CHAPTER 1
Monsters descended from myth and movies share a very strong singularity. They’re solely works of fiction created to scare a public that’s willing to believe in the unbelievable.
That was the logic I grew up believing. That was the sardonic truth my parents wanted me to believe to outgrow my overactive imagination when I was young. When I was growing up, more than anything I wanted to become a writer. It didn’t matter if it was writing cheesy fantasy novels or screenplays that never saw the light of day. A story came alive when I had a pen in my hands or a keyboard under my fingertips. Or, rather, I came alive when I would write. Reading and writing was an escape for my mind. An overactive imagination that was always inventing stories of the unbelievable.
I was never one to believe a boogeyman resided in my closet. Nor did I ever believe there was a tentacled monster under my bed waiting patiently to grab me if I ever dared to drape my foot over the edge. Still, I was persistent with telling stories about ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night. I grew up wanting to scare or enchant people with my writing about monsters. I wanted to help people like me, people who needed an outlet from reality. People who weren’t content with everyday life. Discovering there is nothing extraordinary about the ordinary world we reside in is why I assume people become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Maybe that’s the same as my reading and writing, a placebo to reconcile that the real world is boring and full of uninteresting characters compared to the movies.
But it was the day after a full moon that my twenty-one-year-old self questioned my belief that myths and legends were only passed on to use as a sort of aphrodisiac for people who wanted to escape reality.
It was one night that would forever change how I viewed what I previously thought was an uninteresting and boring world. While driving home one night with my brother, I saw something that I previously thought only existed in fairytales and myth. My brother and I saw something that couldn’t possibly be among the living. Yet, it was.
Our drive home that dark night was a night similar to the many others I had experienced in my two months of living in the tourist town of Wisconsin Dells. The air was chill for late September. The temperature at night was starting to dip into the forties.
It was a month before Halloween; the red and orange leaves covering the thick trees in the forest had yet to fall to the ground. I was driving my truck as Simon sat beside me in the passenger seat. My bubbly fifteen-year-old brother was animatedly talking about how fun it was in the aquatics department at the resort we both worked at. I had started to tune him out at least ten minutes earlier, only occasionally replying to him. I was too cautious of a driver, one who was always watching for the occasional animal to pop out of the woods to cross the road. While driving in the backwoods of central Wisconsin, it seemed the local wildlife often played a proverbial game of let’s see if we can avoid death by car. They would wait until the very last minute to pop out of the woods to sprint across the road. If you weren’t careful, you were going to be scraping possum or raccoon off of your front tires for weeks. This was a lesson I had learned the hard way after my dad borrowed my truck to make a trip to the supermarket. It took a good week to scrape the splattered remains of a squirrel off my grill.
That night I was right to be cautious.
As I made a turn and drove down the familiar dark, winding backroad that led to the last four miles to our parents’ house, a deer suddenly sprinted from the forest and onto the road. It was large in size and running fast. My grip on the wheel tightened as my breath hitched. As hard as I tried to avoid hitting the doe, there was nothing I could do. I slowed down and attempted to stop, but there was no escaping clipping the doe in its mad dash. A loud thump sounded as soon as the deer impacted with the truck’s brush bar. The deer bounced off the road before falling hard into the dark woods. I screeched the truck to a halt as I struggled to catch my breath. I wasn’t going above thirty-five, but that didn’t matter.
“Everly, you hit it!” Simon accused, his green eyes wide with fright. The water bottle he had been holding had popped open and fallen to the ground below his feet. He struggled to pick it up, but it was near empty, so no mess was made.
I said nothing for a moment as a shudder ran down my spine. Simon started running his mouth with insults critiquing my driving, but I paid him no attention. “Twenty-one and you can’t drive properly! C’mon—”
“I didn’t mean to!” I finally snapped, pulling off to the side of the road and putting the truck in park. “I couldn’t avoid it without winding up in Mr. Thompson’s ditch!” Our neighbor Mr. Thompson was an unfriendly old man who owned a large pig farm in Adams County. His hundred acres of land possessed everything from horses, cows, and pigs to apple and pecan trees. According to his daughter who had baked a pie for my parents upon their moving to Wisconsin Dells, Mr. Thompson was a widower who became slightly antisocial after his wife’s passing. He had a large ditch put in that spread ten acres along the road before touching his forest. His daughter claimed it was to discourage hunters from entering his property during hunting season. When my parents told me about it, my cynical self quietly felt it was due to the grouchy old man wanting to majorly inconvenience anyone who could possibly run off the small backroads. With the dark, winding roads covered by forest on either side, it would be all too easy to ride into the steep ditch if you weren’t a careful driver. Thankfully, I had missed swerving off the road. Still, I clipped the deer; that much I knew.
“What are you doing?” Simon asked as I pulled a flashlight out from my truck’s console.
“I have to see if she’s all right.”
Simon rolled his eyes as he watched me get out of the vehicle. He looked so much younger when he was afraid. For the last year, the childlike roundness of his face disappeared as he grew taller and more gangly. But he still looked so young as he stared at me with fearful eyes. His fear was soon pungent with sarcasm. “Would you be after being slammed into by a Silverado?”
“You’re not helping, Simon,” I replied as I used my flashlight to scan the outline where the doe went flying. I left the truck door open as I walked away. My boots made slouchy padded sounds as I walked across the wet pavement of the road. The rain that had been showering down most of the night left a heavy mossy smell on the forest surrounding both sides of the road.
“I’m not trying to help. I’m being realistic.” Simon sniffed. “It’s probably dead. If you had been paying attention, you wouldn’t have hit it.”
Simon had failed his road test a few weeks previously. He wasn’t actually a bad driver; he had only neglected to look over his shoulder once. Evidently our family has terrible luck when it comes to squirrels. His next “mistake” had been when he hit one as it ran onto the road at random. There was nothing he could do to avoid hitting the small creature, but his no-nonsense driving instructor had failed him regardless. Given Simon was still feeling salty about failing, he had taken to giving snarky opinions of both mine and our elder sister’s driving whenever we had to drive him somewhere. I was prone to giving Simon a free pass on his sarcastic nature. I felt given he was my only younger sibling it was my obligation to be the “cool” sister as opposed to our sister Miranda’s strict nature. But I wasn’t in the mood to play good cop. Simon was too talented at testing someone’s patience.