A cryptid story!
Strange Creatures follows Emma, a YouTube investigator of all things ooky-spooky, when she actually finds something terrifying. The Turtle Lake Monster is real! And now she needs to document it for the world, or at the very least, for her followers.
But, of course, something doesn’t go quite as she plans.
I loved writing this story. I got to condense and throw all of my monster and cryptid lore at the wall and see what stuck around. I had also been going through a minor obsessive phase with the satirical author Chuck Tingle, so there may be a little of that energy in the story as well.
Either way, this is a horror story that is more on the silly, campy side of things. Hopefully no nightmares tonight!
Strange Creatures
Emma blinked once. When the purple skin, slit by gills, still remained in her line of sight, she set her binoculars down by her side. There was no way she was looking at what she thought she was. There was simply no way. First of all, The Turtle Lake Monster was a water-creature and this one was on land. Secondly, the skin was purple, and everyone knew that The Turtle Lake Monster was green, or at least, dark blue. Lastly—and most importantly—that creature was not real. It was an urban legend, a folklore perpetuated by townspeople and internet conspiracy boards. Even if she was a so-called cryptid hunter and spent the bulk of her life on those boards or spinning her own theories on YouTube, none of this was really real, right?
Right?
Emma took a deep breath and looked through her binoculars again. The creature was still there. The skin was still purple. Turtle Lake was twenty feet away from the body at most, making it nearly forty feet from her position behind a bush. She was pretty far, so maybe this body was just a doll or prop that fell off a boat. Maybe this was leftover from a movie shot in the wilderness, someone trying to make hoax footage like Patterson-Gimlin. She had convinced herself the body was a stock prop from Supernatural or a practical joke left behind—it was April 19th, after all—but by the time she closed ten feet of distance, her heart sunk.
The body of the creature was lifeless. The gills did not suck in water or air. A fetid, rotting smell hung around them. The creature was definitely dead—but that meant it had once been alive.
“This can’t be real,” she said, barely above a whisper. The dusk air seemed to whisper back a confirmation. Real, real, real. She suddenly became aware of her prone position, alone at the edge of the woods. The nearest town wasn’t for miles. Most of the cabins had tourists inside of them who minded their own business. No one would hear her scream. If something did happen, she’d be just another trans woman to add to a missing list and not investigate further.
But the feeling didn’t stay. Curiosity and the thrill of discovery replaced the fear and left her with the body of a creature she would have called the definitive Turtle Lake Monster on her YouTube channel. With its dead body in front of her, she didn’t want to default to genus or origin stories from folklore. She wanted to know who the creature had really been.
The investigator side of her personality, the one that had grown up watching The X-Files and Outer Limits and who disdained the melodramatic side that Supernatural had now taken, started to creep out. She hunched down by the body with her flashlight and shone against its skin. Most lore said the Turtle Lake Monster was like a large sea-horse with a curved body, scaly, and with a canine head. But this creature resembled the gill-man from the b-movie about the black lagoon. It was fish-like with humanoid features, such as arms and legs and the ability to walk on the shore, as well as swim in the water.
At least, she figured as much. She used her encyclopaedic knowledge of cryptids to decipher the creature’s life before its untimely end while also categorizing and updating her knowledge on the lore itself. The eyes of the creature were harder to place; they definitely seemed reptilian and not human or fish-like, since they were more on the side of its head. Perhaps it was a creature that migrated? Maybe it was evolving? She considered all of these possibilities without touching or moving the body; she had no idea what killed it, and if that thing itself was contagious. She saw no wounds—but then again, it was out of the water. Lack of air could have killed it, but if it had flipped to the surface, she would have thought it’d crawl right back in.
She raised her flashlight to the lake. The sun had set now. The wind was getting colder. She rose from the creature’s body and examined the area of grass from its body to the shoreline. It smelled like the damp part of her dad’s basement; the cleaning supply closest at the hospital where her dad finally died; and the stale smell of vitamins that her mother insisted she take when she was six or seven to make her a ‘strong boy.’
Emma walked towards the lake with her flashlight in one hand and her Swiss army knife in the other. She wasn’t exactly sure what she could fight off with a corkscrew or a small blade, but it made her feel better. Always be prepared was the Boy Scouts code, even if Canada didn’t exactly have the Boy Scouts, but some kind of No Name Brand imitation. Her training came back to her in a whirl, warped with the crypto-zoology and The X-Files episodes she kept on repeat.
