(The following document was saved to an older Blackberry device that I found, sealed in a waterproof bag, on a shelf in an old concessions stand. I found it while working on a demolition crew, tearing down an abandoned water park to make way for a planned green community. I am posting the document, un-edited.)
So how the hell did I end up here, hiding from a monster in the backroom of a dilapidated corn dog stand, frantically pecking out what might well be the last blog of my life? That’s kind of a long story, but the creature prowling around outside seems to be in no hurry. I think it knows I’m in here. Why it hasn’t already ripped through the poorly barricaded door and torn me to shreds, I don’t know, but maybe it will wait long enough for me to tell you my tale.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m KathyCreeps and this is Hic Sunt Dracones.
That’s the name of my new blog, Hic Sunt Dracones, or will be, if I live long enough to post it. It’s Latin for “here there be dragons,” a notation on old maps and charts that denoted unexplored territory. My previous blog had a much different name. Unfortunately, it wasn’t different enough from someone else’s intellectual property, so I was forced to take down my site and remove any references to it. All the other really good names were taken, but I think Hic Sunt Dracones works (kinda wish I had thought of it for my original blog; would’ve saved me a ton in legal fees).
“Way off the map” is a pretty good description for the kind of places I post about. You see, I’m an urban explorer, a creeper. Some use the term UrbEx, or infiltrator, but I like creeper. It’s very descriptive of what I do, since most of the places I visit are off limits to the general public. I search these sites out, sneak in, take a bunch of photographs, and write about the experience. Occasionally, I do a video, but I find that still shots have more impact. My old blog pulled in enough ad revenue for me to get by, but I’ll never get rich doing this, especially now that I have to start all over.
Still, I do it anyway, and not just for the rush of being someplace I’m not allowed to be. It’s more of a compulsion, really. They fascinate me, these abandoned places. I’ve been to most of the well known ones; the Trolley Graveyard, Yellow Dog Village, Cedarcrest Hospital, Hacienda Heights, Lincoln Way, etc. etc., but the ones I like best are the ones nobody has heard of before. The old ghost towns and played-out mines scattered across the west; shuttered malls, mills, and foundries throughout the rust belt; condemned tenements and abandoned subway lines of the east coast urban centers, you know, stuff like that. I find a way in, take pictures, and post them on my site. Over these last couple of years, I’ve become an expert fence climber and gotten pretty handy with a crowbar. In all this time, I’ve only been arrested once. Pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.
My therapist, Linda, thought this “obsession,” as she called it, with abandoned places was triggered by traumatic events in my life. My husband left me for a younger woman, my kids are grown and don’t need a mom anymore, and I was laid off when my job was automated. She says my affinity for abandoned places rises from my own feelings of abandonment. She also says that I need to take yoga classes to unblock my chakras, so that the universe’s positive energy can flow through me and restore balance to my aura. I don’t take her too seriously, but seeing a therapist was part of the plea deal for my trespassing conviction (the place wasn’t as abandoned as I thought it was). I got off pretty easy with time served and six months probation, so I went to the therapy sessions, took the yoga classes, and kept my mouth shut.
Truth is, I’ve been obsessed with abandoned places ever since I can remember. When I was a little girl, my older brother Mark, his friends the Davis twins, and Jenny Dunlap (not really a friend, but the only other girl in my fourth grade class willing to go “down crick” to play) would spend hours exploring McKesky’s farm. The farm was in the woods, on a low bluff overlooking Wolf Creek. We had to hike over two miles of deer trails through the forest, cut across Beebe’s corn field, and dogleg around a bog to get there. The farm consisted of the main house, a barn, and three outbuildings. I don’t know how long it had been abandoned, but part of the roof was missing and enough dead leaves had blown in and decayed for ragweed and even a few small maple saplings to sprout in the upstairs bedrooms.
Downstairs, a moldering davenport sat against the wall in the front parlor, accompanied by the skeletons of two wing-backed chairs. Most of the kitchen floor had collapsed into the cellar, taking the cupboards and counters with it, but the dining room, even with its peeling wallpaper and crumbling plaster, was still relatively intact. A heavy oak table, aged and gray, occupied the center of the room, with eight straight backed chairs still pushed in around it. From the ceiling a chandelier dangled at the end of frayed knob and tube wiring. Shards of frosted globes still clung to the sockets. In the bottom of a corner cabinet, we found a stack of red willow pattern china plates. Billy Davis and Mark smashed it all. I remember that made me very sad.
