Three drunks in Husker windbreakers were tossing peanut shells at the Stag-Man. They were giving themselves points for contact: five for the body, ten for the head. They did not deign to speak to it even in the way they spoke to their dogs, even though the body they shot at was just a taller, stronger version of their own. Max felt a pang of defensive anger and shame, but the Stag-Man seemed to be smiling back at them. Not that its deer mouth could grin, but its eyes were gleeful.
Max crept up to the cage. It was filthy, and swarming with bronze cockroaches. He sensed the Stag-Man watching him and his legs wobbled—the last two times he’d been in the tent he’d been able to hold steady, but not now. Moving his center of gravity closer to the earth quelled a little bit of nausea, but still he had to ask the question. “Do you know me?”
A peanut shell hit the back of his head. “That’s ten for me!” shouted one drunk; “Get out of the way!” said another. Max hissed at them and did not move. Instead he eased his hands between the bars, gingerly laying them on the floor of the cage. A cockroach ran over his empty ring finger and down his sleeve, but the Stag-Man was silent. Max swallowed. Of course it didn’t know him from Adam—God knew how many women from Cripple Creek had gone running into its forest on summer nights. He took out his wallet, and a small secret photo he kept behind his ID. A woman with coiffed black hair and a red Christmas sweater gazed up and out with gorgeous cat-eyes. She was a little drunk but still healthy then, surrounded by cheap tinsel. “This is my mother. Twenty-seven years ago, you . . . ”
The Stag-Man looked at the photo and curled its lips back, showing its teeth. Those teeth were pointed. Max shuddered, and one of the drunks started to retch. At first the man spat bile and beer, but upon reaching into the back of his throat, began to pull out a long and thin industrial wire.
Max should have gotten fired that week—not that he would have cared—because he couldn’t focus on his paperwork. The window behind his desk let in too much light and too much landscape. Cripple Creek seemed filled with broken pre-war churches and painted-over signs: the skeletons of older towns. No matter where he went—the Kwik Shop, the liquor store—these battered, ghostly layers peeked through the concrete he walked upon. “You remember that lady Chastity Dawes?”
Kevin glanced at him over the crest of a golden taco. Max had tried to bring up the chupacabra, but Kevin would always pretend to be choking on something or getting a phone call. “The one that gave birth to a deer?”
“Yeah. Whatever happened to her? I know the Gordons own the nursery now.”
“She killed herself, man. Well, ‘died of exposure.’ But when you ditch your car off Highway 2 in the middle of a snow storm so you can go walking through a corn field, I don’t know how you call it anything else.” Kevin shrugged. “I guess once you’ve given birth to a monster, what the fuck else are you going to do?”
Max tried to picture those cornfields. They were a grim sight in winter—the stalks either pale and withered or draped with silent, crushing snow. “Isn’t that right by Digby Forest?”
“Hell if I know. I haven’t been there since elementary school.”
“Field trip,” said Max. He remembered his own school-sponsored foray into Digby Forest—or rather, he remembered being terrified that he would see the Stag-Man. He was so frightened, so attuned to any blur of movement and any sound of breaking twigs, that he learned nothing at all about Nebraska’s native forests. And here Chastity Dawes had gone running toward this doom, just like his mother sinking in the bathtub. At the time he had thought, Is this world so bad? but maybe they were onto something. “She was going on a field trip.”
“What?” The taco muffled Kevin’s words. “You know, Beecham, sometimes you freak me out.” He kept talking, but Max was looking out the window. Clouds had swooped in from the south in violent formation, armies of fists against armies of hammers. Something was on its way. Judging by the speed of his heartbeat, it was probably his fate.
Tom Lowell and his daughter Caridee were found murdered in their living room on Tuesday the 20th. Tom on the couch, Caridee on the floor, the television broadcasting an episode of the soap opera Coming Up Roses. To say murdered was to put it kindly: they had been disemboweled. The Creeker was gone, its cage bent open like a soup can. Relief washed over Cripple Creek, because people assumed that the malformed beast that shared their name had gone back to Digby Forest. They were duly sorry about Caridee, but at least nobody would have to see that damn thing again. Max alone knew that it was still in town, hiding in collapsed barns and hobbled school buses, and he lay awake at night waiting for it to come crawling through his window. The thought still made his skin crawl, but it was oddly reassuring to feel that he still belonged to someone, something. It was nice to know that he was still someone’s son.
