When I was a kid, there was a big rumor in my friend group about a chupacabra that lived next to my friend's house by the KFC. We had kids telling us they saw the damn thing at the drive thru, and my friend told me how the chupacabra came up to her window and would press its face against it. This was all, of course, bullshit, and it all spawned from a fucking picture that I saw in one of those "unsolved mystery" books that were popular back in the late '90s/early 2000s. But, it was a fun story to think about, and so I came up with the idea of the Gatorgoat and wrote this mess. It got booted off of NoSleep before I could post anything beyond the first installment, so this is the only place where it lives (aside from my girlfriend's writing Discord).
The woods beside the KFC became a hotbed of rumors when I was in middle school. Why? Because our town was dull, our lives were boring, and at the beginning of seventh grade, they found a body under the bridge nearby. It wasn’t a noteworthy corpse--some old guy who had drowned during some flooding--but it was in a time before the internet ruled and at an age where gossip and childhood lies mixed together like peanut butter and chocolate. It was a perfect storm of bullshit. The “KFC Forest” became our Camp Crystal Lake.
And while everyone and their sister seemed to have a story about serial killers and vengeful ghosts lurking amongst the trees, not a kid in our class was better at hyping up this mess than Beatrice.
Before the horror tales began spreading, Beatrice was the last person you’d suspect of hopping on that particular bandwagon. Beyond the old lady name, at face value she was perhaps the most boring, conservative person you’d ever meet. Her family were members of a church that believed in passing around copperheads more often than the collection plate, and her fashion sense relied heavily on floor length denim skirts and turtlenecks. There was a Bible in her backpack, a crucifix around her neck, and a prayer before every bland, home-packed lunch. She was so offbeat and pure that she wasn’t even a subject of ridicule since she barely existed in the same reality as everyone else, and I believe the only argument I ever saw her get into was over whether or not Pokemon was of the devil.
Yet, when people started making up tall tales about ghouls and murderers and whatever else could have killed that old man, Beatrice rabidly threw herself into the middle of it. With a fervor that was nearly religious, she started preaching to anyone who would listen about “the Gatorgoat.” The coroner’s report be damned, she was adamant that this creature had something to do with it.
What was the Gatorgoat, you ask? A monster. To be more specific, it was a drooling, fanged beast that rested somewhere in the evolutionary line between reptile and mammal. It was huge and shaggy with soulless, white eyes and teeth like tusks, the body of a werewolf, and horns like Satan himself. Its tail was long and hairless and slithered like a snake, and its face was some unholy cross between a goat and an alligator. Whenever it made a sound, it was loud and violent, a rumbling roar that would shake your windows.
And, for whatever reason, this cryptid had made its home beside the KFC back when Beatrice was a baby. She’d seen it before, she said, with her own two eyes.
Of course, it rang of bullshit. But Beatrice was Beatrice, the conservative Christian girl who flinched whenever anyone uttered a swear word and who would never tell a lie, lest God strike her down. There was a power in her reputation that supercharged her words. By virtue of being virtuous, she became the most believable source for information about the KFC Forest, and the Gatorgoat itself became something to be feared.
Unlike the girls who’d laugh and then be too scared to go into dark hallways alone, or the boys who’d tease before swearing up and down they saw a monster at the KFC drive-thru, I was a skeptic. It wasn’t a lack of a belief in monsters since I was a superstitious kid who spent my entire childhood convinced my house was haunted, more than I didn’t equate “religious” with “honest.” Beatrice may have seemed nice, but I grew up in a family of holy rollers who I knew were capable of being liars, and nothing about her story added up. Not the sightings, not the biology. Nothing.
I was pretty good at keeping my opinions to myself for a while, up until one Friday at lunch. Beatrice, who’d spent the whole school year sitting alone at a corner of the “loser” table, had developed a habit of migrating from clique to clique with each passing day. One afternoon she’d be with the jocks, the next she’d be with the preps, and on that day she’d found herself at my table, with the rest of the painfully average kids who didn’t fit into an ‘80s movie archetype. My best friend, Kendra, had apparently been the one to invite her over because she had questions about our resident cryptid, and I was an unwilling passenger who would be taking this ride with her.
Beatrice herself was polite and underwhelming. She came bearing gifts of homemade cookies, clad in her pastel pink sweater and carrying her inoffensive plain lunch box. Her initial attempts at conversation were awkward and stilted, since she didn’t really have hobbies that overlapped with ours. We failed to tactfully resist questioning her about her church and snake handling, which she nervously answered in the vaguest terms possible. She was quiet and boring and equally unsure of how to dance around small talk when we all knew why she was there.
In the end, it was Kendra who broke the subject open, belting, “So, have you really seen the Gatorgoat?”
Immediately, and suspiciously, Beatrice’s bright green eyes lit up. Her anxious tittering was replaced with a tone I can best describe as “gossipy housewife with the hot new drama.” She struggled to keep her voice down, but she was grinning ear to ear. The attention was delicious and she was eating it with a spoon.
“Oh, I haven’t just seen it once. I’ve seen it dozens of times!”
According to her story, she lived not far from the KFC Forest. Her house was practically devoured by trees and rested on the opposite end of the corpse bridge, where she had gotten a front row seat to all sorts of monster shenanigans from the time she was old enough to hold a memory. For years, she’d kept it a secret because nobody would believe her but now, in this enlightened age, she could open her heart to her classmates and spill the truth. It was like a weight being lifted off her shoulders, she said, even if it didn’t solve the problem of there being a monster in her backyard.
“Is it big?” Kendra asked.
“Massive.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know! We’ve always just called it the Gatorgoat! My dad thinks it’s a demon.”
“Your dad has seen it?”
“My dad’s had to chase it from the window!”
“If it’s so big and scary, how did he manage to chase it away without getting mauled?” I interjected. My tone was maybe a bit more biting than I meant it, but I was beginning to get annoyed. I appreciated the cookies, but I wasn’t a fan of being lied to to my face, nor was I particularly thrilled that my closest, dearest friend was accepting it all as gospel. Beatrice recoiled as if I’d tried to slap her. She stammered and laughed.
“I mean, can’t people scare bears away?” she asked. “What’s the difference?”
“You said it was a demon. Would demons be as easy to spook as a bear?”
“I, uh, I said he thinks it’s a demon. I didn’t say that it was.”
“If it killed that old man, why’d it drown him? Wouldn’t it have tried to eat him or something?”
“I… I don’t have an answer for that. I…”
“Why does it--?”
“Leslie, enough!” Kendra’s whining was loud enough to cause a temporary pause in the cafeteria. “You’re upsetting her!”