As interesting as the house was, the barn was what really fascinated me. Ancient tools leaned in the corners, dusted with rust and grime. Tack and harnesses hung from the walls, the leather so old it would disintegrate when touched. Mason jars full of nails, screws, and other hardware stood in rows on sagging shelves. There was a Ford Model T, just the frame and passenger bucket, sitting on cinder blocks in one corner, all coated in a heavy patina. Mark and the twins plotted and schemed, trying to figure out a way to haul it out of there so they could build a hotrod, but I wanted it to stay where it was. I wanted everything to stay where it was. It all just seemed so beautiful to me, the way the light played across the dusty jars, the shadows cast by sickles, scythes and saws, the rough grain of distressed wood. At that age, the thought of owning a camera had never crossed my mind, but even then, I felt a longing to somehow preserve all this beauty.
Sorry, I digress. My impending doom has made me nostalgic.
When my ex-husband and I divorced, we liquidated all our assets and split the proceeds. It was easier and quicker than arguing over who got what, and neither one of us wanted to drag things out. The only demand I made was that I got the motorcycle. He had bought a Harley Sportster not long after we were married and rode it sporadically for a year or two, before our first child was born. After that, he pushed it into the back corner of the garage, where it sat, taking up space and collecting dust, until I claimed it as my prize. Maybe Linda was onto something about me identifying with abandoned things.
After I was laid off from work, I streamed some YouTube videos and downloaded a few shop manual .pdfs to guide me as I got the bike running again. On my first test ride, I happened across an old foundry that had been shut down some time ago. Inspired by my childhood memories of McKlesky’s farm, I climbed the fence and shot a couple dozen photos with my phone. When my daughter saw them, she suggested I start blogging. The rest, as they say, was history. Outfitted with saddlebags, a sturdy sissy bar, and a touring seat, I’ve ridden my Harley all over the country, visiting the forgotten places that I post about. I call her my “Wind Mother.” With the exception of changing the tires, I’ve done all the maintenance and repairs myself; a fact that I am immensely proud of. Right now, she’s leaning on her kickstand, behind a boarded up gas station along a disused country highway, three miles away from where I’m hiding. I’m afraid I’ll never see her again.
Damned nostalgia. Right, back to the important stuff.
Being a hardcore creeper, I’ve run across rumors of the Getty Lake Water Park and Aquarium before. Supposedly built by an eccentric multi-millionaire in the late Sixties, the park went bankrupt after a couple of seasons. Not many have ever heard of the place, but the general consensus among those few who have is that it was too far off the beaten path to succeed. Even after the owner spent the last of his fortune to bring in some sort of exotic attraction, Getty Lake never stood a chance. There were just too many other, more easily accessible parks. The worldwide recession of 1973 was the final nail in the coffin and the place was abandoned. According to the stories, they didn’t even transfer the animals to other zoos or parks and simply left them to die.
Early in my urban exploring career, I researched Getty Lake, combing the internet for maps, property records, construction permits, safety inspections and the like, but came up empty. I spent hours pouring over satellite photos of possible locations, but never found anything. There wasn’t even a body of water named Getty Lake anywhere in the region. Eventually, like most others in the creeper community, I dismissed the rumors as a fairytale. Until Brad contacted me.
Brad had been a creeper himself, before falling through a rotten floor and breaking his back while exploring an old psychiatric hospital somewhere in upstate New York. He claimed that he’d gotten his information from a friend, but had never been able to follow up on it because of his injury. He gave me directions to the old gas station where I had parked Wind Mother and a compass heading to follow through the woods that would bring me to the abandoned park. Included in the email was a photo of a rusted chain link fence, topped with a three strand barbed wire outrigger. Most of it had been overgrown by kudzu, but the vines had been pulled back to reveal a rust pitted sign that read “KEEP OUT PRIVATE PROPERTY TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW.” Beneath that, in smaller print, were the words, “Getty Lake Water Park and Aquarium.”
