“I heard all they found was a foot,” my girlfriend Julia said. Grinning.
“No, that’s not right. It wasn’t just a foot,” Danny said. “There was more.”
“More person?” she said.
“How would you know anyway, Dan?” I said. I thought Dan was a moron, but he’d been dating Julia’s cheerleader best friend for a few weeks so I was always having to spend a bunch of time with him.
“Cause my Dad tends the sheriff’s favorite bar and that’s what my Dad told me,” he said. “You wanna hear what they found or not?”
I hated him.
“Yes, yes, please, we want to know about the foot,” Julia said. Much to my embarrassment, she loved true crime. She clapped her hands together and sat up in her seat.
Wolves howled lonely in the distance. The campfire popped.
I reached from my seat beside Julia for some more wood to throw on. We had plenty of wood so I stacked it big. The flames shot up and flickered an evil orange light off our faces and the tall dark cedars all around us. A tiny island in the impenetrable night.
“They did find a foot, but it wasn’t the only thing they found,” Danny said, “that’s the way Rick told it my to dad. I guess he got pretty liquored up at the Old Stump last night. Had some shit he wanted to get off his chest.” He watched the flames rise, rubbed his arm like it was sore. He was a thick chested naturally handsome guy with beady blue eyes and something to prove. He liked to wear black jeans and black t shirts from unrecognizable bands and he liked to get drunk and recite Yeats.
“Do you have to make such a production out of it Danny?” Claire said. She put a hand on his leg and leaned against him.
“Yeah, why not? It’s more fun that way,” he said. He pinched her shoulder through her down jacket and she jumped a little, flipped him off.
I had to bite, I could tell he wouldn’t say any more until I did. “What else did they find?”
He grinned this devilish grin. “Alright, here’s what my dad told me Rick told him. I guess Rick got super fucking wasted so the story wasn’t all that clear. But this is how he told it to my dad….”
We skooched into a close circle around the fire. Julia reached her hand over and put it in mine and I rubbed the back of her hand with my thumb. Last week she told me she loved me for the first time.
Dan eased Claire off his shoulder and leaned in so the orange fire light illuminated his mouth and nose from below and threw shadows on the sockets of his eyes in skull effect.
Rick said they got a couple calls a few years back. Maybe a week apart. Campers up in the national park reporting screaming in the woods near their camp spot. Nothing unusual. People are always getting spooked in the woods especially in the winter when it’s so dark and eery like it is now. You figure high schoolers whenever people say screaming in the night.
Anyway, he said they went out and checked the camping areas near where the screams had been reported. When they got there they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Or it didn’t seem like anything was out of the ordinary when they saw it. He said there was just this one campsite where the ground was all tore up. Like huge deep scratches all around in the dirt. Big branches broken off the trees. But nothing there. So they didn’t think anything of it, you know. Probably just an agitated bear or something like that.
But the next week they get another call. Same thing. Screaming in the woods. Same place. Way up this long service road into the park. So they go all the way back up. It’s deep in the park, you know. Way up this windy bumpy old road. Not too many people go out there. They go all the way back up and they check all the same dispersed spots they checked the week before. This time a different camp spot is tore up the same way as last time. But this time there’s blood everywhere. Like everywhere. All churned up in the dirt and spattered across the trees. And the whole area stunk like fish too. Bad. I guess it really smelled something awful. So bad some of the guys could barely stand it. But they had to suffer out the smell and investigate the scene all day. And they still found nothing. Like nothing. No tracks. No kill. No camping gear. No vehicles. No reason for the fish stink, as far as anyone could tell at least.
They looked everywhere in the area and took samples of all the shit they could find that had any blood on it. Which was a lot of shit. But they couldn’t find anything at all. The blood tests all came up inconclusive or something like that.
They forgot all about it for years. The mysterious fish stinky blood covered campsite.
Until a couple weeks ago…
“So there was a campsite out in the park that was mysteriously covered in blood and it wasn’t reported on?” I said, “how is that not like a local legend if that actually happened?”
“What would they report man? What would anyone say?” Danny said. “We found a shit load of blood but we don’t know where it came from and we aren’t going to do anything about it?” He raised his hands in a helpless shrug.
