It’s not every day you go outside in the morning to leave for work and find the picked-clean skeleton of a dog on top of your trash can.
For most people, at least. This is just one of the weird things that have been happening around my neighborhood lately.
It started when I moved into my house, the first house I had ever purchased, done so in mid-2021 when the market hit the stratosphere because I think things through. It was a decent little rustic house on the edge of a small city in Missouri, a place not particularly special across the river from a place also not special. It was cheap, as far as mid-2021 goes at least, and had everything I was looking for in a house at the time; space enough for my gray tabby Jester and myself, off the beaten path to avoid busy streets but not so much that getting to my job was a chore, and it came with a washer-dryer combo after years of apartment living.
As I moved in, though, I did start to really grasp the oddities of the neighborhood around me. I think the first unusual thing that really started to sink in was the giant plot of land behind all the houses. It’s eastern Missouri, so there are forested hills as far as the eye can see, but this section of forest was plopped just north of the city, sandwiched between the houses and a state highway. It just loomed over all the houses on the street, hill reaching out and vanishing underneath a thick layer of undergrowth, with trees so tall one falling would probably nearly reach the street after smashing in my roof.
And as night fell, the weirdness didn’t really stop. My own house didn’t have lights on the back; I had been planning to put in yard lamps to make up for it. However, none of the other houses had lights on their back porches or by their back doors, either. Lights peppered the street-side but go around the back and it was just darkness, a vine-choked void just past civilization so close it might consume you if you turned your back on it for too long.
All things I figured wouldn’t bother me once I got used to them. I needed a place to stay and I didn’t want to have to keep dealing with uncaring landlords, and short of getting a house fresh on the market because its previous owner was murdered and haunting the halls, I didn’t have many options. But it didn’t take long for me to start wondering if that was a mistake.
The first instance was a week after I had moved in. I was curled up in what I had decided would be my room when Jester started hissing and growling, jumping from my legs to the top of the storage chest I kept at the foot of my bed. My cat’s always been a rather stupid goofball, so tolerant he lets me cradle him like a baby and play with his paws, and he never wakes me up during the night when he’s doing 3-am cat things. Certainly never anything like this.
I pulled myself upright as he hissed and yowled at the window. “Hey, buddy,” I said, trying to pet him while still half-asleep. “What’s going on? Raccoon out there or something?” His fur had puffed up and his tail had turned into a fuzzy feather duster, his ears flipped back against his skull as he looked up at the window, coiling and arching back.
I was about to pull up the blinds and look outside when I heard the loud thump. First one, and then another, heavy thuds going around the side of the house while Jester swiveled around in the direction of the noise. I leapt out of the covers, my own hairs standing on end as I fumbled under the bed, pulling out a replica mace I had bought from a renaissance fair. I held it in both hands, sleep vanishing as I felt my heart speed up a little.
Previous apartments had me well-acquainted with the sound of someone sneaking around where they weren’t supposed to be, and the footsteps I heard outside dwarfed any unwanted visitor I’ve heard going after the homes of people better off, and less present, than myself. They were fast, too; I had to jog to keep up as they sneaked around my backyard, the chain link fence not even rustling as the intruder went over and started going around the side. Shortly after that I lost track of it, but Jester was pacing the rest of the night.
The next morning I went outside to see the lids flipped off my trash can and recycling bin, up against the side of my house in the days preceding curbside pickup, the bag I had brought out the night before ripped to shreds and the remains of the rotisserie chicken I had eaten strewn everywhere. Several of the neighborhood cats had already descended on the remaining splintered bits of bone in a failed effort to find any missed bits of flesh.
That was the first thing, but far from the last. Hardly a week went by where Jester wasn’t put on edge like this, and anything edible left outside didn’t last until trash pickup. I tried putting weights, bungee cords and the like on the lids, but I’d find them placed to the side, stacked or coiled up or hanging off one of the waterspout anchors. I thought about spraying something to deter whatever was doing this, but I don’t think it would have worked. Or if it did, whatever was getting into my trash would come to me personally for a bite to eat instead.
It was nothing, I’d tell myself on the drive to the office I worked at. I’d see the homeless woman on her bench at the nearby park every morning and remind myself at least I had a roof, even if I did have to deal with this.
That’s what I told myself in the mornings after rain when I found tracks in the mud in my backyard, bigger than my own feet and not looking like any animal I recognized. That’s what I told myself when I started hearing scrabbles and scrapes at night just outside and would come out to see claw marks on the fence-posts. That’s what I told myself when I saw my car had been moved, one end lifted up and shifted to clear the way to the trash cans.
Then the neighborhood cats started disappearing. The first one was this fat calico that attacked any dog within a mile of her owner’s house, one that made sure to take time hissing at me whenever I dared to be outside at the same time as her. I just came out one morning to see little bits of calico fur strewn about the entire neighborhood. Her owner was in shambles, of course, and I had to rush back in and hold Jester close while thanking that he had no interest in the great outdoors.
