DISCOVERED
A DEVON CHILDS ADVENTURE
Daniel Marc Chant
Copyright 2017 by Daniel Marc Chant
For Nathan Drake.
CHAPTER ONE
“Welcome students,” the professor said, pacing at the front of the lecture hall. “I am Dr. Devon Childs and I will be your veterinarian professor for your first term here at Whateley College. I have to say, you’ve made a wonderful choice coming here.”
She smiled and looked up at the assembled students. They had intent eager faces, wide eyes. Many were scribbling notes already, even though this was their first lecture and she hadn’t said anything important yet. Some of course looked bored already, their chins resting on their hands, eyes staring off into space. Her smile widened and she gave a soft chuckle.
“Now,” she said, raising her voice, “You may think that the uses for veterinarian medicine are few and obvious but I’m here to tell you otherwise. I am a veterinarian, true, but I’m also something else. I am a Cryptozoologist. Who can tell me what that is?”
She was met with blank faces. Then a hand hesitantly raised.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. She pointed at the student. “You, beside the SLEEPING STUDENT WITH THE STUPID HAT.”
The student in question jumped awake with a thump as their head slipped off their hand and slammed into the desk. The rest of the students laughed. The previously sleeping student rubbed their forehead and smiled in embarrassment. The student who had raised their hand grinned at them and turned back to look at Devon.
“A cryptozoologist is a scientist who wanders around trying to prove the existence of unicorns and dragons.” The student said confidently. There was a smirk on his face and scorn in his voice.
Devon grinned and began to pace. She shook her head. She’d heard it all before and those attitudes no longer bothered her like they once had.
“That is indeed a common misconception,” she said, her confidence building as she started to ramp up. “But that’s not all there is to cryptozoology. It is called by many a pseudoscience but it is actually the amalgamation of many different branches of study. It combines biology, history, media studies, folklore and about a dozen other branches of science and humanities into one.”
“So you’re saying you chase monsters?!” Someone shouted out from the back.
Devon laughed and shook her head.
“No, I don’t,” she said. She clicked a button on the remote in her hand and the slideshow began. “I disprove monsters.”
A video began to play, the sound muted, of something moving through a collection of trees. The image was shaky, zooming in and out seemingly at random and never showing the creature that moved through the trees clearly.
“Using all the advantages of modern technology I track apparent monster sightings,” she began. The screen showed a reel of different headlines from local newspapers. “Using the internet, community websites, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and all sorts of other social media I find out where people are seeing the monsters and I go there.”
“Have you ever found a real one?” someone else called out.
“No,” she said with a laugh, “I am pleased to say that I have never discovered a real cryptid. That’s the term we ‘monster hunters’ use when we refer to the beasts and creatures of myth and folklore. And folklore is very important in what I do. Can anyone guess why?”
Someone hesitantly raised their hand towards the back of the room. She smiled at them and pointed. The student paused before she spoke, her face grew red as people turned to look at her.
“Is it because ancient beliefs were used to explain natural occurrences in the old days?” she asked quietly.
“Go on…” Devon encouraged. “Explain what you mean.”
“Well…” the student hesitated. “Things would happen back then. But they wouldn’t understand them. Lightening, thunder, death and disease, none of it was really understood. So ancient man made up myths and legends to explain them all. And the myths had creatures in them to explain the living things that they couldn’t understand. Over time, as we began to understand the world better, the myths fell out of use but the stories about creatures remained behind. And now, when nothing else can explain what people see, they fall back on those stories to explain it.”
“Well done young lady!” Devon said, her smile growing wide. “That is precisely it. We may have modern science and technology to explain the world to us. We might be able to know what’s going on over in China or what the gross national income of Botswana is but if something strange happens, if we see a shadow in the night that we don’t recognise, well….We can fall back on old patterns. We return to the stories of our childhood, of our communities. Those stories will have been handed down generation to generation and even though they may be twisted the essence may remain the same. Besides, we all love a good ghost story.”
The lecture room broke out in laughter at that. Devon joined in. She clicked the button on the remote again and the image changed once more. It was a headline from a small newspaper in the south-west of England.
BEAST RETURNS AND KILLS SHEEP HERD.
There was a blurred image of a boar like creature beneath and a pencil sketch from the nineteenth Century of a tusked boar with bear like feet.
“Let’s look at the Beast of Dean,” Devon said. “It was my most recent case.”
The image changed again with a click and a collection of dead sheep were shown on screen. There were groans of disgust.
“Come on now,” Devon said with a grin. “You’re going to be dealing with much worse if you’re going to become vets. Now, the Beast of Dean was a monster that’s first recorded sighting was in 1802. Many said that it lived in the Forest of Dean and that it looked like a large boar but monstrously disfigured. It crushed hedges, fences, it felled trees. Children went missing, probably lost in the forest, and people said that the beast had taken off with them.”