The water lapped against the rocks on the shoreline. A few signs had been erected close by declaring the lake a part of Canadian National heritage. One smaller sign followed and apologized in a white-washed way for taking indigenous land. The park was located on a large swathe of land just outside of a reservation in rural Saskatchewan that had been repurposed into a tourist trap that held dozens of cabins for people looking to get away. Whenever Emma made the nearly two hour trek from Saskatoon to hunt for monsters here, she’d only end up finding adults making out like teenagers in the bushes. She’d stopped filming her trips altogether because of it.
“The one time I find a real monster. The one damn time…” she muttered under her breath under she heard a twig snap behind her. Emma turned around so fast she worried she’d knock off her own glasses.
Her flashlight barely illuminated in front of her. All she saw was a slick line of goop from the shoreline to where the body of the Lake Monster had been.
It’s gone.
A chill slammed down Emma’s back, lodging deep in her abdomen. Oh, God. The one time I find a monster and I don’t have a camera… and the monster gets up to leave.
Emma picked up her binoculars and scanned the area. It was too dark now. She should have left fifteen minutes ago. She saw nothing, only blackness, until purple glittered under twilight. Stars had come out, along with Venus, and directed light on what Emma thought was a moving creature. No, a dead creature being dragged. She remembered the way in which her father’s body had been limp yet stiff in death. Those jerky movements were unmistakable, even on a cryptid. The Lake Monster was now being dragged toward a rock-face several hundred feet in front of Emma. The rock wall seemed to shudder. Then all the purple scales, glittering in starlight, disappeared.
Emma put down the binoculars. The wind that had once seemed so comforting warned her. You are not alone here. All of this is real, real, real and you are in danger.
She stamped down her fear long enough to take a sample of the gloop on the grass. Then she ran, faster than she ever remembered, for her car.
*
Alana was home when she called, but Emma spoke so fast that she hung up. Emma called back within seconds and held her tongue between her teeth so she didn’t lose her mind.
“That was you?” Alana baulked. “I thought someone was crank calling me with your phone. Sorry.”
“You have no idea what I have discovered.” Each syllabus felt like a stone under her tongue, slowing her down. “The Turtle Lake Monster. It’s real. I found it tonight. It looks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it’s the Turtle Lake Monster. I swear.”
“Uh-huh. And who donned the gill-suit this time around?”
Emma huffed. “You know I never hire actors for my videos. I just don’t shake the tree of doubt.”
“And you capitalize on smudges.”
Emma huffed again, but didn’t argue. Her YouTube channel had gone viral when she claimed to have found Old Yellow Top on a trip to Niagara Falls. She’d taken a photo in the woods on a whim and soon noticed a strange shadow and blonde fuzz in the background. She’d then showcased the photo in a confessional YouTube video, embellishing her vision of the Sasquatch-like cryptid known to haunt Ontario—but only a little bit. Her photo was like a magic eye painting; some days, she saw it and believed her story so fully. Other days, it made her feel nauseated by stretching her eyes too long with no payoff.
Regardless, people believed her enough to frequent her channel and demand more from her. And Emma had coveted the attention. For once, internet fame had come to a trans person from something other than a before and after gender montage set to some sentimental song. Trans women could have other damn interests—like cryptozoology. Her trans identity was incidental to her belief in strange creatures. No one wanted to hear about hormone injections and surgery rejection letters; about transphobia in her workplace and getting sir’d at the bank. They craved Old Yellow Top, a dozen different versions of Igopogo, and her adventures in Saskatoon’s national parks, looking for other creatures not yet discovered. Her audience knew she was trans—she hated to say it was kind of obvious judging on her jawline and the cadence of her voice when she got excited—but it didn’t matter. For once, people actually didn’t care what was in her pants. They cared about what was in the damn woods.
“I don’t need to have smudges anymore,” Emma insisted. “Not when I have the real thing.”
