How to Forget the Unexplainable

Ivan stepped out from the front door of Dan’s apartment building and was met by the crisp, almost sharp, cold air in his face and he shuddered as it crept down the collar of his jacket and under his shirt. He tied his scarf tighter and drew the zipper all the way up to his chin and plunged into the dark of the night. Dan had won almost every battle they had fought in King of Fighters that night as usual and Ivan had stopped being mad a long time ago and accepted that Dan was the better of the two, although he himself never played the game. They had talked about movies and games as they always did and the time had been poured into their glasses of Dr Pepper and into the bowls of candy. Before they knew, it was ten minutes past two in the morning and Ivan was about to go home but was stopped by Dan that surprised him with an uncharacteristically grim expression on his face.

‘What is it?’ Ivan asked.

‘Nothing man, I was just kidding.’ He said and laughed.

‘Shit, I thought somebody had died or something.’

‘See you tomorrow man.’ Dan said and patted Ivan on shoulder.

He picked up a handful of snow and tried to make a ball out of it but it just fell out of his hand when he tried to form it. He lived a few kilometres from Dan and he was forced to wander through a small park on his way home and he was ready to admit to himself that he was scared to walk there alone. The dried leaves crackled from underneath the snow when he walked among the bare, skeleton-like, trees. He couldn’t see anyone, usually he saw people taking their dogs for a walk when he biked home, and he turned his head to peek through the tall trees. A few lamp posts shone in the distance but the lamps inside the park where all broken. He passed a small playground with a see-saw and a pair of tyre-swings and he kicked one of them so that the chains rattled. It was the only sound he could hear. He was making all the sounds. He walked on and heard the tyre swing lightly from his kick. And then it just stopped. He turned around and saw the absolutely motionless swing and it was like he had never touched it. He stood there for a minute and watched it then he turned around to keep on walking. A pair of red glowing eyes stared at two metres from where he stood. He screamed instantly and fell backwards in the snow, his heart ready to explode. There it stood, perfectly still. A tall, pitch black, wraith-like shape with two glaring red eyes, stared at him. He started to hyperventilate. The shape didn’t move and Ivan clawed at the ground behind him to find something to hold on to but there was nothing to grab except, the icy, powder snow. Minutes went by and he was forced to calm down or else he would faint, it wasn’t until then he heard the low, gurgling, sound like a thick fluid running through a drain coming from the dark form. This wasn’t his mind; this wasn’t a dream, but he could not believe it, yet this creature was right in front of him. The moment stretched out and grabbed hold of all his other thoughts, and the only thing left was the black tormentor. That’s what he felt, torture to his head, to his mind. Something unreal that was about to break itself into his wall of reason and wreak ruin inside. It took one step forward and a second wave of terror fell over Ivan and he closed his eyes. Through his eyelids he could see the red glow from the creature’s eyes and he dared not open his own. It was close now; the sound had come closer and a strong smell of burnt skin had joined it. He inhaled deep and opened his eyes and screamed again. It sat hulked over him with a pair of enormous leather wings extended around him. It rose to its full height, that must have been over two and a half metres, and it flapped its wings in a slow motion. It looked like it was about to lift of the ground and then it vanished.

He blinked but it was still gone. He had now lain on the ground for fifteen minutes after the creature’s disappearance. It was a quarter to three. The encounter had only lasted for three minutes but to Ivan it seemed like it was another year entirely. This feeling stayed with him until the sharpness of the image started to fade and he brought himself to his feet. All of this was too much for his brain to handle so it decided to shut down and ignore it all. Following his brains instructions he walked the rest of the way home and went to bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

He woke up from a dreamless sleep, or at least he couldn’t remember what he had dreamt and it seemed like a regular Wednesday morning. Then it returned to him. First he saw the image of the creature as he remembered it; the red eyes, the black shape and the bat-like wings. He first doubted that it had been real but something like this had never happened to him. He paced around in his room and grabbed a pair of pants and threw them away again. He didn’t do drugs and he didn’t drink much, if that would have had any affect. He sat down on a chair he never used to sit on, filled with clothes, and buried his face in the palm of his hands. It had been real, what he had seen had been real. He couldn’t decide. Was he sick? Was it a hallucination? There where many possibilities he thought, many explanations. He went to his computer and googled: Dark figure, red eyes and wings. What he found was mostly ghost stories and ridiculous tales of aliens that attacked farmers and little children. No this was something more, something he could have touched if he dared stretch out his hand. He watched out the window and noticed that it wasn’t snowing and he could see his own footsteps from last night. He could prove it now; he knew a way to prove if it was his mind or if he had been visited by a nameless being. He put on some clothes and went outside without tying his shoes and ran the same way he had walked home last night. He forgot the freezing cold as he ran, following his own footsteps in the snow, all the way back to the park and to the spot where it had happened.

