Cryptid

So I’m a nurse, I work night shift in the ICU. It’s a sweet job, three days a week is full-time, and if I pick up a fourth day they give me a bonus. I have a little routine - I give my patients a bath first thing - I keep a kit of spa shampoo and lotion (peppermint flavored), that’s right, my patients don’t have to endure the indignity of the dry “shower” cap, they get a real bath and hair wash, and I shave the men’s faces, brush the fuck out of their teeth, then change their sheets, dust them with baby powder and put them to bed. If they have a pain killer or sedative ordered, they get it at nine, and then they usually sleep all night.

They’re grateful to be clean for once in a long time, because most of my colleagues are lazy, but they don’t understand this is the real way to be lazy. Because a comfortable patient rests and leaves you alone and doesn’t push the call bell.

So then I get to do my real job, which is writing. 

I sit between my two patient rooms and tap away at my phone, working on my stories. I’ve had some published in magazines, but mostly I publish online. Lately I’ve been on a cryptid kick - cryptids are a catch-all term for mysterious beasts, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I usually get some good writing time in between the ladies asking for “man help” turning patients or changing sheets, etc.

They’re mostly nice people to work with, but the girl coming to take over for me on day shift, Marcie, is an evil skinny bitch. We used to chit-chat, engage in some light flirting, one time we went to the movies (a group of us from work), she brought a flask in her purse and we all passed it around - right? So she used to be cool. But now she started dating a surgeon and pretends she doesn’t know who I am. And she never, ever shows up on time.

We’re all supposed to clock in at 6:45 (am or pm) for the 12 hour shift, that way we have 15 minutes to take report on our patients and then the workday (or night) starts at seven. But she calls and gets report on her drive over (and I know she only lives a mile from the hospital), so that way she doesn’t have to be here till seven.

Sure enough, at 6:50 am, I saw her name pop up on my phone. I gave her the rundown and I could hear her going through the corridors and up the stairs, then she walked past me, gave me a silent hi-five, and went in to the patient’s room, leaving me free to start my four day weekend.

Now you know a little about me, and I’m going to tell you something interesting that I witnessed over the next two days. You won’t believe me, but that’s all right, it’s a good story either way.

I went home that morning to my apartment and made myself a sleepy time drink - chamomile tea with a generous slug of rum. Then I went upstairs to my pitch-black bedroom. I’d tin-foiled the windows but I did it on my side of the closed blinds so my apartment doesn’t look like an anti-social redneck lives here. Black out curtains are nice for sleeping in, but they can’t make your room totally dark.

Night shift people have different routines, and the key to good physical and mental health is to do your best to maintain them even on your days off. Some of my colleagues like to go home, eat food, do some chores, then sleep. And they wake up right before work. Me, I go home and go straight to bed. I wake up and have two meals before work, then don’t eat all night. This makes it easier for my social life - on days off, I’m able to somewhat modify my sleep schedule to meet people for lunch or dinner, that sort of thing. Some nurses, especially single moms, will try to do something crazy like work night shift for the weekend, when their ex has the kids, sleeping during the day, then they flip to sleeping at night during the week so they can make dinner, deal with their kids schoolwork, that sort of thing, and not break the bank paying for childcare. But they never last long. One healthy young woman in her 20’s developed high blood pressure after just a year of that, and her GP put her on meds. 

Well, I was winding down, had finished my daycap and was scrolling through and editing the story I was working on, when Rob Paschal’s name popped up on my phone. I answered it right away,

”Rob! Great to hear from you, man!”

“Daniel, long time no talk! Hey, I know it’s late notice, but are you free to meet up for dinner this evening?”

“Yeah, yeah, definitely buddy, what’s the occasion? Just to hang out?”

“Actually there’s someone who wants to meet you.”

Rob’s voice sounded a little stiff, good. He knows what he did. Rob and I used to be best buds in undergrad, we were both majoring in philosophy, for three years that is, until I decided I needed a little more income and a lot less education and switched to nursing.

It wasn’t that I disliked school - it just wasn’t what I’d imagined. I was hoping for more symposium-style talks and debates, more reading the classics, but what I got was meek professors splitting the hairs of post-modernism, which we were all supposed to take seriously. Plus, a philosophy of mind position opened up in the department and we got over 100 applicants - all with PhD’s - for a job that paid like 50 a year. A nursing career looked like more of a sure thing.

Rob kept going on the academic path, eventually finishing his doctorate in anthropology, focusing on Native American studies. Now he teaches at the state college. And he quit hanging out with me. 