“Yeah, uh huh. Sure.” Alana’s bored voice was only half an act. Her role on Emma’s show had always been to play the sceptic to her true believer stance. In a way, they were the inverse Scully and Mulder in terms of the roles they played and who they looked like the most. Before Alana had transitioned, she’d been a tall and brooding boy who exchanged a dozen letters with pen-pals about monsters in the wilderness; sort of like a Red Shoe Diaries and Fox Mulder hybrid. Though Alana tried to play to Scully’s sceptic, she also wanted to believe so deeply. She just never wanted to let go until she saw the proof.
Until she saw the damn body in front of her—like Emma just found. In another burst of excited chatter, Emma tried to tell Alana the whole story from beginning to end. The whole truth. She emphasized that point several times before it finally seemed to sink in.
“Wait,” Alana said. “So you’re not reading from a script?”
“Again, I don’t have scripts or actors. Just talking points and smudges.”
“So you actually found something? And you weren’t fucking filming? You whore.”
“You bitch,” Emma said right back in a playful tone. Then she sighed. “But no. No filming.”
“Well, you have photos, right? With your phone?”
Emma’s silence made Alana huff. All the excitement that had once been in her voice was now drained. She didn’t even bother to trade spars back and forth. “So you still have nothing. This is still a wet dream, like us ever getting our licenses to match who we are?”
Emma laughed, though the joke was awful. It hit her in all her most vulnerable places. She grabbed the spare sheet of paper out from her jeans pockets. The goop was in the centre of the page. “I have a sample. From the body. There have got to be chemicals in it. My cell reception always goes wonky in this area. It’s part of why I was looking here earlier tonight. I figured it was going to be aliens if I found anything at all, but now we have a creature.”
“No, we literally have the creature’s wet dream. Ugh. I hate you so much right now.”
Emma smiled. Alana was this close to believing. Just one subtle push and—
“All right,” Alana said. “Take me to where you found the body. I have to see this for myself.”
*
As soon as Emma pulled the car into the lot, she felt like they were being watched. It was half passed midnight, and all the stars that had once been so bright seemed dimmed. Even Venus was no longer visible.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Now you’re getting cold feet? You know,” Alana said, shaking her head, “I’m starting to think you’re a fake. Like the National Enquirer.”
“Hey now. Those magazines actually do report stuff. Serious political issues and cover-ups. They just bury it next to Batboy’s baby mamma so it’s not taken seriously.”
“And now you’re the Lone Gunmen. All in one.” Alana rolled her eyes. “Soon enough you’ll start talking to me about chemtrails. And then we’re going to have a serious issue.”
“First of all, how dare you.”
Emma and Alana locked eyes for a long, extended moment before bursting into laugher. Alana started to mimic the now famous InfoWars segment about frogs turning gay, tying it to their own transition. “If only the water really gave us boobs,” Alana said forlornly, “then wouldn’t need doctors at all.”
“But this conspiracy,” Emma said, feeling the gravity of the situation. “What if it is real?
What if what I’ve found is actually something that would have been buried in the National Enquirer? What if…?”
“You’re given a Pulitzer in crazy talk?” Alana laughed again. “Well, if that’s the case, then we’re sharing it because that snot bubble you trapped on paper is nothing. We’re getting more, okay? And then we’ll talk about, especially if that means we’re given the keys to the InfoWars castle. God, can you imagine?”
Alana continued to chuckle as she got out of the car. Emma opened the backseat and gathered the lap equipment they’d both lifted from Alana’s veterinarian’s office. She could test the sample there come morning, and be able to report back with some kind of definitive certainty what they’d found. Alana had already theorized that it could just be normal guck from lake life that had been warped through plastics and other chemicals. It didn’t have to be some new kind of animals; and even if it was, they were discovering new bacteria all the time. So perhaps they would get an award for all of this. It only depended on what audience they wanted the most.
“Ready?” Alana held her lab equipment. She gestured to Emma’s phone. “You better tape us this time.”
Emma nodded. Her binoculars were around her neck, her Swiss army knife, and back-up hand-crank flashlight in her belt loops. She used the flashlight on her phone to guide her. While Alana walked towards the lake with her own light, Emma flipped open the camera and started the intro shot.
