Beast

by Watt Key

  I slowly looked away to see that Andre had resumed his fishing posture. A few minutes later he flipped another gar up to the female. This process went on for close to a half hour, resulting in six fish. Jane ate two of them and kept four uneaten beside her. Finally, Andre swam across the deep part of the spring with a sort of dog paddle, but without kicking his feet. As awkward as that sounds, it appeared very fluid and natural. The female stood to meet him, holding two of the fish. Andre stepped out of the water, picked up the other two, and they disappeared into the hammock like I had never been there.

  I don’t know if they really came to catch fish or if he was demonstrating the technique to me. Obviously I’m not fast enough—no human is fast enough—to catch fish like that. But he didn’t leave any for me or give any sign his actions were meant to teach me anything. The only clear message I got out of the encounter was they considered the spring theirs, and I’d crossed the line by polluting it with the deer carcass.

  That afternoon I started to think about the camera again. Now that I knew they would show themselves in the daytime and didn’t appear to want to hurt me, I might be able to pull off what I’d come to do. To get such good pictures of these things that it would be impossible for anyone to doubt that they exist.

  25

  Three days passed before I saw them again. During that time I found the deer carcass where it was lying nearly fifty feet away in a palmetto thicket. The meat was certainly spoiled, and now it was covered with both flies and mud. But I was able to cut more pieces off it and use the bits of rancid venison to lure two gars close enough to jab with my spear.

  On that third day I was lying on the ledge, doing nothing. Daylight was fading, and long shadows lay across the clearing. Through the steady thrum of insects and lull of the trickling water, I felt the sensation of being watched again.

  I turned my head and scanned the other side of the spring. At first I didn’t see anything, but I’d studied the weave of the sticks and branches and leaves at every time of day for so many days, the pattern of it all was burned into my memory. Only a moment passed before I noticed a hairy black lump that was out of place. With further study I made out glistening eyes in the center of the lump. A chill coursed up my spine as I recognized the face of Andre, who was staring back at me. But it was more the way he was staring at me that creeped me out. He was on all fours, positioned with his belly to the ground in a sort of spider-crawl. He wasn’t gazing chin-out like any human in a similar posture would have to do—his head was cocked up between his shoulders like it was sitting on top of his back. Like his neck is able to tilt at a ninety-degree angle.

  I wondered how many times they’d crawled through the swamp to watch me. I’d heard nothing. Not even the forest creatures had given me warning. I think somehow the hammock animals can sense the mood of the beasts, or perhaps the beasts can quiet them with the infrasound. It just doesn’t make sense. But that’s how it is. Just when you think you’ve come to know them, they do something that makes you think you really don’t know anything.

  I must have studied Andre for five minutes before he suddenly stood. And it wasn’t like humans stand—getting to one knee, pushing up from the ground, and straightening. Andre simply folded backward and rose to his full height. The motion was so silent and fluid and unnatural, it was unnerving.

  It was obvious the beast knew I’d seen him, but he remained still, continuing to watch me from a standing position. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted, but now that he wasn’t in the strange spider-crawl and his head was back to normal, I felt my breathing slow and the fear subside. And gradually I came to my senses and thought about the camera.

  I began to push myself up slowly. Andre blinked his eyes, and I stopped. It was the first time I noticed he had eyelids. When he made no other move, I sat all the way up. Then I kept watching him while scooting backward toward the shelter. Once I was through the entrance, I looked away for a moment to find my pack. I saw it and no more than touched the zipper before I heard a low, resonant growl that shook my insides. It was a milder version of the deathly howl I’d heard before, but I was instantly queasy and sick. I pulled my hand away from the pack and lay on my side, taking deep breaths, trying to concentrate the nausea away. I could still see him, standing in the same place, watching me. I also saw my knife lying in the leaves in front of my face. To test my suspicion, I slowly reached for it. The growl came again, and I balled up against the pain and plugged my fingers into my ears and closed my eyes.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “Okay.”

  When I opened my eyes again, he was still there. The pain in my gut had subsided. I pulled my fingers away from my ears, and all was quiet. The hammock was nearly cloaked in darkness, but the insects and birds and other small animals had ducked away and gone silent.

  I detected movement to my right and cocked my eyes to see Jane sitting on the ledge with her knees pulled up again. She was watching me from no less than ten feet away. I took more deep breaths, waiting for the nausea to pass. She smiled, but it wasn’t a smile. Her mouth stretched across to slightly reveal the teeth. The smile of a monster. I didn’t know what she meant by it.

  “I’m Adam,” I said quietly.

  She glanced across the spring at her father. He made a series of clicking sounds, and she looked at me again.

  I’ve already tried to describe how fast these things can move. But what happened next still shocks me. Sometimes I wonder if I really saw it this way, or if it’s exaggerated in my mind because of the sickness they’d given me.