At Cabela’s, he looked at the Deer Head Mounts. There was a whole wall of them, right beside the Buffalo Mounts and European Mounts. Some had shoulders, some only necks. The replicas were cheaper, but the originals looked at Max with soft and sad fraternal recognition. They were kin to the Stag-Man, his father—only smaller, with fair and innocent faces. They did not look like monsters spat out of hell. They looked like the deer that the Deer Crossing signs warned of, the deer that lived in the narrow strips of woodland between the farms and the roads. He briefly imagined the heads of all the world’s beasts mounted upon a giant fortress wall. His own head was among them, bolted to a wooden slab.
The sales clerk was rambling statistics. “That rack’s a 17-pointer, with a 30-inch spread. Came off an early season northern whitetail . . . ”
“Can you take the skin off?” Max asked.
The sales clerk looked shocked. “No . . . but we’ve got deer skin rugs.”
They had grizzly skin rugs too, as well as wolf skin rugs and cougar skin rugs and muskox skin rugs and child-sized lynx and badger and beaver skin rugs. All had heads attached to their flat and floppy puppet bodies. Unlike the snarling predators—still fighting even in this state of preserved death—the buck’s mouth was stitched closed. “It’s got a canvas backing. Professionally taxidermied.”
“I’ll take it,” Max said.
That evening he sat on the couch and wrapped himself with the deer skin rug. The buck’s head sat upon his own—he had to slouch to keep it from falling down his back. His new skin was so suffocatingly warm that he turned off the heater. Then he exhaled, trying to feel comfortable. He dug his nails into the hide and imagined it to be his own. What were the odds, he wondered, of having been born into a human body? Maybe it was the wrong one. Maybe he should have been a ruminant all along, just like Chastity Dawes’ fawn.
A door opened—judging by the hard slap of metal on wood, it was the screen door in the kitchen. He looked up. The Stag-Man, bloody-mouthed, stood in the doorway. Its antlers were scraping the ceiling. At first it was just breathing, staring; then it came gliding forward, never raising its hooves off the fake wood-paneled floor.
“Father,” mumbled Max, hoping that it would see him in his deer form. The Stag-Man did look into the false glass eyes of the dead buck, but quickly lowered its gaze to Max’s real eyes, all hazel and watery and bursting with nerves. That gaze reached right inside his head and rummaged around. Within this visual stranglehold the house changed and decomposed. Filth rose to the surface. He saw his mother creeping down the stairs out of the corner of his eye. Neither she nor his father saw each other. Her bloated lips called his name. After ten seconds, Max had to look away.
The Stag-Man hovered above him, sniffing deeply, then withdrew with a grunt. It paused at the doorway. It was waiting, Max realized. It grunted again and Max got to his feet. They were sharing a floor now, father and son. It was like sharing an earth.
How new this night-world was. A man with a flashlight could only point out the random human signposts that survived nightfall in the country—the gravel of a driveway, the lawn chairs on a porch. All else was lost in the dark and gnarly mass: the pulsing, growing stuff that flashligh
ts could not bear to focus on. Max was in the thick of it now, this world without property fences (only land), without cars (only lights), without houses (only wood). He was not sure if he was running or drowning, and he had lost the deer skin somewhere back on 10th Street. Sometimes he could throw himself fully into this night-run, lose himself in the muscle-searing pursuit of his Stag-Man father who did not run but madly leapt from things that used to be mailboxes to things that used to be trash cans.
And then he would look down at his hands and see his pale, chilled human skin. It made his stomach fold. He was pushing so fast that the ground seemed to roll beneath him, so fast his mind tumbled like a whirligig. And all the while, deep welts grew on his skin where trees had clawed him. With blood in the air, the Stag-Man let out a trembling, hungry, open-throated howl. Max felt it in his spine, as deep and familiar as a knife in a wound. He almost stopped. The boy inside him wanted to crawl home. This is home, he told himself. The others would have found you out eventually. You would have started to stink. So don’t mourn. Don’t mourn.