It could have been a hoax. Brad had been a subscriber to my old blog. We’d swapped a few DMs and occasionally chatted in the forums, but had never met in person. I didn’t know him from Adam. There was no reason for me to believe he was telling the truth, but there was no reason for me to think he was lying either. What the hell? I figured. It couldn’t hurt to check it out. The place he described was only three hundred miles away. I could do it in a day; six hours there, four to six hours exploring (if the place really existed), and six hours back home. And, if it was for real, I could always go back with camping gear and really give it a thorough going over. Posting proof of Getty Lake’s existence would be an amazing way to start my new blog and get some ad revenue coming in.
At the end of his email, Brad mentioned that his friend had decided to go on alone, but he had not heard from him since. I really should have paid attention to that.
The old gas station was right where Brad said it would be. I had brought extra SD cards for my camera, so I spent some time shooting photos there. It was really good stuff too. Dusty oil cans sat stacked in a pyramid in the front window. Assorted fan belts, cracked and flaking with age, hung on the wall. Vintage sunglasses, tire gages, and air fresheners were lined up under the glass counter. A rack of disintegrating road maps and a modernist style ashtray stand sat between two chrome and Naugahyde benches. There was even a mechanical cash register with a hammered steel case (it was probably worth some money, but I considered scavenging beneath me).
I found just the right angle to shoot a black and yellow garden spider, hanging in her web, with a poster of a pinup girl who was entirely too excited about a set of bias ply radials, artfully out of focus in the background. There was another hour or two worth of material in the station, especially the service bay where tools still hung from pegboard lined cabinets, but that would have to wait. If I wanted to find the water park, do some preliminary exploring, and get back to my motorcycle before sundown, I’d better shake a leg.
Again, the info Brad had given me was spot on. The compass heading brought me to the fence not twenty feet away from the warning sign in the photo he had sent me. Just below the sign, I found a hole someone had cut through the galvanized chain link. Judging by the lack of rust on the clipped ends, they had done it fairly recently. I wondered if it was Brad’s friend, and, if so, why he hadn’t posted about his find? I keep a pretty close eye on the forums. If anyone had found Getty Lake, word would have spread quickly. Maybe something happened to him. Lone creeping can be very dangerous, especially someplace like this; out in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone signal. It’s always a good idea to bring a partner. After taking my own photo of the warning sign, I shoved my rucksack through the hole and crawled in after it.
Do as I say, not as I do, right? At least I won’t have someone else’s death on my conscience.
The water park was more than I expected, more than I dreamed. Its remoteness had protected it from scavengers, souvenir hunters, graffiti artists, and bored teenagers who just wanted to smash stuff. The area I entered when I crawled through the fence had been for younger kids. Shallow pools filled with murky green water sprouted cattails and even some lilly pads. Minnows darted back and forth just below the surface. See saws, swing sets, and monkey bars poked up from a field of honeysuckle and baby’s breath. The remains of a petting zoo lay under a skeletal awning frame. The canvas that had once shaded the pens had long ago fallen victim to wind and weather. In the middle of it all was a carousel, tilted on its axis. The horses, giraffes, and zebras were faded and chipped, but otherwise unmolested. I shot a few quick photos and moved on to the main park. It did not disappoint.
A ride car, made up to resemble a hollowed out tree trunk with seats and safety bars, sat askew on its track outside the collapsed exit tunnel of the Log Flume. The trough of the Lazy River Inner Tube Float snaked back and forth between rides and attractions, spanned by the occasional pedestrian bridge. Towering water slides rose into the sky. Draped with vines and moss, I could just make out the faded colors of their fiberglass tubes beneath the overgrowth, red, green, blue, yellow. Everything was covered with kudzu and creeping ivy. Tall weeds sprouted from every crack in the pavement. Dead leaves covered the ground and lay in drifts against the walls. Little wonder nobody had ever been able to spot this place on Google Earth.
Below the slides were more pools, larger than in the kiddie park, filled with the same murky green water and aquatic plants. The fish in these pools were also bigger. My photos weren’t very good, the light was all wrong, but I managed to catch a couple of them on camera, some kind of bluegill or sunfish I think. I tried to imagine how they even got there.
