Part 2: A Strange Dash

The alarm on my phone woke me up exactly when it was supposed to. I groaned and rubbed my eyes, turning off the damnable device. It was a Monday in early September; it had been a long weekend and last night I had spent a bit too much time at the Hop Notch Brewery (the one passable sports bar in town) watching the Patriots and the Packers play.

I was tempted to roll over and go back to sleep but I couldn’t. When you do exclusively either gig or freelance work like me you have to motivate yourself. If I had a regular nine-to-five job a minor hangover and lack of sleep wouldn’t matter and it couldn’t matter for me either. It was easy to fall into that kind of trap, where your days just mush into each other.

I got ready for the gym and packed up my laptop. I would workout, shower, and then head to a local coffee spot to work on some writing. I had a couple small articles due this week for the Community Shopper, a kind of local town bulletin that had a print edition and an online version. The print edition was distributed through local stores and businesses and I maintained their website for them. I also dealt with their local advertisers quite a bit: roofing and siding companies, restaurants, a local law firm. It wasn’t bad work but it was sporadic and was paid as piece work, more gig job than regular job.

This evening I was going to do Door Dash. There was a fairly good Monday night football game this evening and I figured it was a good time for some deliveries. I covered the whole county almost by default and though there wasn’t a huge selection of restaurants in the area there were enough and the area was big enough to make it worthwhile.

I was also hoping to find some time to jot down a few more notes about Nebelgutt Estate. It would make a good story if the writing ever happened.

The day went fairly well. I got everything I wanted done after a brief workout cleared my head of last night’s cobwebs. Around four o’clock I went live and started Dashing. The initial round of jobs went really well, easy deliveries, decent tips, familiar customers and restaurants.

Then I got a really strange order. It was about 7:00, three quarts of cashew chicken and white rice from Sonny’s Noddle House on Main Street and a delivery address of 1013 Bogforest Road, delivery instructions: leave by gate send pic ... was that...?

I looked at the GPS on my phone as I sat in my car. A cool fall evening had fallen over my hometown, one of those early fall nights where there was just a touch of the coming seasonal change in the air. This had to be a joke ... it had to be ... it seemed like something I would’ve done in high school if I was right.

Shit, I was right. The address 1013 Bogforest Road was Nebelgutt! What the fuck! Seriously I said ‘What the fuck’ right there out loud in my car. It had to be a joke ... then I looked at the $60.00 tip. I thought hard, took a deep breath, and accepted the order.

About forty-five minutes later my car was rumbling through the forest north of town. I had my high beams on – misty was the best word to use to describe the air here. The trees seemed to almost gather around me. I could feel my heart beating quicker and a bit of a natural ‘flight or fight’ response rose in me. I thought about horror movies but ... I was in a running car and my cell phone still worked. It was all good!

I pulled onto Bogforest road proper and the trees widened out a bit. I spied the crumbling walls of the Estate in the distance and pulled up to the gates. The entry consisted of two brick pillars worn and mossy with age topped by a rusted metal arch connecting them, decorated with scrollwork and ornamentation from over a century ago. The gates themselves hung loosely upon their hinges, one pushed in and he other out. In the distance I could see the outline of the manor house down a long drive which had become a muddy morass over the decades. To the right was a scummy pond covered with lilies – it must have been a spectacular reflecting pool when Teddy Roosevelt was President.

The idea of a horror movie rose in my thought again. Then I calmed myself by realizing I had no college aged girls with me. It was all good!