“Hello Tubies. We’re on a secret mission. Alana is convinced that I’m wrong about finding a gill-man body tonight, which could be the infamous Turtle Lake Monster. In spite of her scepticism, and how my creature differs from the standard lore, I’m still pretty sure I’m right and what I found is real. It disappeared the moment I turned away, but who knows what still lingers in the water? Come on.”
She turned the phone away from her face and held it out as a guide. Her voice had taken on the cadence of a performance; part circus announcer and part confessional queen. A deep fear lingered behind her, something that Emma hadn’t quite faced. She didn’t tell Alana how the body had disappeared. Only that it did.
As Emma walked, Emma glanced towards the rock face several feet away. Nothing glittered. Nothing glinted. But the sensation of being watched was still so acute.
“Here?” Alana asked. She dropped down the kit she carried and examined the grass. “I think I see the purple goo. You getting’ this? I’m not doing this twice and I’m definitely not staging anything.”
“Hush now. We never stage.”
“Uh-huh. Just tell me I’m in the right place.”
“You are. That’s where I found the body.”
Emma filmed as Alana took out tweezers and plucked up some grass. She added them into baggies. When they reached the water, the purple goo had faded, most likely washed away. Rocks lingered at the edge, interspersed with what looked to be egg shells. When Emma pointed it out, Alana shot her a look.
“I saw them. It’s not my first rodeo.” She sighed with what Emma thought was fear as she knelt down to collect the shells. “This is probably nothing. So many people camp in this area it’s probably just leftover breakfast. But I’ll collect it, anyway. Anything to prove you wrong.”
Emma made a noise of feigned pain. She turned the camera to face herself once again. “Well, everyone, what do you think? Are those egg shells from omelettes or something else? Does The Turtle Lake Monster actually sleep out here? Will it come back and rescue its babies? Or will this video be too dark and I’ll be unable to upload it and have to scrap all this effort tonight?”
Alana laughed just as Emma cut the camera. She slipped the phone into her pocket before kneeling down to where Alana was. She examined the eggshells through the plastic baggie, her brows knit with confusion.
“Are you okay? You seemed… spooked. Or dare I say, like a believer.”
“This is really strange, Emma.” It was all Alana said for some time. She extended the bag over to Emma, who looked at the shells. They were striated with lines, faintly purple on the inside. Not familiar, not omelette eggs. Not even close. When Emma looked up, she swore she saw the same glitter of light by the rock face. There and then gone. The lapping of the water and wind was the only sound.
“It is strange,” Emma agreed. “But is it real?”
“I think…I think we may actually be onto something. For once, this may not actually be a hoax.”
*
After two weeks and testing the results twice, the results came back as inconclusive. Unfamiliar. Strange. Not even Alana’s boss understood what he was looking at, and he was an expert in tropical fish. He had no idea what the two of them were doing, but he wanted to publish whatever they found in an academic journal. More people were spiralling into this story, all without warning. Alana had been talking to her former pen-pals who were now email buddies about monsters once again, causing Emma’s channel to explode once more overnight. A new audience was already pre-emptively setting up to wait for the big reveal. The cryptid and conspiracy community beckoned her. The screeching mantle of InfoWars would be passed. Full acceptance. A captive audience. Everything she ever wanted. She had wanted to believe and now she could believe.
But the video remained on her phone, untouched and unedited. She didn’t want to upload the scene because it still felt lacking. She was the only living witness to the gill-man Lake Turtle Monster; everyone else was the friend of a friend, the second stage. They were the ones keeping the lore alive—even Alana. She claimed to have a front seat to the evidence, but she didn’t see the body. She only saw the goop.
As far as Emma was concerned, this was her cryptid. And her cryptid still seemed so distant to her, even though she had been so close to his death.
When Alana called for the sixth time in one night, Emma finally let her phone power down. She didn’t want to talk about the types of tours they’d do now; the books they could write; or even the podcasts they could do. Fuck being a cog in the conspiracy. She never wanted to be on a panel of experts or screech about what was in the water. When she was a kid, and she’d first heard about Bigfoot, she had wanted to go out and meet him. She’d been a scared boy on a Boy Scout trip, listening to the urban legends and fearing that she’d pee her pants. But when those campers finally delivered the punch line in the scary stories, the monsters seemed more like her friends. They were more like herself, in her strange creature form, waiting to emerge into daylight.
Emma got into her car and drove to Turtle Lake.
