Horrifying Stories About Unexplained Creatures

Football is back, and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. On PrizePix, you can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? Download the PrizePix app today and use code SPOTIFY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix. Run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. BJ's Home of the Save. 20th Century Studios presents Whale Fall. The most incredible survival thriller of the year. I need the whale! Help me! In theaters Friday. To survive the unthinkable, do the impossible. You're gonna become so dangerous that the predators can't help but let you go. Austin Abrams. I'm going home! Josh Brolin. Survivor, survivor. Whale Fall. Rated PG-13. Maybe inappropriate for children under 13. In theaters Friday. Get tickets now. For more information, visit www.astronarium.com/Astronarium.com/Astronarium. For more information, visit www.Astronarium.com/Astronarium. If the second shape was the same thing, it would have had to come down, move through the woods, and get ahead of me. I didn't think it could have done that. I didn't want it to have done that. So I settled on having seen two separate things and gone looking for a connection, because I'd already unsettled myself. I took one drink of water. My mouth had gotten dry, which annoyed me because it made the whole thing feel more serious than I wanted it to be. I checked the time on my phone, put it back in the zipped pocket of my shorts, and started moving again. For maybe a hundred yards, I kept looking ahead and telling myself that I was making a story out of nothing. Then I heard a branch break directly above the trail. I ducked without thinking. Something hit the back of my helmet hard enough to drive the front of it down over my eyebrows. The bike swerved. I corrected too much, went sideways, and hit the ground on my right hip with both hands. Still on the handlebars. My right foot stayed caught beneath the frame. There was a brief stretch where I could hear the rear wheel turning and couldn't understand why I wasn't moving with it. I thought a branch had fallen on me. That's honestly what I thought, even with my helmet shoved halfway over my face. I was trying to get the bike off my leg when something pulled backward on the helmet. The strap caught under my jaw. My shoulders lifted off the ground. It hurt. Immediately. There wasn't any gradual tightening. One second I was on my side, and the next I was being dragged by the chin strap with my head bent at an angle I couldn't straighten. The bike scraped along with me because my foot was still under it. I got both hands beneath my jaw and tried to pull the strap away, but there wasn't room to get my fingers through. I saw a dark leg beside my face. It wasn't a person's leg. There was no shoe, no clothing, and the narrow part above the foot bent much farther than it should have. The foot itself was spread across the trail surface. I could see separate toes pressed into the dirt, with dark curved ends that had gone in far enough to leave little holes. There were more joints than I expected to see. I can't tell you how many. I wasn't counting. The pull stopped for a second. I heard something scrape across the shell of my helmet. Then it pulled again. Harder, and the bike shifted enough for my trapped foot to come free. I reached the buckle with my left thumb. I missed it once. On the second try I squeezed the sides together, felt it release, and dropped flat onto my back. My helmet went up out of sight. For a moment I just lay there, looking at the strip of sky above the trail. Then I rolled, got onto my hands and knees, and crawled so fast that I scraped skin off both palms. When I looked back, the thing was halfway up the tree beside me with my helmet in its mouth. It had climbed headfirst, using all four limbs. I hadn't seen the first few movements, but I saw the last one. One of its lower legs came around the trunk, gripped it, and pushed the body higher, while the long upper limbs reached for another hold. There were no wings. The things I'd taken for folded wings were arms held tight against its sides. With the elbows sticking out behind it. It stopped where a branch joined the trunk and turned toward me. Up close, the face was worse, because I could finally see why I hadn't been able to make sense of it. The center was bare, dark skin surrounded by the rough brown covering of its head. There was a slight ridge down the middle, but nothing I'd call a nose. Its eyes were small and set deep enough that I only found them when one caught the light. The mouth was low and much wider than the trunk, but I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. The rest of the features suggested. My helmet was held across it, with the loose straps hanging down against its chest. I didn't know what to do. People always have advice about animal encounters, but every piece of advice I could remember seemed to depend on knowing what animal you were dealing with. I knew I shouldn't run from certain things. I knew you were supposed to make yourself bigger around some others. I couldn't have told you which rules applied to something that had just tried to carry me into a tree. I got behind the bicycle and lifted it between us. The front wheel was turned backward, the handlebars twisted, and the chain had come off. I held the top tube with one hand and the handlebar with the other. My right wrist hurt badly enough that I thought I might have broken it, but I could still grip things, so I kept holding on. The thing lowered its head. I heard the helmet shell crack. That finally got me yelling. I shouted for help a few times, then shouted that there was an animal. I don't remember the exact words. I remember being afraid that if somebody heard me, they'd think I was yelling at a dog and ignore it. I wanted to sound injured without sounding too injured to help. That doesn't make much sense now, but it was what I was trying to do. The thing shifted on the branch. One arm unfolded, and it held the helmet against the wood while it worked its mouth across the broken edge. Bits of white foam fell onto the ground beneath it. It wasn't playing with the helmet. It was trying to get through it. I started backing toward the opening I'd passed. Every few steps, the bicycle caught on something or rolled sideways in my hands. I couldn't carry it properly. I was half dragging it, half holding it up, and the pedals kept hitting my shins. I wanted to leave it. I also felt that if I put it down, there would be nothing between my chest and those hands. I had no reason to think a bike would stop it, but it was the largest thing I could get hold of. I got far enough back that another tree blocked my view of it. I moved sideways to see around the trunk. The branch was empty again. I turned in a full circle, still holding the bicycle. The woods were thick enough that there were a hundred places it could have gone. I looked high first, then low, and realized I was standing with my back exposed while I did it. There wasn't a direction I could face that made me feel any better. A man called from farther down the trail. He was coming from the opening with the orange cord. He wore a faded green shirt, work gloves, and jeans that were pale at the knees. He had something long in one hand. At first I thought it was a shovel, but as he came closer, I saw it was a splitting maul. He wasn't running. He was walking quickly and looking past me, trying to figure out what had happened. I told him to stay back. He stopped about thirty feet away. His eyes went from my face to the bike, then to the blood running down my shin. He asked whether I'd fallen. I said something had pulled me off the ground. I pointed at the trees, which probably didn't help. I couldn't seem to get the important parts into one sentence. He said his name was Vern, and asked whether I could walk. I said yes. He told me to come toward him. There was a building, just up the track, and he had a first aid kit in it. While he was talking, he kept looking at the woods above me. I thought he'd seen it too. Later he told me he hadn't seen anything yet. He was looking because of the way I was looking. I made it about half the distance between us before the thing came out. It came down the bank on my left, low to the ground, using its arms in front of its body. I didn't hear it until it was already moving through the last bit of brush. It hit the bicycle side. The frame slammed into my ribs and knocked me against the opposite edge of the trail, but I stayed standing. For one very clear second, I saw one of its hands closed around the front wheel. There were four long fingers that I could see, and another part folded inward below them. The skin was black and thick across the joints. Its grip covered enough of the wheel that I could see the rim change shape as it pulled. I let go of the handlebar, grabbed the saddle instead, and tried to keep the frame across my body. Vern closed the remaining distance and swung the mall. I don't think he hit the thing. The head struck the bicycle with a hard metal sound, and the animal let go. It pulled back onto its lower limbs and rose just enough for me to see its chest. The brown covering was sparse in the middle. Beneath it, the skin was gray and folded, with a line of small dark marks along the lower ribs. Its shoulders were narrowed. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't grab, so I grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled. He got onto his good foot, leaned hard against me, and we staggered toward the track. I was still holding the saddle in my other hand. The bicycle dragged behind us, banging against my ankles until Vern told me to leave it. I dropped it across the entrance to the track. The thing stopped on the other side. That bought us a few seconds. I don't know whether it was afraid of the bike, confused by it, or just unwilling to throw itself at something awkward. Its head moved up and down while it looked over the frame. I saw the same small rise and fall I'd watched in the first tree. This time I could see that its legs were bending with it. It wasn't only moving its head. It was settling its weight, lifting, settling again. Vern kept his arm across my shoulders, and we worked our way uphill together. The track was steeper than it had looked from the trail. It opened into a little work area beside the building, with wood rounds stacked along one side and a log splitter sitting beneath an overhang. That was the engine I'd heard earlier. It was off now. There was a plastic chair with one arm missing, a pair of sawhorses, and a wheelbarrow turned upside down beside the wall. Beyond the building, the track continued uphill through the trees. The shed was more substantial than I'd expected. Concrete floor, block walls up to about waist height, wood above that, and a corrugated, metal roof. It had a wide set of wooden doors facing the work area, and a narrower door around the side. Vern steered me toward the narrow one. He had to let go of my shoulder to get a key from his pocket, and while he worked at the lock, I kept looking back down the track. The bicycle moved. I could only see part of it through the trees, but I saw the rear wheel lift and drop out of sight. Then the animal came up the track. It wasn't hurrying. It had one hand on the ground, and the other held against its chest. The piece of Vern's jeans was still caught between its fingers. I shoved at the door before he'd finished unlocking it. He snapped at me to wait, then pulled it open and went through sideways. I followed. The door swung outward, and I had to reach outside to catch the handle and pull it shut. The animal sped up when I did that. I saw its head come above the rise. One arm reached forward. I pulled as hard as I could, got the door against the frame, and turned the lock. Something struck the outside before I'd moved my hand away. The whole door bowed inward. A jar fell off a shelf behind me and broke on the concrete. Vern slid a heavy bolt across the upper part of the door. There was another one near the floor. He couldn't bend down to reach it, so I did. My fingers left blood on the metal. I didn't know at that point how much of it was mine. For a few seconds, we both stayed against the door, waiting for it to hit us again. It didn't. I could hear Vern breathing through his teeth. He was holding the back of his leg, and blood was coming through his glove. I helped him sit on an overturned wooden crate. He pointed to a cupboard over the workbench and told me there were towels and a first-aid box. I brought both. He pressed a folded towel against his calf while I stood there with the box open, unable to remember how to open it. I couldn't see any of the little individual packets. He took it from me and told me to get my phone out. I hadn't forgotten I had it. I'd forgotten it could be useful. That sounds stupid, but after the helmet came off, the entire world had become things I could touch, and things close enough to touch me. Calling somebody hadn't entered my head. I got through to emergency services. It rang longer than I wanted it to, which might have been five seconds. Vern gave me the street address, then took the phone, and explained that we were in his lower workshop, reached by the gravel lane below the house. He gave the dispatcher his full name. He said there had been an animal attack, and that two adults were hurt. When she asked what kind of animal, he looked at me. I shook my head. He told her he didn't know. The dispatcher kept him talking. She asked about the bleeding, whether either of us had been bitten, and whether the animal was still outside. Vern answered the first two. Before he could answer the third, something dragged across the upper half of the door. The sound started near the hinge and stopped at the handle. He put the phone on the workbench with the speaker on. I could see most of the room now. There was a long bench under a narrow, dirty window. A vice was bolted to one end. Shelves held cans, boxes of screws, and the sort of stuff people keep because it might be useful someday. A short aluminum extension ladder hung on hooks beside the wide front doors. Its two sections pushed together. There were boards stacked on brackets along the back wall, and several short sections of log on the floor. Up above, the roof framing was exposed. There was no ceiling between us and the metal. I asked Vern whether anybody was at his house. He said his wife, June, was out. He'd walked down to Splitwood while she did the shopping. He said his wife was staying at her house. He said she'd been at her house for a long time. He said he'd been at her house for a long time. elbow on the bench. He apologized to me, which was such a normal thing to say that I almost laughed. Then he leaned against the wall and pressed his hand over the bandage again. Blood had started coming through it. I asked if the glass would hold. He said he didn't know. I liked him more for saying that. He didn't tell me we were fine. He didn't tell me he'd dealt with something similar. He was a man who'd been splitting wood on his own property and had come down to help