“Do you mind if I play some music?”
“I kinda just wanna listen to the radio, Harry”
“Uhh, you don’t ever let me play the music anymore.”
“I just like to listen to the radio, that’s all. It’s nice to hear different music sometimes.”
“I get that, but can we at least change the channel?”
“Can you just fucking chill out? Jesus. Besides, I like this song.” She turned it up.
“I just don’t really dig all this old stuff, you know? — Wow, what the fuck is that. What the fuck? Jesse, what—“
“—Oh my god. Oh god—“
“—is that! Stop the car! Jesse! Stop the car!”
She slammed down on the breaks and the tires screamed out. The truck bounced around and she jerked the wheel to the right, swerving us sharply. We damn near rolled over in the road, and came to a stop so close to a hedgerow it was almost funny.
I tried to say, “Jesse quick, turn on the emergency lights!“ But before I could even finish my sentence, she was already pulling her finger off the button. Hazard lights engaged.
For a few seconds, the slick croons of Elvis Presley were the only sounds filling the forested silence.
Then, Jesse was shouting. Something like, “Harry, Harry. Oh my god, Harry. Did you see that? Did you see it?” And, of course I had seen it. I’d been the one to point it out in the first place, the strange shape on the road.
You could drive out on those lanes without running into another person or house for hours. At night, the roads are lit only by the moon, your headlights, and those of the rare passing cars. And, on that night, there was no moon in the sky, no other car in sight.
It was dark. Inky. The alchemical kind of black that fuses objects, and transforms them into unfamiliar and unsettling assemblages.
“What was that?” she said and “God. I thought we were gonna crash right into it,” and paused for a moment, and added, “did we?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t remember if we did or not, it all happened so fast.”
“It happened very fast, babe.”
“We should go out and take a look, shouldn’t we?”
“Maybe,” I said again, then asked if she had a flashlight, and she said “no,” and then laughed, “actually yes, obviously,” flourishing her phone.
Her hand was hovering, ready to open the car door, when she suggested that, “maybe we should get the crowbar from the trunk first? I mean, it’s so dark out there. It’s kind of scary.”
Jesse’s always been kind of a junkie for danger. Sure, she’d act like she was scared, but I knew her better than that. We’d been together long enough. She was the type of person who daydreamed about the end of the world, some kind of horrible apocalypse, just so she could go and smash a bunch of shit, and hit zombies with improvised weaponry, people too probably.
She was right though. It was so dark, and it was kind of scary. And, what the fuck was that thing in the middle of the road? I could make it out, sort of. Lying there, on the ground, softly glowing orange every time the hazard lights blinked out, like a lighthouse on a rocky shore.
“Do you want me to get it?” I asked, and just incase it wasn’t obvious, added “the crowbar?”
But, she said “oh I can get it, I don’t mind. Just keep an eye on that fucking thing. See if it moves.”
Jesse opened the door, hopped out and then crept over to the boot. I could hear her rummaging around back there, but I kept my eyes fixed forward, locked on to the shape.
Elvis was still going on about how he loved someone too much, and I took great pleasure turning the volume dial till it clicked, killing him again.
What was it? It almost looked like a run down animal now. But before… Before it was…
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound startled me, but it was just Jesse, knocking on the glass with the crowbar. She signalled for me to come out. My shoes hit the ground softly, but my lock-up keys betrayed me, jangling on their chain.
I whispered to Jesse. “Jesus Christ, you nearly gave me a heart attack, babe.”
She mouthed, “you should’ve seen your face. It was priceless.” Then she held a finger to her mouth, to say “Hush!”
She turned on her phone torch, pointing it towards the ground, and led the way.
We edged closer to the strange shape on the road, bit by bit, until Jesse got close enough to give it a good look.
“Oh, we are so dumb.” She said, laughing out loud now. “Harry, I think it’s just a deer.” She nudged it with the crow bar, and sure enough, it was a deer, albeit bloodied and a little broken up. “Pretty dead though.” She observed.
“A deer? Ugh, ridiculous.” I said, feigning confidence. “But, you know, I could’ve sworn it looked like something else. It looked kind of different when we were driving.” I pushed out an uneasy chuckle.
“No, you are right. In the car it looked. It was like a…. Like it was—” she took a quick step back. An uncertainty entered her voice. “What?”
“What? What’s wrong?” I asked from behind her.
“It’s face, Jesus Christ. Look at its face Harry!” she was back to whispering again, only more urgently now. “Oh Harry, what the fuck? Look at its face!”
She stretched out and hooked the carcass with the end of the crow bar, pulling it around to look directly at me.
Where there should’ve been the normal head of an adolescent deer, there was instead, a pulpy, bruised face, slick with blood and glistening in the light of her phone torch.
A human face.
“Oh god.”
“It must be.”
“Oh, what the fuck.”
“It must be some kind of… Some kinda… Harry?”
“Yeah, uh, some kind…”
“Some.”
“Jesse, I don’t know what the fuck that is.”
