Pike Hill

Many a day passed before someone started to connect the dots – and even then it mattered not. The dark-red-almost-black splotch on the path remained despite cleansing rains and snowfalls. Indeed, it had grown beyond the spot where some passersby had seen the decaying body of roadkill that was somehow not on the road, but rather on the footpath, to encompass quite a bit of the walkway.

Many an animal had succumbed to the throbbing pulse of the blot on the path, ignorant, despite more acute senses, to the threat beneath their feet; but it wasn’t until, several of the bipedal type disappeared that notice was taken.

As several people disappeared, and testimony was given, a rookie officer with detective aspirations, noted that each of several said to have disappeared from his sleepy town, were last seen heading towards Pike Hill. On his day off, he hiked the path from the center of town to the peak of Pike Hill, and noted that the path was discolored in one spot – darker, for no apparent reason. He took to returning over and over again at different times of day, and the spot remained, despite many a rainfall.

What he didn’t do, was venture out at night. Had he done so, he may have seen the path buckle and shake. He may have seen a certain sinister light evince impossibly from the dirt beneath his feet. Had he trampled the spot, after the sun disappeared in the horizon, he would have felt, only for a moment, it’s true, a certain ripping, tearing, draining before he, too, like so many others before him, was a mere memory to be forgotten, while his energy lived on in the ever-growing, pulsing, sucking force that lived beneath the path of Pike Hill.