somebody who was yelling. He knew how the building was put together. He didn't know any more about the thing outside than I did. We moved a short cabinet against the inside of the side door, where the wood had bowed. It was awkward because it was full of tools, and neither of us could lift properly. We dragged one end, then the other, until it blocked the lower half. Vern wedged a piece of timber between the cabinet and the workbench. It wasn't perfect, but it gave us something to do. The wide doors had a horizontal wooden bar resting in brackets on either side. Vern checked it while I pushed the crate away from the opening. I asked why we were clearing space there instead of adding more stuff in front of it. He said if the side door came in, we needed somewhere to go. That was the first moment I understood he was thinking about getting out. I'd been treating the shed as the end of the problem. We'd reached walls. We'd locked a door. Someone was coming. I hadn't allowed for the possibility that the building might only buy us time. The animal went up onto the roof a little after that. We heard the weight arrive at the edge above the window. Dust sifted down from the nearest beam. There was a series of heavy shifts across the metal, then the roof dipped between two supports. I could see it dipping. The shape of its body wasn't visible, but the weight moved across one section, paused, and crossed to another. Vern looked up without moving his head much. His expression changed. He told me the roofing at the back was older. He'd replaced the front half a few years earlier and hadn't finished the rest. He said it quietly, aimed at me, while the dispatcher was asking whether we could still hear her. I said we could. My eyes stayed on the back corner of the roof. A piece of rotten wood broke loose almost immediately. It landed near the boards against the wall and broke into smaller pieces. I looked up at the place it had fallen from. A moment later, a strip of daylight appeared along the edge of the metal panel. I could see a roofing screw sticking down through the gap, with nothing around its threads. The animal had got something beneath an overlapping edge and pulled until the strip of wood beneath it gave way. The metal hadn't broken. The wood holding it down had. Vern told me to get the ladder down. I was halfway across the room when I heard the panel move again. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I looked back. Three dark fingers had come through the opening. They curled around the wooden support beneath it, and a narrow wrist followed. The fingers were longer than the gap was wide. They folded down one at a time to fit. I stopped moving. Vern raised his voice, and I kept going. The ladder was held on two brackets by a loop of cord. My hands were slick enough that I couldn't loosen it, so he came over, reached into his pocket, and cut the cord with a small knife. The ladder came down harder than either of us expected. One end hit the floor. I thought I'd brought the animal down with it and almost let go. Vern wanted to block the opening with the end of the ladder. We couldn't pull the roofing back down from where we were, but we could put something between us and the hands coming through it. Maybe that would hold it off until help arrived. We raised the collapsed ladder at a steep angle, with its upper end across the gap. The ladder was held on two brackets by a loop of cord, and I kept going. The ladder was held on two brackets by a loop of cord, and its feet braced against a timber on the floor. For a few seconds, it worked. The fingers pulled back when the end of the ladder reached them. I held it there with both arms while Vern steadied the base. I remember feeling a ridiculous amount of relief. We'd found something we could do. It couldn't put its head through without getting past the rails. Then its weight moved farther along the roof. The loose panel lifted beside the ladder, opening a gap beyond our reach. I tried to shift the upper end across, but the feet slipped off the timber. Vern shouted for me to let it down before it fell on us. We lowered it badly, with one rail scraping the bench, while more of the roofing pulled free. This time there was enough space for the face. It came through sideways. The skin around its mouth pressed against the edge of the metal without any sign that it bothered it. Its eyes moved across the room. It looked at Vern first, then me, then the wide doors behind us. The shoulders hadn't come through yet. It was hanging there with its head turned almost flat, breathing through its open mouth. I could see a thin cut on its cheek where the roofing had sliced it. Blood ran out of the cut and dripped onto the stacked boards. That was the first useful thing I'd learned about it. It could be hurt. I hadn't realized until then how much I'd been treating it as something that couldn't. It had moved so easily. It had pulled my body off the ground. It had followed us into a place that was supposed to be safe and started taking the roof apart. But the edge of a sheet of metal had cut its face, and when Vern lifted the maul toward it, it withdrew far enough to avoid the head. We weren't strong enough to fight it out in the open. That was already clear. It still didn't want to be hit. I told Vern to get the bar off the front doors. I wasn't thinking about making it all the way to his house. I wanted us out from under the opening before the thing came through it. If we could get into the work area, we could at least see where it was coming from. I told him I'd keep the ladder between us and it. He could use the maul if it got close. I didn't have anything better. He set the maul against the doorjamb and used both hands to lift the bar. It stuck in one bracket. He shifted it, tried again, and got it free. The bar fell off the floor. I stood the collapsed ladder upright. I held the rails at chest height with my body behind the middle section. It was heavy, and my wrist hurt so much that my fingers kept trying to open. I moved my grip lower and pressed one rail against my shoulder. Vern pulled one of the big doors inward. Daylight spread across the floor. I could see the wheelbarrow, the sawhorses, and the empty lane beyond them. Everything outside looked exactly the way it had when we'd come in. That bothered me more than I can explain. We were bleeding inside this building. Something was coming through the roof, and outside, there was a plastic chair waiting for somebody to sit in it. Vern picked up the maul and moved into the doorway. The animal came through the roof then. Its shoulders turned in opposite directions as it pulled itself between the supports. One arm came down to the stack of boards. The other stayed above it until the lower legs had cleared off. I cleared the gap. It didn't fall. It lowered itself, gripping the wood, and landed behind the workbench with a heavy sound that I felt through the floor. I backed toward Vern. The thing came around the end of the bench, low enough that I could see the top of its head before I could see its face. Its arms spread. One hand caught the bench leg, and it used that to pull itself forward without taking its eyes off us. I pushed the bottom of the ladder toward it. It stopped. For a second, all three of us held still. Vern was half outside, braced against the doorframe. I was just inside, with the ladder between me and the animal. The dispatcher was still speaking from the phone on the bench. I could hear her voice, but couldn't separate the words. The animal rose slightly, then lowered itself. I recognized the movement. I shoved the ladder forward before it finished doing it again. It jumped at the same time. Its head came between two of the middle rungs. The shoulders hit the rails and stopped, but the force knocked me backward. The lower end of the ladder caught against the threshold. One black hand reached around the side and closed on my forearm. I felt the fingers tighten. I saw the points begin to press into my skin. I shoved the upper end of the ladder away from my chest and leaned forward over the rails. Its feet stayed caught against the threshold, so the ladder tipped into the shed. The rung above me was still. I was still. I was still. I was still. I was still. The rung above the animal's head came down across the back of its neck. Its grip loosened enough for me to pull my arm free. It tried to back out, but I kept pushing until its front limbs buckled and it went down onto its chest. It almost got out immediately. Its head turned sideways. One shoulder began to come through after it. I dropped my knees onto the lower part of the rails, near the threshold, and felt the frame twist beneath me. I wasn't pinning the whole animal. I was keeping that one rung against the threshold. I felt the frame twist beneath me. I was keeping that one rung against the back of its neck for as long as I could. Its hands were pulling at the sides. One finger got caught between the two overlapping sections and bent backward, and it made a harsh, breathless sound directly beneath my chest. Vern hit it with the maul. The first blow landed high on its back. It jerked hard enough to lift me and the ladder together. I fell sideways, caught the rail with my left hand, and put my shoe against the lower end. I thought I'd lost it. It's mouth came around toward my wrist, and I saw the teeth close less than an inch from my skin. Vern hit it again. This time the animal's head dropped against the concrete. One hand came off the ladder and opened flat. The other kept pulling. I couldn't tell whether it was trying to get up or trying to drag itself underneath me. Vern had to lean against the doorframe before he could lift the maul a third time. I remember seeing his left leg shaking. I remember wanting to tell him to hurry and knowing he was already doing everything he could. He brought the maul down once more. The pulling stopped. I stayed where I was. My shoe was still against the ladder, my left hand locked around a rail. I could hear myself making a noise every time I breathed. I wanted to get away from it, but I was afraid that if I moved, it would move too. Vern put the maul on the floor. He gripped the back of my shirt and pulled me toward the doorway. I let go of the ladder one finger at a time. We got outside and stayed against the block wall. He slid down until he was sitting on the ground. I sat beside him, then stood up again, because I couldn't see the doorway from there. I moved a few feet out and looked inside. The animal hadn't moved. The ladder was still across it. One arm lay out to the side, palm upward. Without the body folded around it, the arm looked even longer. The rough brown covering stopped short of the wrist. I could see the scraped patches on the knuckles and the finger that had caught between the ladder sections. There was blood on the concrete under its head. I went back to Vern. He was trying to put pressure on his calf again, but his hands were shaking too much to hold the towel where he wanted it. I knelt and held it for him. The next few minutes are the least clear part of the whole thing. I know I kept looking at the door. I know Vern asked whether I could still breathe properly, and I got angry at him. I was so angry that I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. And the next, somebody was asking me to move my hands so he could see Vern's injury. We both told him to check the shed. He looked through the open door, asked what had happened, and looked again before either of us finished answering. He kept us outside. When more people arrived, they went in together. One of them brought my phone out from the workbench afterward. Nobody came running back out. Nobody shouted that it was gone. It was dead. I need to be clear about that because this isn't one of those stories that the body disappears while everyone is looking the other way. We saw it stop moving. It remained where it fell. The people who came to help found it there, and it was still there when they put Vern on a stretcher. I was taken to the hospital too. My wrist wasn't broken, although I'd badly strained it. I had cuts on my arm and hands, bruised ribs, and enough swelling around my throat that they kept checking it. For several days, swallowing anything bigger than the amount a small mouthful hurt. Vern needed surgery on his calf. He kept his leg, and he can walk normally now, but it took months before he stopped using a cane. June came to see me before I left the hospital. I expected her to be angry. Her husband had been injured helping a stranger who'd turned up on a trail behind their property. She brought me a clean shirt and asked whether there was somebody she should call to take me home. I almost cried over the shirt. Mine had been cut off, and until she handed me another one, I hadn't thought about what I was going to wear. We gave separate accounts of what happened. I told them exactly what I've told you, including the part where I stood and watched it in the tree. Vern described seeing it hit the bicycle and feeling it grab his leg. Neither of us tried to name it. The report I received described an attack by an unidentified wild animal. That's the only identification I have in writing. The body was taken from the shed later that day. June was there when it was taken away. Vern and I both asked afterward whether it had been identified. Neither of us was given a species name or a further report. I can't supply an answer we never received. I know what people will suggest. I've spent enough time looking at ordinary animals since then to have suggested most of those things to myself. None of them change what happened or how it ended. A few weeks later, I was able to see that the After a few weeks later, when Vern was home, I went to see him. We sat in his kitchen because he wasn't getting down to the shed yet. He had my helmet on the table. A neighbor helping June recover the bicycle had found it beneath a tree farther along the trail, near where I'd crashed. Most of one side was missing. The foam had been dug out in several places, and there were deep marks in the shell around the vents. I didn't bring it home. Vern asked before throwing it out, and I told him to go. I did go down to the shed with him later, after he could manage the lane. The loose roofing had been replaced. The bent ladder was gone. There were still marks in the concrete near the doorway, and I stood looking at them longer than I meant to. Vern waited without saying anything. Then he asked me to help carry a box up to the house, and I was grateful to have a reason to leave. We're still in touch. I go over for dinner every so often. June usually says, sends me home with more food than I can eat, and Vern still complains about how much the replacement roofing cost. He's allowed to. I helped pay for it, but he did most of the work, one careful trip down that lane at a time. I ride again, too. It took a while. At first, I could only manage open stretches with somebody beside me, and I'd get off the bike if anything large moved overhead. I'm better than that now. I haven't ridden that particular section again, and I don't feel any need to prove it. I haven't ridden that particular section again, What stays with me most is still the first minute. I had one foot on the ground and both hands resting on the handlebars. I was looking at a dark shape on a thick branch, trying to decide whether it was something worth telling anybody about. I couldn't see its hands from there. I couldn't see how its legs were folded beneath it. All I could see was that slow movement and the branch bending under its weight. I had plenty of time to leave, and I couldn't see it. All I could see was that I stood there trying to make it into an owl. Vern got home to June. I got to go home, too. Whatever came down out of that tree died on the floor of his shed, and it never got close to either of us again. 