by Mr. Deadman
“This whole place—there’s an energy. My dad said this used to be Cherokee land.”
“Why don’t we talk about our plan?” The following day we were going to hike to the cabin at the top of the mountain. Prez had brought his dad’s gun, and I had my bow, and we were going hunting for deer. Since the season didn’t start until September, we had to be stealthy. “We’ll go up tomorrow,” I said, “at dusk.”
“You boys better not be up to something,” Grandma scolded, shocking me again with another complete sentence. She scraped her chair across the floor, and by the time I turned around, she was staring us down with her phlegmy blue cataracts. “You hear me, Ronnie?”
“It’s Buddy, G-ma.” I laughed. “Your grandson. We’re not up to nothing. Just hiking up the mountain tomorrow.”
“Is she looking at us?” Preston asked. “You said she’s blind, right?”
“Oh, I can see more than you can.” She rubbed her hands together. “You,” she said, pointing a boney finger at Preston, “are not supposed to be here.”
Preston pretended to look at his cards.
“Have I ever told you about the Azgens?”
“No, ma’am,” Preston squeaked. “Buddy, we going to play this game or what?”
She put her hands in front of her eyes and opened and closed them. “And the Moon-eyed people don’t tolerate shit like young boys hunting out of season.”
How did she know? “Don’t curse in front of company, G-ma. I’ll get you one of your crème eggs.”
“I don’t mind.” Prez tried to play it cool, but he was already white as a ghost.
“Have I ever told you about the all-white people with black hands? Six fingers on each side. ‘You can talk to them, but don’t touch them,’ the pastor said.” She patted her baldhead. “He said my hair was beautiful.”
Prez’s eyes were wide as saucers.
“She’s pulling your leg.” I used my finger to make the universal cuckoo sign next to my ear.
Prez sloughed off his fear by playing like something had ahold of him under the table and slipped down in his chair. Maybe this was what Daddy had talked about, boys being mean.
“She gets a little weird just before and during a full moon.” I jerked my head toward the stairs. “Why don’t you go up to my room and play Atari while I fix her a snack?”
“You don’t have to ask me twice.” He took the whole deck and headed for the stairs.
“And the Mothmen!” she screamed. “Don’t get their larvae in your hair! It’ll eat your brain!”
“No!” I yelled from the buffet where I had peeled the foil off her candy egg. “Stop with the Mothman, G-ma! Or no snack.”
She smacked her hands on the arms of the rocking chair and moaned. Now, she was the one being mean. She must have heard me telling Daddy that I sensed something in the woods the week before.
“Up by the ruins, I felt eyes on me, I swear. I heard it stepping through the grass, shaking its wings, but when I turned to look, it was gone,” I had told him.
“You’re sounding just like your Grandma now, you know that, right?” He’d mussed up my hair and gave me a look that said, Accept your fear and take it like a man.
Prez ran up the stairs and slammed the door to my room.
It was smart of Grandma to play on my fear to keep me home. If I’d been alone, it might have worked; but I had Prez, and there was safety in numbers, I thought. Besides, there weren’t anything such things as Azgens, Moon-eyes, or Mothmen—at least, I had never actually seen them.
“Here.” I spooned the egg I’d mashed in a bowl into Grandma’s mouth. “You sure are talkative today. Feeling better?”
“Candy!” She showed me her chocolate teeth. “Candeee!”
My bet was on her forgetfulness. Even if she remembered, I could always play it off as dementia.
By morning, the road was washed out and the creeks were rising, but at least the rain had stopped.
“I’m telling you, your grandma’s house is like that hotel in The Shining,” Prez said as we got our supplies together. You would have thought we were going out for a weeklong trip in Alaska with the amount of stuff we packed.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “The water will go down by the time your mom comes back to get you on Sunday, unless you get scared and decide to swim home tonight.”
Prez flipped me off.
