14 Apr Never Run, Never Scream

Part I

I first noticed something different in Owen when the heat broke and the evenings cooled enough to leave the windows open. There hadn’t been an incident—no fever, no fall, nothing to blame. Just a sudden and unshakable quiet that didn’t belong to a six-year-old boy.

He spent more and more time near the edge of the yard, standing where the grass ended and the trees began. His arms hung loosely at his sides, and he stared straight ahead. His posture wasn’t rigid, but there was an intentional stillness to it, like he was trying to imitate something. When I asked what he was looking at, he’d say, “Nothing.” But it never felt like nothing. Not when he subtly shifted his stance as I approached. Not when his eyes flicked back toward the trees, as if waiting for them to move before he did.

One afternoon, I stood behind the sliding door, watching him through the screen. He hadn’t moved from where he’d been the day before. His chin was slightly raised, his lips moving as if he were speaking, but no sound reached me.

I called his name twice, but he didn’t react. Only when I stepped out onto the deck and called again did he finally turn. His expression was calm—maybe even a little curious—as though he wasn’t sure why I was there or what I wanted.

“Who were you talking to?” I asked.

“No one,” he replied.

“Did someone come by?”

He shook his head and glanced back toward the trees. “He’s not someone,” he said.

The next day, I came home from work to find him crouched in the same spot. He was tracing something in the dirt, whispering too softly for me to understand. As I approached, he stood up and brushed his hands on his shorts.

“What were you doing out here?” I asked.

He turned toward the trees. “Just listening,” he said.

“To what?”

“He doesn’t like to talk,” Owen replied. After a beat, he added, “You shouldn’t run from him. He sees better when you move fast.”

There’s a particular kind of stillness that settles into your body when something from your own childhood—the kind of thing you spent years convincing yourself never happened—comes back in someone else’s voice.

That phrase. The warning. I had heard it before.

That night, after Owen had gone to bed, I took a flashlight out to the edge of the yard. I didn’t go far—just past the fence, far enough for the scent of the soil to shift and for the air to grow damp in a way it hadn’t been just a few steps back. The insects sounded different there. The usual rhythm was off—less like buzzing, and more like something faintly electronic but not quite artificial.

I kept the flashlight beam low, sweeping the base of the trees carefully.

About five feet in, I stopped.

There was nothing to see. But the air felt charged. Still. It pressed in close without touching me.

A prickling sensation ran across the back of my neck, as if something had turned toward me.

I remembered the first time I’d felt that—decades earlier, during a summer trip to Arizona. I’d been ten, exploring a trail on Camelback Mountain. It was hot that year, the kind of heat that lingered through September. I’d paused near the base of a sandstone outcrop, standing just outside the shade of a formation that always seemed to hold the same dim light, no matter the hour.

That was the summer my grandmother warned me not to run or scream. Not past the saguaro line.

At the time, it hadn’t made any sense.

Now, it made far too much.

Part II

In the summer of 1996, my parents put me on a plane with a tag looped through my belt and a manila envelope tucked under my arm. Inside were my medical records, emergency contacts, and a handwritten note from my mother that read: Josh likes peanut butter, hates peas, bedtime at 9. I remember the flight attendant assigned to watch me. She wore too much perfume—vanilla and smoke—and her nails were bright red. I spent the descent staring at her shoes, trying not to look out the window. The desert stretching below made my stomach tighten. The sky was too wide. It had corners I didn’t understand.

Grandma Bea met me at Sky Harbor Airport, standing beneath a faded Arrivals sign. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and held a dented thermos. She gave me one firm hug, kissed my forehead, and handed me a pair of sunglasses far too large for my face.

“Don’t squint,” she said. “You’ll age like a raisin.”

Her house sat just off a winding dirt road lined with broken fencing and palo verde trees, the mountains in the distance hunched like sleeping giants. The air outside was dry and unnervingly still for late morning. Her front door was a sun-bleached turquoise, and the screen creaked when she opened it. There was no central air inside—only ceiling fans that rotated slowly and hummed with the sound of tired metal.