20th Century Studios presents Whale Fall, the most incredible survival thriller of the year. In theaters Friday, to survive the unthinkable, do the impossible. You're going to become so dangerous that the predators can't help but let you go. Austin Abrams. I'm going home. Josh Brolin. Survivor, survivor. Whale Fall. Rated PG-13. In theaters Friday. Get tickets now. How far would you go when someone threatens everyone you love? Who can you trust? From Academy Award winner Ben Affleck. Animals stars Affleck, Kerry Washington, Jillian Anderson, and Steven Yeun. When a Los Angeles mayor, candidate's son is kidnapped, he and his wife are pulled into a web of deception, forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. Watch Animals, now playing in select theaters and on Netflix, rated R. Tap the banner to learn more. I booked the trail ride because Marisol had been asking me to go for three years, and I had run out of excuses that sounded believable. She grew up around horses. I had been on one exactly once, at a birthday party when I was eight. She promised this wasn't going to be some wild trip into the backcountry. We'd follow a guide, eat lunch at an overlook, and be back at the stable before late afternoon. That was the plan when we met Coulter at the stable outside Richfield, Utah, on a clear Friday in September. He drove us and the horses to a trailhead on Monroe Mountain. There were three of us on the road. We were all on the road. We were on the road. We were on the road. I was 35. Marisol was 38, and Coulter was 47. None of us had been drinking or doing anything else that could explain what we saw. I'm Adrian. I sold appliances for a living then. I wasn't an outdoorsman, and I didn't know enough about horses to impress anyone. That's important, because Coulter and Marisol did know what they were doing. When both of them became afraid, I wasn't reacting. I wasn't reacting to my own lack of experience anymore. The stable used several permitted routes in Fish Lake National Forest. Our loop crossed open mountain meadows and long sections of aspen. It was supposed to take a little under five hours with the lunch stop. Then we'd load the horses and drive back. The horses had done it many times. I rode a brown gelding named Banner. Marisol had a gray mare called Pepper, and Coulter rode a black gelding named Boone. The stable was a little bit different. described Banner as an animal who'd rather stop than make a bad decision. Coulter checked my saddle twice, showed me how to hold the reins without wrapping them around my hand, and explained what to do if Banner stumbled. Each horse wore a halter beneath its bridle, with a lead rope tied out of the way. Coulter carried the first aid supplies and extra water in Boone's saddlebags. A can of bear spray sat in a holster beside his saddle, with a spare packed in one of the bags. Banner's small saddlebags held bottled water. Marisol had a lunch bag fastened behind her saddle. I carried almost nothing. The first hour was easy. We climbed at a slow walk. Marisol kept asking whether I was comfortable. Banner followed Pepper without needing much direction from me. The trail entered a stand of white-barked trees and narrowed. Fallen leaves covered the ground in yellow patches. Coulter rode ahead, ducking branches and pointing out places where elk crossed. He said, The animals used the higher meadows during that part of the season. We saw the first elk less than ten minutes later. It was a cow, and it crossed the trail well ahead of us. I only saw it for a few seconds. It came out of the trees at a hard run, went down the slope, and disappeared into thicker cover. Banner raised his head. Pepper shifted sideways. Boone stopped completely. Coulter waited and watched the place the elk had come from. I asked whether something might be following it. He said maybe, but elk moved for all kinds of reasons. He didn't sound concerned. We gave the horses a moment and continued. The next part of the route ran along a broad slope. We could see across a meadow to another band of trees. There was no one else on the trail. That wasn't unusual on a weekday, according to Coulter. The stable knew which route we were taking and when to expect us. I found that reassuring. Banner began looking back over his right side. At first I thought he was checking my leg. He'd turn his head enough that I could see one eye, then face forward again. After the fourth or fifth time, Marisol noticed it too. She asked if he was irritated by the saddlebag. Coulter rode back and checked the straps. Nothing was loose. He ran a hand along Banner's side, looked under the saddle, and told me the horse was fine. We moved on. Banner kept looking back. I started doing the same thing. All I saw was the trail, the white trunks, and a few low bushes shifting in the breeze. I could see a long way between the trees. Nothing large should have been able to follow us without appearing somewhere. At the far end of the meadow, Coulter raised one hand and stopped. There was another elk near the tree line. A bull this time. It wasn't running. It stood broadside for several seconds, staring past us toward the trail we'd just used. Then it turned and went uphill at a quick trot. Marisol said it hadn't looked at us once. Coulter agreed. He said there might be another rider behind us, or cattle moving through the lower section. He had seen no fresh sign of either, but those were reasonable possibilities. He suggested we wait in the open and let whatever was moving catch up or pass around us. We stopped near a low rail used as a hitching point. Coulter and Marisol dismounted, and she helped me down because my right leg had gone stiff. Coulter tied the horses with enough room to stand comfortably. We drank water and watched the route behind us. For almost fifteen minutes, nothing came out of the trees. The horses didn't relax. Boone stood with his head high and his ears aimed back. Pepper kept shifting her weight. Banner pressed close enough to the rail that one stirrup rubbed against it. Coulter walked to the edge of the meadow and crouched near the trail. He picked something off a branch and studied it. It was hair. Dark, coarse strands caught on broken bark at about the height of his shoulder. I asked if it was from a bear. He rubbed it between his fingers and said it could be. He didn't sound convinced, but he put it down, rather than carrying it with us. He checked the ground and found a place where something had pressed into the damp soil beside the trail. The edge was clear, but the middle had been disturbed by leaves. It was longer than Coulter's boot and wider at the front. I could see rounded impressions where toes might have been, though I also understood that overlapping animal tracks can look like almost anything. Marisol suggested a bear's front and rear paws had landed in nearly the same place. Coulter said that was possible. He stood and looked uphill. The route ahead would bring us to the lunch overlook. One loop down by a different trail. Going back meant riding toward whatever had unsettled the horses. Going forward meant adding more distance before we reached the trailhead. He decided to continue to the next junction and take a shorter route back to the trailhead from there. We would skip the overlook and eat after we got back. That sounded sensible to all of us. When Coulter untied Boone, the horse pulled back hard enough to tighten the rope. Coulter spoke quietly and waited until he settled. "Banner let me mount, but he wouldn't move until Pepper went first." "We left the meadow in a tight line. Coulter rode at the front, Marisol behind him, and I stayed last. I didn't like being at the back, but Banner wouldn't pass Pepper. Whenever I tried to bring him alongside, he slowed and dropped behind her again. The forest grew denser on that side of the slope. I could no longer see far between the trunks. The ground fell away to our left into a shallow basin. To the right, broken rock and tree roots climbed toward the ridge. We had gone maybe half a mile when something moved above us. I saw a dark section pass between two white trunks. It was too high to be a deer. I thought it was a rider on a dark horse, except I hadn't seen a horse's head or the separation between animal and rider. I called to Coulter. He looked back, and I pointed uphill. By then, the space was empty. Marisol asked what I'd seen. I told her a person, maybe. I said I couldn't be sure. Coulter called out a greeting toward the slope. Nobody answered. He called again and identified us as riders from the stable. Still nothing. We kept moving. I had begun to feel foolish when Pepper stopped so suddenly that Marisol leaned over her neck. All three horses were looking uphill. The black figure stood among the trees about seventy yards away. It was upright. That was the first thing I could be certain of. Its shoulders were above a low branch that would have been over my head. Its arms hung beside its body. Dark hair covered the chest and legs. But I couldn't see a face from that distance. I thought it was a person in a heavy coat. Then it stepped sideways. Its knee bent. One long foot came down on the slope, and the body shifted behind it. It was standing behind another trunk. The movement was smooth and balanced. It didn't drop onto four legs, and there was no animal beneath it. Marisol asked Coulter what it was. He told us to keep the horses facing downhill and not make a sudden move. The figure came into view again. It had moved closer without crossing the open space between the trees where I had expected to see it. Its head sat low between wide shoulders. The arms reached well below its hips. Coulter drew the bear spray from its holster and held it down beside his leg. He didn't point it at the animal. He told us we were going to walk the horses forward, one at a time, and not run. Boone took two steps. The figure rushed downhill. It didn't come directly at us. It moved across the slope, cutting toward the trail ahead. Pepper spun away from it and crowded against Banner. He backed toward the trail edge. Boone reared, and Coulter was able to see the figure. He was able to see the figure. face. The forehead was low, the skin around the eyes dark, and the mouth was a flat line beneath a broad nose. It wasn't wearing anything I could identify. Marisol followed my stare and saw it. She told Coulter it was still there. He said we needed to get off that trail. There was an old sheep corral lower on the mountain. Coulter had pointed it out on the way up, though we hadn't passed directly beside it. A narrow connector trail left our route at the next bend and crossed a meadow to the corral. From there, an old service track ran toward a lower road. The stable used it only when something went wrong. Something had gone wrong. The problem was getting Coulter onto a horse. He couldn't move his right arm. Every time he tried to stand, his breath caught and he sat back down. Boone was somewhere ahead of us. Pepper kept looking. Pepper kept sidestepping, and I was still holding her reins from Banner's back. Marisol asked Coulter whether she should try to put the shoulder back. He told her no. Neither of us had training for it, and he was worried about making the injury worse. He could walk if we helped him up, but he couldn't climb into a saddle from the ground. We needed Boone. I could no longer see the creature. That didn't make me feel better. The horses kept looking toward the same patch of tree, and I couldn't see the creature. Marisol told me to stay mounted and hold Pepper. She helped Coulter stand by taking his left arm and letting him push against the tree with his legs. Once he was upright, he leaned against Banner's shoulder. Banner didn't move. That horse may have saved Coulter before we ever started down. Marisol walked ahead around the bend and called Boone's name. A few seconds later, she called back that she had him. His reins had caught on a low branch, which had stopped him from going farther. She freed them and led him toward us. The black gelding had a scrape on one hind leg, but he was putting weight on it. His saddle had shifted slightly. Marisol loosened it, reset the pad, and tightened the girth while Coulter watched. I kept checking uphill. The creature appeared on the trail we'd already traveled. It stood in the middle of it, fully visible this time. I can't tell you its exact height, because there was no sign of it. There was nothing beside it of known size. Coulter later estimated more than seven feet. That seems conservative to me. It had a heavy torso, long arms, and dark brown hair with lighter areas across the chest. Its hands hung partly closed. The fingers were distinct. It watched Marisol work on Boone's saddle. I said her name quietly. She looked up, saw it, and stopped moving. Coulter told her to finish the saddle, she did. Her hands were shaking, but she pulled the strap through and checked it twice. She also untied Boone's lead rope from his saddle so she could hold it separately from his reins. We brought him next to a fallen trunk at the edge of the trail. Coulter stepped onto the trunk with his left foot while Marisol steadied him. I held Boone's reins from Banner's back. Getting him into the saddle was ugly. He couldn't use his injured arm, and Boone shifted when Coulter put weight on the left stirrup. Marisol pushed from below. Coulter got his right leg over, almost slid off the other side, and managed to settle upright. The creature hadn't moved. Coulter told me to lead. He was afraid Boone would bolt if he stayed in front, and Marisol needed to stay close in case he lost his balance. She took Pepper's reins from me and mounted, then gathered Boone's lead rope in her free hand. I didn't want the job. At first, Banner tried to turn toward Pepper. Marisol brought her alongside him and kept him in his hands. I didn't want her there until he started down toward the bend. Once he was moving, she let Pepper drop back beside Boone. We went around the bend. The connector trail was barely more than a break in the ground cover. It descended between trees for a short distance, then opened into a long meadow. I could see the corral near the lower end. It was a rectangle of weathered rails and wire with a loading chute attached to one side, a small roof-covered part of the chute. Beyond it, the server was on the other side of the chute. The server was on the other side of the chute. The service track curved