Grant Gets His Wish

 1

It was just about 9:30 AM on a beautiful, cloudless day in May that Grant first saw the video. It had appeared on one of the Cryptozoology forums that he loved to spend his free time scrolling through. Watching every bit of video. Quietly concentrating on every snippet of audio. Puzzling over countless transcribed eyewitness reports. He wished more than anything in the world that he could see one for himself one day.

These reports and various sketchy bits of evidence, these creatures that modern science could not find but whose stories have persisted for generations, they captivated Grant, filling him with that same sense of magical wonder he had felt as a child. Back when he would gaze wistfully at the night sky and imagine what sort of creatures were peering back at him from the eternally expanding cosmos above. They preserved his sense that magic was alive and that the world still held enchanting mysteries of all kinds. He cherished them and loved them all the more for it. Especially the legends he had heard growing up in the area. His favorites were a series of sightings of a creature that lived underground and would attack at the same time that lightning would strike, and how it had allegedly killed a large group of squatters over a hundred years earlier.

The video itself was simply titled “Got ‘em”. Its thumbnail image showed a hairy, shaggy humanoid thing, grainy and slightly out of focus. It sat on its butt, bound to a tree trunk with heavy iron chains. Its description read as follows:

“This is the bastard that gon and done killed all our hunting dogs. Real AMERICAN COUNTRY JUSTICE is always best served hot.”

The video itself ran for slightly over a minute. It began with laughing, jeering, and whooping coming from the drunk men off camera before a voice says, “Fuckin’ shut up, we’re rollin’”. The camera jerked to the right, briefly losing focus before recovering and showing what might have been the single most convincing Sasquatch costume that Grant had ever seen. The head was conical and covered in dense, coarse brown hair. The face was almost human, but far too long and broad. Its mouth was huge, taking up nearly the entire bottom third of the thing’s head.

 It opened its mouth and let out a shriek like nothing Grant had ever heard before. It was like a screaming choir of children and many wolves howling in the distance, a deep male human voice, and the rustling of wind in the leaves interwoven all at once in a cacophony of rage and ferocity. Majestic and horrifying and uniquely ethereal. 

It stopped suddenly and grinned sharp, and toothily at the camera. It was a wildly menacing-looking thing, and it had many, many teeth. The ones in front sat like fangs, their tips jutting out very slightly from the thick lips, almost like a stereotypical Orc from the realms of fantasy. Grant felt the shivers run down his spine and watched goosebumps rise up on his forearm. “Absolutely incredible!” he declared loudly to his computer monitor. His fascination soon turned to horror, however, as he witnessed what happened next. 

The video suddenly got much brighter as most of a man’s torso entered the frame, his arm extended out to the Sasquatch, hand clutching a lit blowtorch spewing flames of blue and orange. The creature howled again, this time more gutturally, its voice filled with hate, malice, and fear. A hand extended into the frame and set the flame to high with a whoosh and a hiss. The creature squirmed and tried its best to back away but the flames dipped low and reached its face. The thing screamed again,  squealing with anguish and pain. Abruptly, the video cuts off, the screen turning black, and the feed ending.

2

Grant’s heart pounded, and he blinked a rogue tear from his eyes as he set the video to play again. And Again. And Again. He was hypnotized by the horrible spectacle of what he could sense was a real, genuine Sasquatch. His heart felt heavy at the thought of the pain it must’ve endured before its end, at the blind, stupid cruelty of blind and stupid men. It had hurt to think that such brutality could be unleashed on something so gloriously mysterious and otherworldly. He felt a certain understanding, thinking of the dogs that were killed, but that was part of the natural order of the world. But there was nothing natural about blowtorching off the face of a living legend. That was nothing short of an atrocity. As heinous as a war crime. Horrible or not, he knew what he saw was real and knew it had to be proven. 

