Kaleb Nation: Harken

Two officers sat me down at the back door of the ambulance, asking questions. I hesitated at first, because I knew how unbelievable my story was, but I also knew the proof was far too concrete. They just needed to go to the edge, to look at the corpse of the man with the silver claws, and they would be just as amazed and terrified as I was. Maybe they—professionals, no less—could drag the body up and find some explanation, some mechanical device that the madman had strung together that’d allowed him to soar through the air.

I only became more concerned, though, when the officers kept asking about the body, and kept forgetting about the silver claws. It was almost like they weren’t even surprised…or worse, I soon realized, they didn’t even believe me.

“Just go get the body!” I protested irritably, when they went back to asking about Mr. Sharpe for a third time. It was obvious I was tired of cooperating, so the paramedic shooed the officers away, saying I wasn’t in the right state of mind for questions anymore.

The police had done a solid job of putting me in a bad mood. I saw my mom’s minivan driving up. I was still sitting on the back of the ambulance, parked at the edge of the same forest I’d barely escaped from. Officers were spread out in the woods with flashlights, studying tire tracks and scratches and tears of paint from my car that marked the trees. The sirens were off but the lights still flashed in my face, a red and blue dissonance that illuminated my mom as she ran for me.

“Michael!” she shouted, voice cracking as its volume neared a scream. At the sight of me, she pressed her hands together in shock, face falling. This wasn’t her usual reaction—she’d seen me in spots like this before and was a pro at the you’ll-suffer-for-this-later-Michael shrug. Her brown eyes were marred with horror, slightly-over-forty wrinkles on her face and unkempt blonde hair evenly graying. I was probably helping speed the graying process along at the moment.

“Are you the mother?” the paramedic asked, his boots dangling inches from the ground as he sat beside me on the silver ambulance bumper. He was wrapping up the wound on my arm. My mom didn’t answer and moved to examine the cuts, but the paramedic put up a hand to stop her, holding the bandage together between two of his fingers.

“He’s alright,” he assured her. “Only a cut and some bruises. And some…head trauma, maybe.”

“The car’s in worse shape,” said another officer as she approached. She had DELANEY pinned to her shirt, one of the two officers who’d questioned me. She was dressed in full uniform, heavyset and a head taller than me even if I’d been standing, with large boots crushing the damp leaves under her steps as she tilted her flashlight out of our faces. Her radio buzzed as an officer checked in from another part of the woods. I was relieved—they’d finally found the crash. It’d taken them long enough.

“You’re lucky he’s still alive,” she went on gruffly, hardly directing any sympathies in my direction. Her glance to me could have been a glare.

“Looks like he lost control of the car from driving too fast,” Officer Delaney said, lifting her flashlight to wave at somewhere in the dirt, then in to the trees. She was so disinterested she wasn’t really pointing out anything.

“These are some winding roads and it’s easy to lose control, especially when joyriding in the dark,” she said. “The car is absolutely totaled too.”

My mom opened her mouth to say something, but I broke in before she could.

“ Joyriding? ” I protested. “What are you talking about? Didn’t you see my car?”

The officer looked at me and pressed her lips together. “Yeah, we found it, over the hill where you told us it’d be. Upside down and smashed.”

My mom’s mouth dropped further open in disbelief. I moved to stand but the paramedic shoved me back down, winding more bandage around my arm as I winced in pain.

“What about the man?” I burst. “I told you, he tried to kill me!”

“What the hell is going on?” my mom erupted. “A man? What man, Michael?”

Good thing so many paramedics were around because I was afraid she was about to have a heart attack. The officer, though, seemed far too unconcerned for my comfort. She just huffed, clicking her flashlight off.

“Come on,” she said. “You crashed your car. Don’t make this harder on yourself.”

“Because he was trying to kill me! ” I shouted with dismay. “Didn’t you see… did you even go look for the body out there? Did you find the knife he nearly stuck me with?”

“Michael,” Officer Delaney sighed, “there’s no dead man by your car. We shone down lights and everything. You just drove too fast. Don’t make up some murder story to—”

I’d had enough. My rage at her insinuations reawakened me. I jumped to my feet and tore through the circle before anyone could react.

“Michael, stop!” the paramedic shouted, but I continued to run, holding the torn white wrapping against the cut on my arm as I pushed through the tangled limbs. I could hear their frantic footsteps behind me, my mom calling my name and the officer barking something sharp into her radio.

I crashed through a pair of trees and was back on the familiar cliff edge. In the moonlight I could see the tracks from where my car had skidded through the dirt, the places where the trees had been scraped from hitting my doors, and the underbrush that I’d dived into to hide from my ruthless pursuer. I could even see the spot where Mr. Sharpe had leapt into the air and crashed onto my car’s roof, tree branches cracked in his wake. There was no way I’d made any of this up, because I could still recognize the ground beneath me as the same that I’d dashed madly away from, shocked that I was still alive. I rushed to the edge, knowing that what I’d seen would still be down below, just as gruesome as I remembered.

But when I got there, shoes scratching to stop me, I was greeted with an even more appalling sight than the corpse that had been left behind. Now, there was no man, no long knife, and no silver claws—nothing at all beneath my car, not even a trace of blood to show that a corpse had ever been there. The only thing that rested over the edge of the cliff was my own BMW, smashed beyond repair. At that moment, the car didn’t even matter to me anymore.

My throat felt like it’d become a runaway elevator, dropping deep into my stomach as my eyes studied every inch, hoping the dark concealed the body. But nothing could have hidden those claws, not their reflective edges shining like mirrors. I continued searching though, even as the group appeared out of the woods and my mom pulled me back abruptly.

“Michael Asher!” she shouted in my face, as I stood like a wax figure. I had seen the man. I knew he’d been down there!

“We’ve got him now,” the officer said into her radio, pointing her flashlight straight into my face, not even trying to mask her disgust or how out of breath she was.

“When I tell you to stop, you stop ,” she ordered me. She waved the beam of her flashlight at the edge.

“I know there was a man!” I insisted. “I promise, I saw him!”

I looked at my mom. “He was a client. I’m sorry. But it’s true: he was a client who wanted me to meet him to check on his wife, so we drove out into the woods and then he tried to kill me. But I kicked him out of the car and… and…”

I couldn’t continue, because my story was beginning to crumble even as I told it. I knew what I’d seen, and yet every rational, reasonable part of my brain knew that most of my story was something I’d have laughed at yesterday, the banter of a crazy person on the sidewalks. What had even happened? Flying and claws? I couldn’t say that again, not with the officer’s face staring incredulously at me, like I was a five-year-old saying I’d met a unicorn.