Julia shivered on my shoulder, “I guess there are probably lots of things like that have happened and we’ve never heard about it because it would just make everything more complicated if we did.”
“Right,” he said.
“What about that little girl down the street who went missing last year?” Claire said. She adjusted her pony tail and straightened her yoga pants tight across her skinny thighs.
“No, not like her,” Julia said. “I don’t mean that sort of thing. Not locals. Everyone knows all about that. Everybody in this whole town knows everything that happens to everyone who lives around here. I mean more like road trippers or out of town campers and people like that. Bikers and transients who could disappear without a trace and we would never have a reason to ever hear about it. I could see it, is all I mean.”
“Maybe it’s Bigfoot,” I said. “Did they find any turned over trees around those campsites Dan? Is that what they found with the foot, turned over trees and six-toed footprints?”
“No,” Dan said.
“Was it Sasquatch?” I said.
He glared at me. “It was the Tuna Witch. That’s what they’re saying after yesterday.”
“Tuna Witch?” I said.
“What was yesterday?” Julia said.
“I gotta tell you about the foot before I tell you what happened yesterday otherwise it doesn’t make sense.” Danny said. He pulled a little stainless flask out of his coat pocket and took a sip, passed it to Claire.
It came over to me and Julia on the other side of the fire. I drank. Julia didn’t want any. She shivered again and nuzzled into my shoulder. I put some more wood on the fire and threw an arm over the blanket of dark hair on her thin back. Passed the flask back to Claire and Danny went on.
So a couple weeks ago, Rick gets another call at the station. Freaked out campers who heard screaming way out deep in the middle of the park. It sounds familiar but he doesn’t really make the connection.
It was that day last week when it was real foggy and gray, you remember? Super thick fog but it didn’t rain any. Like the whole sky was just one gigantic sponge soaked up and waiting for a squeeze.
Well, they get all the way up there and they see the same scene they saw all those years ago, blood everywhere, the same fish stink. It clicks then. Everyone remembers. “Holy shit,” Rick says.
So they get everybody up there, all the investigators and photographers and coroners and techs and all that. And they look everywhere. It’s not just blood this time. They find chunks of gore hanging on tree branches and scraps of eviscerated organ rolled up in the dirt. And the rotten fish smell is so horrible that people are running off all over the place puking and fucking up the investigation. They had to designate a vomit space.
And they’re not just finding organ meat and skin flaps and viscera in the dirt. They’re finding these tuna cans all over the place. All different brands and sizes. All tuna. All opened and empty. All with strange little engravings scratched all over them.
So they’re digging around like fucking archeologists coming up with all these fucked up pieces of human meat and these art project tuna cans. And more people are out looking around in the woods. Only the problem is its so foggy you can hardly see ten feet in front of you.
Then some guy starts hollering from the woods.
“Hey, I found something! Hey! Come help! Somebody!”
Everyone drops what they’re doing and runs into the woods after the hollering to see what it’s all about. They get in there and there’s a deputy holding a human foot saying he can’t find Mark or Joe or somebody with a name like that. The two of them had been poking around for evidence and found the disconnected foot, torn just below the crest of the calf, tatters of ripped skin like a botched circumcision hanging around the bloody sharp-boned stump at the top. They found it just laying there above them on a tree branch. This deputy climbed up to grab it and when he got down his partner was gone. Not a sound. Not a trace. Just no more deputy.
So you probably heard all about the manhunt and everything looking for the guy, I still can’t remember his name. At first they’re thinking bear, and that’s what they would love to say. Be done with it. A bear killed some camper, maybe hung around and snatched up the deputy or something like that. But the no vehicles and the no gear and the fact that it’s not the first time they’ve seen something like this, the tuna cans, I dunno, it’s all fucking weird. I don’t think they know what to think. And they still don’t have any idea who the foot and the blood and gore and all that stuff belonged to. I don’t understand how those databases work but they must not be very well organized because they can’t figure it out.
“So why does everybody know about the foot and not the tuna cans?” Julia said.
“Because it’s some freaky culty shit, I dunno. I think they don’t know what it means or what to say about it and they don’t want people to get freaked out.”
