What Attacked Tim?

Generations of my family have spent their summer vacations at our old adobe cabin in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. It is in a tiny secluded valley we fondly call Valley Jo, where two rivers and three mountains all come together. Once in a while when we you are sitting out on the porch at night enjoying the stars, you may hear an odd whirring sound, and an orange ball of light will appear on the mountainside, floating purposefully through the trees. The land was once a Native American settlement. We have found their pottery and arrowheads there over the years, so some of us attribute these "Valley Jo spirits" to them.

Other family members think the spirits belong to the shepherds who once grazed their sheep in the surrounding mountains. They were the ones who originally built our cabin as a base camp hundreds of years ago, and we have found some of their belongings too, along with a couple of human-sized piles of rock that appear to be their graves.

We have our own family graves here in Valley Jo, too. My great grandmother is buried on one side of the cabin, underneath a giant old pine tree that has been struck by lightning. My great grandfather is buried on the other side of the cabin. The reason they are not buried near each other is because my great grandfather abandoned my great grandmother. He started a simultaneous family with a Mexican woman he had an affair with while working as a traveling salesman. Our poor great grandma, left to raise their three sons by herself, became manic depressive, then schizophrenic, and finally committed suicide. If anyone has the right to haunt these mountains, it would be her.

We have never feared the Valley Jo Spirits, we figure they have the right to enjoy that beautiful area too, so for the most part we are able to coexist peacefully. Except for once, when one of my aunts brought her new boyfriend Tim to the cabin.

The two of them went without me. I had just been there earlier in the year. I remember that during my trip I suddenly had a peculiar aversion to one specific window in the cabin. The window faces out to the remains of an old shepherd's shack, and just beyond that is my great grandfather's grave. When I was there we had set up a card table in front of that window and we were constructing a jigsaw puzzle on it. Every time I sat there it felt like someone was on the other side of that window giving me some serious stink eye. I never mentioned it to anyone. Later, when my aunt and Tim went there he commented to her that he felt a similar feeling coming from that same window. It made him nervous, but he didn't know why.

Tim is a nervous guy to begin with though, he actually decided to bring a handgun with him to the cabin just in case. He doesn't have any pleasant childhood memories of the valley and its surrounding mountains like we do in my family. To him the wilderness is a dangerous place to be, with no electricity or running water, just you and your wimpy girlfriend in the middle of nowhere. He felt on edge pretty much the whole time he was there, but near that angry window he felt outright threatened.

When they went to bed the first night, Tim put his handgun on a nearby shelf where he could reach it in case a grizzly bear or a homicidal lumberjack tried to break in during the middle of the night. It was difficult for him to quiet his anxious mind enough to drift off to sleep. He finally did though, despite the creepy window still glaring at him from the foot of his bed.

Something made Tim open his eyes in the middle of the night. He looked instinctively at the window, and was horrified to see a glowing green glob coming speeding towards him. He felt it swoop at his face. He won't admit to screaming. He woke up my aunt and grabbed his useless handgun, and together they waited in the dark until morning when they could finally pack up and leave.

My aunt says she thinks it was the ghost of my great grandfather, unhappy about her unsanctified relationship with Tim. I think it comforts her to think that. I really doubt that's what it was, but I can't come up with a better explanation either. Whatever it was, probably all of Tim's frightened energy caused the attack. The next time I went to Valley Jo, I put holy water on all the windows and doors in our cabin. So far nobody else has been assaulted by green ghost blobs. I'll let you know if it happens again.