What I noticed first wasn’t the heat or the quiet, but the dog waiting in the hallway. She was tawny and long-legged, with pointed ears and a narrow face that reminded me of a fox. Her tail stood out behind her like a stiff brush, and her eyes never left mine.

“That’s Lucy,” Grandma said, hanging her hat on a hook beside the door. “She’s a mutt. Smart, but thinks too much.”

Lucy didn’t bark. She didn’t sniff. She just watched.

“She’ll sleep by your door at night,” Grandma added as she moved toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry. She knows what she’s doing.”

That evening, after dinner—grilled cheese with tomato slices on the side—we sat outside while the sky shifted into streaks of purple and salmon. The sun didn’t so much set as slowly disappear behind the mountain, lowering itself inch by inch as though reluctant to leave.

Grandma lit a citronella candle and took a sip from her thermos. I had realized by then it no longer held lemonade. She looked at me over the rim of her glasses.

“You’re not city-soft, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, good. You’ll be fine then.”

She set her thermos down and stared out toward the horizon, where a line of saguaros stood perfectly still.

“You can roam a bit if you want. Just stay within sight of the house and mind the wash. Rattlers hole up in there when the sun’s high.”

I nodded.

“One more thing,” she said, brushing something from her knee. “This was something your grandfather told me back when we moved out here. He was Army. Saw things he wouldn’t name, and not much ever rattled him. But out here, past the saguaro line…” She paused.

I waited.

“He always said: never run. Never scream. You understand?”

I blinked, unsure if she was serious or trying to spook me.

“Just don’t do it,” she said. “If you see something, stay calm. Walk home slowly, with your eyes ahead. And if it follows—”

She stopped there. Her hand went to her drink, and the rest of the sentence was lost to the clink of ice.

The next morning, I woke to find Lucy waiting at the end of the hallway. Her tail hung low, and her ears pointed straight ahead. When I entered the kitchen, she followed close behind. She didn’t sniff or nudge. She moved beside me like we had done this routine for years.

After breakfast, I asked if I could go exploring. Grandma handed me a canteen and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Remember what I said,” she told me. “No running. No yelling. And if it feels wrong, turn around.”

The backyard opened into desert. The fence had long since collapsed and been overtaken by mesquite and cholla. I followed a game trail past the toolshed and a chicken coop that hadn’t seen chickens in years. The path dipped across a shallow wash where the sand turned reddish and the air smelled faintly of copper.

Lucy walked beside me until we reached the first ridge. That’s where she stopped.

I turned around and called for her. She sat down in the dirt, panting gently, but didn’t move. Her eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

“Come on,” I said, patting my leg. “It’s not far.”

She didn’t follow.

“You’re really not coming?”

She didn’t budge. So I kept going.

The farther I walked, the more the landscape changed. The brush grew sparse, the ground harder. The sun pressed relentlessly against my back, and the breeze shifted in tone. It wasn’t a whistle or a rustle, but a dry, buzzing sound, like air forced through cracked teeth.

I came across what looked like an old foundation, half-buried in sand. Near it was a ring of stones, possibly the remnants of a fire pit. A nearby outcrop bore shallow carvings along its inner face. They weren’t letters I recognized—just shapes and loops, some resembling open mouths or twisted symbols.

I crouched to get a better look, and behind me, gravel shifted. I turned quickly, but nothing was there.

I took a cautious step backward toward the path.

Then I saw it. At the edge of the rocks, beyond the juniper scrub, a shape stood among the brush. It was tall—not quite a person, but too structured to be a tree. It didn’t sway or lean. It didn’t react to the gusts that passed around it. It was simply there.

My mouth went dry.

I blinked, and it was gone.

My grandmother’s warning fresh in my mind, I turned and began walking back toward the ridge, avoiding any sort of stride that could even remotely be considered a run.

When the house finally came into view, Lucy was exactly where I had left her. Her tail no longer moved. Her head was high, nose twitching. She didn’t bark or run to greet me.

