My
Aunt Diane lives on the outskirts of town, in an area typically considered
“low-income”. To this day, I don’t know whether it was by choice or just the
best she could afford. From the outside, her house looks like a run-down,
double wide trailer home, but on the inside, her living room is well-carpeted,
sheer white curtains adorn the windows, and even her guest room has an en suite
bathroom.
As
she’s gotten older, she’s needed more and more help around her house. She’d
never married, having once told me “Some people get all the love they need from
family.” I know she always appreciates my visits. And she cooks the most
amazing foods, like her spicy BBQ ribs and her special “Irish Nachos” made from
cooked potatoes instead of corn chips.
When
I’d visit Aunt Di with my mother, the noises outside always scared me. She
lives so far on the edge of town, you can hear the coyotes howling at night,
picking off the stray cats and dogs in the area.
She
looked quite young for her age, not a sign of gray in her short, curled brown
hair and her brown eyes always seem happy and smiling. The only hint to her age
are some wrinkles that have started to appear in later years, but otherwise she
has the appearance of a fit, joyful 40-something, even though she’s actually
closer to 60!
For
as long as I’ve known her, Aunty Diane has always had this one cat, Ornie, a
big, lazy tabby. He was a stray when she found him. To this day, I don’t think
I’ve ever seen him move. Aunty Di would always joke that he was too lazy to be
a stray and that he never needs to move farther than five feet from his food
bowl. She named him Ornie because door-to-door preachers keep mistaking him for
a lawn ornament.
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I
had a three day weekend thanks to sweet talking my boss out of work and I was
looking forward to pigging out on food I didn’t have to cook. This year, the
first freeze came in early. My windshield was frosted over by nightfall and
Ornie had actually gotten up and moved under the house for warmth. I introduced
Aunty Di to the joy of Netflix and we were enjoying the warmth of the gas
heater while watching episodes of Poirot before we started to
nod off on the couch. Tired, we bid each other goodnight and retired to our
rooms.
The
guest room is deceptively large, with a ridiculously comfortable four-poster
bed and a bookshelf with dozens of books ranging from Agatha Christie to Mary
Higgins Clark and even some Louis L’Amour. Beyond that is a comfortable yet
well used reclining chair and the en suite, possible my favourite part of the
whole house. It’s a bathroom almost the size of the actual guest room with a
shower set in top left end of the room and a luxurious bathtub situated in the
bottom right corner. When I first saw it, the design made me think it was a
squat hot tub with no jet, but the first time I filled it with suds and hot
water, I thought I would never leave. That night, I didn’t have the time or the
energy to run a bath. Instead, I changed into my pajamas and curled up under
the blankets for warmth, finally drifting off to sleep.
It
was some time in the late hours of the night when it felt like the room was the
coldest it had ever been. Some sort of croaking noise coming from the bathroom awakened
me, which was quickly followed by what sounded like scratching. In the darkness
of the room, I couldn’t make out much beyond the meager amount of moonlight
coming in through the window. I briefly lifted the blankets off me to
investigate before realizing just how cold the air was, even with the electric
heater Aunty Di had set up in the room. Comfort and warmth soon won out and I
put the noises down to Ornie being overly energetic, trying to get in out of
the cold. The was a single bump followed by silence, which I took as Ornie’s
resignation, so I rolled over and drifted back to sleep.
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The
morning chill reached the low 40s, but the interior of the house was nice and
warm. By noon, the day warmed up enough that I was able to start helping with
yard work. Aunty Di has several flowerbeds that line her home that she likes to
grow vegetables in, typically tomatoes, onions, and herbs. We spent most of the
day digging and burying sheets of newspaper to kill off any potential weeds
that might take hold next year.
Ornie
would usually watch us from the top of the steps, but he was nowhere to be
found that day. I thought nothing of it until I noticed the hole that was dug
under the side skirting of the trailer. It was big, probably big enough to fit
a medium-to-large sized dog. At first I thought a coyote trying to get to Ornie
might have dug it, but then I realised it was inside the fenced yard and there
seemed to be pieces of white fur caught on the skirting. When I showed Aunt Di
though, she didn’t seem too concerned.
“It’s
probably a raccoon trying to keep warm.” I remember her saying, “Don’t you
worry about Ornie, he may not move much, but he’s been able to take care of
himself all these years.”
I
couldn’t help but feel worry eating away at the pit of my stomach. By the time
lunch came around, my worries quickly melted away, after taking a bite of the
previous night’s leftovers.
In
the middle of the second night, I found myself lying in bed awakened by that
same croaking and scratching noise coming from the bathroom. It was as if
something was trying to push itself up against the floorboards. This time,
there was an audible sniffing. Remembering what my aunt had said, I felt some
relief that Ornie was still under the house, trying to sneak his way into the
warm interior, but that sniffing made me uneasy. It seemed too loud and the
scratching too rough to be from a small cat, or even a raccoon for that matter.
It was at that moment I heard coyotes howl and yip in the distance and I felt
my heart leap into my throat. If that really was Ornie, I didn’t want him being
eaten by some tunneling coyote.
