Do you know about Lycanthropes? Do you believe in them? Well, I don’t. At least I didn’t, until I moved into a little rural Alberta town two years ago.
Now, my family have always been country people, ever since they first immigrated from Germany, and living out in the middle of nowhere could cause you to see strange things. Sometimes, an animal like a cow or a horse would die on our farm, killed by coyotes. We thought. Some of them probably were. But some of these were stronger animals, you know, and coyotes usually go after calves and sickly animals. Not the big, healthy mama cows. It was frustrating to my Grandpapa, a stubborn German man. He’d deal with the corpses, and that was that, because with coyotes and a huge herd of cows there wasn’t much he could do.
Just before the attacks began, one day he was digging up rocks in a field, and he found a rock that was just shallow enough to damage a plow, but too deep to see. So he dug it up.
"But it’s not a rock. It’s a skull," said Grandpapa, "a funny looking skull."
My Grandpapa was a farmer, so he’s seen bodies. He’s seen dead cats. And he had a pretty good idea of what a human skull looked like. But this thing's not one nor the other. It looked like some unholy combination. Grandpapa dug a little more, and he found even more bones: Femurs, ribs, bits of the spinal column, even digits and the hips. He looked at this thing, and didn’t know what to do. He'd heard stories about things like this from his Mum. The devil creatures, who looked like humans, hunted humans, but were not humans. My Grandpapa gathered up the bones and put them in the back of the big tractor storage shop he had, where it sat collecting dust for years.
The attacks began shortly afterward, and have continued off and on since. Of course, I never believed my Grandpapa’s story. He was notorious for his tall tales, and he conveniently forgotten the exact location of the body. He also claimed that the creatures were supposed to curse those who disturbed their remains, but he was an enlightened, civilized man, so he knew it was ‘bullshit’.
I grew up, and moved to a place about an hour away from my old home. And my Grandpapa passed away. In his will, he left me a necklace made from a polished "devil creature's" fang, a joke on his part, I’m sure, for my skepticism over his story. I wore it home, and found it to be my favorite necklace. I wore it all the time.
One night, I wore it to a party, and I stayed out quite late. To get back to my home, I had to drive down a country road pretty far off the beaten path. It was around midnight, and I was just driving along, when I saw some eyes reflecting in the ditch. I slowed down, just in case it decided to make a break for it. Sure enough, it started to move into the middle of the road. It looked like a dog. A pug-nosed, giant, shaggy dog. It’s freaky looking, and I was trying to figure out what it was exactly, when it stood up, right in front of my car, on its two hind legs and looked at me.
Now I don’t mean towards me. I mean it actually locked eyes with me, despite the headlights, despite the windshield.
"Oh my god. Oh my god!" was pretty much all I could think. The creature just stood there, like it was waiting for me to do something. It walked towards me, put its hands/paws on my car’s hood, and then, it was gone. I caught a glimpse of it running away into the field.
I didn’t know what to make of what had happened. So I gunned the motor and was gone, back to my home. I put it behind me, and explained it away. It was nothing.
At least, until a night a few months later, when I was watching a movie. I fell asleep on my couch, which sat just across from a picture window. When I woke up, though, it was way past midnight. I rolled over to drag my sorry ass upstairs to bed, and froze.
That face was in the window. The creature on the road was looking in my window, at me.
I couldn’t move. It knew where I lived. I couldn’t go to sleep. When it finally left, it was dawn. I couldn’t believe it. The devil creatures were real.
And it knew about me.
What did it want? Then I remembered the necklace my Grandpapa had given me was supposed to be a devil creature’s tooth. Maybe it wanted that?
I left it on the ground outside, to see if the creature would take it. It did disappear, but I’ve always seen the creature. I’ve read about Lycanthropes; Native American and African Aboriginal stories about shape changers, and modern stories about them. Devil Creatures all have so many different stories. I don’t feel the sense of dread when I see them any more, but sometimes when I go snowmobiling, hiking or even just for a drive, I can tell they’re there. I sometimes don't even see them, which I know sounds weird. But I know they are there. I know they are real. And should you ever find such a body buried, don’t touch it. I’ve figured out they don’t like their kind being disturbed.