<//BACKTRACK1//>
Altophobia: A fear of heights or falling
The last thing I remember was falling asleep to the noise of a tire screeching on the asphalt. Then all was dark.
I was in my car, which was in a tree. That's about 40 feet above the ground. Since I was driving on the edge of a cliff, I must have drove off and landed in this tree, which was terrible for me because I am deathly afraid of heights. All I could do was sit in my car and not look down. I just sat there in the bitter cold. The car battery had smashed on impact and I couldn’t get any heat. Every time I'd refresh my thermometer app on my phone it would tell me a temperature 5 degrees lower than the one before. This was wrong. When I had left my hotel room, it was warm enough to wear a short sleeve shirt in comfort. Right as the thermometer hit 32 degrees, I saw frost forming on what was left of my car's hood. I couldn't stand the cold.
It was then 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I made my first move since my car had landed in the tree top. Quickly I reached for my coat in the passenger seat. I had just made a terrible mistake. As my hand had grabbed the coat, the broken door on the passenger side fell off. The car then slid to the side, almost forcing me out of it. What I saw sent shivers down my spine. The car was somehow twice as high up as it was before. And there were far fewer branches keeping it up. I doubted this. I jumped back into the driver’s seat due to my fright and then I saw that the tree had grown twice its size. I knew this because when I looked out the driver’s side window, I saw the road that I had been on. I looked around the whole area to find some logic behind what had happened. Then I heard something. My ears were pierced by an unearthly screech that had the ring of true horror to it. It was like the sound of an animal dying and glass breaking. I covered my ears in an effort to tune out the noise, but it did nothing. The noise was coming from the forest on the cliff. I turned my head to face it and saw something staring back at me. The screeching stopped. It was the creature from my dream.
I was frozen in fear. This was the first time I had clearly seen it. I closed my eyes hoping it wasn't true. I opened them again. Oh god. It was now creeping along the road. I saw decaying corpses of animals strung about its body. Deformed bones and skulls were hanging on its back. What had this thing done to those creatures? What would it do to me? I shut my eyes. I began to cry. I pulled out my phone to capture a picture of it. People need to know this thing is real.
The distorted photo that my phone took.
When I opened my eyes, it had vanished. I shifted to the passenger seat. The car shifted a little as well, but not as much as I expected. Where was it? I looked around for it hoping I’d see it, but at the same time hoping it was gone. Then a knock sounded from the roof of the car. A bough had fallen from one of the trees. It was in the tree tops! I quickly snapped a picture of it. The picture, however, was badly distorted and I didn't dare take another, for it grinned, showing me all of its metallic teeth. The branches of the tree were receding back into the trunk. He was controlling the trees. Then my car began to shake. I jumped in the back and braced myself on the driver’s seat. The car slid for a bit, then it plunged into darkness.
Written by RyanDavisKearney
Content is available under CC BY-SA