Bogleech.com's 2018 Horror Write-off:
Angels of Connecticut: Collected Accounts
Submitted by Monkeysky
1995:
"My older brother used to show me a drawing on the wall of an alley on the way to our school, black ink over brownish-yellow brick. I never took a photo of it before we moved away, but both of us learned to draw it nearly exactly how it looked, so I put a drawing underneath. It was like that old graffitti of "Kilroy Was Here", or Foo or Shmoe or whatever you called the guy with its nose poking over a wall, but obviously you'll be able to see how it was different. One of my brother's friends tried telling us that the drawing came from some circuit diagram, but my brother shut him up quick. He told him that the real "Kilroy" (not that that's its real name) was somewhere no one could get to, and all the drawings you see are its sensors.
If you can see its eyes, it can see you. If you can see its ears, it can hear you. If you can see its nose, it can smell you. If you can see its fingers, it can feel you. He never told me what happens if you can see its mouth, but he said there's a reason you never see it. I could guess what would happen if you did, but then again I guess any drawing of it that showed the mouth wouldn't really be a drawing of it in the first place.
I wish I thought about this more when I was younger, because I never got a chance to ask my brother where he heard any of that, or if he made it up. If any of you reading this have ever heard something similar, let me know. If you've seen the wall drawing I'm talking about somewhere in South Hartford, see if you can get a photo."
"2013:
"Before he changed careers, my dad used to work in a lab animal facility, working with mice for pharmaceutical testing, and he must have had to "sacrifice" hundreds of mice every year. He must have felt bad about it, though, since I don't remember him ever any sort of trap or poison in our home through my whole childhood. That's why, after arriving at their new condo in my first year of college's winter break, I was surprised to hear that my dad had broken his little toe stepping on a spring mouse trap.
He explained to me that when they had found holes chewed in packs of rice and pasta in the basement, they just moved the food into plastic containers. The first dead mouse was right under the food shelves, so my parents spent twenty minutes checking to see if it had gotten into the containers, but there was no sign. After that, they would find at least three dead mice every week, and usually more. The locations where they found them didn't seem to make much sense. The bodies seemed to appear at any random time of the day, sometimes in the middle of the floor or on furniture, but no one had ever seen a single moving mouse. After my little sister found a dead mouse right on top of her pillow one night in October, my parents finally decided that traps might be necessary to keep these occurrences down, but it didn't seem to change the frequency at all.
What it did seem to change was the shape of the mice. My dad started to find mice missing legs, usually just one but sometimes two or even three. When he put on a pair of gloves to look closely, he saw that there was no wound or scar where the limb should be, or even a gap in the brown fur. In fact, like every other dead mouse, they seemed completely unharmed, like they had just died of a heart attack. As for the traps, every once in a while my dad would find a mouse with its head snapped in one, but four out of five traps would go untouched for weeks and then vanish completely.
When I came home that winter, they had found over sixty dead mice throughout the condo, and the whole family was relieved to see me. Since I was a little little kid, I've been known to have a very sensitive sense of smell. This has actually been sort of a problem, since some intense scents, like hardboiled eggs or wet paint, have actually made me sick. However, it also made me the most suited to tracking down the mouse bodies hidden under furniture or in the backs of cabinets before they really started to go bad. For me, the whole condo always, always smelled like dead mice. The very first night I got there I followed around the smell (sort of like a rotten cabbage or brocolli smell) for an hour and found four mice, but that didn't help clear it out at all.
Every day I would get up, go downstairs from the guest room to get breakfast, and afterward walk around looking for changes in the condo's odor. When I found mice, I would put on a pair of rubber gloves, and use an old shopping bag to pick it up like a dog turd, tie it off and immediately take it out to the dumpster. I've always hated touching dead animals, but I suppose I hated the smell even more.
By the second week I was there, the dead smell started to fade upstairs, but it never went away entirely. On the last weekend before I had to head back to school, I was so fed up with the smell that I decided to take a thorough search of the basement, where it seemed to smell the strongest. I spent over half an hour just walking back and forth between rooms sniffing the air until I finally ended up staring at a patch of exposed fiberglass insulation in the back corner of the furnace room. I have no idea how that material works, because it seems porous, but when I put on the gloves and pulled it away from the wall, the smell it was holding back nearly knocked me unconscious. Breathing through my mouth wasn't nearly enough to protect me, so I just held my breath. When I got the insulation tucked to the side, I saw where all the mousetraps had gone.