It was kind of mean, but I put Grandma to bed early, hiding that pill that we gave her on rough nights in a spoonful of crème egg, then, tucked her in like it was bedtime. I’d never left her alone overnight before, but I justified it by the fact that I was a kid, and what my daddy was making me do—well, it was too much. I deserved to have a little fun, didn’t I? That’s what I was thinking when I selected cricket noises on the sound machine and locked the door from the outside.
We hiked up to my dad’s camp, slowly, all weighted down, singing Phil Collins’ songs and Twisted Sister—most likely scaring away anything with our off-key voices that might be stalking us.
By the time we reached the cabin, it was just starting to get dark. A strange, blood-chilling call echoed through the woods and stopped us in our tracks.
“What’s that?” Prez asked.
“An owl, I think. They make that sound when they are zooming in on a kill.”
“Right, right, right,” Prez teased. “Okay, liar, let’s set up our hunting tent.”
Secretly, the call unnerved me. I had heard it the night before when Prez was sleeping, and Grandma was rattling around in the hallway. My instinct was that we should sleep in the cabin, but I couldn’t think of a way to talk Prez into it that wouldn’t make me look like a coward.
Prez picked out a spot in the woods at the edge of the meadow, and we staked our camo blind and masked it with brush and fallen tree limbs. He loaded his gun, and I had my bow. We knew better than to build a fire. Instead, we went into the cabin and made dinner on the propane stove. We’d brought two of Daddy’s beers from home and made them last as long as we could while we played a game of War.
Around 10:00 p.m. we got into the tent, settling in with our weapons and snacks. The moon was so full it lit up the meadow, giving us a perfect view.
Sweet smelling flowers had bloomed, their fragrances wafting to us on the breeze. The deer wouldn’t be able to resist. Even so, we should have set up much earlier to air things out. Just the scent of the plastic tent might keep them away.
Prez was talking up a storm. The week before he’d touched some girl’s boobs at church camp, and it was all he could talk about. He kept putting his hands out, pretending like he was still squeezing them. I had seen Grandma’s—but they didn’t even seem like breasts. They were tired things, worn out and hang dog, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I felt like if anyone knew what I had to do, that I would become a leper—no girl would want me to touch her—and quite honestly, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to touch a girl, but that’s a story for another time.
Prez was talking so much that we almost missed the deer. I elbowed him. “Shhhh,” I hissed. “Enough about tits. Look at that!”
“Christ!” Prez said. “I’ve never seen so many white tails in one place.
Nannies, does, and bucks were all munching flowers, and illuminated by the full moon’s light.
“I’m taking that buck.” He held a finger up and silently counted the points on his antlers—twelve— but just as he readied his gun, the whole group tensed and turned their heads. Prez shot, and they all scattered.
“Come on!” he said. “Let’s go!”
We pushed our way out of the tent and started running. I was on fire and felt like I was running as fast as the deer. There was no blood trail, so it was clear Prez had missed. We followed the herd full out and downhill, whooping and hollering like Indians. I think we suspected we weren’t going to kill anything. Still, the moon shone down on us, and when I looked at Prez running next to me, I felt like he was just about the best friend anyone could have. The deer were faster t
han us and well out of eyeshot, but we kept running and yelling. By the time we reached the shed and the truck at the base of the backside of the mountain, it felt like we were in some kind of warp. There was no way we could have covered that many acres in so little time.
All the deer had scattered, and we were out of breath. We stood with our hands on our knees, laughing, gasping for air; and when I stood up straight, I was astonished to see one lone buck just beyond the line of river rocks, grazing in the state woods, seemingly unaware of the fact that two humans had been following him and his family for what felt like nearly a half hour. Now, he stood alone— a gift— just a stone’s throw away from us.
Prez pointed and whispered, “Take it!”
I heard my daddy’s voice telling me No, but the buck was standing broadside, just 100 yards past our property line—a view only seen in my dreams. I aimed for the double lung shot, drawing the bow back. My arrow swooshed through the air and hit, and the buck made a noise—a bit of a gurgle—but it didn’t fall, just wavered for a moment before it slowly staggered off a ways through the brush. We heard it thump when it hit the ground.
I jumped up and down with glee, but I felt a sick wave of guilt in my gut. “Happy birthday to me.” The list of my sins was growing.
