The Man Who Studied Monsters

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. They weren’t supposed to go in there, but the camping trip had been crashed by a violent thunderstorm. Luckily, Kurt Andrews and his wife, Brenda, knew the old cabin was nearby. They had set up the tent underneath the trees in the woods, but the weather had squashed those plans.

Kurt was an aspiring horror writer and was looking for inspiration, but he and his wife also needed a weekend getaway. They were out in a wooded camping area far out from the nearest town of Edgewood, Texas– a place about fifty miles east of Dallas. It was secluded, and it was the summer. The heat during the day was unbearable, the night time not much better. The thunderstorm was unexpected, but not altogether baffling given the level of humidity. There was something about that uncomfortable mixture of suffocating humidity and nighttime stillness that Kurt found unsettling, but on the other hand, the feeling of dread it evoked was perfect for writing horror fiction. If only he could encapsulate all his ideas into a coherent story.

They had packed their Honda CR-V in a hurry that morning. He was positive he had checked the weather updates, and there had been no sign of precipitation when he pulled it up on his phone. He wanted this camping area because it was seldom used. He needed that bizarre feeling of isolation to come up with his ideas. Kurt had also brought along a paperback book about serial killers. He figured he would read more of it tonight with his portable lantern after Brenda had fallen asleep. That had been the plan anyway.

Kurt was scribbling down some notes late at night, and Brenda had been listening to music on her earbuds when they were interrupted by the crackling of lightning and thunder. The rain started to fall, first in droplets, then an unholy deluge followed. The pulsating lightning flickered in the distance like the spark of a cheap lighter. It was followed by the rumbling and drum bang of thunder. It didn’t abate, it only continued as the downpour worsened.

“Do you want to sleep in the CR-V tonight, Brenda?”

“No, not really honey. I can’t sleep in a car. What are we going to do? Our tent is going to get washed away.”

“I know there’s an old cabin nearby. It’s like a one-room log cabin. Nobody uses it.” They both scurried through the rain like frightened mice in an electrical light show. Brenda was petrified of the thought of being struck by lightning.

The cabin door was unlocked. They bolted in not even thinking to wipe the muddied soles of their shoes. It didn’t take them but a minute to realize someone had left a candle burning in the cabin.

“That’s odd. I thought nobody used this cabin.”

Brenda found a towel nearby hanging on one of the coat racks on the wall. There was a relative amount of dust about the place but nothing excessive. She wiped her wet forehead and used it to dry off her wet clothes as best she could. She then dobbed her neck and wrapped it around her shoulders to keep from feeling chilled. Kurt took off his wet shirt with his undershirt remaining. His undershirt for the most part remained dry.

“Look at this, Brenda. Someone left a note.” On a small, yellow legal pad, there were scrawled the words: Now that you’ve entered, whatever you do, don’t go outside.

“That’s creepy,” Kurt said. “Who could have written this?”

“Well, we’re not going outside anyway. It’s pouring down rain.” A screeching sound like that of a demented owl cut through the booming of the thunder outside.

“What was that noise?” Brenda said.

“I don’t know. Sounded like an owl. How should I know, I don’t live in the countryside.”

“Well neither do I.”

“It’s probably an owl. They’re supposed to sound freaky like that.”

Kurt looked through the single window of the tiny cabin. The pitch blackness outside was a curtain of darkness. He could make out movement which was the barely visible rain, streaming down like a steady sheet. Briefly and hurriedly, the lightning illuminated the void. He gazed out, squinting, his eyes trying to decipher as best he could the surroundings. The trunks of the trees he could see, as well as the wet, inundated grass. The rain continued in a never-ending torrent of silver droplets tumbling to Earth almost as if from another world. It was breathtaking if not ominous amid the glow from the lightning.

The screech they then heard again. This time it was louder and closer. It was clearer. It sounded otherworldly. Not like an owl at all. Then through the rain and darkness, the clap and clatter of thunder, they heard it again. The streaking flashes of lightning ignited the void of the black sky above. Lightning is so beautiful and yet so hideous and twisted Kurt thought.

