I run a private campground. I have a set of rules to keep everyone safe. Today I’m going to tell you about a rule that isn’t my own and seems like such bullshit that it’ll make mine look like common sense. And it also explains a bit about the old sheriff, because I think I need to better understand why he was angry that I saved him from the dapple-gray stallion, so that we can reconcile.
If you’re new here, you should start at the beginning, and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
I need to explain how these inhuman things got here. Not the ones that were born here, but the ones that have been around for a while. These creatures follow the people of their origin. America has a wide variety of creatures because we’ve had a lot of different groups immigrate here over the centuries. There’s the creatures that have always been here, of course, as this is ancient land for them. The creatures that came with the immigrants, however, don’t have a place they belong and that is why they’re drawn to old land.
We get our share of random roving monsters, of course. Those are rare. Is it possible that we’ll get a monster that came over with Somali immigrants, even though we don’t have anyone of that ethnicity living in town? Of course. Is it likely? Not really. They’re attracted to old land but I think the attraction of land that is lived on by the people who share the beliefs that created them is stronger.
The stronger the presence, the stronger the lure. That’s why we’ve seen more than our fair share of Slavic creatures. One of the prominent families in town is originally from Russia and they don’t just know the stories and traditions - they’ve practiced them down the generations. It’s part of their family history and as they’ve settled here, those beliefs have taken root. They don’t live on old land, but they’re a different sort of beacon. They bring these creatures here and then those creatures end up in or around our campground.
There’s so much focus on my campground as the source of all things evil around here that I think we forget that the other families are responsible as well. We overlook the things they do that could influence these inhuman things.
This incident I’m telling you about could easily have gotten the old sheriff killed, were it not for me being a petulant little shit who had just heard about a certain rule regarding hair.
It was an off-hand remark, made to me on a rare occasion that I visited the house of the family from Russia. Their children were all a bit older than me. The youngest daughter was only a few years more, just enough that she could stay aloof, but not so much that she could ignore me entirely. For a little while my parents invented reasons for us to spend time together. I think they were trying to help me make a friend, as this was after the incident with the man with no shadow and I was quite alone by then. Certainly, it was dangerous for me to have friends, but this family was a bit more canny with these inhuman things than the rest of the town.
Their grandmother was the reason. She retained all the stories and traditions from her homeland and strictly enforced them on the rest of the family. And like all of these creatures, there were rules. Oh, were there rules. Couldn’t bathe after nightfall. Leave out food for the domovoy. Lots of customs around holidays and funerals. The one that I took particular notice of was the one about hair.
All the women in this family kept their hair braided.
It seems unfair, doesn’t it? Rules about how women are to wear their hair echo through the eras, cutting across cultures throughout the world. Here, it can’t be cut. There, it can’t be uncovered. Sometimes it is a restriction of modesty and I think this is the reason we’re most familiar with in the modern age. But in another era and another culture, it was a signifier of class status. And for what we are interested in right now, it was a matter of protection.
Unbraided hair invites in evil.
This is what the grandmother told me, as I sat in their kitchen, keenly aware that none of the other children in the family had elected to come see me. Certainly, they’d said hi when I was dropped on the doorstep by my mother, but then quickly found reasons to be elsewhere, leaving me standing awkwardly on the threshold. Their grandmother took pity on me, and so I sat at a small table in their kitchen, licking my fingers that were still covered in the cookie dough we’d just finished shaping into balls.
I asked her why this was. I think I was asking in a general sense, but their grandmother took it a different way. She sighed and straightened from putting the cookies in the oven and said she didn’t know why it fell to the women to keep everyone safe. It just was. Maybe someday it wouldn’t be, but until then, they all must wear their hair in braids, lest some evil thing take notice and draw close. Perhaps it would steal the woman away, the grandmother continued. Or perhaps an evil spirit would possess her. But most likely, considering how well protected the house was, it would instead lash out at everyone around the family. I was familiar with this, wasn’t I? How these creatures on my family’s campground attacked the bystanders who knew nothing of what evil things we harbored.