out of sight. We had to cross nearly half a mile of open ground. That should have made me feel safer. It didn't. The meadow exposed us from every direction, and Coulter could barely stay centered in his saddle. If Boone ran, Coulter would fall again. If the creature followed, there was nowhere close to hide. Banner walked steadily. Pepper stayed beside Boone. We were a third of the way across when Marisol looked back. The creature was at the edge of the trees. It didn't rush into the meadow. It moved parallel to us inside the cover, appearing between trunks and disappearing again. Even at that distance, its pace was faster than ours. Coulter saw it and told us not to increase speed. The horses were already close to panic. Asking them to run with an injured rider could scatter all three of us. We kept walking. Halfway across, the figure dropped out of sight behind a low-lying tree. I watched the spot until my neck hurt. It didn't come back up. Then Banner stopped. There was a ditch in front of us. It wasn't deep, but the grass concealed its near edge. Banner tested the ground and refused the straight crossing. I turned him along it, searching for a lower place. Pepper began pulling at her reins. Marisol said something was behind us. The creature had entered the meadow. It was running upright. Its arms moved with each stride. It wasn't charging in a straight line. It angled toward the corral, as if it understood where we were going and meant to reach it first. I kicked Banner harder than I should have. He jumped the ditch. I lost both stirrups but stayed on. Pepper followed. Boone tried to jump from too close, struck the far bank with his front hooves, and came down on his knees. Coulter pitched forward over the saddle. Marisol was off Pepper before Boone stood. She caught Coulter around the waist while his feet were still in the stirrups and braced him long enough for the horse to get upright. He made a sound I don't want to hear again. The shoulder wasn't the only thing hurting by then. The creature was still coming. I turned Banner back toward them. Coulter was hunched over the saddle horn but still seated. Marisol caught Pepper's reins, put her left foot in the stirrup, and hauled herself back into the saddle again. I waited until she told me to go. The horses didn't need encouragement after that. Banner moved at a fast trot toward the corral. Pepper stayed behind him. Boone came last with Coulter bent low over the saddle. We reached the gate before the creature. The corral gate was made from metal tubing and sagged at one hinge. It was held by a chain looped over a post. I dismounted and fumbled with it while Banner pressed against my back. My fingers felt thick and useless. Marisol shouted that it was close. I lifted the chain free and pulled the gate inward. Banner crowded through. Pepper followed. Boone hesitated at the opening and Marisol urged Pepper forward until Boone followed the lead rope through. I dragged the gate closed and put the chain back over the post. The creature stopped outside the corral. It was less than thirty yards away, close enough that it could have been that none of us tried to call it a bear. Its face was bare from the eyes to the upper lip. Dark skin showed beneath the hair. The head was rounder than a bear's and sat forward on the shoulders. Its chest rose and fell from the run. The mouth opened slightly, and I could see flat front teeth. It looked at each horse, then at us. Marisol got down from Pepper. The horses pressed into the far corner, and she let their leads hang rather than tying them. Coulter remained in Boone's saddle, because we couldn't get him down safely without something to stand on. The creature walked to the gate. It reached one hand through the metal tubes and closed its fingers around the chain. I backed away. Marisol took the bear spray from her jacket. She asked Coulter how close it needed to be. He told her to get ready and keep the horses behind her. The creature pulled the chain upward. It came free of the post. The gate moved several inches before it stopped. It was a long, long way from the gate. Its lower corner caught in the dirt. I lunged forward and put the chain back, wrapping it twice instead of once. The creature's hand swept between the bars. I felt air move past my jacket as I fell backward. Marisol sprayed. An orange cloud struck the creature across the cheek and upper chest. Marisol kept the trigger down as it released the gate and turned away. One long arm covered its face. It went down on one knee, then pushed itself upright and moved toward the trees. She finally let go of the trigger. I could hear her coughing, and my own eyes had started to water. We watched until it entered the cover. I expected it to return immediately. Coulter did too. He told us to use the time. The service track began on the other side of the corral. There was another gate there, this one made from wood and wire. It opened toward the track. We would have to cross the enclosure and get through it quickly. Before we moved, Coulter asked Marisol to check Boone. The gelding's front knees were scraped from the ditch. No bone showed. and he was bearing weight, but blood ran through the short hair. Colter said Boone could walk. He didn't want anyone riding him if there was another choice. There wasn't an easy choice. Colter could barely stay upright without help, and we still had several miles to go. One of us would have to walk if we took him off Boone. I offered, but Marisol said she'd have a better chance of keeping Colter steady from the ground than I would. Marisol proposed moving Colter to Pepper. She would walk beside the mare and steady him if he slipped. I would get back on Banner and lead Boone from the saddle. Colter said it could work if Boone followed quietly. That kept weight off his scraped knees and left Marisol close to Colter. We used the loading chute to transfer him. The roofed section had rails close together and a raised platform on one side. Marisol brought Pepper alongside. Colter lowered himself from Boone onto the platform. Nearly fainted, then eased onto Pepper with Marisol supporting his good side. The transfer took too long. By the time Marisol reached the ground again, the creature had returned to the meadow. It kept farther away now. It walked upright along the ditch we'd crossed, stopping to inspect the place where Boone had fallen. Then it turned toward the trail we intended to use. It wasn't confused by the spray. It was thinking about us. Colter said the track, led through a strip of forest before reaching another meadow. If the creature entered those trees first, it could approach us without crossing open ground. We had to leave before it reached them. Marisol opened the far gate. I had remounted Banner, and I guided him through while holding Boone's lead in my other hand. Managing both animals from the saddle was harder than it sounds. Boone wanted to stay near Pepper. Banner wanted to leave. I kept having to stop Banner and wait for Boone to catch up. Colter sat on Pepper. He held the saddle horn with his left hand. Marisol led her from the ground. We entered the service track. The creature changed direction immediately. It moved toward the forest at a run. We had maybe two hundred yards before the track entered the trees. Banner started forward so abruptly that Boone's lead slipped through my hand. Boone stopped and turned back toward Pepper. I called to Marisol. She brought me back to Pepper. I called to Marisol. I called to Marisol. Colter told us to go back to the corral. None of us wanted to, but the open enclosure was the only place where we could see the creature approach, and the spray had made it retreat once. We turned around and went back through the gate. The corral didn't feel like shelter anymore. It felt like a place we had already shown the creature how to open. Marisol rewound the chain around the metal gate and secured the far gate with its wire loop. I got down from Banner and helped her ease Colter from Pepper onto the loading platform. He sat with his back against the chute rail, breathing through his teeth. The horses stayed close together in the middle of the enclosure. The creature didn't appear on the service track. For several minutes, nothing moved outside the corral. The meadow was bright and open. I could see the ditch, the upper forest, and our original trail. The afternoon looked entirely normal. Colter said the stable would start looking if we were more than an hour late, but we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see anything. We couldn't get back from the ride. That was still at least two hours away. The beacon should bring a response sooner, but we couldn't count on how soon. The lower road was probably three miles down the service track. Waiting could bring help, but only if the creature didn't come through a gate first. Marisol asked whether there was another way out. Colter pointed toward a broad ridge beyond the lower meadow. On its far side was a maintained road used by ranchers and forest crews. It was a longer way to reach the same road, but most of it crossed open grazing land. He'd ridden through that pasture years before, though it wasn't part of the stable's regular route. There was no trail from the corral. The grass concealed ditches and holes. Riding fast would be dangerous. Walking slowly would leave us exposed. We decided to wait 20 minutes. If the creature stayed out of sight, we would try the open route. If it returned to the gate, we would use the spray and move while it recovered. I checked the emergency beacon on my jacket. Its indicator was still flashing. I asked whether we should stay where we'd first turned it on so someone could find us. Colter said to leave it running. It would keep sending updated locations, and the open meadow gave it a clearer view of the sky than we'd had on the trail. The stable owner was listed as his emergency contact. Whoever received the alert would have someone to ask about our route. He also said that we needed to assume help was still hours away. The creature appeared beside the loading chute. It had approached from the lower side, where the rising ground and wooden rails blocked our view. One moment the space was empty. The next, its head and shoulders were above the outer wall. Colter saw it first. He told us to move away from the chute. Marisol helped him shuffle along the platform toward its inner end, away from the outer wall. The creature put both hands on the rail and shoved. The wood flexed inward. It was not climbing. It was testing the structure. Marisol raised the spray canister. She'd held the trigger down for several seconds at the gate. Colter told me to get the spare from Boone's saddlebag while she watched the creature. Boone stood in the middle of the corral with the other horses. I moved toward him. The creature shoved again. One end of the canister was still attached at the other end. The opening beneath it was wide enough for the creature's shoulders. I reached Boone and opened the saddlebag. The spare spray was under a folded first aid cloth. I pulled it out and turned. The creature was halfway through the broken section. It came on all fours at first, placing one hand on the loading platform. Then it straightened. Marisol sprayed what remained in her can. The stream fell short and broke apart before reaching its face. The creature flinched, but kept coming. I stepped between it and Colter. I raised the second can, tugged at the safety clip, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. I hadn't pulled the clip all the way free. It was still wedged beneath the trigger. I tore it loose as the creature reached for Marisol. She dropped under the arm and ran toward the horses. I pressed again. The spray hit the creature's neck and lower face from less than ten feet away. Some of it came back at me. My eyes burned, but I could still see its arm coming up. It swung one arm and struck my shoulder. I went down beside the platform. The can left my hand. My right side went numb from my neck to my elbow. The creature turned away from the spray, stumbled into the chute rail, and struck it hard enough to loosen another board. Marisol grabbed the can from the ground and sprayed again. The creature retreated through the opening. It dropped outside. It moved several yards on all fours, then stood and ran toward the upper trees. We didn't wait twenty minutes. Coulter told us to take the open route to the road. He hadn't recovered. He could barely get up from the platform, but he said he'd walk as far as he could if we helped him. None of us could keep him in a saddle if the horses panicked again. The creature knew how to enter the corral, and we had used most of both spray canisters. Marisol helped him down from the loading platform with the can. His good arm around her shoulders. His legs held, though he couldn't stand straight. I tried to help on his injured side and discovered my own right arm wasn't working properly. I could move my fingers, but lifting at the shoulder sent pain across my back. Marisol looked from one of us to the other and said she had always wanted two helpless men depending on her at once. That was the only joke any of us made after we saw the creature. It wasn't especially funny, but it broke the feeling that we were waiting for the next attack. Marisol stripped off Boone's saddle first, then she removed peppers and banners. Coulter said to leave them so there was less weight on Boone and less gear to catch if we had to let the horses go. It took several minutes. I watched the broken rails with the remaining spray in my left hand while she worked. She removed the bridles too, leaving the halters and their lead ropes. We left the saddles and lunch at the corral. She put the first aid kit and water in a small bag, slung it over her shoulder, and took back the spray. Marisol gave me Banner's lead, took pepper, and passed Boone's to Coulter's good hand. Boone walked carefully, but didn't favor either front leg as much as I expected. Coulter could manage on the gentler ground without leaning on Marisol, though he was already falling behind. The lower livestock gate opened into the meadow. Marisol went first and checked the ground. I followed with Banner. Coulter and Boone came last. We angled toward the ridge instead of the service track. The route crossed waist-high grass in places. Hidden dips forced us to change direction several times. We moved slowly, but we could see the upper tree line and most of the open slope. For the first quarter mile, the creature didn't show itself. The emergency beacon remained clipped to my jacket. Its indicator continued to flash. I kept looking down to make sure it hadn't stopped, even though checking it did nothing to bring help faster. The horses were eager to keep moving. Banner seemed to understand that we were leaving. When I stumbled, he stopped, giving me time to find my balance without pulling the rope tight. Pepper walked close beside Marisol. We reached a wire fence that divided two grazing sections. There was no gate where we met it. The strands were fixed to wooden posts and had enough tension that we couldn't push them down safely for the