It would take days, maybe even a full week, to fully explore and photograph just the water park portion of the site. I started making plans for future expeditions, but for now, my main goal was the aquarium. If the rumors were true, if they had left the fish in the exhibits to die, I wanted pictures of the skeletons lying in the bottom of empty tanks. That was the kind of imagery that could pull in subscribers, maybe even start a GoFundMe page.
There were skeletons, plenty of them, and not just from fish.
Right outside of the entrance to the aquarium were two outdoor exhibits. According to the signs (I had to scrape the crud off to read them), one pool had held American alligators, the other California Sea Lions. If there were any bones in those pools, they were submerged under all that murky water and impossible to photograph. As horrible as it sounds, I was disappointed. I figured I’d have better luck inside the building, where rain wouldn’t have been able to replenish the tanks when the water evaporated. As I leaned against the rail of the seal exhibit, to snap a few wide angle shots of the algae encrusted pool, my foot bumped against something. It was an old, army green rucksack, obscured by weeds and fallen leaves. One of the straps had been ripped off and the side was split open, spilling the contents onto the ground. Most of it was ruined by exposure to the elements, but still easily recognizable. Rope, protein bars, water bottles, and a first aid kit among other things; standard creeper’s kit, not much different than the one strapped to my own back. Brad’s friend must have come through here.
The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I felt unease roiling in my gut. What if this was some kind of ambush? I wondered. Had Brad set me up to be attacked by his friend? But that didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t know when, if ever, I would come here. What was Brad’s friend going to do? Camp here indefinitely, hoping that I eventually showed up? The idea was silly.
Still, I was feeling less than comfortable. I was a middle-aged woman, out in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone signal, and the closest thing I had to a weapon was a Leatherman tool. Nobody knew I was here, and, if something happened, nobody would realize I was missing until my landlord came knocking for the rent check at the first of the month. Two of the cardinal rules of creeping are; never go alone and always tell someone where you’ll be and when you’ll be back. I broke both those rules because I wanted an exclusive. I wanted this place all to myself, so that I could jumpstart a new blog and do something I loved, instead of slinging burgers or waiting tables. Despite the doubt gnawing at the back of my brain, I went into the aquarium building.
Just a couple of photos, I told myself, and then I’d hightail it back to Wind Mother, find myself a motel in the nearest town, and call a few associates to put together a proper expedition. Even if I had to share the credit, it would be an amazing way to launch the new site. Besides, I had to take a quick look. Brad’s friend might have met with some misfortune here, and I owed it to a fellow creeper to at least check.
The double doors were not locked and, surprisingly, swung easily on their hinges. Inside the building it was pitch black. Of course, there were no windows. Sunlight would promote algae growth and the tanks would require more frequent cleaning. I had to strap on my headlamp. There was an ankle deep drift of dead leaves inside the entrance doors, but other than that the tiled floors were clear of debris. Maybe Brad’s friend had come through here, letting the leaves blow in when he opened the door. It seemed like a lot of leaves for just one person coming in, but maybe he’d stayed a couple of days and had made this his base camp. I know that sounds thin, but it was the best explanation I could come up with.
In the middle of the foyer was a cylindrical aquarium, twenty feet in diameter and ten tall. Fake stone rose up in the middle of the display, draped with sagging plastic plants, all of it dry and dusty. The pea gravel at the bottom was littered with fish skeletons, the largest being maybe a foot and a half long. The camera’s flash reflecting off the glass kept me from getting a decent photo, so I pushed deeper.
Beyond the foyer was a long hall, lined with tanks of various sizes set into the black painted walls on either side. Again, the flash ruined any photos I tried to take. It was toward the end of that hall that I began to find the animal bones; rats, squirrels, racoons or possums, that sort of thing. Maybe they were the ones pushing through the doors and letting all the leaves drift in.
The next room was larger, with bigger tanks, but I still couldn’t get any pictures. The animal bones littering the floor here were bigger, too. Most looked like they came from deer, but one set of antlers could have only been elk. Were animals somehow wandering into the building, getting trapped, and dying of thirst or starvation? I wondered. The bones were scattered, some of them broken, and appeared to have been gnawed on. Maybe scavengers had been at the bodies after they died. Could the scavengers still be in here? The idea sent a chill down my spine. It was time to go. I turned around to leave. That’s when my headlamp illuminated the sign.
