Beast

by Watt Key

  My fear of the creatures lessened each night and was replaced by anticipation. Despite all the activity, I had yet to see anything more than shadows. I was so optimistic about seeing them that I ignored a more immediate problem facing me: I had run out of fish.

  There were still more gar in the spring, but they were too scattered and I was too weak to catch them. Then I broke my knife blade digging for palmetto root. Strangely none of this bothered me. I was gradually approaching my goal, as vague as it had become. Nothing else seemed to matter except hanging on as long as I could until I saw these things. And maybe I couldn’t hang on that long, and maybe it didn’t matter anyway.

  I began to eat frogs. Just after sunset, when I heard them cheeping, I crawled around the edge of the spring with my penlight and blinded them and hit them with my spear. They were slippery and slimy to hold but soft enough that I could grip them by the head and bite through their thighs. The rest of the frog was mostly intestine, so I tossed it away and chewed and swallowed the leg meat and spit out the bone.

  I often wondered if I was going crazy. Then I remembered that if I was crazy, I wouldn’t know it. I wondered if maybe I wanted to go crazy. Maybe that was part of what I had to do. And then my thoughts went in circles, trying to remember where I had come from and what I was doing out there.

  I was only certain of one thing. There was nothing more I could do. And I thought I was prepared for what was about to happen. I thought I’d slipped into such a state of weak resolution that even fear itself had been starved out of me. I was wrong.

  22

  It had been several days since I’d heard anything from the creatures. I sat outside the shelter listening to the night sounds playing at full volume, sensing nothing, having no reason to suspect they were nearby. Out of boredom and impatience, I decided to imitate the owl again. As my call echoed over the hammock, I listened. A moment later I got my response, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. They were tired of playing games, and they let me know it.

  From directly across the spring came a howl that nearly rolled me over. Calling it a howl is the only way I know how to describe it, but it’s much more than that. If you’ve ever been next to a train when it blows its horn, then you might have some idea of what this noise is like. Then imagine it being even louder than that. The sound vibrated my insides, like I was in a car going over a corduroy road. It seemed to go on forever, penetrating every part of me and making me physically ill. I got onto all fours and began puking. What little food I had in me came up and then I was dry heaving at the ground. The next thing I remember is waking up outside the shelter with sunlight on my face, staring up at oak leaves.

  The howl changed everything for me. Up until then I was thinking of these creatures as something flesh and blood, something I could understand. Like a bear or a wolf but larger. The sound this thing made was not earthly. I had no basis for it. It went far beyond just a sound. It was as much a weapon as anything else. Somehow the howl was at a frequency designed to overload my senses—to bring physical harm to my body.

  If I could have left then, I would have. But it was too late. I didn’t have the strength to fight my way through days of tangled swamp and water. My penlight was already fading, and I suspected I had maybe one or two more nights to use it.

  * * *

  Little did I appreciate the security and comfort that glow of light had given me. Once it was gone, I felt I’d lost all connection with humankind. I spent the nights lying in terror. Terror that played in my head like a distant wailing siren, overlaying and smothering all logical thought and reason. There was no defense against it. There was nothing to do but ball up and clench my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut against the darkness.

  I lost track of the days. I stopped eating, and my stomach cramped with the pains of starvation. Occasionally I crawled down to the spring and drank. Then I lay beside the water for hours, watching the gar hanging in the clear depths and insects crawling in the reeds and whatever else happened to be in front of my eyes. Sometimes I fell asleep until I felt rain on my face or the cold night air. Then I crawled back to the shelter, curled up on the palmetto fronds, and pulled my jacket over me.

  At some point I noticed the face of my watch was broken and the hands no longer moved. I think I might have hit it against the limestone ledge. I didn’t care. I no longer cared about the time, about hours and minutes. There was only day and night. And waiting in between.