  I was staring at the female when I detected movement across the spring. In the time it took my eyes to dart from the female to where her father had been, Andre had leapt the twenty feet from one side to the other and landed in front of me. This went beyond fluid, graceful acrobatics. All I can liken it to is a glitch in a video game. Like a skip in time. But I remember, as my eyes were moving, seeing the frames of him in the air. The distance of the jump and the speed with which it happened and the landing itself were equally unbelievable. When he landed it seemed as if there was not even a bend in his knees. It was all as easy as if someone had taken a simple hop. I would even call it weightlessness had I not felt the tremor of the earth beneath me.

  At this point I can’t imagine what is going on. What they’re thinking and what they’re about to do. Nothing about them is predictable. The only thing I was certain of was they weren’t going to allow me to touch anything of human making.

  Then things got even weirder.

  * * *

  Andre and Jane were in front of the shelter watching me when I heard the leaves rustling to my left. I was still curled into a ball on the palmetto mat. My queasiness was subsiding, but I was too scared to move. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another one spider-crawl into view and stop a short distance from the entrance to my shelter. He studied me for a moment, then stood in that strange, hinged way. This one was no more than five feet tall and obviously a young male. In the face he was even more human-looking than the female. Had I not known of these creatures, I would have thought it no more than a chubby six-year-old covered in hair. But a six-year-old who probably weighs two hundred pounds.

  He stepped toward me curiously. I found myself studying his feet. They were disproportionately large, like he would wear a size ten shoe. It reminded me of a puppy that hasn’t grown into his feet. The feet were also malformed, with the ankle almost in the center of the foot and a heel sticking out several inches. I only noticed this because the others’ feet weren’t like this. On them the ankle is about where it would be on a human.

  The young one approached me and dropped down into the spider position again, and suddenly I was staring him in the face. I no longer noticed his body was covered in hair. What I saw was so human-looking I felt if I spoke he would answer me back in perfect English. But what he did next was not human.

  He crawled slowly with his arms and legs splayed out, his head swaying and his body making lizard-like movements. His
nose constantly sniffed the air as he slithered closer. In that moment I thought of all the stories I’d heard of mother bears protecting their young. How the slightest threat to their cubs provokes them into attacking. And I felt the weight of Andre’s stare and was certain if I made the slightest move, he would rip me to pieces.

  The youngster approached to within inches of my face. The rancid smell of sour milk fell over me as I looked into his eyes. They were not so black, but a hazel color, and I barely detected a dark pupil in the center. He leaned in and began to sniff my hair. At the same time I felt his hand find my wrist and grip it and squeeze it tightly. He opened his mouth, and I stared into it. I saw his teeth and the bubble gum pink of his gums. Then he stuck out a stubby, ash-colored tongue and licked up the side of my face.

  26

  The young one’s tongue was like wet sandpaper. As I felt it slide up my cheek, I made a sudden, involuntary gasp. He growled and leapt backward as fast and as fluid as a tree frog. He stood behind his father, hugging one of the enormous legs and peering around it at me. Andre didn’t move or make any expression. The female made a clicking sound and rocked from side to side, chimp-like. Then, after a few seconds, Andre turned to leave. The young male trailed behind him, and the female stood and followed. After a moment they had melted into the trees.

  The spider-crawling is hard to grasp—how can something that large be so agile on fingertips and toes? But there is even something strange about the way they walk upright. They swing their arms and bend their knees like humans, but there is more bend to the knees and more of a sliding motion with the feet. It’s like someone on snow skis. It’s hard to imagine and even harder to imitate.

  I started to think of them as intelligent. But it’s hard to say if they are more or less intelligent than humans. It’s a different kind of knowledge they work with. Somehow, they sense whenever I reach for anything made by humans—it’s threatening. Like they can read my thoughts. What they know about the specifics of these items, I can’t say. I doubt they know a camera is any less dangerous than a pistol. They are probably as ignorant of these things as I am about their superhuman abilities. Regardless of what they knew or how they knew it, I was left with a disturbing problem; they weren’t going to let me take their picture. And without the pictures, there was no reason for me to carry on.

  I knew soon that I was going to face the slow descent into starvation again unless the creatures helped me. But I couldn’t just stay there and expect them to bring me food. Sometimes they were gone for days. And I remembered what Stanley said about them being migratory. Eventually they might even leave the Refuge.

  I had to get the pictures as soon as possible, then I could try to find my way out of the hammock. I had to somehow lie in wait with the camera disguised and ready. I had to do this while I still had the strength to make the journey.

  * * *

  I figured they would be back within a couple of days. By then I was used to spending hours doing nothing but lying around the shelter, conserving energy. It seemed reasonable to think I could lie in wait with the camera until they returned.

  The following day I cut more palmetto fronds and stood them up around the four sides of the shelter, leaving only a small crawl space for the door. Then I gathered several armloads of Spanish moss and draped it from the roof so it hung down and covered any remaining gaps. After a couple hours’ work, I crawled inside and saw no sunlight through the walls.

  I arranged the camera on a log just inside the shelter and to the right. Then I cut a small hole in the wall to take the picture through. My idea was to lie on the palmetto floor, watching over the spring. As soon as I saw one of the creatures, I would only have to move slightly to my right in order to start photographing them.

