The Bloody Stranger

I don't have any phobias per say, but I do have an aversion to certain things. One of them is someone rapping heavily on the front door. I know it sounds like a somewhat odd fear, but it's true. This isn't to say that I get freaked out anytime someone simply knocks on my front door (personally, I'm always baffled as to how many people do this in lieu of ringing the goddamn doorbell, but I digress), but I do get somewhat frazzled when someone bangs like a maniac on my front door. After reading this story, maybe you'll understand why.

My grandparents were farmers. They grew cotton and peanuts. The lived in a very small town. They owned a home in town and a farmhouse waaaaaay out in the country. Practically in the middle of nowhere. The nearest neighbors were miles away, separated by fields of corn (in the summertime) as far as the eye can see. On a clear, dark night, if you looked really hard, you could juuust make out whether or not the lights were on at the neighbor's house.

My grandparents farm house was a no-frills relic. Quaint and clean, but really more of a place to lay your head after a hard day's work. After a long day of farming the last thing you wanna do is drive an hour to get home, so more often than not, they would spend the night at the farm. The farmhouse had a screened-in porch, a kitchen and four bedrooms. Two of the four bedrooms were used for other things. The room directly off of the kitchen was basically a cloakroom. And if your paying attention, no, there was no bathroom. There was an outhouse, however. Delightful. NOT. I could tell you about the nest of Daddy Long Legs spiders that made an unscheduled appearance once while I was there, but I think you get the idea. The house had electricity, gas and running water, but no telephone. And that's where we begin our story...

One summer my parents, grandparents, my uncle Gary, and his daughter Melanie (my cousin) were spending the weekend at the farmhouse. My grandmother had bought one of those plastic swimming pools for us kids to play in. You know, the ones with all the cute little cartoons printed all on the interior, that you'd fill with water in the summertime and let the kids go wild in. Anyway, she'd bought it and put it in the cloakroom, off of the kitchen and Melanie and I were sitting in it, playing. We were 5 years old at the time. It was around 10:30 or so, and while we played, the adults were gathered around the kitchen table talking. That's when we heard the bloodcurdling screams off in the distance.

Everyone went silent for a few minutes, while we strained to listen for what we thought we'd all heard. Silence. My grandmother looked out the kitchen window, and even with a full moon, she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. My uncle went to open the door that went out onto the porch and before he could reach it, a woman began frantically beating on the door, screaming for help. My uncle stepped back a little, surprised and cautious of whomever was wailing on the door. The screaming and beating seemed to last forever, until finally we urged him to open the door. It was a woman, her face and body smattered with blood.

My mother told us to stay where we were and not to come out. But naturally, I had to look through the crack of the door to see what was going on. I wish I hadn't. There, standing in the doorway was a woman who had blood all over her hands, blood on her face, in her hair and blood down the front of her dress. She said she'd been attacked and needed to use the phone. We told her that we didn't have one, but that the nearest neighbor did. Though we offered for her to come in, she insisted on getting to a phone. We pointed to the house that had the phone and she started to run towards it.

The last thing I remember is looking out the cloakroom window and seeing her running through the cornfield that separated us from the nearest neighbor. The full moon highlighting the tops of the tall corn as it parted and closed in behind her.