When the bell rang, it was a blessing. Beatrice, teary eyed, gathered up her things and quietly shuffled away while Kendra berated me the whole time back to our lockers. I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel bad because I felt absolutely awful, but I couldn’t understand why I was somehow the villain for pointing out an obvious lie. Maybe I should have handled it better, sure, but weren’t you supposed to call out bullshit? Wasn’t lying the actual sin here?
The rest of the day passed by slowly. Kendra, angry, didn’t say a word to me after her initial scolding and, in between classes, I’d catch Beatrice watching me apprehensively from a sea of our preteen peers. Every time our gazes would meet, I’d consider apologizing, but she wouldn’t give me the opportunity. If I looked like I was going to open my mouth, she’d scurry off like a mouse. Eventually, I gave up.
While packing up my things at the end of the day, though, I couldn’t help but feel a presence bearing down on me. Stooped on the floor in front of my locker, trying to shoehorn a ridiculous stack of textbooks into my backpack, I looked up expecting to see Kendra and maybe get an apology. What I saw instead were freckled cheeks and a pink sweater, the innocent face of Beatrice gazing down at me from the center of a halo of hair that had likely never been touched with scissors. She was smiling, but it was uneasy and sad, as though it were taking every ounce of her being to not burst into tears.
“Oh, hi,” I greeted, attempting to sound as nice as I possibly could. I probably sounded mockingly saccharine, but I was honestly trying.
“Hey.” She paused. “Um, can I ask you a weird question?”
“Sure?” I was as confused as I was scared. Weird questions in middle school never really ended up being good ones, and almost every “weird question” I’d heard had been from boys who were barking up the wrong tree. That, or from mean girls who were trying to shake me up with fake rumors that, thankfully, never seemed to stick.
“You’re really not scared of it?”
“It?” I echoed.
“The Gatorgoat. You don’t think it’s real, so you’re not scared of it… right?”
You’d think the question would be spoken with a hint of sinisterness, like I was being set up for a big fall and a jump scare. That wasn’t the case, though. There was nothing short of relief in her voice, like I was some kind of angel sent down from on high to answer her prayers. Still, I was suspicious. After quietly looking up and down the hall to make sure I wasn’t on the receiving end of a mean-spirited prank, I finally honored her with a reply.
“No, I ain’t scared of no made-up alligator dog.”
“You mean that?” she pressed. “You’re not just saying that like Ashley Lynch? You’re really not scared?”
“I just said I ain’t,” I snapped. My patience was wearing thin. Immediately, her hand flew to her chest and she turned her head skyward, thanking Jesus, Joseph, Mary, the choirs of angels, and God Almighty. Maybe I was an answer to her prayers, though I was still pretty suspicious that somebody with a mask was looming around a corner. Beatrice had a lot of new friends with mean streaks, so who was to say she didn’t develop one herself?
“Then, can I ask you a favor? Please, Leslie, I need you to do me a favor.”
I hesitated, threw my backpack over my shoulder, and considered excusing myself from the situation, but the look in her eyes was pleading. Combined with how I’d hurt her feelings earlier, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of remorse.
“Leslie, can you please spend the night with me on Saturday?”
Her hands were clasped together, but this time she was praying to me. Uncomfortable, I took a step backwards, ready to make my exit. Whenever I put a little distance between us, however, she bounded ahead to bridge the gap. Those sad eyes never faded, those praying hands never fell.
“Please, I need your help. I really do. I really need somebody who isn’t afraid of the Gatorgoat.”
My mom didn’t have a problem with me spending the night at Beatrice’s house. Hell, even her parents seemed perfectly fine with some pants-wearing, hair-cutting, worldly stranger staking a claim to their couch for the night. The only person who seemed to have reservations about the whole thing was me who, at the end of the day, was too soft-hearted to turn down puppy-dog eyes. When my mom dropped me off in front of her place, she was all smiles and laughter... and utterly confused as to why I was so sour faced.
Sleepovers weren’t my bag to begin with, even if there weren't ulterior motives. There’s something extremely uncomfortable about sleeping in a home that isn’t your own.
Beatrice’s house was, as she said, on the opposite end of the bridge from the KFC and right on the edge of the forest. Massive maples and oaks blocked the sun from reaching her lawn, which was a mess of dusty dog trails and Indian strawberries. The house itself looked like it had seen better days. It was oddly built--storage on the bottom, living quarters on the top--and the staircase leading up to their porch was terrifyingly rickety and steep. The lack of railing meant I staggered up the entire way, bag slung over my shoulder, convinced that I was going to die before I knocked on the door.
Once I made the ascent, caught my breath, and knocked, I was greeted by a portly, gray-haired woman with the same fashion sense as her daughter. She showed me around--especially to the kitchen where she had some impressive snacks lined up--and joyfully peppered me with questions about how I knew Beatrice. Apparently, she’d never had anyone sleep over before and the whole thing was exciting.
“Wait here, honey, and I’ll go get our little Bea! Make yourself at home, but no food in the living room.”
The inside of the house was more welcoming, but seemed like it was ripped out of an old sitcom. Everything was clean to the point that it looked like a showroom, and all of the furniture was dated and followed a color palette that reminded me of my grandmother’s tupperware. Even the television was a fossil, sitting mounted in a wooden chassis and probably weighing a ton. The dial was a literal knob. I was shocked the picture was in color.
Beatrice finally appeared while I was in the middle of counting the sheer amount of crosses hung around the house, the sound of commercials droning in the background. She padded barefoot down a short, narrow hallway that presumably led to the rest of the house, already dressed in a flannel nightgown despite the fact it was only eight o’clock. Her hair was done up in braids, her eyes tired but excited. Her mom talked to the sides of our heads as a silent conversation went on between the children; her expression told me that she was happy that I actually showed up, and mine told her she was lucky that I did.
“Want to see my room?” Beatrice asked carefully, and I could pick up the subtext immediately. I made my play at being excited to be there, putting on a show for her mom, and dragged myself down the hall. It was time to get to the meat and potatoes of the whole arrangement.
No sooner than we entered her room did Beatrice shut and lock the door behind us. I sat on the floor since it felt too awkward to claim the bed, and examined the room while she listened for voices and footsteps in the hall. The whole atmosphere was as pure and grandmotherly as Beatrice herself, a plethora of floral patterns and garish hand-me-down furniture decorated with antiquated odds and ends. No stereo, no boy band posters, no video games. It was just porcelain cat figures and uninspired teddy bears as far as the eye could see.
Once she was satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping or in danger of doing so, she let out a great sigh and walked to her bed. She landed on the corner and threw her hands onto her knees, her lips a tight, nervous line. The uneasiness spread like a plague, especially since I was beginning to have my doubts as to whether or not it was a waste of time to show up at all.
“You’re not afraid of it, right?”
