I’ve been reading that guy’s SAR stories and one of them flipped a switch for me. One thing I love about his stories is they really capture the way your brain wants to Look Away.
Anyways, here goes:
When I was a kid, I got big into mythology. I found this book of myths, gods, and fae at the library that was mad dusty, like as if it had never been touched, so of course I needed it. For some reason, the librarian wouldn’t let me take it home, so I had to read it there, but she said she would keep it for me and so every time I came in she had it set aside behind the counter, and I would grab it and go off to a back table and read it. I was young, primary school I think. The book was big, like one of those Eyewitness type books, and it was illustrated, but every page was in a whole different style from the others. Some would be like handmade brownish paper, thick and rough, with like sketches and watercolor illustrations. Some were canvas. it was super cool, and my kid self thought it was just a really creative choice of the author to do like that.
So, I remember seeing one page that moved.
This page was in very art nouveau style, but in black, white, and silver. Like, sparkling metallic silver. Like if you melted metal onto the page silver, not glitter, metal. Anyways, It was a big art nouveau style drawing of a woodland grove, in like a frame, and it was warning against something and I could hardly take my eyes off the picture to read the words, except to know that it was Not What It Seemed and that if I ever came across one I needed to Be Still until it was gone, and pretend it wasn’t there until it really wasn’t… Or RUN.
And as I’m reading out my peripheral vision, the Deer Thing steps out in the picture from behind a tree. And it starts walking toward me, stepping between trees. Like, out, and then in and then out, disappearing in the gaps between. Like you’ll see a leg on one side of a tree, body on the other side of a different tree, and nothing in the space between the trees.
And, again, this is an illustration doing this.
I couldn’t look away, or breathe. I just froze, like the text said to, wishing I could close the book but I couldn’t.
It had legs like a deer. The torso of a woman. A faceless face, with silver eyes that were human at some blinks, deer at others, and antlers that kept getting bigger. It would like… caress the trees as it moved, like it really wanted you to look at it. Really wanted to be seen.
I had this deep certainty that when it finished walking through the illustration it would step out of the book and GET me.
It stepped fully behind a big tree that was in the foreground, and I was able to break free enough to shut the book. When I tried to find that page again, to find what it was called, I couldn’t. And all the pages were just normal, Eyewitness book style slightly shiny pages, all in the same font and everything. Just a normal book.
Anyways, fast forward like 20 years.
I’m at work at this mental hospital, and at that point I’m a trainer for new night staff. Now, the hospital was haunted. No way around it, just the odd bored ghost showing up because they do that anywhere you have 24/7 population. So, I would ask newbies if they believed in ghosts, because if so, I would let them know it was haunted, and if not, I’d let them learn for themselves.
So, I ask this New Girl who I’ll call NG if she believes in ghosts, and she just gets a weird look on her face, and says “well, i don’t know about ghosts, but this one time I saw… a thing.”
Here is the story she told me.
When I was like seventeen, I got together with some friends. We were going to drink a little, like just get a little buzzed, and drive around the desert at night. But, my car was acting weird once we got out there so we decided to just walk around.
Side Note, the area of “the desert” she was referring to was an area in that town where there are ATV trails, and marked off-roading paths that aren’t “roads” but are delineated clearly so people can safely offroad without like getting stuck or hurt or whatever. There is also a shooting range in the same area, off to one side, and if you go farther, there is this sort of BLM land zone where people let livestock wander. So its not dead desert, its just like shit land, and no one cares what you do there. The paths are basically paved with broken beer bottles, cans, and shell casings. So there is zero chance of getting lost or whatever if you walk around at night.
We start walking and we are just talking about high school stuff you know, parents, colleges, cars, boys, and like kicking rocks and things like that, and it just gets quiet suddenly. All the sound just went away. We couldn’t here traffic anymore, or cows, or bugs, just nothing.
We stopped there and just started like listening hard and looking around, and it was like we were all afraid to say anything in case it heard us, but we didn’t know what that meant right? So, I think I should say to go back to the car, but then we see this light. Like this ball of light, come out of this …. it looks like a barn but there’s no barn there. But it comes out, like flies out, and goes up real high and hovers for a while.
And then this thing walks out. And at first I think it’s a deer, but it isn’t a deer. Its like… it has deer legs, but its tall, and it comes out like… catwalking.
At this point, NG demonstrates like how a model walks.
Like that, but scary. And the light follows over head, and I just know if we move, or make a sound, it will get us. And so it walks out and is looking around, and I realize that its antlers are human arms. Just a bunch of human arms coming out of its head, and it doesn’t have a face.
I was so scared I swear to god I started to throw up but I couldn’t because I was frozen. I tried to move and I couldn’t lift my feet up. I was stuck there, and it was going to see us any second and we couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe at all, it was like something was holding me perfectly still.
Then there was this sound, really quiet, and the light zinged over to it, and we all unfroze as that thing went after it, whatever the noise was, and it was so fucking fast there was nothing we could have done it would have got us, and we turned and ran back to the car as fast as we could, and I lost my sandals running and I didn’t care that I was running on glass we just ran.
I know the description wasn’t the exact same, but it was for sure the same thing.
Hearing her tell me this, a coworker chimed in about having seen it too, in daylight. He drew it, and I swear to god all the hair on my neck stood up when I looked at it.
It didn’t look like her description, or mine, but it was the same thing.
His was male, with human torso and legs, but hooves, and no arms at all from its shoulders. It had a bare deer skull instead of a face, and a single pair of skeltal-thin human arms as antlers, but with each finger turning into like a branch of wood, with like dead leaves hanging off.