A young woman on a geocaching tour of the countryside, decided
to seek rest in a lonely farmhouse B&B along a sleepy
back-country road. Her room overlooked the house's gravel driveway.
It was a moonlit night, and her excitement over her caching
adventure kept her from sleeping well, so much so that she heard
the clock in the hall outside her room strike twelve. As the sound
died away, it was replaced with another: tires rolling along the
gravel.
She got up and rushed to the window to see who would be arriving
at this time of night. To her surprise, she saw a hearse pulling
slowly up the driveway. Her heart began to race.
In the front was a single driver, an old man in a black suit and
tie, gaunt and nearly desiccated but with blazing, fierce eyes. The
back, where a coffin should be, was filled with countless people,
glassy-eyed and pale. As the woman watched, the car came to a stop
and to her horror, the driver turned and focused his eyes upon her.
He raised his arm and pointed a bony finger at her, curling it as
if beckoning her to him. He opened his mouth and she heard him
croak just as if he'd been standing at her ear, "There's always
room for one more."
Despite herself, the woman shrieked and flung herself onto her
bed, burrowed beneath the covers and clapped her hands over her
ears, the phrase "room for one more", echoing through her brain.
There she stayed, cowering, until sleep mercifully took her.
When she awoke the next morning, she asked the owners of the house
if they had seen anything in the night. No one had heard or seen a
thing. She dismissed it as a bad dream, and as she began her day's
adventure, she had nearly forgot the entire episode.
Toward the end of the day she found herself on the Hoffman Hill
trail. The light was rapidly fading and the gloom was deepening
quickly. With only one cache left on the trail, she glanced at the
sky and her watch and tromped off into the darkness.
As she walked toward the last cache, she heard the sound of
footsteps on gravel ahead of her. She peered forward, and slowly,
through the darkness, she could see the shapes of people walking.
No one was speaking, but they appeared to be examining GPS
receivers and carrying packs with supplies. Thinking they were
fellow geocachers, she rushed forward to make contact.
She called out, "Hello, are you geocaching?" At the sound of her
voice, the last person in the group, an older gentleman, wheeled
around and fixed her with a piercing gaze.
It was the old man from the hearse! The woman recoiled in shock.
Her body froze, her blood turned to ice, and she felt all her limbs
become lead.
"Why, yes, we are," said the man. "Would you care to join us?
There's always room for one more."
It was all the woman could do not to scream. She managed a
trembling shake of her head and somehow stuttered out the word,
"N-n-n-no."
Without a word, the man turned and resumed his march.
The woman stood there petrified. As soon as the group of people was
out of sight she heard the horrifying sound of crashing through the
trees, people screaming, and the low, deep snarls of some wild,
fierce creature. Through the daze of her shock, she knew she had to
run. As if in slow motion, she turned her body and started walking,
step by step, slowly at first, but by the time she reached her car,
she was in an all-out heart-pounding sprint. She scrambled into the
car and slammed the door just as a rabid coyote came hurtling out
of the trees and slammed itself into her car door, streaks of blood
and saliva dripping down the window. Screaming, she zoomed off into
the night.
She later learned that the entire caching party she encountered was
massacred in the woods...all except for an older gentleman who
seemed to escape unharmed... |