The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

RATTLER AND THE MOTHMAN by Sharyn McCrumb

I’M NOT GOING TO SAY that he didn’t look dangerous, because he did.

Now, I don’t hold with talking to dead people, though it seems I have to do it often enough. And worse, besides.

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.”

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.

He considered it. “I can hear your mind better than most. Perhaps it is the solitude of the woods, with no other minds nearby, but I think it is more.”

I nodded. I figured that whatever made me able to talk to the dead, and have other equally irritating experiences, had probably upped the broadcast signal of my thought waves. I didn’t consider it a blessing.

“But although I hear you … I do not often hear the single thoughts of one of your kind. Your minds are too small for me to see within, and you live for such a little time. But sometimes when a great many minds are all wishing for the same thing, their thoughts become strong enough to reach me.”

“Uh-huh.” I didn’t appreciate that remark about little minds, but I decided to let it go. “Did the first people here wish for anything in particular?”

“Long ago they feared monsters in their land, and as a gift to the people I killed them all.”

I had a pretty good idea of what those monsters would have been: saber-toothed tigers, American lions, mastodons — and with all my heart I wish he had left them alone, but it was about ten thousand years too late to quibble about it now. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Did they ever wish for anything else?”

He nodded. “Strange new people came into their land. Not so many at first … Just enough to build a fort out of dead trees and clear some land by the great river to grow crops. The forest people knew that if all went well with these people, many more would come. They wished them gone.”

I only remembered it because it had happened in Shawnee territory, which is a particular interest of mine. In 1775, just before the American Revolution got going, George Washington himself had sent a group of settlers out to colonize some land he owned at the very end of what was then Virginia. The future president bought up some land grants from veterans of the French and Indian War until he had accumulated about thirty-five thousand acres out there, right on the Kanawha River, in addition to all the other territory he owned farther east. He personally selected that land, and planted some oak trees there, so I reckon he liked the look of it, but somebody should have told him that the Shawnee name for the Kanawha River is Keninsheka, the River of Evil Spirits.

I took a long look at my visitor sitting on the log there in front of my cabin. I guess the Shawnee were acquainted with him, all right.

Washington figured on setting up his own little colony out there in the back of beyond, so he sent James Cleveland and William Stevens out there leading a collection of families into the wilderness to start a settlement, and, sure enough, they built houses, and cleared enough land for fields and orchards, and things seemed to be going along pretty well. But then the Revolutionary War broke out, and nobody had time to worry about a little group of settlers on the other side of the mountains. George Washington got busy. You know how it is.

So from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, everybody just went on with the war, and left those colonists out on the Kanawha to fend for themselves, and the next time anybody had any spare time to check on them, they discovered that the entire settlement had vanished. I mean: gone. No skeletons in the tall grass around the derelict cabins; no forwarding address carved on a nearby tree — nothing.

People have always blamed the Shawnee for the disappearance of Washington’s West Virginia colony, and I thought that still might be the case, but I was beginning to think that they didn’t do it in the usual way: attacking the fort and killing the inhabitants and burning the village. No … I think the Shawnee just … wished them gone.

The garuda was nodding. Apparently, he had been tuning in to my thoughts again, which saved a lot of backstory and chitchat, and made him a tolerable companion, except that I thought he might be a dangerous friend to have. At least when you say things out loud, you can be sure that people heard what you intended to say. Or maybe not, what with semantics and all. (Tourists think that people who live in the woods are ignorant, but you have a lot more time to read if you don’t have to commute.)

“The Shawnee wished the colonists would leave, didn’t they? All of them wished that, as hard as they could, all at once?”

“This is so. And they made offerings to me and sent up prayers. I liked that. I thought perhaps these beings in their wooden walls were nagas in another form, and so I saved my forest people from them. I made them gone.”

I wondered where he had spit the bones that time.

“And then you took a nap for a hundred and ninety years or so?”

“A short sleep, yes, but when I awoke again my lands had changed. There were still forests and mountains, but now there were many minds, and many wooden walls. Great cities.”

“Did you like the new people?”

“They loved the land. Because of that, they belonged. They had forgotten me, though. So I appeared once or twice to remind them who guarded their land.”

“Yeah. They noticed.” I thought about the terrified young couple in Mason County, West Virginia, who had reported seeing a huge birdlike creature chasing their car down a country road. Or the ones who lived near the abandoned army facility who had caught him on the porch, peeking in the windows. I’m sure that prayers and offerings to the creature were the last things on their minds.

“They did not understand my presence. I thought to do a great deed for them so that they would know who I was.”

“So you looked around for some nagas, I bet?” I had begun to see that garudas were really very limited in the miracle-working department. They couldn’t — or wouldn’t — make you rich, or improve your health, or clean up the polluted air. All they were good for was killing. As guardians go, West Virginia could do better, but it did make me thankful that the garuda hadn’t picked Washington, D.C., to call home. The wishes of the folks there would make your hair curl.

“Okay, tell me about the bridge,” I said. That’s almost all anybody remembers about Mothman: that in December 1967 he was seen in the vicinity of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, and that a short time later, the bridge collapsed, killing forty-six unfortunate people whose cars had been crossing over it at the time.

“It was a small gesture,” said Mothman.

Well, I guess it was, compared to wiping out dinosaurs and sending the Ice Age mammals into extinction, but I was still wondering why he’d pick on a bridge.

He heard my question in his head. “Because … that bridge led to a land of nagas.”

Oh. Right. Sure, it did. Ohio.

He nodded. “I felt the same thing in the minds of these people that I had known in the old ones of the forest: the wishing away of an enemy.”

I expect he did hear a lot of exasperation in there. West Virginians get pretty tired of the sneering jokes Ohioans tell about them, and they highly resent their overlooking the physicists and the millionaires, and thinking that the place is composed of rustic poor people. The worst, though, is when those well-meaning, fluff-brained do-gooders in Ohio load up all their old clothes in a van and go barging across the river into West Virginia to inflict charity on people who mostly don’t want or need it. I think I’d rather live across the Kanawha from nagas, myself.

Mothman was nodding. “Just so,” he said. “But my new children were helpless to destroy that enemy, and so I did a small thing for them. I did not destroy all of their tormentors, because these new people did not show the proper respect for me. But I let them see my power.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

After a long pause, the garuda said, “They turned away from me. I will not help them again. Or perhaps I will give the creatures in this land one last chance. Is there some enemy that threatens my people here? I could remind them again who guards this land.”

I thought about it, and to be honest, I was spoiled for choice. Who would I like to see attacked by Mothman? The mountaintop removal people? The retired snowbirds holed up in their new gated communities, gentrifying the mountains with million-dollar “log cabins”? The oxycodone pushers who prey on the poor in spirit?

I was tempted, but I didn’t want quite that much havoc on my karma, and I reckon garudas are all about karma. So I leaned in real close to the red-eyed creature, and said, “Over in the next holler, there’s a feller making a movie about monsters.

“I think you should audition.”