The Run of Steve Stiltz

Run. My philosophy, my way of life.  Everyday, rain, sleet, snow, even in a fucking hurricane.  I have never really had to work very hard to be an exceptional runner, my God-given gift.  Not to brag but I have ran the Boston Marathon in a 2:47:23 (and that was in fucking 90 degree weather my friend) and my fastest mile time being 4:45 (which is good considering I can run slightly slower than that for twenty-six miles).  I have also performed well in a variety of other races as well, but that was before I met Steve. Stiltz.
         Steve was a person who I met three years ago at a 5k race.  It was a good race day that day. I ran it in sixteen minutes flat in second place to Steve who ran it in an amazing14:56.  After the race, I congratulated him and we both ended up talking about running the entire evening.  I learned that Steve was also a very talented runner who I never heard of because he said he used to live in Canada.  He was single and had only one love: running, the same as me.  He had short brown hair and was well built. He also had very streaking black eyes.  He looked a lot like someone you would see on the streets of New York and mug you.  Then we got to the famous question that all runners ask: What is your fastest mile time?
         He said with a queer look in his eye, “It depends on the track”.
                   In all my years of asking that question I have never heard that answer.  I looked at him with a lost look and said “What do you mean?”
         I honestly thought he wasn’t going to say anything and just walk away but he finally said something after the awkward silence.
         “Why don’t you come over to my house and we can further continue our running conversation there, maybe over a couple of cans of beer sometime” he said in a friendly tone, but he betrayed something there, a look on his face that said something along the lines of “I am hiding something but I am not going to tell you yet”.  At the moment, I really didn’t give a fuck as long as there was beer involved.  Besides, if he didn’t want to say, fine by me.
         So I said that I would like to spend an evening with him at his house sometime, though not that evening.  I had to get home to my wife.  So we parted and we each went home.


It was about a week later when Steve contacted me again.  I was running a speed workout on the college track at Grove City (Pennsylvania).  I was doing my usual speed training (four 400 meters, four 800 meters, one 1600 meters) and I was dead tired at the end of it.  So I get into my white 1997 Ford Aspire (it’s a good little car, has 100,000 miles on it.  Can’t seem to give it up) when my cell phone starts ringing (I never bring it on to the track with me) and I answer it.  It was Steve of course.
         “Hey Dave!  What’s up buddy?”
         He sounded very excited and anxious, like a child that just got a new toy.
         “Nothing much, just doing my speed workout.  How are you Steve?”
         He answered quickly, “Oh fine, fine.  I was wondering if you wanted to stop at my place for a beer or two tonight, say 5:00, so we can converse further on running.”
         I thought about it a second and mentally checked to see if I had other plans and I agreed to go over to his house.  I didn’t mind having a few beers with a friend in my world of running, besides he seemed sane enough (I guess you really couldn’t call obsessive running sane though).  I was going to find out how obsessive Steve was.


So he gave me directions to his house and then I told him I would see him later.  I then went home, got a shower, and told my wife where I would be.  I left at 4:00.
         I proceeded towards getting to Steve’s house (located at an hour south of Pittsburgh) and I then arrived at my destination.  His house was on top of a hill with no neighboring houses (his house was shall I say, “Off the beaten path”).  It was white and two stories high.  It looked to be a fairly new house and looked quite nice complimented with a well cared for, yard.  Why he didn’t want to live in town so people could see this nice house was beyond me.
         I went to the front door (which was a brilliant red) and rang the doorbell.  I heard Steve shout from inside for me to wait a minute and I waited.  While I was standing on the doorstep I noticed a sign above the door.  It was a bronze sign in the shape of a shoe with wings on the heel nailed to the spot above the door.  It had a little motto engraved on the shoe and it read: Run like hell.  I cracked up instantly at the simplicity of the message.  Steve didn’t look like a person who had a sense of humor.  After I was done laughing, Steve answered the door.
         “Hey I heard you laughing.  What was so damn funny?” he asked.
         “Oh just your sign there above the door.  I like the motto, made me laugh.” I told him.
Steve gave it a thoughtful look and said “Ah yes, that.  I take that motto quite literally myself.”
         I smiled but I stopped when Steve didn’t smile with me.