Next came a Siamese cat from a few doors down, followed by a Bengal at the end of the street. Even when the remains didn’t turn up, we all knew what had caused it. Almost everyone started keeping their cats indoors after that. There was one time when a cross-eyed orange cat named Ernie was yowling outside, and I risked letting him in to wait it out until morning. Besides him, the only other one still around is an ornery Maine coon named King who spends most of his time in the trees in the front of his yard.
As winter came, animals in general started disappearing. Squirrels used to love the trees in the front yards but their numbers decreased until there were none by the first snowfall. Same went for the rabbits, and the birds that left for the winter did not return. And it didn’t take a keen eye in the morning after a winter storm to see a notably lower section of snow, as if something massive had dragged itself through during the blizzard, fresh drift obscuring the footprints.
Neighbors moved away, ultimately replaced by naive saps like myself who were desperate for a home. More people, more pets sacrificed to whatever was living in the woods. One of my neighbors, a redneck but a nice and helpful guy, set up traps around the neighborhood that he used to catch feral hogs on his hunting property.
Judging by the shredded metal bars and gates he found on his roof, across his lawn and through the window of his car, it didn’t take kindly to the effort. Like the rest of us, he gave up after that.
Yard lamps were broken, newly-installed back porch lights shattered. Darkness swallowed half the neighborhood, giving whatever it was free reign to come and go as it pleased. I made sure to never even look in the backyard when I got home from the movie theater or some other time that would have me returning home at night. Let it wreck my trash if it wanted, so long as it didn’t come after me.
Though even I couldn’t deny that, since moving in, the nighttime footsteps had gotten louder heavier, and a lot more common.
Then springtime brought the latest family of fools, enticed by the low house prices of the neighborhood, dismissing all the concerns and warnings of those who lived there with the conceited arrogance and thinly-veiled desperation of someone coming from the city. A mother and father, a little girl and a colossal German Shepherd who nearly knocked me on the ground when he jumped on me to say hello. I petted his thick fur and wished him the best before his masters called him back to go inside. It was nice seeing him every morning as I left for work, the mother walking him, or having him come out the dog door in their house’s backdor to bark at Jester sitting in the window.
Then I saw the skeleton on the top of my trash can, picked down to the broken bones. I helped the mother clean it all up before their poor little girl could see what happened to the family pet.
At this point the walls of my house feel more like the sides of one of my neighbor’s hog traps. Or perhaps the glass sides of a lobster tank, showing me off to a hungry customer just waiting for the right moment to reach in. Jester has switched from defensive hisses to hiding in the bathroom and part of me wonders if I should be joining him. If a massive German Shepherd doesn’t stand a chance against this thing, I doubt I could do anything good.
Especially now.
It happened not too long ago. Unable to sleep, I had stayed up far too late even for a Friday night, grinding my way through a video game in my living room. I had gotten up and gone to the sink to rinse out a bowl when, on a whim, I turned off the kitchen light.
I saw… something. It looked human in some ways, but it walked with its knuckles on the ground, with a second shorter pair of arms jutting out of where its bottom-most ribs would be. The entire massive form looked bloated, corpulent, almost glistening with moisture in what little light there was. The two smaller arms held something close to its distended belly. It had been prowling in my backyard, likely looking in on me as I stayed up late, only just now losing interest.
But the light going off had caught its attention again. It turned around, lumbering over like a misshapen gorilla, stooping down lower to regard me with a face that looked smashed, almost melted. Its coal-black eyes and mine locked, my hands forming a tighter and tighter grip on the edge of the sink, Jester headbutting me as if trying to get me to move. I wish I could have.
It opened its mouth, parting cracked lips hiding yellowed fangs and chipped, brown molars. The shorter arms moved away from the body, and within its grip I could see two clusters of small, pudgy infants, faces just as deformed and mouths just as cavernous as that of the thing that held them, tiny little waist-arms grasping at nothing. They looked up to regard me as well.
Then this thing, this mother, reached a hand up. Its body convulsed as it shuddered in place, a bulge moving up its thick neck before I saw a matted, wet ball of fur appear at the back of its throat. The hand reached down its own gullet, pulling out the still-twitching body of King. It closed its mouth, handing the near-dead cat to its children before its gaping maw, wider than I was, twisted into a yellow-and-brown smirk.
It must have been ten minutes after it had stepped over the fence that I was finally able to heed Jester’s urges and leave the kitchen.
I still somehow managed to get myself out of the house Monday morning for work, making sure every window and door was shut and locked tight. At this point I honestly don’t know what to do. Do I doom another family to this fate? Do I stay and hold out hope that it will leave me alone so long as there’s something in my trash for it to pick at, to feed its spawn? Do I try to convince my neighbors to join me for a last stand, hoping there are enough guns and other weapons between all of us to deal with it? Would any of it even be enough?
Or would I even be able to escape? This year I’m seeing more missing pet signs further into the city. Animal control is setting out traps and warning everyone to either keep their cans in their garages until trash pickup or to make sure the lids are closed tight. Would anyone even be foolish enough to free me from this house with all these red flags around? Maybe appeasement is the best I can hope for.
I doubt it. This morning I passed that same bench at the park. Nothing remained on it but torn clothing, and bright, shattered bones.