“That was a perfect shot, Buddy!” Prez hugged me.
“I just wish my dad could have seen it.” I held on a little too long, and he pushed me away.
“You kidding? He’d tan your hide. And mine.” He stepped over the rocks. “C’mon,” he said, motioning for me to follow. “Let’s get your buck!”
“Wait,” I said. “It’s state land. We should just leave it. We’re not prepared.” Hitting them was one thing, but watching them die, I didn’t enjoy it.
He opened his vest and tapped on a huge butcher knife. “I am.” He gave me a devious smile. “We’ll pull it back to the shed, clean it, and eat what we can. Then, we’ll bury the rest.”
His was wishful thinking, at best. I knew what it took to get deer meat ready, but we did need to make sure it was dead. Burying it was a good idea. I could come back for the antlers at a later time.
We stepped over the rocks and followed the trail of blood about 200 feet past Grandma’s property line, through the trees and into a clearing. Looking back, I could still see the truck and the shed, and I was anxious to drag the buck back there as fast as we could. His chest was still, but the eye facing us was open, brown and watery with fear. I saw my face in that eye when I got down on my knees with Prez, and I said a silent prayer like my daddy taught me.
Prez put one hand on the buck’s belly. “It starts here, I think.” He lowered the shiny blade, but just as he made the cut, a screech resounded through the woods—the same we’d heard before, only louder now. I looked up and saw a large bird diving down on us from the trees.
“Christ! Watch out!” I pushed Prez down into the deer, and the creature flew so close that it grazed both our backs with its claws, ripping us open. Warm blood seeped through the back of my jacket. I looked up to see it land in one of the trees.
Prez cried out in terror. “It sliced me! It sliced my back!” He pulled his vest off and stared at the blood.
I helped him up and pulled him over to a deadfall at the tree line. We were both bleeding.
“What the hell was that?”
We crouched behind rotting logs just as the creature nose-dived back to the carcass. “It got me, too,” I whispered.
“We’re fucked, man. Fucked!” Prez cried. “It’s a freaking Moon Azgen creature with the black hands—whatever your grandma said.”
I knew, but didn’t want to say its name. We were both shaking all over.
The creature hunched over the deer, feeding. It wasn’t a bird, exactly. It was at least 7 feet tall with two glowing red compound eyes as big as softballs, attached to its gigantic capsule-shaped head. Its long proboscis rolled in and out—a sucking mouthpart that drained the blood from the deer. The monster’s body was white, in four distinct parts—head, thorax, abdomen, and legs—all covered in scales that shimmered with a phosphorescent dust under the light of the moon. Its arms and legs were human-like, but instead of hands and feet, its appendages ended in talons.
Every few seconds, it dipped its proboscis inside its mouth—a hairy black sphincter shaped like the end of a toilet brush—which scraped its extension clean. Curved feathered antennas on its head rotated around as if picking up messages from some other world, or trying to gauge our fear—both, I suspected. It sucked the deer until its hide caved in, then, dropped it, and cocked its head in our direction.
“What is it?” Prez whispered.
It stood and flexed its wings— all black and lined with white veins—two fore and two hind that came out of its upper and lower thorax, connected, but tapering in at its waist. They were long in relation to its body, touching the ground and reminded me of Grandma’s elongated earlobes.
I pissed myself, and wanted, not my mama, not my daddy, but Grandma. It was muscle memory, how she used to protect me when I was little. Now, she was locked in her room, maybe bumping her head against the wall, trying to get out—all because of me. There was no way she could help me now.
“Let’s make a run for the truck,” I said. “The key is on the front tire.” I got up first and Prez followed.
Mothman took flight and circled above us, making the same static-y sounds that bugs make around a porch light.
As we reached the truck, it swooped down again, barely missing my shoulders. “Crawl under!” I screamed. We dropped and shimmied beneath the chassis. I reached up and pulled the key off, scraping my knuckles on the rusty wheel well. “Got it!” But it didn’t matter. Mothman was on its talons now, crouching down to view us. When I made eye contact with its glowing red pupils, it made a high-pitched sound and extended its hairy proboscis right into my ear, wiggling it around until it found the right spot and began to bore into my eardrum.