We stayed and chatted out in his backyard on his patio and drank beer.  We talked about running, races we’ve won or lost, speed routines, running shoes, and also, marathon moments. 
         “I remember when I was running the Columbus Marathon, coming into 24th mile mark and there was a man in front of me with a message on the back of his shirt that said “If you can read this then I am not in last place”.  I thought that was pretty humorous, so I tried to catch the guy to make a comment on it.  But every time I tried to catch him, he would speed up faster.  That really pissed me off so I start to go to a near sprint to beat this guy.  But he would somehow keep that distance between us those 15 feet or so.  I tried to catch him those last two miles but he beat me at the end, his damn shirt mocking me.  I never saw his face but man was I pissed!” I told Steve.
         Steve looked solemnly back at me and nodded at my story.  He had that serious look but there was a twinkle of craziness in his eye.  Then he spoke.
         “Do you remember when we spoke about my fastest mile and I told you it depended on the track?” Steve said slowly.  I told him yes and he was silent for roughly five minutes before he spoke again.
“I have something to show you but we’ll have to drive to get there.” Steve said quietly.
He told me we will take my car but I told him I probably could not, for it was now dark going on 9:00 and my wife will probably want me home. 
         “Ah it won’t take long; let me get dressed into my running clothes” he said.
         So I waited out by my car until he came out of his house in full running regalia (which happened to be a pair of short blue running shorts and a plain white tank top).  He handed me a stopwatch.
         “I want you to see me run my fastest mile; the world’s fastest mile” he told me quite plainly.  I must have been pretty drunk because I went with this incredulous plan.  I just said okay, we got in the car, and we left.