The lightning flashed brightly and for a moment peeled back the dark with its skinny, crooked fingers almost like the tips of branches from demon-possessed trees that were reaching out to them from the sky. Then the lightning’s fingers disappeared as quickly as they had come.

Screech!!!

He heard his wife breathing hard. They saw it this time where the noise was coming from. There could be no mistake. It was a shadowy figure. Black and featureless but like a tall man dressed in a black robe from head to toe. It had yellow-orange eyes and its eyes beamed a demonic, red glow seeping out from it like an ugly, black alligator’s eyes at sunset. Kurt was frozen in place and horrified.

Kurt had seen that before in East Texas when he went to an alligator farm. The alligators float there impassively in some murky pond and at sunset, the eyes are unforgettably creepy. They look like smoldering embers and when the alligator’s eyes smile at the final moment of sunset, before the last bit of sunlight is about to be snuffed out, that yellow-orange glow reflects red on the black ripples of the pond. At that moment, it’s not too hazy just yet to make out what’s connected to those eyes– the jagged teeth, the spine-chilling overbite, the complacent grin of that prehistoric reptile. It has a long-lasting smirk, a smile that can’t be subdued by time or the possibility of extinction. In essence, it smiles evil.

Kurt got the same feeling from this thing out there. Somehow, he intuitively understood it was smiling evil, and it was looking directly at him and not at his wife.

“Oh my God, honey. Is that a person?” Brenda said.

“I don’t know. Don’t go out there. Lock the door now.” Brenda made sure the door was closed all the way and was relieved to see it had a bolt. She pushed the bolt into place and stepped back now breathing harder than he had ever seen her. Her towel fell from her shoulders and landed on the floor of the cabin. His own heart and lungs were doing somersaults inside his chest trying to stay calm.

The lightning flashed bigger and brighter this time. The sight of the woods was lit up and transfigured in the rain a little bit longer. It gave them both the chance to see more clearly what they didn’t understand and couldn’t believe before their very eyes. They saw the silhouetted form still in its same position in the open area of the woods facing the cabin window but still a ways off.

Brenda gasped and then was silent. Kurt’s eyes were still transfixed. The thing’s face was thin and gray, cheeks sunken in, its chin long and pointed under its black hood, the yellow-orange eyes still penetrating the gauzy mist of the heavy rain. The hint of a devious smile was unmistakable. Kurt felt coldness run over his arms and shoulders and down his spine.

“Oh my God, Brenda, what is that thing?”

“I don’t know. We need to call the police.” Brenada said. A loud clap of thunder roared directly over the cabin like a 747 zooming overhead. They both covered their ears to cushion out the deafening noise.

“Jesus! Where is your phone, Brenda?” Kurt kept his eyes on the figure in the open woods while Brenda looked frantically for her phone. She must have laid it down somewhere in the cabin when she toweled herself off. She found it lying on the floor and hastily bumped into the cabin table by mistake knocking the yellow legal pad to the floor. The phone signal wasn’t working.

“Kurt, the phone isn’t working. There’s no signal out here.”

“Oh my God,” Kurt said.

“Wait, what’s this?” Brenda said. She was squatting on the floor and bent down to look at the yellow legal pad.

“There’s another note, it was under the first one.” Brenda’s face looked confused. She handed it to Kurt. He read what was written on it.

Don’t worry, it shouldn’t come inside. Wait out the night, it should be gone by sunrise.

The note brought little relief, but Kurt had the inclination to follow its advice. They had no choice but to stay inside anyway. They weren’t about to sprint out into the rain and darkness with something so grotesque and frightening lurking about.

Brenda paused for a moment and tried to slow down her breathing.

“Kurt, look, it’s gone,” she said. Kurt turned to the window hoping his wife was right. He scanned the outside as best he could. He couldn’t make out the dark figure anymore. It had vanished. Just then a part of him noticed how it felt so damp and humid inside the cabin. The candle burned inside and gave off a strange scent– one that was familiar but that he couldn’t place just yet. His eyes burned a little. Maybe garlic?

“Maybe we should blow out the candle,” Brenda said.

