CHAPTER ONE

“I cannot believe that you are doing this,” my best friend, Charlotte says as I fold a clean napkin and put it in my backpack. A half-assed smile that barely reaches my eyes is all I can give her in response then I turn away from her to pick up my water bottle. We are on opposite sides of the island in my kitchen, and the room is, unfortunately, not big enough to keep me far from all the judgment and worry radiating off Charlotte.

“Cathy, honey, you cannot climb up that mountain,” she says with a dry chuckle. “It’s extremely dangerous.”

For a few weeks now, I have been preparing to achieve a personal goal of climbing the semi-tall mountain in our town and reaching its peak, and my best friend could not be more livid about it. She tried to scold me into backing out, then she threatened to call my mom and I still did not budge. When I told her I’d taken the week off work to do this and to recuperate after, she must have sensed that I meant business and would not be talked out of it, especially not in that tone. Since then, she has shown up at my house unannounced multiple times trying to convince me to back out in this super-friendly tone that only makes me roll my eyes at her. 

I place my water bottle in the small compartment at the side of my bag and begin to zip all of its openings, making sure that the zapping sound echoes the finality of my decision to my disapproving best friend.

“Okay, this is crazy.” I hear her get up from her seat but I do not lift my eyes off of my backpack. “You know why you’re doing this, right?”

“What do you mean?” I ask as I slowly lift my head. She is in front of my fridge with a glass of wine in her hand being raised to pursed lips.

She takes a sip of the wine with her eyes fixed on me, makes a dramatic show of swallowing, squeezes her face in disgust and places the wine glass gently on the countertop. I try not to laugh. “This is about Brad,” she says finally.

“Here we go again,” I say as I grab my fully packed backpack and walk away from her towards my living room. I don’t look back but I hear her hurry after me.

“It’s true, Cathy,” she says. “You are trying to fill up the space that jerk left with this weird fantasy and I…”

“Stop it!” I do not mean to snap at her but the mere mention of my ex-boyfriend’s name and every word that comes after that raises my blood to an unbearable temperature. “This is not about Brad. This is about me. I want to feel something and just cross something off my bucket list, okay? I want to achieve this as a personal feat, and as my best friend, I am disappointed that you are not being more supportive.”

Charlotte’s face is a salad of emotions. She is very clearly shocked but underneath that, I can see a tinge of guilt and possible internal debate on whether she should maintain her position or be the supportive friend I need. 

“You’re right,” she says after a short period of silence that feels like a decade. “I should be more supportive and understanding. I’m just really worried.”

I step closer to her and stretch my right hand forth to hold her left in mine. Charlotte is slightly shorter than me so I slightly angle my head to stare directly at her face, its oval shape accentuated further by her short fringe hairstyle. We are standing right in front of my grey couch and I notice a tiny stain on the cushion so I make a mental note to get that cleaned immediately after I return. 

“Thank you for caring so much but I have to do this,” I say and then I quickly add: “For me.”

Charlotte takes in a deep breath and looks away from me as though what she is about to say stands against every fibre of her being. “You couldn’t get a cat or learn to knit or something,” she says, to which we both laugh and I pull her into a hug.

“I’ll call you when I’m back,” I say into the nape of her neck.

“You better.”

*

I stop beside a rock to retie my left shoelace. It must have come undone at some point during the climb because I made sure it was tight when I was at the foot of the mountain. I grab my water bottle from the compartment I put it in and take a much-needed swig of water. The cold liquid drizzles down my throat and some of it drips down my chin unto my chest and makes its path over my breasts and into my tank top. 

As I drink, I look down the path that I’ve made my way through and let out a deep sigh. The view from up this mountain is much different from the view at its foot. Down there, you look up and you see a brownish mound covered by extensive green vegetation, taking up a considerable portion of the horizon. From up here, that mound feels much less intimidating, especially when climbing it takes nothing more than a healthy lung, enduring muscles and a crazy determination, but also because you see most of my town; its narrow streets, scattered houses and sprawling vegetation.

I have been climbing the mountain for only thirty minutes but my legs already feel so heavy that it feels like I have been at it for at least five hours. I adjust my leggings in the area over my knee, place my water bottle back into its place and continue my climb. 

