The Encounter, Part 2 (Wednesday, October 4)
For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6 NKJV)
Everything was about to change. Like the flash of lighting during a thunderstorm that lights the entire sky, our minds were about to be illuminated in ways that we were not prepared for and were not ready to understand. In the span of mere moments, everything we thought we knew came crashing down around us and for the first time we began to truly understand exactly what we were dealing with.
We thought that we had a firm grasp on the situation with the House at the end of the Driveway. We were convinced that this house was little more than a place for the local high schoolers to party, and a safe place for some local drug manufacturers and dealers to conceal their illegal activities. We weren’t concerned about the parties, but we had made it our personal crusade to get rid of those that we believed were using the house to make and deal drugs.
Remember, we were a couple of young and dumb college age kids with very little real-life experience. We had no plan, and we certainly didn’t have the means, but we were motivated and we were full of youthful confidence. These next few moments made us understand that we really had no idea what we were dealing with.
There we stood; Craig and I with our trusty ski poles, Dru waiting to turn on the exterior lights, and Chad serving as our “eyes” over the yard. All of us were more full of bravado and dreams of grandeur than smarts! We were convinced that the next few minutes would end with us capturing the perpetrator of the recent string of house burglaries, and then we would get our ten minutes of fame. And then we heard Chad tell his brother to turn on the outside lights. That’s when things got just a little too real.
To this day I can’t fully explain what took place, or exactly what we experienced. I can only share the events, as compiled by what the four of us saw. Even as I write this, I see these events clearly in my mind’s eye, and I wouldn’t believe it, except for the fact that I was there.
Craig and I began to step towards the center of the yard, just off the patio when the strangest “thing” sprinted between us. It appeared to all of us to be like a dark shadow figure, about five and a half feet tall. From the back (which is all any of us saw) it had the appearance of a cat standing on its back legs. From the moment that it passed between Craig and I, to the time that we heard it hit the fence at the bottom of the yard, was a span of just a couple of seconds.
Craig and I made our way down the yard to the fence, assuming that this creature would be cornered. We were wrong. We heard the creature hit the chain-link fence, and we saw it put its hands on the top and pull its legs over the fence. The time between the creature running between us and then clearing the fence was less than ten seconds.
Remember the neighbors’ vicious dogs that we were warned against? When Craig and I reached the fence at the bottom of the yard, those dogs were cowering in the far corner of the yard whimpering. Craig and I didn’t see the creature again, but we heard it scamper over the chain-link fence at the other end of the neighbor’s yard. Again, it took this creature mere seconds to make that trip.
This entire encounter, from seeing the creature run between us, to hearing it go over the second line of fence, was less than thirty seconds. Craig and I stood there, for what felt like forever, in shock and disbelief at what we had just seen and experienced. It was only after Chad hollered for us to get back inside that we made our way back to the house. The next few minutes were spent locking every outside door in the house and turning on every light that we could find!
We spent the next several hours sitting downstairs and talking about what we had just witnessed. None of us had any answers and no matter how we tried, more and more questions kept presenting themselves: “What was that?”, “Do you think it’ll come back?”, “What do we do now?”. Sometime very early in the morning, before falling asleep Craig and I both knew that in the very near future we needed to return to the House at the end of the Driveway.
Join us next time for Unexpected Help.
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