Grant was beginning to form an idea. Before the video was taken down by moderators, he set up a microphone and recording software that he kept at his desk and captured the video’s audio. He edited out any human-made sounds and made a loop of the remaining 38 seconds. This he immediately ripped to a blank CD. He dashed to the hall closet and threw aside a number of well-neglected jackets and windbreakers, finding the old boombox he knew he had stored away deep in the back. He put in new batteries and tested the built-in CD player, making sure that everything worked. The creature’s nerve-jangling howl launched through the speakers, soul-wrenching and fear-inducing in its enormity. 

His plan was simple. Grant lived in a special part of rural Appalachia, one that was notorious for its unusually high reports of Bigfoot sightings. Local legends and superstitions both agreed that you could often hear these creatures howling and calling to one another in the dark of night, especially if one found themselves in the hills, alone. Grant lived deep in those very same hills, and forest swathed the land around his house as far as the eye could see.

He figured that this would be the perfect place to test the authenticity of the Sasquatch snuff film, as he was ashamedly beginning to think of it. He was going to take the boombox out into the forest that his backyard touched on, and play it as loudly as he could. From there, he was going to wait around and see if he could get a response from anything. Trick one of the creatures into calling back. He would have his phone ready to record at the first sign of anything out of the ordinary. Thus, he would be able to prove the veracity of both the video and the local legend at the same time. He wondered absently how many other hunters and trappers could’ve killed one of these creatures.

With his mind made up and his plan fully formed, Grant prepared himself, gathering a backpack with water and food and matches and many, many spare batteries. He took two flashlights, one he slipped to his belt. The other was attached to one of the backpack’s arm straps. His phone was set aside to charge fully. He set a pot of coffee to brew and settled in, scouring the forums for more information as he waited for sundown and the start of his test, grabbing absently for his bong.

3

With the onset of nightfall, Grant began to move. He shouldered his pack and took off out the back door, boombox in one hand and flashlight firmly in the other. The backyard was unfenced, and the trees at the farthest end were his initial goal. As he reached the treeline, Grant turned around and looked back at his house one last time, feeling a sudden pang of trepidation and uncertainty deep in his chest as he did so. With a sigh, he forced himself to set off down the overgrown footpath leading out of his yard and eventually to a clearing about a quarter mile down.

Grant had been out in the woods plenty of times in his quest for the confirmation of worldly magic, but this time, something felt off. The woods were darker and more menacing than he’d remembered. Trees and bushes sat hunched and bent, leaning in conspiratorially to whisper hidden messages to one another. Branches and leaves seemed to hang closer than normal, and Grant felt dwarfed among the trunks. He told himself not to panic, that he had been down this path hundreds of times before in both light and darkness. The clearing is just ahead. Everything is fine. He kept repeating in his head, over and over, until the forest seemed to retreat slightly, until the gloom felt less dense.

Moments later, the branches and trunks and burrs had parted entirely, and the tiny footpath emptied itself out into a fair-sized clearing. It was just big enough to set a cabin in the center of and give it a little bit of yard on all sides. Grant strolled over to a nearby log and sat down, his flashlight waving to and fro in the shadowed clearing. He set the boombox on a stump to his left, steeled himself, and hit play. 

At first, nothing seemed to happen, and Grant winced at the booming silence enveloping him like a thin shell. He leaned in to peer at the tiny screen on the device, checking to see if it was on. As soon as he did, it leapt to life. The tortured howl of that anguished Sasquatch cleaved the stillness in half, cutting far and clear into the vegetation around him. He fell back, startled, reflexes kicking into overdrive, just barely catching himself before he hit the ground.

“Holy Christ, that’s loud!” he exclaimed with a chuckle as he willed his heart to stop racing. He peered around dubiously, suddenly concerned that someone had seen him in his act of foolishness and was laughing at him from the shadows. He could feel eyes on his back.

The track looped, the screech sounding again. Grant shook off his embarrassment, but oddly enough, that feeling of being watched seemed to linger with him. Again, that menace seemed to creep back into the world, insects seemed to grow still, frogs quieted in their croaking, and a hush fell over the clearing and the woods beyond. On the fourth loop, Grant paused the CD. Something didn’t feel right.

