It was the summer of 2004. I was staying in the log cabin with my boyfriend, Jason. It was dark, cold, and ungodly sketchy area. My boyfriend’s grandparents built the log cabin in 1956, they were both long gone now but they always loved it here, I don’t know why. It was scary. The cabin was a wind blow away from tumbling off of the wooden stilts its set on, the water is thick and contaminated with algae, and the tree never grew leaves, they just sat there with naked, scattered branches. It wasn’t as beautiful as it once was, a long, long time ago. I’ve seen pictures of the just born cabin from long ago, and it will never replicate what it once looked like.
It was beautiful, you could tell that it had a lot of attention, and it was well kept up with. Jason’s grandfather, Papa, built it by hand. It was painted a dark brown, had gorgeously placed shingles, the porch and shutters were painted a tan, and the steps were stone. The trees were always full of big, green leaves that during the autumn season, had beautiful foliations of yellows, reds and oranges. The lake was always a light blue, you could see the floor of the water which was covered with rocks and thick sand. You could see the many types of fish that roamed the waters ways. Not anymore.
Everything changed when Papa died. He died in 1997, he was almost sixty. He made the cabin when he was eighteen years old, young and fresh. Papa would visit the cabin every weekend to make sure that it was up to par for Mammie. Mammie was Papa’s whole world, he would’ve grabbed her the moon if he could reach that far up. In 1985, Mammie died of a heart attack, no one’s sure of what actually caused it. She was at the cabin all day with Papa, he was out back gathering wood for the fireplace. She had just made her morning coffee, and was snuggled up in her bath robe, she took a walk outside so she could water he flower bed when Papa heard a blood curdling scream. And that’s when he found her, dead.
When paramedics took Mammie in for an autopsy, Papa searched. He searched for anything that he could possibly find that would’ve scared Mammie as bad as it did. An animal, a weapon…a person. He spent years looking for anything that would’ve killed his beautiful wife, and he never did. When he died it left a lot of questions, because unlike Mammie’s death, Papa had wounds that had no answers to where he got them. Knife wounds. The camp always sent shivers down my spine, it never felt like home and I was never comfortable there, knowing there was two deaths from something unknown. Mammie being a heart attack, and Papa being apparently stabbed. Stabbed? Why? How? Papa was a heard working, caring, sweet, old man. I had only known him for a year or so, but I loved him to death. How could anyone do anything so horrible to him? How could anyone maliciously kill him like that?
Jason was laying on the plaid couch, with the handmade quilt that Mammie made laying over top of him. I was in the kitchen making ice tea and cooking the rosemary chicken that Jason wanted so badly for dinner. I was looking out the small window that was above the sink, overlooking the lake when I glimpsed a standing figure walking along the edge of the bank. It moved slowly, tall and slender, and was a blackish brown color. It was dark out, so I just figured that it was a bear or something, I never put much thought into how odd the “bear” looked. I never said anything to Jason, I just let him continue to take his nap. He woke up and had out dinner; rosemary chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and ice tea.
It was almost seven o’clock so Jason ran out to get the wood to start the fireplace in the cabin before it got too cold and dark. I was inside, reading my book when I head Jason screaming, “Becky! Becky help me!” I threw the book off of my lap and ran outside to where the wood pile was, Jason wasn’t there. I panicked and started running being the cabin to look for him. I found him behind the cabin, but he only cried for help because he dropped a log on his leg. “Are you insane? I thought something got you!” “Sorry,” he said “but there’s nothin’ out here anyway.” “Actually,” I said, “I saw something walking along the edge of the lake earlier, and I don’t think it was a person, there’s no one out here.” Jason looked at me kinda funny, “You got quite the imagination, Becky. But there’s nothin’ out here to worry about.”
I took his word for it and we went inside to get ready for bed, I put on my pajamas and he put on his. Jason lit the fire and we crawled into bed together, cuddling up because the sheets were still so cold. And then I heard IT. I heard pounding on the door next to our bed that lead outside to the porch, the glass on the window started cracking and small chunks fell to the floor. Jason pushed me into the corner of the bed and covered me in blankets and pillows. He grabbed his shotgun from the corner of the room and swung the door open.
