Good evening. I've lived out here in Frederick County my whole life. Forty-nine years. Born in the valley, raised on the east slope of South Mountain, and I have driven the National Pike more times than I could ever count. So I want you to understand that when I say something was wrong that night, I'm not somebody who spooks easy. I know every bend in that road. I know the treeline. I know when something doesn't belong. We grew up with the Snallygaster out here. Not as a joke, not as a story for tourists. My grandmother talked about it the same way she talked about the weather. Matter of fact. There are still barns in this county with seven-pointed stars painted on them, old hex signs the German settlers put up to keep it away. I drove past those barns my whole childhood. Never thought too much about them, I'll be honest. I do now. This was October of 2019. A Thursday, late. Maybe eleven-fifteen by the time I got in my truck. I had just finished a double shift at the diner where I work on Route 40, right there in Braddock Heights. I was tired, I was ready to be home. I had my dog Pepper in the backseat, because he always comes with me on the late shifts, he doesn't like being left alone at the house. Old dog. Thirteen years old, a beagle mix, been riding in that truck since he was eight weeks. The drive home is maybe eight minutes. I had done it ten thousand times. And heading east on the National Pike that night, there was not another set of headlights in either direction as far as I could see.
Pepper started in first. That is the thing I keep coming back to. He was in the backseat and he started making this sound, low and continuous, not his bark and not a whimper, something between the two that I had never once heard from him in thirteen years of living together. dog making a sound after 13 years you have never heard before, that would unsettle me - Linda' I checked the rearview. His ears were completely flat against his skull. He had wedged himself down into the footwell behind the passenger seat like he was trying to get below the window line. Then the radio went out. I had a new radio installed in that truck the previous summer. It didn't cut to static. It just went silent, like something had swallowed the signal. I reached for my phone to see if something was wrong with the Bluetooth and the screen was completely black. Wouldn't respond. I had it plugged in at the diner all shift, so there was no reason for it to be dead, but it was just a dark rectangle in my hand. I set it on the seat. And then the pressure changed. That is the only way I know to describe it. The air inside the cab got dense, the way it does before a summer thunderstorm when your ears pop and your sinuses ache. Except the sky through the windshield was clear. Stars everywhere. A half moon sitting low over the ridge. Pepper made a sound I never want to hear from a dog again and I looked up at the treeline on the south side of the road and my foot came off the gas without me deciding to.
Something was above the trees. Not in them. Above them. The trees along that stretch of the National Pike are old growth, some of them thirty, forty feet. This thing was clearing the tops with room to spare, moving east, moving slow. Too slow for a bird. Not slow the way something struggling looks slow. Slow the way something in complete control looks slow. Like it was drifting. I pulled off onto the gravel shoulder and cut my headlights. Some instinct. I can't explain it. Like I didn't want it to notice my truck was there. I left the engine running. I could not have made myself turn it off. The wingspan. I need you to picture the wingspan. The National Pike is a two-lane road, roughly twenty-four, twenty-five feet shoulder to shoulder. This thing was wider than that. Not a little wider. The wingtips extended past the treeline on each side. The wings had this dark, leathery quality, like membrane stretched over long thin bones, and they moved in these long slow beats that by any logic should not have kept something that size in the air. I couldn't tell you how long I sat there staring at the wings before I noticed the eye. And I mean that. I genuinely could not tell you if it was thirty seconds or five minutes. One eye. Centered on what I'm calling its head. Amber-colored, lit from somewhere inside it. Not bright. More like the filament in an old incandescent bulb right before it goes out for good. Just present. Just there.
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