A dozen little wooden boards were piled up along the edge of the floor. The coiled metal springs were a foot above the floor, crudely stapling something to the wall. It looked like a long grey worm, the size of a ferret. It was covered in something more like mold than fur, with twenty-something twisted little legs coming out all over its body. Its head was the only part that really looked like a mouse, even with its eyes full of pink fiberglass fuzz. It was 100% definitely dead, but as soon as I looked at it, it moved. Its mouth opened, and it made a sound like a human child sighing, and even with me holding my breath the smell of death absolutely filled my body.
Maybe this seems anticlimactic, but I really don't remember what happened next. The next thing I knew, I was walking toward the condo from the dumpster. My gloves were gone. When I got inside the smell was worse than it usually had been, but by the time the sun set it was totally gone. I don't know why, but I just told my parents that I found three dead mice in the basement, and since then I've never gone in that room again, let alone looked behind the insulation.
I went back to school two days later, and on the phone with my parents the next month I found out that the dead mice had stopped the day after I left. The last dead mouse any of them saw there was a little pink baby mouse my dad found right on the welcome mat outside the front door. It was so small that he just picked it up with a napkin and tossed it into the woods behind the condo, but he did tell me that when he looked closer at it, it seemed to have three pairs of legs."
"2009:
"In sixth grade, my class and two other classes took a field trip to Hammonasset Beach State Park in March. It was an hour-long bus ride, but we were only there for about twenty minutes. I think we were supposed to be learning about tide pools or something, even though it was still nearly freezing outside. When we got there though, a park employee wouldn't let us go anywhere near the coast, and from the parking lot we could see why. All over the beach, going up from the water onto the concrete walkway, were little pink and purple blobs. A big rainstorm had washed up hundreds of jellyfish, and for whatever reason they never told my school that they couldn't have any kids down there until after we arrived.
Looking down at the beach from a distance, I saw a man standing on the beach and moving the jellyfish around with a long stick, like the handle of a broom. He was forming them into a shape like in the attached image, about five feet wide. It wouldn't have looked deliberate except that he had already made the exact same shape six times and was working on the seventh. From the distance, all I could really see about this guy was that he was wearing a blue shirt, swim trunks and was barefoot. I tried asking one of the teachers about it, but they told me that he was just clearing off the beach. I knew that wasn't true, but I guess they didn't want to give me any ideas about going down there myself. Fifteen minutes later, we all got on the bus and headed back to the school. I tried asking some of my friends about it on the bus, but none of them had noticed him.
That night, at maybe 9 o clock I looked out my window and saw two shiny dots in the driveway, and I realized there was some sort of animal there. I shined my flashlight outside the window, and saw that the two dots were the eyes of a man wearing a raincoat and squatting in a deep puddle and staring up at my window with an expression I've never seen before. He looked like he hated me at that moment just for seeing him, like some sort of territorial, wounded wild animal. After just staring back at me, he stood up and bolted up the driveway and down the road. As he ran, I saw that he wasn't wearing anything on his feet. It was hard to see, but it looked like either his toes or toenails were way longer than normal. I told my parents about this the next day, and they were pretty insistent that I had just dreamt it up. I never saw any sign of that guy again, but I know my own dreams well enough to know that I didn't dream that. I just still don't know why I never felt afraid at all."
"
"2004:
"When I lived in Fairfield, I used to ride the school bus and sit next to this kid named William, who had everyone call him Buzz. I was never in the same class or recess period as him, and he got picked up by his mom after school, so I only ever saw him on the bus ride each morning. He was the kind of kid who would claim to be a werewolf and tell gory stories about eating wild animals. He wasn't particular mean or cruel, but he had a strange fixation on violence and an overactive imagination. He never really caused any trouble or went too far, except for one incident where he claimed that his dad had died during 9/11, and then sheepishly admitted the next day that he had lied.
One Monday morning when we were both in fourth grade, as soon as I sat down next to him he rolled his sleeve up and showed me a huge band-aid on his forearm. I expected some story about a vampire bite or something, but he peeled it back, and underneath was a terribly inflamed scratch, about three inches long. He told me that on Friday night he got it from a nail sticking through a wall of his house, and I just told him to go to the nurse and put something on it. I got an infected cut on my ankle the year before, but it was nothing compared to that gash.
