I first saw the chimpanzee when I came back after chopping our Sunday firewood.
I’m retired, and my wife no longer works either. We live in a house by the woods alone in Northern California, and it snows around this time of year. I’ve rarely left the state, and never traveled outside the US. But I’d seen photo’s of chimps before, and how one could have gotten into our area, let alone our house, was beyond me.
My wife and I have both had quite a few jobs over the past years, many paying very well, and my wife and I both share a tendency not to spend any more than we absolutely have to, or close enough. That, along with her father’s very rich inheritance, helped us from early on get the things we needed and get enough money to raise a family in retirement early. Not a realistic goal for most, especially in California, but we made do, and here we are. Neither of us want to be rich, and we prefer the woods and the mountains up here to more expensive city houses. Plus, property tax here is too much for anything big.
Our home is a few miles from the nearest town and gas station, and we aren’t close to any relatives. We grew up in Sacramento but neither of us liked the heat, so I eventually got a home built up north and we finally moved in after retirement a year ago. This is where we plan to have our two kids, and while it might not have seemed possible to reach this point, my wife has been more financially successful than me and somehow made this lover’s dream a reality. Now we spend the weekdays raising our first child, my wife has started writing books and I’ve taken up shooting.
I had finished chopping the wood, and I made sure to set it in a neat pile, because I always like to be tidy around the barn. On Sundays I try to rest, so I went back to the house to spend the evening with my wife. I rarely went into town anyway, and I much prefer her company to a bar.
It was sitting in the cradle in our room when I opened the door. Small sized, clearly an infant. I’m slightly ashamed to say it, but I was scared for a moment. It was sitting in the middle of the cradle, face thrust out toward me, eagerly awaiting attention. It didn’t move much, but it was breathing and had one hand wrapped around the bars, as if it was ready to climb out. The way it looked at me and smiled with its large eyes is not something I was prepared for.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the thing. A shot of terror coursed through my blood, primal and cold. I turned, carefully watching the baby chimp, and yelled for my wife. There wasn’t any response, but I waited and kept calling out. After a moment, I heard footsteps coming my way. I was relieved, but still scared and no small bit confused as to why a chimpanzee was in my son’s crib.
My wife walked up behind me and asked what was the matter. I moved aside and showed her what was in our room. A shocking mix of emotions flowed across her face. My wife is usually good at hiding what she feels when she wants to, but of course this caught her off guard. I caught surprise and concern, what I deemed to be rational emotions, but I almost doubted seeing a flash of guilt in there. Almost.
She rushed to the side of the cradle before I could stop her, and by the time I reached her, she had picked up the thing. I froze as I reached out and saw what she was holding.
In my wife’s arms was our son, not looking upset in any way. She started cooing to him and bouncing him up and down and all the while occasionally glaring at me between making faces at the baby. She usually acts like this when I have neglected some tiny detail about caring for the baby, but doesn’t mean any harm by it. I knew that in a moment she would reprimand me for making some small mistake or not noticing something, but I couldn’t get over what I’d seen.
After bouncing the baby a few more times, she paused. “Is something wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” I stared at her, then shook my head and told her it was nothing. I was sure I saw an animal and not our son in that bed, but there he was, and no chimpanzee in sight. I checked around the room and looked at the crib a bit later, but nothing was out of the norm.
The next incident was at church the week after. My wife and I aren’t by any means devout Christians and we don’t always commit to attending any one chapel, but we try to make a visit together to some church or other every few Sundays and occasionally meet some new people. I had thought quite a bit about what I’d seen the week before, and I hadn’t told my wife about it, but I wanted to consult with a priest or other religious authority about what I’d seen. I didn’t want to go to a doctor due to travelling time, so divine help was my solution.
It was as we were about to enter the chapel and my wife suddenly turned around and started to comfort the baby. She always likes to hold him instead of using a sling at church, and plays with him enough that this was normal. But as she hid the baby from my sight, I saw a flash of something.
Black hair.
My kid has short, blonde hair right now, but it will eventually fade to dark brown like his parents’. What I saw as she turned was long, straight black hair being flung about by the quick movement. It was the baby’s hair.
