If you ever find yourself in the American Southwest, drive out to the mountains of New Mexico, and once you’re deep, deep into them, make a turn, and down you go on a dirt road forever and ever, and there you’ll find my house, a gargantuan beast among the nature that stands out above everything while staying enshrined by trees. But that’s not the only structure in these woods, it wasn’t then and it isn’t now. I don’t think I’m the only one living here, even still. But I am the only human.
It started almost a year ago, when everything used to be normal, when I had a wife and neighbors, a job, a life. When the lights and sounds of the city really started to get to me. I work from home, as does my wife, but like clockwork, when the sun rose, and the cars left their homes, I would get a migraine. And that would last until three or four in the morning. I went to sleep so late, every night, not climbing into bed until six then having to wake up at nine, just so I could enjoy that sweet respite from my pounding head.
So we moved to a quiet and dark place deep in the forested mountains, our property line ending less than a yard away from where national forest land began. And that first long drive down that dirty road, I thought to myself, how peaceful it is to be alone. I haven’t had a migraine since we moved here, and that joy, that grateful feeling of freedom, I think has overshadowed what has truly been happening to us.
It started a couple of months ago, when the migraines returned. With my head pounding, I walked outside. It was a dark and drizzly day, rain lackadaisically dripping from above, the smell of petrichor lofting through my nose. I wanted a breath of fresh air. I had hoped it would cure my headache. When I stepped outside, I stepped on something. A crunch beneath my feet that I was afraid was a package or something my wife had dropped, but when I looked, it was two splintered sticks and a length of twine.
We have a couple of neighbors, an older man with dementia, a younger couple with two homeschooled kids, and a newly retired couple. I figured that the kids had laid a cross at my door, something not too out of the ordinary, as they always try to get me to attend church with them. I kicked the two sticks aside and took my breath.
I breathed in, deeply, through my nose, inviting the smell of rain and wet dust inside my lungs, but I was instead greeted with something sharp. I looked around for the source of the foul odor and found nothing. I kept breathing, hoping for something good, but nothing changed. I stood out there for ten minutes, feeling like a gambler who loses his money every time he plays, who doesn’t even come close to winning, but still keeps playing. I kept inhaling, hoping for something, and just that sharp, stinging odor.
When I walked back inside, my wife, who was sitting on the couch, reading on her laptop, started to greet me, but when she laid eyes on me, all she could say was, “Oh my god, what happened?”
“I just went outside, it’s raining a little bit,” I said.
“Please don’t tell me it was a deer. I’ve been so scared someone would hit one, and it’d end up on our property. Don’t tell me anything about it, I don’t want to know!”
“What?”
“Look at yourself!”
And so I did. I looked down at my blood-spotted clothes and screamed.
I ripped off my shirt and ran to the bathroom, looking at myself, exposed, in the mirror for any injuries. I thought I was dying, but aside from the blood soaking my hair and dripping down my skin, there was nothing. I looked outside the window, it was still raining but more heavily now, deep, dark drops plummeting onto the grass.
I had read about a place before, that had such iron-enriched soil, water, and air, that the rain appeared red. There was a factory and a mine just down the main road, right at the entrance into the mountains. They mine iron, I thought, they must. I stood in the shower, watching red drip from my body, red that was not mine, watching it swirl down the drain, and by the time I stepped out of the shower, that’s all it was. Red. Iron enriched rain.
It’s late now, and cold. My warm bed calls to me. I will update this soon, but for now, I must get some sleep. It has been a long couple of months.
Read more: I Am The Only Person Living In These Woods Now (Part One) Here’s a new article from https://reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1t53kb1/i_am_the_only_person_living_in_these_woods_now/: If you ever find yourself in the American Southwest, drive out to the mountains of New Mexico, and once you’re deep, deep into them, make a turn, and down you go on a dirt road forever and ever, and there you’ll find my house, a gargantuan beast among the nature that stands out above everything Continue here: I Am The Only Person Living In These Woods Now (Part One)