I remember when playing in the woods behind my house was an endless exploration of imaginative adventure that could only further inspire my eight-year-old mind. Many times I was a barbarian warrior like Conan, lopping off heads with my enchanted tree branch. The evil beasts conjured up in my mind stood no chance against my strength and whit, my lust for action and romantic adventure. However, I now realize just how close my world was intertwined with the Cimmerian of his fiction.
For many times the tales of Sword and Sorcery described monsters of unfathomable terror. Of such, only the brute force and unwavering mind of a fearless warrior could encounter and hope to defeat. I was not this warrior and yet my discovery of a hidden terror seemed to be destined for me to find. For when I wandered off the set path which leads from mine to my grandparent’s houses I stumbled across a shaded patch of forest with a small murky pond at its center.
The area was dead quiet save for the crunching of dead leaves beneath my feet and the occasional nerve-wracking pop of breaking twigs. I remember a slight fog over the water, more like vapors dissipating as if the pond we’re boiling. Yet, being an ignorant youth, I reached down and touched the surface and felt it was very cold. So much so that I drew back my hand in surprise only to begin violently wiping my fingers on my clothes for the liquid was like some sort of sticky alcohol. With the commotion I made I heard across the water a soft rustling that seemed to be heading around the pond in my direction, but stopped once I glanced towards it.
For all my fear of the sound, my eyes suddenly came across a shape in the center of the pond. It was pale like smooth limestone yet from it came a small delicate trail of bubbles escaping from an unseen pocket of air. Stupidly I started to lean forward, squinting for a better look. I fell. My body was submerged in the cold burning of the foggy liquid. I desperately tried to place my feet on whatever ground I could find. There was none. I kicked and thrashed toward the surface not wanting to open my eyes for fear of the liquid blinding me. Suddenly, I felt one of my feet strike something hard. That limestone maybe. But in response, there came a sound, a low grunt of some kind. The pond began to build up a slight current and, as if returning the favor, a sharp pain hit my thigh. I screamed into the mysterious waters and put all of my efforts into reaching the shore of what now seemed an infinit ocean. I was no longer Conan the as I breached the surface. I was a child crying out for his parents, smothering from the fumes of this potentially poisonous body of creature infested water.
I climbed out after what seemed an eternity of an unwaking nightmare and refused to look back as I ran from the pond. I expected to hear the sound of the monster breaching the pond, but the silence of dark woods remained unbroken. The vapors of the drying liquid trailed behind me as I desperately made for the familiar path. When it was in sight I felt the calmness of familiarity which caused me to slow my pace. The world was luminous with the summer evening and the creatures of common knowledge went about their business ignorant of what I had found. When I reached home I wondered if I had only dreamed up another fantasy in which I encountered the pond. There was no scent of the strange water, no more burning on my skin, but the fear in my heart returned as I looked down at my torn jeans and spied the coagulated blood from a long scratch in my flesh.
I hurried inside, tossed my clothes in the hamper, and showered for good measure, unintentionally earning praise from my mother for being on top of my hygienics. I told my parents nothing about the pond or the scratch, but I couldn’t completely hide my fearful glances to the windows facing the edge of the forest during dinner. The questions did not come. All was normal within our home which made more and more at ease, as well as conscious of my illogical perception. The evening went on with my dad and I watching reruns of Star Trek while my mom read one of her awful Amish based novels in the lamplight. I think of this time to comfort myself with what followed.
I was tucked into bed lovingly by my parents, being an only child at the time I was coddled quite a bit. My bedroom was alight with glow in the dark stars, posters of Star Wars, shelves of action figures ready to defend me while I numbered. The light of my aquarium and the shadows of Angelfish gliding on the walls eased me into a near dose until the bubbles from the pump caused me to open my eyes in fear. Suddenly, as if responding to my fearful pondering, I heard a scratching in the vent near the right side of my bed. A soft clinking followed by breathing as if something small was making a great effort to get through the grate. I was terrified. My hopes that my imagination from my playful excursions of the day had overtaken my senses were dashed. The Spock logic prior tot had provided the explanations for all that overcame me was lost. Yet the delusion refused to let loose its prisoner which was my sanity. I knew I had to face it in order to prove its nonexistence so that logic may once again have its dominion.