She snatched the crowbar away, and the deers head and neck slumped back on to the tarmac with wet sound, like fthlumph. Its head and human face bouncing twice before coming to a rest on the gravelled surface.
If it hadn’t been so beat up and bloodied, and, if it wasn’t grafted onto the skull of a deer, it might well have been almost elegant. It had a sort of peaceful expression. The kind of expression you’d find on a painting of a saint in a church.
“Jesse, can you get the light off that thing. I can’t look at it. It feels wrong to look at it.”
“Yeah, sure. Of course babe.” She said, switching off the light and sliding her phone into her pocket. She slipped her spare hand into mine and led me back to the hood of her truck.
It was just a vague shape again, periodically blinking orange. We sat there for a while, talking ourselves in circles.
“What are we gonna do?”
“What was that thing?”
“Did we kill it?”
“What are we gonna do!?”
We went on like this for a good 20 minutes, until eventually, we saw another pair of lights. An approaching van, some way away. As it got closer, it noticed our hazard lights and slowed down to a halt a little way behind us.
--
“I’ve gotta be honest, I’m a little relieved. For a good minute there, I thought you were gonna tell me you hit a person or something.” Said the man who’d been driving the van, after we’d explained the situation to him. “You both okay? You look like you’re in shock.”
He was balding, maybe in his sixties, and he was dressed in a closely fitting boiler suit. Over his heart there was a small embroidered logo, the same one that was on his van.
COOPER AND FAMILY LTD
Your Plumbing Solution!
Behind his ear, he’d tucked a rolled cigarette, which he’d retrieved when I started telling him about the face. He had seemed to wrestle with the idea of lighting it, smoking it, but eventually he tucked it back behind his ear. I figured he was trying to quit.
“We’re just a little shaken up,” I said, my hand tensely, grasping Jesse’s, her other hand clenched around the crowbar. “It’s face. You gotta understand, it’s—“ I trailed off, unable to bring myself to explain again.
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but shock, it’s a real powerful thing. Probably, your mind was just playing tricks on you.”
What he said sounded sensible, it was rational even. But I knew what I saw. I knew it for a fact. There was no way that it had been a figment of my imagination, and Jesse had seen it too, and how do you explain that away?
Then he said, “listen, if it makes you feel any better, I could go and take a look for you. Maybe clear this all up?”
I couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease, Jesse obviously felt it too as she took her hand out of mine, slipped off the hood of the truck and offered him the crowbar. “Take this. Just incase, okay?”
“Honestly, I don’t need it I’ll be fine.“ he said, rejecting it with a warm smile.
“Take it, please. It’ll make me feel better.”
He did, and then he walked over.
As he got closer to the deer, torch in one hand and crowbar in the other, he slowed, until eventually, he froze altogether.
“Good lord.” He said.
Jesse cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted “See! Just like we told you.”
He didn’t seem to hear her, he just continued exclaiming to himself. “Why I’ve never seen anything like it, long as I’ve lived. What in the hell is this thing.”
She shouted again, louder this time. “Now do you believe us!?”
I couldn’t shake that feeling of unease, and I shouted too. “Hey, you’ve seen it now, so come on! Come back here! Let’s talk about it!”
He turned around and waved at us, and yelled back. “Just a second kid. I just wanna see something.”
The man who we had not known long enough for him to have even thought to introduce himself, leant down, bending over the deer.
There was no warning sign.
Three, slender and sinuous tendrils stripped themselves away from the deers neck, leaving long, maroon gashes in its hide. They coiled themselves around his neck, long before he had a chance to notice them.
Firmly in their bind, he let out one, piteous yelp. Then they killed him.
They must have been very sharp, because the slits across his throat were made so deep, and with such ease, that his death was almost instantaneous. Almost.
He made one desperate attempt to take in a final breath, which only bubbled out through the lacerations. Then he fell. Flopping over the deer-creature. A deep purple now spreading through his blue boiler suit like a tie dye shirt.
“Fuck.” I expelled the words, more breath than voice. “What the fuck is happening.”
I really was in shock now. I didn’t even have a scream in me.
Jesse took my hand again, this time dragging me back inside her truck. “Fucking hell, I gave that guy the god damn crowbar.” I just nodded long, not really hearing her. “I don’t think I’ve got anything else in the back.” I kept nodding. The rhythm of it felt good, sort of comforting. “Harry. Are you listening to me?” Nod. “Harry, god damn it. We have to do something! Okay? Harry?”
“Uh-huh,” I managed to say.
“God, you are no good in high stress situations,” she said, rolling her eyes, “just put your seatbelt on. Okay? Baby?”
She threw the truck in reverse and started driving away. All the way back up the road. Far past the dead mans van and even further.
Good, I thought. Yes. This is good, we’re getting away. Good.
Then she switched gears, and began to move forwards.
No. No, that doesn’t make sense, I thought. Not back there. Not there.
“Jesse. What are you doing?”
“Well, we can’t just ignore it, Harry.”
