Beyond Bray Road

I thought it all started with a phone call, but, as usual, I was wrong.It took me a minute to get up to speed, because my buddy Bruce was talking fast and I had no idea what had fired him up."Is this what it comes down to, you keeping secrets from me?" he demanded. "Don't go off on another one of your tirades about hidden functions in phone apps! I told you the app would report back to Mark. If you would have written it for us, you would have known it sent us summaries. Mark says he's never seen readings as high as you encountered. Why didn't you call me? Tell me the truth! Tell me you saw it!""Dude, what are you talking about?" I asked. I really had no idea what he was harping on about."Don't fuck with me, man!" Bruce insisted. "Mark says we should verify the ID in the app, and then confirm the readings from the log. You know he's more of a hardware guy, and he probably messed something up when he kludged the app together. If you saw something, you gotta tell me!""The app?" I questioned.It was starting to make sense, but I think they had the wrong friend. The three of us had known each other since we had met in the Air Force twenty years earlier. Even back then, we all were interested in bizarre and occult things. Over the years, I had concentrated on history and secret societies, while Bruce and Mark had pursued measurable phenomenon.Mark was always inventing crazy gadgets to detect ghosts and sasquatches, and I usually got suckered into writing software to support them. I also humored them when they told of their latest finds, but I rarely got involved in testing or use. Our 'Fourth Musketeer' was also named John, and they probably had sent their device to him. The three of them all lived within an hour of each other on the East Coast, while I was living in the Midwest."Come on, man, wake up!" Bruce practically shouted. "Just get your backup phone out and give me the damned numbers!""Hold on," I answered. I reluctantly moved to retrieve my secondary cell phone from my briefcase, just to prove him wrong.In spite of what the advertisements claim, cell phone service is touchy in this area. My phone that works great in Southern Wisconsin gets hit hard with roaming data charges when I go down into Illinois. My phone that works great in Illinois barely gets service when I'm home. I travel back and forth between the two areas, so I carry two phones.There was definitely something fishy going on. I was shocked to pull my other phone out and discover some sort of device plugged into it. It sort of looked like a USB flash drive, but it had strange aluminum fins sticking out the side like little fingers. I had never seen it before in my life.When I swiped the screen to wake the phone up, there was an odd icon that I had never seen before as well. It was simply labeled "Finder". I tapped it, and the app opened. The display had a big number, a small graph, and some buttons. The number was hovering around zero, and the graph seemed to update in real-time. Overall, it was far too simplistic to be one of my programs."What the fuck," I thought.I must have said it out loud as well. Bruce replied, "Just hit the setup button and tell me the ID code."Even as I tapped the button, my mind was going a million casino siteleri miles an hour in several directions. I had no idea where the device had come from, and I had no idea how the app ended up in the phone. As my mind raced, my fears made me do something I had never done before. I lied to my best friend."S-X-2-1-4-5," I read out the number."2-1-4-5?" he repeated. "2-1-4-5? That's not right! You told me 2-1-5-4 yesterday!""What do you want, dude?" I answered, sounding annoyed. "I'm not the one with lysdexia. You wrote it down wrong!""Don't do that!" he shouted. In a more reasonable tone, he added, "Yes, I have dyslexia, and you know how much I hate when you make fun of me for it. I swear to god I'll never talk to you again if you keep it up. And I made you repeat it twice while I wrote it down twice. Dammit, you better not be fucking with me!"For the record, I will say I was tempted. It's a long story, but my wife was the main reason he and I had ever become friends in the first place. She would never have forgiven me if I truly pissed him off, so I am forever stuck with him for her sake. On the other hand, I was still weirded out by the device and the app."Dude, I must have been tired, or something," I replied. "I didn't even go out last night, so whatever Mark was seeing, it wasn't me.""Huh," he grumbled. "You promised you would go." He paused for a moment, and then cried, "Wait a minute! You didn't go out, or you don't remember going out? Maybe you went out and you saw it! Dude, tell me the Bray Road Beast didn't fuck with your mind!"I couldn't stop from laughing. 'The Beast of Bray Road' was an alleged wolf-man that haunted a stretch of road up by Elkhorn, Wisconsin. It was featured on an episode of "Mysteries of The Unknown", and Bruce had realized that it was only twenty miles from my house. It didn't surprise me at all that he and Mark would have come up with some gadget to go investigate. I still had no idea how it ended up attached to my phone."The Beast did not fuck with my mind," I answered."Holy fuck!" he gasped. "Tell me you're not the Bray Road Beast!""Dude, you and I were stationed in Louisiana when that story first came out," I reminded him. "It's not like I could run off for a couple of hours to drive fourteen hours up here and scare the crap outta people and still make it on base each day. Look, I gotta go. I'll catch up with you again tomorrow.""Okay, I'll let you go," he answered. "But click the 'Send Log' button and forward the log data to me or Mark!""Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Goodbye!"I guess I felt bad about lying to him, but it still didn't make any sense. He knows how much I distrust cell phones and internet providers, and there was no way I was going to send anything to him and Mark without knowing what I was sending. I used the app to send the log data to myself.According to the log, I had started the app at 6:30 the evening before. The numbers had hovered around zero until around 8:45. Starting at 8:45, the numbers had quickly shot up, going from zero to over two hundred in the course of fifteen minutes. The numbers had stayed high like that until 9:20, when the log abruptly stopped. There was no data after that until the point where güvenilir casino I started the app to get the number for Bruce.Absolutely none of that made sense. I am almost certain I hadn't left the house. All I could think was that whatever it was, it had come to me. Or maybe Bruce was right. Maybe I was 'The Beast of Bray Road'.I guess there was one way to find out. If I assumed that Bruce and Mark had sent me the gadget, and if I assumed that Bruce wasn't lying when he said that I had promised to go look, then I could assume that I left the house and headed out towards Elkhorn. I decided to see if I could retrace the route, based simply on where I would have gone if I were investigating the Beast.If finding the device attached to my phone hadn't weirded me out enough, getting into my car made things worse. I have a cell phone holder on the dash of my car. Although it is adjustable, I have it set so I can put my regular phone in it. My backup phone is smaller. When I got in the car, the phone holder was adjusted to fit the smaller phone, with one of the supports swung back to make room for the gadget. I swear I didn't do that!Call me paranoid, but I was freaked out. I knew I had to press on, but I impulsively put the backup phone in 'Airplane' mode, but then checked that the app was still getting readings. Everything looked good, so I headed out.If I were in a hurry to get to Elkhorn, I would have taken the county highways up to the expressway, and I would have been there in under twenty minutes. That didn't feel right.As I left town, I started taking side roads that would weave through the farmland between the local lakes and eventually lead up to Bray Road. As I drove I considered the timeline of the data. From 6:30 to 8:45 was more than enough time to get to Bray Road, drive up and down it a couple of times, and maybe head out toward the hospital where sightings had also been reported. In that amount of time, I probably would have decided to head home.From the area east of the hospital, I would have done a nostalgic drive down past the house where my wife had lived when we first started dating, and then swung past the first house we had owned, eventually making back home.Although it would be backtracking a bit, I decided to follow that course in reverse and see what happened.I would have to assume that nothing happened. The evening seemed to zip right by, and when I made it home, I went straight to bed.--------When I woke up the next morning, something was wrong. It felt like it should have been obvious, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't until I sat by the window to read the newspaper that anything jumped out at me. Even then, it didn't exactly jump - it just sort of crept up on me.There was a painting on the wall that was nagging at my thoughts. Done in grays and browns, it featured a single, dead tree on a forested hill over a lake. Almost as an afterthought, there was an owl in the tree. There was something odd about the owl's eyes. It was almost as if they had just opened, and yet they could see right into your soul. Somehow, that one tiny feature was the true focus of the whole painting. It was almost unnerving.Of greater concern was the canlı casino fact that I knew two solid but conflicting facts about the painting. First, it had been on the wall for years. Second, I had never seen it before. And then third, my wife would never have allowed such a painting on her wall.There was a painting on the opposite wall, one that I feel better about claiming we have had for years. It shows a bright colored cat sitting in the sun. It was sort of funny that I had always felt the same intensity from that cat's eyes that I did from the owl's eyes. You could tell the cat had just looked up from the mouse hole it was watching, and its eyes could see right through you. The entire painting was done in the bright colors that my wife preferred.The wrongness of the morning jumped at me in a way that could not be ignored. Almost simultaneously, I noted that the signature on the bottoms of the paintings was the same, and it dawned on me why I was feeling odd. My wife and I had briefly met the artist when we bought the painting of the cat and the signatures made me think of the pretty, middle-aged artist. I couldn't even begin to say why, but thinking of the artist's pretty face made me realize that I was sore between my legs.The feeling between my legs was unmistakable, and I only knew of two ways to end up with that feeling. You might end up with this sensation if you forced yourself to masturbate a couple times too many in one sitting, and you will definitely end up feeling this way if you forced yourself to have marathon sex. The previous day's conversation with Bruce raced through my mind, and I suddenly realized that somebody had to have been fucking with my head.As near as I could tell, I had two problems. First, I had no evidence or memory of sexual overload, and second, I had somehow managed to wake, shower, and eat breakfast without realizing what my body was feeling. I don't do drugs, and I hadn't been drinking. Somebody had been fucking with my head to make me forget.I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon trying to decide what, if anything, to do. I almost called Bruce. I was pretty sure that he wasn't behind whatever happened, and I wasn't sure telling him would help. Almost belatedly, I remembered something else I had done the day before. I quickly retrieve my main cell phone and hooked it up to my computer to download some hidden files.There's a long story about how Bruce and Mark got into a bunch of trouble on a ghost hunting misadventure. They barely escaped a legal mess that they blindly stumbled into. To protect them on their subsequent adventures, I had written an app for them that quietly takes a picture and records the GPS data on it. It would record a hidden picture every few seconds, even if the camera was in use. Their version had already saved them some trouble once by proving that they had been where they claimed they were. I had set up the app to run on my phone and I had activated it before I left the house the night before.The pictures I found from the previous evening were just about useless. I had dropped the phone into the center console in my car, so every frame was black. The GPS data was a lot more revealing. I had trekked around a bit until ending up at an address near one of the smaller lakes. I had stayed there for more than four hours, and then driven straight home. If I wasn't wrong, which I usually am, that address was the studio/home of the artist who had signed both paintings.