Bill MacAtee was dead, but he was not the one the Stag-Man wanted. The Stag-Man had killed him with a teacher’s patience, lingering over the precise angle and depth of the slice across Bill’s stomach, encouraging Max to scoop out the viscera. Bill was the kind of asshole that used to drive around town calling quiet men fags, and Max (having been Bill’s target once or twice) tried to be glad that Bill was dead. And maybe he was, but not like that, not with long swaths of Bill hanging out and inviting flies, not so Bill could stare up at the clouds like a middle-schooler rolling his eyes. The Stag-Man had already moved onto the true object of its desire: the MacAtees’ sheepdog, groomed and collared with hair the color of a Holstein cow. It had come running after Bill, barking indignantly, but when the Stag-Man turned toward the dog with its branch-like arms outstretched and its dirty claws dripping with the master’s blood, the domesticated little creature buckled down, whimpering.
At least the Stag-Man killed it quickly. Max wasn’t sure why—some hint of tenderness, or pity? The dog might have been wild, in another lifetime. After it collapsed, blood soaking its blue collar black, the Stag-Man squatted down and dug a hole beneath the dog’s ribs. Liquid gushed out along with a twitch and a squeak as if the little life was not quite gone. Max pressed his hands against his own belly. The Stag-Man pulled tendons and muscles and gelatinous organs out of this cavity like they were the treasures of the damn Sierra Madre, but all Max saw when the Stag-Man’s hands opened was inside-out-dog, all the wet under-the-skin shit that he didn’t want to see. And then the smell—putrid, sour, like drowned flowers—hit him.
Max retched. He slapped his hand over his mouth so that when the salt bubbled up his throat he could chase it back down. When he looked up the Stag-Man was standing at full height. The burnt black eyes drilled down into him as if from the pinnacle of a grotesque tower. The steaming, dripping hand was still available; God only knew he tried to take it. His father was grunting at him, thrusting the hand forward, snorting. He had flashbacks of walking across Fallspur Bridge, and the sunburned children on the other side who screamed at him to hurry and cross. The plank wobbled. The world beneath, the great bottomless funnel, rocked and churned. His body failed him now as it had failed him then. The Stag-Man threw the innards at his heart and Max compulsively shuddered, trying to shake the wetness off without getting it under his nails. Maybe it was this final twitch that ruined it, because the Stag-Man turned then, growling: away from Max, back toward the wild tree line. Max hurried after, mewling like a lost animal. He had not realized until then how warm he had felt in his father’s presence.
And then his father had him by the neck in a bristling, rough embrace. His ribs were groaning, but Max tried not to struggle. His mother had sometimes held him this way. “Come here. Oh God. Don’t cry.” A bark-skin hand clenched the roots of his hair—so tightly that he could feel his scalp peeling off his skull, tears shooting into his eyes, so tightly that he forgot all but this pain and an incomprehensible fear—and ripped Max away. Like a man pulling off a leech. A human would have been disemboweled and a fawn would have been taken along, but Max was just tossed into the winter grass, a formless mess not even a mother could love. It came down like an iron gate between them: you are nothing of mine.
Max flinched and curled his muscles, trying to turn his trembling body into a fist. The Stag-Man was gliding away toward the foggy pines. “Don’t you dare walk away!” Max shouted. “Hey, you look at me!”
There was no response. He remembered his mother sitting in her rocking chair, staring unshaken at the black locust tree. He could have set himself on fire and not drawn her eye—not until she coughed on his ashes would she realize that the skinny thing she sometimes called her child was gone. He grabbed Bill MacAtee’s shotgun, pulling back the cold, thick fingers one by one, and after another warning—another “Look at me!”—he fired it at his father. The cartridge opened a hole in the tawny hide of his father’s back. Blood-petals sprayed into the frosted dawn like a bridal bouquet, but for a full thirty seconds, the Stag-Man kept walking. What call could be higher than its own survival? Max’s eyes began to water and when he looked back after wiping his face, the Stag-Man was gone. A deflated lump so unlike the striking figure in his mother’s Polaroid lay in its place. The pines shook and Max hunched over, shivering.
