The Old HOuse by the Highway, pt. 3

I tip-toed in and approached Monica tenderly. “Babe,” I said softly, shaking her, “wake up, I need your help.”

She bolted up, eyes wide. She hadn't fallen back asleep, it seemed. “What happened?” she whispered frantically. “Are you ok? Where's the gun?”

I realized she was shaking, her eyes huge and her hands gripping the sheets white-knuckled. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Everything's fine,” I smiled. “There wasn't anybody out there. ...Kind of.”

“Kind of? What do you mean kind of?” She dropped the sheet to her lap.

“Well, there was something there, but it wasn't an intruder.” I felt ludicrous saying this. “It was... It was a goat.”

Her shoulders, which had been up at her ears in anxiety, dropped, and her frightened look was replaced by one of annoyance. “A what?”

I shrugged. “I don't know how it got in here, honey, but there's a goat in our spare room. You heard him clopping up the stairs. Not a burglar.”

She just looked at me for a while, probably trying to determine if I was lying. I just shrugged again. Finally she looked away. “Stupid farm country. I should've known this would happen eventually. Move to the country, get broken into by a barnyard animal. Ridiculous.” She shook her head and laid back down.

I touched her shoulder again. “No, honey, don't go back to sleep. He's still in there and we've got to figure out how to get him down the stairs.”

She rolled over to look at me with contempt. “I don't know how to do that,” she said.

“I know, but neither do I. He's pretty big. This is going to take two of us.”

She made a disgusted noise and threw back the covers. “Oh, for Christ sake. Fine, show me the goddamn goat.”

We headed across the landing together, with me silently praying that the animal had put down the bloody flesh.

I stopped at the doorway and looked back at her, motioning to keep quiet. “My plan is to stay quiet so he doesn't take off running,” I whispered. “Then we'll have to grab him, maybe by the horns, and pull him to the stairs. And we'll just go from there. I'll go around this pile of boxes to the right, you go left. We'll come at him both ways.”

She nodded wearily.

We slipped into the room and separated. I got that same apprehensive feeling I'd had the first time. The hair prickled on the back of my neck and my forearms as I moved slowly around the room, listening for any sounds from the animal, but all I heard were Monica's feet shuffling around the stacked boxes from the other side. I heard no clopping, no snuffling, no chewing. He must be holding still, waiting for us somewhere in the dark. Suddenly I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye and jumped around a corner to find myself facing Monica again. I whirled back around, thinking maybe I had overlooked him, but I knew that if neither of us had seen him in our circuits of the room, he must not be there. He was too big to miss. Maybe he had left while I was getting Monica, although I hadn't heard his hoofs clattering down the hallway to the spare bedroom.

“He must have gone somewhere I else,” I said, shrugging. Monica's face was pale, her eyes wide. She must have shared my unexplainable unease. Even if the intruder was an animal, I supposed, it was still unsettling to know it had gotten into your house while you were asleep. Especially if the intruder was a carnivorous, blood-covered quadruped.

“Let's check the other rooms,” I instructed, trying to ignore the flipping of my stomach. “You take our bedroom, although I doubt he could have gotten in there without us noticing. I'll take the other spare room. Shout if you find him, and close the door till I get there.” She nodded slowly, the ridiculousness of the situation weighing on her, and we went to check our respective rooms. I shut the door to the store room firmly to be sure the goat wouldn't re-enter.

I went to the other bedroom, which we'd fitted up with a bed and dressers for guests. Tiptoeing in, fully expecting to find the bastard chewing on our 300-count sheets, I scanned the dark room for signs of the beast. It was difficult to see in the shadows, but I didn't sense any movement except my own breathing and pounding heart. I felt my hair begin to stand up again, though, and my stomach somersault in the now-familiar apprehension of the animal's presence. I switched on the light and squinted, and simultaneously felt the goat brush by my leg on its way out the door. I spun around and leaned into the darkened hallway, my eyes scrambling to adjust, but saw nothing except moonlight streaming in from the window on the landing and the open bedroom door. Had it just been an air-pressure change, or my own hyped-up senses fooling me? I looked back into the spare room. Nothing. My blood was rushing in my ears, but still I was sure I'd have heard the clopping of its hooves on the hardwood floors if it had been there.

Shakily, I closed the door and made my way to the master bedroom, where I found Monica looking confused, as well. “It's not in here,” she said from the edge of the bed where she sat. “It's weird, though. I'm like... terrified right now. I feel like I just got in line for a rollercoaster or something. I’m kind of freaked out.”