I didn’t react as fast as I would have liked to. But by the time I got around to looking at the child in my wife’s arms, it was my son. He was as adorable as always and he gave me the sweetest look. And there was no black hair. Nothing was wrong, and my wife didn’t seem disturbed in the slightest. I thought it must have been my imagination, but I was still determined to talk to a priest after the meeting.
I never got to. My wife made sure we rushed back home as soon as possible, making some excuse and giving me a look that said ‘don’t you try to say it’s not a good reason’. I sucked it up but didn’t suspect that my wife was trying to interfere with my plans. Maybe it was my imagination. After all, she hadn’t picked anything up.
The fawn was what stopped me doubting it was just me.
Another two weeks had gone by and my baby had started crawling. My wife was super excited about this and regularly encourages him to chase her through the house or takes him out with her to ‘get the feel of nature’. I was inside, reading what my wife had added to her latest work-in-progress novel, and she came and asked me to take my turn with the baby while she finished the piece. It was fairly good already but I agreed and went outside. It had snowed earlier, but only enough to cover the ground in a thin sheet of white, and the air was pleasantly cold.
The only problem was that I couldn’t find the baby. I don’t know what my wife had been thinking in not handing him off to me and leaving him outside, but my wife loses control of her ADHD sometimes and often leaves things she was holding in random places. I concluded she must have left the baby in her haste to put her train of thought down on paper. It wasn’t an excuse and I resolved I would have words with her when I found the baby and got back inside. But I had to find the baby first, and he couldn’t have crawled far, nor would he have wanted to in the cold snow, thin as it was.
Thing is, there were no marks in that snow at first glance. Nothing to indicate where the baby had gone, and I assumed she’d set the baby down near the door. On second glance, there were marks. It was abundantly clear that she had set him down a few feet away from the door, and that he had crawled a bit. What wasn’t clear was why there were deer tracks leading away from the spot. Small deer tracks.
I hurried to where the deer tracks lead, behind the barn. I took a turn and found the wood pile, with the tracks leading around it. I leaned around, hoping to find an ordinary fawn, dreading something worse.
It was something worse.
Lying in the snow where the deer tracks lead was my son, shocked into silence by the cold. The prints lead up to him, after they seemed to have paced a bit. He was sitting where the tracks ended. I immediately picked him up and hurried him inside. My wife looked up from her writing and instantly saw something was wrong. Her first instinct was to make sure the baby was okay, and after getting him warm and tucked away, turned on me, ready to whip out a lecture on fatherly behavior.
I walked out the door, knowing she would follow. Angrily she stuck her head out, and she was halfway through saying my full name in the most intimidating way possible when she saw the tracks. I explained what I’d seen to her, not sure what to expect. I didn’t expect her to laugh. She thought it was incredible that I managed to let a deer pick up our son and move him without noticing or seeing the deer, and wouldn’t budge on any attempt on my part to make her see that that was nothing like what actually happened. I was left disturbed, and for the first time in our relationship I became suspicious my wife was hiding something from me.
I’ve always trusted my wife. We’ve been honest and straightforward since we got together and I’ve never had reason to suspect anything was going on that I couldn’t see. Problems didn’t always work themselves out, but we had faced them together through our marriage and nothing had come this close to breaching our trust of each other, and that made this situation even more concerning. I had no small amount of spare time on my hands, and I was determined to get to the bottom of the issue.
Over the next few months there was an occasional hint of something strange. Cat hair on our bed, rabbit pellets on the bathroom floor, things I could notice, but never explain. I cleaned these up before my wife could ever see them. Hiding things from my wife didn’t sit well with me, but I had to make sure. I frequently checked on the baby, but never saw anything out of the ordinary.
Eventually our baby began to say words. There hadn’t been an incident in a while, and checking for one was a background habit at this point. I was letting my guard down, and again I started to doubt whether anything was amiss. That’s when I heard it.
My wife was with the baby, in her writing office. I was getting the dishes done after we had dinner, and I heard a roar from the other room. It sounded like some high pitched beast roaring, but I honestly had no clue what animal it could have come from. I’d heard grizzlies and mountain lions roar, but this was nothing like either of them. There was no sound I could hear from my wife.
