The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

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You’d think that holing up out in the woods like I do, living on Dr Pepper and Twinkies, would give me more peace and quiet than John ever saw. (That there’s a biblical reference, which slides right past most people nowadays. There’s a lot wrong with life in the twenty-first century, which is why I took to the woods in the first place, but in a world where the Dalai Lama is on Twitter, I don’t reckon there’s much hope for any of us Shamen — New People’s word — to get let alone.)

My favorite neighbors are the ones that fly south for the winter, or else hibernate in a cave until spring. They’re never a bit of trouble, but unfortunately in the warmer months, the woods tend to fill up with varmints. There’s some idiot a ways down the road who fancies himself an independent filmmaker, which means he has no money and can’t spell. Anyhow, he’s been going around trying to recruit the locals to work for free in his magnum opus, Haints in Hillbilly Holler. Said I’d be a natural. I told him I’d rather be dragged backward through a briar patch, which he took to mean “Maybe.” He is from Florida, and doesn’t speak the local dialect very well. From what he said about his movie, I can see that he plans to trot out every old stereotype in the book and make everybody in these mountains look like ignorant savages, just to juice up his cheesy horror flick. He ought to play the monster himself. Typecasting.

And I’m always getting tomfool backpackers traipsing out here, asking me for something to cure what ails them, which is mostly boredom and too much civilization, from what I can tell.

If they’re polite fellers, and in genuine distress, I give them sweet tea with sassafras; and if they’re arrogant turistas who sneer at my shack and snicker at my accent when they think I’m not noticing — why, I give them a dose of laxative, whether they need one or not. They’re just irritating, but when you’ve had to listen to lectures on string theory from a Cherokee ravenmocker, and stand under cold iron to get rid of the night riders, why, you get a little short on patience with the common and garden variety of idiot: the kind that wear Sierra Club sweatshirts and use poison ivy leaves for toilet paper.

Things do tend to simmer down a bit of an evening. I reckon those suburban hikers are afraid they can’t see the snakes underfoot in the twilight, so they go off to wherever it is that L.L.Bean-wearing, cell-phone-toting, vegan-and-mineral-water pioneers go when it’s time to turn in.

That’s when I drag an old wooden kitchen chair out into the yard, take out a jug that ain’t tea and sassafras, and start counting the stars. There’s a deal more of them out here than there are in city skies, and usually I have the rest of the evening to sit back and commune with them all by my lonesome. But on that particular night, before it got dark enough for the stars, and I was just watching the bats overhead, circling the treetops and chasing bugs, I saw something up there, hanging in the dark sky, in the distance between the ridge and the mountaintop. At first I thought it was one of them bats, until I calculated in my head how far away it had to be, and that told me that the thing was closer in size to a hang glider than it was to a bat — except that it wasn’t a hang glider, either, because its wings were moving.

I turned that straight chair around so that I could keep an eye on that flying thing until I could figure out what it was I was seeing. My money, if I had any, would have been on the merry pranksters from the nearest air force base, because the filmmaker couldn’t even afford a paper airplane. The word around here is that the pilots like to fly their newest experimental aircraft low along the ridges to scare the bejesus out of any locals who happen to be watching. I was wrong about that, though.

Just for the heck of it, I reached around for my lantern, lit it, and waved it slowly, side to side while I faced that flying thing. I hoped it would come close enough to give me a better look at it. Sure enough, after a second or two, it noticed my signal, because it seemed to wobble for a moment in midair, and then it commenced to fly straight for me. I set down the lantern and waited for my visitor to arrive.

It didn’t take long. First it circled the treetops around my cabin, same as the bats were doing, only instead of eating bugs, it was checking me out, maybe looking to see if I was armed with more than a lantern.

I wasn’t.

Most of the dangerous things that hunt me up in these woods wouldn’t even slow down for a firearm, and the ones that would — the bears and the bobcats — generally don’t want trouble any more than I do, so we maintain a judicious neutrality. I’m generally polite to the others — the Cherokee gods and such — though I can’t say that I care overmuch for their company.

The thing was coming closer. It looked like a big shadow, blotting out the night sky, and then it swooped down below the treetops, and when I got a better look, I was staring into a pair of red eyes that looked like the running lights on an airplane — except they blinked a time or two. They sat there in a shadowy face that I would have paid more attention to if I hadn’t been sidetracked by the fifteen-foot leathery wings stretching out behind him and flapping slowly as he set himself down in the grass a few feet away from my chair.

In the faint glow of the lantern light, I could see him more clearly now. He was roughly human shaped, standing upright on long legs that ended in bird claws. Those red eyes flashed and glowed, seeming to take in everything around him. They were set far apart, on the outer edges of a round face with a sharp beak of a nose and a lipless mouth that made me think of a cave entrance: just a way into darkness. I was wondering if he had teeth, and not particularly eager to find out.

The whole cast of his countenance would cause you to think “insect,” by way of classification, except that his expression and bearing said that there was somebody home. He was a lot smarter than a housefly. You could tell.

His body was covered with a fine fluff, (gray or blue — I couldn’t tell in the dim light) — that might have been fur or the sort of downy feathers you see on baby birds. I could have reached out and stroked him to find out which it was, if I’d wanted to.

But I didn’t want to.

Still keeping those burning eyes trained on me, he folded his wings up against his back, and lowered himself ceremoniously onto a sycamore log that I keep moss-free and weeded, in case I get company. While I had been watching him draw a bead on me, swoop down, and make himself comfortable on the log, my mind had been flipping through possibilities. The Cherokee in these parts told tales of a giant fire-breathing wasp named Ulagu that burned all the trees off Roan Mountain, so that they never grew back. The summit of that mountain is treeless to this day, with nothing bigger than rhododendron bushes growing there. Nobody knows why. Scientists call such bare mountains “balds,” but that’s a classification, not an explanation, so I guess a giant wasp is as good an answer as any. I didn’t think this was him, though. Those old stories made the wasp out to be a lot bigger than my seven-foot visitor here, and not much to speak of in the brains department, so I had ruled out Ulagu. That only left one possible candidate, and, as unlikely as it was for him to drop by, I figured he had.

“Good evening,” I said, giving the creature a cordial nod, while I sized him up some more, trying to think of something polite to say to someone maybe seven feet tall, and covered with duck down.

He inclined his head in my direction, and I took that for a gesture of greeting. The silence stretched on some more, so finally I said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

It was hard to tell anything about his emotions from that Halloween mask face of his, but I swear I think he looked pleased when I said that. He got up and let out a little shriek, sort of an owl-noise, and stomped one of those big chicken feet of his in the dust. Then he stretched out those leathery fifteen-foot wings to their full length in order to impress me even more, so I added, “Nope. I certainly did not expect to see you here. You being from West Virginia and all.”

Well, that stuck in his craw. He blinked in mid-preening and looked down at me, and then his wings started folding back of their own accord. You could tell that he’d have been a lot happier if I’d gibbered and cowered at the sight of him, but there’s been worse things in my yard than him, and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking he had impressed me.

“I would greet you by name to be neighborly, but I don’t think they went so far as to give you an official name up there in West Virginia, did they? And I don’t believe they ever figured out that you already had a name that you picked up somewhere else. In that other range of mountains where you’ve been seen now and again, I believe they call you Garuda, don’t they?”

When I said that, those red eyes of his blinked half a dozen times, and he started looking around the yard, as if he expected people to jump out of the bushes and tackle him. I couldn’t think of anybody that would want to try, but I just kept smiling pleasantly at him, while he made up his mind about what to do next.

Finally, in a guttural voice with an accent I couldn’t place, he said, “There are many garudas. It is not a name.”