by Tim Curran
“Actually, I wasn’t going to. I was more intrigued by the creature itself. If you say it happened, it happened,” Nina said. “I’ve known you long enough to know that you’re no fool. You’re not some nut who makes up wild stories to get attention and you’re definitely not unbalanced. I believe your story. It’s fantastic and frightening and has all the makings of a truly unique urban legend, but I believe you.”
“Maybe I’m not the only crazy one,” he said.
She laughed. “My sanity has been questioned more than once through the years. I once slept in a cave with over two-hundred hibernating rattlesnakes because a Bannock shaman told me I would receive great visions.”
“Did you?”
“No, about all I received was a sore back. Which is neither here nor there. The question is: what are you going to do?”
“Nothing because there’s nothing I can do. If I tell the truth, the police will tag me as a weirdo. The only thing I can do is keep my mouth shut. At least publicly.”
“And privately?”
“Privately I plan to find out what the hell this is all about.”
Nina encouraged that. Being a zoologist, she wanted every detail of the “flying thing,” as he called it (he couldn’t truly say if it was a bird or a bat). He gave her all he could which was precious little. He talked and she sketched. He knew it had claws and huge wings and that it was jet-black, kind of shiny like wet quartz. But other than that, he couldn’t be sure. He kept trying to elucidate on the creature he’d seen tearing off the door of the SUV, but he couldn’t. It was dark out and the thing was murky.
“I think the intriguing thing here is that this animal sounds intelligent,” Nina said, looking up from her sketchpad where she had drawn some very impressive looking batlike wings and huge, curving claws. “At least, intelligent enough to be sadistic. Now, I have no idea what sort of wounds were inflicted on Dinah and Rita in the crash, but when an animal attacks it’s either to defend its territory or for food. There are a few exceptions. Leopards will kill simply for the thrill of it, as will squids. But those are rare exceptions. With most creatures it’s either territorialism or hunger. I think we can rule out the latter for the most part. If a creature that large seized either of them for food, it would have flown off with them and fed on them at its leisure. That would be in keeping with the behavioral mechanics of raptors.”
He saw what she was getting at it. This thing apparently plucked Dinah from the SUV then impaled her on a shaft of metal, then it took Rita into the sky—apparently still alive—and then threw her with great force at the wreckage. It killed simply to kill.
“So maybe it was a territorial thing,” he said.
“I find it interesting that it peeled off the door to get your friends. It could have gotten them through the missing windshield. Do you see what I’m saying? How did it even know that it could get at them through the door? That’s very unusual and nearly points to intelligence of a sort.”
They talked about it in some detail, knocking the ball back and forth. Nina said that if it was nocturnal, and that seemed obvious, there was no reason why it would ever have been seen. At least, by anyone that lived to tell the tale. There were myriad nocturnal denizens that people never, ever saw.
“I think the territorial imperative is worth considering,” she told him. “It might be interesting to explore the surrounding countryside to see if we could find evidence of its feedings or a possibly a roost. It would seek a high place, I’m thinking, the way an owl would.”
When Jim left that night, he felt oddly relieved and oddly disturbed. He knew he had seen the thing…yet, now that Nina was intrigued by the idea of tracking it down, it firmly pushed it out of the realm of fantasy and firmly into the light of reality. He wasn’t so sure that was a good thing. But at least he’d gotten it all off his chest. Now he had confederate, a partner in crime, someone he could openly discuss his trauma with. That was a good thing.
It was a clear, starry night as he slipped through the gate in the hedges that separated Nina’s yard from his own. He closed the gate, latched it…then was gripped by that feeling of vertigo again. His head swam and his skin crawled and his flesh broke out in a fine dew of chill sweat. He was driven to his knees, flooded with terror, sinking in a black sucking pool of it.
What the hell is going on?
He didn’t know exactly, only that he was incapacitated by it. The fear owned him. It was in his blood and in every breath he took. Like a mouse in a field that fears the approach of a hawk, he crouched there, looking up at the sky, over the rooftops of his house and Nina’s. He saw nothing but stars…yet, he felt that there was something, something there.
But he never saw it.
His nerves. It had to be his nerves.
Finally after ten minutes or so, he pulled himself up and walked quickly to his house. He didn’t start breathing again until the door was locked and there was a roof over his head.
9
He went to bed but he couldn’t sleep. Most nights he went for a nice walk but he knew that was out tonight. There was just no way he could stroll around the neighborhood after what—or what had not—happened out by the hedges. The idea of the open sky over his head filled him with a shriveling anxiety.
It was no good watching TV or listening to loudmouth idiots on late night talk radio or even reading. In fact, it was no good doing anything except what he knew had to be done. He was already dressing by the time he realized just exactly what he was up to. He grabbed his wallet and keys and went out to his pickup in the garage. He sat behind the wheel and started the engine.
Now if you don’t open the garage door, you’ll simply go to sleep. No more worrying, no more bullshit.