She waited until I passed her, then fell in beside me, silent and steady, as if she understood exactly what I had seen.

Part III

The quiet changed first.

In the weeks after I walked past the ridge, the desert stopped sounding the way I remembered. There had always been a certain rhythm to its silence—something built from the quiet friction of life: cicadas ticking in the brush, the scratch of birds shifting in the dust, the distant rasp of wind as it struggled across stone. Now that subtle chorus had gone missing. The places that had once whispered with movement felt drained, and in the absence of sound, I began to notice footsteps.

They were never loud—just the faint crunch of sand or the brittle snap of twigs behind me. The sound would vanish the moment I turned, retreating into stillness as if it had never existed. At first, I thought it might be Lucy keeping her distance. But she had not crossed the ridge since that first day, and I never saw her leave the house when I did.

I began walking the trail with my shoulders braced and my head forward, forcing myself not to look behind me. But I always listened.

I didn’t tell Grandma. She had already warned me once, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she’d say if I admitted I had ignored her.

Late in July, I stayed out longer than I should have. The sky had begun shifting to deep orange and violet by the time I realized how far I had wandered. I had followed the edge of the wash down past a row of shale ridges that didn’t look familiar. The air had cooled quickly with the sunset, and the breeze cut against my skin in dry, sharp bursts.

As I climbed back up the embankment, I heard it again—footsteps, just a few behind mine, close enough to register but not close enough to place. I froze—and the sound stopped instantly.

I stood motionless, flashlight still unlit in my hand, fingers tightening against the metal. My skin prickled with the sense that something nearby wasn’t just watching—but observing, studying me.

I didn’t run. I remembered what Grandma had said.

I walked back, each step deliberate, holding my breath until I saw the porch light appear through the brush.

Grandma was waiting for me. She stood just outside the front door, arms crossed, lips pressed together in a tight, unreadable line. The screen behind her was closed and locked. Lucy sat at her feet, ears pinned flat against her head.

“You were out past sundown,” she said.

“I lost track of time.”

“Don’t do it again.”

Her voice wasn’t raised, but it carried the same weight as the desert beyond her fence. She reached back, shut the front door, and turned the deadbolt—once, then twice.

She didn’t ask if I’d seen anything. I didn’t offer an explanation. After that night, she began locking every window before dusk and kept the porch light on until morning. I started sleeping with the sheet pulled up to my chin, even when the nights stayed warm.

A few days later, the nightmare came.

In the dream, I woke to a soft tapping against my bedroom window. At first, I thought it was a branch or maybe a moth, but the sound came with intention—three taps, evenly spaced. Then silence.

I rose from bed and stepped toward the window. Outside, crouched just beneath the sill, was a figure. It wasn’t pressed to the glass. It didn’t peer in or press its face close. It simply knelt, its spine arched unnaturally, one shoulder raised higher than the other. Its head tilted at an angle that didn’t seem natural—not aggressive or curious, but analytical, as if I were a shape it couldn’t quite define. Its mouth was stretched wide, impossibly so, but completely still. No breath. No sound. Just that open mouth, waiting.

I woke with sweat across my chest and the sheet tangled around my legs. The window was closed and locked. But when I leaned in, I saw three smudges on the glass. They were the length of fingers, spaced evenly apart.

I didn’t sleep again until the sun rose.

* * * * * *

The last day I spent alone in the wash was the day I broke the rule.

It was just past noon. The air shimmered with heat, and the rocks blurred at the edges. I had packed a peanut butter sandwich and a can of ginger ale in my backpack and was sitting beneath a stub-limbed mesquite tree at the base of the ridge, watching dust swirl across the shallow wash. Lucy had followed me part of the way that morning, stopping—again—at the same familiar point where the incline shifted. I could still see her from where I sat, her figure still as a post at the crest of the slope.

By then, I had convinced myself the footsteps were tricks of the ear—echoes, animals, nerves. I had grown too used to the quiet.