“Christ!” Prez yelled, “Christ! What do I do? What do I do?”
“Help me!” I screamed. “Help!” I kicked my feet and thrashed as Mothman tunneled in. It was going to suck my brains out of my head just like Grandma had warned, and Daddy would find me dead, just after my 13th birthday, and maybe find Grandma dead, too—all my fault.
Prez pulled on my arm, but he couldn’t get enough traction to separate me from Mothman.
I continued to thrash as my vision blurred with shock and tears, but then I heard Prez scream, “Help! Help us!”
I looked over to see a familiar pair of brogans. Grandma! When her boot made contact with Mothman’s hairy anterior, I heard a squish, like an axe sinking into wet wood, and the creature crawled off, screeching.
“You boys get in the truck, now!” Grandma yelled.
We wiggled out and climbed in the cab. “C’mon, Grandma,” I said, holding the door.
“You little assholes should have listened to me the first time.” She slammed it and motioned for me to hit the lock. My ear was dripping blood, but all I felt was relief.
“Who is that?” Prez asked.
“G-ma! It’s my g-ma! And she kicks ass!” She did look otherworldly—bald as a baby, wearing her overalls, and steadying Daddy’s rifle—her eyes clear and blue. For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom how she had gathered enough sense to climb out her window and over the mountain.
Mothman had pulled itself off the ground and circled over Grandma, but her kick had taken something out of him. Her rifle was ready. She cocked her head, listening for the shot. As soon as it made a break for her, she pulled the trigger, and I heard a loud pop before Mothman burst into a spray of flesh.
“Grandma!” I screamed, getting out of the truck. “You got him! Come on! This way!”
“Get back in the truck, Ronnie!” She turned toward my voice and pointed her gun. “I love you, son, but today is not your day.”
Pieces of Mothman fell all around her—confetti flesh worms that were stunned for mere seconds before they began wig
gling their way toward Grandma.
“Watch out!” I screamed, tapping on the glass.
They scaled her legs and covered her in no time—a mass of writhing larvae sucking at her with probing mouths until she collapsed in the dirt.
“Grandma, no!” I hollered, banging on the glass. “I love you, Grandma!”
“Get ahold of yourself, Buddy!” Prez yelled, putting his arm around me. “We have to get out of here. Do you think you can drive?”
I was sobbing. “We can’t leave her!” I put the key in the ignition.
The larvae on Grandma popped and crackled, and wings sprouted from their slime. They morphed into an eclipse right before our eyes—a thousand black wings pumping and beating.
“She’s a goner! They’re eating her!” Prez screamed. “Drive!”
I pressed the pedal and the truck lurched forward. As if sensing our escape, the new moths rushed to our windshield, completely darkening our vision.
“Do something!” Prez screamed.
I hit the wipers and the blood and guts of a few smeared across the glass. The rest lit for the trees, flapping their Halloween wings under the light of the moon. I took one last look at Grandma’s shriveled body in the rearview, then, peeled off down the state road for the highway.
At the station, it was impossible to explain what happened. The cops insisted on driving us back. Grandma’s body was still there by the shed.
“What the hell happened here?” they asked, hands on their holsters.
“She looks like fruit leather,” the fat one said. “All the life sucked out.”
We started to tell them about Mothman, but the skinny one cut us off and called for an ambulance. They took her body over to Beckley for an autopsy, but the findings were inconclusive. Daddy showed up the next day and wept in a way that made me feel weak in the knees. Three days later, we had Grandma cremated.
If it hadn’t been for the game camera on the shed, I think Daddy might have suspected Prez and I had killed her. There wasn’t much on the tape—just a blurry image of Grandma being pulled to the ground and covered up in night. After he watched it, Daddy smashed the recording with his boot and put the mountain up for sale. Then, he moved us up to Charleston, where I still live. Neither of us ever talked about it again. And we never went back.