by Jeff Strand
Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope
Edited by
John Palisano
Western Legends Press
Unnatural Tales Of The Jackalope
Copyright © 2012 individual authors
and Western Legends Press
Cover Artwork © 2012 Jason Mones
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places are either invented by the authors or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events, locations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Or so the King Jackalope wants you to believe.
Book Cover Design
By D.T. Griffith
Interior Design
By Stephen Tallarico, John Palisano, D.T. Griffith
Copy Editing
By Joseph A. Perry, John Palisano, Aaron J. French
Western Legends Logo Created by D.T. Griffith
Ebook Formatting
By Kate Jonez
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1477451915
ISBN-13: 1477451919
Western Legends Press
P.O. BOX 1226
Hollywood, California 90078
www.facebook.com/WesternLegendsPress
THE ARTISTS
The cover art was created by Jason Mones. Please visit his website: www.jasonmones.com
The graphic design and layout of the book was created by D.T. Griffith.
You can check him out at:
www.dtgriffith.com
Thank you both for doing a superlative job at bringing this anthology to life.
DEDICATION
A portion of the proceeds from this book
will be donated
in loving memory to
Michael Louis Calvillo
Please check out:
The Calvillo Hope Fund
[email protected]
AN INTRODUCTION FROM CASIE SMALLS
WHEN I FIRST MET THE EDITOR of this book, that wild-haired, scurry-footed man John Palisano, I really thought he was out of his mind. Or on the other side of sober. Probably both. Who′d want to assemble a book of stories about mythological creatures most people believed were invented to sell postcards in the American Southwestern during the 1960s? Rabbits with antlers glued on top? Ain′t real. Just a goof. Right? Sure. ″There′s truth behind every joke,″ he said. ″I want to find that truth.″
So why would he approach me? I′m small time. I work at a small College in Arizona teaching about the critters of the area, mostly to soon-to-be ranchers and farmers. People that work the land. Most my students wouldn′t have any idea about what I do in my spare time. I′m a pretty practical man. I do my best not to smile when I′m working. Smiling′s no fun, and wins you no respect. And I don′t take kindly to myths and make-believe. Jackalopes? You kidding me? Them things are fake. Made up. Silly. A fad that′s probably about ready to fade away.
Except that it isn′t.
Except that people started seeing them. People I trusted. Good women and men who didn′t have time to make up stories and pretend. The kind of people who don′t like reading unless they really have to. The kind of people that don′t like movies or made-up things. So how could this be?
I went out and waited with one good man, George Smith. We waited one night on his ranch out by where the steer fences fade into the distance. Now, listen: I didn′t expect nothing. I didn′t bring a camera. I didn′t bring a gun. Just my skepticism and my thirsty throat. George told me he′d ply me with beer if I came. ″Sure,″ I′d said. ″Sounds like a fine way to kill an evening.″
I saw one.
And not just any one, I tell you. She was a big sucker. Like a King Penguin. I should probably correct that because I think she saw us first. She raised an arm and pointed at us, one yellow nail right at my eye. Right then I knew there was something to this. Rabbits don′t get that big, and they sure as heck don′t point at people.
She spoke in a tongue I can′t describe. Her King waddled up next to her. He was shorter than she was, and I got the feeling she was the one calling the shots and he ended up doing all the dirty work. She leaned over and spoke again, but it was quieter.
A second later the King Jackalope charged us. I mean to say that sucker was faster than shit after Taco Bell. My legs almost went right out from under me when I twisted round and saw those antlers reflecting moonlight...I was sure they′d be reflecting my gored insides if I didn′t hurry.
I caught poor George looking down at himself while he ran. He sported a large pee spot that ran from his belt all the way down his right leg. Couldn′t have made it any easier.
Why didn′t I bring my camera? Or take out my phone and take a picture?
We ran fast as we could. Details are blurry, but somehow we got away. Chalk it up to adrenaline, I guess. Or willful forgetfulness.
Either way, I ain′t seen one since.
But I′m gonna. One day I′ll have my proof.
That′s what′s been driving me all these years. Collecting people′s stories. I turned John onto a few of the people in these pages. Course we had to change some names and events to protect the guilty, and some of them took some whisky soaked convincing, but they all made it to the finish line with us.
So there you have it, friends.
Check out these artifacts and make a conclusion for yourself at the end of the book. And if you believe, come look me up. I′m always looking for good folk to come join me on the lookouts. Maybe you′ll be my lucky charm. Just make sure you bring something to drink that′ll keep you warm, k? Never know what you′re going to discover if you let yourself believe.
— Casie
THE LONELIEST JACKALOPE
JEFF STRAND
BOB THE HIKER FLAILED around on the ground, screaming as eight or nine jackalopes jabbed at him with their razor-sharp antlers. Gordon the Jackalope sat off to the side and sadly watched.