Perhaps what strikes me the most about this mountain is its ordinariness. Climbing is like walking through really sloping and rocky woods. There are parts of it thick with tall trees and other parts with barely any grass; it is all so natural that I cannot help but think about all that I have heard about it. Stories and folklore that have partly inspired my decision to climb it. 

Ever since I was a child, I have heard stories of the different monsters that exist at the very top of this mountain. My belief in these stories has gone through multiple stages. I spent most of my childhood thinking them to be the gospel and often wondered what it would be like to see these monsters and go on an adventure. Then, I became a teenager and disbelief took its place in my mind. I scoffed at those monster stories I once believed and made fun of anyone who brought them up. “Monsters don’t exist anywhere,” I often said. “They’re just stories that your parents tell you to keep you from going up that mountain.”

My thoughts of the mountain and its monsters stayed like this for most of my teenage years and into adulthood, and for the most part, I did not even remember or think about them. Until four months ago when Charlotte visited and she had that twinkle in her eye that’s only there when she has juicy gossip. 

“You’re going to want to be seated for this,” she said when I opened the door to my apartment to see her standing outside with a bottle of wine in her hand.

“Hello to you too,” I said.

“Oh, this is too good to waste time on hellos,” she said as she walked past me and flopped herself on the couch.

“What is it? Are you okay?” I asked, taking the seat next to her.

“You know Sue?”

“Yeah.” Sue is the perky redhead with the big boobs who works at our favourite coffee shop down the street. She is always trying to start a conversation with Charlotte and me but we never pay her any attention. It’s not that we do not like her but she just seems too friendly and too outgoing for our taste. With Sue, one conversation could translate into getting invited for game nights and trivia Sundays that were never fun.

“Well, she just took a very interesting trip to the top of the mountain,” Charlotte said, and then she proceeded to tell me a very interesting story that sounded epic but read as extremely fabricated. In this story, Sue went hiking up the mountain and found herself in a strange settlement where she met a bizarre man-like creature who put her in his house, treated her like a princess, and then made love to her senseless. 

I listened to the story with rapt attention. When she started to speak, I could not help but roll my eyes in doubt. Did Charlotte expect me to believe that the same Sue we know experienced all this? Sue, who cannot make two consecutive trips to the coffee shop’s kitchen without leaning on a chair and panting like a dog. No way she could have climbed that mountain to the top without passing out halfway. Besides, everyone knows that Sue is not the most truthful person around. She has a well-established history of exaggerating every silly and mundane thing that happens to her. But Charlotte is such a good storyteller that I listened to everything she said.

Then, the story changed and my interest peaked for a reason entirely different from Charlotte’s storytelling abilities.

According to her, when Sue reached a certain height on the mountain, she encountered a mysterious man-like creature, a monster, describable only by Sue as “very huge and so fucking sexy”, who took her into his home. She said that he lived up there in a place that seemed to her like a whole new world. Charlotte went into such detail about the way he touched Sue and held Sue, about his body and especially his member which she said was bigger than twice the biggest one she’d ever seen. By the time she was done talking, I could only manage a stutter. 

“W-what?” My mouth was drier than desert sand, a warm sensation had engulfed my body and there was a tingling in my nether regions that I did not want to pay attention to, lest it spread around my body.

“It’s crazy,” Charlotte said. “Anyway, I’m sure it’s all fabricated and she’s lying. But wouldn’t it be wild if it was true?”

“Yes, yes, it would,” I said, and neither of us said anything else because, at that point, that was the end of it.

I did not pay any mind to Sue’s story or the mountain for a long time after that for several reasons. First of all, the ad agency where I worked was going through a bit of a rough patch and had laid off a few of the people in my department, which meant I had to do more than twice the work I used to. Also, my boyfriend, Brad, was in the throes of switching up on me which meant I was also doing twice the work of trying to keep our relationship alive; cooking and bringing him dinner, setting up dates he constantly cancelled and spending hours shopping for things to gift him in the hopes that videogames and expensive devices would draw him back to me.

When all of these failed, and on that humid Tuesday morning two weeks ago in the corner booth of the coffee shop, he told me that ‘he just was not feeling this anymore’, I began a slow descent into insanity that only led me to wonder if perhaps, Sue’s story might be true.  