“We don’t have to! We can call the police. We just have to get somewhere—“
“—Yeah and if we call the police, they’re not gonna believe a single word we say. It sounds insane. Then they’ll go check out the man and the deer, and the exact same thing will happen. Again. Rinse and repeat. Is that what you want to happen, babe?”
Slowly, I shook my head.
She slammed down on the gas. Forwards.
She hit twenty. She hit forty. Sixty. Eighty. She hit a hundred, and we collided with the man and the deer like a fucking cargo train.
A blushing film of scarlet mist coated the windscreen, setting off the automatic wipers, and, this time we did enter a hedgerow. But, she pulled the truck right back out again, and began adjusting her rearview mirror, trying to get a better look.
I stared, blankly, at her, wanting to say a thing, anything, but I could find no words, nothing to express myself with.
She looked at me sympathetically and patted me on the thigh with her hand. “Just hold on, babe.” And then, like she was talking about something so ordinary. “It’s trying to get away.”
She stuck it in reverse, and this time she took it real slow. Deliberate. Driving backwards over the man and the deer. Twisting the wheel. Grinding the tires as she went.
--
“You okay babe?” She asked me, as she finally pulled up the handbrake, a little way away from the site of impact.
“Mmm,” I said, unsure, struggling for words.
“I think we got it!”
“Mhmm,” I mumbled, nodding.
“Listen, Harry, babe, I need you to start being useful again. Okay? You need to give me a hand. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, uhh. Sure. Just give me a second” I said, and tried hard to shake myself loose from all the shock.
She left her headlights on this time, and we got out of the truck. The beams spotlighted, what had just been, the body of a man and the creature. Now, there was not much of anything left, just a mostly flattened boiler-suit and a few, rogue pieces of deer, and…
“Oh, what! Jesse, look at that!” I said, pointing at the cracked head of the deer-creature. “What is that? What’s that, inside of it?”
“Wow. That’s not… It’s not blood or like, brains. What the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know, It sort of looks like…”
“Like vines?”
“I was thinking spiders legs.”
“Ugh, gross. I hate spiders.”
“So what now?” I asked.
“Well, first we gotta pick up what’s left and put it in the back of my truck, then I’ll take it back home and we’ll burn it, but before that, you’re gonna find the keys to his van, you’re gonna drive it into the reservoir.”
“No, Jess. What?”
“You have to.”
“But, that doesn’t make any sense,” then, whispering angrily, “the man has a family. The van doesn’t say Cooper, the lonely guy who no one’ll even know is missing. It says Cooper and Family. Family, Jesse. Family. Surely now we can call the police? Right?”
“Okay. Lets run with that, ring the police and tell them what exactly, Harry?” She said, gesturing to the chunks, the smears, the steam-rollered boiler-suit. The word overkill hadn’t ever felt more appropriate.
“Fine, I get it. I feel like you’re actually kind of enjoying this. You are, aren’t you?
She said, “don’t be silly,” but I could see that she was holding back a smile as she turned to get the blue tarpaulin from the back of her truck.
We laid it out flat on the road, and she began kicking the remnants into the centre of the plastic sheet.
She asked me if I’d found the keys, and I said “no,” and then she sighed and rolled her eyes again, muttering something about having to do everything, all by herself, as she began to search the pockets of the recently vacated boiler-suit.
“Gotcha.” She shouted proudly, and threw them in a perfect arc, into my palm. Then, wiping off her hands on her trousers, she said, “I think that’s everything. Help me wrap this up and bring it to the back.”
“God, do we have to? I think I’ll be sick.”
“What, are we just gonna leave it here now, after all of that? For some random person to find?”
“No I just… It’s just disgusting thats all, I—“
“Exactly. Now you take this end, and, on the count of four we lift and fold. Meet me in the middle.”
“Fine, fine.”
“One, two, ah-one, two, three, four!”
We raised it up, carried it over to the truck and swung the tarpaulin, letting it fall into the open boot. As it landed, the fractured skull of the deer bounced out, hairy tendrils splaying out from within. On the surface, it’s broken, human face, looking up, frozen in a death mask, still looking remarkably peaceful. A stray lock of auburn hair curled down over its remaining blue eye.
“Go on then. You’ve got the keys to his van. You know what to do babe.” Said Jesse, rubbing my back with her palm.
I fumbled with the keys a little, my hands still shaking, and I clambered into Mr. Coopers van. I sat for a minute, eventually managing to get the keys into the ignition, and I left them there for a while as I googled routes to the reservoir on my phone. I selected a path that avoided the main roads. Better not to be seen, I figured.
The van had those old school manual windows and I rolled down the one next to me to ask Jesse something. “What do I do? Once it’s done I mean. Will you pick me up?”
“Yeah, but not by the reservoir, just in case. Meet me at the intersection, off of Bidford lane. You know, the one by that old barn we always point out?”
“Okay, baby.” And then I said “I love you.”
“I love you too, babe.”
I rolled up the window, and turned the key.
The radio jumped to life with the engine, and started playing out some oldie.