Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Page 3

  Furthermore, in Canada, the leprocaun revealed a malicious side rarely displayed in its native land. While in Ireland, the leprocaun was content to play little tricks, perhaps stealing your key ring and replacing it with a ring of braided tapeworms. In Canada, the leprocaun’s tricks were more nefarious—they began obsessively stealing the noses, and ears, off corpses, and replacing them with false noses, and ears, made of cheese.

  As the leprocaun population grew throughout the late nineteenth century (for the nasty little vermin breed like rabbits) the number of corpses so mutilated grew to epidemic proportions. A town would know that a leprocaun had set up inside its borders because suddenly every wake would be spoiled by a mourner’s shriek: A child would stretch out a hand to wish Grandma a final good-bye as she lay in her coffin and would accidentally knock off her nose; a nose that proved to be Muenster cheese. It soon became the custom throughout Canada to tweak the nose and tug the ears of a corpse before the coffin closed—just in case.

  The leprocaun is very skilled at shaping cheese, and the noses and ears look very lifelike on the dead. Where the leprocauns get the cheese is unknown; some say they make it themselves, between their hideous toes. What they do with the noses and ears they steal is well established: They eat them raw, calling it revenge for the massacres and extinction they suffered. They talk about this while chewing the noses and ears, showing the half-chewed organs in their vile little mouths, and spraying bits of cartilage everywhere. They really are filthy little creatures.

  Up-to-date funeral directors now equip their parlors with electrified screens, trained leprocaun-hunting scorpions, motion detectors, and false poison noses. But for a long time these modern contrivances were unavailable, and desperate people were forced to sit up all night with a beloved corpse before burial, a broom in hand, ready to beat off any encroaching leprocauns. For the leprocaun is small and bendy and can fit even through a mouse hole.

  In Kitchener, Ontario, in 1935, one particularly malignant and cunning leprocaun proved the terror of the town. It had mastered a particular tune on its cattail pipes, a potent lullaby that drove all listeners to dreamtown. I mean they took a bite of the sleep sandwich. I mean that after three bars they were snoring.

  Corpses in Kitchener got interred immediately; but this was not always practical, and often the body had to wait overnight for burial. And when it did, come morning, its ears and nose were cheese. Relatives wept. Town officials gnashed their teeth. But every time, whoever stayed up guarding the body woke the next morning next to a mutilated body, ashamed of his failure.

  When the homecoming queen of 1936 choked on pep pills one Saturday night, the town council feared her attractive and popular face would be marred by cheese organs, so they put out a call for a doughty soul to stand guard until the cemetery opened on Sunday. Great rewards, key to the city, the hand of the mayor’s daughter: They offered the works. And one who heard was a young man just drifted into town. He was headed westward to Regina by broken-down train and had to spend the night in Kitchener anyway while they adjusted the railway gauges; why not volunteer to guard the body? He brought a thermos of coffee and a thermos of Kenyan dust tea, the strongest tea there is; he had a broom and a pack of chewing gum. Hopeful townsfolk locked him in the funeral home, in a small room with an open coffin.

  “If the leprocaun get from her face,” they warned him, in broken English, for they mainly spoke Kitchenerese, “it will be the harm for you.”

  The young man paced the floor of the room, swigging from his thermos and furiously chewing gum. He could see through a small barred window the lights of the town wink out one by one. An old-fashioned clock on the wall, the kind with Roman numerals, ticked the slow seconds by. A single bulb cast long, strange shadows on the walls. And there in the room with him was the corpse of the young woman.

  He would neither sleep nor, the young man told himself, go mad. As the clock outside tolled two, strange, soft music began to play. The young man found his eyelids growing heavy . . .

  But, realizing that this must be the leprocaun, he slapped himself in the face. He ran a few laps around the small room. Soon the music stopped and he could resume his vigil.

  An hour or so later the music started again. By this time the coffee was gone, and he was afraid that if he drank any more tea he’d need to slip away to the bathroom, leaving the corpse unguarded. He slammed the coffin lid on his fingers a few times and kept himself awake until the ominous tune stopped.