Then I heard it again. This time, it didn’t come from behind me. It came from somewhere off to the left, deeper in the wash. The sound was heavier than before, slower. It dragged across the ground with weight.

I stood, feeling the hairs on my arms rise. I scanned the brush slowly, trying not to move too quickly or sharply. Then, between two boulders, a tall, ill-proportioned figure stepped into view. Its limbs were too long, and its posture didn’t resemble that of anything I recognized. I couldn’t see its face. I wasn’t sure it even had one.

It didn’t lunge, hiss, or advance at all. It simply was, and that was worse.

My body moved before I could stop it—I ran.

I barely made it ten feet before something hit me hard from the side. I hit the ground, elbow scraping rock, and let out a startled yell.

It wasn’t the creature. It was Lucy. She stood over me, growling low, her body rigid and braced against mine. I started to rise, but she snapped her head toward the rocks and let out a single bark—sharp and warning.

I froze. At the edge of the path, something moved. It wasn’t enough to be certain, just a twitch at the periphery—just enough to make me question what I had seen before—but nothing stepped forward. Lucy remained between me and that part of the wash for the entire walk home. She never looked away. She didn’t leave my side once.

That night, Grandma sat me down in the kitchen. She didn’t scold me or ask questions. She poured herself a drink and stared out the window above the sink.

“You ran, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t sigh. She didn’t even seem surprised.

After a moment, she said, “He knows you now.”

Then she turned away, and that was the end of it.

Part IV

I stayed inside for the next three days. I didn’t speak much, and I didn’t stray far from the windows. Lucy wouldn’t leave the back door. She lay curled on the mat with her chin resting on her paws, ears twitching at every floorboard creak or shift in the wind outside. Grandma didn’t ask questions. She moved more quietly than usual, watching me out of the corners of her eyes, like I was someone else’s child she’d agreed to watch for a while.

She started leaving the radio on during dinner. It played old country songs from the sixties—fuzzy, warbling tunes that filled the silence without demanding attention. She also began pouring her drinks earlier in the evening. Once, I caught her standing at the kitchen window, staring out at the base of the hills. Her hands gripped the sink’s edge, and her lips moved silently, as if she were reciting something she wasn’t sure she remembered correctly.

On the fourth morning, something shifted.

The stillness that had taken root inside the house—the tension in the walls, the quiet pacing of Lucy’s feet on the tile—eased slightly. Not completely, but enough that I noticed. A breeze came in from the north, steady and dry, carrying a sound I hadn’t heard in weeks: insects. Faint, at first—barely more than a whisper—but it was life returning, testing the edges of the quiet.

Even Grandma seemed to sense the change. She opened the front door and swept for the first time in days.

For the first time since I saw the figure, I began to think I might be able to step outside again.

I told myself I would only go as far as the ridge. I would stay within sight of the house and return before noon. I wasn’t planning to test anything. I only wanted to see that the desert still belonged to itself.

Grandma had fallen asleep in her chair when I slipped out. Lucy tried to follow, but I stepped out quickly and shut the screen door before she could push past. I didn’t want her getting hurt again because of me.

The path beyond the house looked unchanged—the same dusty trail, the same collapsed fence, the same red brush curling around the edges of the dry wash. But something about the space felt subtly off. The light seemed too bright, and the shadows cast by the saguaros didn’t quite settle where they should have. There was a looseness to the landscape, as if its outlines had been sketched instead of drawn.

I walked the ridge with measured steps, dragging my shoes through the gravel just enough to hear the sound they made. I listened carefully, scanning the familiar terrain for anything out of place. Nothing moved. The trail ahead remained still.

I passed the spot where Lucy had tackled me. Her prints were still visible in the dirt, softened by time but still distinct.

I should have turned back—but I didn’t.

It wasn’t curiosity that carried me forward. It wasn’t defiance, either. It felt more like gravity, like the pull you feel when staring too long into deep water. You don’t want to step in, but something in you wonders how long you could hold your breath.

The arch, sitting recessed into a crumbling sandstone ridge, wasn’t visible until I was nearly on top of it. Its curve was imperfect, jagged in places, as if something enormous had once forced its way through and left the wound behind.

