Revenant

It was a day in late November, in the early evening, when I found the strange man in my shed.
For two years, my home had been a small log cabin on the side of a mountain in northern Maine. It always gave off a bleak picture, with its gray rocks jutting out from the ground and the trees always menacing, either in fall and winter when their thin spindly branches seemed reaching for your soul, or in the spring and summer when their bushes of leaves seemed to be hiding some kind of great secret. And the wind always seemed to have a kind of unwelcome presence as well: especially now, though, in the growing grip of winter, as it grew stronger and weakened in turns, carrying with it a chilly load.
I had spent all my day inside my cabin. Earlier, when I first awoke, I had built a fire—not that I needed it, though, since my cabin had all the conveniences of the modern home, including heating, electricity, plumbing, the works. But there was just something so homely about having a nice warm roaring fire in the brick fireplace. Through the rest of the day-hours I had gone between eating, taking a little nap here or there, reading my book, and even drawing a portrait of the landscape as seen outside my living room window.
By the evening the fire had died down, and was about to go out completely. I left the cabin, in my heavy coat and ear-flap hat and boots, walking to the shed out in my front yard to get some firewood from it. I opened the door, and in came a small amount of light. On the right side of the shed, opposite the door, was a large waist-high pile of wood chunks; and on the left side, right across from the door, my shadow falling over him, was the strange young man.
I knew he was strange from the start, besides the fact that he was in my shed. Everything about him seemed to be in shades of black and white: his long hair was dark, as was his clothing; and his skin was paper-white, like chalk, with every facial detail showing up clearly even in the dim light of the shed. His eyes, though they didn’t stare straight at me, seemed dark as well...and something else about them, something I couldn’t place right away...
And he wasn’t shivering. Here I was, in my heavy coat and gloves and hat and boots, and I was shaking a little, my spine quivering. And here this strange man was, in rather light clothing, a short-sleeved black shirt and jeans with holes in them that seem so popular among teenagers, and he didn’t even seem chilled.
But I didn’t have time to ponder on this: his eyes with sudden speed drew upward and met mine. For a moment there was silence and stillness between us, and I was struck by how dark his eyes looked, the implacable strangeness of them, and I was afraid that if I stared long enough I would fall into this bottomless void...
A smile spread across the young man’s face, and he said, “Hello.”
He had rather proper speech, the words clipped and refined to perfection.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m just a passerby, nothing more.”
“You’re just walking by...on this mountain?”
The young man shrugged—to him, it was no big deal.
“What are you doing, then? In my shed?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, glancing between my legs at my house beyond. “I...well, I was walking along, like I said, and I got a little cold. And I was passing by your house, and—pardon me, I know it’s rude—I thought this place was abandoned, so I just popped in here to warm up a bit.”
He was right by his thought: I was a little offended by the fact that he thought my house to be abandoned. I actually did go through some pains to keep the log cabin up-to-snuff.
“Well,” I said, “this house is owned by someone—me.” Then curiosity got the better of me, and I asked him, “But what were you doing up here, anyway? You weren’t just going for a walk.”
The young man’s head bowed down, and his eyes momentarily left mine. For a moment my mind felt free, as if it had been in bondage before. I wondered what he was doing, as he sat there with a bowed head, as his eyes swayed around the room. They weren’t searching for anything physical, but his mind was working. And I wondered what the mind searching meant: whether he was debating about telling the truth, or what the best lie would be.
After a few moments he came to a conclusion. He raised his eyes to me, not his head, and he said with a somewhat haunting smile, the bottomless eyes once again upon me, “I’ve been a bad boy.”
How wide and toothy that smile seemed, so white and clean and perfect.
“You’ve been bad? What do you mean?”
“I’ve run away from home. My parents. I’ve run away from them. That’s what I was doing up here: running away.”
My stomach tightened, twining around and around like a coiling rope. My breath stopped, my heart skipped a beat. My mind flashed, an image, a past image, of my own house...how it had receded behind me...so long ago...
I stared ahead for it seemed a long time, and finally I remembered where I was, and I saw the young man sitting in front of me still, that smile and his upturned eyes and down-turned head still facing my direction.
“You seem...troubled,” the young man concluded.
I moved off to one side, intending to sit down against the wood; my legs felt suddenly weak, feeble, shaky. My shadow left the young man, and for a moment as the light hit him he squinted and held his hand up to his face.
“Sorry, but could you close the door? I’ve been in this dark place for a long time, and my eyes aren’t used to the light.”
I didn’t find this strange. I went over, shut the door, and the shed was plunged into darkness, save for a single window letting in dusty, shafted sunlight. I went over to the wood piling and leaned against it. A small portion next to me jutted out, so I nudged over and sat on the wood, and though it was uncomfortable, it made for a makeshift seat.
“You ran away from home, you said?” I asked.
The young man nodded, that smile still there. Wide and white and toothy.
“I ran away from home when I was younger, too,” I said, trying to throw the lie at him that I was proud. But that fell apart, my eyebrows tilted on their outsides, and I’m sure he could see that. Those eyes seemed to see all.
“You ran away as well?” he asked, sounding rather astonished—it didn’t matter anymore whether or not he was lying to me.