“REPTOZOID” it read in garish red letters eight feet tall. The font reminded me of horror movie posters from the ‘50s. “HALF MAN! HALF MONSTER! ALL TERROR!!” Beneath that it continued; “From deep in the unexplored jungles of the Amazon comes this aberration of nature, an evolutionary impossibility, yet still, he exists! This exhibit is not for children, pregnant women, or people with heart conditions. Enter at your own risk!” The words were superimposed over a faded, but surprisingly realistic, mural of an underwater panorama of sunken logs, aquatic plants, and tropical fish. In the lower left corner, the artist had painted a cave, with a pair of menacing, yellow eyes peering out from the darkness.
“Oh, this I gotta see,” I chuckled.
Yes, I actually said that out loud, before pushing open the door and walking down the ramp to the viewing area. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
The exhibit was twelve or fifteen feet below the rest of the building, and consisted of a small auditorium with four rows of theater seats facing the glass wall of a humongous tank, so that the audience could see below the water’s surface. Filled with the same murky, green water I had seen in the pools outside, the tank was dimly illuminated from above. There must have been skylights or a hole in the roof. That would explain how rainwater got in to keep the tank filled.
The beam of my headlamp revealed even more animal bones, strewn haphazardly across the floor and piled against the walls. One of the skulls obviously belonged to an alligator. Was it one of the scavengers or one of the scavenged? Either idea made me shudder.
I was pretty sure I knew exactly what this was. The park owner had hired some guy (who was really good at holding his breath), dressed him up in a rubber monster suit, and had him swim around the tank to the fear and delight of the audience. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen something along these lines. My ex-husband once took me to a restaurant in Las Vegas where topless women, made up like mermaids, swam around in similar tanks. The fact that he was willing to shell out almost four hundred bucks, just to stare at aquatic bimbo boobies while we ate mediocre lobster Thermidor, was one of the things that made me feel not so bad about our divorce. I snapped a couple of pictures, making sure I got some good close-ups of the gator skull, and headed for the exit. Photos of that skull, and some slightly lurid speculation about the exhibit animals eating each other after they were abandoned, would be the highlight of my first post on the new blog.
Something caught my eye, a ghost of movement in the murky tank, a swirl of suspended sediment. I approached the glass, thinking it must be some kind of fish, like in the pools outside. Cupping my hands against the glare of my headlamp, I squinted into green water.
A large, scaly hand, webbed fingers tipped with black claws thumped against the glass beside my face. Yellow eyes, pupils slit like a poisonous snake, peered out at me. I screamed, stumbled backward, and fell painfully on my ass. I couldn’t see so much as sense its movement as it shot upward with incredible speed. I heard a splash and a heavy thud on the ceiling above me.
I was up and running for the exit faster than any forty-six year old woman has a right to move. At the top of the ramp, I saw another skull that had been hidden from my view behind the door when I entered. It was a human skull. Brad’s friend, maybe. Probably the former owner of the rucksack out front. A few leathery scrapes of tendon still clung to the jaw, but the rest of it had been stripped clean. The top half had been ripped off. Something had very much wanted to get at the brains inside.
There I was, fleeing in terror from some unknown creature, and part of me still wanted to stop and take a picture of that skull. I’m crazy, aren’t I?
No sooner was I through the door and back in the room with the big empty tanks and deer bones, than I heard a heavy thump in the auditorium behind me. There must have been a hole in the ceiling that I hadn’t noticed. Whatever had been in that tank was now in the auditorium, and it was obviously coming after me.
Dashing towards the long hall lined with aquariums, I tripped over the femur of a deer. As I scrambled back to my feet, something banged into the auditorium door, fumbling with the handle. I didn’t bother to wait and see if it could figure out the latch. Judging by all the gnawed bones around me, the thing had mastered doors long ago. Instead, I sprinted hell bent for leather down the hallway, my headlamp bouncing crazily with each step. Near the entrance foyer, I heard the rhythmic slap of feet on the floor tiles coming up fast from behind.