  I realized my plan wasn’t perfect. Because of the way the camera was situated, I was only going to be able to get pictures of them standing across the spring. Anywhere else and they’d be out of sight or close enough to suspect something. It was also going to have to be daylight. I could only imagine what they’d do to me if they saw a flash go off.

  * * *

  Three days passed. In the early morning hours of the fourth night, I heard the padding of footsteps on the limestone ledge. Then I saw one of them walk past the entrance of my shelter. The hair seemed of a lighter color, and I suspected it was the female, but it was too dark to make out any features. And the walls now covered my range of vision and only allowed me to catch glimpses. I know the creature stopped and sat down not very far from me. Even though I couldn’t see it, I heard it picking at and eating something. Occasionally it grunted softly. There may have been others, but I was only certain of this one.

  For nearly an hour I lay in the shelter, listening to the creature. Everything was peaceful. The night sounds thrummed steadily, and there seemed to be none of the normal signs of danger. But it made me uneasy not to be able to see it, and I was too frightened to move.

  Suddenly the night was shattered into silence by one of the fearsome howls echoing across the hammock. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It seemed far away, maybe a mile or more, but it was enough to send even the beast outside my shelter crashing off through the palmettos.

  The howl came again, closer now, perhaps only a half mile away. If it was the same creature, then it had traveled an incredible distance in an impossible amount of time. That paralyzing feeling of helplessness and impending doom gripped me.

  I heard and felt it coming at the same time. If you have ever been close to a horse running, then you know how you can feel their footfalls shaking the ground. It felt like that but more powerful. And the sound was like someone driving a truck at high speed through the underbrush. Then the noise and violence increased until I heard what sounded like a tornado all around me, trees snapping and leaves flying. Whatever it was panted and grunted and thrashed about, tearing at the swamp in a complete rage for what felt like five minutes or more. Then the shelter exploded around me, leaves and sticks and palmetto flying around my face. I was suddenly exposed, lying under open sky while the beast raged around me, tearing trees from the ground and hurling them in all directions. This was not Andre. This creature was much bigger. And there was nothing I could do but ball up and wait to die.

  27

  The creatures had made me fear for my life several times, but in that moment I thought I was certainly going to be torn to pieces. I could see no other outcome after this beast had traveled at least a mile in fury to confront me.

  I don’t know how long I waited for it to be over. It could have been only a minute, or it could have been ten. But eventually he stopped his tantrum, and I heard him standing over me, taking rough, raspy breaths so deep and tonal I felt them in my bones. This time I smelled the horrid odor, and I opened my eyes and took in what was no less than twelve feet of terror, muscled and sculpted like the largest bodybuilder you can imagine. What looked like white scars ran across his chest and down his legs, like he’d spent a lifetime battling other creatures. For the first time in my life, I felt I was staring into the face of absolute evil. I had never even used that word in my head. I had never understood it until that moment. But now I was facing an entity who craved bringing the fear of death more than death itself.

  He leaned over me and opened his mouth. His teeth were white and wet and glistened in the sky glow. He bowed his arms out, clenched his fists, and inhaled. His arms tensed, and every muscle in his body seemed to inflate as he sucked an impossibly long breath into the barrel of his chest. I knew what was coming, and I looked away and slammed my hands over my ears. But there was no defense against it. The scream was so loud and impactful, it caused my body to physically overload and pass out.

  * * *

  The next thing I knew, I had sunlight on my face. I felt sick and weak and disoriented. I watched the trees overhead for a while, not wanting to move. Eventually I sat up and looked around, queasiness pooled in my stomach. Complete destruction lay before me for twenty feet in all directions
. Palmetto and vines and branches were strewn everywhere. Trees a foot in diameter were floating in the spring. There were more jammed up into the branches of other trees.

  I started crawling around in a daze, digging in the debris for my pack and camera. The first thing I saw was my bat, broken into three pieces, like he’d found it and focused on it. A moment later I recovered the pack under a fallen tree. Then I had to stop and vomit and lie down to rest. It took me another hour to find the camera. And by the time I did, I wondered why I had even bothered to search for it. But I was too frazzled to make sense of what I was doing. I stuffed it into the pack. And just that small effort had me puking again. I lay on my side, clutching my stomach and waiting for whatever it was to pass.

  * * *

  I slept for a few hours. When I woke I was still weak, but the sickness had passed enough for me to think straight. I got up and went down to the spring and drank. The cool water helped revive me. Then I sat at the water’s edge and tried to figure out what had happened.

  I had met the alpha. Of that much I was certain. But why this creature had suddenly acted that way toward me was a mystery. Maybe the female was really his offspring, and he felt threatened by her interest in me. Or maybe he had just found out about me from the others and wanted to show me who was in charge. I didn’t know. These creatures just seemed to go ballistic for no reason. And I knew I couldn’t bear another encounter with him. It was worse than death. It was time to leave no matter where I had to go to escape. No matter what was waiting for me back in civilization.