Her voice was low, cutting right into the heart of the matter like an assassin. There was no time for hellos, formalities, or any of that junk. She was getting right down to business.
“I told you. I ain’t afraid of it. It ain’t real.”
“And I’m telling you it is.” There was a subtle hint of anger in her tone. “But, if you believed this thing was real, would you be afraid of it?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I was not (and am not) the most creative or imaginative person in the world, so trying to envision myself being afraid of a creature that didn’t exist was a mental exercise I couldn’t pull off. Even if I could somehow picture myself as a person who would square off against the Gatorgoat, I probably still wouldn’t have been inclined to answer. I was uncomfortable for completely mundane reasons.
“The last person I invited over was Ashley Lynch,” she continued, unprompted, “and she said she wasn’t scared of it, too. But when I asked her to spend the night, she didn’t show up and stopped talking to me.”
Nerves carried her words away, and she trailed off even though I could tell she had more to say. Instead, her eyes did the talking, drifting over to the window again. And again. And again. By the time her sentence had come to a conclusion, she was gawking out into the dark as though anything could reach her up on the second floor. When I turned to look as well, all I could see were some tree branches that were barely illuminated by the bedroom light.
“Okay, so what did you want me for?” I interrupted, hoping to get the ball rolling. There was a long, tense silence that I almost swore was for dramatic effect, then Beatrice blinked and shook her head, as if snapping out of a trance.
“I need somebody to help me find it.”
The way she said it was so serious that I almost felt bad that I cracked a smile. No matter how I tried to wrap my mind around it, I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to find something I doubted existed. But even if I didn’t believe in the Gatorgoat, there was enough conviction in Beatrice’s voice that it began to slowly dawn on me that she did. This wasn’t a matter of a prank she was pulling. This was her bogeyman as surely as Pennywise the Clown had been mine when I was four.
She continued to explain (quietly, and with frequent pauses whenever we heard footsteps in the hall) that she had already tried to enlist a handful of seeming nonbelievers before she wound up with me, the first person to take her up on an offer of a sleepover to negotiate conditions. The Gatorgoat, she said, had been a thorn in her side ever since she was teeny tiny, and the sudden interest in her neck of the woods gave her a good opportunity to maybe find some closure after years of living in fear. She had her theories about what it was, but none about why or how it was, despite the fact her dad liked to spout off ideas like an erupting volcano.
It was a demon. It was a devil. It was there to test their faith. She said that, when she was younger, her family hadn’t been nearly as strict as they were now, but the Gatorgoat had changed everything. When simple Baptist services didn’t seem to be pure and extreme enough to get rid of the monster, her parents dove headfirst into taking up serpents to prove they were faithful enough to be freed of the evil that stalked their house and killed their cats.
The more she spoke about her dad and his crackpot theories, the more uneasy I began to feel. It wasn’t that I was a stranger to religion more than I had my limits to what was reasonable, and the whole thing struck me as more than a mite off kilter. Beyond that, it dawned on me that I hadn’t even seen her father since I had been there. Her mom, sure, and Beatrice herself, but the halls were narrow, the rooms were small, and there didn’t seem to be a place where somebody could just be hiding. Well, unless he’d been in the bathroom the whole time.
“He’s at service,” she conceded when I finally asked, interrupting her tirade. My brows furrowed.
“Service on a Saturday?”
“Mm-hm. Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. But he usually goes alone on Saturday and Wednesday. Those are in the evening, and he doesn’t want me and momma out at night. He goes ‘cause somebody has to represent our family and he’s got the best chance of fighting it off.”
“Fighting what off? The Gatorgoat?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but the words died in her throat. A low, weird vibration jostled the room. Her porcelain cats gently clinked against their glass shelves, and the window rattled in the sill like a low flying helicopter was passing overhead. Footsteps raced down the hallway, far more panicked than the light tapping and the gentle voice of Beatrice’s mother asking if everything was alright. It was the only sound I heard; whatever was shaking the walls and floors made no noise whatsoever.
I looked up to Beatrice and saw she was looking at the window again, her face drained of color but her expression steely and resolute. Taking a peek for myself was perhaps one of the single hardest things I ever forced myself to do in my life, my heart in my throat and my stomach twisting into knots. I held my breath and ripped off the bandaid, whipping my head around so hard that my neck hurt.
Pressed against the window, covered in coarse gray-brown fur, was something huge and toothy. Milk-white eyes watched us, and it was impossible to tell which of us it had taken an interest in. Curled horns twisted around deer-like ears, and a long, flexible tongue wrapped around its broad snout. Its breath fogged the glass, and with every exhale, the room trembled.
I didn’t sleep well that night, but I did sleep. Beatrice, apparently used to this odd peeping tom of hers, was out like a light shortly after telling her mom it was “just” the Gatorgoat. That left me, too terrified to sleep alone on the couch, lying on a pallet on her bedroom floor and staring at the popcorn pattern of the ceiling. I was still in my jeans, too spooked to go into the bathroom alone to change, and the physical discomfort didn’t help matters. When I wasn’t trying to rationalize what I’d seen, I was mad about how inflexible my clothes were. Right when I’d get my pants how I’d want them, my mind would drift back to that thing.
A mask. It had to be a mask. And her dad was controlling and crazy. If I thought about it using sensationalist daytime talk show logic, it all made perfect sense that an insane, hyper-religious father would go to great lengths to scare his family into going along with his Jesus frenzy. He was the only one not in the house after all, the only one allowed to go out during Gatorgoat hours and, honestly? It isn’t too hard to climb a tree and look in a window.
I ignored the fact that the room had been shaking. I ignored the fact that it seemed oddly real for how bizarre it looked, and that I’d watched its facial muscles twitch and its tongue slither and slurp.
Eventually, I dozed off, but it was only a couple of hours before the house was bustling again.
When I sat up, Beatrice was gone. There were voices coming from the other end of the house, people pacing up and down the halls, and typical happy family banter. Dishes clattered and doors creaked open and closed. The bathroom sink seemed to turn on and off every five minutes as if scheduled to do so. Exhausted as I was, I was also a light sleeper and rattled to the core. Panic built up inside my chest as I woke up enough to realize I was alone and, like the herd animal I was, I decided that being around people would somehow make me safer.
Before I left, though, I spared a glance at the window. Just to be cautious.
Nothing.
I shuffled out into the living room in the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before, knowing my hair was a mess and able to feel the dark circles under my eyes. Nobody really acknowledged it. Beatrice’s mom, darting back and forth from the kitchen to the rest of the house, greeted me with a mixture of warmth and relief. Dressed in her Sunday best, she told me that breakfast was in the kitchen and I was more than welcome to eat my fill. A man I didn’t recognize, presumably Beatrice’s dad, weaved around us both. He was surprisingly normal looking and strikingly handsome, and I groggily tried to compare his body to that of the “Gatorgoat” as he zigzagged around.