There he lay, Jason Greene. He was gone, it had got him just like it had gotten Mammie and Papa. He lay in a puddle of almost black blood that had drained from an open wound located in his chest. The blood wasn’t flowing inside of him anymore, which meant he was for sure, dead. I grabbed his wrist to check his pulse when my fingers felt digs, when I looked at it, it had been engraved with a razor with the word “IT”. I was in shock, I sat with his body on the porch, holding his bloody hand while I looked off into space crying. Jason was actually dead.
My heart pounded when a police officer approached me with the worst question and accusation that one could ask,
“Ms. Thompson, did you kill your boyfriend?”
“NO!” I screamed back at the officer. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t see because my eyes were blurred with tears.
“Then why are you covered in his blood, Ms. Thompson?”
“I was standing directly behind him when he was killed, it splashed all over me! When he was laying there I held his hand. I’m covered in blood because I witnessed my boyfriend being slaughtered.”
The officer nodded his head in disbelief as he rolled his eyes and walked away from me, I was filled with anger and pure terror from what I just witnessed. What I just watched take the very life of my boyfriend, my boyfriend that I loved with my whole entire heart. He was gone, and I had to figure out what took him away from me, what stole his one and only life in the blink of an eye. I would figure it out. I walked into the police station, hands by my side and head up. I walked to the front desk and demanded to speak to the head sheriff. The secretary gave me a look and asked me for my reasoning to speak to him, and I told her about the murder case and I wanted to give him my side of the story, considering they just blamed me for the whole entire thing. She walked me into the interrogation room and sat me down around a small, square, cheap white table. She left me there alone to wait for the officer all by myself. As I sat alone, I gathered my thought and wrapped my head around the reality of the situation. My boyfriend was dead, I was being accused of murdering him and there was something out there that killed him, but I didn’t know what.
The sheriff came in and sat in the chair across from me. He took out his papers that were neatly filed with a large paper clip. He tugged the pen out of his shirt pocket and pulled his glasses down over his eyes.
“So, you wanted to talk about the murder?”
“Precisely”, I said smartly.
“So tell me what you have to tell me, then.”
“I didn’t do it. Did you see those claw marks on his face? How could I have possibly done that, how could I have left those wounds on his face? Not only that I couldn’t do that because I love him, but how in the world could I have physically left those prints on his body without any weapon source? I knew what it was. Something has crept along our camp, it was that, I know it was. It killed Mammie, and it killed Papa, and I know that it’s what killed Jason, I know that it was.”
“Describe it.”
“Tall, lanky, blackish-brown, stands on two feet, certainly not a human, it’s an animal almost like a bear. That’s what I thought it was when I first saw it, a bear.”
“When did you last see it?”
“The night Jason was killed. Right before he went outside, when I was making dinner, through the kitchen window.”
“Okay.”
The sheriff dismissed me from the room and I went home. The ride home was a long one, the terrifying thought that the sheriff didn’t believe me stayed in the back of my mind was killing me one second at a time. I was so scared. I was so scared that I would be blamed for the murder of my boyfriend, I would be blamed for the murder because there was no witness, and its sounds comical that I would think a bear type creature did it, and that there was no proof besides my own. There was no proof, and my proof wasn’t valid enough. They couldn’t see it like I saw it, they didn’t live it like I did. And boy, didn’t I live it.
I opened the door and the blood splattered on my face before I had the reflex to pull my hand up over my face to shield myself from the mess, and before I could look, it disappeared, and there he lay, Jason Greene. The toughest, smartest, funniest, most handsome man I know, laying at my feet in his own pool of blood. A story that no one would believe, a story that only I knew was true. I knew I didn’t kill him, how could I have done that damage. I couldn’t have, that’s how. I wasn’t strong enough to take Jason, I wasn’t smart enough to outdo him. I couldn’t, and I absolutely wouldn’t. I loved him more than words could say, and now, he was gone. Jason was dead. Then I got the call.
“Hello.”
“Ms. Thompson?”
“Yes.”
“We have found your case to be guilty. We need you to come to court.”