*
A well-worn pathway in the grass directed her to the rock-face, where another pathway, lined with small evergreens and black pebbles, led her to the top of a steep hill. When she felt along the rock for edges, her finger dipped into a crack. She squinted. The cracks lined up and led her fingers to a doorknob. She turned it and a sharp grating sound followed. Not a knob, but a bell. She stood in front of the fuzzy door and waited. Someone would come, she was sure of it. She needed to reveal herself in order to be revealed.
“My name is Emma,” she said after a moment. “Emma Bryant.”
The door quaked. It slid apart. An older woman with a sharp nose and thin lips appeared. Her hair was dyed a monochrome black and pulled back into a ponytail so tight it seemed more like a hood than hair. Lines around her mouth revealed her advanced age, along with the lines near her eyes that spoke wisdom. She smiled when she saw Emma.
“No friend tonight?”
“No. Just me.”
The woman ushered her inside. The steep hill had been hollowed out, making Emma think of the first plans for Mount Rushmore. On a road trip to see her cousins, her father had taken her to the monument and told her all about the crazy inventor who’d wanted to keep important records inside the Presidents’ heads. He died before it was complete, so the rocks stayed piled up and nothing was ever stored inside. Emma could sense, from the smell of decay and printed paper alone, that the woman had managed to succeed where one man had failed. Her records became evident once Emma’s eyes adjusted to the low light.
Each wall was covered in photographs, many of which were amber with age. Emma recognized many of them from her crypto-zoological studies. There was the original 1947 image of Caddy, a sea serpent in BC, a visual rendition of the Igopogo lake monster of Ontario, and a frame of the famous Bigfoot footage from the 1960s, mixed in with other cryptids from around the globe. She even saw her own photo of Old Yellow Top, the one from her YouTube channel that had been repeated on a dozen postcards in her online shop. Emma was about to ask the woman how she knew of these images, when she spotted a framed photo of the woman (years younger) standing next to Old Yellow Top himself. Emma paused, blinked several times, and then pressed her face close enough to the photo she could see lingering fingerprints on the glass. This was Old Yellow Top. Not a costume, but very real. The woman’s records weren’t just a wunderkammer of any crypto-scientists’ wet dream. They were her records, like her own family photos.
“Tea?”
“No thank you,” Emma said. She sat on the chair the woman offered to her. Her kitchen was also filled with photographs, along with knick-knacks and trinkets which took up every spare shelf and mantelpiece. A stuffed jackalope hung over where the tea mugs were placed. The woman brushed the head of the jackalope, as if for luck, before pouring herself some tea.
“I would appreciate it if you do not expose this place,” the woman said.
“Oh. Um.”
“I know you have a channel. And I know you take this seriously. But you can’t.”
Emma buckled under the criticism. She always hated it when people told her what she could and couldn’t do, especially with the occult. The only thing other prohibition that irked her this much was when people told her what to do with her gender.
“I…” In spite of her anger, the woman’s cool gaze made Emma bite back her tone to a more cordial disagreement. “I don’t see how that matters to you.”
“Not to me. But to the animals and creatures, it matters a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
Before the woman could answer, small hissing noises broke up the room. Emma thought it was the kettle, but the woman had already poured her tea. The woman rose from her seat and opened a door next to the kitchen. Several small purple creatures nestled together in a makeshift bed. They were small lizard-like creatures, but with humanoid arms and legs. Their skin looked gooey, almost like raw chicken, except that it was purple.
“Oh my God,” Emma said.
“Yes,” the woman answered. She opened a drawer and removed a plastic bag that seemed to skitter with life. She dropped some live beetles into the baby Turtle Monster’s nest. The creatures ate it up. “These are what remains of The Turtle Monster you found two weeks ago.”
“It… it can have babies?”
The woman smiled. “How else do you think they reproduce? They are not created through thought forms, like the tulpas. They must also breed like you or me.”
“Obviously. I mean. I just…”
“What you found on the grass was afterbirth. The mother laid her eggs, but she died in the process. It happens every so often.”
“Oh, okay.” Emma bit her lip, pretending to understand. In no textbook or strange small-fonted website on Angelfire had she ever seen this kind of information. Everything was familiar—yet brand fucking new. “I am glad her babies survived.”
