Small and Spooky

My Wife

My wife is a monster.

I wish I didn't have to say that but after looking over all the evidence I've come to the conclusion that this is the only answer. My wife is a monster. Specifically, she is the monster that has been terrorizing our small town. She is the monster that lives in the woods.

It started a little over two months ago. Some kids playing in the woods brought home something I'm sure their parents weren't so happy about.

Two rabbits and a squirrel. Mangled nearly beyond recognition. Naturally the parents reprimanded the kids for bringing home something so disgusting and urged them to throw it back into the woods. What kid picks up some coyote's half eaten remains, anyway?

It should've ended there, but it didn't.

This is a small town, a boring small town. People get bored so very easily and with boredom comes gossip. Word was that those animals didn't look like the meal of some hungry predator, but instead like something had tried to rip the animal to shreds. Organs shred to ribbons, heads removed, limbs ripped off instead of chewed off.

Most people passed these rumors off as simply that, rumors, but from the beginning I had a sinking feeling that it was more than rumors. Who makes something up like that after all? Gossip about kids being weird and gross, but why try to make a dead animal out to be something more than it is?

But for the first week or two after, they just remained rumors. I tried not to let myself worry about it, whatever did that to those animals clearly wasn't a problem.

It was two weeks after the first incident that it became apparent that this may be a larger issue. Jimmy and Rusty Seymour, the twins who ran the local mechanic shop, came back from hunting in the woods. And with them, they brought a deer. Have you ever seen a half-eaten deer carcass? It looked nothing like that. It's antlers were gone. They'd been ripped off and the Seymour boys had found dust where there should've been antlers, almost like something had crushed them. So many parts of it's body had been mangled and torn out, it looked like a horror movie. This wasn't the act of some wolf or coyote, eating their prey. This was an animal that had been killed and then played with by something sick.

The talk of the deer threw the town into a frenzy. What's out in those woods?! Why's it doing this? Will it come into town? Is it safe to let out kids wander around the woods? Is it safe for anyone to go in there alone?

Mayor Floyd told us not to worry. So maybe some nasty wolf is out there causing problem. It is not cause for alarm. We'd sent out a little party of men to hunt the beast down and we'd be done. Three days later, the group of men came back with a rather large coyote that they'd found and killed. The thing was stuffed and the town celebrated. However, the dead animals kept being found. More men went out and more dead coyotes came back. And slowly, it seemed, the mangled animals stopped showing up.

I don't think anyone expected to find what happened next.

Wayne Walker, town taxidermist, sixty-eight and one of the weirder people who lived here. They found him on a Saturday morning; he was right on the edge of town, right where civilization turned into the woods.

His head was missing, along with half of his torso. Most of his internal organs had been pulled out and stretched along the forest floor. They found his head three hours later, one eye missing and with the jaw torn out. It was floating along the river. Parts of his arms and legs had been clawed through so violently you could see his bone.

That's when anyone who hadn't been panicked before finally began to panic.

If this thing, whatever it was, was willing to kill one person so violently, what did that mean for the rest of us? There were more hunts, but this time they didn't bring back anything. How could anyone kill a coyote and truly believe that that was the thing that killed a man so viciously?