Not Your Average Monster, Vol. 2: A Menagerie of Vile Beasts

by Pete Kahle

  And so, I arrived in New York (glorious, nascent metropolis, aswarm with life!) three weeks ago, without enough in my pocket to return home, even if I wished it. I had secured cheap lodgings (I cannot, even now, suppress a shudder at the memory of those gargantuan rats, scurrying across the filthy planks—too, too, unmysterious a species, alas! Would that they had better hid themselves!), and begun to make preparations for my journey West, when a chance item in the newspaper put me on an entirely new scent. It was a tiny item, hidden near the bottom of one of the back pages (but I have learned to scour them well, these gutters of the broad sheets), and told a brief but curious tale, of two Canadian trappers of French extraction who, whilst hunting in some woods in the west of Maine, claimed to have encountered, in their words, ‘un bête inconnu,’ a creature quite unlike anything they had ever seen, or heard of, before.

  No further details about the animal were included, the writer choosing instead to spend his precious few inches of type indulging in fatuous raillery about the effects of Scotch whisky upon the imagination of back-woods-men.

  But I hear the hiss of brakes; we are at Portland, the chief city in the state of Maine, and the place where these trappers were reported to have given their confused account, at one of the taverns here. It is, then, within the ‘saloons’ or public-houses of this saltwater city that my investigation must commence.

  More anon.

  # # #

  It is late at night, and I write from a simply but comfortably furnished bedroom in a rustic farmhouse, many miles from any telegraph wire or other index of our modern, nineteenth-century civilisation.

  But let me retrace the steps that led me from a busy seaport on the Atlantic to a village bounded all round by wooded hills and placid freshwater ponds, where no breath of sea-air wafts.

  Less than three hours after penning the above entry on the train, I had located the tavern in question, and spent the evening engaged in questioning any and all men I could find who had been present on the night when the two trappers had told their wild tale there.

  Note-book in hand, and ringed about with grimy, earnest faces reddened with firelight and drink, I recorded every detail which they could recall, in exchange for a steady supply of local ale. I had, of course, hoped to question the trappers themselves (having hastily bought, before leaving New York, a phrase-book in the French language, with which I hoped to supplement my own sadly deficient knowledge of the tongue).

  But these men were dead: the first of an apoplexy, suffered the very day after telling his strange, largely incoherent story; the second by his own hand—he had opened a vein in his wrist with a skinning-knife—less than a week later.

  Besides this startling news, however, the men in the tavern could add little of substance to what the newspaper had printed. The trappers’ very limited grasp of the English language, as well as a certain lack of cogency attributable to their having experienced some profound shock, resulted in a necessarily much circumscribed narrative: the two men had spied something—a ‘beast’ of unknown type, seemingly in flight—somewhere in the western woods, shortly after day-break of the previous day, an experience that had upset them greatly, causing them to cut short their hunting expedition and hasten towards civilisation (or, as one of them had been heard to murmur, ‘les visages humains’).

  To this bare-bones account the bearish, rather child-like men I questioned could add almost nothing, save that, while the memory of the animal’s appearance had profoundly troubled the hunters, they seemed equally haunted by the way it had moved through the woods. To my very great chagrin, however, the trappers had not, apparently, supplied a single concrete detail in either respect.

  I did learn one thing further, however, which I hope in the end may prove to be the one thing needful: one of my interlocutors, looking thoughtfully into the amber depths of his fifth or sixth glass of ale, recalled one of the trappers muttering a word more than once, which terminated in what sounded like cook. Upon hearing this, another of the men frowned, drank, spat, drank again, and thrust forth a much stained and calloused finger, then asserted that he had heard of a small and remote village, in the western woods near New Hampshire, called ‘Suncoke’ (that this is the usual spelling, I have since ascertained).

  For this small but, as I believed, substantial clue, I enthusiastically pressed a sum of money into the man’s horny hand (an amount which, upon sober reflection, I could but ill afford to spare), and hastened from the place, hoping to find some means of transport thither, that very night.