  One afternoon I took off the watch and flipped it into the spring and saw it sink slowly until it bumped into the wall and slid down into the black abyss. Later on it occurred to me I could have used the watch hands to make a fish hook. Then it seemed like too much work, and I was glad not to have the temptation.

  * * *

  Finally, after I don’t know how many days, I saw one. I woke in the night, immediately aware something wasn’t right. I had fallen asleep next to the spring. I heard the water gurgling beside me, but the frogs and the insects and the night birds were absolutely quiet. I lay on my back, staring up, but I saw no stars. Everything over me was inky black. Then I thought maybe I was dreaming. But I breathed deep and inhaled the full scent of the beast.

  The smell was an odor of rotten meat and urine so heavy and thick it made me gasp. And when I made that small noise, I detected something about the darkness shift above me. Then I felt the breath of it fall over my face. It was the breath of a dog, but stronger and meatier.

  As I slowly focused my eyes, I began to make out white teeth and then the full features of the creature leaning over me, not ten inches from my nose.

  Now he’s going to eat me.

  What I saw bore some resemblance to a man’s face, but in the most gruesome way. The teeth were square like human teeth but four times as big. Cartoonishly exaggerated. The mouth was horrendously wide. The jaw, if opened, could fit my head into it. The nose was as large as my fist but pressed in like a fighter’s nose that’s been broken many times. The eyes were glossy black with no trace of iris or pupil.

  I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even breathe. I was looking at a monster. The terror I felt was so great I wanted to die to escape it.

  23

  The beast stared at me for what felt like an eternity. Then the face withdrew, and I watched the creature rise before me to its full height, outlined by the starry night sky. Even though I’d seen and read about and expected something this big, I wasn’t prepared for the enormity of it. He was every bit of ten feet tall with shoulders five feet apart.

  I must have started breathing again, because my lungs filled with the stench of him. Then he made a clicking sound, and I heard something moving in the underbrush to my left. He took a small step sideways and crouched about six feet away, facing me. It seemed strange that something that big could move at all and make no noise. And it struck me just how fluid his motions were.

  I cocked my eyes and watched him. The beast was hunched over and working on something with his hands. Then I heard a snap and a wet tearing sound. I saw him lift something to his face, and his mouth opened to reveal the giant teeth in the starlight. Then I heard him crunching and smacking. I was still in such a state of numb shock that, for an instant, I wondered if he had pulled off my leg and taken a bite of it. Then I realized he was too far away.

  I heard another series of clicking sounds come from the underbrush. Each of the clicks had its own distinct tone, and the noises strung together sounded like a strange language. The beast stopped chewing and looked to his right. He clicked back. I heard more movement and thought I saw the shadow of something large cross above the ledge.

  The beast must have stayed there five or ten more minutes, with me listening to him smack and chew and occasionally getting glimpses of his white teeth. Then he suddenly stood and took one step and disappeared into the underbrush with barely a sound. It wasn’t natural, the way this thing moved. It was like a bulldozer driving quietly through a thicket. It made no sense.

  I waited until the chorus of crickets and
frogs rose around me again, and I knew he was gone. Then I sat up and looked past my feet. I saw the mound of something lying on the ledge. I got to my knees and crawled to it cautiously. It took me a moment to determine what I was looking at. A deer with its hind legs torn away, its dead eyes reflecting in the sky glow. The top half of the carcass looked untouched. I reached out and ran my hand along its fur. After a moment I crawled closer and got over the back of it, where blood was puddled on the ledge. I inhaled the coppery smell of raw meat and the scent flowed into my body like warm soup, alerting and reviving every dying organ inside me. With no hesitation I lowered my head and began to eat.

  * * *

  The beast had left me a gift. It was the last thing I expected. I ate my fill of venison that night and puked and ate again and puked again. It wasn’t a sick feeling, but more like my body refused to hold food. Later the doctors would tell me a stomach shrinks when a person is starving, and it takes time to stretch it out again. Even though I couldn’t keep anything down, it satisfied me just to taste the meat and feel the sustenance of it permeating my bloodstream.