The temperature dropped as I stepped beneath it. Not enough to chill me, but enough to raise goosebumps on my arms. The air carried a wrongness that I couldn’t define. It didn’t smell like rot or blood or ozone. It didn’t resemble anything I could name. It was simply unfamiliar—an alien scent that didn’t belong to wind or stone or life.

I turned, suddenly certain I wasn’t alone.

That was when I screamed.

The sound tore out of me before I could think to stop it—a high, involuntary snap of panic that split the air like a crack in glass—and the world responded. Everything around me changed at once. The wind paused. The light froze. The colors drained slightly from the sky. It was like something aware had taken notice and paused the moment to listen more closely, as if every particle around me had turned its attention to a single point.

Then it appeared.

I didn’t see it emerge. It was simply there. Gaunt. Imposing. Taller than any person I’d ever seen. Its limbs were too long, its torso too thin, its frame shaped like it had been built to slip between things rather than move through them. Its arms hung nearly to its knees, its fingers stretched far beyond human proportion. Its face—or what passed for one—lacked any identifiable features except for the two black hollows where its eyes should have been.

Those weren’t sockets. They were voids—tunnels cut through the illusion of shape and memory and flesh. Looking into them was like glimpsing the bottom of something without end. They didn’t reflect light. They absorbed it. And they were looking back.

I couldn’t move. My lungs pulled air, but the motion felt wrong—mechanical, unsatisfying, like breathing in the memory of oxygen without the substance.

The creature didn’t speak. It didn’t reach toward me or threaten in any way. It tilted its head slightly, as if it were trying to understand what I was. The angle matched what I’d seen in the dream—detached, analytical.

Then, from my left, something collided with it.

Lucy.

She hit it mid-stride, fur bristling, teeth bared. Her body passed into it, not against it, as if the creature weren’t solid—more suggestion than structure. There was no sound of impact, no struggle.

She disappeared into its form, and the figure flickered—not as if injured, but as if interrupted. Its outline warped, the way a reflection bends across rippling water.

I stumbled backward. My heel struck the edge of the arch behind me, and the moment shattered. The weight in the air lifted. The light returned to its proper shade. Insects began to hum again in the distance. Wind moved the brush, and everything resumed.

I turned and ran, and didn’t stop until I reached the porch. My legs went out from under me as I hit the steps, and I pressed my back against the door, struggling to breathe.

Lucy was gone.

Grandma found me later that evening. I don’t know how long I sat there, but the sun had lowered again when her car pulled into the drive. She didn’t call my name or rush from the vehicle. She just stepped out, walked toward me with slow, even steps, and looked at me like something had changed permanently between us.

She helped me up and didn’t say anything. We drove back to the house without a word. The tires rolled over the dirt with a soft, papery crunch. When she parked, she sat behind the wheel for a long moment, hands resting gently at ten and two.

Finally, without looking at me, she said, “He saw you. But you lived.”

Then she opened her door, and we went inside.

Things were never the same after that.

Part V

Present Day

By the time I found the drawing, I’d already started to worry.

Owen had grown quiet. I’d seen him standing at the edge of the yard, whispering to someone I couldn’t see. His posture had changed. He no longer twitched or shifted the way children do when they’re bored or restless. He held still the way a deer does when it knows something else is watching.

Still, part of me had hoped it was just a phase. A six-year-old’s imagination. Something borrowed from a cartoon, or repeated from a story he didn’t understand. I hadn’t let myself believe it meant anything more.

Then I opened his sketchbook.

It had been tucked between the pages, half-hidden beneath his pillow. He hadn’t meant to hide it—he was still too young for secrets—but he’d hesitated when I walked into the room earlier that day, closing the book a little too fast. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Not until later that evening, when the memory of the arch, and those hollow eyes, came rushing back.

