After a long and arduous battle we managed to eliminate the foul creatures. Once the smoke had cleared the good Mr. Shackleford officially offered me a job with his company. I have been traveling with the Professional Monster Killers ever since. I will endeavor to record our adventures with the utmost accuracy.
We are currently journeying by rail to the recently added state of Utah. A few days ago we received a letter from a Mr. Wilford Woodruff of the Mormons, seeking to hire our services. Apparently some foul creature has made its home in one of Utah’s northernmost lakes. It is unknown how long it has dwelled there, perhaps subsisting off of fish and wildlife, but recently it had taken to devouring people, which was most unacceptable. We have been commissioned to deal with this nefarious beast.
As Mr. Shackleford gathered the company, he pontificated upon the idea of someday having teams of professional monster killers scattered about the continent, ready to respond quickly to monster threats without the necessity of us riding from town to town first. Someday perhaps Mr. Shackleford—being a man of great industry—will build such an empire, but now is not that day, which is why I’m writing this in a train car chugging relentlessly westward.
Due to our small and efficient company of eight men, one woman, four dogs, twenty-two horses—riding and pack—and one war wagon (the second had not yet been fully repaired from our encounter with the Chenoo) we were able to mobilize quickly. We loaded thousands of rounds of ammunition, many pounds of dynamite, and our two Colt-Browning machineguns upon the train. Because our new client informed us the monster was aquatic in nature and exceedingly large of stature, Balthazar Abrams—who serves as our quartermaster—sent a telegram to San Francisco arranging the purchase of several whaling harpoons, and requesting expedited shipping to our new location.
That is the thing about hunting monsters. We must be prepared for everything, and if we are not, then we must adapt quickly. Everything can be killed. We just so happen to be very good at killing the big things. I am most eager for the opportunity to harpoon something.
If Hannah Stone had to choose the one thing about Utah she hated the most, it had to be the weather.
While she had lived in the West for much of her life, Hannah had never cared for the climate. So naturally, they just had to go to Utah in the “spring” after one of the harshest winters in years. In the mornings it was freezing cold to the point that she needed her thickest coat, then the afternoons would be so hot and dry that she’d empty a good-sized canteen in under an hour. Rain would flood in, even when just a few hours prior, the only clouds in the sky were wispy and small. The worst part, though, had to be the snowstorms. Just when it looked like the weather was finally going to regulate itself, clouds would roll in and drop inches of snow. There was just something not right about a snowstorm in May.
Ten minutes ago she’d sat by the little hotel window to enjoy the sun while she ate her lunch. Now she was watching snow flurries. Utah could go straight to hell.
But Hannah didn’t so much as mutter about that. Garlick and Abrams were also present. The other Professional Monster Killers laughed and poked fun at her whenever she complained. Sure, the men complained just as much, if not more—the weather, the pay, the food, the distance traveled, the hours in the saddle, the aching bones, so on and so forth—but they only seemed to notice when she did it. It was natural, Hannah supposed. She was not only the newest member of the group, but also the youngest and the only woman. She knew Bubba hadn’t wanted to hire her for those exact reasons, thinking monster killing was too difficult for womenfolk or some such nonsense. Except she’d been too stubborn to leave and Bubba had been too much the Southern Gentleman to let her die.
Despite her annoyance at being treated like a child at times, for the most part she got along well with her compatriots. The Professional Monster Killers were a rowdy band that said what they meant and meant what they said. They didn’t care for the opinions of most normal folk. Nor did they care that she wore men’s trousers, or that she would much rather beat the other hunters at poker than do needlework, or whatever boring thing it was that more traditional ladies were supposed to do to keep themselves entertained. The group was outspoken and Hannah respected that.
However, that nature was probably the reason why Bubba always met the clients alone. A few hours after going to meet with their client’s representatives, he returned to the hotel, looking stern and glum as usual.
“Balthazar, Harvey, Miss Stone,” he said by way of greeting. “Where’s the rest?”
“I believe, for most of them, sleeping off a drunk, boss,” Balthazar explained. This may have been Mormon country, but Ogden was a town born to cater to the railroad, so the religious types ignored the little Sodom and Gomorrah of the mountains. “The boys were excited for the change in scenery. They were up late.”
Balthazar was too old for that nonsense, and Garlick fancied himself something of a preacher, but the rest did enjoy their saloon tours, loud piano music, and women of ill repute. Despite that, all of them had remained respectable gentlemen and treated Hannah as a lady at all times; though she liked to think that was because they respected her, she was perpetually armed, and would shoot anybody who looked at her cross-eyed, she’d also found out that Bubba had warned them the first one who acted the ass toward her, he’d castrate like an unruly bull calf.
“Shall I summon them, Mr. Shackleford?” Hannah asked.
“Slumbering past noon like bums . . . Please do.”
She put her fingers to her lips and let out an unholy high-pitched whistle. It was the next best thing to firing her revolver into the air.
