Chapter 46 : My Trip to the Slaughter Yard: A Story My Mom Wouldn't Tell Me Until My 30's (Part 2)

A few weeks later, she was cooking downstairs. Boss was outside, Victor asleep in his crib, and I was in my playpen in my room upstairs. I also had a gate on my door and one at the top of the stairs. The stairs ran up from the side of the kitchen, so my mom said she could listen for us crying or fussing while cooking. My mom said no longer than 15 minutes after the last time she looked in on us kids, Boss starts going crazy again in the yard. She runs up to check on us. Victor's still sleeping, every baby gate is still shut and locked, but I am not in my room. A frenzied search reveals I'm not in the house at all.

A sudden image of Boss saving me from drowning causes my mom to rush outside to see what he's trying to tell her this time. She said he was running circles in the yard, barking uncontrollably. When she got outside he took off towards the right, away from the pond. He would run ahead, turn around and bark at my mother, wait for her to catch up a little before racing off again. He ended up leading her almost a mile and a half, out onto the dirt road that separated our property from our neighbors. He led her to a thick stand of trees on our neighbors side of the rocky drive.

She said what hit her first was the foul stench of advanced decay. She plowed into the trees with her heart in her throat and her stomach full of ice. She said she noticed many piles of corrugated tin, tarps, tires, and other debris. The miasma was emanating most strongly from these junkyard cairns. Peeking under a sheet of tin, she discovered the extremely decomposed corpse of a butchered cow. As she headed deeper into the thicket, where the tree cover was denser, she said less care was taken to cover the remains. Grisly pieces of bones and rotted chunks of bovine littered the area. Apparently our neighbor, in an effort to cheat his taxes, had been illegally slaughtering cattle and hiding the remains in (at least) one of the few thick stands of trees around.

She found me in the dead center of this thicket, just standing there looking around like I was confused, surrounded by carnage. She said I didn't seem scared or anything, just standing. She rushed over to me and, after ascertaining that I wasn't injured, began questioning me on why I was here, how I got there, etc. Keep in mind that although my mother said I started speaking very young, I still didn't have much of a vocabulary. She said I told her, with that serious look only small children can give, that the children brought me here. Shatting her pants at the thought that anyone, even children, could walk right past her through the kitchen, get me from upstairs, and walk right back past her on the way down the stairs and out with me, she demanded to know what children and where the hell they are now. I looked at her dead serious and told her the ones that live with us in the room at the top of the stairs and that I didn't see them anymore.

After a moment of stunned silence, she started asking all kinds of questions about these "children". However, she told me that I refused to say anything else. She said as long as she questioned me about what happened I would just stand there staring at her with a serious expression and my mouth closed. She said this same pattern held true every other time she brought it up to me so she was always left wondering and immediately began hounding my dad about moving closer to town.

While the incident with me getting to the pond was highly unlikely, it was at least remotely possible. My mother is adamant that me being in the hidden slaughter yard that day was flat impossible. She says there is no way I could have even known it was out there, much less have the ability to open and relock the baby gates, get downstairs, past her, and end up almost 2 miles down the road and in this place in under 15 minutes. I was only 2 and as slow and clumsy as most toddlers. As I said, she is still shaken by it after 30 years. Personally, I have no idea what happened that day. I've thought about hypnosis but haven't yet decided I really want to remember! Maybe it's better to let it be a mystery, because whatever tf those things were, I really don't think they were children.