The Feeling Of It

Trips to the beach were a yearly event for me, and living in Australia there were plenty to visit. My parents were quite fond of Fraser Island. I was not. My older cousins had always tormented me with gruesome stories of savage dingoes that would attack you on site.

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My fear of being bitten by these dogs made visiting Fraser less than pleasurable, let alone the fact that my parents felt the only true way to stay there was in a flimsy tent.

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Many of my memories of this time have become skewed and distorted but I can remember one night, towards the end our trip in vivid clarity.

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I remember the warmth of my sleeping bag which cocooned me and pinned my arms to my chest. The moonlight projected a silhouette of tree branches on the tent walls to mesmerise me with, instead of loosing myself in the darkness of the night. Then came the rustling. It was distant at first but it grew closer to the tent. I focused on the noise and tried to identify what exactly it was. I quickly realised it was the sound of a number of creatures sniffing. It sounded just like my dog did when ever he caught the sent of something interesting in our garden, except multiplied. It had to be the dingoes, I decided. It wasn’t uncommon for them to wander into campsites, that’s why we had made sure our rubbish and food was stored away properly. My eyes strained in the dense darkness as I tried to make out their shadows on the canvas walls of the tent, but there were none.

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The noise was continuing to grow louder, like they were pawing and sniffing at the tent, but I saw no movement. I shifted my gaze to see if anyone else had been woken up but the noises, but my father, mother and brother lay fast asleep. Fear was beginning to make a hollow in my chest.

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The noises escalated into furious scratching but still the tent made no movement. It was eerily still in fact. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the hollow in my chest grew. I was becoming less and less sure that the cavern in my chest was in fact the sensation of fear and instead perhaps, something totally different. This hollow feeling spread to the edges of my body and, to my horror, began to strip the skin back from my muscles. Of course I did not see this, my eyes remained shut, in fact, I could not open them, even if I had wanted to. My body was now floating incomplete darkness and I realised that I was unable to physically sense anything. I couldn’t feel my sleeping bag, or my clothes. Not even the cool night air. However, I heard a lot.

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The scratching had risen to an unbearable volume. The scraping of claws gave way to a sound I could only describe as howling. It rang in my head and my brain felt like it was a gold fish being shaken in a plastic bag. I tried to open my eyes but they were held down tight by invisible fingers

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Just when it seemed the howling had reached it’s crescendo the noise fell away to the sound of crashing waves.

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I was outside. The dark sky was retreating from the rays of sun that crested on the horizon. My mum was gripping my shoulders, repeating my name. I was up to my waist in the ocean that had lay beyond the sandbank of our camp site.

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Sleep walking. Sleep walking and a surreal nightmare is what my parents and I chalked it up too. I was happy to believe it had all been a dream and the final night past by uneventfully.

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I am in my early twenties now, and my parents were planning their next trip to Fraser. I said I would skip on it.

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I can’t say exactly what sparked the memory of that night on the beach, our brains like to remind us of things we would rather forget, perhaps to stop us from letting it happen again. Anyway, I bought it up with my parents and they did admit, I’d never done anything like it before, or after for that matter.

A freak event, a fluke, it puts my mind at ease. However, I did ask my brother if he remembers our little camping trips. By brother is a quiet type, and nearly always stone cold serious. When I ask him he ponders the question in his usual manner and then, very slowly, recounts the story of when the wind made the most horrendous noise, yet nothing moved, and how it made his skin crawl, and than practically flee. I asked him if he remembers me getting up and leaving the tent that night. He shakes his head and says that he couldn’t see anything, something was holding his eyes shut.