“While those roustabouts stir, I’ll tell you three the bad news. They’ve tried to kill the monster themselves several times, but the thing never appears when armed men are waiting in ambush. It’s too clever for that and remains hiding in the depths. Yet it continues to pick off victims, sometimes even slithering up into the shallows and plucking travelers from the shore. Witnesses describe a creature of incredible size.”
Abrams chuckled. “They always do.”
“Yet these weren’t the types prone to exaggeration. Several confirmed that it was seen effortlessly dragging a full grown horse and rider into the water. This is nothing natural. It’s got a neck like a serpent, with the head of an alligator upon the end, but a bulbous body with tentacles like a squid.”
Garlick pounded the table. “It’s the Leviathan of Revelations! I knew it!”
“No. It ain’t. Calm yourself, Harvey. Not every miscellaneous critter we come across is opening the seventh seal and bringing about the apocalypse.”
“That’s not how—” Garlick started to correct him, but Bubba held up his hand.
“And even if some critter was ushering in the end times I wouldn’t particularly care, but I would ask for an increase in our fees.”
“Then let’s mount up and go shoot us a lake monster.” Hannah was extremely excited, having never shot a lake monster before.
“Don’t be hasty, Stone.”
She bit her tongue. Hannah was aware of her reputation for being infamously obstinate and aggressively quarrelsome, but contrary to popular belief she did listen to her boss most of the time. Partly because he was the one who paid her, but mostly because she had started to look up to him as a mentor. Bubba was the one who issued the smart orders that kept them alive in a fight, and she’d rather not die before she got a chance to live the rest of her life.
“There’s something not right about these stories. I’m no natural philosopher but a hybrid of distant ocean and swamp creatures ending up in a fresh water lake in the middle of the continent don’t make a lick of sense. If this is the product of foul sorcery or some form of spirit, we need to know, because there ain’t nothing more annoying that having bullets pass through something like it’s made of smoke. So we’ll take our time, figure out the nature of the thing, then make our move.”
Bear Lake is several days’ ride to the north of the train station, throug
h high, rugged mountain passes. Currently we are traveling by horse and wagon toward Cache Valley.
One thing that Mr. Shackleford always stresses is the value of good research. If all anyone needed to do to make a career of monster eradication was a shotgun and some grit, we would be out of a job. When embarking on the hunt for a trophy animal, an accomplished hunter will spend just as much, if not more, time preparing, than in the pursuit itself. We are much the same.
However, information pertaining to the supernatural is often lacking in accuracy. We hunt creatures of legend and fairy tale, so the natural place to look would be those old stories. On occasion, they will have some good information, but often over the decades the stories have broken away from the actual facts and gone down divergent paths. Unfortunately, blatantly asking a normal person off the street if they had seen a monster was simply not going to go well. President McKinley has on two prior occasions sent Mr. Shackleford strongly worded letters admonishing him upon the necessity of keeping the existence of monsters secret.
So a professional killer of monsters must tread cautiously, relying only on the best sources of information.
Hannah never understood why Bubba trusted the Scholar.
She had been winning the current hand of poker against some of the other Professional Killers when Skirmish McKillington—their massive-yet-friendly Irish boxer—burst into the parlor, telegrams in hand. “Boss! Words back from the Scholar!”
“Thank you, Skirmish.” Bubba took the telegrams and began to read. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Bubba was usually a cautious man when it came to trust. Since she had begun working under him, he had warned her of the dangers of cavorting with shadier characters far more than she could bother to count. Thus, naturally, Hannah found it mighty hypocritical of him to trust the advice of a mysterious and unnamed outsider. There was something mighty shifty about somebody who signed his correspondence only with the letter S.
Despite his suspicious nature and unknown intentions, the information the Scholar sent was usually fairly accurate, and when he couldn’t be sure of his own research, he pointed them toward a “regional folklore expert.” This was generally someone who had actually seen the monster firsthand, or at least had a vague understanding as to what it was. Hannah was curious as to what manner of man he must have been to know all of these strange people, considering the last “expert” dispatched was a powerful witchdoctor poison woman who could turn into a murder of angry crows.
“The telegraph operator confirmed the same thing we already heard,” Skirmish told the rest of them as Bubba read. “There’s an eerie howl that goes out over the lake, echos for miles, heralding the coming of the beast. When they hear that sound, the locals go inside and hide their children. ”
The small boarding house they were renting in the tiny town of Pickleville was empty except for their company, and the sharpshooter could tell why. Blue-green wallpaper was peeling off in the corners and edges of the room, and the whole thing smelled like mold and mildew. The proprietor was a scruffy-looking sort that liked to glare at the group whenever they raised their voices, as if they were going to scare off the rest of his nonexistent patrons. They probably would have gone somewhere else, but the rooms and the booze were cheap, not that Hannah would be having any of the latter. Drink made her hands too shaky to shoot straight, and it made it harder for her to successfully cheat at poker.
“I knew there was something unnatural about this creature,” Bubba said as he put down the telegrams.
“Well, sure, boss,” Skirmish replied. “I figured that was implied by all them tentacles.”