I looked at Julia and shook my head with an imperceptible movement and a slow blink, Claire saw me do it and laughed this breathy full laugh.
She looked at me with her pointer against her front teeth, licked her lips, “you think it’s bullshit?”
“Of course I think it’s bullshit,” I said. “Dan’s only trying to get us riled up. It’s not even a good story. It was obviously only a bear.”
“And what if it wasn’t?” Claire said. She leaned forward and licked her lips with the tip of her tongue. Shone her wide questioning eyes at me.
“What else could it possibly be?” I said.
“I dunno,” she said. Like she shouldn’t answer. Like it was a dirty question.
Julia looked up at me, then at Claire. She squeezed herself against me.
Danny held his hands out over the fire, let us talk. Then he said, real quiet, “you heard they found that other deputy yesterday right?”
“Come on man. Stop with this shit.” I said.
“Wait I actually did hear that,” Julia said.
“Yeah, I heard it too,” Claire said. She picked up Danny’s flask and shook it. Winked at me. Claire was hot, and she liked drinking as much as I did.
“Think I got a bottle in my truck,” I said. I got up and walked away from the fire past our tents to the trucks. The night was growing darker, the thick misty oppressive darkness of a Pacific rainforest. I could only see the vaguest impression of my truck where the fire light reflected off the dull rusty paint. Walking towards the silhouette I looked out into the deep dark night and I wondered about it. Out there. If there were things out there that we didn’t know or understand. Would never see. I grabbed a bottle of bourbon and some plastic cups from the cab. Looked back out into the night to see if there might be something looking back. There wasn’t. Or maybe there was. I didn’t know. I closed the truck door and went back to the fire.
I poured the booze and passed out the cups. Cheersed and drank.
“Yeah well they did find him,” Danny said. “They found that deputy yesterday afternoon.”
They found him when they went to check out another call about screams coming out of the woods.
They went down a different road, but still pretty close to where they found the foot. This time they brought respirators for the smell. When they got there it was the same scene. Blood. Gore. Viscera. Etched tuna cans. Torn up earth.
Right in the middle of the process of trying to get everything bagged up and documented and put together and organized, they hear this tortured scream coming out of the woods. Like really awful super loud screaming.
Just like with the foot, they all drop everything, run into the woods to figure out what the fucks going on. They followed the screaming right to the missing deputy. And then nobody knew what to do.
They found him on the ground under a giant tree writhing and wailing like he was getting a vivisection. His uniform was all ripped up and they could see all these bloody designs cut into his flesh where there were holes in his clothes. He had stars and half moons and little stick figures cut like cave paintings into the skin on his forehead. And all around him there were hundreds of tuna cans engraved with the same designs he had all over his mutilated body. The cans were all piled up into a huge pentagram at the foot of this massive cedar, with him, this superscribed and disfigured deputy, right in the middle as the idol of the rite.
Everybody, the whole crew of twenty or thirty government trained individuals, just stood there and watched him writhe and scream and gawked at the designs carved into his red flesh. All of them wearing white rain slicks and respirators. Just standing there. It must have been a scene.
Nobody wanted to touch the tuna can pentagram.
Nobody knew what it meant.
They just stared.
Rick finally showed up and burst through them all and kicked the cans aside to break the star and entered the circle and knelt beside the deputy.
“Paul!” Claire shouted. Punched Dan’s arm.
“Oh nice, yeah, it was Paul,” Danny said.
So Sheriff Rick kneels beside deputy Paul and tries to get him to calm down and quit screaming and flailing around.
“Paul, son,” he says. “I’m here, Paul. It’s me, Rick. It’s your sheriff. I got you, son. You’re safe now. We’re gonna take you home,” he says.
So the guy Paul, he eventually quits screaming and just has this empty look of horror on his face and starts rambling nonsense. He won’t stop. At first nobody could get him to say anything. Then they couldn’t get him to shut the fuck up. “Tuna Witch. It was the Tuna Witch. She’s coming. The tuna is coming. It has to eat. We have to eat. Tuna Witch. Tuna Witch.” That’s what he kept saying. Shit like that. Over and over. And nobody could get him to stop. They dosed him down with some go-to-sleep injection and got him over to the hospital.