When the cookies were done she took the first one off the tray and set it on a platter, then put it out on the threshold for the domovoy. Then she let me take a handful before she called the rest of the children to come have some. I watched them as they entered, the daughters in particular. Their hair was all braided. One wore it elaborately. Another wore it simply. And the youngest wore it carelessly, so that the grandmother smacked her gently with a wooden spoon and told her to rebraid it before it fell out.
The youngest… this story is in part about her.
I try to conceal people’s names when I think there’s a reason to. The old sheriff has a moniker because he’s well known outside the campground on account of having run for office numerous times. I’d rather not connect his name to these stories so directly. Now, while this family’s youngest daughter isn’t well known, I think it’d be best to keep her identity hidden. Just in case. She doesn’t have an easy moniker either, so I’m going to use a fake name.
That’s a lot of words for ‘I’m gonna call her Lisa’, I know.
Have you seen someone beaten to death? I think in our fascination with the macabre we glorify the amazingly creative ways that people can die. The allure of the obscene. I won’t name names, but I’m sure you know which movies I’m thinking of. In humanity’s quest for novelty, I think we overlook the simple horror of a bad death.
‘Interesting’ isn’t necessarily a bad death. There’s plenty of interesting ways to die that aren’t that awful. My own death will likely be interesting, after all, and I hope to find a way to make it a good death, as my grandmother did. But a bad death? That is the kind of death that your body and soul rebels against, the one you initially fight because you know it isn’t your time and this isn’t how you wanted to go. Your struggles are futile and slowly, hope falters and vanishes entirely, leaving you alone with the spectre of your demise wrapped cold around you.
That is the death of the spirit. The death of the body comes next.
You suffer as you feel yourself failing little by little and perhaps you yearn for death, just to make it stop, but it ignores your pleas and takes you on its own time. Not yours. Sooner than you wanted, but also far slower than you crave. This final agency is ripped from your hands and given to a cruel, callous world that treats your will with disdain. This is a bad death.
I figured this out as a child when my mother took me to the morgue for the first time. It wasn’t long after that visit to Lisa’s house, when her grandmother made me cookies. Perhaps my mother thought it was time that I was introduced to this part of the family business, or perhaps she didn’t want to take the detour to drop me off at home first. I was disoriented, because I didn’t recognize the streets she took or the building we arrived at. On account of the number of bizarre deaths that occur in our town, there is a morgue attached to the sole funeral home so that we don’t have to send all of the bodies through the hospital. The police can keep everything local. It’s an unassuming building, set a bit away from the funeral home itself and far from the main road. Easy to overlook. Just a drab building made out of cinderblock.
The interior, however, is a different story. It is heavily protected and I don’t mean by mundane standards. Sure, there’s a security system and some cameras (which I think are fake) and that’s it. But every protection you can think of from every culture is painted, engraved, or hung around the entrance. The funeral home did their research. Nothing dead or undead is getting in or out of this building without their knowledge.
You’re probably thinking, ‘oh wow the funeral home owners must have some stories of their own’ and yes, they do, and I suppose now I’ve cursed myself to write them out someday, haven’t I?
At the time, the building felt cavernous. The lack of decoration on the interior, the austere white walls and the harsh lighting made it seem far larger than it really was. As an adult, I realize that the morgue is little more than a glorified shack with an overzealous AC. There’s hardly any space between the metal table in the middle of the room and the row of shelves on one wall, such that no one can squeeze through when one of the trays is slid out. I remember thinking it would be fun to play in here, to sidle underneath the open slab like it was a bridge I was swimming under, until I realized there was a corpse on it.
