Beast

by Watt Key

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  Special thanks to Cheairs Porter, Stephen Davis, Wes Germer, Andrew Gude, and Daniel Barrand for their help with this project

  1

  A lot of people want to know where I was for the two months I went missing. And I know I’ve said I don’t remember. I do remember—I just thought no one would believe me if I told them. Now I feel like I owe an explanation to everyone who helped me recover, especially Uncle John and Dr. Ensley and the people who found me nearly dead on the roadside. So I’m going to write it all here exactly as it happened. You’ll probably think I’m crazy. I’m not. I know what I experienced. And I’m certain one day you too will see these things yourself and experience terror so great you’ll want to die to escape it.

  * * *

  It all started with the accident. When I woke in the hospital, Sergeant Daniels was standing over my bed. He was tall and bulky and serious looking with his state trooper hat casting a shadow across my sheets. He told me my parents were missing, which made my head start throbbing even more than it already was. I had to close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. When I opened them again, he took a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket and asked me to try to remember everything that had happened. So I did.

  We’d been to Disney World down in Orlando for a few days and were late getting back because of construction on Interstate 75. I was in the back seat of Dad’s Jeep Cherokee. Right before it happened, I remember noticing the digital clock on the dashboard reading 1:11 a.m. We’d been off the interstate for nearly an hour, driving Highway 98 toward our home in Perry, Florida. Mom was asleep against the window of the passenger seat. I wasn’t supposed to be awake, but seeing Dad driving so quiet and alone on the empty highway made me uneasy.

  “Then there was something in the road,” I said to the state trooper. “Dad turned the wheel and then I don’t remember anything else.”

  “What was in the road?” the trooper asked me.

  The question made me see flashes of something. Like a movie playing with scenes missing. Scenes I didn’t want to remember.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Like a tire? A bag of trash?”

  The movie flashed in my head again, and I closed my eyes and forced it away.

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “How big was it?”

  I shook my head. The trooper waited, his pen hovering over the notepad.

  “You said something was in the road,” he continued. “There’s no report of any obstacles on the highway at the scene.”

  “It was standing in the road,” I said.

  “Then it was an animal? A deer maybe? There’s lots of deer in the hammock.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t a deer.”

  “A wild pig? Maybe it was a wild pig.”

  “It was standing,” I said.

  The trooper studied me, not writing anything. “You mean on two legs?”

  I nodded.

  He lowered his pen.

  “A person?”

  I didn’t want to describe what I’d seen. I didn’t want to remember it at all.

  “Son, was there a person standing in the road?”

  Then I couldn’t keep my thoughts to myself with the trooper towering over me and staring at me like he was.

  “It was right there in our headlights. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. It was too big. It was as tall as a basketball goal, and its shoulders were as wide as three men put together. Its arms hung down to its knees, and it was covered with black hair. Everything was covered with hair except for the face. It had a man’s face. Except for the eyes. The eyes were black too.”

  Relief settled over me. Surely the trooper could give me the answer to what it was I’d seen that night.

  “Like a bear?” he said.

  The momentary relief I’d felt vanished. I shook my head. Suddenly I felt like crying.

  “It wasn’t a bear,” I said.

  “There’s black bears out there. And they can stand up.”

  “It wasn’t a bear,” I said weakly.

  The trooper started to say something else, but didn’t. Then he lifted his pen and started to write, but stopped. He put the pen away and lowered the notepad.

  “You don’t know what it was, do you?” I said.

  “I think maybe you need to get some more rest. Then we can talk about it again later.”

  “Did they find my parents yet?”

  “No,” he said. “But they’re still searching the river.”

  “But you think they’re dead.”

  He hesitated. “We don’t know that yet.”

  * * *

  The day after my visit with the trooper, there was a short article in the local paper.

  COUPLE MISSING AFTER CRASH; BOY RESCUED

  FANNING SPRINGS — On Sunday morning at approximately 1:00 a.m., a Jeep Cherokee traveling westbound on US Highway 98 sideswiped a telephone pole and swerved off the roadway, plunging into the Suwannee River west of Fanning Springs. The driver was Adam Parks, 43, of Perry, Florida. Passengers were his wife, Hazel Parks, 44, and their thirteen-year-old son, Adam Jr. Emergency personnel were unable to locate the parents. Search and rescue efforts in the area are underway. The doors of the vehicle were all open, and the boy was found unconscious at the side of the road. He was treated at the scene and transported to Chiefland Medical Center, where he is in stable condition. According to the boy, the family was returning from a trip to Disney World in Orlando. He has told police his father swerved to avoid a collision with a Sasquatch-like creature standing in the highway. A state police spokesperson said they had no comment at this time.

