Walsenburg, Colorado. 1986.

In the town where I grew up, there was an old, out-of-the-way pedestrian bridge not far from my house that everyone called the swinging bridge. It was about two feet wide and made of rusting steel cables with planks to walk on and chain link fencing on the sides. Some of the planks were broken or missing and there were places where the fencing came apart from the bridge, leaving big spaces open to the small creek below. If you stood right in the middle, you could make the whole thing bounce up and down pretty well with enough effort, but no matter how hard you tried you couldn't make it swing. I later learned that there was an earlier, less sturdy, version of the bridge that did swing, and the name stuck after it was replaced with the steel cable structure I was familiar with. Last I heard, the whole thing had been washed away and has not been replaced.

People called the dirt road and few houses among the trees on the other side of the bridge el Bosque, and compared to the open, semi-arid land that surrounded it, the sparse trees on either side of the creek did seem like a forest. When my grandmother told me the story of la Llorona, this was the spot where she said that the woman had drowned her children. I told myself that I didn't believe in the legend in the daytime, but whenever I found myself going down that road in the evening, I always pedaled my bike as fast as I could, terrified that I would hear her wail and never be able to return home.

Probably because of this association, whenever I heard some weird or fantastic local tale, I always thought of it happening there, by the creek. So, the story about the charming stranger who came to town and danced with all the ladies before anyone noticed the cloven hoof prints he was leaving on the ground, in my mind, happened, not in a dance hall as the story was told, but in a little clearing by the side of the creek. Likewise, when I heard the one about when my tio Concho was passed out in his car and woke in the middle of the night to find a cat demon trying to claw its way in, I assumed that he must have been parked on the road by the creek.

In any case, one day, when I was about eleven or so, I had managed to get my grubby little hands on some cigars and decided that the swinging bridge would be a fine place to go to smoke one without being bothered. As I stood there on the bridge, enjoying the sweet taste of the cigar's tip more than the actual smoke, I remembered a time when a friend and I had gone down to the water to look for crawdads, and decided to give it another try.

After a minute or two of half-hearted searching I was about to give up and sit down to finish my stogie when I noticed what looked like a large, broad action figure half obscured in the weeds. It was about seven inches high with thick, rounded limbs and torso, and a perfectly round, fat head on top with what seemed like small oval stones for eyes. It looked like a cross between a clay golem and a little demon, with its mouth full of sharp teeth. At first it startled me, the way it was placed there in a standing position, but then I smiled at my jumpiness and moved closer to check it out. My smile turned to a laugh when the thought came to me of a tiny troll standing guard beneath its tiny bridge. I liked that idea so much that I laid out flat on my belly several feet away so I could look at the little figure on its own level, imagining that it was a living creature staring at the passing water while it waited patiently for some poor bastard to try to cross the bridge above.

As I lay there, a little wind picked up and nudged the figure, and the small movements it created made the illusion of life more complete. It even seemed to bend to the side a little at its waist as the wind very slowly turned it toward me. My giddiness at just how cool this was, though, was replaced with a jolt of panic when the wind died down and I realized that the thing was still moving. I wished I could hide, but settled for laying very still until I could reign in my frenzied thoughts. While my fear kept me pinned in place, the creature continued to bend to the side very slowly.

As I watched my fear was gradually replaced with fascination when I realized that the thing was doing what seemed to be a very deliberate, graceful dance, so slowly that if you only glanced at it quickly, you might not realize it was moving at all. It seemed clear to me then that I was in no danger from this thing that could obviously only move with extraordinary slowness. Being thus reassured, I let myself relax and watched as the thick, clumsy looking creature moved around with amazing elegance and control in what I thought had to be the most beautiful dance I had ever seen. I was eventually filled with such a sense of wondrous well-being that I think I could have laid there all afternoon and watched this eldritch performance. Before long though, the little dancing troll came to a stop directly facing me, its head tilted forward in a little bow before it straightened up and fixed me in its blank gaze for the first time.

As those two unseeing stony eyes met mine I immediately lost sensation in my body and felt as though I were floating. The grassy ground, the water in the creek, even the air between myself and the now still creature all seemed to waver briefly then pulsate in colors before completely dissolving into a lustrous, multicolored cloud that enveloped me, and I was falling gently forward. The cloud dissipated and I could feel my body again. I was still lying belly down, but I had apparently let my face fall forward, as it was now planted firmly in the dirt. I lifted my head and tried to shake off a little of the confusion as I saw that the creature was now several inches closer to me and bending over an object in the grass, still moving with the same deliberate slowness. Then reality throbbed again and I was in the cloud of colors, drifting downward, but this time the sense of well being was replaced by a vague, thoughtless anxiety.

When I came to, the creature was much closer and had something in its hands that I failed to immediately recognize due to my foggy mental state. After several moments of staring at it as it moved forward at its painfully slow pace, I realized that the thing it held in its hands like a spear was an unfolded pocket knife, long and spotted with rust as though it had laid for some time in the open. Without understanding the full implications of what was going on, I looked into the creature's face in the hopes of learning something of its intentions. I found only blankness and those two expressionless eyes that set the world reeling and undulating again when they met mine.