  By this time it was the darkest, strangest time of night. The young man’s feet ached from the hours spent pacing the room. The rush from the coffee was wearing off. His fingers hurt, too. The corpse had shifted position when he’d slammed the coffin lid, and now, with the lid back open, he could see the head cocked to one side, as though listening. But there was nothing to listen to except the horrible ticking of the clock.

  Just to make sure the corpse was still whole, he reached into the coffin and pinched the girl’s nose. It was real, but it was cold as ice, and the strange, rubbery sensation of a dead face filled him with disgust and dread. He was no longer so sure he could hold out for a full night. “We’re going to make it,” he said to her, although he did not believe it. Then he said, “Green church-mouse ire box.” Only in the smallest and tiredest hours of the morning can the world seem so confusing.

  It was just before the dawn that he heard the pipes again. He covered his ears and thrashed about to stay conscious. As he staggered about the room, he was only dimly aware of the things he was knocking over: a hat rack, an umbrella stand, some filing cabinets, and, finally, with a tremendous crash, the coffin. Screaming from fear and agony he fell down over the mess and lost consciousness.

  He could not have been asleep long, and he awoke to the sound of the door unlocking. Quickly standing up, he was soon surrounded by concerned townsfolk, wondering at the disorder of the room. But although the queen’s carcass had unceremoniously been spilled out on the ground, her ears and nose were quite real. The leprocaun had been kept at bay!

  There was a hearty cheer, and the young man found himself an instant celebrity. The town hoisted him on their shoulders and paraded him about. His reward, measured out in gold bullion, began to pile up in the town square. By the time everything was toted up, the sun was beginning to climb toward noon. The young man felt a trickle, as of sweat, on his neck. Reaching up (between congratulatory handshakes) to brush it aside, he touched his earlobe, which separated in a goopy mess. The adoring crowd set their autograph books down and stared in horror. The young man’s ears and nose were nothing but cheese, cheese that under the warmth of the sun had begun to melt. The leprocuan had done its grisly work.

  The young man slunk away into the strange places and the mysteries. And you must know, dear reader, that young man was I.

  I was able to parlay my reward into the beginnings of the fortune that funded many of my expeditions. And I did claim the hand of the mayor’s daughter; it was mechanical, and made of aluminium.

  Let us never speak of this again.

  Funeral Mountain Terrashot

  (Morgellons explosissimus)

  One of the strangest and most haunting sights offered to travelers in the Amargosa Desert is the procession of the terrashot. A long, single-file line of the wobbly, unsteady creatures comes winding down from the Funeral Mountains into the heat of the desert and their ultimate doom.

  The terrashot is an odd creature, part animal and part fungus, in much the same way that a lichen is part fungus and part alga, or a cockatrice is part rooster and part serpent. It grazes in meadows in the Funeral Mountain heights, romping on three to seven legs, until some mysterious instinct drives whole herds of them into the desert.

  Long part of Native American oral tradition, this procession was first recorded in 1846 by members of the Mormon Battalion under Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke. The lieutenant colonel noted the incident in his diary, in the curiously c
oncise code employed by the U.S. Army at the time; “” he wrote, which decodes as: “We are done for! An uncanny procession of living caskets we have witnessed march into the desert! Lucky is the man who has died ere this day, as assuredly fell doom awaits us.”

  For the creatures did indeed resemble coffins—coffins with unsteady legs. A more sober assessment came from Private Orson Schultz, who rode close enough to the creatures to describe them in detail in a letter he sent to his beloved mother. He noted that the terrashot (as they were later known) all measured six to eight feet in length, with rectangular, oblong bodies. The back of the terrashot, as Schultz noted, is covered with a hard carapace, like the polished wood of a casket.

  Along its sides and underbelly, however, the creature is soft to the touch, “like a moth’s ears,” Schultz wrote. Schultz was also the first to describe the strange fate of the terrashot. As the terrashot herd ambled single file into the desert, Schultz watched the heat of the sun swell each terrashot, until finally they would explode with a terrific report.