horses. Coulter said there should be a gate uphill, closer to the forest. I didn't want to go uphill. None of us did. But following the fence downhill would take us away from the ridge and into a narrow basin. We could see less ground there. We turned toward the trees. The gate was perhaps 300 yards away. It looked small against the open slope. I focused on it, and tried not to search every gap between the trunks. Pepper saw the creature before we did. She stopped and backed toward Marisol, who moved out of her way. Boone raised his head. Banner jerked against the rope in my left hand, and I had to step toward him to keep my grip. The creature stood just inside the forest, uphill from the gate. Its face and chest were wet from the spray. Dark hair clung together around the neck. It rubbed one side of its face against its forearm, then lowered the arm and looked at us. We were closer to the gate than it was, but only by a little. Marisol said we should move without running. Coulter agreed. We led the horses along the fence as fast as we could manage. The creature came out of the trees. It didn't run at us. It moved down toward the gate, matching our pace. That was worse. Whatever it had learned from the earlier attacks, it was now moving toward the only opening we could use. The gate was made of wire stretched inside a metal frame. A chain held it to the post. There was no other barrier, no corral, and nothing we could use for cover. Marisol reached it first. She passed Pepper's lead to me and worked the chain free. I held Banner and Pepper with my left hand. Once she'd opened the gate far enough, I led them through. They pressed in opposite directions, nearly pulling me off my feet. I stopped and looked at the creature. It was a creature. It was a creature. It was a creature. I stopped them a few yards beyond the gate, while Marisol held it for the others. Coulter and Boone were still fifty yards away. The creature was closer to them than to us. Coulter let go of Boone's lead. The gelding didn't leave. Coulter slapped his side and told him to go. Boone took several steps toward us and looked back. The creature changed course toward the horse. Boone finally ran. He came through the opening before Marisol had pulled the gate fully wide. His shoulder struck the gate. Boone ran. Boone ran. Boone ran. Boone ran. Boone struck the frame and knocked it back against the hinge post. As he swung his head away from it, a loose end of the wire mesh caught through a metal ring on his halter. Boone lunged forward. The gate twisted on its hinges and swung across most of the opening, dragging his head sideways. His body blocked the gap that remained. Coulter was on the wrong side. Marisol tried to free the caught ring. Boone kept pulling against it. I looped Banner's and Pepper's leads once around a fence. I pulled the gate. I pulled the gate. I pulled the gate. I pulled the gate. To keep them close and went to help with my left hand. Coulter reached the opening. He couldn't squeeze past Boone without getting beneath the horse's scrambling legs. He tried to climb the fence beside the gate, but he couldn't pull himself up with one arm and the pain across his ribs. He dropped back to the ground. The creature was less than thirty yards away. Marisol took out the spray. She told Coulter to get behind the gate post. He pressed himself against it while she aimed through the wire. The creature stopped outside the useful range. It knew what the can did. Boone struggled again. The bent frame shifted against the post. The ring wouldn't come free. Marisol tried to cut the halter's cheek strap with the small knife from the first aid kit. The nylon was wet with sweat, and she couldn't hold it steady while Boone kept throwing his head. I pulled the wire panel toward me with my left hand. When it wouldn't move far enough, I tried to brace it with my right forearm. Pain ran through my shoulder. I lost my hold, and the frame sprang back. The creature moved closer. Coulter picked up a broken piece of wood from the ground. He held it in his left hand and made himself face the creature. He didn't shout. He didn't have the breath for it. He stood there with one shoulder hanging wrong and a piece of wood that wouldn't have stopped anything. Banner pushed past me. His lead had stopped. His lead had slipped loose from the post. Boone swung his hindquarters away from the opening, and Banner shoved into the space he'd left. His weight forced the bent gate farther open. The wire scraped along his flank. Coulter caught the post and moved out of his way. Banner was outside with him now. His head turned back toward the other horses. The creature came at them. Banner tried to turn through the gate, but Boone was still across it. Banner swung his hindquarters toward the other horses. He turned back toward the other horses. Banner turned toward the other horses. The creature came within a few steps. Banner kicked. Both rear hooves struck the creature high on the chest. The impact lifted it enough that its arms spread. It fell backward onto the grass. Coulter slipped through the space Banner had forced open and came to my side of the fence. Boone stopped fighting for a moment. Marisol got her fingers under the halter strap and cut through it on the third pull of the knife. She peeled the broken halter off, his head. He backed away from the gate and came toward Pepper. Banner remained outside. Marisol pulled the gate as far open as its bent frame would allow. I called him. He was moving stiffly after the kick. The creature rolled onto one side and pushed up with its arms. Marisol called him too and stood clear of the opening. Banner stepped through to join Pepper and Boone. His flank had a long surface scrape from the wire, but no deep cut. I caught him, his trailing lead. Marisol dragged the gate shut and wound the chain around the post. She unwound Pepper's lead from the fence post and passed it to Coulter. Then she stayed beside Boone, who no longer had a halter. He followed Pepper when she moved. The fence would not stop the creature. We all knew that, but Banner's kick had. The creature remained on the ground for nearly a minute. When it finally stood, it bent forward and held one arm across its head. It was a very strong kick. It followed us along the fence without crossing. We walked toward the ridge. The ground rose gradually, giving us a wider view. The road was still hidden on the other side. The creature stayed behind the fence for several hundred yards. There were places it could have climbed or pushed through. It didn't. It paced us, stopping whenever we stopped. I don't believe it was frightened of the wire. The corral had shown otherwise. I think it was afraid of the wire. I think it was hurt. I think it had decided the horses could injure it again. We still had more than a mile to the road. Coulter's condition worsened. His face had lost color, and he began taking short, uneven steps. He passed me Pepper's lead. Marisol put his good arm over her shoulders. I held both ropes in my left hand and kept my injured arm close to my body. Boone followed Pepper without a rope. When he stopped, we all stopped until he came on again. At the top of the ridge, we finally saw the road below us, a pale line through the open grass. The creature stopped following. It stood by the fence and watched us descend. In the full light, at a distance of perhaps a hundred yards, it looked less like a person than ever. The torso was too long. The head projected forward. One hand nearly reached its knee, even while the elbow remained slightly bent. I didn't see it leave. The ground turned and the ridge blocked our view. The road was still farther than it had looked. Distances are hard to judge in open country. We walked down through low brush and crossed another shallow ditch. Boone's knees had stopped bleeding, but all three horses were tired. When we finally reached the road, there was no vehicle in sight. The surface was compacted dirt wide enough for a truck. Coulter knew it eventually connected with the road back toward Richfield, but he'd never driven this stretch and wasn't sure how far it was to the next junction. None of us could face walking farther without knowing that. We decided to stay where the emergency beacon could lead someone to us. There was a broad turnout on the downhill side. Marisol brought the horses into it and had them face the direction we'd come. I helped Coulter sit with his back against the bank. We cleaned the worst scrapes on Boone and Banner with what remained in the first aid bag. Then we waited. I kept expecting the creature to appear on the ridge. It never did. About 40 minutes later, we heard an engine below us. A stable pickup came around the bend with a three-horse trailer behind it. The owner was driving. A county deputy sat beside him. The beacon's emergency center had notified the county and reached the stable owner. The first location had put us on the trail. Later updates showed us moving through the pasture toward the lower road. The owner knew the access roads and had offered to take a deputy up in his truck with the trailer. They'd been working their way toward us while we were still on the ridge. The owner took one look at Coulter and helped him into the truck. The deputy told us an ambulance would meet us farther down, where the road was better. They used a spare halter from the trailer for Boone and loaded the horses. Banner resisted until Marisol went up the ramp ahead of him. Once all three were secured, she stepped out and joined us in the cabin. The owner drove us down to the ambulance. I gave my account after we'd been checked by the medical crew. The deputy spoke to us separately. Later, he told me that Marisol and Coulter had also described an upright animal, the approach to the corral gate, and the attack beside the chute. Our estimates of its height differed. Our descriptions of the face differed in small ways. The main facts did not. Coulter had a dislocated shoulder. Two cracked ribs, and a severe bruise across his hip. The hospital treated the shoulder that evening. He spent the night for observation, and went home the next day. My shoulder wasn't broken. The creature's arm had struck the top of it and damaged a nerve temporarily. I wore a sling for several days and did exercises for months. Marisol had bruises from supporting Coulter, but no serious injury. Boone's knees required cleaning and bandaging. Banner's wire scrape was shallow. Both horses recovered. The stable owner and two deputies went back the following morning. At the corral, they found the broken rails and our saddles. Farther across the pasture, they found the bent gate with part of Boone's cut halter still caught in the wire. There were large impressions in the soft ground near the chute, but the area had also been crossed by horses and cattle. No single mark proved what made it. They collected a few strands of hair caught on the broken rail. The stable owner paid to have the hair sent to a private lab. What he told us afterward was that the sample contained hair from more than one animal, and hadn't yielded a usable identification for the strands he was interested in. I never saw the report myself. I mention it because people often ask whether anyone tested anything. The stable closed that loop for the rest of the season. Before it reopened the following year, the damaged corral was removed by the land manager and the pasture gate was replaced. The stable also changed its procedures, so each group carried a two-way satellite communicator, as well as a backup beacon. Guides had to check in during the ride, not just when they returned. I never learned what the creature was. People have called it Bigfoot when I've told the story. That name is as close as anything I have, but I can't use it as proof. I can only tell you it walked on its own, it walked on two legs, used its hands on a chain and rail, learned to avoid the spray, and stayed behind the fence after Banner kicked it. There wasn't another encounter connected to ours. No one followed us home. Coulter never reported seeing it again, and neither did the stable owner. The danger ended on that mountain. Coulter stopped guiding after his shoulder healed. He said the fall had made an old back injury worse, and that he had been considering a change already. Marisol remained friends with him, and kept riding with the stable on easier routes. I didn't ride again. That used to embarrass me. Marisol never made it into a failure. She said I had stayed on Banner when she needed me to, and helped get three horses down a mountain with one useful arm. Whether I returned to a saddle wasn't the measure of what happened. The stable retired Banner from guest rides that winter. He was healthy, but he'd been working for many years, and the owner decided the mountain had asked enough of him. Marisol and I visited in the spring. Banner was in a pasture near the stable with two older horses. I stood outside the fence while she went in. He came over anyway and put his head above the top rail. I scratched the flat place between his eyes. I don't know whether he recognized me after that one ride. He stayed until I took my hand away. Then he turned back toward the other horses, and we let him go. The ball is back, and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. What you want? PrizePix. Run your game. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, 3 cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork, and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for 6 months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. First off, I would like to remind whoever is reading this that all of these stories are 100% true and happened to me personally, so there is no lying here. Also, I don't know why, but I feel almost compelled to tell my experiences and I hope that someone out there can relate to them or at least get a kick out of them. I've had a run-in with a skinwalker. Let me tell you that it is not easy to talk about, let alone write about, because just thinking about it gets me scared all over again. My hands are sweating while I type this, so I'm going to tell you about the night I saw one, which also happened to be the first time I had ever heard of one. I've told bits and pieces of this before, but I've never told the whole thing, start to finish, including how it ended. I think it's time. A little background about me. I live in Utah, and all of my experiences happened while I was still living at home with my parents. I grew up about an hour outside of Salt Lake City in farming country, so I was raised on a farm. We grew hay and some corn, and we ran about 40 head of beef cattle, plus whatever calves we had going that year. My mom kept chickens, and there was always a barn cat or three that nobody would admit to feeding. I'm the only girl, and I have four brothers. Growing up, I used to go hunting, with my dad and my brothers four or more times a year. Deer in the fall, elk when somebody drew a tag, ducks on the reservoir, and coyotes pretty much any time dad got fed up with them. So between hunting, camping, and growing up on a farm, I know my animals pretty well. I can tell you what a fox sounds like when it screams at night. I can tell a coyote track from a dog track in the mud. I can tell you when a cow is about to calve just by how she's standing. I'm saying, I'm saying all this so you understand. I'm not some city girl who got spooked by a raccoon. To start the story, it was seven years ago, in the middle of October. I was 18 years old, and my boyfriend, who is now my husband, was 21. For the sake of privacy, we will call him Rob. He is half Spanish and half Irish. One thing to know about Rob is that he is a pretty big boy. He's six feet tall, 260 pounds, and back then, he was a football star. He lived all the way down in Salt Lake, but he would still drive up every single day to see me after we both got off work. That's an hour each way, and gas was not cheap. He was a real trooper. Our property sat at the end of a long dirt lane off the county road. There were only two houses on that lane: ours and the Osler's. Gary Osler was an old widower who'd farmed the ground next to ours since before I was born. His house sat maybe 70 yards from ours, just across the fence line, and behind the fence line, Behind it, he had a big field of hay that ran all the way back to the irrigation canal. Past the canal, there was nothing but sagebrush and foothills for miles. That fall, Gary had hired a man to help him with the last cutting of hay and to fix up some fence line before winter. Gary was getting up there in years and couldn't do it all himself anymore. The man's name was Lyle. That's all anybody ever called him. I never heard a last name. He showed up sometime in late September, and Gary let him stay in an old camp trailer parked behind his barn in exchange for work. I didn't like Lyle. I couldn't have told you why at the time. He never said anything rude to me. He never really said anything to me at all. But in the mornings, when I went out to feed the calves before work, he'd be standing at the fence between our two properties, just standing there with his arms at his sides. He wouldn't wave. He wouldn't nod. He'd just watch me the whole time I was out there, and when I went back inside, he'd still be standing there. My younger brother Sam said I was being dramatic and that the guy was probably just shy. My mom said the same thing. So I let it go, mostly. I started feeding the calves a little later in the morning, after I figured Lyle would be out in Gary's fields working. The other thing I remember from that week, and I didn't think anything of it until later, was our dog. We had an old red heeler named Bandit. Bandit was about 11 years old, and he'd been a working dog his whole life. He wasn't scared of anything. I'd watched that dog get kicked by a cow and go right back in after her. But about three or four days before what I'm about to tell you, Bandit stopped leaving the back porch at night. He wouldn't go out in the yard after dark at all. He'd lie right up against the back door, and if you tried to call him out to the barn, he'd just look at you and whine. He'd just look at you and whine. Dad figured he was getting old, and his hips were hurting him. That made sense, so nobody thought much about it. Well, one night that week, Rob wasn't feeling too good. He'd been fighting off some kind of cold, and he had to be at work early the next day, so he decided to take off a little bit earlier than usual, at three o'clock in the morning. I know, three in the morning is not early, but for us back then it was. We'd sit up in the basement watching movies and talk about it, and then he'd drive home and sleep for three hours and go to work. We were young and in love and dumb. The way our house was set up, the basement door led out into the backyard, and Rob always parked out front on the gravel by the lane. So we walked out the back door and started around the side of the house toward his car. The moment we stepped out that back door, the smell hit us. It smelled of rotten meat. Not a little bit, either. It was so strong that I gasped. I gagged and had to put my sleeve over my nose. Rob said the country air stunk worse than usual tonight. He was teasing me, but I could tell he was gagging, too. I remember thinking that maybe one of our cows had died earlier in the day, and we just didn't know about it. But it didn't smell fresh. It smelled of something that had been lying out in the sun and decomposing for weeks. And it was cold out. It was the middle of October, and there'd been frost on the ground every morning that week. Things don't rot that fast when it's that cold. I didn't think about that part until later, either. Bandit was on the back porch when we came out. He didn't get up. He didn't wag his tail at Rob, which he always did, because Rob would sneak him bits of jerky. He just lay there pressed against the door with his ears flat back and stared toward the front of the property. I reached down to pet him, and he was shaking. We got around to the front of the house, and Rob threw himself on the floor. He threw his stuff in the car quickly. Then he got back out to give me one last hug goodbye. And that's when something caught my eye over his shoulder. There was a porch light on at the Osler place, and it lit up part of Gary's front yard. In that light, there was an animal. My first thought was that it was a dog. A skinny, bony dog that could barely walk. It was so thin I could see the ribs and hip bones standing out under its fur, even from where I stood. Its fur was pretty thick, patchy and grayish brown, and its head hung low. It moved in this stiff, jerky way, and every couple of steps it would stop and put its nose to the ground. I remember thinking it was a stray, and that I should go shoo it away before it got into Mom's chickens. But the longer I looked at it, the more I noticed the way its body was shaped. The legs were too long. The snout was long and narrow. So I figured it had to be some kind of coyote. A sick one. Maybe mangy. I kept quiet, because I didn't want Rob getting all macho and walking over there to chase off a sick coyote at three in the morning. It was sniffing around my neighbor's front yard, working its way from the porch steps toward the side of the house, toward the back where Lyle's trailer was. And then all of a sudden, it stopped dead in its tracks. It lifted its head, and it stared directly at my boyfriend and me. I have been stared at by a lot of animals in my life. Deer will stare at me, Cows stare at you all day long. Coyotes will stare at you for a second before they turn and run. This was not that. The hair on my neck and arms stood straight up. It wasn't just looking at me. It was studying me. It held completely still, and I could see its eyes catch the porch light, and they didn't shine green or gold the way an animal's eyes do. They were a dull, flat white. And it kept looking. Ten seconds later, twenty. Animals don't do that. An animal looks at you and decides whether you're a threat or not, and then it does something about it. This thing just kept looking at me, and I had the most awful feeling that it was memorizing me. Rob felt me stiffen up, and he turned around to see what I was looking at. And that's when it stood up. I mean it stood up on two legs. It didn't just lift its front feet off the ground. It stood up straight, all the way up to the top of my head. And it was tall. It was easily taller than Rob. It was gangly and thin, with its arms hanging down almost to its knees. And its head was still that long, narrow coyote head sitting on top of a body that was shaped wrong for it. Then it ran. It hauled ass straight back past Gary's house and into the hayfield behind it, upright, on two legs. I have never seen anything move that fast in my life. Not a horse. Not a deer. Nothing. It was past the edge of the porch light and gone into the dark field in a couple of seconds. And here is the thing I keep coming back to, all these years later. I never heard its feet hit the ground. That field had been cut. It was stubble, dry and crunchy with frost. When the boys and I walked across it, you could hear every step from the house. That thing went across it at a dead sprint, and it didn't make one single sound. I grabbed onto Rob, scared out of my damn mind. I turned to him, but he was still watching the spot where it had disappeared, and his face had gone completely white. I'd never seen Rob scared of anything before. I whispered to him, asking what in the heck that was. He didn't answer me right away. Then he grabbed both of my arms, hard, and he told me to hurry and get my butt back inside the house. Lock the doors, shut the blinds, turn the lights off, then call him. No questions asked. I started to argue. He squeezed my arms harder and said it again. No questions asked. Go. So I went. I sprinted back around the side of the house to the backyard door, and the whole time I was running, I could feel something watching my back. I didn't look. I got to the back porch, and Bandit was already scratching at the door to get in, which he was never allowed to do, and I didn't care. I shoved the door open and let him in with me, and locked the deadbolt behind us. I did everything Rob said. I went through the whole downstairs locking doors and windows. I shut every blind. I turned off the TV and the lamp in the basement. Then I ran up to my bedroom, which was on the top floor at the front of the house, and I peeked out through the edge of my blinds. Rob's car was already gone. I couldn't even see his taillights on the lane. He must have burned some serious rubber, to get out of sight that fast. And in the Osler's front yard, under that porch light, there was nothing at all. I have never dialed a phone number so fast in my life. Rob answered on the first ring. I could hear his engine roaring, so I knew he was flooring it down the county road. The first thing he asked was whether I was inside, and whether I'd done everything he told me. I said yes. He asked if the blinds were shut. I said yes. He asked if I could see. I told him I'd looked out my window, and there was nothing out there now. He told me to stop looking out the window. Then I asked him again what we had just seen. He didn't want to tell me. He said he didn't want me freaking out, and that it was better if I just tried to forget about it and go to sleep. But I wasn't going to let that go. I had just watched a coyote stand up on two legs, and disappear into a dark field without making a sound. So I kept pushing, and eventually he got me. He gave up and told me. He said it was a skinwalker. He said it very quietly, almost under his breath, even though he was alone in his car. I had never heard that word before in my life. I didn't know what it meant. I thought maybe he was making a joke, but his voice was shaking, and Rob doesn't shake. He told me he knew what it was, because he had seen one before. When he was a junior in high school, he had a good friend on the football team named Nathan. Nathan was Navajo, and his family was from down south, near the Four Corners. One summer, Rob went down with Nathan to stay with his grandmother for a week. On their second night there, the two of them were driving back from a gas station on a dirt road, and something ran alongside the truck. Rob said it kept pace with them at 40 miles an hour, and it was running on two legs, and it was looking in the passenger window right at Rob the whole time. Nathan didn't say a word. He said, I don't know what it was. I don't know what it was. He just drove. When they got back to the house, Nathan wouldn't let Rob get out of the truck until he'd honked the horn, and his grandmother came out onto the porch. That night, Nathan's grandmother sat them both down at the kitchen table and explained to Rob what they'd seen. She told him the Navajo stories about them, at least the parts she was willing to say out loud. She said a skinwalker is not an animal. It's a person. It's a man or a woman who has done something so wrong that it's hard to believe. She said, I don't know what it was. It's so evil that they've been given the power to put on the skin of an animal and become it. She didn't tell him what the evil thing was, and Rob said he didn't ask because of the look on her face. She told them three things, and Rob repeated them to me on the phone that night. Don't go near them. Don't think about them. Don't talk about them. She said talking about them draws their attention, and thinking about them is a way of calling them. She said if one ever shows interest in you, it's a way of calling them. She said if one ever shows interest in you, you go inside, you shut everything up, and you don't answer anything that calls to you from outside. Not a voice. Not a knock. Nothing. Then Rob told me something that made me feel sick. He said the grandmother told them that skinwalkers don't wander around at random. They're people, and people live somewhere. If you see one, it's because it lives close by, or it's come to where you are on purpose. I didn't sleep at all that night. I sat on my bed with every light in my room off, and the phone pressed against my ear, and Rob stayed on the line with me all the way home to Salt Lake, and then for another two hours after that, until the sky started turning gray. Neither one of us said much. I just needed to hear him breathing. A little after six, while it was still dark out, I heard my dad come down the hall and go out the back door to start chores, the same as every morning. Bandit went out with him. I remember being surprised by the sound of his voice. I was surprised by the sound of his voice. I was surprised by that. Less than a minute later, Bandit was barking his head off out behind the garage, where Mom kept her chicken coop, and the hens were making this awful racket, squawking and slamming into the sides of the coop. Then Bandit yelped one time, and it all went dead quiet. I told Rob, and he told me not to go look, so I didn't. When the sun came up, I finally made myself go downstairs. Mom was making breakfast. Dad came in from chores, and said Bandit had chased something off the chicken coop in the dark, probably a raccoon, and that the old dog had come back looking pretty proud of himself. I didn't ask him any more than that. I went out to the coop with her to collect eggs. None of the hens were hurt, not a single one, but all of them were crammed into the far corner of the coop, piled up on top of each other, and they wouldn't come out, even when Mom threw down Scratch. There were no feathers anywhere. There was no blood. Nothing had gotten in. On the outside of the coop, though, on the side that faces the field, there were long scratches in the old wood siding. Four of them, close together, running straight down. They were too far apart to be from a cat, and too high up to be from a dog. The top of the scratches started about level with my head. Mom said a raccoon must have been trying to get in. I didn't say anything. That afternoon, after I got home from work, I told my dad what Rob and I had seen. I didn't use the word skinwalker. I just told him that we'd seen a coyote in the Osler's front yard, and that it stood up on two legs and ran off. My dad is a very practical man. He's not a superstitious person at all. He listened to the whole thing, and then he said that it was three in the morning, that I was tired, and that sometimes a coyote will rear up on its back legs to get a look over tall grass. He said the porch light probably wasn't on. I said, I said it ran on two legs across the whole field. He said it was dark. I asked him to walk over with me and look for tracks. I think he agreed mostly to make me feel better. We walked down the lane to the Osler place, and Gary came out and asked what we were doing, and Dad told him I'd seen a coyote in his yard last night. Gary said he hadn't seen anything, but that he'd been smelling something dead around the place for a couple of weeks and couldn't find what it was. What you want? PrizePix, run your game. The Frost had melted by then, but the ground near Gary's porch steps was soft from where his gutter drained, and the tracks were there in the mud. We all three looked at them for a long time. They were canine tracks at first. Four feet. A trotting pattern the way a coyote moves. They went from the porch steps along the side of the house. And then, right where it would have stopped to look at us, the tracks bunched up together. In one spot. Past that spot, there were only two prints. Long ones. Each one about the length of my forearm. Narrow, with the pad pressed in deep, and the claw marks out at the end. And the next two prints after those were at least eight feet apart. Gary said that was the biggest dang coyote he'd ever seen. He was trying to make a joke out of it. Nobody laughed. My dad crouched down and looked at those two prints for a long time. Then he stood up and said a coyote could have jumped. That's all he said. But I noticed that on the walk back home, he didn't say anything else. And that night, he brought his rifle in from the truck and stood it up in the corner by the back door. One other thing about that walk. When we passed behind Gary's barn, Lyle was sitting on the steps of his trailer. