Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read online

  Then she laughed and hung up. “That’s the stupidest prank call I’ve ever heard. Do you even know anyone with a” she glanced at the phone, “406 number?”

  I shook my head.

  We went back inside and ordered new drinks. It being a Tuesday, we were even able to get our stools back.

  Sonovia, the bartender, smiled at me and then glanced at the phone. I didn’t remember putting it on the bar instead of back in my bag, but there it was and I was fidgeting with it.

  “Everything alright?”

  I nodded and managed a smile, but not a very convincing one, because the next thing I knew she was giving me a buyback on a shot of Jameson.

  The calls weren’t every night, at least not at first. If they had been I would have just flushed the phone down the toilet like a prom baby, or turned it off. No, they were sporadic, and yet somehow only came when I was drunk enough to answer, thinking this time it might make sense.

  It didn’t, and finally Ginger demanded custody of the phone because me running in and out of the bar getting more agitated was not the point of the exercise. I was happy to hand it over. She let everything go to voicemail.

  Now we’re coming to a part of the story where I look kind of stupid. Stupider.

  So, it was a week after I’d given up on my cell phone making any sense, more than four months after the gas leak, or whatever you wanted to call it. That’s when I see that asshole Doyle for the first time.

  He waited until I was five beers in. Then he walked up as though he’d just come in off Bedford Avenue, he even had a foil-wrapped lamb shawarma in his hand, and he plopped down on the vacant bar stool next to me when Ginger went to the bathroom. But he blew it with his first line.

  “There are tigers in the air,” he said.

  He looked at me as though he expected me to supply the other half of a secret password, while the yogurt sauce dripped through the foil and onto his fingers.

  “Tigers? In the beer?” I gazed into the foam at the bottom of my pint glass, then back at him. Then I decided that maybe this was some kind of PETA thing, like the sea kittens, even though I could smell the delicious dead baby sheep in his hand.

  The whole point was that I was drunk enough to take the burden off of things to make sense, after all.

  I didn’t want anything to do with any save-the-yeasts campaign, so I turned away and asked Sonovia for another drink. Then I turned back to tell this tiger guy to get out of Ginger’s seat. But he was already gone.

  I shrugged and when Ginger got back we laughed about it. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t irritated when I saw him again the next evening, sitting in the backmost booth. I’m sure he thought it was a good place to observe without being observed, but it was next to the bathrooms. Poor dumb fuck.

  “He’s here,” I said to Ginger when I got back from the facilities, leaning over close to her ear.

  “Who?”

  “Tiger dude.”

  “Where?”

  “Last booth.”

  “What, the guy with the beard and the five-head?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Ginger stared, so blatantly he couldn’t have missed her. I gave up trying to resist and stared too. His untrimmed beard and bulging cranium, combined with his narrow cheeks, made his head look like a giant had pinched it. His eyes were ridiculously huge, dirty-ice gray, and bloodshot. Although to be fair Rosemary’s lighting scheme tends to make everyone’s eyes look that way.

  “Creeper,” Ginger said after a moment’s consideration.

  “You can’t say that just based on the fact that he doesn’t own a beard trimmer.”

  “My instincts are never wrong,” she said, and to be fair this was accurate in my experience. Also I had no interest in defending the dude.

  We turned away. For the rest of the night my shoulders were tense waiting for him to come up behind me, but he didn’t.

  That was too good to last, though, and a few days later we walked in and he was just standing at the end of the bar, grinning through his beard at us.

  “Looks like someone gave him the talk about how self-confidence is attractive,” Ginger muttered.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said as we approached, and held up his hand so that I had to stop if I didn’t want to touch him. “I’m not trying to be dense on purpose. I thought you knew.”

  I was drawn into the question like quicksand. “Knew what?”

  “About the air jungles. About those weird phone calls you’ve been getting. About what killed all those people in your office.”

  Ginger stepped around me to get between us. “She doesn’t want to talk about that shit.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” he said, side-stepping her. “In fact,” he looked directly at me again, “you don’t have to talk at all. You listen, I’ll tell you what I know. You can decide if I sound like a reporter, or someone who actually knows what’s going on.”

  “Not right now,” I said, “I need a beer.”

  But you can’t hear something like that and not wonder. Besides, if I didn’t talk, and Ginger was right there, everything would be fine.

  The stupidest thought I ever had in my life. And I’ve drunk-dialed my mom at midnight to win an argument, flirted with the tracheotomy guys, cried about Jeanette and Karl and Angel in public even though I know I couldn’t have done anything different.

  Anyhow, when a bar stool opened up next to me a couple of hours later, he slid in immediately.

  “Get lost,” Ginger said without looking up.

  “No, let him stay,” I said. Judas asshole me. She gave me a look that would have killed me if I had any sense. Anyway, I said, “Let’s see if he’s actually as smart as he says.”

  He smiled again. His teeth were weird. All there, all white and shiny, but they seemed off-center somehow.

  “Thanks. I’m Henry Doyle. And like I said, you don’t have to tell me anything. The people in your office didn’t die of any gas leak.”

  I didn’t move, didn’t nod my head or twitch my hand. It could be a set-up, despite his insistence that I didn’t have to talk.