  In the event, however, I was obliged to wait until this morning, when I was able to secure a place in a mail-wagon heading north-west. I shall not try the reader’s patience with a protracted account of my long day of travel, with its many changes of conveyance, irritating mail-stops, and other maddening delays. It is enough to say, that by the time the sun began the final stages of its western decline, I watched it sink, a disc of reddish gold, behind a back-drop of deep-sea-green hills, with snow-topped mountains of prodigious height visible in the far distance.

  After gliding past a series of serene, mirror-topped lakes, surrounded by woods of tall, close-grown pines, I was deposited by the sullen Cato in whose farm-cart I had made the last stage of my journey, in the center of a packed earthen street, surrounded by a few wooden structures, to which some vestiges of white paint still clung.

  I made one or two inquiries of one of the villagers who stood gawking at this stranger in their midst, and soon thereafter I had secured lodgings in the only thing answering for a rooming-house in these parts. This was a large, old farmhouse inhabited by a family of three: a careworn couple whose chief occupation, like that of everyone else in that village (as I was soon to learn), lay in the maize-fields to the north of town, and their son, a lad of perhaps fifteen.

  Then, at supper, which I took with the family directly upon my arrival, a curious incident took place which immediately convinced me that I had, indeed, struck ‘pay-dirt.’

  During a hearty meal of ham (accompanied by a kind of maize-pudding so delicious I confess to having devoured fully three helpings!), I made a few polite inquiries regarding the nature of daily life in the village.

  After a few mumbled replies about the maize-harvest just commenced, there fell over the table a silence of many minutes’ duration, during which I burned to broach the subject I had come to investigate.

  At last I cleared my throat and (à-propos of nothing at all) asked the family whether they had ever heard rumours concerning an unusual creature or creatures living in the woods beyond the village.

  At this, the lad started violently, dropping the tarnished knife which he had been using to scrape up the last of the pudding. He glanced wildly at his parents, then opened his mouth as if to speak. An angry look from his father shut it again as quickly. His mother then uttered a very artificial-sounding laugh, and rose to clear the table, with the remark, ‘They ain’t by no means unusual, but the crows, which be allus at the corn, are as troublesome a set of critters as we’ve got in these parts.’ She then left the room.

  By way of explaining my non-sequitur, I began to relate the tale of the trappers to father and son, but saw straightaway, by the former’s glaring eye and hard-set jaw, that my efforts would be in vain. Yet the lad’s initial reaction to my query, and the father’s answering taciturnity, had set my pulse racing faster. And there was something else: as the three of us sat, sunk in an awkward silence, I saw that, two or three times, the boy’s eye flitted in the direction of the large window near the dining-table, through which the declining light of day still filtered.

  He was, I realized with some surprise, looking not through the window itself but at the curtains which hung beside it: hand-embroidered calico things which were covered all over with a curious, spider-like pattern.

  Under the circumstances, however, it was hardly possible for me to examine this design more closely; and shortly thereafter, mine hostess returned with an unlit candle, to show me to my bed-chamber on
the first storey (or, as the Americans say, the second).

  This proved to be a small but comfortable room with an old-fashioned iron bedstead and a rustic table on which rested a ceramic pitcher and ewer, near the sole window.

  As the landlady withdrew, her head bowed respectfully, I realized with a start that the large quilt covering the bed was pictured all over with the same curious spidery figure I had seen on the curtains. I turned quickly, a question on my lips, but the woman was gone.

  Hastily stowing my things under the bed, I drew a chair near to it, so as to study the figure more closely. My first thought had, again, been of a spider, but the more I looked, the less confident I became in this identification. As I scrutinized it, indeed, a series of simultaneous, and not wholly reconcilable, ideas presented themselves to my fancy: I thought variously of an arachnid, a centipede, and of the trilobite.