Every day, he would show me the progress on his arm and point out differences. A week in, he admitted that he enjoyed watching it heal and change. Surprisingly, it actually healed up pretty well in just two weeks, turning into a narrow pale scar without any need for stitches. We kept looking at it for the rest of the month, but nothing really changed.
A couple weeks later, he showed up with a big band-aid again, and when he peeled it back this time, there was a second scratch, even worse than the first one, running parallel right next to the scar. I asked him if that was from the same nail, and he told me that he just woke up with it, and he didn't want to answer any more questions about it. Just like before, we watched the cut every morning to see how it changed, and again it quickly scarred up without any real problems.
I know I should have suspected something on the third cut, but he at least had a story for it. He told me that was running down the road when a tree branch fell and hit him on the arm. I should have been more suspicious, but I couldn't think of what else the truth would be. This cut was still on the same arm, at an angle this time running across the two scars. It started out not looking too bad, actually, but unlike the first two cuts, this one got worse and worse every day. For the first week it got red and puffy, and even though it wasn't bleeding any more it started to seep some yellow fluid. I tried to insist that Buzz go to the nurse, but he refused.
When I saw him the next Monday morning, he eagerly showed me that the cut was changing colours again, turning a deep green around the edges. I got really worried when I saw that, but he insisted that it didn't hurt at all, and he wanted to see where it went. If I knew any better, I would have reported it to the nurse myself, but I'll admit I was sorta curious myself. Within three days, the skin within two inches of the cut had turned a sort of teal. The cut itself was no longer releasing any fluid, but a few thick black hairs, like eyelashes, were sticking out. More of these hairs started growing in over the next week, until the skin under the band-aid looked almost like it had a long eyebrow.
The last week I ever saw Buzz, I sat next to him and he rolled up his sleeve without saying anything. He pushed his thumb against the side of the cut and pulled it back, stretching the blue skin and revealing a shiny white shape between the hairs. I actually jumped back because I thought his arm had rotted all the way down to the bone. He grinned, and told me that it was a tooth, and he could feel more starting to poke through. Neither of us said anything else for the rest of the bus ride, and the next day his spot was empty.
I really do feel guilty for never asking any of the teachers why he stopped going to school. I guess I was afraid that if it had to do with his arm, I'd get in trouble since I knew about it for so long. I just hope that he's still out there now and feeling okay."
"2010:
"Have you ever heard of Holy Land USA? It was a religious theme park built at the top of a hill in the fifties, with all sorts of attractions based on different bible sites and stories. In the eighties it was basically abandoned, and it basically rotted away for decades. It's actually been restored a little bit recently, and apparently they had an official service there last year, but back when I used to live there practically the only people who would go there were drug users and hipster photographers. I wasn't really interested in either of those groups, so I'd avoid people, but I honestly found the place to be very spiritual. Even if I don't agree with the creator's theology, I still appreciate the energy put into the place, so to speak, and I found it very satisfying to pray there.
I've only been bothered by another person four times there. Two times, I was asked to take a group photo for some tourists, and once a man mistook me for a drug dealer he agreed to meet, and ran away the second he realized his mistake. The fourth time, I was sitting behind some grotto meant to represent a part of Bethelhem when I heard a man shouting. After a few minutes, he didn't stop and I felt obligated to make sure everything was okay. When I looked over the side of the grotto, I saw a crowd of over thirty people, all dressed nicely, quietly watching a single womman, wearing a white robe standing on top of a rock and intensely speaking down at them. I have no idea that many people got there without me noticing, especially with how conspicuous the speaker was. She was facing me, so I didn't want to get out of my cover, but I could hear some of the stuff she was saying.
She said "Your hair will tear away your face and your nails shall tear away your hands. You shall not understand that peace and flesh cannot survive at once."
Then she pointed up toward the sky and said "The hawk will feed flies to the chosen, and the chosen child will spit them into the sea, and the sea will boil. You will not understand that the sun and light cannot survive at once."
Then, she turned and looked directly at me, and pointed toward where I was standing. Everyone in the crowd turned around and looked toward me, just looking sort of bored. She said "And in this house, the hunter lays together with the prey. The child of the two shall forget the world." At that point, I ducked down out of sight and hopped over a fence to get down the hill. I still have no idea who those people were, and I have no idea if they even saw me, or just saw the structure I was standing by."