This time I drifted forward and downward through the relentlessly shifting color shroud that enveloped me with a sense of the purest, incoherent animal panic, so that when I awoke I was able to gather my senses more quickly, but I found that it did me little good because before long at all I was losing bodily sensation again and the creature was so close that the rusty tip of his knife was only about two inches from my face. I strained with all my will against the torpor that had set in, as in a lucid nightmare in which you know that all you have to do is will yourself to wake up and you will be okay. Then, just as the objects in my field of vision began to expand and contract again with that peculiar discolored wobble, I managed, in a great feat of concentration, to turn my face away from the thing's eyes, and the enchantment was broken in an instant.

I jerked back and quickly took up a defensive position, but soon realized that the unnaturally slow creature was now completely harmless again. In spite of the the adrenaline rushing through my system after that close call, I did my best to steady my hand enough to re-light the stub of the stogie that had gone out while I lay helpless for who knows how long. I wondered at this, and at the strange colors that my surroundings had taken on as twilight fell without my being aware of it, and guessed that I must have been laying on the ground for well over an hour, drifting in and out of consciousness

Up until then I was careful to not look at my little tormentor except in my peripheral vision, but when I noticed that it had started it's dance again, the one that had enchanted me, I was suddenly overcome with uncontrollable anger. Without thinking, I bent down and jabbed the burning cherry of the cigar into one of the creatures expressionless eyes. The little oval that had appeared to be made of smooth stone before turned out to be something closer to flesh, I realized, as it sizzled under the lit stogie in my hand. Over a span of time that seemed to extend on and on, the creature's little mouth opened with its customary slowness, and let out a low, pitiful groan just before its head exploded with a sharp pop and its body instantly dissipated into a sickly, colored mist that quickly spread out and settled into the weeds and rocks on both sides of the stream.

The unnatural way that the mist moved had an unnerving effect on me, so I quickly made my way back up to the bridge. From there I noticed some movement from the weeds and rocks where the vapor had settled, and for a moment I held my breath and thought to myself, "please let that be the wind," even though I knew, in my pounding little heart, that wind didn't move weeds that way. So a second later, when hundreds of copies of the little monster boiled out of from under rocks and weeds and other hidden areas below, I didn't gasp, or shudder, or stand frozen in fear. I bolted. Before I had even crossed the few yards of bridge, though, I could see that the little beasts were following me, wielding sticks, stones, or just flashing their terrible, sharp little claws. Unlike their progenitor though, these little monsters were agile and astonishingly quick. I was only a few yards past the bridge when I came to the terrible realization that even on their stunted little legs, the creatures were moving faster than I was at a full run and would inevitably catch me.

Out of habit I was running toward a rift in the fence of a long abandoned football field that I usually cut through as a shortcut, when a desperate thought came to me. The field had been used by the local Catholic high school before it was shut down, and from that tenuous association with holiness, a frantic childish hope grew in me that maybe the place retained just enough sacredness that little creek demons or fairies or whatever would never chase a boy down and tear him to pieces there. By the time I got to the opening in the fence I was certain that by stepping through it I would achieve salvation, so when my little pursuers followed me through without as much as a hint of hesitation I felt as though my heart were breaking. I ran on, past the tumbledown bleachers and onto the field itself, feeling utterly abandoned and full of the terrible certainty that I would never reach the other side.

By the time I felt a handful of the little devils catch hold of my pants and begin to carefully clamber up my legs I was beyond any kind of thought. I was only running, a doomed animal in flight, just barely aware of the black cloud dislodging itself from the shadowy vicinity of the grain mill at the other end of the field, toward which I was running. It must have seemed appropriate enough in that state of mind that I should be brought down from behind by relentless pursuers even as a shifting dark mass approached to envelop me from the front, because it wasn't until I realized what the mass consisted of that I began to scream. With my pants and shirt covered by nearly a dozen of the clinging little creek demons, and my voice hoarse from the animal sounds I was making, I ran full speed into the living cloud of numberless bats. I continued to run as they collided with my face and body, as their numbers blocked out most of the fading evening light. Even when their flapping wings made me close my eyes, I ran in darkness.

It was the little tugs at my shirt that brought me back from that internal darkness. I barely registered them consciously, but those sharp tugs set off a feeling in my mind that I should stop running. Standing still now, I shielded my face from the wings flapping all around me and looked down to see the few little creatures that still clung to my clothes under assault from the colony of bats. They tried to fight off the aerial attack with their free hands, but one by one, the bats dislodged them and carried them away. As stout as the little things appeared, almost as if they were made of dense clay, I now realized that they had become weirdly light and insubstantial hanging on my shirt, and the bats seemed to carry them off with little effort. As the swarm of bats started to dissipate I could see that they were doing the same to the remaining host of things from the creek as well, carrying them all up high into the air and disappearing with them over the trees to the south and out of sight.