Short Tales of Abominations

Megafauna

Detective Arthur Van Hoyt had been driving all night. He didn't dare stop at any of the dingy motel's he passed on the way. Though a man of logic and reasoning, he took a little superstition to how movies portrayed motels. Especially those with neon signs.

For weeks he had been investigating the disappearance of a woman in her mid-twenties. Her parents had contacted the precinct after her workplace had called and inquired to her location. At first they didn't seem worried, then the calls of her friends kept pouring in.

Arthur's town was only large enough to be placed on a county scale map. Due to this, the job seemed like it would be easy. Find the lady, get her story, get her home. The more he prodded however, the more anomalies cropped up.

The woman's name was Anna. Gas station clerk at the Clure's Gas & Go in Sundown, Illinois. Last seen driving northeast.

Interview after interview seemed to produce little to no evidence. Anna was overly eager to help people, which to Arthur, sounded sweet. However, it was a typical song and dance for victims.

People always say things like that. "They were so sweet" or "Truly a gift to the community."

If people had been even slightly more honest, these investigations would actually get somewhere.

Give me a flaw, He thought, 'She has temper' or 'a gambling addiction.' Tell me something other than how great she was.

For how great these people tended to be, it was never elaborated on how they made their community better. Arthur lived in Sundown for 25 years and he had never heard of her.

It took an angry ex of hers for him to finally get some kind of lead. Anna had apparently gone on and on about this older gentleman she had been helping in a town called Evansfield. Slowly, taking care of him seemed to consume her schedule until the boyfriend couldn't take it anymore and broke it off with her.

It seemed pretty obvious to Arthur. The man hid a darker side of himself and it would turn out that he wasn't so decrepit as he let on. Instead luring innocent young women to their doom.

He couldn't jump to conclusions however. It was just what he would surmise, given the books he'd read and cases he'd studied.

The car's suspension creaked as the pavement gave way to a gravel road. He was out in the middle of nowhere. Not even mile markers were placed out here.

The road seemed lonely. No foliage on either side had come into his headlights to say hello. Nothing to welcome him to this countryside he had never before seen.

For several minutes he drove until the radio quit playing his jazz tunes and he had to switch it off to avoid being driven mad by the staticky buzz.

He stared passed his headlights into the darkness that had yet to be illuminated by his lights. The moon had been hidden behind a curtain of clouds on an overcast night, completely blacking out landscape around him.

He began to hum, weary that, without a noise that wasn't the shifting gravel under his tires, he would fall asleep.

Several minutes more passed and the road became surrounded by woods. Trees of thick bark showed off their deep ridges and waving branches barely touched the light of his high beams.

Finally, atop a rise in the distance, he saw a house. As his car rumbled up the incline, he noticed a wooden sign with a flap display counter nailed to it's bottom.

Etched into the sign had been, 'Evensfield' and below that was 'population,' with the display reading 214.

He looked at the sides of the road as he drove, there didn't seem to be driveways from what he could glean at the edge of the dusty rocks. Only the house ahead was visible. Of course it could have also been the only one with the lights on.