The
scratching and sniffing ceased and I heard what sounded like scurrying and
digging from beneath the house. I listened anxiously for several minutes,
expecting to hear the sounds of Ornie attempting to fight off whatever was
coming for him, but there were no further sounds. Outside my window, I heard a
series of yelps and the sound of coyotes fighting. That was quickly followed by
silence. My imagination ran wild with the possibilities of what had happened. I
fought hard to to calm myself down. The fighting noises came from outside and
out in the streets. Ornie wasn’t likely to leave the safety and warmth of his
hiding spot and the coyotes were probably just fighting each other. It took
some effort, but I was finally able to fall back asleep.
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The
next day still brought no sign of Ornie, which served to further fuel my
concern. As my aunt cooked breakfast, I went for a quick look around the house.
I even checked the surrounding streets, but there was no sign of that cat. I
recalled the fighting from last night, so I ran around to the area where I thought
the sounds had come from. I found nothing but bloodstains on the road. There
was no body. There seemed to be too much blood to come from one cat. The
absence of anything made me all the more uncomfortable.
I
walked around the side of the home, where I happened upon a second hole. This
one was the same size as the last, but it was on the side of the trailer that
wasn’t fenced in. When I tried to talk to my aunt about the scratching and the
bloodstain over dinner, she dismissed it again.
“Honey,
those raccoons get into everything. And a flock of turkey vultures can have
roadkill picked so clean before the morning’s done that you’d think there was
nothing there to begin with!”
That
night, she attempted to calm me down with books and movies. We set up my laptop
in the guest bedroom to watch one of my favourite romantic comedies on Netflix.
Aunty Di sat in the reclining chair reading. It wasn’t long before I looked
over and saw her dozing off, still wearing her reading glasses. Not wanting to
leave her in the chair, I carefully moved her to my bed and turned the lights
off. As close as my aunt and I are, it seemed awkward to share the same bed
together. I set myself up on the couch and closed my eyes for a second.
I
woke up to a series of thumps rattling the couch. I saw that my laptop was out
of batteries and believed for a second that it was vibrating to tell me so, but
that didn’t make sense. I quickly realized the sounds were coming from the
guest room. A sickening groan that sounded like someone struggling to scream
echoed from the guest bedroom. I found myself flying off the couch and running
towards the sound. I swung the door open to see nothing but the dark. My eyes
still adjusted to the lights that were still on in the living room, tried to focus
on the dim light illuminating the bookshelves. In my peripherals, I noticed the
corner of the bed in tatters. My eyes moved to the mattress. The blankets were
torn to shreds and I saw red, too much red. Blood.
There
was a flash of white and in surprise, I took a step back. When I did, the light
I had been blocking with my body revealed a snarling, hissing form as it
launched itself off the bed. It was covered in short, white fur and landed on
all fours. It scurried against the floor. The claws it was equipped with were
longer than each of my digits and this figure was the height of a German
Shepherd with the length of a full grown man. Its jaws were stained red and its
pale pink nose had protrusions that looked like several finger-length tentacles
with countless thick, long whiskers sprouting from either side of its muzzle.
But the one feature I can’t seem to forget is its large eyes. It seemed too
shiny, too dead. They looked like eyes that had never seen the light of the
sun.
The
creature slammed its full weight against the door, sending me flying back
against a nearby wall as I heard it start clawing against the wood. I ran to
the living room and grabbed my cellphone. I dialed the police. I kept looking
in the direction the guest room, my body tensing up with every scratch the
creature left on the door. The operator picked up and I frantically asked for
officers to come to the house as quick as they could. I told her about the
creature that had attacked my aunt. The voice on the other end of the line kept
calm and told me to stay where I was, that officers were on the way.
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By
the time help had arrived, my aunt was gone. Officers found no sign of her
apart from the bloody mess that was the bed. They searched the nearby streets
for clues, but there was no sign of her or the creature.
When
I described the creature to them, they put it down to shock. They excused it as
a coyote attack. They said it had clawed its way into the room from under the
bathtub, following the water pipes to the valves hidden behind a small panel
found along the side of the tub. From there they said the coyote had dragged my
aunt back under the house and then out into the streets and beyond. They
admitted that it was out of the ordinary, but that coyotes behaved strangely
when hungry enough. Even when I insisted they search underneath the house, they
found nothing, just the same two holes on either side of the building and a
large, caved-in hole not far from where the bathtub was.
They
say the coyote had been trying to dig a hole to keep warm, that it had probably
been under the house for several days. They even found pieces of coyote fur
around the hole that seemed to back it all up, but I know it was something
else, something that came up from beneath the ground and killed Ornie. If it
hadn’t been for the coyotes on the second night, it probably would have killed
me too. And because I couldn’t get my aunt to listen to me, it killed her too.
If I’d only been able to convince her, she would still be alive. She’s gone and
I still know nothing about what killed her. To this day, the
closest animal I’ve ever found that looked remotely like the thing I saw that
night is the star-nosed mole, but the creature I saw that night had longer fur,
its head was more canine, the eyes too big. And it was big, almost impossibly
so.
I don’t know what to do, where to
look or who to turn to. My aunt is gone and I can’t sleep at night. I keep
thinking I hear that scratching but nothing comes. I’ve moved to a top-floor
apartment, even homes with a concrete base don’t feel safe anymore. Whatever it
was, whatever depths it clawed its way up from, I pray I never see it again.