"Ow! Ow! Ow!" Bob shrieked. "I have never encountered such a high volume of pain! These fierce beasts will be the death of me! Ow! I've just lost three of my ten fingers! Doomsday has arrived; not on an apocalyptic scale, of course, but for poor Bob the Hiker, the end approaches! Ow! My armpit! I never imagined that my armpit was so sensitive! Ooooh, I can see a rainbow in the mist of my blood...or am I merely hallucinating?"
The jackalopes continued their gruesome attack. One might assume that with so many pairs of antlers stabbing into a human body at once, they would get tangled, or at least clack against each other. But these jackalopes, these fearsome monsters, had killed so many hikers (thirty-eight, not including Bob the Hiker, who still drew breath, if not very efficiently) that they were a well-oiled machine of murder.
"If only I had not hiked on this trail by myself!" Bob cried out. "It upsets me to see so much of my blood no longer contained by my skin! Why, I think I even see a bone! How peculiar to see something that was not meant to be seen without the use of an X-ray machine! I feel that in seven seconds I will have expired...perhaps four now...less than four now...woe..."
And with that, Bob the Hiker died (thirty-nine). The jackalopes laughed amongst themselves, a most dark and ghoulish laugh indeed, and then they began to devour Bob's dead body, veins and all.
But not Gordon. Gordon the Jackalope just watched, feeling great sorrow. He even cried a little, his tiny nose twitching with each tear.
Before long Bob the Hiker had been replaced by Bob the Skeleton. The jackalopes, those sinister creatures, played merry games with his
bones. They bowled with his skull and played marbles with his toe-bones and wore his hipbone like a silly hat and had swordfights with his leg-bones and, oh, those nasty wretched demons used them all!
Soon the sun began to set, and as everybody knows, jackalopes are afraid of the dark. So they hopped away from the scene of grisly carnage to return to their den.
"Why are you so sad?" asked Vincent the Jackalope, joining Gordon at the back of the line. He had some blood on his fur that he was saving for later. "It was a great kill today, don't you agree?"
Gordon shrugged as well as a rabbit can shrug. "I guess so."
"You guess so? At one point he was spraying like a fountain from three different places. I'll have his muck under my paws for the next week, and I approve of that. Had I been just a hair quicker, I would have gotten part of an eyeball. Why aren't you basking in the post-human-shredding glow like the rest of us?"
"Because, Vincent, I only got to watch."
"But why did you only...oh, that's right. I forgot. I'm so very sorry."
Vincent suddenly seemed to realize that socializing with Gordon was a good way to get shunned, and he hopped further up the line.
Gordon the Jackalope had been born terribly disfigured. Oh, his ears were fine, and his legs were fine, and his fluffy brown tail was fine, but Gordon — it was almost too unspeakable to admit — had no antlers. Not even one.
William, the elder of this pack of jackalopes, had scowled at the newborn bunny, as Gordon's mother and father averted their eyes in shame. "A jackalope without antlers? What's the point of that? Why, he might as well be a regular old rabbit!"
"Please don't banish him," Gordon's mother had pleaded.
"Or squash him under your foot!" Gordon's father had added.
William the Elder had thought for a while. A jackalope without antlers was about as threatening as a clown without fangs. If another pack of jackalopes saw them, oh, how they'd laugh! The only solution to this problem was to have the other jackalopes rip the new bunny to pieces, and then console the distraught parents with an unrelated amusing anecdote.
"Please show mercy!" Gordon's mother had said. "He might still grow antlers!"
Jackalopes were born with their antlers intact, which is why jackalope mothers were not as keen to breed as other rabbits. William the Elder had never heard of a jackalope sprouting antlers later in life, but he supposed that it wasn't out of the realm of possibility. What if Gordon grew the largest, mightiest antlers of them all? What if he was fulfilling some sort of prophecy?
"Very well, I will allow him to live, and we will strive to treat him as if he were not a grotesque mutation. I'm not saying that he won't occasionally be ridiculed; in fact, I'd be disappointed if he weren't. A bit of ridicule is good for the soul when you're a misshapen aberration. But though we will never let him forget that he is inferior to the rest of us, at least we won't pretend he's a leper." He almost added "A Lepus leper!" but as the jackalope elder that kind of joke would have been inappropriate.
And so Gordon was given permission to not be stomped upon. But he did not grow antlers. For six long years, at least once a day he'd close his eyes and scrunch up his face and squeeze all of the muscles in his head as hard as he could...yet no antlers grew.
He was an antler-free jackalope.
Nothing could be sadder than that.
Except for an orphan jackalope, which is what he became when he was two years old. Bears were so unkind.
Sometimes Gordon tried to put a happy spin on his birth defect. For example, unlike the rest of the jackalopes, he could sleep on his side. He could also duck under things with greater ease. Sadly, those were minor benefits, and Gordon was the loneliest jackalope in the entire land.
* * *
"Die! Die! Die! Die! Noooooooo!"
Each time he said to die, Paul the Hiker had stabbed at a jackalope with his hunting knife. The first, second, and fourth stabs had missed, but the third got Vincent right between the eyes. Though of course there were no good places to be stabbed, this was a particularly bad one, and Gordon watched his closest friend fall dead. The rest of the jackalopes swarmed around the hiker and severed both of his legs with their antlers, inspiring the "Noooooooo!" comment.