My mother didn’t call me over to look, but I was curious, and did so on my own. The body was covered by a sheet and it was lumpy. There were pits and dents here and there. A deflated shoulder. A swoop over the knee, like someone had scooped it out with a spoon. My mother lifted a corner of the sheet to look underneath and I glanced around her, peering past her body towards the corpse that lay beneath. It was mottled and for a moment I didn’t think it was human, that perhaps I was staring at some kind of salamander creature with blue-purple skin. Then I realized I was looking at bruises. Every inch of the body was covered in bruises, the colors ranging from crimson red all the way through purple, blue, green, to yellow. The face was a crushed mass resembling oatmeal and those strange hollows I saw - the shoulder, the knee - were where the bone had been pulverized to the point it could no longer hold the muscle and skin in place.
Mother quickly dropped the sheet. She’d seen enough. This was indeed an unnatural thing, she said grimly. Our family would deal with it.
The problem was, my mother said later, over the dinner table, that we didn’t know what unnatural thing we were dealing with. Some of these creatures are unique in how they kill their prey. Vampires leave their victims exsanguinated, there’s beasts that only eat the heart or the liver and such. But for every creature that leaves a calling card at the morgue, there’s a dozen more that all kill in the same way.
Beating someone to death is a very common tactic for these inhuman things.
The thing that distinguishes it from human brutality is that humans tend to stop when they realize the person is dead. Inhuman things leave their victims without an inch of skin untouched, never dealing the fatal blow until the unfortunate person is thoroughly worked over. This was not the first time my family has dealt with the creatures that do this. I’m sorry to say that a lot of the time we never find what did it and it just goes away on its own after leaving a handful of bodies behind. My parents expected this time to not be any different.
Then, a few weeks later, another body showed up. It too had been beaten to death. This time, the old sheriff showed up at the house. He told my parents that there was a pattern to the killings. The local police got a call about someone trespassing and surprise surprise - it was a camper that had wandered off the campground and wound up in someone’s backyard. They gave them directions back to the campground and let them go walking off.
While they couldn’t be identified by their appearance anymore, their clothing matched the body currently in the morgue. The homeowner had watched them leave after the police officer directed them back towards the campground and instead of walking the whole way, a car had driven up rather soon after they’d left and given them a ride. At the time, they’d assumed it was a friend from camp, but the timing seemed off when the old sheriff reviewed the report.
They’d hitchhiked, the old sheriff decided. Just like the first victim, who had been seen trying to catch a ride some hours before their death.
“Are we dealing with a human this time?” mother asked.
Now that I am older, I know the reason she glanced back towards the bedroom. She was thinking of her gun and her knife and wondering if she needed to slit a throat.
“Could be an inhuman thing that updated its tactics,” my father offered.
The old sheriff intended to find out. He was going to go walking along the road until someone offered him a ride. This caused a brief argument among the adults in the room. My mother insisted that she should go. If it were a human, they’d be more inclined to pick up a woman that they thought would be easy prey. I heard the savage vindictiveness in her voice and knew that they’d be the ones beaten to death this time, if they took the bait. The old sheriff finally won the argument when my dad told her to ‘let him do this’ and she reluctantly yielded.
The old sheriff told me what happened, when a car slowed to a stop beside him and the driver offered him a ride. It was after my parents were dead and I was in charge of the campground. I needed to know the full story, he said, now that I was in charge of keeping my campers safe.
The driver was an ordinary looking man, albeit with a rather fabulous beard and shaggy hair that needed a trim. They chatted a little bit as the driver took him down the roads towards his supposed destination (a dead end road with a police officer waiting, just in case it did turn out to be an ordinary human murderer). The old sheriff began to wonder if perhaps he’d found just a kind stranger to offer him a ride and the hitchhiker theory was no good.
Then the driver jerked the wheel sideways. The old sheriff remembers an impact and then nothing after that. He regained consciousness while he was being dragged through the woods by the collar of his shirt. He remembered thinking, as the man threw him to the ground, that it wasn’t a human after all. His theory was correct.