“Bill?” Caroline MacAtee stood on the back porch. Her trembling fingers rose to touch her mouth. Max could not tell—simply could not determine—whether she was staring at him or at the dead things gathered at his feet.
“Everything’s okay!” Max shouted, raising the rifle. “It’s gone now, I took care of it!”
Caroline MacAtee didn’t thank him—she backed into her house and slammed the door. But maybe he couldn’t blame her, because here it was starting to snow.
The wild had been tamed, and now they were losing visibility. Max was too busy clenching his teeth and the steering wheel to manipulate the windshield wipers, and he drifted toward what looked like a glory-white horizon before recalling fear and slamming on the brakes. He slid to a stop half-on, half-off the shoulder. “A fire out in Digby Forest . . . ” KMKO Radio was starting to cut out. “Not sure if they’re going to send the Fire Department on account of . . . hope it doesn’t come near us . . . ” On the other side of the road, a pudgy man in a green Parks and Recreation jacket stood next to a blinking truck. He was trying to shovel the remains of a very large piece of road kill into the truck’s open bed. Black tarp was whipping in the wind.
Max rolled down his window. “What is that?” he shouted.
“Hell if I know,” the Parks and Recreation man shouted back. “Guy said it just showed up in the middle of the road, didn’t even try to get out of the way.”
The corpse was the size of a small horse and covered with icy fur, but elephantine tusks protruded from the garbled carcass.
“Sixth call we’ve had this hour. I didn’t even know we had these many animals to run down.” The Parks and Recreation man started laughing, then coughing. “You know there’s birds falling out of the sky by the racetrack? Something in the weather, I guess.”
Deena used to say that animals could tell when it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. “You’ll know when bad times are coming,” she whispered, “Because you’ll hear them howling.” Max closed his eyes. He never wanted to think of that name again. Never wanted to see that bewitched smile again. Stay dead, he thought. Stay dead.
“You hear that Digby’s burning down?”
Suddenly tired, Max rested his arms against the steering wheel. “Yeah, I heard.”
“I hope they let it burn. That no-good place.” The man’s lower lip was trembling. “It’s just a breeding ground for monsters.”
Burning the black locust tree had cauterized some of the wounds in his young heart. Maybe that was all Cripple Creek needed: a good cleansing burn, some scar tissue to seal away the unpleasantness. He nodded. “Get rid of it,” he said. “
Nothing else you can do.” With growing anger, the Parks and Recreation man smashed his shovel against the unknown animal. The creature was fixed to the ice, more figurine than entity, too ugly and beaten to be mounted on somebody’s wall. Max looked away.
Both eastbound and westward, cars were diving off the edge of the road into the white expanse. Max counted eight in all. Their doors were open, their seats were empty. He didn’t know where those drivers thought they were going—did they really think there was anything left to run away to? The world was smothered with ash and snow.
Mallory’s fluorescent windows glared like the beacon of an arctic outpost, so harsh he had to squint. He rang the door bell and listened to her slippered feet approach from the other side. Was she looking through the peep hole? Did she see spatters of blood, any antler stubs? No—she was unlocking the dead bolt, unhooking the security chain. She opened the door, and he was surprised by how empty and sterile her home looked, like a hollow egg. Bare as the sky and the buried fields. No, not empty, he told himself. Safe from monsters. “Max?” She leaned her listless head against the door. “What are you doing here?”
“I cleaned myself up,” he said. “I bashed in those demons. I dropped that baggage . . . feel lighter already. I’m good as new.” He realized that he could not feel his lips. But after all these years of feeling, he could use a little numbness. It was a small price to pay for the capacity to forget. “I want to start over. Please, Mallory. We can be happy, I know it.”
Mallory’s sleepy blue eyes looked him up and down. She smiled faintly. As she parted her lips to speak the wind rose to an ear-splitting shriek, and all the sound in the world went out.
Biographies
Nathan Ballingrud lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter. His short stories have appeared in SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror, Lovecraft Unbound, Teeth, and other places. Several stories have been reprinted in various Year’s Best anthologies, and he won the Shirley Jackson Award for “The Monsters of Heaven.” He can be found online at nathanballingrud.wordpress.com.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Page 44
