Max flapped the Polaroid in her face—his mother did not respond. He had tried to destroy the photo but every time he took it to the backyard with a lighter, some bony inner feeling stopped him. So it lived in his closet in a taped-up shoebox, supposedly contained.
“Why did you tell me!” he shouted. “Come on, mom!” The urge swelled to seize her and wrestle her to the floor—anything to break her out of the stasis that had closed in around her like a hard coat of amber. He grabbed the chair instead, swung it around so that she couldn’t look at the tree anymore. He immediately wished he hadn’t. Her miserable, time-eaten gaze felt like the swing of an iron bar.
“You didn’t like what you saw?” She was breathing shallowly. When she sighed it sounded like wind rushing through a pipe. “Bummer.”
She and the tree died that winter. The end was very hard. Deena fought the hospital staff with long-dormant claws whenever they rolled into her room with needles and droopy bags of liquid medicine. “Fuck your poison,” she would say. The hospital was two hours away from Cripple Creek, and the neighbor who drove Max in and out of the city always fish-tailed on the icy roads. The flat white landscape would spin past with no beginning and no end; the neighbor would mumble obscenities, and Max would think ecstatically about dying. At first the tree went on without her, its branches twisting round its trunk, but Max burned it down.
Max’s grandmother, Rowena, came down from Vertigo to see him through high school. She shed no tears for the one she called her lost child. “She was gone by the time she walked out of those woods pregnant with you,” said Grandma Ro. “So I’ve been mourning your whole life.”
Years later, after Grandma Ro had passed on (she died in her daughter’s bedroom; Max taped the door shut afterwards, designating the room “condemned”), Tom Lowell caught something large and alarming on the edge of his property. By then Max was twenty-six and working at Ticonderoga Mills, buying wheat from the ragged, leftover farms of Cripple Creek. Whenever prices dropped, Max would see them leaning heavy against their trucks, eyes to the dirt. Sometimes they cussed him out. Max reasoned that they shouldn’t have been clinging to their backwards lifestyle anyway. He hated their excuses: their fathers’ fathers had cultivated that land for generations, and now the grains were in their blood. “What if your fathers’ fathers have been killing for generations?” he would mutter to himself. “What then?”
Then you strip yourself down to the smallest, purest molecules and rebuild yourself up to something better, that’s what. Max thought that he had pretty well succeeded at this—at least he did not see those eyes in the mirror anymore, at least he had a job and a girl and a house (his mother’s house, but still)—but then Tom Lowell started running around town saying that he was charging twenty dollars to see the Meanest Looking Thing on Earth, this Devil’s Child. Max began to feel the Polaroid staring at him from inside the shoebox again.
Nothing very strange had happened in Cripple Creek in the years between Max’s birth and the capture of what Tom Lowell christened The Creeker—aside from the woman who ran the plant nursery, Chastity Dawes, getting pregnant out of nowhere and giving birth to a small fawn. The hospital had the creature euthanized, despite the mother’s objections. But other than that, life in Cripple Creek had been normal. Progress continued apace. The racetrack, the shopping mall, the microbrewery. They were on track to match Grand Island in annual revenue. God knew theirs was a community on the rise.
Kevin from work wanted to see The Creeker. He wanted to see it so he could laugh at it, and at Tom Lowell. “It’s probably just some two-headed cow,” Kevin said. “Lowell’s a nut, you know. I heard he went hunting for some Demon Razorback of Arkansas once.”
Of course Max knew what this Creeker was, in the bowels of his soul. It was the Stag-Man. It was his . . .
And then he would have to go to the restroom and cradle his head between his knees. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone. On the drive over, his stomach was flipping so badly that he couldn’t talk. But it would have looked strange if he’d bowed out—he’d gone to mock the “crop circles” out at Rookshire, after all—and besides, his depraved subconscious just couldn’t let go of the image of Tom Lowell’s farm and the captive creature behind its fence. In the days before they finally went to the farm his world had warped into a tunnel, a vortex like the one at Rapid City, with all furniture and foliage blurring together and everything hurtling toward a pair of eyes like lumps of coal.