4

A rustling sound came to Grant’s ears then, like something quietly but confidently striding towards him in the treeline. He raised his flashlight, arms trembling slightly in nervousness. The sounds continued right up to the edge of the trees, stopping suddenly within just a few strides of the clearing. 

The flashlight swivelled towards where the sounds had died, and Grant’s mouth began to open and close in shock, words dying on his tongue as quickly as they entered into his mind. Eyes floated in the dark, reflected by the flashlight’s beam, at least seven feet in the air, well above the lowest hanging branches. Oh my god oh my god ohmygod chanted Grant in his mind. With his free hand, he reached for his cellphone, plucking it from his vest’s front pocket, and he began to record. 

A earsplitting, earthshattering cry rent the night air, thundering from the shadows right where Grant had been pointing his flashlight. It boomed with rage and burning hatred before tapering off into a kind of keening warble. The warble, flecked with sorrow and tones of mourning, died to silence. Grant whirled on his heels and took off, sprinting towards the footpath he knew lay ahead. 

He made it three steps before the thing in the treelines flung a massive, thick branch at him, hitting him directly in the back with a sickeningly loud thud. Grant flew forward, head over heels, before crashing into the hard dirt, moaning in agony and writhing in an attempt to get into a crawling position. His lower ribs had shattered, their connection to his spine severed in an instant. 

A large rock sailed out immediately afterward, arcing splendidly from the brush, skillfully landing on and pinning one of Grant’s legs. His knee exploded with the impact, the kneecap shooting off into the night like a dud bottle rocket. He screamed, shrieking so loudly that he could feel his vocal cords beginning to rip with the force. He flopped over onto his stomach, but the strength was leaving his arms, the pain flooding his body so intensely that it was threatening to make him pass out.

This was when the Sasquatch emerged from the woods entirely. With long, deep brown hair covering every inch of its towering body, it looked wonderfully unearthly. Like a legend come to life. A breeze stirred its mane gently as it stood still and silent, glaring at Grant as he writhed on the ground, mewling pitifully in horror and pain. On legs like knotted trunks, it strode swiftly and deliberately towards him, panting in rage and grinning at him madly, looking uncannily like a tall, graceful gorilla deadset on protecting its territory. 

In a matter of moments, it reached Grant. Its huge arms jumped forward immediately and flipped Grant onto his back. The weight of the rock pinning his leg was too great, and with a disgustingly wet popping sound, everything below his knee wrenched itself free of his body, bits of muscle and sinewy tissue clinging to the severed appendage, veins dangling loose. The Sasquatch bent over Grant then, taking an arm in each of its iron vicegrip hands and pulling as hard as it could. With a guttural roar, it pulled the arms free, Grant shrieking briefly before blacking out of existence. Blood bloomed vibrantly from his three dripping stumps, splashing the glade in gouts of sticky crimson. It tossed the limbs recklessly behind it, heedless of anything other than its conquered enemy. 

One arm cartwheeled its way into the blackness, wholly discarded. The other set itself on a trajectory born of poor luck, striking the forgotten boombox, knocking it to the ground, and restarting the CD. The shriek of the tortured beast rang again into the chilly night air, and the sasquatch stopped dead in its tracks, instantly turning to find the source. It saw the small metallic orb-shaped thing on the ground and picked it up, the loop still playing, still roaring its agony to the world. 

The Sasquatch’s eyes turned glassy, and tears had started to run unchecked into its fur. It cradled the boombox to its chest. Held it as close as it would a lost child, rocking back and forth and making soft, sad cooing noises all the while. Eventually, it ran its fingers over the boombox’s face and, quite by accident, hit the pause button. The shrieking stopped, and it bent its head slightly, ear to the sky as if listening for a last cry from its lost love. Once more, head bent mournfully now, the creature clutched the boombox to its breast and wandered off into the night, blinking away tears. 

Ian Berling lives in the same hometown as Rod Serling. He is a (not very good) musician and has been collecting horror books and movies for as long as he’s had access to the internet. He lives with many cats and one cat-sized dog.