He didn’t greet me. He barely looked at me. He was too busy buttoning up his shirt or fixing his hair or barking at his wife that they needed to hurry. After a while, I began to feel like I was in the way and trudged to the kitchen.
There I found Beatrice, already dressed, sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of sausage and eggs. When she saw me, she smiled, though it faded when she registered how rough I looked. I didn’t even have to prepare my own breakfast. One glimpse of me and she was on her feet, assembling a pile of food to power me through the day.
“Do you believe me now?” she asked as she sat it in front of me. She fumbled with the orange juice, but finally managed to get me a glass.
“I dunno,” I replied, unwilling to admit defeat. “Could’ve been a prank.”
“Well, if that’s what you think, do you mind helping me find proof while momma and daddy are at service?”
“You’re not going?”
Beatrice shook her head, laughing, “I have company today. And I don’t think your momma would like it if we took you to go play with rattlers. It’s fine if I stay home alone.”
“Even with the Gatorgoat out there?” I pushed, eyebrow raising.
“Leslie, everyone knows it don’t come out during the day. It’s asleep right now.”
There was still morning fog hanging in the air when her parents loaded into their car and set off for worship, bidding Beatrice farewell as she stood waving on the porch. I watched as their car vanished into the distance, down a backroad leading away from the main street and the bridge. It seemed like it led further back into the KFC Forest, up the hill and into the trees to God only knew where. Despite the fact I’d lived in the town since the day I was born, my life had encompassed staying where there were streetlights and people. I didn’t have a clue what was up that way.
We watched, and once we were satisfied they were out of sight, Beatrice turned to me with determination in her eyes. She straightened her posture, went back inside just long enough to fetch her shoes, and bid me to do the same. Every neuron rattling around in my head told me I was making a horrible mistake, but I was too hampered by sleep deprivation to think straight and too stubborn to back down. Again and again, I repeated my mantra: It was only a mask, it was only a mask.
Within fifteen minutes, we were as ready as we were going to be and Beatrice was leading me through her yard and into the trees beside her house.
The kids at school always called it the KFC Forest, but I’d always imagined it was more a line of trees than actual woods. Sure, forests weren’t exactly rare where we lived and surrounded the whole town like a barrier, but most anyone I knew would call any collection of more than five trees “the woods.” It was unnerving to be out there in the morning, surrounded by fog, being led by a girl who was hunting for monsters and realizing that, no, it actually was dense, and large, and extended on and on and on up into the mountains and possibly beyond. We didn’t stray so far that we couldn’t look through the foliage and see the road, but every crunch of twig under my shoe was sobering.
We crossed the “river” the bridge passed over pretty easily; it was more of a stream, barely a trickle, and I was confused as to how anyone could have claimed somebody drowned in it. We hiked up a steep, root-covered hill covered in leaves, and from the top we could see the dim glow of the KFC sign promising a discount on a family bucket meal. Once we found level ground, we followed deer trails through the shrubs so we could backtrack a little easier.
Whenever I asked what exactly we were looking for or what clues she was interested in, Beatrice would ignore me. It didn’t seem to be a matter of being rude more than a matter of nerves, or maybe that she didn’t even know where to start our hunt. She didn’t exactly strike me as the type of person who’d have a well thought-out plan of attack for something as severe as tracking imaginary monsters and family pretending to be them, and the more trees that swallowed us, the more it dawned on me that we may be running blind.
At the top of another steep incline, she stopped and took a seat on some tree roots conveniently sticking out of a ledge. Below us, through gaps in the branches, we could still see concrete and roofs, but they seemed impossibly far away. With a heavy sigh, she dusted off her skirt and pointed in the direction of her house. If I squinted, I thought I could see the edge of her property.
“I think it lives up here, ‘cause it’s a straight shot from here to the house,” she explained, picking twigs and leaves out of her hair. “Also, Daddy said it always runs off in the same direction when he chases it away, and this is the direction it goes. So, it only makes sense that it runs back home when it gets scared, if it gets scared, and that up this way is where its home is.” She paused, unsure of herself. “That does make sense, right?”
Her voice was almost pleading, and I nodded to put her anxiety out of its misery. In my sleep deprived brain, I supposed it sounded like sound reasoning. Maybe it was smart enough to follow deer trails, just like we were. I knew that I would follow the path of least resistance if I was an imaginary animal trekking through the woods, especially if I thought I was being chased. Hypothetically, of course, since I was still telling myself this was all a mean spirited prank being pulled on Beatrice.
“I don’t see anything, though,” she continued, scanning the trees; her voice sounded as disappointed as it did frightened. “No paw prints, no hair, no nothing. Uncle Jeff says there’s always something he sees when he follows deer. Do you think it’s too smart for that?”
I didn’t answer because I was too busy looking in familiar directions, at places I’d rather be. She didn’t seem too bothered about it, though. After plucking the last twig out of her hair, she brushed off her chest and turned to look further up the hill. The deer trail made a pretty easy path all the way to the top, save for the occasional low-hanging branch and curious blackberry bush.
“Maybe it’s just that we haven’t gone far enough,” she suggested. “Come on, Leslie.”
And off she went again, plants tugging at her skirt and the occasional spider web prompting a squeak of alarm. I protested at first because I didn’t want to get too far from her house, but she promised me that everything would be fine. From the top of the hill, we would be able to see everything and, even if we couldn’t, the deer trail would lead us back home. Even if I wasn’t sure how much I believed her, the idea of leaving her to her own devices was a little more scary than pushing ahead. Images flashed in my head of her parents berating me for letting her do something so stupid all by her lonesome, or even doing it at all in the first place. Besides, a small corner of my brain was reserved for irrational fears of being jumped by the Gatorgoat on the way back.
Safety in numbers, you know. Two heads are better than one.
In retrospect, the walk wasn’t that far. It seemed big because I was a middle-school student who had about as much patience as I had leg length, seconds spanning into minutes inside of my head. From my perspective, the hill seemed gargantuan, even though it was just a bump in the foothills. It was the fact that I spent more time playing Gameboy than sports that was really taking a lot out of me. I was practically crawling when we crested it, reaching the top and emerging into a clearing of knee-deep grass and dew-covered wildflowers.
Which was odd, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. As soon as we popped out of the treeline, Beatrice took a few steps out into the field and then placed her hands on her hips. A baffled “huh” echoed through the empty space. Somehow, I knew we were both thinking the same exact thing.
Bald patches on the mountain are as noticeable as a shaved spot on a dog, moreso if it’s just some big old hill in your backyard. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a clearing from the street. Not when I was riding with mom to the grocery store, not when I stopped for the occasional dinner at KFC, and not when I was visiting Beatrice’s house. As Beatrice herself slowly spun and spun, it was obvious she was equally stumped. She pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something awful, then looked down at me as I huffed and puffed into the grass.