Then they poked around and they found an even more fucked up scene. Bodies. A guy and his girlfriend mangled in the trees just next to the camp spot. Turn to pieces. Like they’d been thrown around like tiny rag dolls and ripped apart. The girls torso was impaled on a broken tree branch with all her intestines hanging down out of her like medusa hair. By the time they found her the possums and the squirrels and birds and shit had already got in and sucked everything out of her guts so they were just like translucent husks, like gory snake skins dangling out of her dead top. They found the boyfriends body all twisted up into a knot around some branches with his eyes popped out and a leg missing halfway up the same tree.
The faces on their bodies were way too fucked up to identify. Like squashed rotten watermelons. But there were still a few teeth in their mouths the cops were able to pick out. I guess when they went to get them out they found one of those tuna cans stuffed halfway down the girls throat. Fucking freaky. The good thing is I think they’ll figure out who these ones were after the dental records come back.
Still, all those cops all together and not one of them can think of what could do that. Not a bear. That’s for sure. Useless fuckers. Took them half the day just to figure out how to get the boyfriends body out of the tree.
“Wait what?” Julia said. She whispered it and held me tight by my arm.
“Hold on a second Dan,” I said, “shut the fuck up. Are you saying that two people got legitimately murdered out here in these woods two nights ago?”
“Oh yeah,” Danny said. “Probably the most horrific thing that’s ever happened around here.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you say anything about that before we came out here?”
Julia was breathing hard and quiet and clutching my arm. I stroked the back of her neck. To relax myself as much as to relax her.
“What the fuck Danny, are you for real?” Claire said. I heard the panic in her voice.
“I dunno, I figured it’d make the story more fun this way,” Dan said calmly. No emotion. He didn't look up from the flames.
I did my best to keep myself under control, tried to keep the quiver out of my voice. Julia seemed to be doing better for herself than I was. Claire started to cry.
Julia looked at me with pleading eyes, “should we go home?”
I just kept staring at Danny across the fire.
“Danny, you’re saying you knew people got murdered out here, right where we are now. Are you fucking retarded?”
He didn’t say anything, he pulled up his sleeve and rubbed at some scratches on his arm.
“I didn’t tell you how the deputy escaped did I?” he said. It was barely a whisper. He kept rubbing the cuts on his arm and staring into the flames with this blank empty look.
“Fuck you Danny,” Claire said. She had tears running down her face, glinting like fearful little diamonds in the firelight.
He ignored her. “Yeah, the deputy escaped,” he said. “He escaped and he went around town mutilating people the same way he got mutilated, cutting shapes and stories onto people until the cops finally caught up with him and threw him in a cell instead of a hospital bed. I don’t know how many people he got to but he was running around with a scalpel going into peoples houses all last night.”
I looked at the cuts on his arm he kept rubbing at, saw them lit up by the fire. Bright red lines forming grotesque childlike designs. Like crayon on a white wall.
I looked around into the impenetrable misty black night hanging heavy in the thick trees around us. Looked back at his arm.
“Danny?” I said.
He didn’t answer. H kept looking at the fire. He was hunched over working on something in his hands like a raccoon on a shell.
Claire was sobbing now. Julia clung tightly to my arm and whimpered, “I wanna go home, I think we should go now” she said.
I kept looking at him.
“Danny?” I said. “Dan?”
I smelled the fish before I saw it.
He turned and had a can of tuna in his hand. He used the knife he’d been scratching at it with to pop the lid off. Dumped tuna and juice over the flames.
Claire got up to run for the trucks, and Julia and I followed her. As fast as we could. My truck was only a few yards away. We were halfway there.
When we heard it.
Somewhere in the woods right behind us.
This bellowing sub animal roar that sounded like a thundering car woofer from the streetside.
We froze. Looked at each other with terror on our faces. Looked at the place by the fire where Danny had just been sitting.
I squeezed Julia’s hand as tight as I could.
The smell intensified. Breath of a thousand tuna cans. Air thick with hot oily fish stink.
We heard the roar again, then this awful throaty cackling shriek.
Then her voice.
Eat your tuna. You love your tuna.
Then nothing.