Then the man picked up a stout stick and began to beat him. His bones shattered under the blows. One eye popped, the other was half-blinded by a wash of blood. His mouth was full of blood and broken teeth. He fought back, of course, but his gun had been taken from him while he was unconscious and the creature was so strong. Far stronger than any human should be. He said that his last cognizant thought was that he was glad he hadn’t let my mother go in his place.
Before he succumbed, he reached up a hand - his fingers crooked and blackened - and clutched helplessly at his attacker. His hand closed on something - a flask of some kind, hanging from a cord off his belt - and the cord snapped. It fell on him, the stopper coming free, and the water soaked his torso.
Instantly he felt whole. The pain vanished. He felt strong - stronger than he had any right to be. And he reached up with fingers that were now straight and unblemished by bruises and he seized the stick and wrenched it out of the man’s hand.
He used it to crack the man’s skull open. The stick cleaved through the bone and into the brain, splattering bits of it across the forest floor.
That was the end of it. For a few days, at least. This time, the old sheriff didn’t tell my parents about the body they’d found. Another confirmed hitchhiker. This time someone from the edge of town whose car had recently broken down and they hadn’t gotten it fixed yet and were just bumming rides from anyone that came past. The old sheriff feared that after last time, my mother would once again insist on going and use the fact he almost died against him in the ensuing argument. Instead, he went walking along the road after only telling his officers. He knew how it would work this time.
If there was a pattern, he reasoned, perhaps he could circumvent it before the inhuman thing wrecked the car. Perhaps that was how the cycle could be broken. So along came the car and it slowed and the window opened and the man inside offered him a ride. The old sheriff got in and took a covert look at the driver.
The same man. Except this time, the beard was longer, and it looked like… there was a face formed out of the curling hair. He told the driver where he was going and as the driver replied that yes, of course he could take him there, the beard’s mouth moved as well in time to the answer.
Unsettled, the old sheriff tried to focus on watching the driver’s hands. Trying to anticipate when he’d throw the wheel so that he could grab hold and keep it on the road.
Well, the old sheriff told me, he succeeded in that much. But turns out it’s a lot harder to stop someone from wrecking a car when they really want to, especially when they’re blessed with inhuman strength.
Things happened much as they had before. The man dragged him through the woods for a bit before seizing a stick and beating him with it. This time, the man had a stick in each hand, and the old sheriff thought he wasn’t going to survive long enough to get a chance to snag the flask at his waist. He said he felt his organs rupture, his lungs filled with blood. He was entirely blinded as both his eye sockets were crushed.
Then, a pause. He felt the man grabbing him by the neck. Checking for a pulse. And he flailed with the last of his strength, he felt his ruined hand smack against the flask, and that small blow knocked the stopper free and the water poured out and onto his chest.
This time, after the old sheriff had cracked his skull in two, he dragged the inhuman thing’s body back to my parent’s campground. They burned it. I was there, watching the sparks, because I always did like a good bonfire and it was easy to ignore what was inside or to stand upwind of the smell of burning flesh.
“This isn’t over,” my mother told the old sheriff as they stood watching. “There’s a pattern here. And since you started it, you have to finish it. Survive the third encounter and kill it once more and that’ll be the end of it.”
The old sheriff said he wasn’t sure if he could survive one more time, but he’d try. I thought it strange that his voice sounded more resigned than resolved.
I wonder if at some point, the old sheriff accepted that he would die from some inhuman thing in an attempt to save another. I wonder if that is why he threw himself inside the vanishing house and why he was willing to sacrifice himself to the dapple-gray stallion. Perhaps it isn’t heroism… but he believes it to be his fate, just as I cannot shake the belief that the beast will be the death of me someday.
As it turns out, he never got the chance.
I’m sure you’re wondering at this point how the hell Lisa fits into all of this. Was that little bit at the beginning with the cookies and the weird rule about hair all just a detour down memory lane?