  * * *

  My body was still weak when I woke the following morning, but my mind felt healthier than ever. It seemed as if the sun was brighter and the birds louder. The carcass lay just beyond the front of the shelter, the limestone still wet and sticky with blood. I saw it was a doe, something I hadn’t noticed the night before.

  I had a smaller blade on my knife no bigger than half my little finger. I used it to cut into the deer’s shoulder and slice off more of the venison. This time I was able to keep it down by swallowing small portions and waiting ten to fifteen minutes between bites.

  I guessed the temperature was in the midsixties, cool and comfortable for me but probably not cool enough to keep the meat from spoiling within a couple of days. I sat there until nightfall, eating when I could, trying to regain my strength. And while I waited for the food to settle, I thought about the beast and tried to get my head around what I’d seen and why he had acted the way he had. He was flesh and blood. He ate and he breathed. But there was something more to him. The size of him. How agile and quiet he was. Had I not heard them occasionally crack a twig or crunch in the leaves, I would have considered them ghostlike. And then there was the howl. I felt like it could have stopped my heart with it, had it done that in my face.

  For two more days I ate the venison, feeling my body growing steadily stronger. I was careful to cut into a new area of the carcass each morning to avoid those parts that had become covered with flies. I got no sense that the creatures were around, but I no longer trusted my instincts when it came to predicting them. And should they decide to show themselves, there was nothing I could do about it.

  As my body and mind became stronger, I circled back to my old reasoning about why I had come out here. And for the first time in over a month, I thought about the camera in the backpack. I pulled it out and looked it over. Just holding it in my hands, I felt like I was dangerously pushing my luck. If they had any concept of what a camera was and what I planned to do with it, I was certain they would let me die or kill me. I shoved it back into the backpack and tried to put the idea out of my mind. Then I thought it strange that I would even consider these things knew what a camera was.

  In my mind I began referring to the one who brought me the deer as Andre, after a wrestler I’d seen on television called Andre the Giant. I assumed it was a male and suspected this same creature was the one I’d seen that night long ago. But I knew there were others. And I was about to meet them.

  24

  On the third day after meeting Andre, I felt as if I were being watched again from the moment I crawled out of the shelter. The feeling is both mental and physical. There is an unexplained heightened fear that comes with a gradual suffocation of the senses, a soft ringing in the ears, shortness of breath, and a quickening heartbeat. But I didn’t expect the creatures to come around in the daytime, so I told myself I was just imagining things and overly anxious about their return.

  Despite my uneasy feeling, I decided to get on with another day of trying to survive. I was getting worried about the venison. There was still a lot of meat left, but almost the entire carcass was covered with flies. I decided it was too risky to keep eating off it, but I had another plan.

  I cut off a small piece of meat and tossed it into the spring. I watched it sink slowly until one of the gars approached and snapped it up. Convinced they would take it as bait, I dragged what was left of the deer to the edge of the spring and pushed it in. Then I got my spear and positioned myself near the floating carcass and waited.

  Suddenly I heard a crashing sound over my shoulder. In an instant Andre was beside me. He reached and swiped the carcass out of the water and hurled it into the trees. It all happened so fast, I barely had time to roll away and lie on my back and stare up at him. My body was weak, my mind was wrecked, and I was totally helpless. But for the first time, I was able to fully take in his features.

