Interlude: A Flashback
My narrative is not over by the way, but it’s taking much longer to write than I anticipated. Here it is February and I’m still talking about November.
A quick flashback then. If I’ve never mentioned why I frequently go to Mexico (and I’m not sure that I have)… then ask me about it later. Suffice it to say, I was in Mexico in September. The place at which I usually stay has amenities like electricity and plumbing. This was my first time staying at “The Ranch”, which is located in the middle of nowhere, a 45 minute drive away from the main stretch along a windy, rocky, dirt road, does not have such luxuries. (Perfect for an electrical-engineering-hating luddite such as myself.) The sleeping accommodations consist of about a dozen single room “loft houses” in two semi-circles (like an “m”). For whatever reason, I could not get to sleep one night, and perhaps out of boredom as much as necessity, I got up multiple times to go to the bathroom. Being male, I did not feel the need to walk the several hundred feet to the outhouse, and chose to simply to do business around the back of the house.
The first time I was up, I was perplexed by a rapidly dancing point of light coming from a different part of the camp, that looked as if someone was erratically waving around a small Mag-lite. I could not think of a good reason for someone to be doing this in the middle of the night, and figured instead that it must have something to do with the dying embers of the camp fire which was also somewhat in that direction. However, when I looked in the opposite direction, away from the camp, no people, no fire, still I saw the same dancing light.
The second time I got up, as I was making my way to the back of the house, I distinctly heard what sounded like someone running off in the distance. As I stood wondering about this, the sound changed so that it seemed to be coming straight towards me. It was dark, but I could still see well enough to know that there was nothing moving in the clearing in front of me. So my ears were telling me that something was coming straight at me and my eyes were telling me that there was nothing there. At that point I decided that I really did not have to go to the bathroom after all, and scurried back into the house and to bed.
“What?” I chastised myself, as I lay there. “I thought you weren’t afraid of anything!” Well, first of all, I don’t recall making that claim. But assuming for a moment that I did, even if it were true that I am not afraid of anything in this world, if something that I can not see is running toward me, I simply did not want to be around when it got there.
I don’t know what all that was about. I was in an unfamiliar place, late at night, and my eyes and ears were just playing tricks on me is all. There’s no reason to think anything supernatural was going on, right? Right?
For outside of your comfort zone… Here be Monsters.