The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

He droned on for a while about the four garuda kings, and about the great cities of the garuda, and their eternal enemies the nagas, which, as far as I could tell, were either snakes or dragons, but apparently the garudas’ mission in life was to kill nagas. He claimed he could get so big that his wingspan would be twelve hundred miles wide, and that with one flap of those wings he could dry up the sea. He offered to demonstrate, but since Tennessee is within twelve hundred miles of the ocean, I thought it best to decline the offer.

I shrugged. “Well, maybe garuda isn’t a given name, then. I thought it had more of a ring to it than Mothman, but that’s just a personal preference.”

He just went on staring, so I said, “You are that particular garuda, though, aren’t you? The one in West Virginia that they called Mothman?”

It had been about two hundred miles north of here, as the … well, moth … flies. Back in the late 1960s, as I recall, two young couples had spotted a hawklike creature out in a rural area near an abandoned military facility outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The thing had scared the bejesus out of them. They even claimed he flew after their speeding car. But aside from a few evening appearances to frighten the locals, he hadn’t really done any harm. Not so much as a chicken went missing anywhere that could be blamed on him. But then, in December of ’67 something terrible did happen. And he got blamed for that quick enough, which is human nature, I suppose, to single out the different one and then ascribe all the bad luck to his existence. Of course, they might have been right. Given the powers he claimed he had, he would certainly be capable of wreaking any amount of havoc. I was trying to think of a polite way to introduce the topic, without — you know — ruffling his feathers.

“The Mothman, yes,” the creature said, nodding his head slowly up and down. “I was called that once. They searched for me for many days then. But we can change. Change size. Change shape. Some garudas can take on the aspect of a human.”

I eyed him thoughtfully. “You haven’t quite got the hang of that yet, have you?”

He shrugged — at least I think that’s what it was. Then he leaned forward and locked eyes with me, and he seemed to wait for a minute as if he was listening to something far off. “You don’t mind this visit from me,” he said slowly, stating a fact. Then he cocked his head and waited some more. “You are not afraid of me, not like other people are. You like your solitude — yes … understandable. But you would mind even more having some ordinary human intrude upon you here — a hiker perhaps, or a tourist. You prefer me to them.”

Well, you can’t argue with a creature who tunes in to minds as if they were radio stations, so I just nodded and sat back, wondering what it was he had come about. He wasn’t ready to tell me, though, and after the silence had stretched on for a couple of minutes, I said, “You know, you scared people pretty bad back in the sixties in West Virginia, appearing in the dark in front of their cars, and peeking in the windows of a house. They’re still talking about it.”

He grunted.

“Somebody even came through here one time wearing a Mothman T-shirt. I reckon you’re as close as West Virginia has ever come to having a dragon.”

He growled deep in his throat, and those big leathery wings of his rustled some. “I … am … not a naga!”

“No, no. No offense. Easy there, big guy.” If you think ambassadors have a tough job, you should try having diplomatic relations with a supernatural being. “I just meant that you were out of the ordinary for the area. They’re not used to big scary things with wings.”

“I was there before they were.”

I nodded, not the least bit surprised. “Thought that might be the case,” I said. “Seems to me I heard a Shawnee tale or two that you’d fit into pretty well.”

“The old ones. Yes. They understood me better than these people there now.”

“Well, I expect that was because folks back then just accepted the evidence of their own senses, whereas people today are always having to filter their reality through science textbooks and conventional wisdom and whatever the journalists are selling this month, which is just another name for the lies everybody believes.”

He ignored that last sally. Apparently, he wasn’t up to debating the politics of culture, or else, after the first few millennia, it just becomes monotonous. He said, “I was there already. I was there before the people. When I first knew the place, the land was covered by a warm shallow sea.”

I nodded. “I’d heard that. A few million years back, wasn’t it? Most of the continent was underwater back then. I know coal was formed from the ferns around that time. Bet there were dinosaurs poking around in the shallows of those ancient seas.”

His eyes flashed again, and he hissed, “Nagas!”

“Well … I suppose … to stretch a point.” Dragons, dinosaurs … it was all a question of semantics, I reckon. Or maybe we all just see what we expect to see. “But they’re all gone now.”

The eyes glowed red again, and he said, with something like satisfaction warming his voice, “All gone. Yes. I killed them.”

“You — ” I remembered I was talking to a deity of sorts, and that his experience of time and reality was not the same as mine. Anyhow, I wasn’t going to out-and-out call him a liar. I’ve had so much practice being polite to city-slicker trail bunnies that putting up with an ancient winged monster was a piece of cake. Anyhow, his tales were less outlandish than some of theirs. “Killed them yourself, did you?”

His wings fluttered a little. “I told you. When I attain my full size, and beat my wings, I can dry up the sea.”

“Yes, you did mention that. I reckon that would do it. I’ll take your word for it. So you dried up that shallow sea that was covering West Virginia, and then you killed off the nagas that were left?”

He nodded. “Then I rested for a great stretch of time. Things were quiet.”

We lapsed into a companionable silence while I mulled over this new theory of dinosaur extinction. I didn’t think there would be any use mentioning it up at the university, though. I didn’t have any letters after my name, so I wasn’t even allowed to have an opinion. Besides, the truth is just what everybody already believes, and this wouldn’t fit into their game plan even a little bit.

After a few more minutes of companionable silence, another thought struck me. “How come you stayed around after you had destroyed all the nagas?”

“I required a long rest after such a great battle.”

“A few million years, huh? That’s how I feel when I’ve cooked a whole kettle full of stew and then tried to eat it all. Makes me want to sleep for days. You ate them, didn’t you? The nagas? All of them?”

He grunted. “As many as I could. I spit their bones into the mud.”

“Yeah. I think we found them.”

“Then I went back to the other oceans, where there are other garudas. Time passed there. We built cities, and fought other nagas. But one day I returned to the land where the shallow sea had been. And when I arrived, there were new minds in the land where the seas had been. Minds like yours.”

“That would have been the Shawnee, I expect. I think we’re distantly related.” And if he had left in the late Pleistocene and returned with the Shawnee, that had been one heck of a long nap, followed by an extended visit to Asia, between wiping out the dinosaurs and turning up again in West Virginia maybe three thousand years ago. But, like I said, he may not experience time the way we do, and I wasn’t up to talking metaphysics with him — not sober, anyhow. I had a jug of moonshine under the sink, and it crossed my mind to offer him some of it, but he looked like he might turn out to be a mean drunk, so I thought better of it.

“Shawnee …” He was tasting the word, or maybe trying to set up a chord in his memory. I wondered where he had been lately.

“Yes, I expect you remember them. They were quiet folks, living with the land, before the current occupants arrived and started paving roads through the forests and cutting off mountaintops to get to the coal.”

He nodded slowly, as if he were summoning up the memory from a long way off. “I remember them. That was a peaceful time. The creatures who inhabit a garuda’s land become as children to us, and from time to time we try to listen to their wishes, and to please them.”

I didn’t much like the sound of that. It seemed to me that there was a lot of room for misunderstanding between a group of simple country people and a giant winged creature who lived outside time. I’d be careful what I wished for around him.

“Can you read exactly what people are thinking?” I asked, belatedly cautious.