No! Don’t! was Kurt’s first reaction, but before he could stop his wife, she had already bent over to blow it out.

“Hold on,” Kurt said, but it was too late. The candle was out with a puff, and the cabin went black inside. Kurt had a bad feeling about this. He had wanted to look around the cabin for anything that could be used as a weapon, but now it was too difficult to see. His wife and him bent down and hunkered on the floor beside the small cot in the cabin.

“Whatever it is out there, we’ll just stay in here and wait it out. Hopefully, it goes away.” Kurt said these words to his wife with little reassurance. He didn’t know what was going on.

A series of thuds came pounding on the roof of the cabin like heavy footsteps or hailstones. Kurt knew it was on the roof whatever it was. He grabbed his wife closer to him as they remained quiet. He whispered in her ear, “It’s on the roof. If it gets in here somehow, we’re going to blaze out the door and run to the car.”

His wife was in too much shock and confusion to respond. She turned her eyes to his. In the dark, he saw the whites of her eyes, felt her short, gasping breaths on his face. She was trembling, and he could sense the fear.

What came next was like a light, sawing sound– a scraping on the roof followed by that ungodly screech. Above his head, Kurt felt a draft of air, he felt the rain trickle into the cabin. It clawed through the roof somehow. It had begun to breach its way into the cabin. He looked up to the ceiling. The yellow-orange eyes and the gray face were peering down on him– its eyes showed no meaning and no soul. Its face was not quite animal and not quite human. The hollowness of the eyes denoted something feral almost. They smiled evil. There was no sound save the rain and thunder, but he felt a telepathic connection. There was laughing going on inside his head, and it was coming from that thing. He knew somehow that this thing was projecting it onto his mind.

When the lightning flashed, it became visible to his wife. Brenda screamed. “Run,” is all Kurt said. What followed next Kurt couldn’t remember well. He saw Brenda unbolt the door and tumble out into the rain. He felt himself longing to follow, but something grabbed his body and threw it against the wall. His head slammed back against one of the coat racks and splintered it into pieces. He saw lights go off inside his head. He laid on his back. Something had bitten the hem of his jeans near his foot and was dragging him out of the cabin and into the rain. He smelled something terrible like putrefaction mixed with the fresh grass and rain outside. He heard this terrible, low growling. It’s a monster was the clear thought that ran parallel to the agonizing pang in his head.

He was being dragged out into the rain, sleeking on his back like a limp snail, his head still not clear. The rain fell down into his eyes and into his dim consciousness. His arms and legs felt weak and heavy. He clasped at the grass and dug his fingernails into the dirt to no avail. He was being taken to a lair to be eaten, he thought. Then he heard what sounded like a siren go off, and he heard a man yelling. The voice sounded bizarre yet familiar or was it his own voice?

The man came out of the woods blaring a sound-device in his hand that looked like a foghorn and wielded a machete in the other. He came running like a savage warrior and yelling. It caught the shadowy figure off guard. The noise startled it, and its yellow-orange eyes poked up. It released Kurt’s pants from its serrated teeth. The machete went through the thing’s neck decapitating it. It was dead. The man went to Kurt and grabbed him around his shoulders and propped him up and dragged him back near the cabin.

“Where is your wife?”

“What?”

“Where is your wife? Brenda?”

“I don’t know. Please find her.” With that, the world fell away and Kurt fell blank into his own dark space and passed out.

* * *

The next morning, Kurt woke to the smell of coffee and Brenda’s hair who was lying next to him with her head perched on his chest. She was already awake. They were outside under a canopy tent next to the cabin. Kurt looked up at the man who saved them the night before who was preparing breakfast near a morning campfire. Kurt was in a state of shock. The man looked exactly like him except he was older with grayer hair and much more muscular. A deep scar ran through one side of his face, and it was immediately obvious from the plate he was holding that several of his fingers were missing on his left hand. He had a Bowie knife sheathed on the side of his dark green pants. He looked like he was wearing some type of sleeveless combat fatigues with his biceps poking out. It was Kurt alright, but it was the Rambo version of Kurt.