“It’s pretty,” she conceded.
“It’s weird,” I replied.
“It’s where the trail led. Wonder if we’ll see a deer. Or the Gatorgoat.”
Once again, she abandoned me, wandering off to go explore. As tired as I was, I tromped after her, stepping high and crunching down the grass as well as I could. The entire time, though, a black hole grew inside of my stomach. Wading through the prairie grass felt like walking deep into dark water, knowing that something lurked just beneath the surface. A chilling quiet settled around us, interrupted only by the sound of our muffled footsteps and the occasional commentary from Beatrice as she tried to make sense of what we were seeing.
“It’s big,” she announced after a few minutes of mumbling. “Too big, and flat. Don’t you think?”
I nodded. As gorgeous as it was, it kept going on and on, matching us step for step so that we never got any further than where we were. There were trees in the distance, obscured enough by the fog that they appeared as a solid wall of shadow, and my stomach flooded with cold water the longer I looked at them. Instead, I stared at my feet and followed the sound of Beatrice’s voice.
For a long time, she didn’t say anything that really piqued my interest. She commented on how the sun was beginning to break through the clouds, how weird it was that the fog wasn’t lifting, and that it’d been a long time since she heard anything but our own footsteps. The birds and bugs were as quiet as death itself, and the wind hadn’t stirred since we walked out of the woods. Even though I noticed, I didn’t think it was particularly noteworthy since everything about this patch of land was odd and off-putting; it wasn’t any more of a warning sign than the fact it was perpetually stuck in early morning dreariness and felt absolutely endless.
Then, her voice rang out with, “Look! Leslie, look!”
Against everything my instincts told me, I looked up from my feet. Yards ahead of me—far further than I had expected—Beatrice stood on her toes and began to gesture towards something in the distance. A shack of some kind, with flaking paint and grayed wood, standing beside a leafless birch tree whose white skin and pale bark acted as a beacon. It hadn’t been there before, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t find it in me to question it overmuch. A mysterious building where there previously hadn’t been one? Sure, why not. Maybe I was just blind, or it blended in with the fog.
“Wonder what’s in there?” Beatrice asked. “Do you think that’s where it lives?”
“No idea,” I responded, perhaps sounding more fed-up than I meant to. “To be honest, I don’t know if I want to know. Lots of these old places end up being meth labs.”
“But, Leslie…”
When she turned to look at me, I watched her brows furrow as she looked beyond me. A chill crept up my back as I summoned the courage to turn, half expecting a monster or a murderer. Instead, what I found was that, for all the time we’d been walking, we’d only really made it about fifteen yards from the trees. It honestly felt like it should have been miles but I could have thrown a rock and hit the trunk of the nearest oak. The thought crossed my mind to actually give it a try and see what happened, but that would necessitate ducking down into the grass to find one and I couldn’t shake the fear that I’d never come back up.
“Weird,” she finally muttered. Taking a deep breath, she peeked back at the building. Her hand flung to her hip as she swayed in contemplation. She chewed her lip. She fiddled with her skirt.
“We should go home,” I repeated, suddenly convinced something was amiss. Her head ducked and weaved to the side and I could tell from the preemptive whine she was about to make a bad decision. The longer she drawled, the more certain I was that she’d say something I wouldn’t like.
“Maaaybe I could just take one peek, and then we leave? Just to see. ‘Cause if the Gatorgoat is in there, I could tell daddy where it runs off to when he chases it away.”
“That sounds stupid.”
“It’s not stupid!” she spat, stomping a foot. Her face flooded with the most righteous rage I’ve ever seen in a preteen before and since. “We’ve been dealing with this stupid monster for as long as I’ve been alive! It ate my cats, it attacked my dog! It’s been trying to get in the house!”
“Then move.”
“Like we got a choice to do that! You think I ain’t heard momma and daddy trying to figure out how to do that? Momma can’t work, daddy’s job sucks! All they can do is chase this stupid thing off, and nobody knows where it goes when it gets past the trees! And if it’s in there, we can get rid of it. For good. And if you’re too much of a coward—”
“I ain’t a coward!” I barked. “I ain’t a coward and I bet you there ain’t nothing in there. Gatorgoat is probably your dad in a Halloween mask anyway, giving you a good scare to keep you out of the woods.”
Beatrice sputtered, then snapped, “How dare you! My daddy would never do such a thing!”
“And there ain’t no such thing as an animal that’s a reptile and a mammal. You’re in Miss Mars’ life science class with me. You know that. Reptiles are cold blooded and mammals ain’t so they can’t—”
“God can do whatever he wants.”
“I thought this thing was a demon. Why’d God make that?”
“I said it might be! And… ugh! Whatever! Do whatever you want! I’m lookin’ in that shed.”
“It ain’t a shed. It’s like a little house or something.”
“I don’t care!”
The tonal shift was somehow more jarring than the weird grassland and the spontaneous little building. Beatrice, who at her most negative had been closer to a kicked dog than a rabid one, was red-faced and teary-eyed and staring at me like I personally set fire to her house. My heart sank through my stomach as the guilt settled in. While I have never been the type of person to back down from what I say when I mean it, I’m not a monster. Seeing all that legitimate grief and anger and desperation made me feel about as small as when I called her out about the Gatorgoat during lunch.
“One peek,” I conceded, “and then we hightail it. I don’t wanna be here longer than we have to. This place is weird.”
“It is weird,” she agreed, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “And I already told you it’d only be one peek. I’m not stupid.”
My feet stayed locked where I stood as Beatrice turned away from me and waded closer, arms lifted so that they barely brushed the tops of the grass. It seemed to get deeper the further in she walked, then receded down to her knees once again as she reached the house. The branches of the nearby tree creaked as they blew in a wind that I couldn’t feel, but it caught Beatrice’s hair, too. The bits that had been pulled out of her braid danced around her head as she walked up a couple of concrete steps and stood in front of the black, doorless entryway.
Broken glass and debris crunched under her shoes and I cringed. They seemed too soft for walking through that kind of terrain and, in my mind’s eye, I could imagine a chunk of window slicing into the bottom of her foot. She didn’t seem to share that fear, though, and I watched her grab onto the door frame and slowly lean her head inside. The darkness swallowed her up like a black hole. It was as if she didn’t even exist in the same world anymore.
I held my breath until she pulled herself back out. She turned towards me, her back to the void, and scrunched up her still-flushed face in confusion. In the quiet, I could hear her sniff back the remainder of her tears as she shrugged. I responded by gesturing to her to get away from the building so we could leave. She held up a single finger, turned back to the doorway, and poked her head in again.