I hurried to the room, but made sure to be as quiet as possible. I opened the door to see my wife leaning over behind the desk, fussing over something I couldn’t see. I could see the elephant’s trunk flopping around the top of the desk, looking for something to grab onto. The desk is quite tall, so I couldn’t see anything going on behind it, but it was clear there was a large animal there, and I could see my wife was tending to it. She quietly gasped at my entering while standing up and turning to face me. She wasn’t holding the baby.
“You know I don’t like you pulling surprises on me when I’m writing—” She cut off as I raced to the desk and looked over. On the floor was our son, diapers open and very messy.
“Writing?” I asked, looking at her questioningly.
“That, and something else you never seem brave enough to manage.” she teased as she knelt and continued to change the diapers. I felt a bit stupid staring over the desk but I was done with us both pretending nothing was happening.
“What was that sound I heard?”
She didn’t look up. “Must have been the pipes. Have you checked to see if something is wrong?” Being involved with the designing of the house, I knew for a fact that there was nothing in the office area that would produce anything close to that sound. And I knew for a fact that my wife was lying to me.
I left it for the day. I couldn’t handle the fact that my wife was clearly hiding things from me, and the fact that there was a baby elephant in the house just moments earlier. I couldn’t process it. But I still pushed away doubts and the thought that it was all in my head. I wouldn’t accept that I was going insane. This was real, but I couldn’t believe what was going on. Taking a step back, the possibilities were absurd. Animals from other continents suddenly appearing in my house? My infant son turning into these animals? None of these were anything I could tell anyone without seeming absolutely insane. Even priests seemed out of the question.
For a while I pretended not to notice the changes. I saw the claw marks begin to appear on the bars of the crib, the occasional feather or fur shed on the sheets. I pretended not to notice, and my wife made sure to clean it up. She knew as well. But I still had the feeling she knew a little more than me, and I had lost enough trust that I didn’t want to bring it up. Besides, it wasn’t a huge block in our day to day life, and rarely did the occurrences happen.
I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t. Whenever I heard noises from another room, I felt afraid for my son, because there was something wrong, and I had no idea what it was or how to prove it. Every time I saw one of the hints before they vanished, a deep terror filled me, my imagination creating all sorts of horrible scenes in which I saw these clues being left, just before my wife hid them from me.
The last straw was when the bear shredded our kitchen. Grizzlies are pretty common where we live but I hadn’t seen one come close to our house, let alone inside it. The door was hanging ajar, basically splinters, along with all the cupboards containing food in our kitchen. There was a possibility it was just a normal bear, unlike the rest of the time. I wasn’t sure how to act, but just for safety I grabbed my Remington 870, ignoring how badly my hands were shaking. Going outside I could see clear bear tracks to the barn. A small bear.
I didn’t know what to do, but taking a few steps I could see the door was open. Carefully I moved around, keeping my distance from the door that was ominously cracked open, barely letting light into the dark interior. For a moment I hesitated, afraid of what I would see inside. Fearfully, I kicked the door open the rest of the way, then scrambled to the light switch. The lights flickered on, showing the room well and revealing—nothing. I ended up going in slowly, shotgun up. My body was trembling more than ever.
After a moment of tense searching I found a bear cub, huddled at the back. It looked frightened, but my first thought of caution was that I didn’t know where the mother bear was. My second thought was that this bear might be my son. My third thought was interrupted by the mother bear slamming into me.
My gun was thrown out of my hands and slid across the floor out of reach. I scrambled toward it, but was pinned down in an instant. I tried to turn, to throw the bear off of me, giving a cry of exertion and horror that I knew would be my last. My efforts were futile, and I ended up doing nothing. So did the bear.
A grizzly would have killed me in an instant if it saw its cub being threatened. I should have been mauled instead of pinned. But the bear simply moved past me and laid down right on top of the gun. I played dead, trying to hold still despite the dread within me. There was nothing else to do. I simply waited. I didn’t calm down, but I forced myself not to move. Eventually the bear moved back to the corner with its cub.
But there was no cub. Instead, my son sat in the corner where the small bear had been. He started wailing as the bear picked him up with his clothes in its teeth, beginning to carry him outside. I couldn’t take it. The sound of my son’s crying hit something in me. I didn’t think about dying. I rushed for the gun and raised it to the bear.