There was a bad moment when I thought the entrance doors must have locked when I came in, because, no matter how hard I pushed, they wouldn’t open. In my panic, with those slapping footfalls growing louder, I had forgotten they opened inward. Yanking the handle so hard I almost dislocated my shoulder, I flung myself out into the summer sun. After the darkness inside the aquarium building, the mid-afternoon light was blinding. Disoriented, I stumbled into the rail of the alligator exhibit. Momentum carried me over and I plunged into the water. That’s where I lost my camera. It wasn’t one of the top-of-the-line models, I can’t really afford that, but it was a trusty friend that had been with me on many adventures. I will miss it as much as my motorcycle.
Can’t think like that. I might still get out of this.
As my head broke the surface and I sputtered for air, I heard the bang of the aquarium door being yanked open. The creature stepped out into the light, hissing in pain and holding up wide, webbed hands to shield its eyes from the sun. I only caught a glimpse, before thrashing away through the water to the far side of the pool, but it was enough. The thing was stocky and broad, built like a gorilla, with stubby legs and long arms. Instead of fur, gray-green scales covered its bulging muscles and both hands and feet were webbed. A broad, flat tail, ridged with spines, trailed behind. The head was wide and flat, with those yellow, slitted eyes protruding from the top of its skull. Its snout was short and snaggle-toothed. Wattles of empty skin hung under its gullet. This beast had obviously evolved to rip chunks of flesh from its prey and swallow them whole.
Alli-rilla? Ape-a-gator? I guess Reptazoid is as good a name as any.
It heard my splashing and felt its way to the rail, but before its eyes could adjust to the bright light, I pulled myself out of the water on the far side, pushed through the overgrown shrubs of the exhibit’s backdrop, and scrambled over a hidden fence. I dropped down into unfamiliar territory, and ran straight ahead.
With my own rucksack bouncing on my shoulders, I dipped and dodged around the guide rails to ride entrances, sagging picnic tables clustered around concession stands, and decorative planters overgrown with weeds and trees. Stagnant water sluiced from my clothes, leaving a trail that a blind mole could follow. All the while I could hear those slapping footfalls and a sporadic slurping noise, like the one my kids used to make eating spaghetti. Glancing back over my shoulder as I ran, I saw the creature chasing after me in an awkward gallop, holding one arm up to shield its eyes from the sun. It wasn’t completely blinded, but it didn’t like the light very much.
Squeezing between two dilapidated carnival game booths, I entered an open plaza. It was surrounded by more booths in various states of decay and, standing in the center, was a defunct water fountain. Rising up from the basin was a column of aquatic animal sculptures. The busts of fish, dolphins, and whales, each with a water pipe protruding slightly from its open mouth, ringed a central column like faces on a totem pole. That would’ve made for some really good photos, if I hadn’t lost my camera. Or been running for my life.
In the open, I was able to pick up speed and put a little distance between me and those slapping footfalls. Slipping between two more booths on the far side of the plaza, I came to a slope of tall grass, leading down to the remnants of a man-made beach on the lake the park had been built beside.
I was beginning to think I might have a slim edge in speed and agility over that thing on land, but I knew I had precisely zero chance in the water. The beach had been constructed on the tip of a broad spit, jutting into the lake. Shoreline curved back towards the main park on either side of me. Behind, I heard the crash of splintering wood, as the creature bulled its way into the plaza. I was trapped, surrounded on three sides by water and cut off from the only route of escape by the thing chasing me. My only option was a clapboard shack, with a faded corn dog painted on the side, sitting along the path that led from the plaza to the beach. It was twenty yards away. I ran.
The door was locked, but I was able to lift the front shutter enough to roll over the serving counter and drop down inside, landing on the floor below a row of deep fryers. I grabbed the stainless steel prep counter to pull myself up, coating my palm with dusty grease in the process. Beside the fryers was a door, leading into a storage room at the rear. As I slipped in and eased it shut behind me, I heard the thing crashing through the booths on this side of the plaza.