  Schultz did not have the biological knowledge we do now, so he did not understand that the terrashot’s apparently suicidal trek is really its method of reproduction: When the wind from the desert is blowing toward the mountains, the creature arranges for the desert heat to explode it and scatter its spores, which are wind-borne back to the mountains. Frankly, what happens next science is not too sure of, but whatever it is, a new generation of terrashot springs up to wander, in turn, into the desert when the wind is right.

  The terrashot’s explosion in the desert, which is powerful enough to leave a crater in the sand, is one of the loudest macroevents in nature, surpassed only by the rut-roaring of the sphinx and the daily screaming of the earthworms (which happens at a frequency too high for humans to hear, fortunately). “I am blest I was not closer,” Orson Schultz wrote his mom, “for I should have certainly been reduced to my component atoms from the force of the event.”

  Schultz, a versatile observer, also recorded in the highlands of Missouri an early sighting of the jimplicute, a vampiric sauropod. I acquired a bundle of his correspondence in an estate sale in the late ’50s, and I have taken his sage advice to heart: Never have I dared approach a terrashot in the desert too closely, lest I perish when it does.

  Not everyone has been as circumspect, though. Witness the sad case of Gloria Grundy and Scaraband Thompson-Chang of Glenvale, Nevada. These two lovebirds had been picnicking in the highlands when the procession of the Funeral Mountain terrashot swayed by. Unwisely they pursued the creatures into the desert, unaware that they could prove fearsome.

  When the first terrashot exploded, Mr. Thompson-Chang, who was trying to ride the fool thing, was turned to dust, more or less. Miss Grundy was far enough away from the blast that she only suffered a ruptured eardrum, but she was, tragically, downwind, which meant she inhaled a vast quantity of terrashot spores (as well as, presumably, much of the remaining mass of her late boyfriend). She returned to Glenvale in mourning, and the police filed her report under creatures, fearsome—a catchall for the mysterious and unsolvable. Gloria Grundy seemed a little ill, but this was dismissed as nerves. At dinner with her parents she foamed at the mouth a little. One day later, concerned friends noticed a fine down was sprouting from her skin.

  “It’s just nerves,” she said, somewhat mechanically.

  She died that night, peacefully in her bed. What was most remarkable was that she was found with the covers kicked to the floor, lying in a coffin as though in state. The mysterious coffin, with its fuzzy sides and shiny lid, would be her final resting place. The coroner noted, in a report that he filed too late, that the coffin appeared to have sprouted from her body.

  As soon as I heard about this curious incident through my contacts in the Bureau, I sent a telegram posthaste to the officials in Glenvale, Nevada, warning them. I had to send it collect, though, and it is possible they never received it. Gloria Grundy’s last wish was to be cremated, and friends and family, including the surviving members of the Thompson-Chang clan, were gathered in the Glenvale Funeral home. open 24 hours / we never close read the sign on the door. sic transit gloria grundy read the message on the funerary wreath. Everyone clustered around as the casket trundled down the conveyer belt toward the crematorium. The heat was getting oppressive. The casket began to swell. Everyone took a deep breath . . .

  Stay out of Glenvale, dear reader, is what I’m saying. You don’t want to go there.

  Slide-Rock Bolter

  (Leviathanetta mucopuruluntius)

  The slide-rock bolter is so reclusive and mysterious that its existence was unknown in 1919, when Giuseppe Zangara Orifice, a postwar immigrant from Austria-Hungary, purchased a large and fertile valley in Colorado with the money he had made profiteering. Giuseppe Zangara Orifice intended to raise sheep, as was the custom at the time, but twice he awoke in the morning to find that a good half of his flock had disappeared in the night, the fence to their pen shattered and flattened. Two halves, disappeared twice, means no flock left, as simple arithmetic will teach us.

  Thoroughly confused, but despairing of raising disappearing sheep, Giuseppe Zangara Orifice rented his valley out as a sanatorium for rich people with tuberculosis. One night an entire bungalow, with sixteen consumptives inside, disappeared. The survivors coughed up terrible stories of a strange rumbling sound at night.