I sat down beside her and put an arm around her. “Me too,” I admitted. “It's weird to think that an animal could just wander in. I guess we'll have to be more careful from now on.” She leaned on me and I felt her heartbeat racing, her chest heaving, like my own. I patted her on the shoulder. “Well, it's got to be here somewhere and we've got to get it out before it breaks something, or eats something. I hear goats will eat anything-” I got a snapshot vision of that piece of flesh dripping blood and clotted fur onto the floorboards. I shook my head again to get the vision out, my breath catching as I did so. I set my shoulders and stood up, helping Monica to her feet. “It must have gone downstairs.”

We searched every room in the house, twice. Even the basement, which had started to reek of whatever-it-was again, musty and unexplainable and disgusting. We turned on all the lights and looked in every corner, went back upstairs to double check, and shone a flashlight around the attic. But the animal was nowhere to be found. My heart was in my throat the entire time, the memory of the bloodied chunk of meat and those unsettling yellow eyes on mine keeping my adrenaline pumping. Even more unsettling than the animal's conspicuous absence was the fact that both our front door and the side door were closed and locked. The doorknobs themselves were locked and the deadbolts drawn. Even if the goat had had opposable thumbs, he couldn't have gotten into the house. Unless we had been so drunk that we had let a blood-smeared quadruped into our house when we walked in – which we had definitely not been – there was no way to explain its presence.

Maybe I had still been asleep when I'd seen it – maybe I had had a waking dream. But I couldn't forget the distinct feeling I'd had of its presence, the hairs on my neck prickling, the flips of my stomach. I knew the difference between dreams and reality. That thing had been real. I couldn't explain it. But I told Monica it must have been a dream, that I must have thought I saw something that wasn't there. I'm not sure she believed me, but the alternative explanations for what had happened were so bizarre that we both allowed ourselves to believe it, at least enough to go back to sleep.

* * *

The next few weeks passed quickly. I was busy at work and had been spending long hours at the office. Monica, upset by the goat incident, had been spending a lot of time out of the house as well, running errands and gardening during the day. Her unease in the house was compounded by the smell from the basement, which seemed to be getting worse every day. It was midsummer, and the days were hot and humid, so smells were magnified. Especially so close to the river where the ground was damp and the air more humid than elsewhere, it made sense, but understanding why it smelled so bad didn't make being in the house any more pleasant. We called a local flooring company about pouring cement down there, but we had a month-long wait until they could come out to the house.

One day I came home late from work to find Monica sitting on the porch with a stricken look on her face. She was dirty as if she’d been in the garden, her gloves beside her on the floorboards as she wrung her hands. She looked like she had been crying. I settled beside her on the porch without saying a word, and she clung to me, shaking, then burst into tears.

“Monica, Monica, hey, what happened?” I stroked her hair as she heaved giant sobs into my shoulder.

“The.... the goat -” she gasped. I felt a chill go through me. Not this again. “It – it got back in... into the house! It's in there! I – I saw it!” A giant sob wracked her shoulders. “And... I tried to get it out. I tr-tried to get in, b-b-but it locked the door! It l-locked the damn dd-oor and...” Another sob. “I've b-been out here f-for hours! And... and I'm scared!”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I patted her back and held her to me. “What do you mean, you saw it? Where did you see it? How did it lock you out?”

She sobbed a few more times. I knew she was probably getting tears and snot all over my work shirt. “I heard a n-noise, like... like a noise a goat would make, you know?” She seemed to be collecting herself. “A-and I was in the garden. And I looked at the house and I saw it. A-at the window in the spare bedroom, just looking right back at me!” She sniffled and sat up, wiping at her face with the back of her hands. She squared with me and continued, the sobbing subsiding. “So I ran to the door and it was locked. And my keys are inside! So I've just been sitting here and waiting. And I haven't seen it again, or heard anything from inside. But... but I saw it up there. I know it's in there, probably eating things, and breaking things, and... and I don't know why, but it's just like last time, I'm scared of it. How did it get in there?”

She leaned against me, done crying, but still drawing in giant breaths. I rubbed my hand along her arm. “I'm sure there's some explanation, babe,” I said, knowing in my head that I couldn't think of a single one. “Don't worry, I have my keys, and we'll go in and look around.”

She looked up at me, tears welling back up in her eyes. “B-but what if... what if it's like last time and we can't find it? I'm just... I don't know what to think... I don't think I can take that again.”

