by Joseph Wallace

We were camped on the shores of Lake Nakuru in Kenya, first stop on a six-week jaunt through East Africa. I was fifteen years old, it was my first long trip away from home, and I was spooked.

Lake Nakuru was an eerie place to camp, because down at the edge of the lake stood a flock of flamingos. When I say a flock, I mean about four million flamingos. At dawn, as I lay in my tent, I could hear them all start to call at once--an endless gabbling and croaking, like a sound the damned might make in hell. The sound would rise and fall, and if you listened to it long enough, you'd begin to swear that the flamingos were conversing, and that if you just tried a little harder you could understand what they were saying. Not that you necessarily wanted to know….

On our first full day at Nakuru, we hiked along the lake's shoreline under the pale-eyed gaze of countless watchful flamingos. As we approached the clearing where we’d planned to stop for lunch, I saw that someone had erected a pair of basic outhouses--concrete-walled, tin-roofed structures, the kind with a splintery wooden bench with a hole over a deep, smelly pit.

Now, this was better than the "bathroom" we'd dug for ourselves last night, so I hurried over to use one. But as I reached for the door handle, suddenly something threw itself against the door from the inside. Something big. Something that made the tin door screech, as if long claws had scraped against it.

My heart pounding, I took a quick step back. There’s was a moment's silence, and then the thing hit the door again. I saw the handle rattle, but the door stayed closed. Then, as if enraged, it began throwing itself against the walls, against the door once more, even against the tin roof. Hitting with such force that the heavy roof lifted a couple of inches off the concrete walls before crashing down with a thunderous impact.

In the ringing silence that followed, one of us said, "What the hell is that? Do you think someone’s stuck in there?"

?I took a deep breath. "Hello?" I called out, my voice shaky. "Do you need help?" But only silence greeted my question. A waiting silence, as if whatever was in there was listening, deciding what to do next. Even the watching flamingos down by the lake were quiet.

"Oh come on!" I said, stepping forward and yanking at the door.

But the door was locked. And my attempt to open it set the creature off once again. Again it crashed into walls, into the door. Again, in a paroxysm of fury, it slammed into the roof...once, then once more with tremendous force, before it fell still.

Silence. I felt sweat dripping down my face.

"We have to see what's in there," one of us said. "What if it's someone who's delirious, who's sick, who's been stuck in there for days?"

They all looked at me. I said, "What?"

"Well, Joe, you provoked it," they said. "You get to see what's in there."

So that's how I found myself standing on someone's shoulders, a flashlight between my teeth, using all my strength to pry a corner of the tin roof off the concrete walls. Aiming the flashlight down into the small room, and seeing....

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The outhouse was empty. There was nothing there. No man. No creature. Nothing. Unless....

I aimed the beam down through the hole in the wooden bench--and just for an instant I thought I saw something move down there, the slightest shifting of the darkness in the pit. Just that, and no more.

I let the roof drop back into place with a clang, then jumped down. "Let's get out of here," I said.

As we walked away, we heard it start up again, begin to slam against the door, the walls, the roof. But we didn't look back, and we didn't speak until we were out of sight of the clearing and back within view of our camp.