  A Sasquatch-like creature. Those were their words, not mine. I didn’t even know the word Sasquatch. Had I known the problems it would cause—just the suggestion I’d seen such a thing—I would have never opened my mouth about it.

  2

  Even though I had been found unconscious, the doctors at the hospital said the tests they ran on me all came up negative for concussion. It seemed my injuries were limited to cuts on my face and bruises, but the doctors kept me in the hospital to monitor for internal bleeding. Sergeant Daniels didn’t visit me again, but Mom’s brother, Uncle John, came by as much as he could. I guess he’d gotten there within hours of them bringing me in.

  If my parents were really gone, Uncle John would be the last of my close family. He had Mom’s same thick brown hair and wide eyes. He was six-and-a-half-feet tall, a little overweight and socially awkward. He’d never gotten married and lived alone in Cross City, a small community just fifteen miles west of Fanning Springs. He was a control board operator at Florida Power and Light Company.

  It was Uncle John who showed me the newspaper article. Considering that it said his nephew had reported seeing a Sasquatch, I figured he might want to talk about it, but he didn’t. He was known for his corny jokes, but now he didn’t seem to want to talk much about anything. I think he was as stunned as I was over the situation with my pare
nts.

  “Adam and Hazel just always did everything right,” he said. “They were the best of us all.”

  As their son I guess I took them for granted and might never have thought that before, but now that they weren’t around, I could see it was true. Our family may not have seemed particularly special at first glance. Dad ran a small insurance company, and Mom was his receptionist and bookkeeper. We went to church most Sundays and took a trip to Disney World once a year. Dad was the volunteer coach for my Little League team. He liked to read and garden and walk in the woods. Mom cooked for the school bake sale fund-raisers. She enjoyed jogging and eighties pop music, and sometimes I caught her dancing when she didn’t think anyone was looking. It was all so boringly normal, but I guess that’s what made it so happy and safe.

  When I was six, Uncle John talked Dad into joining the Cabbage Hammock hunting club in Dixie County. Dad wasn’t into the deer hunting aspect of it, but he liked to cook for the camp members and walk with me in the woods and talk to me about the plants and animals. This was his idea of a good day in the woods. At first I was disappointed he didn’t own a powerful deer rifle like Uncle John and the others. That he didn’t shoot big bucks and hang the mounted heads on the walls at our house. All he had was a Ruger 222, and he let me carry it on our walks and try to shoot squirrels.

  When I was eight I finally brought home a squirrel I’d shot at the hunting camp. I skinned and cleaned it in the kitchen like Dad showed me and put the meat in the freezer. Then I took the hide into my room and spread it on a board and nailed it down. I poured Morton salt over it to cure it so I could make a hat. After a week Mom trailed the smell and found my project under the bed. When I got home from school, she had placed it outside and asked me about it. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not, so I said I was making her a purse, assuming she couldn’t turn down a gift. The next day I took it off the board and sewed the feet pieces together with a big needle and dental floss until I had a squirrel-hide pouch complete with tail. Then I used a piece of red yarn to make a shoulder strap. Mom wore it over her shoulder to church that Sunday, smell and all.

  That’s how she was.

  When I was twelve, Dad bought a deer rifle. I thought he was going to finally shoot a buck, and I wanted to be with him when he did. We got dressed in the early morning hours and walked to our stand. Sometimes it takes an entire season to get a shot, but we hadn’t been there thirty minutes before an eight point appeared ghostlike out of the misty timber. It was like Dad had been saving it for us all those years. But then he slipped the rifle to me and told me to remember how I’d shot the squirrel. To aim for the shoulder and hold my breath and squeeze the trigger. I killed the buck, and he told me the rifle was mine.

  That’s how he was.

  * * *

  Late Monday afternoon Uncle John brought me an iPad so I could stream movies and browse the internet while I was recovering. It didn’t take me long to find video footage from a local news crew on the scene of our accident. A female reporter stood in the midst of strobing blue and red lights talking about the crash, while behind her a wrecker winched Dad’s Jeep from the river. As it came up the bank, slime covered and dripping, I saw that the doors were hanging open and the back window was missing.

  I brought up a map of the area. The accident happened just north of the Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge, nearly fifty thousand acres of swampy hammock. The Suwannee River cut down the center of the refuge clear to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. It was overwhelming just staring at the map, thinking my parents were somewhere out in that vastness, alive, or not.

  I turned off the tablet and just lay there in the darkened room. I couldn’t sleep, but I didn’t want to be awake either.

  Even though they were still considered missing, I knew in my gut they were gone for good. I couldn’t admit it, but I knew it. And when I tried to imagine life without them, my thoughts went blank and I got a faint ringing in my ears. I couldn’t even think about it. My mind wasn’t able to go there yet.

  How? I kept asking myself. How can this happen?