  Besides, if he was the kind of person he looked to be, he’d go on in the absence of any encouragement.

  “What most people don’t know about the history of aviation . . . ” He stopped, waved his hand vaguely. “What most people don’t know about the history of aviation fills books. But even the books don’t tell about Harold Conrad, or Lieutenant Ash, or Randolph Joyner-Leigh.”

  It wasn’t hard to keep looking at him blankly.

  “Why should anyone remember? They were only three martyrs, out of many martyrs . . . but my great-great uncle remembered. You might have heard of him.” He paused, took a little sip of his PBR, and for a moment I thought Williamsburg suited him very well. “Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “Yeah, the writer,” Ginger said. “Who wrote fiction.”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes when he wrote the truth, the government asked him to publish it as fiction, with the names and details changed to throw the public off track. He did what they asked. But in the family, we passed it down for generations. There’s a reason none of us will get on an airplane. I personally spent days getting here on a Greyhound bus next to the most awful gum-chewing old woman who wanted me to pray with her every time she opened a snack cake, rather than risk flying.”

  Sonovia came by and Doyle interrupted his rant to order us all another round, although he hadn’t finished the one he already had. As soon as she stepped away to pull the taps he plunged back in, still in the groove.

  “What the history books, and the science books, and the governments of this and every other nation won’t tell you is that there are jungles in the air.”

  “With tigers?” I said. I couldn’t help myself. At least one minor thing made more sense now.

  “With every sort of creature that belongs in an ecosystem, from tiny herbivores to massive predators. All amorphous or supported by gas bladders, all adapted to living in the upper
atmosphere. Early aeronauts ran into these creatures from time to time as they got high enough. Or when the creatures get low enough, because sometimes they get knocked down somehow. The Crawfordsville monster, to name one, was probably a smaller and less dangerous . . . ”

  “Horseshit,” Ginger cut in. “If that were true, we’d have planes and things getting attacked all the time.”

  He seemed to be prepared for that. “Does the fact that normal tigers don’t eat people in downtown Mumbai prove that the normal jungle doesn’t exist? Does the fact that you aren’t currently being eaten by a black bear prove that there’s no such thing? No. The fact is, when the governments of the world saw how key a role aircraft could play in warfare, if only they could get up there without getting their heads eaten, they took it upon themselves to civilize the skies. The tigers like the head best, you know. And the tongue best out of the head.”

  “Yum,” said Ginger.

  He frowned at her. “The air tigers were slaughtered or repelled by the numbers stations. They exist now mostly over remote, uninhabited parts of the world that no major power bothers with.”

  “Numbers.” I needed to stop doing that, but when I wasn’t talking I had nothing to do with myself but drink and my latest beer was already almost gone. I could feel my brain shuffling and reshuffling all this information, trying to make the pieces fit, and I didn’t like the futility of the feeling.

  “Yes, have you heard of numbers stations? Broadcasting eternally on a wavelength no one listens to, impossible to jam, sending out a string of numbers to the atmosphere—numbers that mean nothing to a human, but repel the air-beasts like citronella repels a mosquito.”

  “Ginger,” I said, “give me my phone.” There were seven missed calls blinking, and when I hit the callback button, the Carmina Burana started playing in Doyle’s pocket.

  He chuckled. “Caught me. I wanted to see how you’d react to that. I thought it would tell me how much you already know.”

  “Thanks a lot, asshole.”

  He brushed that off. “So, like the tigers in earth jungles, these were out of sight and out of mind—maybe killing some hikers in the Urals, grabbing a hunter in Vermont, causing a plane crash or two over what the rubes call the Bermuda Triangle, but mostly not a problem. Except for the rare instances where they come down over a major, populated area. Like they did a few months ago.”

  He waved Sonovia over. “You look like you could use another drink.”

  I was shaking like a chihuahua I was so pissed off. “Yeah, no kidding.”

  “Put it on my tab,” he said to Sonovia, and then he tapped on the bar. “I’ll be right back.” He headed for the bathroom, and went into the ladies’ by mistake.

  “What a dipshit,” Ginger said.

  “For real. I was about to buy it for a while, with the numbers thing.”

  “You should have decked him for that.” She gulped beer; she was pissed for real, even if she was joking. “You still can if you’d like, I’ll hold his arms.”

  “Not even worth it.” I sighed. “I don’t know why I fell for it. It’s not like Jeanette or any of them had their heads eaten, or their tongues, or whatever.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and then she grinned and said, “Do it.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I don’t need any more reasons for the police to yell at me.”

  “They’d give you the keys to the city for it if they had any sense. Put you on the cover of the Post.”

  After what seemed like a ridiculously long time for a pee, Doyle came back.

  “Ok, my turn,” Ginger said, and as she walked by me whispered, “Don’t smack him while I’m gone, I want to see this.”

  Doyle didn’t hear, and didn’t seem to sense the shift in the wind. “A lot of us believe that most of the UFO flaps in history are actually sightings of air beasts. If you look at the older reports, they tend to suggest something organic—it’s only when the Air Force gets involved during and right after World War Two that you start to see witnesses jumping to mechanistic explanations for what they saw.”

