Michael Hunter: Come Get Me

With him needing a place to stay and the two of them growing closer by the day they figured why not move in together. They went to the local bank got a home loan and bought one of the better old houses on the outskirts of town. It needed some work but that was ok. It was a sturdy little house and it was what they wanted so they’d bought it. Now here they sat quietly enjoying each other’s company.

The silence was suddenly shattered by a loud banging noise from the rear of the house. It sounded almost like rocks hitting the paneling of the back wall. But that couldn’t be right. All that was behind the house were woods; there weren’t any rocks back there.

Looking at each other for a confused second they quickly got up and ran off the porch and around to the side of the house. Stopping at the corner they slowly approached the backyard. When they finally rounded the corner they were surprised to find nothing. No animals or anything else that might have caused the ruckus. They did hear something running heavily through the woods. They didn’t see it but it could be heard rushing through the woods breaking branches as it went. After a few minutes the noises suddenly stopped. It was a little eerie.

Eyes darting here and there, neither of them saw anything out of place in the yard itself. The table and chairs were still where they’d put them, the flowers in the garden were undisturbed and everything else appeared normal. There was no evidence of where the noises had come from.

Then they turned to look at the house. What they saw instantly set Jill into a yelling fit but for some reason it didn’t surprise Jim in slightest.

“Goatman was here” was written in very small letters for one end of the house to the other finally ending right next to the backdoor. It was at a level that looked just about right for a kid but the writing was nowhere near neat enough for it to have been done by one.

Jill was outraged. She was yelling at the top of her lungs telling whoever was hiding in the woods to come back and do it now that they were there. She also told them in no uncertain terms that if they did come back they’d better watch out. She was going to set some bear traps that would take care of them and how did they like that. She was sure there were kids back there laughing at them. At one point she even thought she could hear them but that turned out to be Jim himself. Her anger was turned on him for a while after that. She thought he was encouraging stuff like this. She surprised him by saying that when they had kids he better not act like that. She obviously surprised herself too by what she’d let slip because she instantly shut up.

Jim was prepared to just let her calm down but when she made that little slip he couldn’t help but pick on it. Eventually he let her maneuver the subject back to what she wanted and demanded to know why he wasn’t mad. He told her he couldn’t get mad. He gave her some lame excuse about doing the same type of thing when he was little and luckily she bought it. Not happily but she still bought it and let the whole thing drop. Although she did tell him in no uncertain terms that he was cleaning up the mess. He thought that was a fair trade.

As they walked back around the house he made sure she didn’t notice what he had. On the ground under the place where the writing was were huge goat shaped prints. Not deep and not really that noticeable if you weren’t looking like he was. This was something he remembered from childhood. If he looked closely he could see them coming from the woods to the house and back again.

“This doesn’t piss you off?” she asked once more as they walked.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said putting his arm around her, “it’s just kids being kids. We are kinda famous now after all.”

Then he tugged her gently towards the front of the house. Looking over his shoulder once more as they rounded the corner he could almost swear he saw something with a huge set of antlers walking along the edge of the woods toward the back side of their property. He just turned around with a smile on his face and continued walking knowing they had chosen the right place to live. Maybe, if what Jill had said was true, they would have kids of their own and he could tell them all about the Goatman one day.