"
"
"My older brother used to show me a drawing on the wall of an alley on the way to our school, black ink over brownish-yellow brick. I never took a photo of it before we moved away, but both of us learned to draw it nearly exactly how it looked, so I put a drawing underneath. It was like that old graffitti of "Kilroy Was Here", or Foo or Shmoe or whatever you called the guy with its nose poking over a wall, but obviously you'll be able to see how it was different. One of my brother's friends tried telling us that the drawing came from some circuit diagram, but my brother shut him up quick. He told him that the real "Kilroy" (not that that's its real name) was somewhere no one could get to, and all the drawings you see are its sensors.
If you can see its eyes, it can see you. If you can see its ears, it can hear you. If you can see its nose, it can smell you. If you can see its fingers, it can feel you. He never told me what happens if you can see its mouth, but he said there's a reason you never see it. I could guess what would happen if you did, but then again I guess any drawing of it that showed the mouth wouldn't really be a drawing of it in the first place.
I wish I thought about this more when I was younger, because I never got a chance to ask my brother where he heard any of that, or if he made it up. If any of you reading this have ever heard something similar, let me know. If you've seen the wall drawing I'm talking about somewhere in South Hartford, see if you can get a photo."
"2013:
"Before he changed careers, my dad used to work in a lab animal facility, working with mice for pharmaceutical testing, and he must have had to "sacrifice" hundreds of mice every year. He must have felt bad about it, though, since I don't remember him ever any sort of trap or poison in our home through my whole childhood. That's why, after arriving at their new condo in my first year of college's winter break, I was surprised to hear that my dad had broken his little toe stepping on a spring mouse trap.
He explained to me that when they had found holes chewed in packs of rice and pasta in the basement, they just moved the food into plastic containers. The first dead mouse was right under the food shelves, so my parents spent twenty minutes checking to see if it had gotten into the containers, but there was no sign. After that, they would find at least three dead mice every week, and usually more. The locations where they found them didn't seem to make much sense. The bodies seemed to appear at any random time of the day, sometimes in the middle of the floor or on furniture, but no one had ever seen a single moving mouse. After my little sister found a dead mouse right on top of her pillow one night in October, my parents finally decided that traps might be necessary to keep these occurrences down, but it didn't seem to change the frequency at all.
What it did seem to change was the shape of the mice. My dad started to find mice missing legs, usually just one but sometimes two or even three. When he put on a pair of gloves to look closely, he saw that there was no wound or scar where the limb should be, or even a gap in the brown fur. In fact, like every other dead mouse, they seemed completely unharmed, like they had just died of a heart attack. As for the traps, every once in a while my dad would find a mouse with its head snapped in one, but four out of five traps would go untouched for weeks and then vanish completely.
When I came home that winter, they had found over sixty dead mice throughout the condo, and the whole family was relieved to see me. Since I was a little little kid, I've been known to have a very sensitive sense of smell. This has actually been sort of a problem, since some intense scents, like hardboiled eggs or wet paint, have actually made me sick. However, it also made me the most suited to tracking down the mouse bodies hidden under furniture or in the backs of cabinets before they really started to go bad. For me, the whole condo always, always smelled like dead mice. The very first night I got there I followed around the smell (sort of like a rotten cabbage or brocolli smell) for an hour and found four mice, but that didn't help clear it out at all.
Every day I would get up, go downstairs from the guest room to get breakfast, and afterward walk around looking for changes in the condo's odor. When I found mice, I would put on a pair of rubber gloves, and use an old shopping bag to pick it up like a dog turd, tie it off and immediately take it out to the dumpster. I've always hated touching dead animals, but I suppose I hated the smell even more.
By the second week I was there, the dead smell started to fade upstairs, but it never went away entirely. On the last weekend before I had to head back to school, I was so fed up with the smell that I decided to take a thorough search of the basement, where it seemed to smell the strongest. I spent over half an hour just walking back and forth between rooms sniffing the air until I finally ended up staring at a patch of exposed fiberglass insulation in the back corner of the furnace room. I have no idea how that material works, because it seems porous, but when I put on the gloves and pulled it away from the wall, the smell it was holding back nearly knocked me unconscious. Breathing through my mouth wasn't nearly enough to protect me, so I just held my breath. When I got the insulation tucked to the side, I saw where all the mousetraps had gone.