  “Who is us, exactly?”

  He looked at me and smiled so I could see those awful teeth again. “There are a lot of us who know the truth. More than the government would like, for sure.” He pulled his beer towards him, and knocked my cell phone off the bar. I ducked down to retrieve it.

  After I came back up and took another sip of beer, my memories get all wobbly.

  Yeah, not the smartest night of my life.

  I woke up, sort of, with streetlights flashing over my face. The side of my head hurt where it was pressed against the cold window glass, and I’d drooled on my sleeve.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said, pulling myself upright.

  “That’s to be expected.” It was Doyle. I’d known it would be. Ginger doesn’t even own a car. “There’s a bottle of water in the cup holder. It’s still sealed.”

  “Too late now.”

  He chuckled. “You really had me going, you know. Whoever covered up your ties to the government did a good job. And I thought you might honestly not know what I was talking about for a little while there. “

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  “Drop the act. You’re the only person who wasn’t eaten in that office. You know how to survive. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.”

  “No one was eaten!”

  “I said drop it. You gave yourself away when you tried to get names out of me.”

  We were going about eighty miles an hour, thought the road didn’t seem built for it. I wasn’t sure if I could survive jumping out of the car or not. If I’d really been a government agent, I would know things like that.

  “Would you mind telling me which branch you were in? We’ve never been quite sure whose bailiwick the air tigers are—I’ve always felt it would be Air Force, but some of my friends think it’s more the C.I.A.’s type of thing. Or even the N.S.A.”

  I opened the water bottle and took a slurp.

  “Of course, it’s just idle curiosity on my part. It’s all the same in the end.”

  “Why,” I said slowly, trying to sound non-confrontational, “allowing that these air tigers exist at all, why would the government want to cover them up? They don’t cover up real tigers.”

  He looked over at me. His expression was unclear behind the beard but I felt safe assuming it was a smirk. “I suppose I might as well admit that we don’t know. It’s the subject of a lot of speculation in our groups. Probably at first it was to prevent panic that would discourage aeronautic exploration, and later because secrecy is self-perpetuating in the halls of power. Am I close?”

  I slurped again. If I told him I had to pee, would he let me out long enough to make a break for it? Probably not.

  “Now it’s my turn to ask a question, and of course you won’t answer, but it doesn’t matter because I’ve learned to read your face. Why let any through? Is it some kind of green nonsense, like those idiots who put the wolves back in Yellowstone? Is it to keep people panicked? Has the government decided to bankrupt the airlines so it can nationalize them?”

  I realized after a few seconds that if I didn’t say something, he was going to keep watching me instead of the road.

  “Well, when I was talking to the police after the attack on my office, they did keep asking about bioterrorism.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I thought. It all makes sense. Frightened people are sheep.”

  Baaah, I thought, and didn’t jump out of the car.

  Doyle shut up and I tried to puzzle out where the hell we were. Clearly outside of the city. The streetlights had ended abruptly and now we were driving uphill with trees closer than I liked on either side and large areas of unnerving emptiness that I guessed must be meadows, or marshes, or glimpses of the Hudson. Or maybe off the edge of world. You’d think there would be something. Deer, owls, then, if this is the country. A light from a window in the distance. But no.

  I was nauseous from just
the water by the time we stopped, and my head was pounding again. Doyle could obviously tell that I was doing bad. He let me walk behind without anything tying me to him except the need to stay in the circle of his flashlight.

  “Luckily for you,” he said as we walked out of sight of the car on an unpaved path, “we don’t need to go all the way to the top. This tiger is coming to unprecedented lows, or so my guy with the tracking equipment says.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “I’ll tell you when this is all over.”

  “According to you, when this is all over we’ll be eaten. Or at least our tongues will.” Right now that didn’t even sound like such a bad option.

  Doyle waited for me to catch up, but he didn’t answer. I didn’t have the breath for much more conversation anyway, and it did feel as though making noise under these pine trees in this dark would bring something down on us, even if air tigers were bullshit.

  Finally, after I’d drained the rest of the water bottle and developed blisters on top of my blisters, we came to an open space.

  “This is the spot,” Doyle said. “Or within a quarter-mile of here anyway.”

  He clicked off the flashlight, and I felt that I had no option but to sit down too.

  I felt pretty calm, like people who’ve been kidnapped often say. I thought maybe he’d doze off and I could grab the flashlight, make a break for the car. Maybe when morning came and we were still alive and had our tongues I’d be able to talk him down. Maybe I could call 911. It seemed improbable that I’d have a signal, but maybe luck would be with me, if he’d just fall asleep so he wouldn’t see the light from my phone.

  To distract myself from the pain and how chilly the night was, I stared up at the stars. Out here they looked close. I could pick out the Big Dipper, and the North Star, and . . . well, that was it, actually. So I looked at that, until a cloud drifted by.

  The cloud passed on, and over the moon, and Doyle gasped. He fumbled a bit, stood up, turned the flashlight back on and pointed it at the ground.

  When I looked back up from that distraction, the cloud was bigger. And expanding, every second. The stars behind it turned pinkish-gray.