The drawing was crude in the way most children’s drawings are, but something about the proportions turned my stomach. The figure’s legs were too long, stretching nearly to the bottom edge of the paper. Its arms hung well past its waist, ending in dark, knotted fingers. It had no mouth, no nose—just two black circles for eyes, scribbled so hard the paper had nearly torn through. All around it were looping lines, coiled into spirals that seemed to pull away from the figure.

The next morning, I asked him about it over breakfast.

“What is it?” I said, tapping the edge of the page.

Owen didn’t hesitate.

“It’s the man from the trees,” he replied, calm as ever. “The one who watches real still.”

I asked if he’d seen it in a dream, and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I see him in the morning. Before you wake up.”

He was unafraid, and said it like he was describing a neighbor, familiar and expected.

That was when he started asking about dogs. Not dogs in general—Lucy. A name I hadn’t spoken aloud in years.

“Can dogs protect you when they’re gone?” he asked one night while brushing his teeth. He didn’t look at me when he said it. His tone wasn’t casual; it carried the kind of weight that comes with a question asked more than once in a child’s mind before it’s spoken.

I crouched beside him and asked, “What made you think of that?”

He shrugged, but his answer came without pause.

“She sits by the trees sometimes. She doesn’t come inside. But she looks at me like she remembers.”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure how to.

That night, after he’d gone to sleep, I pulled an old storage box from the attic. It was one I hadn’t touched since before Owen was born. Inside were newspaper clippings, a few faded Polaroids, and a worn leather collar with a tarnished brass tag, which read: LUCY, etched in block letters.

When I turned it over in my hand, the tag struck the edge of the box and made a sound sharper than I expected. It echoed longer than it should have.

I didn’t sleep much that night.

Two mornings later, I woke to find Owen already dressed. He stood by the back door with his flashlight in one hand. The other hung loosely at his side. He didn’t turn around when I entered the room.

“I think you should come with me,” he said, his voice unwavering and full of conviction. He sounded like someone ordered to deliver a message they didn’t fully understand.

I told him to wait, stepped into my shoes, and pulled the camera from the drawer. I didn’t know what I expected to see—maybe nothing. Maybe just a shadow in the trees I could blame on fog or sleep deprivation. But part of me already knew better.

The woods behind the house had never felt threatening before. They weren’t deep—just a narrow belt of pines and underbrush separating our backyard from the old drainage ditch beyond—but that morning, they seemed older than the land around them. Something about them struck me as sinister.

We walked side by side at first. Then Owen moved ahead, his flashlight swinging in a loose arc. He didn’t speak until we reached the line where grass gave way to root-choked dirt. There, he stopped.

“He doesn’t want me,” he said quietly, just loud enough for me to hear. “He wants you.”

The words settled between us. It wasn’t a warning or a threat—it was a fact.

I raised the camera, though my hand had begun to shake. Owen stepped aside, just slightly, clearing my view of the narrow corridor between the trees.

At first, there was nothing. Then, rapidly, something began to take shape. The trees seemed to shift around it, opening in a way that made space for it, as though they were used to its passage.

A tall, unnaturally thin figure stood at the center. The same outline I remembered from the desert and from Owen’s sketch. It didn’t move, but its head tilted just enough to acknowledge the attention. Its eyes—those twin hollows—were fixed on me.

They weren’t blank. They were focused—and they were ravenous.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t run. I kept the camera raised, its lens pointed directly at the thing in the trees. But I didn’t take a picture. Some instinct told me that doing so wouldn’t capture it. It wouldn’t expose it. It would only give it a new way in.

Instead, I reached for Owen’s hand. His fingers curled into mine without hesitation.

Together, we slowly stepped back, my gaze never leaving the thing in the woods.

It didn’t follow—not physically, at least. Something followed in the silence it left behind, however, haunting us long after we retreated. Something I don’t think has ever truly moved on.

When we reached the porch, I turned the lock carefully. Each click of the bolt felt final.

Owen looked up at me with a thoughtful expression.

“I don’t think he’ll come in,” he said.

“I don’t either,” I replied, praying I was right, and held my son tight.

And we left it at that.