway, came stumbling out of his truck, a bottle of Jack in hand, half finished.

I don’t remember all of what was said when my friends’ dad came bursting through that door, drunk out of his mind. All I remember was the crashing of fists against walls, the yelling and screaming, and then Reese’s mom ushering me out of the door, sporting a black eye and a swollen left cheek that looked fresh.

I hadn’t known about Reese’s family life and in truth, I couldn’t blame him for not telling me. He thought everything had been better since his dads promotion at the factory, but the promotion came with new stresses, and in turn, he relapsed into an abusive alcoholic.

Now I was outside, six blocks from home and scared. I had never seen abuse. I was young and understandably, did not know how to handle the situation, so I started to walk home. The streetlights were not on yet, but the nights curtains were closing quickly around me.

I picked up in my pace, I could feel the cold of night nipping at my heels. I could hear a mixture of Mr. Holloway yelling and hitting his wife, along with my mom lecturing me about being home before the lights came on.

That bleak orange tinge that brushed over the dark clouds was fading, failing to the twilight and the emerging of the crescent moon. Only to be smothered by blackened clouds that shrouded over head.

As I walked down the open road, I kept looking over my head for the streetlights to come on. Nothing. Even looking behind me in anticipation of the streaming headlights of a passing car, but the road was bare of anyone except me and my fear.

Now the road I was walking on was like a county road of sorts. Reese lives on the outskirts of our town, and I live about twenty minutes from him. To give an idea of the landscape. There are a ton of trees, nearby creeks that run rampant during the rain seasons, but were exceptionally shallow right now, so the water was still and silent. By all rights this walk should have been peaceful.

Instead, it was hollow and harrowing. My heightened anxiety from the previous events obviously served as a conduit of jittery reactions and panic to small, sublime things that on a regular day wouldn’t even catch my attention, but now, every move of a branch, every rodent mucking about in the brush had me jumping on edge.

Even in that moment I was rationalizing, trying to mentally usher myself into a calmer disposition, but instead my fear as served with a fresh injection of a perverse, creeping spine tingle when all the shrubbery and branches began twirling and undulating as if a powerful windstorm had just brisked through the county line.

However, there was no wind. The air was still, the temperature was that of a warm, even hot, summer night. Watching all the bushes and shrubbery made me power walk now, staring up at the streetlights, begging for those lights to flicker on and guide my feet back home.

It was dark now. Night had fully smothered the sky. Only the waning light of a crescent moon, which had its twilight lamination become dampened, nearly choked out by the dark clouds.

Still, the streetlights failed to flare. Instead, those shallow creek beds just off the road began to splash, splash loudly behind me, then all around me. The hairs on the back of my neck rose, as if an icy hand of whatever lurked behind me, splashing about in the creek bed at night, was reaching out to throttle me.

My power run became a full-on sprint. I looked behind me, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was manifesting nature itself to defy its own rules and splay about, causing plants to move and water to crash.

Nothing.

There was nothing. I came to a skidding halt, nearly sliding backside against the pavement. I had to rationalize this. I needed a moment to think this through. There had to be a reason. Things like trees swaying and water splashing, they don’t just happen without a reason. I may have been young, but I had a love and appreciation for science, for logic and action and reaction.

My search for the action was answered in the sound of a muffled, demented type of hoarse, guttural cry that sounded as if a person had made this cry, it likely tore their throat to ribbons, slicing the back of their voice box to a bloody mess. Yet it also sounded drowned out. As if someone was screaming abnormally loud through a pillow that had been taped to their face.

Well, every action has a reaction. And the cry now had a body that drunkenly swayed out from the creek bed, just off the road and shambled onto the road. Its bones cracked like the trees around us, still swaying about in the still air, assaulted by some unrelenting, unfelt presence.

This thing was taller than me, perhaps about six feet tall. It looked up in the air, its body facing sideways to me, so I did not have a good look at the entirety of this shadowy, apparition. All I could see was it look up, gazing at the dead streetlights. Its arm cracking upright, fingers with some type of long extension, perhaps nails? Long, tangled nails began to tap, tap, tap, against the steel of the pole.

Then its sinewy, frail body shuddered as it now faced me, and I could get a frontal view of it. Long, frazzled hair that looked unkempt. Then a smell. A burnt, coppery, expired stench that was thick enough to taste in the back of your throat. It tilted its head at me, as if confused by my presence. It took a step closer, still at least a full block and a half away from me, and then I saw a chunk of its face sling down from its jawline to its shoulder, flailing back and forth.

The image was grotesque. I stepped back, shocked, until I realised that it was not something from its jawline that hung about, it was its jaw, just torn off, hanging by a few fragments of what I could only presume to be bone and flesh.

I had no intention of finding out, so I ran as fast as I could, desperately crying out for help, calling for someone to come and save me.

To my horror, I watched my own neighbours watch me run and flail my arms toward them, staring t them with watery eyes, begging for help, only to be responded with closed curtains and sad looks.

How could they do this? How could the people I have known my whole life watch this happen to me?

I screamed insults and swore more than Reese’s garbage, drunkard of a father.

That’s when I heard the loud, mechanical humming coming from behind me, along with that things, guttural howls. The streetlights began to power up and turn on. One by one I caught glances behind me at the lights chasing the thing that chased me.

Now the thing picked up its pace, gaining on me in horrifying fashion. The way it shambled and sort of crawl-ran at me on all fours, with its hanging jaw swaying about, I could see from the bursting light that gained on it that its jawline had teeth sewn into it. Which only made me want to puke more.

A large white truck whipped past me and then slammed on the brakes, turning till the drivers’ side door faced by backside. I stopped, rushing to the truck, hopping inside the back passenger door.

Just before the thing flung itself in air, charging the truck, the final streetlight came on, and it dissipated into nothingness.

The man in the truck drove me home, calling himself Earl. He was a Lineman who had to come out and fix the start-up issues with the streetlights. He yammered on about old breaker systems in the town, seemingly unphased by the other worldly being that chased me and nearly smashed into his truck.

When he stopped at my place, my parents came rushing out, hugging, and holding onto me. Before I was brought inside for the longest lecture of my life, I asked Earl one more time, what had happened and why nobody helped me. He gave me an answer, albeit a vague one.

“I am a lineman son, and we have brought light to the roads across the world since we made homes from clay and wicker. We have seen a lot. We have kept this world bright to blind the things that grinds its knives in the dark. I won’t say much about the folk that watched you struggle, and I am sorry it happened. Just do as your mom and dad say and come home before the lights come on.”

I felt unsatisfied by his answer, and in truth, in disbelief. I grabbed his sweater as he tried to get back in his truck.

“So, what, you are trying to say that guys that work the lines keep us safe from, that thing?” I was dumbfounded, and in truth, I felt cheated by his answer.

All he did was laugh and point to the insignia on his city truck. Which held a lightning bolt over a torch with the initials of our city and state. “Linemen were torch bearers and lamppost builders in the old times. If our job is so safe, then why did we carry swords?” he said with a smug smile before getting into his truck and driving off into the night.