She clicked the button again and the headline returned. This time the print was different, the font older, more oddly spaced. There were no photographs on the page.
“This clipping is from the local newspaper in 1802,” Devon said loudly. “The local farmers, tired of having their livestock ripped to shreds and their fences crushed and broken, put together a raiding party to hunt and track the beast. Hunters from all over the country came to join in.”
There was a sketch from the paper on screen now. It showed a massive group of people all filing into the forest. It was replaced with another headline.
NO SIGN OF THE BEAST.
“All of the hunters returned, none the worse from their trip,” Devon said. “Except for a few blisters.” People laughed and she smiled. “But there was no sighting of the beast. There were no tracks, no trails, no clue as to where the beast had gone or even if there had been a beast. People called it the Moose-Pig as well, it was so big. It stood to reason that there would have been some sort of trail left. The best trackers that could be found had travelled to the Forest, men who prided themselves on being able to track anything. None of them found a thing.”
“Couldn’t it have just been a big boar?” someone called out.
“That’s what people might have thought,” Devon said. “Except…it was a well-known fact that there were no more wild boars in the area at the time. Or anywhere else in England. They were…extinct.”
She clicked the button again and a series of images of newspaper clippings began to play. They were all headlines with the dates attached. All spoke of the Beast of Dean but from different years.
“The sightings continued though, through the years,” she said. “Never close together and the destruction left by the beast was never as bad as when it was first seen. Each sighting was met with more
searching and every time they found nothing. That was until three months ago.”
The slideshow of images stopped on the original picture that had started it all, the mass of sheep, slaughtered and the nineteenth century sketch.
“Three months ago, a farmer’s herd of sheep were found killed,” Devon said grimly. “They had been gutted, thrown around like they were nothing. But, and this is a big but, no parts of them were missing. They had not been eaten. Most of the injuries weren’t consistent with those left by a predator. And the only tracks were those of pigs and sheep. I’d like to mention here that the farmer did have a tendency to keep his sheep and pigs in the same fields, lord knows why.”
“Couldn’t it have been kids?” one of the students asked. “They heard the story and decided to have some fun.”
“That’s what people thought as well,” Devon said, her face growing grimmer. “The local police and government put a curfew in place and demanded parents keep their children in view of them at night. It led to a lot of unhappy teenagers but it also ruled them out when three nights later this happened.”
She clicked the button and a new slide came up. It was of a barn. The side had been torn open, shards of wood lay everywhere. Bales of hay had been torn apart, bags of feed scattered and trampled.
“The farmer’s barn was almost destroyed,” she said. “The majority of his winter feeds were either consumed or damaged beyond salvation. This meant major trouble for him. If he has no feed he can’t feed his animals through the winter. If he can’t feed his animals he has to either slaughter them or sell them. If he has no herd come spring he can’t begin lambing or breeding and preparing for sale come the summer. I think you can all appreciate how serious that would be for someone whose income relies on the steady and reliable turn of the years.”
A low hum of agreement filled the room. Devon looked around and saw heads nodding. She smiled in satisfaction. Sometimes it was easy for people to forget that these weren’t just monster sightings, things out of stories come to life. They were real events that had real impact on people that could last for months, even years.
“Thankfully the community was very tight knit,” Devon continued. “They banded together and helped pay for the barn to be repaired and more feed to be brought in. Even the local teenagers helped out now that they were off the hook.”
“Couldn’t they have snuck out, broken curfew or something?” someone asked. “I mean, come on, you know what we were like when we were younger. We’d find a way to get to the party no matter what.”
“Indeed,” Devon said with a smile. “But the entire area around the barn was checked for any sign of human activity, excluding the farmer and his immediate family and workers. The only thing that they found in the churned up mud were a few smeared animal tracks. This was an area of high traffic remember so that wouldn’t have been that unusual. All the teenagers were appalled at what had happened as well, they all went to school with the farmer’s daughter and let me tell you, she was one popular young lady. Then, three more days later another farmer was hit. Or at least, almost.”
She pressed a button and a video began to play. It was a night vision image of something moving around in the yard of a farm, staying close to the edges of the buildings. Then a blur moved across the yard, almost too quick to be seen. Devon pressed a button. The video rewound. She pressed again and it played once more, slower now, the frames flipping by every second. The blur moved across the yard much more slowly but it was still unclear. She pressed a button again, the video rewound a few frames and she hit pause.
There, in the middle of the farmyard was a boar. It was hideous though, nothing like a normal boar. It had wide curving tusks, thick black hair that grew in sparse patches all over its hide. There were open sores that glistened wetly in the light of the camera. Its ears were ragged and torn, almost the entire size of its head.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Devon said, a hint of pride made its way into her voice. “I give you, the Beast of Dean, in the flesh, in the modern era.”