  In daylight he was even more impressive. He stands slightly slumped, like someone with bad posture, and his arms hang just a little in front of him. I focused on his hands first. They are proportioned like human hands, but as large as baseball mitts, and the tops are covered with coarse black hair like the rest of his body. The fingernails are brownish-yellow and hard and chipped, like he uses them for digging. His arms are longer in proportion than a man’s, like gorillas, the hands hanging almost at the level of his knees. The biceps are as big around as my waist. The chest is barrel-shaped without an inch of fat on it, ripped like a bodybuilder but three times the size of Andre the Giant. Over all the muscle is longer hair, nearly three inches long. Beneath it is leathery, ash-colored skin. He appears to have no neck, and while his head is still three times the size of a man’s, it seems too small for the body—like a bowling ball lodged between two massive shoulders. But it isn’t round—it’s more egg-shaped, with a high forehead. There’s more hair around the face but not on it. The heavy brow line makes him vaguely resemble a Neanderthal man, yet there’s something slightly off about the spacing of his facial features. The eyes are too far apart, and the nose is too high above his mouth. But the nose is hooded like a human’s. While I was staring at him, the nostrils flared in and out, like he was constantly taking in my scent. Through the enormous mouth he sucked and exhaled massive amounts of air with a throat that must be the size of a fire hose. I thought I detected a look of anger, but it was hard to tell. The mouth seems only capable of opening and closing. There are no lips, and it doesn’t move at the edges to give away a frown or a smile. All expression is in the nose and eyes. Black eyes as reflective as glassy obsidian.

  It occurred to me later that the smell of him wasn’t as strong and offensive that time, more like a large, wet dog, exactly the odor you would expect from such a thing. The stronger smell may be a form of defense, like skunks have. Or it might just be something they emit depending on their mood. It’s not just the appearance of these creatures that is hard to accept; there are things about them that go against the laws of nature as we know them. It really is like they are from another planet.

  For example, they react and move at an unbelievable speed. Something as big as these creatures shouldn’t be able to move like that. As strange as this sounds, their movement reminds me of a mouse. The way mice jump and sprint in spurts and twitches. But that’s what it’s like. Thousand-pound ape-men that can move as quickly as mice. Like they have so much muscle, they can overcome their mass.

  I found another thing unsettling. After Andre hurled away the deer carcass, he stood over me and stared at me for several minutes. I thought he was trying to intimidate me, but I was slipping into that same flawed logic that they think like we do. I don’t know why he studied me for so long—there’s no pattern to how they act. It’s like something really smart and insane and unpredictable at the same time. You can never be at ease or lower your guard around them. And then again, even the notion of guarding yourself is rid
iculous. The biggest, strongest human in the world would cower before him, helpless.

  A noise across the spring caused the beast to look away. In my periphery I saw another figure appear from the trees. I slowly turned my head and watched it approach the water’s edge. This one was smaller, but still close to six feet tall. I could tell right away that it was a female. The hair covering her body was lighter in color, like that of a golden retriever. Her face looked smooth and young and innocent and not nearly as weathered and monstrous. Like maybe she was a teenager that hadn’t yet grown into the gruesome features of the adults. From a distance, there was something captivating about her. In my mind I called her Jane.

  Andre made a clicking sound at her. She sat at the edge of the spring and pulled her knees up and hugged them like a kid. Then Andre stepped into the pool and waded out into the clear water until it was chest high. There he stopped with his arms hanging beside him and his back to me. I remained absolutely still, my eyes darting back and forth from the female to what I now assumed was her father. It seemed like nearly ten minutes had passed before Andre’s arm appeared to twitch. In fact it had moved several feet out in front of him, but so fast it was barely noticeable. He lifted a gar from the water and tossed it to the female. She snatched it from the air as quickly as a snake strike.

  What I saw next caused my initial impression of Jane to vanish. She watched me as she brought the live fish to her face, her eyes void of all emotion, reminding me of an animal wary of you approaching their meal. Then her mouth expanded eight inches to the outside of her cheeks and opened to reveal that shocking set of square, pearl-white, humanlike teeth. As I looked on in horror, she took a large bite out of the gar’s back while it flipped and struggled and quivered. As she studied me and chewed, I heard the crunching of bones and watched blood drip from her mouth and fish scales cling to her lips and teeth. She swallowed and bit the fish again, with no aversion to head, intestines, or tail. And in only a moment, she had consumed every part of it.