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I emerged from the darkness of the cinema, escaping a halloween horror, freed from the terror of a masked murderer, only to exit into the dark night. The cinema crowd spilled onto the street, filling up the night with texture and sound, momentarily, but quickly dispersed and dissipated.
I rolled my eyes for the umpteenth time as I endured the last awkward moment and stiffly hugged my date farewell. Released, at last, from the torture of date night, I marched off indignantly, leaving his wounded aura behind, grateful to be alone at last with the full moon ebbing in a sea of charcoal clouds.
Ominous cracks in the sky illuminated the deserted foot path that led me past the window lined with death; grotesque, glazed, headless ducks hung insensitively by their delicate webbed feet. An icy wind pawed at my face, and my neck tingled with tension from repeatedly looking over my shoulder, unconvinced that I had escaped my jilted date. When the pedestrian bridge entry revealed itself at the end of the moon promenade I exhaled in relief, blowing fake smoke rings as exhalations of hot air confronted cold.
Twenty feet later, I was nearly home free with the moon promenade disappearing behind me and the sunken spotlights guiding me along the deserted bridge. I reached the ferry terminal with minutes to spare and sighed deeply, finally allowing the tension to escape.
The brown, muddy, silt-laden water lapped forcefully against the blackened wood of the jetty. Had the sun been sitting in her throne of clouds, the sound of lapping water might have reassured me, but the combination of howling wind through mangrove trees and lapping water reverberating into the dark, empty, silent night unsettled my heightened senses and I reverted to a state of tension – an owl on high alert, scanning left and right, front and behind, up and down for signs and sounds of danger.
“Relax,” I whispered, “there’s not a single soul in sight”.
The blackened skeletal fingers of the tree loomed ominously above me as I looked up. I followed its outline from branch tips to the mutilated trunk. If it’s branches were long skeletal fingers, then the trunk was surely the face of Freddy Kruger. Two-toned bark engulfed in fire, or set on the stove to boil, the viscous bark cooling and setting into a mutilated, bumpy, rippled, blistered, gnarled, solidified skin.
A reverberating crack slit the partition of night and I leaped and shrieked uncharacteristically. I looked up to see the skeletal tree drop one of its limbs and instinctually ducked, covering my head with my arms and hands, and squeezing my eyes shut as the heavy, spiky limb struck my head forcefully and then crashed and landed at my feet.
An unfamiliar scratching and wailing interrupted the split second silence and sharp claws pierced my scalp. Something was stuck in my hair and it was clawing and wailing as it attempted to extricate itself.
Hot adrenaline flooded my cold body and I reached up to grab and settle the hysterical creature. Tufts of short coarse, bristly fur. Soft, elasticated wings. Claws flexing into my tender scalp. Seconds blurred into minutes as I struggled to confine it between my hands and then shimmied my fingers down to the claws, attempting to coax the creature to retract its claws from my scalp.
Someone gripped me from behind and a deep voice uttered the word “Final”…
My body jerked defensively before my brain computed and an almighty crack reverberated as our heads connected.
“Final Ferry,”finished the stranger as I turned to face him, shocked, moon-coloured cheeks.
“You’re not having a good night, are you?” he said between fits of laughter. “If you’re planning on catching that ferry you’ll have to leave the bat behind!” he concluded.
I stood there staring at him blankly, rolling his words over in my frazzled brain. The sharp claws flexed into my scalp again, summoning me back to my unfortunate situation. His contagious laughter filled the night, neutralising my nerves, causing me to laugh in spite of myself.
“Three victims of the night,” I chuckled, motioning to him and I, and the bat in my hair.
The Ferry man approached me, gently removed the bat from my hair and released it into the night. “After you,” he said ushering me toward the purring catamaran, “the night can only get better.”
© 2013 B.G. Bowers All Rights Reserved
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