Chapter 18 (Part 3)

And that wasn't all. Now to tell you the story that my father told me.

My dad, like his dad, is honest to a fault. He hates liars and has never, to my knowledge, told me anything but the truth.

According to my father, this event took place in the late '70s, right before he shipped out for boot camp. He was out on the farm after dark, a buddy and him were having a camp fire in what we call the south meadow, over by the back pasture field from the first part of the story. He swears up and down that they had not been drinking, there had been no drugs of any kind, nothing to alter their perception of reality. This was just one last night, meant to be spent relaxing under stars, shooting the shit with his best friend. He had driven his truck into the meadow, that way they wouldn't have to walk all the way back to the farm house in the morning. As the night went on, they began to hear strange sounds coming from the woods that separates the south meadow from the back pasture. It sounded like a big animal walking through the woods, he said, something closer to the size of a bear. His friend, named Mark, was wanting to know what it was, and so grabbed a flashlight. They headed over towards the sound, not thinking that anything bad could happen. As they got closer to the woods, Mark trained the flashlight on the tree line, looking for anything that could be there. At first, they didn't see anything, but they could here the crashing getting louder, like it was coming near them. They started to back up, realizing this wasn't the smartest move they have ever made. Just as Mark was about to turn the light off, my dad swears he saw a pair of yellow eyes, and a mouth full of teeth. He said that something looked off about it, that something about the shape of the mouth and the placement of the eyes relative to where the teeth were was wrong. He describe the snout to be very wolf like, but much, much bigger than any wolf or coyote he has ever seen. Mark apparently had seen this as well as, my dad put it, he screamed like a girl and bolted for the truck. My father, seeing no reason not to do the same, joined him. As he neared the truck, he said the creature let out a howl that was so unearthly, it to this day rings in his ears. He couldn't describe what he heard to me, only that it was so haunting, so primal, he was sure he was about to be set upon. Mark, who I had the distinct pleasure of knowing very, very well before he passed away a few years ago, corroborated my dad's story, adding only that it was the scariest thing he has ever been through, even scarier than surviving the bob cat attack.

I think it is important you know my thoughts on these stories before I tell the final part so far. As I was growing up, I never once truly believed in these being true. I thought they were simply stories told by my family to scare us into being careful on the farm. I never once thought they were real, and it wasn't until after my own experience with the unknown that I began to question my family and realized that they had not lied.

Back to the very beginning, on the night with myself and my best friend out on the farm. I told him all of this, just as I have told all of you. After I was finished he turns to me, and asks why the hell hasn't anything been done about it? Why not a grid search, or low lying aerial photography to see if there was anything to be seen? I chuckled, explaining to him that I was pretty sure these were all ghost stories, that none of it was true. Of course, that was when the world laughed at ME, and decided to prove just how real these stories were.

We had parked up by the barn which also served as the slaughter house. For the last decade, the farm has been on the Reserve list. This means that it is no longer farmed, but is set aside for future generations to use. The farm is now largely just a deer camp.

The barn is close to the house that my second or third cousins now live in. As we were sitting there, we began to feel uneasy, like something very wrong was about to happen. At first I chalked it up to two grown men getting scared by a dumb ghost story, but as the feeling became more prominent, I could not escape the fact that something felt horribly out of place. And then the dogs my cousins own went ballistic. I mean crazy. This we weren't barks of aggression, but of fear. Terror. Something was frightening them out of their minds. The dog pen was about a hundred feet of pitch blackness away from us, around the back part or the house, just out of sight. It was basically a chain link fence with a door, big enough to hold the three German shepherds. Over the sound of the dogs barking, we could here something trying to beat the fence down, to force its way in or out. I was betting on it being the dogs trying to get out, and I didn't want to be there to be attacked by three terrified German Shepherds. As I looked at my friend to tell him it was time to go, we heard what I can only describe as the scariest fucking sound I have ever heard. It was a sound that could not be explained, except that to me, it was the herald of death. It chilled me to the core, and sent waves of terror through me. I cannot really go into more detail than that, it is something that must be experienced to understand. Without one more word, we were both in the car and throwing gravel everywhere as we booked it out of there.

My cousins never woke up to those sounds that night. Apparently they sleep with a White Noise Machine on I guess. For those that don't know, that is a machine that produces a soothing ambient noise to cancel out any sounds from outside the room. They did however, lose a dog that night, and have to rebuild the dog pen. The local authorities ruled it a Coyote attack, and moved on.