“Hello?” I asked the darkness. Immediately the noises ceased and in my mind’s eye, I could see a rat scurrying away in fear of its discovery, but it was my contributions to this fable which were now dismissed. “You found it, boy.” Came the whisper of a tiny creature behind the grate. My eyes welled with tears at the sound. I was about to call out for my parents when it continued. “All this time I tried to keep it hidden from you “Short Noses” and a runt such as yourself seems compelled to find and wake it!” The voice was irritated, yet it also contained fear in its reverberations. “What was it?” I asked in a trembling voice. My aquarium bubbled quietly reminding me of the pale shape in the pond. “It IS a manticore. One that has hybernated for many human lifetimes but has ended far more. I was entrusted to watch over it by the one who placed it in its prison. You stirred it. Now it will soon awaken.”
I raised up forgetting my fear of the disturbing circumstance of speaking with this hidden thing. I knew what a manticore was. I knew it well enough to have it far from my mind to dream up during my woodland adventures, for the image of the creature caused real fear in me, though in a hypothetical sense. The images I had seen in books of the monster went through my brain and disturbed me anew, now I realized that I had been scratched by the thing in its restlessness. Had I opened my eyes while submerged in the pond I knew that I would have gone mad to see its shape within the burning fog.
“What can I do?” I asked the voice. It didn’t respond, yet I could still hear it breathing in the vent. “Please…” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to wake it up.” I was trembling beneath my bedsheets which used to make me feel safe. Now I only felt cold and alone and guilty for bringing such a thing back into the world. “You cannot put it back to sleep. Its been too long now and it will be hungry. You cannot hurt it with any weapon for its flesh is invulnerable. It can eat you whole and it will leave no bones behind. Its roar is terrible, boy. Your mother and father will wake up to the sound of it and will be taken by madness once it enters your home. It will devour your neighbors, all who dwell nearby, and no one will know what has happened to any of you.” I fell out of my bed and onto the floor sobbing. I crawled to the vent and put my face down to it without fear of what I might see if anything. “What can I do?” I implored in quiet desperation. “How can I kill it?”
In the grate, I could see a tiny shape stirring within. Two glimmers of silvery light peered at me and I could see the green flesh of a long pointed nose. It was a Goblin, small and mischievous looking, though at the moment the eyes looked sad and pitying. When it spoke for the final time I sensed the want of a brighter circumstance. “If you wish to truly be the hero you pretend to be, you must slay it through its mouth.” The eyes disappeared and a soft scrambling shape faded into the darkness. I was alone with this frightening knowledge and I had to make a choice. Should I return to my bed and risk waking up to the roar of the manticore? Or do I face the night and the strange water to slay it before it rises? I was a child. I was scared. But, I knew I couldn’t let my family and my neighbors be devoured because of what I had done.
I dressed, grabbed a flashlight and a small family picture propped on the table next to my bed, then quietly went to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife from the rack. With a weapon in hand I went out the back door to the swaying of trees of a windy midnight. I started the path with an empty mind, neither allowing terrible imaginations nor doubting logic hinder my stride. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t foolish. I simply WAS. The reality, or at least my perception of it, had been shattered into shapeless pieces of mirror that no matter how well-formed could never show my reflection in its former naivety. I prayed that I wouldn’t find the pond, but I knew for sure that I would. The shape would be there. I would have to go back into the water and somehow open the mouth of the manticore and shove in a feeble kitchen knife. This was my plight. I was eight years old on an adventure in my favorite place to pretend and I could feel a laughing mockery at my innocence when I left the path once more.
There was no sound but the wind in the trees. A crescent moon and a star-filled sky watched me from afar. I held my family picture to my chest and walked the hills of dead leaves. The beam of my flashlight shown through the trees who almost seemed lonely in this part of the woods for in truth, this was a world left behind a long, long time ago. When fairies took flight in Elvish gardens and Saytrs piping tunes for dancing nymphs. Whatever creatures flourished in this pocket of time so close to my home we’re long since devoured by themanticore. Likely whatever force imprisoned the beast also sent it here to our plane. As well as having the courtesy of leaving a Goblin behind to watch over it. No doubt this same being is still sowing travesties in other worlds as it has for us at present.
