Well, I got another one for you…that is, if you’re up to hearing another one. I didn’t weird you out too bad with the first one, did I?
Alrighty then.
You ever hear of a not-deer?
Oh, boy-howdy. You’re gonna love this one.
This happened maybe a year or so after I seen that funny-lookin’ dog. I’d got over that by then, I think, and didn’t have much of a problem going outside late at night anymore.
I just kept telling myself I’d had a lot more to drink that night than I’d thought, and it had me seeing things that wasn’t there.
So, like I said, this happened maybe a year later.
Sometimes I like to take a drive at night and go to this place I know where you can’t see nothing built by man. It’s this big empty field, all surrounded by trees, and the whole damn place has been overrun with kudzu vines.
Yeah, that stuff. Grows so fast you can almost hear it, climbs up trees and over the ground and basically covers up everything.
You get a grove of trees overgrown with kudzu, and it gets to looking like one of those abandoned jungle temples you see on TV.
But what I like about this place is that there’s absolutely no man-made light nearby, so it’s the best place I know of for stargazing. You go out there with a six-pack on a moonless night with no clouds, and just kick back and watch the sky.
I seen my share of shooting stars out in that kudzu-waste, let me tell you.
The only problem with that place, though, is the deer.
You see, since there’s pretty much no ground cover except for the kudzu, and it’s mostly just a big old field, there’s not much holding the soil together, and so the whole place is washed out and shot through with these deep gullies and ravines.
Some places, it’s wide enough and deep enough that you can get a small herd of deer down in one of them, and the whole place is so grown over that it all looks flat until you see deer just start rising right out of the ground.
Real unnerving the first time you see it happening, but you get used to it. And the deer out there looooove eating kudzu, so there’s a lot of them out there. But generally they won’t bother you.
So I’m out at this place one fine dark night, lounging in the back of my truck and slowly making my way through a six-pack and watching the sky, when I hear some rustling noises off to one side.
At first I didn’t think nothing of it, because it just sounded like deer noises. But it was pretty close by, and after a second I started getting curious about it.
So I found my flashlight and got ready to turn it on, and I waited. I figured if the sounds got closer, I’d see what it was, and if they went away, why, I could leave the light off and not have to wait for my vision to readjust.
So I wait…and I wait…and just as I’m starting to think maybe I was just imagining it all, I hear the noises start up again and start coming closer.
It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away when I finally decided I wanted to see what was going on out there…because I could also hear it breathing. And it didn’t sound quite right for a deer.
So I turn on the light, and shine it out where I thought the noises was coming from…and just then I see this set of antlers poking up out of the kudzu.
It looked like flat ground, but there must have been a gully underneath the vines. Because that deer just slid up into view like it was coming up a flight of stairs. Right up through the vines and onto the flat ground, not twenty feet from where I was.
Now, I’m sure you’ve seen a deer at least once in your life. They got a certain shape to them, and you can look at it and say with certainty, ‘that’s a deer.’
This wasn’t a deer. I started getting that vibe as soon as the antlers came up into view.
The antlers was smooth and kinda pointy, like you see on wall-mounted trophy bucks.
But at that time of year, all the bucks are still in velvet, so their antlers is kinda rounded at the end, and covered in short velvety fur.
This deer’s antlers didn’t have that.
The eyes was wrong, too. You flash a light on a deer’s eyes in the dark, and they shine white.
This thing’s eyes didn’t shine at all. Just two pools of inky black where the eyes should have been.
And they was facing forward. They was where they should have been on the deer’s head, but not pointing where they ought to. They was both looking forward. At me.
The rest of this thing looked more or less like a deer should…then I saw the legs.
They didn’t look right at all. I’m pretty sure they each had an extra joint, or an extra bone, or SOMETHING…they looked all kinds of wrong.
And the back legs was too short, and the front ones was too long. And they stuck out to the side, kinda, not bowlegged, but like they wasn’t stuck on the right way to begin with.
I wanna say they moved more like a spider’s legs than anything else. They didn’t look like spider legs, though…just sorta moved that way.
So this thing is standing there, close enough to hit with a beer can, just staring at me, and I’m staring at it, and the longer I look at it, the less like a deer it feels.
Imagine a little kid, just old enough for the really big box of crayons, and this kid’s fairly good at drawing people, but they ain’t never seen a deer.
So you tell this kid all about deer, how they look, how they act, how many legs and all that…and have this kid draw you a picture of a deer.
Now make that into a real thing.
That’s what I saw that night. I don’t know what in the hell it was, but it for damn certain wasn’t a deer.
It was close, in the same way that a toilet and a fire hydrant are close.
You can use the hydrant as a toilet if you need to…but that toilet ain’t gonna work like a fire hydrant no matter how much you want it to.
I was real close to just climbing into the cab of my truck and rolling on out of there…and then this not-deer stood up on its back legs.
Stood right up like a man. I didn’t think of it at the time, but later it reminded me so much of that funny-lookin’ dog and the way it had stood up.
And it’s just standing there, and our heads are at the same level now that it’s up on its back legs…
And then it spoke to me.
Opened its mouth up and spoke. Clear as a bell. It spoke like people do.
It said, “There’s no turning back from this.”
And it said it…in my own voice.
Then it spread its front legs…only they looked a lot more like arms, now…spread ‘em wide open like it wanted to give somebody a great big hug…
And then it tipped its head up to the sky and started screaming. Sounded like half a dozen people all being burned alive at once.
And it kept on screaming like that, just standing where it was with its arms out, screaming at the sky.
I didn’t stay to see if it had anything else to say. I jumped into the cab of my truck and booked it right the hell out of there.
Ain’t been back since.