I nodded. “I don't know what will happen, but I bet we'll find him in there somewhere. A big goat like that can't disappear twice, right?”

She nodded, but the look in her eyes must have mirrored my own. We were both nervous. We took a few deep breaths, then I unlocked the door and we entered quietly, locking the door behind us to block the animal's escape route. We separated like we had before, our hearts both beating fast and our senses running on high. I have to admit, I was on edge. The animal's presence was so unexplained and unsettling. I’m the kind of person who likes knowing how and why things happen, especially in my own house, and yet this goat thing was totally beyond me. It was possible that I had been half-asleep when I thought I saw it the first time, and that maybe my story had upset Monica so badly that she'd locked herself out and imagined she had seen it, too. But something rang false with that explanation, and that same something made the idea of it seeing it again unsettling.

We searched the entire house, and to neither of our surprise, we found nothing. No traces of an animal having been there, and certainly no goat. Nothing was out of place or chewed up or broken. In fact, nothing even hinted that a large hoofed animal might have passed through. Monica and I finally reconvened in the kitchen, where I cracked open two beers to help us calm our nerves.

She looked at me earnestly from across the kitchen table while I took a long gulp. “Ed, I don't like this,” she said. “Something's not right here.”

I stopped myself from nodding. “Well, let's face it,” I replied. “We've both had a bad scare. What happened that night was bizarre, and we've both been on edge because of the basement smelling. Our eyes and our brains must be playing tricks on us. There's no reason to be so upset. I'm sure things like this happen all the time.”

She shook her head. “I know what I saw, Ed. There was a goat upstairs.”

I sipped my beer. “Well, I thought I knew what I saw, too. But it just can't be what actually happened. It's impossible for an animal that size to be prowling our house without us finding it, or at least some evidence of it, Monica.”

She crossed her arms and stared at me.

“Well,” I pushed on, “think of it this way. We've just made a giant transition in our life together, you know? We're both a little scared of being out in the country for the first time. And I mean, if you put it all together, the night I thought I saw it, we'd just come back from the bar, where the locals were telling us about all the farms in the area. I mean, it's perfectly logical that our nerves were more on edge than we realized and we just kind of freaked out together. And I know you were upset by it... maybe we're just feeding off each other's fears. Maybe we need to just calm down a little.”

She was shaking her head between sips of beer. I stumbled on: “Who knows, maybe this smell from the basement is some sort of gas that’s interfering with our brains somehow. Radon, or whatever it’s called. We’ll get it checked out. I bet that once this flooring gets put in and we're more settled, this will all go away, and we'll laugh at ourselves for it.” Even as I heard myself talking, I didn't quite believe it.

Monica was quiet for a minute, thoughtfully peeling the label off her beer bottle. “Ok,” she finally said, leveling a piercing look at me. “Here’s a question: What did the goat you saw look like?”

The image of the beast, grizzly scrap dangling from its maw, its face and body streaked in blood, popped into my head so clearly I almost choked on my mouthful. But I pretended to have to think about it for Monica's benefit. “Wow, it's getting kind of fuzzy now, like a dream or something...” I sipped my beer and peeked at Monica. She did not look convinced. “Well,” I said, wiping my mouth, “I guess it was pretty big, at least up to my waist. And it had horns... not big curly ones or anything, but pretty serious horns. And floppy ears. And it was black and white, not spotted, but blotchy, almost like a cow. You know, just a normal goat.”

Monica waited while I avoided her eye, her stance assuring me that she was about to say something I found unpleasant. When I was finally looking her in the eye, she said slowly and distinctly: “That's exactly what I saw. It was the same goat.”

I shrugged, “Well that makes sense, I mean if we're both unsettled by all this, of course you'd imagine seeing what I saw, right?”

She picked up her beer. “But Ed, you never told me what you saw. We didn’t talk about what it looked like.” She threw back her head and took a few big swallows.

I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. I'd never described the animal to her. She'd never asked. We stood in silence for a few minutes, nursing our beers. I didn't know what to say, and she knew that she'd made her point.

Finally I put my empty bottle down. “Hey, why don't we go to the Almanac and have dinner and a few drinks? Just get out of here and relax, and see some of our new bar buddies. I bet it'll get our minds off the goat, and that's exactly what we need.”

She looked as if she wanted to argue, but there really was no point. We weren’t going to get anywhere by debating who saw what. So she agreed and headed upstairs to take a shower while I tried to figure out what could be happening with the mystery goat. By the time she was ready to go 45 minutes later, I had still not come up with an answer.