Rushed by Brian Harmon

door and onto the porch, where he found himself directly in the path of a charging bulldozer. 

 
     
     
     
    Chapter Six
    Coherent thought failing him, Eric reacted less on calculated strategy than on pure instinct and adrenaline.  Uttering a startled and, to his credit, a rather creative curse, he turned and leapt over the porch railing with the kind of grace he hadn’t demonstrated in at least ten years.  And then he sprawled face-first into the grass with exactly the kind of grace befitting him these days. 
    Behind him, the wooden porch burst into splinters against the onslaught of the dozer’s blade. 
    Even over the roar of the engine and the resounding crash of cold steel against breaking wood, Eric could hear the thing that came out of the wardrobe.  A terrible, rage-filled howl cut through the air and seemed to carve its way into his very soul. 
    Then there was only the thrumming roar of the machine. 
    Then even that sputtered into silence. 
    “You okay?”
    Eric sat up and turned around to see what the hell had just happened.  The first thing he saw was that it was not a bulldozer that had nearly flattened him as he fled the farmhouse after all, but rather an ordinary tractor with an impressive hydraulic blade mounted on its front.  The blade was now firmly pressed against the front door of the house, preventing the wardrobe monster from following him. 
    He had no idea what was keeping it from lunging through one of the house’s windows instead.  It had been fully capable of throwing the bed across the room and tearing apart the hallway.  But the house seemed to have fallen utterly silent in the wake of the tractor’s unexpected assault. 
    The next thing his racing mind took in was the old man climbing down from the tractor’s seat, the man who had likely just saved his life, but just as easily could have squashed him into jelly.  All the easier for the monster to chew. 
    He was a tall, slender man, with hard, sun-beaten skin wearing dark, oversized glasses and a blue and white cap.  “When I saw you go in there, I thought you were done for.”
    “Guess I almost was.”  He recalled looking back down the hallway and seeing that awful face clawing after him.  He also recalled, now that the gripping panic had subsided and he was thinking back on it without the mortal fear of his imminent and violent death, that the screams he was spouting at that moment weren’t exactly the manliest of cries.
    Well, at least he hadn’t wet himself.  That would have to do, he supposed. 
    “Didn’t Annette warn you about leaving the path?”
    “Annette?”
    The old man cocked his head, lifted his hat and ran a hand through his thick, gray hair.  “No.  I suppose she didn’t.” 
    Eric’s eyes drifted back to the ruined porch.  What was keeping that thing inside?  He couldn’t think of a single reason why a thing like that wouldn’t still be tearing after him, yet the old man didn’t seem remotely concerned about standing this close to the house. 
    “I guess she’s still going on about Ethan.”
    Ethan?  Ethan was the old woman’s husband, he recalled.  Now he understood.  She was Annette. 
    “She never accepted it.  He’s been gone a while now.”
    At this, Eric turned and met the old man’s eyes.  Ethan was dead?  Suddenly, he remembered the way she kept staring at the shirts as she hung them up, that profoundly sad look in her eyes.  She talked about her father, and made it sound like she was worried that she might lose Ethan the same way.  She even said something about giving him a red ribbon for good luck.  But Ethan was already dead and gone.  That was perhaps the saddest thing he had heard in a long time. 
    “Let’s see if we can keep you on the path from now on, okay?”
    Eric took a step back, surprised.  “What?  Oh.  No.  No way.  I’m done with this nonsense.  I mean…what the hell ?  I was just attacked by a goddamn…”  He thrust his finger