“What’s going on? Where am I?” Kurt said. The Kurt Two responded.

“This may be hard to understand, but you’re not in your own world. You’re in a parallel dimension.” Kurt looked at Brenda whose eyes revealed that she had been told exactly this prior to Kurt’s waking up. She remained silent but attentive.

“What?” Kurt said in disbelief.

“Obviously, I’m you, and you’re me, but I’m you in a different world.”

Kurt lifted his head up and struggled to get to his feet, his back and head aching like nobody’s business.

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“Believe this,” Kurt Two said. He led him around the back of the cabin and pointed to a massive tarp that was sprawled out over the dewy grass. The strong scent of decay was evident. When the identical man pulled back the tarp, Kurt saw two human-like cadavers. One was missing its head– the decapitated visitor from last night. It was a putrid sight. Disrobed of its black cowl, its twisted, naked body lay there on the grass like on a slab. Kurt looked at its gray, emaciated face on the severed head propped up near its gray, emaciated rib cage. Its eyes had lost their deathly glimmer. The mouth was wide open, its fangs exposed and its blood-red tongue plopped out like a dead fish.

“What is it?” Kurt said.

“It’s probably what you would call in your world a vampire or something in that neighborhood. A blood-sucker. A man-eater. Here, we just call it a monster or if you want the technical term, a gray goblin.”

“And what’s that next to it?” Kurt asked. The cadaver next to it looked similar– the same ashen flesh– but had a distinct androgynous look. It looked somewhat female and had leathery appendages attached to its back, thick bat-like wings as wide as a pterodactyl’s with swollen, protruding veins the color of black cherries. It appeared as though it had been dismembered at the bottom or cut in half.

“That is a female,” Kurt Two said. “I didn’t cut it in half. That’s how they reproduce. The female will rip its body in half. Everything below the navel– the pelvis and legs part– that will regenerate a new head and torso and form into a new monster. Sometimes, it will stay female. Sometimes, it will shift into a male. The upper part of the female will regenerate its legs eventually but gets around by flying.”

“Looks like a gargoyle,” Kurt said.

“Yes, it does. When the female splits itself in half, the upper part is in pain for several days– it’s at its weakest. If you catch it sleeping, you just clip its wings and kill it that way because it can’t fly away then. The lower half remains dormant. If you rub salt on it, it won’t regenerate, and it dies.

Kurt had a moment of recall.

“Where have I heard this before?”

“In your world, it’s in Philippine folklore. A manananggal. A Filipino vampire.”

“Of course,” Kurt said. He had gone on vacation in the Philippines years before and had studied the local horror stories and mythology with the help of his expatriate friend in the hopes of writing a book about it one day– one of his earlier ideas for a novel that he had never fleshed out. According to the long-held belief, the vampire splits but instead of replicating as Kurt Two had said, the head and torso will return to its lower half after preying on innocent human victims. If you rub salt on the lower half of the vampire while its upper half is detached, both halves will die.

“So the manananggal was real all along?”

“Sometimes,” Kurt Two said, “Monsters from our world make it into your world. Through some rip or opening in the space-time fabric– let’s call it a portal– the portal manifested itself somewhere in the Philippines about a thousand years ago. The geographic location appears to be completely random, but nevertheless, they entered and have been part of the local folklore ever since. Their progeny may still exist there for all we know.”

“Who is we?” Kurt said.

“The scientists of my world. I’m a scientist and scholar. We study monsters. We search for portals in our world that will take us to other dimensions. We study each world’s monsters. We make observations, we learn. More often than not, we try to stop as many as we can. The monsters cause chaos to the multiple array of universes. The monsters cause problems, they cause suffering. They cause harm to the innocent. As people suffer more and more, each universe will slowly die until it can bear no more suffering.”

“Why did you bring me here?” Kurt said.

“Well quite naturally, I’m interested in my dimensional twins. You’re not the first other Kurt I have met. I try to meet as many as I can. Just in case I have to come back here, it’s best to set up some kind of connection with my own self so to speak.”

“Why couldn’t you just meet me in my own world. Why bring me to yours?”