I finally saw the pond reflecting it’s murky grayness with my flashlight and my soul cried out within me as a cold fear enveloped my body. There were no more vapors floating above the surface. Neither was the pale shape below. It was still and empty. The thoughts now began to race both logical and fantastical. It was gone! It was never there! I can return to my warm bed and forget about it. It will be there waiting for me in the midst of my parent’s innards. I wanted to scream for all the emotions, but it was the Manticore that screamed into the night sending a terrible jolt throughout my body. My bowls cramped at the sight of the giant face of a man hovering 10ft in the air. The paws of the enormous lion body thudded the ground, the wings on it’s back flapped a gust that almost made me topple over. The barbed porcupine-like tale flicked violently left to right taking out a tree with one careless swipe. The eyes were a large and bulging yellow with black gashes for feline pupils. When my eyes met that of the monster it screamed again in satisfaction at its discovery of its first meal after so long a slumber. I could see its three rows of teeth as it howled at me and yet somehow my only thought was ‘My parents are hearing this and they are going to find that I am out of bed. They’re going to look for me. They won’t find me. I’ll have been swallowed whole.’
When the manticore reached me it stopped and gazed down at my tiny form and did something that finally snapped me out of my insane stupor. It grinned. The monster was grinning at my fear. The teeth were sharp and yellow. The stench of its breath broke through each of them and made me almost vomit. Stagnation of time. The willingness of its stomach acids to return to its labor The manticore was ready to indulge itself. It breathed in through its nostrils then opened its mouth and slowly came down over my head. Yet, somehow, instead of succumbing to terror a white-hot hatred took over me suddenly. I was offended at how weak it perceived me. I was irate at how much of a bully this thing was. This freak of nature had thrown its weight around eons ago and eradicated the peaceful world it which blighted. I refused to let this happen again. To my family, my neighbors, to me! I stepped on the first layer of its teeth and stabbed the knife into its tongue. It screamed and began to try to close its jaws on me, but I had already climbed further In and now sank my knife into the roof of its mouth.
The beast thrashed its head trying to sling me out but I kept climbing further in, slicing and stabbing all the way through. I remember the barbarous man of action that I pretended to be and I embraced it fully, burrowing deep into its throat, spitting the blood from my own mouth as I climbed. By the sudden change in equilibrium, I could tell it had fallen to the ground and was struggling against the pain. I pressed my feet against the back of the throat and shoved the knife deep beneath the skull. I couldn’t penetrate it so I began to cut upward as hard as I could. Its screams were deafening, but I knew that it could hear my laughter as I sliced and mangled without mercy.
Suddenly, I was drowned in the cold burning water from the pond along with fresh screams as it mingled with the manticore wounds. I lost my knife in the flood but not my footing or the family picture in my hand. I kissed it then smashed the glass in the frame then shoved it in the open gash as hard as I could. The monster bellowed then suddenly began to whine pitifully. The thrashing ceased and the water flowed inside until I was completely submerged. I began to swim out of the mouth fearing the teeth, but to desperate to hesitate. My eyes burned horribly and all vision had darkened from the night so I felt my way past the teeth and to the surface. Through the burning I could make out my flashlight which lay on the ground and I swam towards it ,fearing the claws of the beast seizing me before and pulling me under. Suddenly, there were small hands grabbing my right arm helping me out of the pond. It was the goblin though I could barely see its shape. “You did it, boy! You did it! You have slain the Manticore!”
I was confused. All the effort I put forth to hurt the creature still didn’t seem enough to kill it. The goblin continued to bellow his claim and I expected any moment the thing to rise back up once more and chomp us both. Yet the creature was silent. I could see now that it had plunged headfirst into the pond and drowned itself apparently. “Its… really dead?” I asked.
“Poisoned! The water is deadly to Manticores that ingest, which is why It was put to sleep here, but they can hold their breath for a long time. You made it drink the water to relieve the torture you brought upon it. Its innards will burn away now.”
I fell back and watched the star-filled sky. A meteor passed and with it went my wish to always have this bravery that overcame my impossible fear. As the years progressed in my life and I found myself abandoning my imaginations, my thoughts of heroism, I still remember the moment when I accepted a new reality at the edge of the pond.