What he saw there gave him no relief, although it cemented the fact that he was not crazy. He could clearly see the traces in the snow where he had thrown himself backwards. And you could also see large imprints in the snow leading up to his fall and the traces of the wings being dragged behind the creature’s footprints, but nothing that lead up to its initial spot or from where it had disappeared. He almost wished that he was insane; that it had been a ghost of his mind. To think that such things existed added a whole new ungraspable perspective. Suddenly a strong sense of paranoia gripped him and he turned his head quickly in all direction searching with his eyes. What if it returned? What would it do to him? Until yesterday he hadn’t really known fear, what it meant to dread something that resembled pure terror. He wanted to tell someone, anyone, what had happened to him. There was no question that they wouldn’t believe him. What if all the stories where true, and people just didn’t believe them. He wouldn’t before yesterday, hell; he almost didn’t believe himself now. What had happened to all those people? They had been ridiculed and made fun of and no good happened to them. Were it more people still, which held their secrets within their hearts as they knew they wouldn’t be believed? Was this the way to go from here? He slumped down into the snow. He knew that he never could explain it to himself or anyone else. What good would it bring him to tell his mom, or his dad, or even Dan? He decided not to tell a soul about his experience and before he left he erased the only trace that existed and went home.

He had spent the first two weeks regretting that he had removed the prints in the snow. At times he just wanted to scream it out at the dinner table, while his parents talked about the unusually high priced Christmas threes. But he didn’t and his secret caused him to mostly spend the nights thinking about red rays of light piercing through his window blinds. With the help of sleeping pills he had returned to sleeping after five weeks of insomnia but the paranoia persisted. He attended school but his friends stopped calling him as he became reclusive and went home directly after school, and more often than not before the classes were over. He had never talked much to his parents so they didn’t notice any considerable change in his behaviour, and that was a relief to him. He had come the point, many times, where he just thought over the moment over and over again until he snapped out of it. In brighter moments he rethought his strategy and gradually the outcome of those thinking moments turned into a decision to forget it. How else would he return to a life where dark monsters did not exist? If he was to stay sane he could not obsess about eyes watching him from a distance. After all, the rational thing to do was to forget and move on. The creature hadn’t harmed him, in fact he had always thought it was out to hurt him but when he replayed the events that had happened that night one more time with a different set of eyes he realised that he didn’t knew what it wanted. He had focused on it as a tormentor, a punisher. Maybe it was not. After that afternoon he felt much better and instead of thinking about it in a negative way he was finally free to think of the other things this might mean. What other things was out there. That the creature was supernatural was without doubt as it had appeared and disappeared without a trace.

Ivan sat in his room and wrote in a notebook, with homework papers strewn around on his desk. His cell phone rang and he answered as he laid himself back on the chair.

‘Joe, what’s up?

‘Are we still up for tomorrow?

‘Sure man, bring a controller and I’ll buy the snacks.’

‘Nice, see you tomorrow.’

Ivan hanged up and felt at ease. Some more homework to do he thought, better get on it. His mother knocked on the door.

‘Ivan, do you want some sandwiches? Were making some now, come to the kitchen if you want one.’

‘Nah, that’s all right mum, Dan’s coming any second.’

‘Okay then, have fun sweetie.’

He looked forward to get beaten by Dan again; it was a year since that night, since they had last played. But he was late, typical Dan. Someone banged at the door and Ivan went to the door and opened. Dan rushed in and slammed the door behind him and moved into Ivan’s room without taking off his shoes or jacket.

‘What’s going on,’ Ivan asked.

Dan didn’t respond immediately but threw off his jacket and sat down in the clothes filled chair.

‘I saw...’ he began and then went silent.

‘You saw what?’ Ivan asked but knew the answer.