“Well, that was more of an accident. The portal is funny the way it works. We can’t always control it. A portal opened in these woods, and the monster had already entered your world and started to stalk you and your wife. I had no choice but to use you as bait and bring you here in order to lure it back. What I didn’t know is that a female came too. Luckily, I caught her before she was able to reproduce.”

Kurt stood up. “You said you came to study monsters. What monsters are endemic to my world. Bigfoot?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Brace yourself for what I have to tell you next, Kurt.” Kurt nodded to his inter-dimensional twin.

Kurt Two began. “Your world is unbelievable. Out of all the dimensions in existence of which we know, yours is the hardest one to understand. Have you ever read about crime-ridden, modern slums like the Projects in New York City or the City of God in Brazil back in the 70's when things were really bad, at their worst? The ghetto? The urban cesspit? Your world is the Projects of the universe. It’s the dimmest light in the kaleidoscope. And your world is much scarier than mine. It’s scarier than any I’ve ever encountered.”

“Why is that?”

“In your world, the monsters look like everyone else. They look just like people. I haven’t seen anything like it before. In your world, the monsters don’t reproduce by splitting in half. They don’t have to. The weak and foolish people of your world just admire them or comply with their bidding. Some go so far as to imitate them and in the process, assimilate into monsters themselves out of sheer seduction or stupidity. It’s the signature absurdity of your world. Whether it be child molesters, mass shooters, religious extremists, or amoral politicians, there’s no end to the replication and the depravity.”

“Where do monsters come from?”

“We don’t know. We don’t know where they keep coming from or what made them. They just exist. They didn’t come from my world nor yours. But we can rightly guess the place they come from does exist. Of some evil dimension whose name no one yet knows.”

“How do they travel from world to world?”

“We don’t know that either, but somehow, they found a way to access the whole of the universes just as others from other worlds have. With the technology we have in my world– which I assure you remains classified to the greater masses– it is really hit or miss. Sometimes, we can enter another world when the gate is swinging wide open so to speak, but we have to be quick before it closes. The monsters are different. We can only assume that they have perfected inter-dimensional travel or found some unknown, intergalactic tunnel which passes under every world."

"That's insane," Kurt said, "Why can't they just leave us alone?"

"Good question. Why do they choose to torment us? There’s no rhyme or reason to it, they just show up. What I do know for certain is that for a long time my world was overrun with them. And the same thing is happening to yours if it hasn’t already happened.”

Kurt felt sick to his stomach by all he was hearing.

“But what can be done?” Kurt said in earnest.

“Whatever you can do. Warn people. Tell them the monsters are real. I have much more to learn about your world, but it seems to me that the outer layer of skin of some of your monsters has been cracking and peeling away for some time now. Their disguise is wearing thin, and it should be apparent to people now. They should be able to make out what’s on the inside but for whatever reason, some are still willfully blind.

Kurt understood what he was saying. He looked at Kurt Two, and there was a moment of connection and clarity.

“Anyway, it’s time for you and Brenda to get back home.” Kurt nodded in agreement. He felt like he was in the fog of the strangest dream.

Kurt Two walked them both to the front of the cabin and held his hand out. Kurt gripped it to shake it.

“We’ll stay in touch,” Kurt Two said.

“How?”

“All in good time.”

Without even realizing it, Kurt and his wife walked through the cabin door, and Kurt Two’s face and the backdrop behind him whirled into oneness and obscurity like colors in a washing machine. They felt the air sucked out of their lungs, and when they took a deep breath to regain their composure, they felt dizzy but peaceful. Relieved.

Kurt looked around. They were in the cabin again, but it was different. He knew they were back in their own world.

“Oh, Kurt, what just happened to us? Are we losing our minds?”

Kurt didn’t say anything at first. He peered through the door of the cabin and out into the lush greenness of the woods and enjoyed the calm chirruping of the birds.

“No, we’re not losing our minds, Brenda.”

“How do you know that?” Brenda said.

“Because,” Kurt stopped and looked down for a moment lost in thought. She read real sadness on his face. “Because he described our world just as it is. The monsters are real.”