  Certainly it had appendages—I hardly know whether to call them legs, or tentacles, or feelers—radiating from a queerly shaped central body. Furthermore, as I frowned at the figured surface of the quilt I could not shake off the impression that whatever the appendages might have been, there seemed to be either too many or, perhaps, not enough of them—a wholly absurd conclusion, of course, considering my utter ignorance as to what species the figure was intended to represent; nonetheless, there lingered a disconcerting impression of asymmetry, one which quite defeated my efforts to dispel or confirm by the (simple, one would have thought) expedient of counting.

  But it is unquestionably the same creature depicted on the curtains below, and at which the lad’s gaze had strayed so curiously, so significantly. I must seek an opportunity to question him apart.

  May not this strange figure constitute a kind of naif representation of the being I have come in search of: an attempt on the part of these simple, rustic creatures to incorporate some unknown, wholly anomalous species into their daily folk-life?

  There is, beyond a doubt, some mystery here, and that of a zoological nature. I have surely come to the right place…

  Once again my right leg jounceth apace! I shall, I fear, scarcely be able to close my eyes tonight. Tomorrow I begin my quest in earnest.

  # # #

  Twenty-four hours have elapsed since I last took up my pencil: so short a span of time, yet so great a change in my state of mind have the events of this day engendered, that verily I feel as if I had lived another lifetime altogether…

  I must, I suppose, be thankful that the thing was hidden from sight; yet still—

  And if they had not been children I—

  Nay, Ned, that is not the way. Every thing in its proper order.

  I have filled a pipe, yet have resolved not to avail myself of its soothing properties until I have set down, as is my wont, the events of this day, however disturbing.

  Well, then: let us begin with this morning.

  # # #

  I am an early riser; yet though I washed and dressed before the sun had fairly made its appearance (a process much retarded by the absence in the room of a mirror), I found the entire household already departed when I came down to breakfast. Upon the table I found a covered meal, a china pot of still-hot coffee, and a scarcely legible note explaining that the family had gone to labour in the field, it being (as I had been told the night before) harvest-time.

  With excellent appetite, I fell to my dish of eggs, which had been scrambled together with more of the succulent Indian-corn which I had tasted at supper. As I drank my coffee I made a note to ask these people some questions regarding the extraordinary variety of maize they cultivated in this region; I have seldom tasted anything so delicious in my life. Instead of raising enough only for their own use, and for sale to their neighbours, surely they (or an agent acting on their behalf!) might realize a substantial profit by selling the seed.

  After breakfast I took a stroll about the village proper, with a view either to locate the maize-fields (and perhaps the lad from whom I hoped to obtain further information), or else to strike into the woods themselves, to find what I might, in an admittedly aimless fashion (I had no fixed plan, having as yet no definite data).

  But as I made my way down the chief thoroughfare, in which some dozen or so men were making their way together towards (presumably) the fields, my attention was arrested by the approach of a most singular-looking individual, walking in the opposite direction. He was tall and extremely gaunt, even skeletal in appearance, and clad in the torn and filthy remains of what must once have been a fine black frock coat. His pale blue eyes, the right disfigured by a milky cataract, stared idiotically ahead. A glistening rope of saliva (I could not help but notice) hung from his drooping lower lip, where it vanished in the grey, stubbly whiskers that ranged unevenly over his neck and chin.

  He staggered along, carrying a large and heavy bucket in each hand. I was particularly struck with the manner in which he was greeted, or rather, not greeted, by his fellows as he passed: they appeared, in fact, to be wholly (and I may say studiedly) ignorant of his very existence. Once or twice a person standing in his path was obliged to move aside to let the wretch pass, yet contrived to do so without so much as looking at him, or giving the least indication that he was in being.

  I myself could not take my eyes off the man with his swinging, dual burden; I gazed, with awful fascination, upon his dull and vacant stare. Then, as he passed close to me, I felt my gorge rise suddenly as a hideous stench assailed my nostrils. Looking down at the buckets he carried, I was presented with the disgusting sight of a stinking admixture of what seemed to be decaying offal and fresh ordure, the whole seething with a blue, buzzing blanket of blow-flies (Musca Vomitoria).

  I recoiled, holding my sleeve to my offended nose, and looked wildly at the other village folk standing about, who however gave no sign of anything being amiss.