“I am too. But you must respect them.” The woman placed the paper bag back into the shelf and shut the door to the babies’ room. A flash of light emitted before the door was shut, as if a hot lamp went on from a sensor once the door was closed. The hissing died down. “So I do not ask that you hold back your video for me, but for them. For the generations of cryptids like them.”
“Like Old Yellow Top? You have to make sure he gets busy and breeds, too?”
When the woman nodded, Emma held back a laugh. No way this was real. What was this woman, the cryptid whisperer? Was she proficient in Cryptid husbandry? It made no sense. It was like some strange erotica found on Amazon and written by a crank author. She was about to say as much when the woman held up her hand.
“You will find this foolish. But there is something dire happening here. When the land is destroyed, so is home of all wildlife. You take care of the caribou, the cougar, and the sea otter, while I’ve taken care of the cryptids. I’m not alone, but I’m the best.”
“I have no way of checking that citation.”
The woman smiled. She grabbed a worn leather book from a shelf behind her and extended it. The name Phoebe Cavanagh was written on the bottom. “That’s me. I’ve been doing this a long time. I started out as a doctor. Then I noticed that my patients kept getting ill in one area. So I went there. I realized they weren’t becoming ill, but being pushed out by a native species. The Thetis monster wanted its water back. It needed the reserve. So I gave it him.”
Emma opened the book. A photo of the a creature that looked oh-so similar to the purple one she’d seen was on the front page, followed by newspaper clipping from the 1920s at the first sighting of the Thetis Lake Monster, and the sickness which came after and killed seven people. The second newspaper clipping was from the 1950s, during a second wave of sickness. Phoebe was quoted in a newspaper article from the 1950s, and pictures in an image. She somehow maintained her stoic wisdom even back then, while also remaining youthful. Her hair dark and her eyes were bright. In the book, Phoebe detailed how to treat the Thetis’s water so it could still live and thrive, and the town would no longer need to steal, but share the resources.
“My patients got better soon after we implemented a better system,” she said. “And the land got better too, because the cryptids were happy.”
“And now you’re taking care of the woods?”
She nodded. “All of Canada has monster problems. I’ve been all over—but here, in Saskatoon, there seems to be an influx of creatures dying. I’m still trying to figure it out. Luanne wasn’t the first patient I’ve lost, but at least she laid eggs this time around. At least there is another generation to keep going.”
Luanne. Emma repeated the name inside her head. It was strange to think of that name fitting that creature—but it somehow did. Emma wanted to be like the monsters. She wanted to understand them. This was the best way to understand them—to learn their names and habits—and yet in spite of an overwhelming feeling to bond and learn, she looked at the scrapbook in front of her with scepticism like a shield.
“Let’s say all of this is true,” Emma started. “And that my silence helps these creatures maintain their privacy so they can go on reproducing, what’s stopping me, really, from taking this scrapbook back to town as proof? Sure, most people will call me crazy and walk away. But a handful will come. And a handful will destroy this place, but possibly make me rich. There is nothing stopping me from uploading that video.”
“Except a conscience.”
“Fancy word. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“But Luanne does. But names do. And you know them now.”
Emma shook her head. Phoebe may have been right, but that still didn’t stop Alana. Emma may be more sentimental, but Alana was now on a mission.
“I can help you, you know. With your predicament.”
“My predicament?” Emma had to laugh. She gestured to her body in a derisive manner. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m born this way. Haven’t you heard?”
“I’ve heard a lot of things. And I’ve learned a lot of things. Flip to the back of the book.”
With a curious head tilt, Emma examined photos from a mid-century circus with Lobster Boy and a The Fattest Man. Then of a woman and man hybrid called Donna/Donald. As the photographs continued, Donna disappeared and out emerged Donald. There were more sequences just like that, spanning from the early 1950s to modern times. Each image of a smiling face was familiar to Emma in spite of never knowing these trans people personally. She’d seen these before-and-after cascades so much on YouTube; all that was missing in Phoebe’s version was a Coldplay song.
Emma closed the book. “I don’t think you have what I want.”
“Are you sure?”
Emma wanted to get up. Leave the weird hollow stone and post her video for all the glory. But she stayed rooted to her chair. Phoebe noticed and went on.