Every time I went to the coffee shop after that, I watched Sue intently, as if trying to decipher if she had lied. At some point, I could hear her telling one other person the same story Charlotte had told me with more details and a palpable excitement in her voice. She even had a glow about her that I had never seen before. Part of me wanted to talk to her and question the truthfulness of the story she was peddling but I restrained myself, afraid that I would have to admit the reason why her story interested and fascinated me so much. I would have to admit the deepest darkest fantasies my mind has entertained on those nights alone in my apartment. Fantasies involving a big monster or two up on this mountain. 

I take another swig from my water bottle and push my dark hair from over my shoulder to the back of my neck, then I tighten my ponytail. Looking down, I can see that I have covered more ground than is left to reach the top of the mountain. I pause for a moment wondering how it would feel and how I would react if I reached the top of the mountain and it all turned out to be untrue. I would probably return home and give Sue a much-needed tongue-lashing.

It better not be false because my body wants it to be true. But if it turns out to be just a plain old mountaintop, I suppose that won’t be so bad either. At least I will have that achievement and I can wave my victory in Charlotte’s face.

As I climb higher, I can feel myself getting more fatigued and struggling to take the next steps. Once again, I scoff at the thought of Sue climbing these mountains if I, a pretty athletic woman, am struggling like this. I consider stopping for a while but I can see the mountain top inching closer with every step I take and the promise of having my fantasy come true fuels my body and keeps me going.

Suddenly, a gentle, almost inaudible purring grabs my attention and stops me in my tracks. I turn away from the straight path that I’ve been taking and face the direction that the sound is coming from, just to confirm what I’m hearing. When I look though, I see nothing but a big rock around which grass with tall sharp blades has grown. I am about to turn away and keep going my way when I hear the purring again. This time, it is louder and it sounds like a cat in distress. 

I walk to the rock and hold my water bottle in my hand, ready to use it to defend myself but realizing it probably won’t be of much help. If a coyote has gotten a cat down, what exactly would my plastic water bottle do to a wild animal?

“Hello,” I say, hoping the cat can hear my voice and just come out of its hiding.

I kick the tall grass out of my way and climb on top of the rock so that I can see what is on its other side. And there, behind the rock, is a cat as white as snow and as cute as a button. The moment it feels my presence on the rock, the cat looks up at me and my heart immediately melts so that I let go of my defensive stance and place my water bottle back in its compartment. I am not going to hit this cat under any circumstance. 

Suddenly, the cat turns away from me and begins to run down a pathway to the left of the one I was headed. This other pathway is narrower and has a thick patch of forest around it so that light is limited and I cannot see down it. Without thinking or perhaps because something I cannot explain has come over me and is propelling me forward, I begin to chase the cat.

“Hey!” I scream out at the running cat, willing it to stop.

The cat turns left towards an even darker and narrower path. As I run, low-hanging branches hit my face and one or two leaves make their way into my mouth but I just spit them out and I keep running. After about fifteen seconds of running, I come to a clearing. At this point, I stop in my tracks and begin to look around at this strange place where I have found myself. First of all, the cat I was chasing is nowhere to be found and I am suddenly aware of just how alone I am. The clearing itself seems out of place here on this side of the mountain as it is a circular piece of land no bigger than a person’s bedroom with absolutely no trees or vegetation. This is especially strange because every small inch of land around this special clearing is overgrown with tall trees. These tall trees have such huge canopies that have connected overhead so that they completely block any ray of sunlight from making its way to this clearing. It is quite obvious that somebody has done the difficult job of making this clearing look this clean, isolated, and dark. 

“Woah,” I say to myself when I realise just how creepy this place I am standing is. For the first time since I embarked on this climb, I find myself panicking. 

I bring out my cell phone from my backpack, fumbling with it and cussing under my breath before picking it up again from the dirt. I hurriedly use my shaking hands to put on the phone’s flashlight and start swinging it around as if trying to make something appear. 

What exactly was I thinking coming all this way? If any harm comes to me, I will be so mad at Charlotte for being right. I begin to gather myself to return in the direction I came from. This ends now. I cannot believe that I decided to come up here through these creepy paths just to make myself feel better and fulfil some fantasy. While getting to the top would have been amazing, this place is so strange that I am now worried for my safety. I decide that I need to make a run for and leave this instant but when I turn around to go back the way I came, I am faced with a surprise.