Caridee Lowell, sixteen years old with eyes sunken from methamphetamine, sold red tickets out of a tin lunchbox. “To your left,” she hissed after taking their bills. There was no need for directions; the bright yellow fireworks tent was visible all the way down Cahokia Drive.
The tent was surprisingly quiet. The dozen people gathered inside would knock heads to whisper to each other, but all their eyes were fixed upon one location: a metal crate on the far side of the tent, large enough to shuttle a cow. “It’s one of Murray’s old transport cages,” Tom Lowell said. Several years ago there had been a short, ugly attempt at a town zoo—both the Ag Department and Fish and Wildlife had to get involved. The surviving animals had all been taken away, supposedly, but one reasonable theory argued that this Creeker was some mutated, mutilated escapee. Angry with man. Hungry for revenge. An old story. “It’s for handling wild animals, so don’t worry. He won’t getcha.”
And there, in the cage, was the Stag-Man. After years of staring at a three-inch image in a palm-sized Polaroid, its immense size overwhelmed Max. He would have needed to stoop to get inside that cage, but the Stag-Man had to sit, cramped, its knees to its chin. Its four-foot antlers flared out from its cervine head like skeleton-wings. Max could see immediately that it was too big for this cage, too big for this tent. Its skin was loose—it was not feeding enough. His slow-burning father, the monster. The captive. Why was it just sitting there? What was it thinking? Dread crawled up his throat. He felt fear, yes, but also the early twinges of sympathy.
Max and Kevin heard the nervous mumbling as they pushed to the front—“Where the hell did that thing come from?” “What’s it doing here?”—but no one wanted to answer, because no one really wanted to know. Sometimes after they asked these questions they would cough and pat their chests, as if they had accidentally invited themselves down some terrible internal rabbit hole. The ones that simply said, “I don’t know what to say” fared better. Kevin whispered “No fucking way” with his eyes glazed, and Max was thinking, “Father.”
Up close the scent of rank earth nearly knocked them down. Max could barely believe the Stag-Man was real and tangible and capable of bleeding—it had made so much more sense as a dream-spirit, his mother’s Boogeyman. He stared at the beast for fifteen minutes, helpless, trapped like a rabbit in a snare. He thought it was because the Stag-Man knew him as a son but post-tent conversation would reveal that everyone in the Creeker’s presence thought it was staring them in the eye, holding them rapt.
A little girl standing beside Max clutched the bars as if she was the one imprisoned. She was watching the Creeker breathe, so it seemed, and sobbing quietly the entire time.
There were casualties. Unlike the Big Eats Barbecue, Tom Lowell’s show did not spread joy. People left the tent either stone silent or pissing mad, bickering about “that one night in Reno” and “what you did with my father’s money.” The biggest casualty that night was Pastor Connor from the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. He had come to pressure Tom Lowell into closing down the show, but of course had to look at the exhibit first. It was a mistake. After staring at the Creeker for several minutes he ran out of the tent, shoving his own parishioners aside, and collapsed on the grass with his hands to his heart. Kevin called an ambulance and Elise Buckley fed him aspirin, but it was too late.
“Ah, geez,” said the kid in the paramedic uniform. “I told him not to go.”
“You’ve seen the Creeker?” asked Kevin.
“I went opening night,” said the paramedic-kid. “I was freaking o
ut for a whole week. Kept thinking about all the squirrels I shot coming back rabid and biting me in my sleep.” He tried to laugh. “Fucking weird, right?”
After Pastor Connor was lifted into the back of the ambulance the rest of them stood in a circle with their hands in their pockets. They were more distressed by the Creeker than by Pastor Connor’s death, which seemed like a just response to that monstrous aberration. A small child screamed from some parked car—they glanced up, but dropped their chins when they heard the stern voice of a disciplinarian-father. Finally Elise Buckley lit a cigarette and started to talk.
“I guess it was a bad summer, if that thing’s wandering out of Digby this time of year. Isn’t that what happens with bears? If they’re scavenging in October, you gotta figure it’s because they didn’t get to feed enough in the summer. Feeding on what, I don’t know. People’s lost dogs, I guess.”