Do you recall how Lisa was scolded by her grandmother for letting her braid come undone? That was not an isolated incident. For a little bit, Lisa had been in the habit of taking her hair out of a braid once she arrived at school. She told her friends it was giving her a headache and it was fine as long as grandma never found out. I was resentful of her defiance. There were no consequences to it. Not like me, who had to leave the windows shut and ignore the little girl crying outside or we’d all die.
I don’t remember quite how old I was, but I do remember that I was an evil little shit at that age. So a preteen, maybe?
That night, I tattled on Lisa over dinner. I don’t think there was any particular reason. I think I was just irritated that my parents were distracted and not paying enough attention to what I was saying about school, so I decided to stir things up by saying something I knew they’d get upset about. And if it wasn’t me they were upset at, so much the better.
“Lisa?” my mother asked. “Are you certain? How long has this been going on?”
I told her. And as a child, I thought that my plan had backfired horribly, for mother left immediately after dinner and made my brother and I take care of all the cleanup ourselves.
She went to Lisa’s grandmother and the next day, Lisa’s hair was in a braid and it stayed in a braid all throughout the school day. She was subdued and quiet and I felt maliciously gleeful that she’d gotten into trouble.
As I said, I was an evil shit back then. But I was also desperately lonely and resentful of an entire school full of children that were afraid to be my friend. I lashed out however I could.
Honestly it’s astonishing I didn’t get sent to the principal more than I did.
The old sheriff walked along the road for almost a week before he finally had to admit that the man with the beard wasn’t coming back. He didn’t want to admit it, but it looked like Lisa had indeed been the cause of its presence. No one wanted to believe that something so simple as a young girl’s hair could be the cause of such evil.
But unbraided hair invites evil, for those that believe such things. And Lisa’s family is prominent around town with numerous houses owned by relatives. It isn’t a coincidence that the killings began around the same time Lisa began unbraiding her hair and that the hitchhikers were all picked up along the property lines of people with blood ties to Lisa’s grandmother.
The last time I remember seeing Lisa was in highschool, shortly before the end of the school year. She was a senior and her friends were asking her what she wanted to do after she graduated.
“I’m leaving,” she declared, and she reached back and tore the hair tie off her braid. “I don’t care where, but I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”
Going somewhere there weren’t creatures attracted to her blood. Somewhere that these evil things couldn’t find her, regardless of how she wore her hair. I kept walking down the hallway, but I looked back just long enough to see Lisa, now alone at her locker, hastily putting her hair tie back in before her braid fell apart.
She graduated and she did exactly that. I haven’t seen her since. I can only hope that she’s happy and that she can wear her hair however she wants.
I’m a campground manager. The old sheriff told me this story because he fears that this isn’t over. Perhaps someday the bearded man will return and begin to claim victims again, and that he - or someone else - will have to finish the pattern that was started so many years ago. I think he is also a little angry that my parents intervened. That they went to Lisa’s grandmother and then without a beacon inviting it here, this evil thing lost interest and went away to torment some other town.
I wonder if he carries the guilt of not having stopped it. If he carries the guilt of all those that couldn’t be saved.
I’ve only just begun to question if I’m doing enough or if I’m taking the easy way and leaving a trail of bodies in my wake by doing so. I sleep well enough at night right now, but I’m starting to think that someday this won’t always be the case. My conscience is recalibrating and while today it only has a needle with which to prick me, I fear it may someday carry a sword.
I respect the old sheriff, but I’m not sure I want to be like him.
I called him yesterday. We’re going to meet for coffee tomorrow morning. I’m going to apologize first, but then I’m also going to tell him that he has to think about himself as well. His life is not wholly his own to give away as he pleases. The town needs him. I’m assuming his wife needs him.
And… I need him.
Someone said that he seems like a father figure. And I guess he is. It might be time that he knows that.
This might be the hardest conversation I’ll ever have. [x]