He pressed the button on the opener and listened to the door roll up. No, he had not come out here to kill himself. If there was any real plan at all, that was definitely not part of it. He had driven very little since the accident and getting behind the wheel made him nervous. But after ten minutes or so, he calmed.
Then he took Route 50 out into the desert.
One of his last memories was telling Rita that they were about twenty minutes out, so he drove for twenty minutes, then pulled over. This had to be the approximate area. He got out of the truck and looked up into the black sky. The stars were brilliant diamond shards winking down at him. He looked out across the desert floor and saw nothing but sand and rocks, mounds of shaggy saltbush. There was little else.
He stood there, trying to get a feel for it and coming up blank.
“This isn’t it,” he said under his breath.
He got back in the truck and pulled back out onto the highway, following the road for five or ten more miles until he knew he had come too far. He turned around and came back the way he would have been coming from the convention that night. The very idea of it made a cold lump rise in his throat. He kept going. There wasn’t another car out there. He had the road. It belonged to him. He had inherited it the way he had inherited this entire nightmare.
Here.
He slowed and pulled off the road into the desert and just sat there, gripping the wheel tightly. He squeezed his eyes shut, then forced himself to open them. He wasn’t sure if it was instinct or memory or what, but he knew this was the place. Maybe not the exact spot, but very close.
He stepped out of the pickup into the cool desert air. Nothing moved or stirred. There wasn’t so much as a breeze. He walked along the roadside with a flashlight in his hand for about five minutes until he found exactly what he had been looking for: skid marks. Jet black skid marks that ran for about forty feet, angling off the road.
Though it was not warm out there by any means, sweat began to run down the back of his neck. He could feel it sliding down his spine and it was cold. His heart began to pound and the vertigo returned. But he would not allow it. He forced himself to stand upright even though his head spun like a top. Gritting his teeth, he rode it out.
There. Gone.
He stepped of
f the road. This was it. This was the place. He could feel the trauma and loneliness haunting his bones as if Rita and Dinah were still here, trapped in some limbo, anchored and earthbound to this highly unremarkable section of ground. The flashlight beam revealed the torn up real estate—rutted and well-trod with numerous drag marks and discolorations to the soil. The former were probably from his SUV, the accident investigation, and the tow truck that yanked the corpse of the SUV out; the latter were probably from fluids that leaked from his engine and burn marks.
In a few months, the desert would have healed the scars and he’d probably never be able to find this place.
Sighing, he turned away from the road and started walking because his instincts told him there was something out there, something important. Maybe that was true and maybe he wanted to believe that it was true. Regardless, he walked on. Studying patterns in the sand and craggy heaps of rocks, stepping lightly through dry washes and over low dust-blown hills, down into gullies and up onto the flatlands through stands of greasewood and creosote. He studied alien-looking stands of spiky yucca and clumps of mule’s ear whose blossoms were closed for the night.
What do you hope to accomplish out here?
That was the question he kept asking himself, but he had no good answers. Instinct called and he answered. The desert was endlessly repetitious and that was why so many people probably had gotten lost out there through the ages. He was walking without the flashlight on now because the stars were bright and his eyes had adjusted. In the distance he could see rising spires of rock and flat-topped mesas.
It would seek a high place, I’m thinking, the way an owl would, Nina had said.
If that was the case then he knew that they could search for months, if not years, exploring every possibly high roost. But something kept drawing him in a more or less straight line and he went with it, disturbing the late night ruminations of kangaroo rats and one very large coachwhip snake that Nina (no doubt) would have made friends with.
Then he stopped.
It was almost as if it were not a conscious decision. He stood there, listening to the night. He could hear nothing. Not even the distant cry of scavenging night birds.
Something was happening.
The air around him had been disturbed. It was moving in a sort of spiraling pattern like he was at the epicenter of a dust devil. It began to pick up. Not cool now, but warm, unpleasantly warm, blowing stronger and bringing an oily, musky stench with it. The smell reminded Jim of the hide of a huge diamondback rattlesnake that his uncle had shot when he was a boy. He had skinned it and tacked the hide to the barn wall and the distinctly reptilian smell of it had lingered for days as it dried out.
That’s what Jim was smelling now.
Panic beginning to creep in on him, he got down low to present a less appetizing target. The wind cycled around, blowing sand and dust around in a gritty maelstrom. Tumbleweeds were flying in the air, bits of loose rock stinging as they hit his hands and face.
Then it settled down.
It passed, a voice told him. What you’re looking for just passed by. Maybe not directly overhead, but it passed. It must have circled around you and created that wind and smell.
Breathing fast, his hands bunched into fists, Jim waited there. After maybe five minutes, he stood up again even though he was terrified to do so. When a few moments passed with no further phenomena, he relaxed a bit. The desert was unbearably silent. No insects. No birds. Nothing. It was eerie and unnatural. He had a mad desire to turn and run for the pickup.
Then, just to the west of him, he heard a cracking sound that was…yes…quite like thunder. It boomed and echoed. But there were no clouds. He began to perspire freely, his throat so dry he couldn’t even swallow his fear down. The cracking/booming sound was echoing out of the darkness from the high elevations, it seemed.