After this little burst they fell quiet again, thinking about dogs they had lost, and horses that had supposedly run away, and then the really unpleasant stuff: the missing people. There had been no more than a handful in the past ten years, but how the news stations had dwelled upon those unlucky few. Everyone around for the last census remembered at least one. Even the missing migrant workers were considered tragedies. They must be cold out there, people said.
“That thing’s not ours,” Kevin mumbled into his gloved hands. “It’s not our problem.”
Elise shook her head, took a big drag, and walked away. “I really hate all of you people.”
Then it was just Max and Kevin watching for shadows on the darkened grass. “I saw a chupacabra once,” whispered Kevin. “I was visiting my grandparents in Texas. It was the middle of the night when I heard it howling. It killed my favorite goat.”
The Stag-Man was some kind of witch, Max decided. In all the years that he had known these people, nothing else had warped them so. He knew what Kevin and Elise and everyone else was feeling—like they were wobbling on the lip of a great dark funnel—because he had suffered the power of the Stag-Man’s gaze every night since he was eight. Max wanted to tell them this, but like hell would he admit to his friends and neighbors that he shared any blood with that thing in Tom Lowell’s cage. He had a brief moment of panic: what if Kevin saw some familial resemblance between his long features and that of the Stag-Man? He frantically rubbed his face. He was feeling for rough fur and a soft wet snout, but all he got was dry human skin. When he was twelve he had asked his mother if he had anything in common with the Stag-Man, and now he heard her reply: ”Believe me,” she’d said, with a snort, “You’re nothing alike.”
Mallory Jablonski taught fifth grade at Cripple Creek Elementary. It was the same school Max had attended, but they were not schoolyard sweethearts—she grew up in Lincoln, and she had the straight teeth and designer jeans to prove it. She’d been on a school dance squad, which Max understood to be a mythical troupe of hot girls in black leotards that would never be permitted at Cripple Creek High, where even the cheerleaders wore turtlenecks and chastity rings. Mallory had been on a class trip to New York. She liked sushi. All sorts of things, and still she radiated that earthy glow of harvest corn. Mallory was cultured; Mallory was genuine. He drove her around town slowly, with the windows down, because damn if his classmates wouldn’t be surprised that he managed to catch a girl like that. Mallory always laughed when they stopped at intersections. “Traffic’s real bad today,” she’d say. It was funny because there was no such thing as traffic in Cripple Creek.
When the Creeker became the talk of the town she asked him to take her to see it. “All my students are talking about it,” she said. “Have you seen it?”
He thought of the Polaroid. The slow-burning eyes. “Yeah.”
“And? Is it scary?” She bit her nails, grinning. She probably thought it was some pathetic artifact of rural Americana, a cousin of cow-tipping and haystack rides. “No, don’t tell me. I want to see it myself.”
Max took her to the Lowell farm that Friday. The carnival tent was fraying now that the first of the cold fronts were moving in. Mallory had been talkative as they crossed the pesticide-yellow grass, but in the presence of the Stag-Man, she approached the cage as if in a trance. She knelt down at the bars the way she did at Mass and looked soulfully, silently into the Stag-Man’s eyes. Max felt acid bubble into his throat. They were exchanging secrets and truths, he could just tell. She was in communion with the same incubus that had seduced his mother. He would have yanked her out of that deferential pose by her hair, but Mallory stood up just as he was reaching down. She stuffed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets.
“Let’s go, I want to go,” she mumbled. “I don’t feel well.”
A throng of preteens that had set up a devotional camp outside the Stag-Man’s cage leered up at them. They looked like jackals in black clothes. “Ooh, yeah,” said one of them. “Run along and hi-i-ide.” Max sharply told them to go home—trying to sound like a responsible man, even though his own father was a freak in a cage—but they sang back, “This is home.”