We drove for fifteen minutes on the highway when Steve took a left turn on to a dirt road that was guarded by a battalion of willow trees and rough marsh.  It was hard going and I have no idea how my little Aspire could push through all this.  Steve meanwhile just had that crazy sparkle in his eye and fierce determination on his face.  I just sat in the passenger’s seat like a dumb idiot.
          As we went deeper into the marsh, my drunkenness must have started to wear off because I started to notice my surroundings (with what I could see with my car’s high beams that is) and I noticed that we passed through an old rusty gate that said in iron letters at the top Loveleaf Academy.  I immediately had a nagging feeling that I had heard that name before somewhere.  Newspaper perhaps?  But the feeling passed as we came into the sight of a huge broken down building in the middle of the woods.  It had broken and boarded up windows with vines visible on all sides of the building.  This is where fear started rearing its ugly head and pinch at your soul saying “Hey something isn’t right here.  I don’t like this.  Let’s get the hell out of here.”  But you keep going anyway because you think your being foolish.  Like all scary tales, it’s the same old song and dance.
         Steve stopped the car and parked right in front of the sad old building, which was probably quite majestic in its time.
         “Well here’s where we get out.  The track is around back” he said and got out of the car.  Why I didn’t question at all, not where we were or why we there, was probably because I was afraid to ask.  Fear of the answer that would be uttered out of Steve’s mouth. 
         We walked pass the school and turned behind it.  We came to a locked chain link fence, then Steve took a very old looking key and unlocked the padlocked gate.
         “I went through hell and back to get this key” he chuckled dryly “It was certainly a hard key to get my hands on.”  I didn’t respond.
         We walked past the now unlocked gate and down a hill where there I saw the track.  It was a normal looking track in the respect that it was oval, but it was colored a brick red.  The surface looked to be made concrete (a bad surface to run on due to the fact it hurt your legs) and it had dull white lines split to four lanes.  I noticed as we got closer to the track that there were symbols (made with size varying stones) all around in the grass, some shaped like circles and stars, but there were also shapes that were not taught in geometry class.  Steve didn’t give them any notice.
         “Do you have the stopwatch ready?” Steve asked.  I said yes and Steve stepped on the track.  I had a sudden chill.
         “You may not believe this at first, but that’s okay.  At least someone will know what lengths were made for me to run the fastest mile” Steve said solemnly.  I was about to say something, but Steve said “Start!” and he ran.
          I started the watch and that’s when the shit hit the fan.  The circles and shapes started glowing with a fierce light.  Steve was clicking, fucking clickin’.  I heard chanting suddenly on the cold wind, and flames started to lick the side of the track.  Steve had just finished his first lap at 50 seconds.  Steve looked very pale but he was still fucking zooming.  The chanting grew louder and it became recognizable: run like hell.  That phrase was chanted in a slow monotonous deep baritone voices.  The circle’s light became fiercer. 
         Steve finished his second lap at 48 seconds.  He was breathing very heavily and his eyes were sunken into his head.  He just kept running and running, staring straight ahead, in pure focus and sheer determination.  But, his sunken eyes were the eyes of a dead man as they were reflected off the flames.  I was frozen with terror, watching him go around the damn track.  The chanting grew faster.
         Then Steve came around the third lap at 47 seconds, but he was no longer Steve in my eyes.  He was streaming with blood coming out of his mouth and nose in rivers, but something else struck me more.  As I saw Steve’s body pass, the back of his shirt read: If you can read this then I am not in last place.  I stared at Steve’s back dumfounded as he went around for his final lap.  The chanting grew to a great roar at this point and the noise alone held me on the spot.  The flames leapt higher.
         As Steve finally came around to the finish, (which happened to be a white line marking the end of 100 meters) the watch read 3:10:45.  He had just run a mile in three minutes.  As soon as he finished, everything stopped, the chanting, the light of the circles, and the flames.  He stopped at the finish line and looked at me in the face.  Blood stained the front of him, looking more like a dead corpse then a live body.
         Then he said with finality and indifference “Was that shit fast enough for ya?” and then he burst into flame, his body burnt to scattered ashes.  I stood there for what seemed an eternity, until I finally ran like a bat out of hell into my Aspire and got the fuck out of there.  I cannot recall, though, my drive through the marsh, but once I got home, I collapsed on the couch and had a dreamless sleep.


I woke up the next morning with no recollection of the night before, at first.  I realized I was still in my clothes (not uncommon especially since I had a hangover) and when I got up and stretched, I realized I was clutching something round and hard.  I looked in my palm and there was the stopwatch reading 3:10:45.  My blood ran cold and I felt my spine tingle, but I calmly controlled myself and slowly went to my room to put the watch in my dresser, not cleared. 


I often wonder what happened to Steve that night at the Loveleaf Academy track.  Whether he was satisfied with his bizarre fate or how he had come upon that track to begin with.  Some of those answers came with time.  About a month after that night, a search was made for Steve after his mailman noticed the mail wasn’t being taken out of his mailbox.  About three weeks after that, Steve was declared dead.  There was a small funeral at which I didn’t attend.
         It wasn’t until four months after Steve’s funeral that I figured out where I had actually heard of the Loveleaf Academy.  I was reading the newspaper that day and I saw that the school was being torn down and the area surrounding it would become a place to chop trees for lumber.  This was the article:

“It was declared today that the Loveleaf Academy in Beaver County would be torn down so the area could be used for lumber project headed by Bill Seame.  ‘There’s a lot of dead wood in the area but plenty of nice strong trees perfect for lumber purposes.’ Seame says.  The Loveleaf Academy which was shut down in 1978 for teachers teaching students witchcraft and “defying the order of church and God” so the township had it closed down and the area was vacated.  This caused a lot of uproar among parents with no school and how such a thing could possibly...”

I stopped reading it there.  It suddenly came to me like a spark in the darkness.  The man with the shirt... the damned shirt... a picture came into my mind just then of the man wearing the shirt, but now the message was complete: If you can read this then I am not in last place.  Loveleaf Academy Track Star 1965.