After all those years of me picking up the bar tab when he was a broke grad student - no that’s not it, that doesn’t bother me. What got to me was when he started acting better than me, smarter than me. Finally he decided to call me up one day, and give me a condescending lecture about how I needed to quit going on political rants on social media, how it was going to get me fired if my hospital googled me. I was over it and made a mean joke about how you don’t need to worry about that when you provide objective value to your employer, he didn’t laugh, but he did defriend me online and off. 

But now he wants to go out. I am curious - one of his colleagues wants to meet me. Because she read my work! Not so pulp now, is it, Rob? Of course he picked the fanciest steakhouse in town to impress her, I bet he’s going to blow his whole restaurant budget for the month. I put my phone on silent and drifted off to sleep.

Woke up at three in the afternoon, had breakfast, and went for a run. Incredible weather we’re having this time of year. Though a little warmer than it’s been in the past. It isn’t global warming - it’s that the trees are gone. There used to be a dirt road going through a deep forest, filled with ancient, cathedral-like oaks, but they’ve been developing it, the road’s been asphalt for years now. There’s still shade here and there so I keep running the same path. I’m a creature of habit.

The signs are up for a new community. The first thing they do is cut down the trees, then they pave their roads, then they start building. My father grew up on a tobacco farm around here. He told me, when he was a kid, he would see flocks of birds fly over - and they’d fill the whole sky. Like, it would get noticeably darker. Hard to imagine seeing something like that today. People say it’s pesticides making the birds’ eggs weak, but I think there’s a more obvious explanation - there aren’t enough trees for that many birds to live in anymore. I imagine them flying around, looking for a place to nest. Fighting with their own kind for the same remaining tree.

After a shower I got ready for dinner. I thought about wearing a good old boy, country, pearl snap dress shirt and jeans just to fuck with Rob but decided against it. Maybe he’s ready to be friends again so I shouldn’t start out with reminding him of our shared hillbilly heritage. I went with a perfectly normal shirt and tie.

At The Mountaineer, I was shown to their table. Rob stood up to shake my hand, and introduce me to his companion, Dr. Regina Stone. She was a tall, striking woman. She had that genetic condition where a young woman goes prematurely grey, but her hair was long and healthy. Her skin was tanned, like she spent more time outdoors than your average academic, and I tried to guess at her ancestry. Her eyes were dark and almond shaped, but she was unquestionably American.

Over cocktails, we talked about her work. She studies languages, and had found our little town mentioned in one of her old manuscripts. She told us it indicated there was an Indian religious ceremony performed on a site nearby, and, though she usually doesn’t do field work, curiosity compelled her to come and see for herself.

She hoped Dr. Paschal would be able to provide his expertise, in the unlikely event they found something. Rob still had a truck (I was amused to learn), and he planned on driving her out to the location tomorrow morning. I had a feeling he would’ve done anything she asked. 

We had finished our appetizers by now, and Rob ordered a bottle of red wine to accompany the meat. We watched as the waiter poured a taste for him, he swirled it around in the glass, sipped, and nodded approval. Dr. Stone’s glass was filled first, then ours. Rob proposed a toast: “To discovery!” We all clinked our glasses together and I felt our shared excitement ripple through the air. It was disappointing to miss out on their adventure, but then again, I’m just a nurse.

Dr. Stone turned her striking eyes toward me and asked about my writing, and usually I have an ego about my work, what writer doesn’t? But it was hard to concentrate when she was looking straight at me. Her eyes were big and dark, and sleepily half-closed, so they were all iris, practically no whites. I wondered if the alcohol was hitting her or if she always looked at people like that. I had to shift my gaze toward the candle flame to be able to answer her. 

She wanted to know where I got my inspiration from. She said it seemed like I had access to local folk stories or manuscripts she hadn’t read yet, and, if so, she would very much like to borrow them. I replied that I was sorry to disappoint, but that all of my stories were made up. I got my ideas from hiking through the woods and hills, and from the feelings that came over me on certain evenings. Sometimes, when I got an elderly patient who wanted to chat, I would ask him about his childhood, and how much our area’s changed over the decades, sometimes stories would come to me then, too.

“Well if you like to see strange things in the woods,” she said, “you should join us tomorrow.”

I glanced at Rob, he looked surprised (angry?) but told me, of course I should come. And of course, I wanted to!

After dinner, I waited with Dr. Stone at the restaurant entrance while Rob walked to the parking lot to get his vehicle. I was burning up with curiosity about our adventure, and this mysterious professor.