  I kept trying to make sense of things, but it was like my brain had turned to mush. All I could do was stare at the wall while bits and pieces of what I’d gone through the night of the wreck kept flashing past like bits of broken glass.

  A Sasquatch-like creature.

  I kept seeing the beast in my head. I knew it wasn’t a bear or anything else I’d ever laid eyes on.

  After hours in the dark, I suddenly found myself desperate to focus on something other than my thoughts and the flashing movie scenes. I grabbed the iPad, opened the browser, and did a Google search for Sasquatch. It took me only a moment to see this creature mostly went by a name I had heard of. Bigfoot.

  3

  If anything’s clear it’s that Bigfoot is not a hidden creature on the internet. Just searching that word alone, the results page listed almost fifty million hits. I clicked on some blurry videos and pictures before I found a site for the Bigfoot Searchers Organization. The BSO, as they like to call it, seemed to have the most clear and organized information about the creatures. I quickly discovered people all over the country—all over the world—had been seeing them since the beginning of recorded history. There was even an online map showing all the reported sightings in each state. Florida alone had hundreds. Levy County, where we’d had the accident, had had twelve.

  I began reading about some of the encounters. Most were roadside sightings by motorists, but many reports were from hunters and farmers. Sasquatch and Bigfoot were the most common names for the creatures, but I learned there are others, depending on what part of the country you’re in. In Florida, it’s often called a swamp ape in the Panhandle area and a skunk ape around the Everglades. People claim they carry a powerful smell that’s something like week-old roadkill crossed with rotten eggs. The adults are typically between six and twelve feet tall, their bodies broad and muscular, and estimated to weigh six hundred to a thousand pounds. While all the eyewitnesses generally describe a giant apelike man, there are subtle differences. Some of the reports claim to have seen a creature that is more apelike, with eyes that glow red. Others describe what I had seen clearly in the headlights: the face of a Neanderthal with black eyes staring through a mane of hair. Despite varying names and appearances, the creatures all have one main thing in common: big footprints.

  As I read on into the night, I began to realize why so few people talk about Bigfoot. Despite all the sightings, there is no convincing proof it really exists. It’s a cryptid: an animal whose existence has never been substantiated. Witnesses have the footprints and blurry videos and pictures, but that’s all. To most people this creature is in the same category as aliens and chupacabras and the Mothman.

  That night I had dreams more vivid and terrifying than any I’d ever experienced. I woke several times in a cold sweat, lying in the quiet semidarkness, breathing hard, listening to the faint chirping and beeping of hospital equipment beyond my walls. What was strange about the nightmares is they weren’t scary in a “deadly animals attacking me” kind of way. It was a smothering fear they filled me with, a feeling of being absolutely alone in a world that suddenly wasn’t at all what I’d been taught about it. A fear I’d gotten a glimpse of something I wasn’t supposed to see, that perhaps I was going to be punished for. And the growing realization I could no longer trust anything adults told me.

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep soundly until after the sun came up Tuesday morning. Daylight always seems to ease my fears, and it did so enough to let me drift off again until the nurse came to change my bandages a few hours later. Then Uncle John dropped by again with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and sat there and ate a couple with me.

  “You look a little red in the eyes,” he said.

  “I didn’t sleep good,” I said.

  “Yeah, me neither. Doc Ensley says you might be out of here tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Says it’s a miracle you weren’t
hurt worse.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s no word on your parents yet.”

  “I know,” I said.

  After he left I slept again but found the nightmares were stronger than daylight. They crawled all over me. This time I dreamt I was walking through our house in the middle of the night. I looked into my parents’ bedroom, and they weren’t in bed. Then I went over to their closet and opened it, and they were in there, lifeless, hooked up to some kind of charger with their eyes blinking. I ran out into the yard to get help, and everything was turned off, like I was the only real person in the world and everybody and everything else was a trick.

  I woke up yelling. A nurse came in and stood over me and asked if I was okay.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you need the doctor?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to cry. “No,” I said again.

  She held out a pill.

  “Here you go, hun,” she said. “This’ll help you forget about that monster.”

  I looked at her. She didn’t believe me either. But at the moment I wanted to sleep without nightmares more than I cared what people believed. So I took the pill, and whatever it was, it was stronger than my dreams.

  4

  Uncle John and I walked out of the hospital late Wednesday morning, and I felt sunlight on my face for the first time in nearly four days. I’m sure I looked a mess, with some of the bandages visible on my nose and left cheek. My entire body was sore and tight from bruises and stitches, but otherwise I felt physically fine. It was my mind that was still sick.

  I climbed into the passenger side of his truck. He told me we were going to Perry to get whatever things I needed from the house. Then I was coming to live with him until we learned more about my parents.