  What neither Giuseppe Zangara Orifice nor the sanatorium director knew, but what you, dear reader, have probably guessed, was that both sheep and consumptives had been swallowed whole by an enormous land fish known to posterity as the slide-rock bolter.

  This bolter, it turned out, hung from the summits of nearby mountains by its hooked caudal fin, exuding from innumerable disgusting pores a mucopurulent secretion. At night it would release itself with a flick of the tail and skid down the mountainside, the lubricating mucopurulence protecting its soft underbelly. Zipping through the valley with its wide mouth open, it swallowed whole whatever man, beast, plant, or structure was in its path. Momentum and a little judicious wriggling would carry it to the top of the next mountain, where it would hook its tail and rest, digesting. The slimy trail it left behind evaporated in the dawn. So high was its perch, swaddled in clouds and concealed by crevices and trees, that none knew or suspected that an enormous fish had been responsible for all the damage and havoc. But they knew something was wrong.

  The sanatorium closed down, and Giuseppe Zangara Orifice rented the remaining buildings out to an orphanage, which was less fussy about safety. Seventy-seven orphans were guzzled by the bolter over the course of one dread week.

  People were frantic. Was the valley haunted? “Of course it is not haunted,” I would have told them if they had asked me, and if I had been alive a hundred years ago and had also possessed the power of foresight. “It is simply the hunting ground of an enormous land fish.” People can be so superstitious and silly sometimes.

  Now, there are many well-authenticated stories of people swallowed by great fish or whales and surviving—Jonah, Ruggiero, and Geppetto are three examples—so you may hope that a thriving community of orphans, consumptives, and sheep will eventually be found in the bolter’s belly. Unfortunately, a bolter’s esophagus passes through three gizzards lined with razor-sharp chitinous teeth. So no orphans, et al., will ever be found inside the bolter; but many pieces of orphans will be.

  No one dared live in Giuseppe Zangara Orifice’s accursed valley, because of cowardice and the 80 percent fatality rate. Short on funds and almost in despair, Giuseppe Zangara Orifice gave a discount rate to a leper colony. The lepers were unenthused with the location. One raised his fist in protest, but it fell off, and the rest sat docilely around the valley, awaiting their fate. Did they pray to their leper gods? Did they weep leprous tears?

  That night there was a tremendous crashing sound, as there so often was, and a whole cottage and its twelve leprous inhabitants were found missing. B
ut this proved to be the end of the bolter’s reign of terror.

  Lepers are delicious, but they are also contagious. In the process of digestion, the bolter contracted the disease. Leprosy is a grisly business, and all the more so in a fish the size of a railroad car.

  Chunks of flesh sloughed off the bolter, tumbling downhill into the horrified valley. Eventually, the bolter tried to coast down through the valley one last time, but the rough ride was too much for its diseased body, which shivered to pieces at the bottom.

  Giuseppe Zangara Orifice was delighted to find that the scourge of his valley was dead. “A happy ending!” he crowed, forgetting the long queue of the dead among his tenants. With the money he had made massaging insurance claims and selling the bolter’s body to science, he brought his family from the newly minted Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to his Colorado vale, and all twenty-six of them lived there in harmony among the pleasant greenery. “A happy ending.” He chuckled to himself again.

  Tragically, as is so often the case, it turned out that only the presence of an alpha- predator like the slide-rock bolter had kept the populations of other animals in check. With no bolter to scare them away, wolves, spider-wolves, overwolves, Frenchmen, and even a renegade hodag began to fill the valley. They ate the miserable Orifices one by one, starting with the youngest.

  “Slide-rock bolter, please come back,” shouted a weeping Giuseppe Zangara Orifice as the overwolves closed in on him. It was the last thing he ever said.

  Toteroad Shagamaw

  (Peripeteia garbagophagus)

  The most fearsome creature of all, dear reader, is unpreparedness. It is for this reason that I award the toteroad shagamaw second place.

  For I have sought two-headed snakes in Africa, feral koalas in Australia, behemoths in Asia, and Frenchmen in Europe; each has been deadly, but in each case I was prepared. However, the toteroad shagamaw is deceptive. The toteroad shagamaw plays a deep game.