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he was supposed to be working, but he was just sitting there. He was wearing a heavy jacket, and he was wearing a heavy jacket. He was wearing a heavy jacket, and he was wearing a heavy coat, even though it was warm out, and he was holding his right hand against his chest. He watched us walk by the whole time. He didn't watch my dad, and he didn't watch Gary. He watched me. After that night, Rob and I started hanging out in the city at his place instead of at mine. That was his idea, and I didn't argue. I'd drive down after work, and we'd spend the evening at his apartment, and then I'd drive home before it got too late. Rob made me promise to be home before dawn. I'd drive home before it got too late. There was no more smell. Bandit started going back out to the barn at night. The hens came out of the corner. Then came the night I was home alone. It was a Thursday. My parents had gone to a church dinner in town, and my brothers were all gone, either at work or at their girlfriends or wherever. I'd come home from Rob's before dark like I promised, and I was in the kitchen making myself a grilled cheese. It was maybe eight o'clock. Bandit was lying under the kitchen table. I'd come home from Rob's before dark like I promised, and I was in the kitchen someone knocked on the back door. It wasn't a loud knock. Three soft taps. And then I heard my brother Sam's voice. He said my name, and he said he forgot his key, and could I let him in? Now, Sam was sixteen, and he lost his key about once a month, so this was a normal thing. I actually started walking toward the door. I had my hand out for the deadbolt, and then Bandit came out from under the table. I was in the kitchen, and I heard my brother Sam's voice. He said, He didn't bark. He planted himself between me and the door, with his head low and his hackles all the way up from his neck to his tail, and he made a sound I had never heard him make. It wasn't a growl. It was a long, high whine that went on and on. I stopped, and I thought about how I hadn't heard a car come down the lane. Sam drove an old pickup with a hole in the muffler, and you could hear it from the county road. I hadn't heard anything. The voice said my name again. It said it exactly the way Sam said it. Same lazy drag at the end. Same everything. Then it asked me to come on and open the door. It was freezing. I got my phone out of my back pocket with my hands shaking so bad I almost dropped it, and I texted Sam. I asked him where he was. He wrote back within about ten seconds. He was in Ogden at his buddy's house. And he'd be home around eleven. Then he asked why. I didn't answer him. I backed away from the door until I hit the kitchen counter. The voice outside kept asking to be let in. It said my name. It said it was cold. It said the same few things over and over, in the same order, and after the third or fourth time, I realized it wasn't really talking to me. It was repeating things. Things it must have heard Sam say. In the same tone every time. Then it stopped talking, and the doorknob started to turn. Slowly. All the way to the right, until it stopped against the lock. Then all the way back. Then to the right again. I called Rob. I couldn't talk above a whisper. He told me to go upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom and not come out until somebody I knew came home and called my cell phone from inside the house. I did that. I took Bandit with me. I sat on the floor, and I sat down on the couch. I sat on the floor of that bathroom with my back against the tub, and the old dog pressed up against me. And Rob stayed on the phone with me for the next two and a half hours, until my parents' car came down the lane, and my mom called my cell from the kitchen. When Dad heard what happened, he went out the back door with a flashlight and his rifle. There was nothing in the yard. But on the back porch, right in front of the door, in the dust on the concrete, there were the prints of two long, narrow feet. They were standing side by side. Facing the door. And the smell was back. Rotten meat, so thick on that porch that my dad had to turn his head away. That was the night my dad stopped saying it was a coyote. For the next few nights, my dad and my brothers took turns sitting up. There were four of them and Dad, so they split the night into shifts. Whoever was on watch sat in the dark in the kitchen with a rifle across his lap and the back porch light on. And every so often he'd walk to the front room and look out at the yard and the lane. My oldest brother, Tanner, had moved out the year before, but he came back home and slept on the couch, so there'd be one more set of eyes. Josh and Caleb took the late shifts. Sam was only allowed to sit up until midnight, which made him furious. Nothing came while they were watching. Not once. And I think that scared me more than if it had. Because it meant it knew. On the fourth morning, Caleb went out to feed and found one of the calves dead. We had eleven calves in the pen by the barn that fall, all of them weaned and getting fat for winter. The dead one was lying right in the middle of the pen, flat on its side, with its legs stretched out straight. The other ten were crushed up against the far fence, pushing so hard against the rails that two of them had skinned their shoulders bloody. Caleb said they wouldn't move away from that fence, even when he went in with a bucket of grain. There wasn't a mark on the dead calf. Not a bite. Not a scratch. Dad went over every inch of it. There was no blood on the ground. Coyotes don't kill a calf and leave it. Nothing out there kills a calf and leaves it. Except for one thing. When Dad rolled it over, there was a strip of hide missing along its back. About two inches wide, from the base of the neck all the way to the tail. Cut clean. Not torn. The meat under it wasn't touched. And the smell was all over that pen. I heard Dad on the phone with Gary Osler that afternoon. Gary had lost two ewes that same week. Same thing. No wound. A strip of wool and hide taken off each one. Gary had figured it was kids messing around, and he'd been too embarrassed to say anything. That night, Rob called his old friend Nathan. They hadn't talked in a couple of years, but Rob told him everything. And Nathan said he'd call his grandmother. She didn't have a phone that worked half the time, so it took a day and a half for Nathan to get back to us. When he did, he talked to Rob for a long time. And then Rob drove up to the farm that evening and sat down at our kitchen table with my whole family and told us what the grandmother had said. My dad listened to every word. A month before, he'd have laughed. He didn't laugh. She said that it had picked someone in our house. She said that's why it stood there and stared. It was choosing. She said a skinwalker that picks someone wants something from that person, and it will keep coming back, until it gets it, or until it's stopped. She said the hide it was taking from the animals was for itself. It was building onto what it wears. She said it was getting stronger. She said it was someone close. Somebody who lives near, and can watch the house in the daytime without anybody thinking twice about it. And she said that a person who lives near can watch the house in the daytime without anybody thinking twice about it. And she said that a person who does this, has to have something of yours to work against you. Hair is best. Clothes you've worn. Something that's been close to your skin. She said we needed to think about anything that had gone missing lately. And we needed to search the whole property for anything that had been left there that didn't belong to us. If we found anything, we were not to touch it with our bare hands. The last thing she said was the one that made my mom put her hand over her mouth. She said that the person would come to the house in the daytime and ask for something. They'd ask politely. They'd ask to borrow something, or to come inside, or for a drink of water. And she said, do not give them anything. Not a match. Not a glass of water. Do not hand them anything across the threshold. And do not let them in, no matter what they say or how pitiful they look. I sat there at the table thinking about anything I'd lost. And two things came to me. One right after the other. The first was my hairbrush. I kept a brush in the console of my car because I'd drive to work with wet hair and brush it out in the parking lot. About two weeks before, it had gone missing. I'd figured it fell under the seat and I'd just never found it. I never locked my car. Nobody out there locked their cars. The second was my gray hoodie. It was my and hung it on the clothesline out back, and the next day it was gone off the line. We'd all figured the wind took it into the field, and that it would turn up when Dad plowed. When I said those two things out loud, nobody at that table said anything for a while. That Saturday morning, my dad and my four brothers and Rob searched the whole place. Every outbuilding. The haystack. The grain bins. The chicken coop. Inside the barn. Under the dune. It was wedged up underneath the back porch steps, in the gap between the bottom step and the concrete, right next to where Bandit always slept. Right under the spot where those two long prints had been standing. It was a little bundle about the size of my fist. Somebody had wrapped it in a strip of red and white hide, the same color as the dead calf, and tied it up tight with orange baling twine. Rob didn't touch it with his bare hands, because the grandmother had warned about that. He pushed it out with a stick, and it was gone. I couldn't believe it. And into a feed bucket. Dad cut the twine with his pocket knife, and he peeled the hide back with the tip of the blade. Inside was a tangle of long, dark brown hair. My hair, pulled out of a brush. It was wound around a chip of bone, and there was some kind of black dirt packed in with it that stank of rot, and a strip of gray fabric. The same gray as my hoodie. I remember I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what it was. I sat down right there on the back steps, and Bandit came and leaned his whole body against my legs. The grandmother had said, if we found anything, to burn it. Burn it all the way down to ash, and then bury the ash. So Dad dumped the whole bucket into our burn barrel with some diesel and lit it. It burned with this thick, greasy black smoke, and the smell that came off it was so foul that Josh threw up behind the garage. While it was burning, he threw up behind the burning. Bandit sat in the middle of the yard and howled. He howled the entire time. I had never heard that dog howl once in eleven years. It was while we were standing around that barrel that Dad remembered something. He said that on the morning after the first night, when Bandit chased that thing off the chicken coop in the dark, the dog had come back with blood on his muzzle and his front teeth. Dad had wiped it off with a rag, and figured Bandit had gotten a piece of a raccoon. He hadn't thought about it. He hadn't thought about it again. I thought about Lyle sitting on his trailer steps in the middle of a warm afternoon, wearing a heavy coat and holding his right hand up against his chest. I told Dad about Lyle's hand. He didn't say anything. He just looked over toward the Osler place for a long time. The very next afternoon, Lyle came to our door. It was a Sunday. Dad and the boys had taken the trucks into town for diesel and feed, and Rob was on his way up. It was just me and Mom at the house. It was broad daylight, maybe three o'clock, sunny and cold. We heard a knock at the front door. Not the back. The front door, which nobody ever used. When Mom went to the window to look, she told me it was the man who worked for Gary. I went with her. She opened the inside door, but the storm door was still shut between them, and I'm thankful every day of my life that it was. Lyle was standing on our porch. I had never been that close to him. He was thin. Not lean from hard work. Starved, with the bones of his face pushing out against the skin. His skin was a grayish color. He had on that heavy coat. And his right hand was wrapped up in a filthy rag, brown and stiff with old blood. There was a smell coming off of him. It was faint, under the cold air, but I knew it right away. He was polite. That was the worst part. He said good afternoon to my mom. He said he was sorry to bother her. He said he was sorry to bother us. He said he'd hurt his hand on some wire, and it had gotten bad, and Gary didn't keep any bandages in the house. He asked if he could come in and wash it out at our sink. He said he'd only be a minute. My mom is the kindest person I know. She has fed every stray person and animal that has ever come down our lane. I watched her hand go to the handle of the storm door. I saw her start to push it open. I grabbed her wrist. I said no. I said it loud. I said, I said it. Lyle's eyes moved off my mom and onto me, and they stayed there. It was that same look, that same awful, steady look, studying me. He didn't