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.

I did not roll down the window. I did not look directly at it. I kept my eyes on the road and I put my foot down and I drove that last four miles at a speed you should not drive a delivery truck on dirt, bouncing and sliding, and the whole way it stayed with me, right at the passenger window, breathing, until the trees suddenly fell away and the road spilled out onto the paved county highway and the streetlights came up.

The instant my front tires hit pavement, it stopped. Not faded -- stopped, like a line had been drawn that it would not cross. In my side mirror there was only the black mouth of the Cutoff, dust settling, nothing there. I pulled over on the shoulder under a streetlight and sat with the engine running and my hazards on for a long time.

I told the older driver the next day. I did not have to say much. He just nodded, the way a man nods when you finally learn a thing he already knew, and he said the same as before -- the Cutoff does not like company after sundown, and now you know why we do not argue with it. He said it has walked beside trucks on that road for as long as anyone can remember, and it has never once been seen, and the only rule that matters is that you keep moving and you get to the pavement.

I quit taking the Cutoff at night, obviously. I would rather lose the twenty minutes. And on the few daylight runs I still made through there before I changed routes for good, I always caught myself glancing at the treeline on the right, at the pines standing there so innocent in the sun, and wondering where it goes in the daytime, and whether it was watching me pass, and counting on me to be foolish enough to come back once it got dark.