And again. And again.
The same gestures. The same shrug. The same sniff. Always holding up her finger to indicate that I should give her one more moment, only to turn back in and take a look around. It was a record skipping in real life.
It took me a shameful amount of time to notice. I was far more consumed with what was in the dark and how I had hurt Beatrice’s feelings and how I couldn’t just leave her there if something were to go amiss. My brain would choose to notice new details in her movements that I swore I hadn’t seen before, ignoring the obvious repetitions in the way her arms moved, the way her shoulders rose and fell, the way her hair floated around her head in a nonexistent breeze. The hairs on my arms stood on end as I finally squeaked her name and demanded, in the most broken and pitiful voice, that she get off the stoop and follow me the fuck back to her house.
She looped again, as if she didn’t hear me. She simply raised one finger, right on cue, and turned back to the door.
“Beatrice, this isn’t funny!” I finally yelled. “Cut it out!”
The response was the echo of my voice, since Beatrice was trapped in whatever time loop she’d been dragged into. The only difference was that, between the building and the tree, the grass rustled. Something hidden in the field stirred.
Beatrice scrunched up her face and sniffed.
From beneath the tops of the grass, a shape began to grow. It was far bigger than anything that could be concealed by plants that were only knee high, and yet it continued to rise. Big and hairy, with twisting horns atop its head and a broad snout beneath milk-white eyes that seemed dull and sightless. But, it was looking at me. I could tell.
Beatrice shrugged. The wrinkles it made in her shirt were the same as they had been the last three times.
The creature rose up on its hind legs like a bear, and the size was comparable to the grizzly I’d seen at the zoo. Its long and thick arms were tipped with claws that were more akin to a sloth than any carnivore I’d ever seen, but its shoulders and hunched back were bulky with muscle. Thick, matted gray-brown hair coated every inch of its body, save a tail that flicked behind it like an angry cat.
Beatrice held up her finger. Just wait one more moment.
A low rumble came from somewhere deep in its barrel chest and its mouth pried open to reveal rows of teeth. The air seemed to tremble, the ground vibrated ever so gently. I could feel it in my chest, like heavy bass. Later in life, I’d have a panic attack at a concert because of just how similar the feeling was.
Beatrice didn’t turn away from me. She dropped her hands to her side and smiled as sweetly as a good old Christian girl could. Unblinking, she stepped willingly backwards into the house and vanished from sight entirely, devoured by the building itself. I felt my heart stop.
Then the Gatorgoat charged and it jumped back to life.
Despite how ungainly its claws seemed to be, it was fleet of foot, a strangely agile and graceful wall of fur. It thundered across the field, mouth still open and voice still shaking the very fabric of the world around me. Every step could be felt in the earth itself, and my legs turned to jelly even as I floundered away from it. It was a struggle to keep going, stumbling and choking and disoriented, and I could feel it bearing down on me. It radiated warmth like a space heater and sweat beaded on my back beneath my shirt.
I hit the ground and clawed at the dirt and grass to push and pull myself up and forward and away, twisting and writhing as one monstrous paw landed beside my head. Every muscle in my body jerked and trembled, tears flooded my eyes. Snail trails of snot streamed down my lip as an overpowering and rancid odor burned the inside of my nose. Hot, moist breath against the back of my head matted my hair against the back of my neck and the sides of my face as it blasted around me.
Then, I felt something wrap around my torso. Dulled claws coiled around me and I was rolled hard across the ground. The grass flattened behind me as I coughed and sputtered, inhaling pollen and dirt and a wildflower that had popped into my mouth as I found my voice and let loose with a scream that bordered inhuman. What truly was inhuman was how the Gatorgoat matched it with a shriek of its own, a loud and shrill cry that drowned out my own and seemed to echo off the sky itself. My ears ached but couldn’t cover them. I needed my hands to try to get upright.
Dirty, aching, and openly sobbing, I struggled up on shaking knees and tried to reach my feet. I didn’t have a chance before the monster loped over to me, a massive blur in my periphery, and latched onto me again. This time, it grabbed my arm in its mouth, just firm enough that I could feel its teeth threatening to pop my skin like a balloon. It yanked its massive head to the side and twisted its body, tripping over its own massive paws as it moved sideways, then backwards. I felt my shirt hike up as it began to drag me, blades of grass and stray twigs clawing at my spine.
I shrieked. It growled. I tried to yank away and felt the first bit of give in my skin. The louder I wailed, the more aggravated it seemed to get, and every time I tried to find my footing, it would yank so hard that I’d swear it was trying to rip my arm out of the socket.
The world was a blur of fog and flowers, then darkness. But it wasn’t as if I passed out or was blinded. Its jaws opened and something swung into my side and I rolled and rolled until I finally stopped on my stomach. Dirt clogged my nose and, when I found the strength to raise my head, I realized I wasn’t in the grassland anymore. A path of snapped saplings, deflated shrubs, and disturbed leaf litter marked my trajectory. I was in the woods again, dangerously close to wrapping around a tree. Just up the hill, there it stood.
Tall, hunched over, powerful, and mouth dripping with saliva. It braced itself on the trees like Beatrice had braced herself on the doorway, leaning in curiously and letting out what I could only assume were warnings in whatever bestial language it spoke. Snarls, growls, yips, howls; it made one hell of a ruckus, but didn’t seem too keen on chasing me any further.
The fact it wasn’t actively pursuing me didn’t help the fear too much. I pulled myself up using a nearby tree and awkwardly found my way from where I’d landed to a deer path that I hoped was the same one from before. I openly wept as I followed it back, covered in leaves and twigs and blood and spit, only relaxing when I started to see familiar sights. The roads, the rooftops, and the dim glow of the KFC sign called out to me like a lighthouse lamp. They gave me the strength to walk faster, then run. The last leg of my escape was spent sprinting downhill until I found myself standing in a familiar yard of dog paths and indian strawberries.
There was no car in the driveway, but Beatrice’s house was still where it should be. And sitting on the long staircase up to the front door was none other than Beatrice.
When she saw me, she jumped up as if she’d seen a ghost. Her face was snow white, her hair frazzled, and her shoes covered in dust and paint flakes. When I saw her, I burst into hysterics and fell to my knees. Before long, I was in a fetal position next to a tire swing with her kneeling next to me, pleading for me to get up. She wanted to look at me, she said. She needed to know I was real.
y memory began to hiccup after she finally coaxed me inside. Everything happened in snapshots and timeskips, my brain latching onto brief snippets of conversation and tastes of leftover breakfast, then releasing everything else that it deemed unimportant. I don’t remember being guided up the steps and into her house, but I do remember a local preacher being on the television as I languished on the couch. I don’t remember eating the bacon, but I do remember the way I struggled to swallow it and the taste of salt.