“Dr. Stone, the manuscript that pointed you to our town, what language was it written in?”

“Ahh, it was Latin.”

“Latin! I took three years of Latin, I know that’s not much, but would you let me have a look at it?”

She turned to me with those eyes again, laughing this time,

“Absolutely not!”

Then she climbed up into Rob’s waiting truck and they drove away. 

I went to bed early that night, at two am, but didn’t sleep well. I was up, dressed, and ready to go by the time they picked me up that morning at nine. 

Dr. Stone sat in the middle of the cab, navigating from a hand-written sheet of paper. To my surprise, she had Rob turn down the same road I always jog on. I tried to discreetly read over her shoulder, the note appeared to be in Latin. It had been so long since I’d tried to read any Latin! “Dolor sit amit…” doesn’t “dolor” mean “pain?” It didn’t look like ordinary directions, and there wasn’t a map. 

We didn’t drive far at all, in fact, we pulled over right next to the sign for the new construction. We all got out and followed Dr. Stone through the tall grass and over to a small hill all covered with brush and vines. Dr. Stone was no longer consulting her paper, if she ever had been. She clicked on her lantern and pulled a curtain of dusty vines aside to reveal - the opening to a cave!

The intrepid professors went in without hesitation, but I lingered a moment. I’ve explored these woods and fields ever since I could walk, and never saw anything like this. The downward slope had rough-hewn steps, the cave did not appear to be naturally made. But I wasn’t going to miss out on the adventure, so I clicked on my lantern and crossed the threshold.

My eyes adjusted to the light, and I saw Rob beside himself with excitement. He kept repeating that he’d never seen anything like this before, it was all brand new, it was going to be a bombshell discovery!

I looked around the cave, it was just one room. The most striking thing was a huge, broken stone on the floor opposite the entrance. The two pieces lay in front of a hollow in the wall. I thought the stone must have been a door. Runes were etched into one side of the stone, and deep, disordered gashes marred the other side. It was unsettling to see there was no evidence of animal activity anywhere in the cave - not even a spiderweb.

With the motion of our three lanterns, the light moved like firelight, and I looked at the paintings covering the walls. It was animal imagery similar to other native Indian art, crows, bears, deer, and something else - a tall, shadowy, bipedal creature. It was situated in the middle of the animals. I turned to look back at the entrance and there were two trees painted on either side. The meaning of this place was obvious to me - it had been a tomb. The animal spirits, and the runes on the guardian stone, were meant to trap something inside of that hollow in the wall. But now the stone was broken and the grave, empty. My blood ran cold, and I wanted to tell my friends we should leave, when Regina spoke to Rob,

“So what can you tell me about this place, doctor?”

“I, I have no idea! I’ve never seen anything like this before! These runes, they bear no relation to any other native writing or artwork. This is entirely new! It could be we’ve stumbled upon something older than any of our previous finds! I couldn’t tell you what any of this is! Not yet, at least.”

“Then you’re useless to me,” replied Regina, and she stepped right up to Rob, but she didn’t look at him, she looked right at me, and smiled.

I will never be able to put into words what she looked like in that moment. Her hair shone like moonlight, and her smile was as happy and innocent as a kid on the first day of summer. I felt all my problems roll off my shoulders, I was as light and free as a cloud. This crazy idea came to me that she and I were going to spend the rest of our lives running through the wild forest like deer.

Then, the spell was broken, a wave of dizziness hit me and I stumbled forward, my foot landing in something soft and squishy, like a big wet marshmallow. I looked down and it was - Rob’s lung. They had been ripped out of his back and splayed open like obscene butterfly wings. The rest of him was - broken. I couldn’t see his face anywhere. There was almost no blood. I looked up at Regina, there was no blood on her hands or clothes, but it was still on her face. As I watched, a long, thick, black tongue snaked out of her mouth and wiped her face clean. Then she spoke again,

“What do you think happened here?”

“I…I…I’m not sure…”

She drew me to her with her gaze, like I was a trout being reeled in, I stumbled over poor Rob’s body and fell into her iron grip. Then, suddenly, she let me go.

“Just make it up!” she cried, despair in her voice, “I don’t remember anything before I woke up!”

She shoved me in the chest but it was nothing, she had the strength of a young woman now, not a monster. “Just tell me what you think might have happened, please! I’m all alone. Maybe your story will sound familiar.”

I couldn’t speak when I was looking at her, so I turned and looked at the broken stone. Then I took a deep breath, and told her a story.

And I’m still alive, so I guess she liked it.