“I ask and offer these services to you because I know we can only live in two worlds for so long. We either embrace the supernatural and let it consume us, until Lake Monster eggs are quotidian and we know the skin is purple and never was another colour, or we turn our backs on this world and never look a strangeness again. We forget what’s hidden and we become normal.”
“Being normal is overrated,” Emma said.
“Being normal is what’s been denied to you. So you embrace the odd. That’s fine. I embraced the odd. I wanted to help—but I’m helping creatures stay normal, too. To have babies. To repair broken bones or amputate limbs caught in bear traps. This is my normal. This is not a freak-show to me. You have to decide if you want to be normal with humans or if you want to be normal among cryptids. You can’t have both anymore, Emma. That’s reached an end now.”
Emma wanted to argue. She wanted to yell back like a child and complain that no one could ever tell her what to do. About gender. About the occult. The two most important things to her felt taken from her by an old witch—but they also felt finally explained. Emma had wanted to be a monster because she felt like a monster as a young boy. When she realized she didn’t have to be a scary boy eating vitamins to make him grow strong and following in his dad’s footsteps, she said fuck it. She left that world behind—only to be stuck in this one. Being trans without ID. Without a license. She did the YouTube stuff because the ad revenue from blurry photos paid her bills. She waited and waited and waited for surgery that would make her normal, while also knowing that it would never come. So she thought she’d just stay with monsters.
But these monsters were normal. It was different, but there was a normal here. They had photos on their walls. They posed with their friends and families. Their doctor. Phoebe was a doctor, just like the ones that acted as gatekeepers. Except that Phoebe provided her with a door to a normal life. Not one living as a freak in either realm—but she had to choose.
“Are you sure you can do this?”
Phoebe nodded. “It’s kind of my speciality.”
Emma didn’t want to ask how or why. It didn’t seem to matter. She closed the book and handed it over. “Okay, I won’t post.”
“Thank you.” Phoebe rose from the table. She set out another pot of water to boil and took down another jar filled with herbs. When she offered tea to Emma this time, she said yes.
The darkness came faster than she thought possible.
*
“Hey, Tubies,” Emma said into her phone. It was daylight. Her body ached, but she was alive. Her smile was wider, her mind clearer. And her license was brand new in her purse. She could do anything now. She climbed up the rock face across from Turtle Lake and made sure the door to Phoebe’s world was hidden in her video. “I wanted to let you all know that this will be my last update. Ever. Alana will be taking over, though, and she has some amazing things to tell you guys.”
Earlier in the week, Emma deleted the earlier footage. When Alana had asked why, she claimed it was too dark. Alana had been frustrated, especially since the vet’s had been broken into the night before. The sludge that was really after birth was now gone. No records of the strange lab experiments remained. Even Davis, Alana’s boss, somehow now had an explanation for what they’d seen that day, categorizing it as an obscure fish disease. He no longer wanted to publish.
But Alana couldn’t let it go.
That was okay, though. Phoebe had assured Emma as much. Alana had never seen the Lake Monster up close. She only saw the traces, the edges of the monster. She only had the lore. There was no face to face contact, no crossing into another world. Alana was always going to be skating close to that edge, but she would never get inside unless she was lucky. It was always a million and one chance to be that lucky.
Emma had used up all that luck. As a parting gift, handed over her YouTube Channel, now bursting with subscribers, to the person who would carry on the lore—but the lore only.
“So, I’m moving to Ontario,” Emma said, still looking into the camera. “Not just because of Old Yellow Topper, but because there’s a lot cool things in Toronto. Boring things for you guys, but cool for me. I really did have a blast doing this show, guys. Probably more than you can even imagine.”
Emma’s smile hurt. Her heart swelled. When she signed off, she gave her standard peace symbol with her fingers, but for the last time. She closed the camera on her phone. She would upload it when she had a signal again. She wouldn’t even need to edit it.
Then she would move. Her life would start over, utterly normal.
She rose and stood next to the door. It would not open for her again. But when she pressed her ear against it, she heard the sounds of life on the other side. Hissing and the fussing. Baby cryptids, and a mother that would keep them safe.
A minute later, Emma walked towards her car and headed for home.
END
Eve Morton 