The room was full of supplies, but nothing useful. Bins of plastic cutlery, decaying paper napkins, stacks of plastic serving baskets and boxes of wax paper to line them with filled the shelves. An empty propane tank, hooked up to pipes that fueled the burners under the fryers, and freezer chest sat against the interior wall. As quietly as I could, I wiggled the freezer in front of the storage room door. I knew better than to open it. After forty plus years, any corn dogs or frozen french fries left inside would be pretty nasty. The barricade was of dubious comfort, but better than nothing.
There were cracks in the clapboard siding, just wide enough for me to peek through. I watched the creature stalking back and forth, walking on its hind legs and the knuckles of one hand, while shielding its eyes with the other. It stayed in the shadows as much as possible, moving quickly through the light when it had to. At one point, it hunkered down in the shade of a booth and sat very still for several minutes. Suddenly, its tongue shot out of its mouth, the barbed tip spearing a robin that had alighted on the raised end of a collapsed picnic table. The tongue retracted with lightning speed and the bird disappeared into the creature’s maw. I nearly gasped aloud when it dawned on me what that spaghetti slurping noise had been. The bird had been at least fifteen feet away. I shuddered to think how close that thing had come to skewering me with its tongue.
Ape, gator, now frog. What the hell is this thing? Some mad scientist’s fever dream? “Aberration of nature;” yeah, they got that part right.
The creature’s head snapped around to look directly at me. I instinctively pulled back from the crack I was peeking through. That’s when I realized I was still wearing my headlamp. It had survived my little dip in the alligator pool and was still working. What can I say? I invest in good equipment. I ripped it off and thumbed the kill switch, but the creature must have noticed the light. It came loping over to the corn dog stand and tried to peer through the cracks while I huddled on the floor between the freezer and the empty propane tank, hands clapped over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream.
I don’t think it saw me, but I’m pretty sure it knows, or at least suspects, that I’m in here. It spent several minutes moving around the shack, pressing on the walls to test their strength. I heard the shutter out front squeak open and bang closed, but the creature didn’t come in. I don’t know why. By the time I screwed up enough courage to peek out again, it had returned to the shade behind the game booths, crouching in their lengthening shadows. But it was watching the corn dog shack intently.
Everything I know about animal behavior I learned from nature documentaries on TV, so suffice it to say, I’m no expert. Still, from what I’ve seen of the creature, I think I’ve got a few things figured out. First, it doesn’t like light. Second, with those stubby hind legs, the frog-like spear tongue, and the fact that it couldn’t run down a middle-aged mother of two with a fondness for wine and chocolate, I think it’s an ambush predator and not the kind that’s much good at running down its prey. I really hope I’m right about those things, because my plan depends on them.
The kiddie park, the hole in the fence, and the woods between me and my bike, all lie to the east. In the morning, if I can get past the creature and its tongue and back into the plaza with the fountain, it’s almost a straight shot through the park. I’m not in great shape, but I’m in good shape. I think I can outrun it, especially if it’s blinded, chasing me into the morning sun. Once I get through the fence and into the woods behind the old gas station, I should be okay. I don’t think ambush predators venture too far from their dens, or lairs, or whatever you call them. At least I hope they don’t. For all I know this thing could sprout wings and shoot fireballs out its ass, so we’ll see.
All I have to do is make it through the night.
I’m going to leave my Blackberry with this message here. I learned early on to carry all my electronics in waterproof bags while creeping, so it survived the gator pool. The battery will likely discharge. I’ll leave the charger in the bag, too. Once it’s plugged in, the information in its storage should still be good. People need to know there’s a dangerous creature living in the old aquarium. Anybody who finds this, please tell Megyn and Jeremy that I love them and was thinking about them. Their numbers are in the contacts list.
But that’s all just in case. I’m pretty sure my plan will work, if I can just hang on until morning. Either way, this is KathyCreeps, signing off.
Hic Sunt Dracones.
(I attempted to call the numbers listed for Megyn and Jeremy in the Blackberry’s contacts. Both were “out of service.” On a side note, one of the demo crew went missing last night. Since many of the unskilled laborers that the company hires for these jobs are itinerant, the police filed a report, but are not conducting an investigation as of yet. Still, the missing man had no vehicle and it is a very long walk to the nearest town.)