It was only my conspiracy over the past few months that made me hesitate, and it was only my hesitation that saved me from shooting my wife. There she stood, holding my son in her teeth, standing in the corner of the barn. My own wife. And my son. I couldn’t process what was happening. I didn’t even hear the gun hit the floor when I dropped it.
There was nothing to say. We walked out together, went back into our living room, sat on the couch in front of the TV, and put the baby between us. She tried to hold my hand several times, but I wasn’t having that. Her touch felt slimy to me, filthy, not literally, but I just couldn’t touch this thing that I thought was my wife. The baby changed, and I was expecting it. Not a baby, but some pale, bone-thin infant with long, greasy black hair and oily skin, along with a hairless tail. It stared at me with its maw of a mouth hanging open, its black eyes seeming to pierce my soul. I looked away, back to my wife. After staring at one another in silence for a while, I said it.
“Where is she?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“I am your wife, silly.” I stared at her blankly, asking the question again. She just shook her head and kept on reassuring me that she was my wife. I repeated the question, with a slight revision.
“Where is my son?” Again, she just told me that the boy sitting between us was our son. I didn’t believe it, and from the look on her face I could tell she knew. There was pain there, pain and regret. The one thing I didn’t expect to see was relief.
“What… what’s going on?” I barely was able to get the words out. My wife gave me a sympathetic look, once more trying unsuccessfully to hold my hand. “How long…” She took a deep breath.
“Second grade.” I stared at her. That was the first time we had met. Clearly she could see that I wasn’t going to say anything, so she continued.
She’d been a skinwalker her whole life. There wasn’t much detail into her infancy, but she said that once she learned English she joined school under the identity of a dead child she found in the woods. She never was bothered by the cold snows, but she soon found her place in her new family and only took off her skin when it got too uncomfortable after a few weeks. She always liked the woods because she could roam free with her skin off, rather than the reason’s she’d always told me.
When we met in college, she’d really fallen in love with me. Sometimes she forgot she was a skinwalker, she could almost pretend that she was human, until the itching began and she had to stop wearing the skin. Her emotions were just the same, and she had fulfilled her jobs successfully thanks to altering her form sometimes to get what we needed to live in our dream home. Some of it was unlawful, but thanks to changing skins she wasn’t suspected in the slightest.
She hadn’t known our kids would be skinwalkers too, but once he was born she had to give him the skin of a relative. There was no elaboration, but somehow I knew that the other child had been killed. She still shared our dream of living up here, with our kids, but eventually I stopped listening. I knew she loved me, but this was betrayal. She’d done everything to achieve our dream, and never stopped loving me, and I hadn’t stopped loving her. I didn’t know what to think about the crime, but the fact that my wife was a shapeshifter never seemed to fit into my head.
Eventually she trailed off. I realized she was crying when she told me she loved me and loved our child, and I could tell she was being honest when she said she still wanted to share our dream. If I was a good man I would have let her stay. I loved this woman. I married her for love, I lived and retired with her, and she was still the woman I loved. But she wasn’t. It broke my heart.
I barely remember kicking her out of the house, the door still splintered and hanging, the kitchen still a wreck. She cried as she led our child away. I probably cried as well. It broke my heart again when she took off her skin, changing into a mirror image of what my son now looked like, only eight feet tall and still bone thin. She looked back at me, and I wished I could see some emotion in that horrifying face that stared at me, branding a scar into my mind as she walked away into the woods.
I didn’t sleep that night. The blinds weren’t closed, and the lights were still on in our room. I saw her stoop down and peek through the window, her demon’s face smiling at me beneath those dead eyes, knocking on the glass. I didn’t move, but there must have been something in my face, because she stumbled back and loped away while I stared at her back.
I still lie awake some nights. Sometimes I get letters, about how our son is doing in school, or cookies baked with a short and sweet note on my doorstep. Sometimes when I’m out chopping my Sunday firewood, I see a tall, thin figure in the woods. Sometimes I think it’s not my imagination. Sometimes I feel lonely in bed at night. Sometimes, late at night, I’m not alone in bed.
Sometimes, I don’t mind.