A dozen little wooden boards were piled up along the edge of the floor. The coiled metal springs were a foot above the floor, crudely stapling something to the wall. It looked like a long grey worm, the size of a ferret. It was covered in something more like mold than fur, with twenty-something twisted little legs coming out all over its body. Its head was the only part that really looked like a mouse, even with its eyes full of pink fiberglass fuzz. It was 100% definitely dead, but as soon as I looked at it, it moved. Its mouth opened, and it made a sound like a human child sighing, and even with me holding my breath the smell of death absolutely filled my body.
Maybe this seems anticlimactic, but I really don't remember what happened next. The next thing I knew, I was walking toward the condo from the dumpster. My gloves were gone. When I got inside the smell was worse than it usually had been, but by the time the sun set it was totally gone. I don't know why, but I just told my parents that I found three dead mice in the basement, and since then I've never gone in that room again, let alone looked behind the insulation.
I went back to school two days later, and on the phone with my parents the next month I found out that the dead mice had stopped the day after I left. The last dead mouse any of them saw there was a little pink baby mouse my dad found right on the welcome mat outside the front door. It was so small that he just picked it up with a napkin and tossed it into the woods behind the condo, but he did tell me that when he looked closer at it, it seemed to have three pairs of legs."
"2009:
"In sixth grade, my class and two other classes took a field trip to Hammonasset Beach State Park in March. It was an hour-long bus ride, but we were only there for about twenty minutes. I think we were supposed to be learning about tide pools or something, even though it was still nearly freezing outside. When we got there though, a park employee wouldn't let us go anywhere near the coast, and from the parking lot we could see why. All over the beach, going up from the water onto the concrete walkway, were little pink and purple blobs. A big rainstorm had washed up hundreds of jellyfish, and for whatever reason they never told my school that they couldn't have any kids down there until after we arrived.
Looking down at the beach from a distance, I saw a man standing on the beach and moving the jellyfish around with a long stick, like the handle of a broom. He was forming them into a shape like in the attached image, about five feet wide. It wouldn't have looked deliberate except that he had already made the exact same shape six times and was working on the seventh. From the distance, all I could really see about this guy was that he was wearing a blue shirt, swim trunks and was barefoot. I tried asking one of the teachers about it, but they told me that he was just clearing off the beach. I knew that wasn't true, but I guess they didn't want to give me any ideas about going down there myself. Fifteen minutes later, we all got on the bus and headed back to the school. I tried asking some of my friends about it on the bus, but none of them had noticed him.
That night, at maybe 9 o clock I looked out my window and saw two shiny dots in the driveway, and I realized there was some sort of animal there. I shined my flashlight outside the window, and saw that the two dots were the eyes of a man wearing a raincoat and squatting in a deep puddle and staring up at my window with an expression I've never seen before. He looked like he hated me at that moment just for seeing him, like some sort of territorial, wounded wild animal. After just staring back at me, he stood up and bolted up the driveway and down the road. As he ran, I saw that he wasn't wearing anything on his feet. It was hard to see, but it looked like either his toes or toenails were way longer than normal. I told my parents about this the next day, and they were pretty insistent that I had just dreamt it up. I never saw any sign of that guy again, but I know my own dreams well enough to know that I didn't dream that. I just still don't know why I never felt afraid at all."
"
"2004:
"When I lived in Fairfield, I used to ride the school bus and sit next to this kid named William, who had everyone call him Buzz. I was never in the same class or recess period as him, and he got picked up by his mom after school, so I only ever saw him on the bus ride each morning. He was the kind of kid who would claim to be a werewolf and tell gory stories about eating wild animals. He wasn't particular mean or cruel, but he had a strange fixation on violence and an overactive imagination. He never really caused any trouble or went too far, except for one incident where he claimed that his dad had died during 9/11, and then sheepishly admitted the next day that he had lied.
One Monday morning when we were both in fourth grade, as soon as I sat down next to him he rolled his sleeve up and showed me a huge band-aid on his forearm. I expected some story about a vampire bite or something, but he peeled it back, and underneath was a terribly inflamed scratch, about three inches long. He told me that on Friday night he got it from a nail sticking through a wall of his house, and I just told him to go to the nurse and put something on it. I got an infected cut on my ankle the year before, but it was nothing compared to that gash.