The wind was coming again, picking up gradually until it was a blowing mist of sand and dust and loose debris. And that smell…it was stronger. Positively gagging. Not just reptile musk but something beyond that, something green and noisome and revolting. The stink not of carrion but perhaps the stink of something that had been feeding on carrion. It was hot and maggoty and it put him right to his knees.
It’s coming, it’s coming…
The wind turned into a maelstrom again and he hugged the earth as dust and dirt blew around him and an immense black shadow passed overhead with incredible velocity like an F-16 Falcon flying close air support.
When the dust had settled, he was still curled-up on the desert floor, his gears stripped with a fervent terror—eyes wide and unblinking, mouth frozen in a crazy grimace, every muscle bunched and straining.
It was some time before he could get to his feet and when did, he ran in a crouch to the shelter of a heap of boulders, pressing himself up against them.
He stayed there until dawn.
He didn’t dare move before then.
When the sun turned the horizon pink, then orange, and its light was blazing down on him, lighting up every craggy shadow and pocket of darkness, he stood up. Shimmering heat waves began to rise from the desert floor. He looked in all directions through the haze. In the distance, he saw countless mesas and towers of rock, ancient and forbidding now with dark primeval secrets. Beyond them there was the mast of a radio or TV tower.
But nothing more.
The sky was clear.
He wasted no time getting back to his pickup and driving back home, studying the sky the entire way. It was when he pulled into his driveway that he saw that he had company.
10
When he stepped up onto the porch, two men waited for him. They both stood up and he knew right away they were no cops. Just looking at them, he started getting a real bad feeling inside and he had no idea why.
One of them was short and squat with a four-leaf clover tattooed on his left forearm. He sported a fashionably unshaven face and thick dark hair, cold gray eyes but a very warm smile. “Mr. Duchane? Sorry to drop by uninvited like this, but we thought it might be the best way to make your acquaintance,” he said. “I’m Pettis and this is Shiner. We need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About something that may or may not have happened to you.”
Shiner grinned as if he could barely contain himself. He was tall, jittery, and thin with hair so red it looked like it had rusted. He had bad teeth and a crooked smile, a gangly textbook nerd that even wore Coke-bottle glasses as if to accentuate the fact. He looked like he wanted to explode right out of his skin. He had a Bigfoot T-shirt on that read, BIGFOOT DOESN’T BELIEVE IN YOU EITHER.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” he said, egg dropping from the breakfast burrito in his hand.
Oh boy.
Pettis glared at Shiner. “We just need to ask you a few questions about the wreck you were in out on Route 50. I promise it won’t take long.”
Somehow, some way, he’d been expecting something like this. He wasn’t so much angry about it as intrigued.
“You better come inside then,” he told them.
He sat them at the kitchen table and started the coffeemaker. Then he sat down across from them, wondering how they had found out about him.
Pettis cleared his throat. “Mr. Duchane, we run a website called Cryptodesert.com which is concerned with cryptozoology, the science—”
“Pseudoscience, if you prefer,” Shiner said.
“—of unknown animals.”
Jim nodded. “Yes, I know what cryptozoology is. Bigfoot and lake monsters and that kind of thing.”
“Right. That’s part of it—”
“But only part,” Shiner chipped in.
“—but there’s much more to the field than Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. At Cryptodesert.com our focus is the Nevada/Utah area, particularly the deserts of the Great Basin and Mojave. We collect regional tales and ephemera concerning things like killer bee swarms, giant beavers, cattle mutilators, the Bear Lake Monster, and, of course, Sasquatch.
” He held up a hand as if used to silencing skepticism. “Now, Mr. Duchane, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in these creatures or not. I’m not one-hundred percent convinced myself. We’re basically interested in chronicling so-called encounters and following up on any physical evidence that might exist.”
Jim just sat there, wondering why he had invited these guys into his house. Was he that lonely? That desperate to talk about what happened? Maybe he was. Maybe telling Nina hadn’t been enough. And especially after what he’d seen—or didn’t see—out in the desert last night.
“So you don’t necessarily believe in things like Bigfoot?”
Pettis shrugged. “Not necessarily. Even if there isn’t such a creature—“
“There is,” Shiner said.
“—the body of folkloric data is still interesting, don’t you think? The need for people to still believe in monsters? From a perspective of social anthropology and psychology, it’s fascinating.”
Shiner laughed dryly. “What’s even more fascinating is that there’s a large, unclassified hominid wandering the primeval forests of North America.”
Pettis purposely ignored him and gave Jim an apologetic look.
“Don’t put me off like that,” Shiner said. “You’re always doing that. Being the voice of reason and rationality is fine, if not misplaced. The creature exists. You can’t ignore the sightings in the High Unitas or Provo Canyon. You can’t possibly discount the evidence of—”
“Okay, okay,” Jim said before the debate got heated. “That’s all well and fine. But what do you want from me?”