I remember the expressions on the faces of family photos in the hallway. I remember the sting of alcohol and a box of large bandaids.
And while I don’t remember asking Beatrice how she got home, I do remember her answer as she fumbled through bathroom drawers and shakily tried to open a bag of cotton balls. While she seemed unharmed and fairly clean, her hands were trembling about as badly as mine and her voice reminded me of a shell-shocked soldier in a war movie.
“You weren’t moving,” she squeaked. “I said I was going to look inside and you said you’d watch my back. You said you’d tell me if the Gatorgoat showed up. And I walked up and I walked in, and when I looked back out, you were just standing there giving me a thumbs up. Wouldn’t even blink.”
“I didn’t say that,” I told her. “I told you not to go in.”
She patched me up as best she could, and I cleaned myself up as much as possible. When her parents rolled back in from church and asked about our day, we were quiet and vague and struggled to smile. I hid the wounds on my arm with my coat, and we helped each other pick all the leaves out of our hair. Both of us were waiting for the other to crack first, to mention the Gatorgoat or our adventure or the fact we even left the house at all, but time ticked by in silence. The opportunity to fess up came and went. By the time my mom picked me up, the conversation had shifted to which parishioner had missed Beatrice the most and how many folks got slain in the spirit.
As I was leaving, however, Beatrice grabbed my hands in hers and held them tight. Her mouth was a thin tight line as she looked at me with eyes that seemed dull and desperate. She took a deep, frightened breath. As our parents watched, confused, she didn’t tell me goodbye. In a voice so tiny that it may as well have been silence, she only said one thing.
“Sit with me at lunch tomorrow. We’ll talk about it then.”
Kendra was deeply offended that I wouldn’t sit with her, calling me a baby for not taking her Friday criticisms with enough grace. She rattled off something about how she was just being honest and that I shouldn’t have been hurt, then called me a brat and told me my attitude was going to cost me all of my friends. She ignored the fact that I had been seeking out Beatrice all day and that, once I found her at lunchtime, we’d gone to find the most secluded corner, sequestered on one side of the outcast table while a handful of them played Yu-Gi-Oh on the other.
She still had her plain and inoffensive lunch box, and had brought extra food in case I was too shaken to pack my own. I graciously accepted her offering of a dry turkey and cheese on white, and washed it down as best I could with a Mountain Dew I’d smuggled in the pocket of my hoodie.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” was her ice breaker, and I felt tears stinging my eyes as I returned the sentiment. I told her that, in all honesty, I thought she was dead. I choked down the last bite of the sandwich before the waterworks really started, then pushed my palms into my eyes in a vain attempt to stymie them. In the end, I was still crying, but my vision was also filled with afterimages and flashes of color.
Beatrice’s voice cracked as she told me her side of the story again, taking the time to spell out every detail. Apparently, in whatever field she’d walked into, I had eventually taken point after she’d expressed an interest in turning around. I’d called her a coward and told her that I wasn’t afraid of the Gatorgoat, and ended up pointing out the same exact shack to her that had spawned seemingly from nowhere.
“The paint was flaking, and yellow,” she told me.
“White on mine,” I responded. We took a moment to contemplate what that could mean, stewing in our own silence. Neither of us addressed it again. We were twelve. We had no explanation.
She told me the shack was covered in flaking yellow paint, and that I had told her that I’d seen something moving inside. I promised her that, if she wanted to take a peek, that I would play guard and tell her if I saw anything suspicious. She’d been hesitant initially, but could remember her Uncle Jeff telling her about killing rats starting at the nest, and figured that maybe she could get rid of the Gatorgoat once and for all if she figured out where it was hiding.
So, she went inside. Whenever she’d look back out that open doorway, she’d see me giving her a smiling thumbs-up to indicate that she was safe, that nothing was there, that she was good to go.
“I thought it was weird,” she conceded, “because you aren’t really… you know.”
“Peppy,” I finished. I knew what I wasn’t, and I wasn’t the type of person to just be gleefully smiling for much of any reason. I never had been, and even folks who didn’t know me too well knew it. Still, that didn’t seem to be the exact word she was looking for. Despite her reservations, she didn’t press it.
Instead, she continued her story. She said she started noticing something was weird when she realized I wasn’t just giving her a thumbs up whenever she turned. I wasn’t moving at all. As she meandered through that tiny building, full of debris and broken glass and more twists and turns than it looked as if it could fit, she peeked out a window and saw me standing stock-still, facing the door with my thumb raised, as unblinking as a wax statue.
“Then, I heard a noise. Something banging downstairs…”
“There was no upstairs,” I snapped.
“Of course there was,” she corrected. “I was upstairs and there was banging downstairs. Everything started vibrating, so I ended up climbing in a closet and I just… waited there until the shaking stopped. And when I opened the closet to make sure the coast was clear, I… I don’t know if you’ll believe me.”
“Try me.”
“I walked out of the hall closet in my house.” She paused, giving me a moment to soak it all in. “I didn’t think I was even really home until you came out of the woods. I didn’t see a car or another person and I swear that there was different stuff in the closet than I remembered. Nothing seemed right. Or real. It was awful, sitting on the porch waiting.”
I stole one of her fruit snacks and nodded thoughtfully as she struggled to make sense of it, a struggle that only got worse when I told her about everything I saw, the way the Gatorgoat roughhoused me and threw me down the hill, the way she vanished into the house in the field. She seemed equally mortified hearing about her doppelganger as I had been about mine, mulling it over and reacting incredulously every time I mentioned her saying or doing something she wouldn’t say or do. By the end of the discussion, with mere minutes of lunchtime left, we’d picked through the last of her snacks and found ourselves alone with our own thoughts.
Silence stretched on as endlessly as the field in the mountains. The chatter beyond our corner was forgotten. The only thing that snapped us out of our trance was the bell.
I crushed my Mountain Dew can and helped Beatrice collect her garbage. She zipped up her lunch box and took a deep, shaky breath. The moment I turned to walk to the trash can, she lashed out across the table and grabbed my shoulders with the same, gentle grip she’d had when she held my hands.
I turned to her.
She looked beyond sad. She was scared. She was miserable.
“I don’t think it’s a demon anymore,” she said. “I know you said it was really warm, like something outta hell, but I don’t think it’s a demon.”
“What do you think it is, then?”
“Scared.” A pause. “It’s a scared animal, I think. It wasn’t trying to kill you, I don’t think. It’s just scared, and I think it’s stuck. Like a raccoon in a wall, all cornered and alone and not knowing what else to do when something grabs it but to bite.”
“I don’t think it’s stuck, Beatrice. It had plenty of space to go wherever it wanted to go.”
She didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Obviously embarrassed, she finally muttered, “Nevermind. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
We made a habit of sitting together every day after that, two soldiers brought together by a single shared horror. We struggled to talk about anything but the Gatorgoat at first but, eventually we exhausted every tiny thing we could. People stopped caring about the urban legend and Beatrice didn’t care to feed it. Our school careers progressed and we distanced ourselves as best we could from the secret of what we’d seen that day while her parents were at church.
It was when we were in high school that the subject came up again, during a ride home from school. Our senior year was marked with drama of all stripes, and the world-ending event of the day was Beatrice missing her bus home. She found herself in my passenger’s seat in the KFC drive thru, picking up a snack to give us an excuse to hang out. Her story about the cute boy in her congregation got cut short by the class bell and I needed a few more minutes to tease her about it.
As we sat there, however, she looked up past the restaurant’s dumpster and into the woods. Her nose wrinkled in a way that I hoped wouldn’t play on repeat.
“He still shows up, you know,” she finally said.
“Who? Tommy Bradford, the handsome dreamboat?” I teased. “Come on, Bea. Nobody talks like that outside of your Bible study group.”
She punched me in the arm, but it was more like a tap. The girl was so gentle that I could barely feel her through my jacket.
“Not Tommy, you dork,” she chuckled, but there was no humor to it. “I mean the Gatorgoat.”
My breath caught as the drive thru door opened and I was handed my meal. I wordlessly shoved the bag in her lap and stared ahead as the poor attendant tried to hand me my change. The look on her face as I drove away without it would have been priceless had I done it in any other situation.
In contrast, Beatrice was casually digging through the potato wedges as I pulled into a parking space. Nothing about her expression indicated she was worried or scared or anything, and she was soon holding out my popcorn chicken to me as if she’d never said anything at all. I accepted, of course, but maybe a bit more snappily than I meant. She seemed startled, then offended, then glowered at me with all the profanity her morals wouldn’t let her say out loud.
“What the hell do you mean that thing still shows up?” I demanded. She shrugged.
“He still shows up. I started leaving an extra bowl of food out for him, like an opossum.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me that—”
“He stopped attacking our cats after I started doing that, you know. He just kinda sits on the porch and then goes back in the woods. Daddy even stopped chasing him off. Got the idea after I realized that we didn’t see a damn animal in the woods or the field that day, you know? Not even the deer that left the trail, or a hint of them. He’s definitely a carnivore but there’s no food anywhere. It’s really sad.”
I watched her incredulously as she popped a potato wedge in her mouth. When she reached for some of my chicken, I smacked her hand away.
“You’re insane,” I told her. She shrugged again.
“God wants us to show compassion to all of His creatures. I’m showing compassion. Sue me.”
“That’s not one of God’s creatures. That’s a demon.”
“Animal,” she corrected, “and it may not be an animal from here, but God created everything in any universe ever, so He created the Gatorgoat, too. And it’s pretty tame now, honestly. You know how if you feed a squirrel enough it’ll start recognizing you?”
“That thing ain’t a squirrel.”
“Oh, I know. But I can get near it and it leaves me alone.”
She spoke with such infuriating confidence that all I could do was shovel chicken into my mouth to keep myself from saying something I’d regret. She knew it, too. From her throne on the other end of the car, seat tilted back every so slightly, she feasted on her fried potatoes and dumped the crunchies directly from the container into her mouth. She watched me with full knowledge that she was getting away with proverbial murder.
“I take it you’re bringing this all up because you did something stupid,” I finally said. Yet again, she shrugged, and I felt like a bull watching a red flag.
“Well, if that’s what you want to call it.”
“What did you do?”
“I went back. To the field.”
“You did what?”
“I went back to the field. I figured if the Gatorgoat recognizes me, it was probably safe to make the walk. I mean, what’s going to get me if the only animal there recognizes me as a caregiver?” She successfully snatched a piece of chicken and wolfed it down triumphantly. “It’s all the same as it was, you know. The deer trail is still there and the saplings you broke when you rolled down the hill. It’s all still there. Nothing has changed. And, how many years has it been?”
“Five.”
“Right, so it’s weird it’s the same, right? The only thing different is the field. It was a different house this time. You said yours was white, right? This one was white. Which is crazy, because I know it was yellow when I saw it. It was that gross pale yellow like mom’s prehistoric tupperware.”
As she went for another piece of chicken, I pulled it away. I was done with the games and I was done with her stealing my food. Angrily, I snapped, “Would you just cut to the chase, Bea?”
“Oh, yeah. Right. The point is simple. You remember how I told you I thought the Gatorgoat was just a trapped animal? I said it was like a raccoon stuck in the wall of your house. It’s scared and alone and hungry and it doesn’t know how it got there. It just knows it’ll die if it doesn’t find a way out.”
“I remember.”
“I think the Gatorgoat was never the problem at all. I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know how it got here, but I do know that it’s not the problem. The problem is the KFC Forest, and that field. It’s like the hole in the wall the raccoon comes through. Are you following?”
“I guess?”
“Or maybe it’s the house. I don’t know. I just know there’s a hole and then you end up in a different place, in a weird sort of ‘space between the walls.’ Except you can adapt to the space between the walls. You can learn to fit in. You can adapt. Like the Gatorgoat did eventually. Am I making sense? I hope so, because I’ve been trying to figure this out for years.”
“Not really,” I laughed bitterly. “If you could get to the fucking point I would appreciate it.”
Beatrice sat quietly for a moment, and I watched her visibly deflate. Wetness gathered at the corner of her eyes and she blinked in a desperate attempt to push them away. As soon as I opened my mouth to apologize for being a massive bitch, she fixed me with her gaze and I had no choice but to meet it. My heart skipped a beat as I remembered the way her green eyes had lit up and sparkled the moment Kendra and I had asked her about the Gatorgoat all those years ago. How much duller they looked when she held my hand when my mom picked me up.
I swallowed hard. My stomach twisted.
“You get it now, don’t you?” she pleaded. “You understand, right? I’m not crazy, am I? I just need somebody to know, I need anyone to know. I just need somebody to tell me I haven’t gone insane. Do you think I’m insane?”
I shook my head. I told her she wasn’t crazy. I questioned if maybe I was, however, because I had no idea how I could have missed it for all this time aside from willful ignorance. And even then, faced with the girl who’d become my best friend, who I’d faced down an actual monster with and whose secrets I’d carried for half a decade, I wanted to make myself ignore it. It would be easier that way, less complicated and messy. But I couldn’t ignore it, because it was staring me right in the face and making me confront it, using somebody I cared about as a vessel.
I stared and I stared and I stared some more. My jaw fell open, but no words came out.
Beatrice’s eyes were gray.