  For some minutes I stood in the street (soon deserted, but for myself) to recover my equanimity, after this disconcerting episode. I then decided upon a walk alone in the woods, as the thing most likely to calm my nerves (such woodland rambles have frequently comforted me, in England, when I have felt ‘the world to be too much with me’—or, as has frequently seemed the case, too much against me!).

  Accordingly, I left the road, crossed a small meadow, and presently found myself swallowed, as it were, by the looming, fragrant pines. For perhaps a quarter of an hour I walked slowly through the deliciously cool wood, turning around and around in my mind the strange scene I had just witnessed, whilst occasionally (and rather absently) noting some novel avian species, or other New-World fauna, in my mind.

  Then, of a sudden, there came bubbling to my ears the laughter of children. Directing my steps towards the sound, I came presently upon a group of young boys and girls, engaged in acting a puppet-play within a shadow-streaked clearing. So engrossed did they seem in their diversion, that they did not perceive my approach. And so (succumbing, I admit, to a sudden mischievous impulse), I stationed myself behind a titanic oak (Quercus Alba) to watch their sylvan Punch-and-Judy show unobserved.

  There were five or six juvenile performers, and as many youths again for an audience, seated cross-legged on the needle-strewn ground. There being no stage, the puppet-players stood in a half-ring and waggled their crudely-fashioned figures in air. These were made of wood, and habited with colourful scraps of cloth.

  Crossing my arms with a smile, and fully prepared to enjoy the performance, I was first treated to a brief dumb-show featuring two dolls, whose rustic dress seemed to signify that they were simple men of the soil, very like the children’s own fathers. As a further aid to surmise, rudely shaped bits of wire had been appended to their tiny hands, in likeness (as I suppose) of hoes, or rakes, or some such agricultural implements. As I smothered a chuckle in my sleeve, the children caused the figures to plod slowly back and forth, their little wooden heads bobbing up and down in a fashion indicating that they were to be understood to labour in an imaginary field.

  Then a third player appeared upon the aëri
al boards, one whose discrepant appearance caused me to raise an eyebrow. It was doubtless intended for a man like the others, yet loomed far above these two, indeed quite dwarfing them. Moreover, its limbs seemed to be very strangely proportioned—though this was difficult to ascertain with any confidence, the figure being both cloaked and veiled.

  As I watched, the rustic figures did awkward obeisance to the strange, towering newcomer, who waved an ungainly, cloak-hidden arm over their bent heads in a vague gesture of benediction. Soon thereafter, a fourth puppet was brought into the scene, and I found myself in yet greater perplexity. For it depicted no man at all but (I could only conjecture) some manner of beast, also more or less entirely concealed, beneath a kerchief-sized sheet or shroud. Despite this merciful occultation, I felt the goose-flesh rise on my forearms as I beheld the hateful means of locomotion it employed, under the direction of the youth who manipulated it (with no mean degree of skill, I am bound to confess).

  But this was nothing to the sweat that poured from me in icy freshets a moment later, as I watched the children’s hideously scrupulous depiction of a particular ACT involving the cloaked figure and the unseen beast-thing. There is no word for this ACT in our language, nor should I ever have imagined that one living thing might put another to such a use as that which the veiled manikin seemed to purpose. I might, indeed, have lived for a thousand years and never suspected that such an ACT were possible, or even conceivable; yet, once seen, I am sure that it could never be effaced from one’s consciousness.

  But before this ACT could be entirely consummated, I rushed forth from my hiding-place, shouting in great anger and waving my arms wildly, entreating the children to desist in this ungodly representation. At this fevered irruption, the children scattered in all directions, leaving nothing behind.

  I must, I fear, have appeared quite a lunatic, red-faced and hardly coherent. Yet what man—what Christian man, I was about to say! But even such a man as myself, to be numbered among those Mr. Huxley has recently termed Agnostics, could not watch such a thing in cold blood. Even now I cannot write of it, albeit obliquely, without fresh perspiration wrinkling this page.