Every day, he would show me the progress on his arm and point out differences. A week in, he admitted that he enjoyed watching it heal and change. Surprisingly, it actually healed up pretty well in just two weeks, turning into a narrow pale scar without any need for stitches. We kept looking at it for the rest of the month, but nothing really changed.
A couple weeks later, he showed up with a big band-aid again, and when he peeled it back this time, there was a second scratch, even worse than the first one, running parallel right next to the scar. I asked him if that was from the same nail, and he told me that he just woke up with it, and he didn't want to answer any more questions about it. Just like before, we watched the cut every morning to see how it changed, and again it quickly scarred up without any real problems.
I know I should have suspected something on the third cut, but he at least had a story for it. He told me that was running down the road when a tree branch fell and hit him on the arm. I should have been more suspicious, but I couldn't think of what else the truth would be. This cut was still on the same arm, at an angle this time running across the two scars. It started out not looking too bad, actually, but unlike the first two cuts, this one got worse and worse every day. For the first week it got red and puffy, and even though it wasn't bleeding any more it started to seep some yellow fluid. I tried to insist that Buzz go to the nurse, but he refused.
When I saw him the next Monday morning, he eagerly showed me that the cut was changing colours again, turning a deep green around the edges. I got really worried when I saw that, but he insisted that it didn't hurt at all, and he wanted to see where it went. If I knew any better, I would have reported it to the nurse myself, but I'll admit I was sorta curious myself. Within three days, the skin within two inches of the cut had turned a sort of teal. The cut itself was no longer releasing any fluid, but a few thick black hairs, like eyelashes, were sticking out. More of these hairs started growing in over the next week, until the skin under the band-aid looked almost like it had a long eyebrow.
The last week I ever saw Buzz, I sat next to him and he rolled up his sleeve without saying anything. He pushed his thumb against the side of the cut and pulled it back, stretching the blue skin and revealing a shiny white shape between the hairs. I actually jumped back because I thought his arm had rotted all the way down to the bone. He grinned, and told me that it was a tooth, and he could feel more starting to poke through. Neither of us said anything else for the rest of the bus ride, and the next day his spot was empty.
I really do feel guilty for never asking any of the teachers why he stopped going to school. I guess I was afraid that if it had to do with his arm, I'd get in trouble since I knew about it for so long. I just hope that he's still out there now and feeling okay."
"2010:
"Have you ever heard of Holy Land USA? It was a religious theme park built at the top of a hill in the fifties, with all sorts of attractions based on different bible sites and stories. In the eighties it was basically abandoned, and it basically rotted away for decades. It's actually been restored a little bit recently, and apparently they had an official service there last year, but back when I used to live there practically the only people who would go there were drug users and hipster photographers. I wasn't really interested in either of those groups, so I'd avoid people, but I honestly found the place to be very spiritual. Even if I don't agree with the creator's theology, I still appreciate the energy put into the place, so to speak, and I found it very satisfying to pray there.
I've only been bothered by another person four times there. Two times, I was asked to take a group photo for some tourists, and once a man mistook me for a drug dealer he agreed to meet, and ran away the second he realized his mistake. The fourth time, I was sitting behind some grotto meant to represent a part of Bethelhem when I heard a man shouting. After a few minutes, he didn't stop and I felt obligated to make sure everything was okay. When I looked over the side of the grotto, I saw a crowd of over thirty people, all dressed nicely, quietly watching a single womman, wearing a white robe standing on top of a rock and intensely speaking down at them. I have no idea that many people got there without me noticing, especially with how conspicuous the speaker was. She was facing me, so I didn't want to get out of my cover, but I could hear some of the stuff she was saying.
She said "Your hair will tear away your face and your nails shall tear away your hands. You shall not understand that peace and flesh cannot survive at once."
Then she pointed up toward the sky and said "The hawk will feed flies to the chosen, and the chosen child will spit them into the sea, and the sea will boil. You will not understand that the sun and light cannot survive at once."
Then, she turned and looked directly at me, and pointed toward where I was standing. Everyone in the crowd turned around and looked toward me, just looking sort of bored. She said "And in this house, the hunter lays together with the prey. The child of the two shall forget the world." At that point, I ducked down out of sight and hopped over a fence to get down the hill. I still have no idea who those people were, and I have no idea if they even saw me, or just saw the structure I was standing by."
"
"