“Not that. The Shoshone had legends of a lake spirit. Jim Bridger even saw it when he came through here back in the twenties, but our target don’t match his description at all. Poking around town, though this area has been settled by white men since the sixties, this squid beast was only first spotted a few years ago, and has only in the last two seasons taken to eating people. I think our monster is a relative newcomer, and now I know from where . . . Stone, get your gear and saddle up. We got some investigating to do.”
Hannah was a little surprised. Bubba had never called upon her to aid in any witness interviews before. She tended to do rather poorly in the speaking-to-people part of the job. It was probably something to do with her aggressively oppositional nature, and the fact that most folks were stupid and annoying. “Why me?”
“A traveling circus is similar to a Wild West Show, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Good. Then you should feel right at home. I believe we’re dealing with an escaped circus freak.”
It is quite common for those of us in this profession to run into difficulties. Sometimes the monster we’re hunting turns out to be quite a bit stronger than we thought it would be, or an entirely different creature altogether. Death is not an uncommon occurrence. Other times, the fault lies with the clients, who will occasionally try to swindle their way out of paying, though they usually back down after realizing what manner of professionals they are dealing with. Often we have difficulty with the local population either meddling, chasing off our prey, or getting themselves eaten.
Sometimes the problem with the locals is even more challenging in nature. In the case of the Bear Lake Monster, there was an individual who actually wished to protect the creature and shelter it from harm.
Some supernatural creatures, such as nosferatus or other beings of such dark persuasion, have the ability to manipulate people’s minds. This charm is usually broken when the source of the manipulation is exterminated. It is far more difficult when the person in question is genuinely emotionally attached to the beast we’re trying to eliminate.
Then it gets complicated.
Everywhere was lush and green, and wildflowers of all sorts of colors popped up in clumps all around the trail they were riding. Hannah probably would have thought it was very pretty, if she bothered enough to care. The grumpy young woman was instead focusing on the task ahead of them. Shooting was easy. Talking was hard. So get through this, shoot the monster, then go onto another job in another place and kill whatever problem they had there. Repeat.
Hannah liked to think she had “a roaming spirit,” though when she’d attempted to describe her general feeling of discontent to Bubba, he’d called it ‘being young and stupid.’ She couldn’t help that she couldn’t stay in one place for long. That’s why she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to begin with. All she had to do was travel around with the group and perform a few tricks for an adoring crowd. The only downside had been when she actually had to interact with that crowd. She couldn’t help that she had an angry looking face, even when she wasn’t angry at all. It tended to put folks off.
A small cabin came into view through the trees. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney or movement coming from within, but the tidiness and overall condition of the place meant it was lived in. They were a long ways out from town.
“Somebody was searching for privacy,” she mused.
“Keeps to herself something fierce, they say. Avoids nearly everyone. The locals figure she’s a witch.”
“Oh.” Hannah had actually been thinking this kind of seclusion would be nice.
Bubba loudly hailed the cabin as they approached. When nobody shouted back or shot at them, they dismounted and hitched their horses to sturdy branches. As Bubba knocked on the door, Hannah could hear shuffling and the occasional falling object through the log walls.
“Hello. I’m Bubba Shackleford. I mean you no inconvenience but there’s an important matter to discuss.”
After a few moments the door opened a crack and a face popped out.
Now, Hannah had seen plenty of ugly people in her comparatively short lifespan, but this woman took the cake, pug dog ugly. Hannah was a tall girl, but the lady that answered the door was abnormally short, probably only reaching the sharpshooter’s stomach. Only the lady was so wide and thick that they probably weighed about the same. Her face
was square, well, it was probably square, it was hard to tell with the matted beard which stretched from below her large, bulbous nose to her waist.
“What’chu want?”
Hannah looked over to her boss, to the strange woman, and back again. If Bubba was surprised at all by her appearance, he certainly didn’t show it. Then again, he’s probably seen weirder.
“I’m assuming you’re Mildred Jemfinder. I believe you have some information on the Bear Lake Monster.”
The lady swung her head back and forth, as if checking for something, before opening the door the rest of the way. The two hunters took that as their cue to enter.
The inside of the log cabin was nowhere near as clean as the outside was. Piles of junk were illuminated by whatever light had managed to sneak in around the furs covering the windows and the now open door. She had accumulated everything: old newspapers, Sears and Roebuck catalogs, empty sacks, old bottles, scraps of cloth, and various metal trinkets. Through all the mess, Hannah saw the faint glimmer of reflected light on top of the mantle. It was some kind of large seashell, with shimmering colors of all shades. She’d only noticed it due to all the contrast from the otherwise dismal room. Its frequent use was obvious, due to the lack of dust. A brief moment of eye contact indicated that Bubba had seen the shell too.
The extremely short woman picked her way through the clutter before shoving more trash off of what turned out to be a chair. With some difficulty, she managed to firmly plant herself in said chair before crossing her arms and looking at the two.
“What’chu want with Bubbles?”
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