He and Mallory walked back to his truck with his arm around her shoulders. He could feel her trembling. It was a cold sort of relief to see that she was suffering instead of enraptured. She was nothing like his mother, he told himself. She was an innocent. Virtuous. Competent. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. This stuff’s no good.” He bit his lips, in guilt. Mallory shook her head absently but didn’t speak until they were in the muscular safety of the Chevrolet Colorado, barreling down Cahokia Drive, listening to Doctor Touchdown on KMKO Radio.
“I used to have an imaginary friend.”
He turned the volume down. “Huh?”
“But I don’t know if she was really imaginary. She came out at night, from the wetlands. She would tap on my window. Glowing like a gravestone. No one else saw her but I . . . saw her more and more after my sister died.” Max hadn’t known about this sister. “I think she wanted me to go away with her. She said there was a castle under the water at Napoleon Pond. Oh, God.” She slumped forward in the passenger seat as if something had punched her in the stomach. Max wondered if this was why she could not sleep facing any windows, why she slept in the pitch-black dark with the sheets over her head. “I never told anybody. But I guess seeing that thing on the farm . . . brought it all back.” She looked over at him plaintively. “You think I’m a freak, don’t you? Just say it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
It was a strange moment. He would dwell upon it later to try to determine what had possessed him to tell her the truth. Maybe he was shocked that a girl as presentable as Mallory could feel his bewildered shame. Maybe he thought shared alienation would deepen their bond. “I don’t think you’re a freak,” he said. “Something even stranger happened to me.”
She raised a pale brown eyebrow.
“You know that . . . thing on the farm?” She nodded. “Well, that’s my father.” He immediately exploded in terrified laughter. The sensible, screaming part of him wanted to backtrack before things got any worse—tack on a quick “Holy shit, just kidding!”—but when he opened his mouth only nonsense dribbled out. “My mother was a strange lady. She was the kind of person that chased tornadoes, you know? No jeep or cameras or nothing, she’d just head out the door and run after them. She’s dead now. Died a long time ago.”
Mallory was trying to smile. But she was waiting for that “just kidding!” and when it didn’t come—when every word that rolled down his chin was a confirmation of the wretched truth—Mallory gathered up the handles of her purse and said to take her home. She looked like she was about to jump out of the truck. “I have a lot of quizzes to grade,” she said.
He reached over, teeming with concern, but Mallory recoiled from his hand. It was as if she was saying, No—I never touched you. I disown you. I don’t know who you even are.
The road dwindled. Her driveway was covered in fallen leaves. “Mallory,” he said, hoping to remind her of what they had been sharing for the past six m
onths. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Mallory’s eyes widened; she was probably remembering the same six months in retrospective horror. “I can’t do this, Max.” The passenger door swung open and the cold rushed in. “I can’t do this now.”
And then she was gone. He had wanted to marry her. He had visualized himself walking into her parents’ house in the old part of Lincoln, all brick walls and roundabouts and leafy trees, and introducing himself to her father the banker. “My name is Max,” he would have said, and there would have been no doubt.
He started dreaming about hurting Mallory. He didn’t enjoy these dreams, but they satisfied the same ache in his belly that years earlier made him want to shake his mother until her head popped off. The Stag-Man was there too, watching and waiting, and after the floor swallowed Mallory’s ruined body, the Stag-Man would remain: bright and powerful and merciless. A fire in the woods, an old whispered force. Sometimes the Stag-Man called him “son.” Sometimes Max would curl around the creature’s feet because in the dark the Stag-Man was all there was to the world. With its crown of antlers it looked like some wise and wizened tree. And sometimes when Max woke up he would go to the bathroom mirror and rub his forehead to see if his own velvet-covered antlers were growing in.
Tom Lowell had cut the entrance fee in half. Word had spread of the Creeker’s negative side effects—nausea, heartburn, indigestion—and now the farmer stood alone in the middle of his driveway, hands on his hips, watching for vehicles on Cahokia Drive. “You think it makes ’em feel better to think this stuff doesn’t exist?” he asked Max, cocking his head, chicken-like. “Hey, isn’t this your third time?” Like the Stag-Man was some ride at Worlds of Fun.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Page 43