I nodded. “Yeah. Oh yes. It was in my last year of high school. I...nobody liked me. I was different, you could say. ‘Different’ is a light word for it, what I was...I’ll admit, I was different, I liked differently then everybody else, my likes were rather...rounded, you could say.” I chuckled a little, but dipped back down into deep nostalgia. “Nobody wanted me around. Just because I was different; just for that simple fact. They shunned me. I had no friends. My peers spit at me. The teachers excluded me: they’d look right over my hand when I raised it in class. Even my parents seemed to push me away. I was their only child, yet they acted like...like they didn’t have any children.” I sighed, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. I was suddenly sweating profusely. “So I ran away. It was like killing myself in a way. I was cutting myself off from everything, disappearing. But it was like being reborn. Getting my own life, out here in the woods—it’s freedom.” I paused, my head sinking down a little. “But...” I hesitated, realizing the truth of what I was thinking, what hesitated on my tongue, stayed in my mouth. “But nobody ever came for me. Not even the people that were supposed to love me. Nobody...ever...”
And the young man had stared at me the whole time, watching me, rather raptly. And that smile had never left his face. It had remained constant, like it was always there, glued there like some kind of crazed human form of the Cheshire Cat.
“You ran away because you were different...”
I nodded.
“Because you weren’t as straight as the others...because you were rounded?”
I nodded again, then added, “I had too many acute angles...things slipped to my liking easier...” I loved how many ways I was finding to cloak the obvious. But I didn’t want to speak the truth aloud; the actual realization of it by vocal volume would be too jarring, I knew that.
The young man suddenly moved. I barely noticed, but suddenly he had grown closer to me. He was moving along the floor, on his hands and knees, but his movements seemed so reptilian. Like a slithering snake, swaying back and forth, body arcing horizontally, moving gradually forward.
And those eyes—so riveting—never wavered from my connected gaze.
“I ran away too, because I was different. But mine wasn’t neglect: they outright hated me. They threw rocks at me, they cursed me out. They drove me out of my home, where by birthright I belonged. So you see...me and you...we’re the same...”
His voice sounded so inviting, and though at first I resisted, suddenly I realized he spoke truth, that it wasn’t acid that his words dripped with, but that they were soaked with honesty. That phrase was true, that the truth hurts, honesty stings, whatever spin you want to put on traditional sayings. And he seemed like me: so vulnerable because of this past, out here on his own, with no one who cared for him...
He kept on, growing closer, “So we belong together, you see. We can be together, and then we have each other.”
He was up to my knees, and he gradually rose to his feet, and he was tall, so towering, hovering over me. Like a black specter. But I wasn’t afraid. Though he seemed cold (though not literally, he still didn’t shiver), his words projected warmth.
“Then there’ll be somebody to care for each of us: I care for you; you care for me. And then you can let go of the past, because it hurts you, I can see that. It hurts you every time you open a scarred wound. The same goes with memory.”
He bent down, and he was inches from my face. His hand went to my cheek, and it stayed there...it was cold to the touch, but what did I expect? He’d been out in the cold for so long, so no wonder his touch was ice-cold, like a freezer-box’s brethren.
“I can heal you. Just let me. Just tell me it’s all right, and everything will be all right.”
I nodded, and I breathed, my breath showing in a mist, “Heal me. Please.”
That smile descended out of sight. His head descended, away from mine, and I felt the warmth as he kissed my neck. Right along the side. It hurt at first: I’d never experienced it before, and I felt like this was all a dream. Was the pain physical, or was it mental? But the pain passed, the sting melted away like a shot’s first prick, and then I felt the warmth spreading through me. At first I was aware of my neck: the warmth seemed to spread down that, in a kind of waterfall.
Had he bit me?
I thought nothing of it, as the comforting warmth spread through me. I felt like he was an angel, that he was giving me life, that my meaning was coursing into me. And I let him fill me...fill me with the warmth of life...
And then I was gone; I blacked-out.
The warmth didn’t stay. It melted into cold quickly.
I awoke, and I felt cold. It was nighttime, and the strange man was gone. I didn’t feel physically cold, I didn’t have goose bumps, but my spine felt cold—a constant chill that ran laps up and down itself.
That was two months ago. I’ve continued living in the cabin, but I feel more alone than ever. The stranger had left, and I’ve never seen or heard of him since. Sometimes, on my nighttime excursions, I look for him. I don’t sleep at night anymore, I have no urge to: my body, though, drops down to sleep as soon as the clock rounds to six in the morning. And the sunlight hurts: it doesn’t burn, but when I go into it, it’s like a stinging that doesn’t subside, but it gradually grows stronger and stronger, more painful...
I’m hungry for many things now. My stomach has not been full in the past two months, ever since that fateful encounter with the strange young man in the shed. My mind feels hungry most of all, hungry for love, for acceptance. Something that I know now I’ll never get...because even the supernatural had no lust for me for more then what my blood offered...and that supernatural thing had stolen the last drop of hope I had...
And I’m hungry now, my stomach churning, my head burning. The moon is full outside, the night is dark.
I think I’ll feed on more then wolves or wild game tonight. There is a big town at the foot of the mountain, after all...