The lecture hall broke out in whispers and excited chatter.
“After this image was captured I was called in,” she said, raising her voice to be heard. Silence quickly fell. “I have friends in numerous police forces, a widespread internet presence and several people who call themselves my minions who scan for things like these and let me know. A friend on the Gloucestershire constabulary passed my name on to the local authorities and after a bit of checking they called me. At the same time, one of my… minions… found these images all over social media and passed it on to me. Needless to say, within an hour of being contacted I was on my way to the Forest of Dean.”
“Did you find the monster?” Someone called out again.
“Indeed I did,” Devon said with a nod. “I had a good team, highly trained trackers, experts in their field. And the tracks we had were good. The police had been made aware of my practices and had ensured that no one touched the tracks and kept well clear of the area. As soon as we arrived we were able to begin tracking.”
She began the slideshow again, images of the tracks and her team following them.
“It took us surprisingly less time than we expected to find the beasts.” Devon said. “And yes, I did say beasts. We found them in a secluded part of the forest, well away from humans. In fact we had to use our machetes to cut through the undergrowth, that’s how long it had been since people had been through. Once we reached the clearing that these creatures had made their home we found something very, very unexpected. There was not just one Beast of Dean there but in fact an entire herd. We took photographs and managed to get a blood sample from a couple of them.”
She clicked the button once more and this time the screen was filled with images of a herd of the beasts that had been shown on the earlier video. There were dozens of them, scattered around the clearing, all different sizes but all equally grotesque and deformed. Sores oozed. Horns and tusks curled up and spiked into their skin. The image changed once more to show one of the creatures on its side with Devon leaning over it. She was holding a syringe and an array of medical supplies lay nearby. The creature itself was almost as big as she was.
“As you can see, the beasts are incredibly large,” Devon said, waving her hand at the screen. “The results from the DNA testing and species testing later revealed a very surprising secret. These are not strange monsters from the dawn of time, nor were they hybrids between moose and pigs. In reality they were simply the common wild boars.”
“But they’re hideous!” someone shouted. They were met with dozens of cries of agreement from all over the room.
“Indeed they are,” Devon said with a small nod of her head, a gentle smile across her face. “Sadly, that’s not because they’re monsters, as I’m sure many of you are hoping. The reality is that these boars had grown larger than normal and were so malformed because of one simple reason. Can anyone guess?”
“Radiation!”
“Science experiments!”
“Random genetic mutation!”
“Something they ate!”
That last one was met with laughter and even Devon joined in. She shook her head eventually though.
“All wrong I’m afraid,” she said. “The simple cause of their deformity is inbreeding. All of these boars are related to each other in bizarre ways. The inbreeding goes back quite a few decades as far as we can tell from the few blood samples we took. We’d need more in order to get a fuller map but we decided to simply leave these creatures to the rangers who protect the Forest of Dean.”
“How did it happen?”
“Did they kill them?”
“What did the locals say?”
“Do they taste good?”
Once more people laughed and Devon once again joined in. After a moment or two she held up her hands for silence and quickly got it.
“I would answer those questions… well apart from the last one,” she said. She glanced at her watch and winced. “However we a
re at the end of the lecture and there is another class waiting for this hall. I guess you’re all just going to have to turn up next week to find out. I promise I will tell you.”
The students groaned, good naturedly and with a little laughter thrown in. She leaned on her desk and watched as they packed their things away into bags and began to file out. Once the last few, who were having conversations as they left, had begun to head out she packed up her own things. Her colleague, a member of the biology department came to the stand and they shared a nod as they switched places.
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey Devon,” the teaching assistant said with a smile as Devon walked into the room and collapsed into her chair with a heavy sigh. “Tough class?”
“Hey Danny,” Devon said, smiling back. She leaned back in her chair and groaned. “The class was easy. It was getting away that was the hard part.”
“You’ve got a fan club?” Danny asked, her eyebrows almost disappearing into her hair. “It’s only the first day of classes! How’ve you managed that one?!”
“I told them about the Beast of Dean,” Devon said with a heavy sigh. “And then I didn’t finish the story so they had to come back next class.”
“So they waylaid you after class then?” Danny asked. “Trying to get you to tell them early. Smart. Stupid and annoying. But smart.”
“The way I remember it you were one of those kids once,” Devon said, glancing at Danny with a fond smile. “Didn’t you keep appearing at the door to my office and badger me in to telling you more stories?”
“Yeah,” Danny said, “Because I was a fan! Not because I wanted to know so I could skip the next class if I wanted to.”
“True,” Devon said, nodding her head in acknowledgement. “And it did pay off in the end for you. How’s the reading going for Professor Malcolms anyway?”
“Horribly,” Danny said, throwing herself back on to the sofa. “He’s got us reading some boring 18th century tome about how to avoid being eaten by dragons or something.”
Discovered Page 1