Gordon hurried over to Vincent, who was too dead to even let out a final gurgle. His best friend...gone! His only friend...gone! And he wasn't even that great of a friend. What a sad, sad life it was when his dear friend could perish and yet Gordon would only lose a few minutes of companionship each day?
"Please spare me!" wailed Paul the Hiker. "I beg you not to turn me into a man with no legs and but one arm! Argh! Now I beg you not to turn me into a man with no legs and no arms! Argh! Now I beg you not to shorten my torso! Argh! Now I beg you not to...argh, you're already unspooling my upper and lower intestines! You have failed to heed all of my requests! Such cruelty!"
Soon the jackalopes, those unconscionable fiends, had whittled Paul the Hiker into a form that was no longer capable of speech. Though a couple of them looked sadly in Vincent's direction, most of the thrill-killers were too overcome by bloodlust to pay much attention to their fallen comrade.
Jackalopes, like most animals living in nature, didn't own much in the way of physical possessions. But as the sun began to set and the jackalopes finished playing with Paul's remains, Gordon sniffed at the knife that had punctured Vincent's skull and picked it up in his mouth.
It was difficult to bring the weapon back to the jackalope's den, because despite their homicidal nature, it must be remembered that they are still tiny little furry bunnies whose bodies were not physically designed by God for knife carrying. But Gordon dragged the knife all the way home.
The next time there was a group kill of a hiker, Gordon did not sit sadly and watch the other jackalopes have all the fun. Instead, he nosed through the contents of the hiker's backpack until he found another knife. It was smaller than the first, but it would have to do.
In their den, while the other jackalopes slept and dreamt of screaming human baby heads, Gordon stared at his knives. Though he was afraid of the dark, there was something he had to do at night, and so he'd have to do it alone.
Two knives were even more difficult to drag around than one (it's simple mathematics and simple physics) but Gordon was a very determined jackalope. Oh, how scary the night was! There were strange sounds, and spooky shadows in the full moon, and even the ghost of Bob the Hiker, wandering the earth like a lost soul desperately seeking passage to the next world.
Gordon didn't let these distract him. He needed to find a real live hiker at night. It had to be at night, because what he really needed was...
There! Up ahead! A campfire!
Gordon crept up to the fire. A hiker lay next to it in a sleeping bag, asleep. Gordon twitched his nose with delight and dropped both knives into the edge of the flames.
The first time Gordon saw a fire, a couple of days before the bear ate his parents, he'd put his paw right into the beautiful orange light. It hurt. And as he scampered away, he'd noticed that a small rock stuck to the skin of his burnt paw.
He gazed at the two knives in the fire.
This was not going to feel good.
Not even a tiny bit.
But if it meant an end to the loneliness...
Gordon waited until the knives looked ready, braced himself for an extremely uncomfortable sensory experience, and then pressed his forehead against the hot steel.
The smell of burnt fur and sizzling bunny flesh was not pleasing to his adorable nose, and he felt safe equating this pain to the eternal torment of jackalope hell. But he did not lift his head until he felt his brain begin to cook.
The agony was beyond description, and, yes, he could tell that he was less sane than he had been before shoving his head into the fire, but now Gordon the Jackalope had two sharp, gleaming steel antlers!
He cackled with glee for a while, then stabbed the hiker to death right through his sleeping bag. He'd done an excellent job — the
blades didn't even wobble.
Obviously, a tiny little creature like Gordon couldn't drag the entire body back to the jackalope den, but the hiker's head was round and it rolled easily.
"Look what I have done!" Gordon said, kicking the head right over to where six or seven of the others slept in a big bunny pile.
Well, those jackalopes, those horrid devils, were delighted by what they saw! None of them had ever witnessed self-mutilation before, and they all agreed that it was a fine thing.
And so Gordon was no longer the loneliest jackalope in the land. Oh, he certainly wasn't the most popular. They called him "metal head" and "burnt head" and "silver head" and lots of other mean names, but he was more popular than he'd been without antlers at all, and the other jackalopes usually let him be the first to sever a hamstring.
Though the knives did eventually fall off, it was a simple enough task for Gordon to burn them back on again. And, yes, the third time he did so he went completely mad, but at least he was happy during his total descent into madness, and his story should be taken as an inspiration to us all.
RUNNING WITH JACKALOPES
Sephera Giron
THERE WAS THAT SINGING AGAIN.
I lay in my bed in the darkness of my room, goosebumps rippling my flesh as the grating high pitched lullaby echoed from the living room. At first, I thought it might have been a cat in heat howling outside of my window but the sound was coming from inside my small apartment. Sighing, I threw back the covers and slipped out of bed to follow the sound. It was sticky hot in the apartment, as always, and I wiped my sweat soaked hair from my eyes as I stumbled out into my tiny narrow hallway. The living room glowed faintly with the full moon shining through the sheers. The haunting noise screeched higher and then stopped as I entered the living room and turned to face the couch.