Bump In The Night

So I went on vacation last week. A week in the Middle of Nowhere, New Brunswick (that’s Canada, northeast of Maine). We stayed in an old house on an island in the Bay of Fundy, which used to be a bed & breakfast.

It was a wildly uneventful weekend, which was great. I read a whole book and wrote almost a whole short story. We ate lobster every day and had more blueberries than I can even speak of.

The one thing that sticks out most in my mind about the week, though, was the one night I stayed up late, drank too much, and wrote the majority of that short story.

The only bathroom was on the second floor, by all the bedrooms, and as anyone who really knows me is aware, I have a really weak bladder when I’m drinking. So, for a couple hours that night I was tiptoeing up to that bathroom every 20 minutes.

Now, the house itself was a little creepy in the dead of night. I was waiting for a gang of folks with bags on their heads to come kill us all or ghosts to pour out of the rafters by the dozens.

So please understand my state of mind as I went into this bathroom. Drunk. Writing about creepy shit (I can’t write anything else). Alone. In a creepy house in the woods.

And I tiptoe to this bathroom to pee:



So, I’m standing there, doing my business, and I have this nagging feeling of someone standing behind me or looking over my shoulder. So, I turn my head to the left to look behind me. That’s when I realized what was creeping me out – this picture:


I’m serious. His name is Benton Hill. Just look at him a while. He’s scary. He was especially scary that night. Again and again I headed up to that bathroom and stood there, hoping this guy wouldn’t eat me alive. He JUST KEPT STARING at me.



Now, I try not to be the type to get scared in real life – I do enough of that in my sleep – but trust me, his gaze was enough to chill your bones, that night.