blink. Then he asked if he could at least have a glass of water. He said his throat was so dry. I said no again. Mom didn't say anything. I could feel her arm shaking under my hand. Then Lyle said my name. I never told that man my name. Nobody in my family ever introduced me to him. I never told him my name. Gary might have said it, I suppose. But the way he said it, it came out in Rob's voice. Not close to Rob's voice. Rob's voice. The exact way Rob said my name when he called me at night. I shut the inside door in his face and locked it. Then I pulled mom away from the door, and we went and stood in the kitchen and held on to each other. We didn't look out the window. I called Rob, and he said he was ten minutes out and to stay put. When Rob pulled into the lane, Lyle was still standing on our front porch. Rob said he was just standing there with his hands at his sides, facing the door. When Rob's car came up the lane, Lyle turned and walked down the steps and back toward the Osler place. Rob said he didn't hurry. Rob said he watched him the whole way. And right before Lyle went behind Gary's barn, he stopped and turned around and looked straight at our house. At the window. When my dad got home and heard about it, he got right back in his truck and drove over to Gary's. He was gone an hour. When he came back, he told us what Gary had said. Gary said that Lyle had shown up out of nowhere in an old brown pickup with out-of-state plates, asking for work. Gary said that in five weeks, he had never once seen Lyle eat. Not a meal. Not a sandwich. He'd invite him in for supper, and Lyle would always say he'd already eaten. Gary said the lights in the trailer stayed on all night. Every night. And that more than once, he'd gotten up in the middle of the night and seen the trailer door hanging wide open and nobody inside. He said Lyle did good work during the day, but he'd been slow lately, favoring that hand. And then Gary told Dad something he hadn't told anybody. He said ever since Lyle came, he'd been sick. He'd lost almost 20 pounds. He couldn't keep food down. He said he'd been to the doctor's office. twice, and they couldn't find anything wrong. Dad told Gary to get rid of him. Gary said he'd already been thinking about it, and he'd do it first thing in the morning. Gary went out to the trailer the next morning and told Lyle that the work was done, and he needed to be off the property by Saturday. Gary told my dad later that Lyle didn't argue. He didn't ask for his wages. He didn't say anything at all. He just turned his head and looked across the field toward our house and kept looking. Until Gary got uncomfortable and walked away. Saturday was the 31st of October. Nobody in my family went trick-or-treating that year, or to the church party, or anywhere at all. Dad called a family meeting at supper. He said that whatever Lyle was or wasn't, he'd been told to leave by Saturday, and if he had something left to do before he went, he was going to try to do it tonight. Dad said we'd all stay in the house, every one of us. Nobody goes outside after dark for any reason. Nobody opens a door. Nobody answers a voice. He asked Rob to stay the night. My dad had never let Rob stay over before, not once, and I don't think he ever would have if it wasn't for this. Rob said he'd already packed a bag. Tanner, Josh, and Caleb each brought their rifles in from their trucks. Dad had his.30-06, the one he'd taken every deer with since before I was born. Sam had his.30-06, the one he'd taken every deer with since before I was born. It said his name, and then it said, come here, boy, come on, come here, the exact way my mom said it every single night when she called him in from the barn. My mom was sitting right next to me on the couch with her shirt over her face. I felt her whole body go stiff. Bandit didn't move toward the door. He backed up until his rump was against my legs. The voice stopped. Then it started again, and this time it was Rob. It was calling my name from outside. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. The laugh was coming from the yard. Rob whispered to me not to listen, not to think about it. He kept saying it. Don't think about it. The voices stopped. For about a minute, there was nothing, and then we heard something on the roof. Our house had a covered front porch, and the porch roof ran right up underneath the upstairs windows. My bedroom window looked straight out over it. Whatever it was had gotten up onto that porch roof. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. We heard the shingles scraping. Slow. Something heavy. Moving along the porch roof toward the middle of the house. Toward my window. And then we heard it at the glass. Tapping. Light tapping. With something hard. A fingernail or a claw. Tap. Tap. Tap. Then a long scrape down the glass. Then tapping again. It was at my bedroom window. It thought I was up there. It had watched my window every night it came, and it thought I was in there in my bed. Dad turned around and looked at all of us. I'll never forget his face. He wasn't scared anymore. He was angry. He told Tanner and Josh to stay with us in the living room and to shoot anything that came through a door. He told Caleb to come with him. And he went up the stairs, as quiet as I've ever heard anybody move on those old stairs, with his rifle up. My bedroom door was at the top of the stairs. I couldn't hear a The tapping kept going the whole time. Tap. Tap. Tap. Scrape. Then I heard it change. It started saying my name through the glass, in my own voice. My own voice. Soft, saying my name over and over. I heard my bedroom door open. Caleb told us afterward what he saw. My blinds were closed, but the moonlight was coming through the slats, and you could see the shape against the window. Dad crossed the room and he didn't stop to look. He reached out and yanked the blind cord, and the blinds went up, and there it was. It was crouched on the porch roof with its face right up to the glass. It had that long coyote head, gray and patchy, but the eyes in it were dull white, and they were looking all around my room, looking for me. Its arms were up against the window, and Caleb said the hands were not paws. They were human hands, long and gray, with the nails growing out of their hands. I couldn't stop to look. It was crouched on the porch roof with its face right up to the And the right hand was wrapped up in a filthy, bloody rag. It saw Dad. It opened its mouth. Dad fired through the glass. In the living room, that shot was the loudest sound I have ever heard. The whole house shook with it. And right after the shot came a scream. I have heard rabbits scream when a hawk takes them. I have heard a horse scream with a broken leg. This was a person. It was a man screaming. It was a woman screaming. and dragging, and every few seconds it would scream again, and the screaming got farther and farther away until it was gone. Tanner and Josh both went for the front door. They wanted to go after it. Dad came down the stairs and stood in front of that door and told them no. Rob said no too. The grandmother had told them never to chase one, never follow it into the dark. You wait for daylight. Dad said whatever he hit, it would still be hit in the morning. So we waited. Nobody slept. The smell started to fade around four. Bandit lay back down around five. What you want, download the PrizePix app today and use code SPOTIFY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. Home of the save. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. When the sun came up over the foothills, dad finally opened the front door. There was a mess of shattered glass on the porch roof and a smear of dark blood running down the shingles to the gutter. In the frost on the front lawn, there was a body-shaped, flat spot where it had landed and a lot of blood. And then there were tracks and a blood trail heading out across the yard toward the fence. There was blood and gray hair caught on the barbed wire. And on the other side, across Gary's field, there was a trail of blood in the white frost that you could have followed from a hundred yards off. The tracks out of our yard were not long and narrow anymore. Dad crouched down to look at them and then he stood up and didn't say anything for a while. They were the prints of bare human feet. Dad and all four of my brothers and Rob followed the blood trail across the field. I went too. Nobody was going to make me stay in that house by myself. Dad said I could come if I stayed behind him the whole way. The blood trail went straight across the field, through a gap in the Osler fence, and around behind Gary's barn, to the camp trailer. Lyle's brown pickup was gone. There were fresh tire marks in the frost where it had pulled out fast and spun around and gone up the lane. Sometime after the screaming stopped the night before, we'd all heard an engine start up over at Gary's place and none of us had known what it was. Gary came out of his house in his slippers and he looked at the blood on the ground and then at my dad's rifle and he went back in and called the sheriff. The trailer door was standing open. Dad went up the steps first with his rifle. He looked in for a long time before he let anybody else come close. There was blood all over the trailer floor. It was in the doorway and down the steps and in a big pool by the little bed. There were rags everywhere, soaked through, and there was a hide on the floor. It looked to be a coyote's at first, an old one, gray and patchy and stiff, with the head still on it. But it was wrong. It was much too long. There were other pieces sewn onto it with heavy black thread and some of them were red and white calf hide and some of them were sheep's wool. There was a hole torn through the shoulder of it and the edges of the hole were black with blood. When my dad saw that hole, he looked over at me and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. His bullet had gone through that hide and through whatever had been wearing it. On the little fold-down table, sitting right out in the open, was my hairbrush. It was still full of my hair. And folded up next to it, neatly, was my gray hoodie. The deputy came out about an hour later. He was a man dad had known since high school. Dad told him the truth, mostly. He told him that something had come up on our porch roof in the night and tried to get in my bedroom window and that he'd shot it through the glass. He told him the hired man next door had been bothering his daughter and was gone now and had left a lot of blood behind him. The deputy wrote it all down. He looked at the hide for a long time and didn't touch it. He took my hairbrush and my hoodie as evidence. And then he looked at me. And then he handed them back to my dad and said he didn't think he'd need them after all. After the deputy left, Rob called Nathan and Nathan called his grandmother. The message came back that afternoon. Burn it. All of it. The hide. The rags. Anything of mine that he'd touched. Burn it to ash. Bury the ash deep. And then don't speak about it again. We did exactly that. Dad and the boys carried the hide out of the trailer on a pitchfork, along with the rags and my brush and my hoodie. And they put everything in our burn barrel and soaked it in diesel. It burned for over an hour. That same black, greasy smoke. That same smell. Bandit didn't howl this time. He lay on the back porch and watched the barrel until it was out. Then Dad dug a hole out past the corn stubble, about four feet deep, and buried the ash and filled it in and drove the tractor over it. Two days later, the deputy called the house. A highway patrolman had found a brown pickup at a pull-off on the interstate up near the Wyoming line. There was a man inside. Dead. He'd been shot high in the right shoulder, all the way through. He'd tried to pack the wound with rags, and he'd made it about ninety miles before he bled out behind him. The deputy told my Dad there was no wallet and no license in the truck. And when they ran the plates, the pickup came back registered to a man down in Arizona who had been reported missing almost two years earlier. They never found that man. The deputy said nobody had any idea who the man in the truck really was. The deputy asked my Dad one more time what exactly he'd shot at through that window. My Dad told him. He told him all of it. The whole truth. Start to finish. He told me the truth. Start to finish. The deputy listened, and when Dad was done, he closed his notebook and said the case was about a dead drifter in a stolen truck, and that was all it was ever going to be. And as far as I know, that's all it ever was. That was the end of it. I've thought about it every day for seven years, and I can tell you that for certain. That was the end. Gary Osler started getting better within a week. He put the weight back on by Christmas. He had the camp trailer hauled off to the dump in the spring, and burned the spot where it had sat. He lived another five years after that and died peacefully in his own bed. Our hens never piled up in the corner again. We never lost another calf that wasn't lost to the usual things. Bandit lived three more years, and he went out to the barn every single night of them. Dad put new glass in my bedroom window, and the smell never came back. Not once. Rob and I got married two years later, and we live in the city now. We go up to the farm for Sunday dinner most weeks. Sometimes, after we eat, I'll go stand on the back porch and look out at Gary's old hayfield. Somebody else farms it now. There's nothing out there but stubble in the canal and the foothills. And I can stand there in the dark as long as I want, and nothing looks back at me. We don't talk about what happened unless it has to be talked about. Writing this is the most I've said about it since the night it ended. When we do talk about it, both of us still get pretty frightened. But it isn't the kind of frightened you feel about something that's still coming. It's the kind you feel about something you got through. It's over. The thing that stood up in Gary Osler's front yard and looked at me is dead, and its hide is ash, four feet under a cornfield. My dad made sure of that, and I sleep just fine. What you want? Download the PrizePix app today and use code PRIDE. Spotify to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. Home of the Save. Open soon. You're going to become so dangerous that the predators can't help it. We'll go. Austin Abrams. I'm going home. Josh Brolin. Survivor, survivor. Whale Fall, rated PG-13. In theaters Friday. Get tickets now. Who can you trust? When a Los Angeles mayoral candidate's son is kidnapped, he and his wife are pulled in. Into a web of deception. Forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect. Stop. This is simply safe. Police are on the way. Using smart AI cameras, live U.S.-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in. Stop it from ever happening. Plan starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off. Start off your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/spotify. 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.