Something Walks the Blackpine Cutoff

The Blackpine Cutoff is a dirt road that runs six miles through thick forest and shaves a good twenty minutes off the highway route between two small towns where I used to run deliveries. Everybody local knows about it, and here is the strange part -- almost nobody uses it after dark, even to save the time. When I first started the route, an older driver told me flat out to stick to the highway at night. I asked why. He just said the Cutoff does not like company after sundown, and would not say more. I figured it was small-town nonsense. I took the Cutoff plenty in daylight and thought nothing of it.

Then one night I was behind schedule and tired and the twenty minutes mattered, so I took it in the dark. The road in there is a tunnel, pines right up to the edge, no moon getting through, just my headlights and the dust and the wall of trees sliding by. About two miles in, at the passenger window, in the dark just past the reach of my lights, something started to keep pace with me.

I could not see it. That is important. I could only sense it, the way you sense a person standing behind you in a quiet room. But then it started making noise -- a steady rhythmic crashing through the underbrush, exactly matched to my speed, keeping perfect station off my right front fender. I was doing thirty on a rough dirt road. Nothing runs thirty through six-foot brush in the pitch dark without tripping. This did. It kept up with me effortlessly, and the sound of it was heavy, two-legged, deliberate.

I sped up. It sped up. I slowed, to test it, some idiot scientific part of me needing to be sure, and the crashing slowed to match, and then -- and this is the part I hate telling -- when I slowed, it moved closer. The sound came right up to the shoulder of the road, just outside the window, so close that if it had been in my headlights I would have seen it clearly, and I could hear it breathing. Big slow breaths, out of rhythm with the running, like the running cost it nothing at all.