It’s amazing the way good old fashioned fear can strike guilt into the long hardened hearts of men. Hello there, My name is Elroy Helms, I’m 48, and I live in a VERY rural community, running a slaughterhouse, and selling wild game. It’s been a generational business from my father, to his father, all the way to my great great grandfather who settled here and founded our first slaughterhouse. We always looked at it as if we were doing God’s work. Feeding and providing the good people of of our community with the freshest cuts of game! All for a very reasonable price of course. So…why feel guilt now? Why now do my palms sweat and heart race? What could have possibly been so special about that damn deer? But deep down I know it had to be something. I know not the lore or the specifics behind that sacred creature, but I’m not so dense that I couldn’t feel the unnatural urge to drop my gun and leave the woods the second I set my sights on him. But, apparently, I WAS just dense enough to ignore the fact that every fiber of my being was screaming “DONT SHOOT!” and “NOT THIS ONE”!.
I’ll be honest though. It had been a long winter. And a pretty shoddy spring too. I’m feeding a teenage boy for God’s sake, and defiantly spitting on family tradition by planning to send him off for higher education. To make something better of himself. To be more than the son of a hunter, bound to a town like this. Not that he even minds hunting with his father. He didn’t mind our town or way of life or anything. Hell, he even has a knack for running the shop. Maybe I just wanted to stick it in the faces of my forefathers. To show him that there was more to our bloodline than this life. Maybe it even had something to do with my late wife Loren, who wanted her son to grow up and be a scholar, and get sent off somewhere to make something of himself, and all that bullshit. Damn her for making him so soft. Damn her for going off alone to fish in those woods.
But all of that purpose and meaning put behind my pulling of the trigger seems foolish now. Purged away in the flame of anxiety that spreads through my body like a cancer. Goodness, it was a beautiful deer too. It stood at least 7 or 8 feet tall, with a mesmerizing set of antlers, curving in ways most unnatural, ending with long points, facing the sky like steeples. He’d have made a killing off the hide alone, which seemed almost luminescent, and gleamed with an unnatural color that I’m not entirely positive I had ever seen before. Just looking at the thing made tears well up in the corners of my eyes, as a feeling of deep reverence overtook me.
However, in my arrogance, I shook away these feelings, steeled my resolve, and denying every last bit of instinct i had to drop my gun and go home, I was overtaken by thoughts of greed. I could put back money for my boys education. I could buy that new knife I had been eyeing, and maybe even make myself a beautiful mount on the wall to go above the fireplace. And, perhaps greatest of all, I would finally be out of this hunting rut. I’d been getting shit from some of the boys down at the bar for my bad luck lately. Almost as much shit as I’d been getting from some of my customers who were sorely disappointed that I didn’t have any venison, or deer jerky, or deer sausage for them. So I took the shot. It was eerie how quickly and gracefully the thing submitted to death. It made no sound as prey usually did, how they usually screech and bleat and carry on, fighting the inevitable, fighting with that primal desire to cling on to life. It fell to the ground quickly and without fuss, and by the time I got to the body, the life was already extinguished from it’s eyes. The temperature was already decently chilly that late spring morning, and a light layer of frost dusted the grass, but it seemed to me that it plummeted even more so as soon as the deer hit the ground.
The trek back home was arduous. I had loaded the beast up on my well-used wagon, which creaked and groaned under its immense weight. There was a breadcrumb trail of bio-luminescent blood left behind us, that was the same odd indescribable color as was visible on the animals coat. After storing the body in my shed, outside of my slaughterhouse, I promptly threw up my breakfast of eggs and sliced ham. I had a pit in my stomach, my hands were shaking uncontrollably, and despite the cold, a smattering of sweat had formed on my brow. I figured I would prepare the carcass later, right now what I really needed was a drink, and a short rest in my old hide rocking chair. I stumbled inside, slamming my rickety back door and poured myself a glass of whiskey. Upon taking my seat in my favorite chair, I tried to focus on my whittling project that left shavings all over the floor, a hobby that often left Loren in a fit of annoyance. But I didn’t have to worry about that now, did I? My eyes grew heavy, and the rain that had just started drizzling was all the more lulling to me, my mind must have been exhausted after that stressful morning. As my sight turned bleary from the sleep that was quickly overtaking me, I thought I could make out a shadow of someone watching my from the window adjacent to my chair.
That was hours ago. I woke up and the sun was gone. There’s a horrible storm caught up outside and I can’t get this feeling of guilt out of my stomach. My heart feels like it’s going to explode. I can’t find my son, and he’s not answering his phone. There’s something that’s been watching me through the the storm. I can just barely make it out when lightning strikes for just a moment, there’s a figure, there’s something caught in the downpour. It’s always shuffling around, moving closer, then farther away, then closer. I can’t tell if I’m losing my mind, but throughout the onslaught of noise from the storm, I can almost hear something crying.