DWAYYO

Written by Jordan Miller

Alexis Johnson stood in her kitchen as she did almost every night, staring through the window into the field behind her house. At night you could only see so far, but the cornfield stretched out to the edge of the woods and then up into the Maryland hillside. Sometimes when the wind blew just right, and the night was black enough, Alexis would sit on her front porch and imagine that the sound of the wind pushing through the corn was really the sound of the tide coming in. She would try to imagine she was back on some Virginia beach in the summer and could smell the salt blowing in from the ocean. In those fantasies she was always about age fifteen, and she was always with her father.

Tonight, however, it was bright. The moon was full and the warble of tree frogs and insects sounded like a 1950’s flying saucer preparing to rise over a distant hilltop. The pinwheel stuck into her lawn spun freely in the wind, its multicolored wings turned to shades of gray and blue in the overpowering moonlight. Tonight Alexis wasn’t thinking about the beach or the tides, but she was thinking about her father. She was remembering the last time they spoke, which she really couldn’t call speaking at all. A fight is what it really was, and it had been a particularly nasty one. Alexis felt ashamed every time she thought about that final conversation and those memories were always followed by another. The memory of an empty casket.

She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich for a late dinner. It wasn’t really a proper adult meal, she thought. More like something she would have craved when she was fifteen. When her dad still called her Lexi. On nights when she thought about her father she often ate meals like a teenager, though she didn’t consciously realize it. Tonight it was grilled cheese.

Connie, her spotted terrier, hovered around her feet while she cooked. Moving quickly from one side of her master to the other, always looking up and panting expectantly. Only once did Connie bark, but Alexis held out one stern finger and the barking stopped. Alexis had spent weeks training her to not to bark every time she wanted something, and Connie had become very good at staying quiet on command. Alexis rewarded her good dog manners, giving her a treat and pouring a fresh bowl of kibble before sitting down to her own meal. Connie didn’t waste a second before pushing her snout into the bowl and chowing down, her stubby tail wagging madly.

Putting her sandwich on a paper plate, Alexis took one final look out the kitchen window and turned towards the living room to eat. On the way, her eyes fell across a photo on her wall, as they did every time she passed it. The photo was of herself and her father twenty some years ago. In the photo they are fishing on the river. She is dangling a fresh catch that no fisherman would boast about, but it was obvious from their smiling faces that they didn’t care about that one bit. They were happy.

The photo always made her think how young they both looked, even though she was the only one of them who would get the chance to grow old. Now she looked much closer to the age of her father in the picture. She wondered for a moment what her father would have looked like as an old man, and pushed the thought away.

Alexis ate her meal the way she always did, on an old TV tray on the couch in the living room. She usually kept the television on but rarely paid attention to the programming. Turning on the chatter, she always called it because to her it was primarily background noise. She put down her plate, picked up the remote and flicked it on.

Over the chatter, Alexis thought about the last fight she had with her dad and how venomous she had been. He had talked about sending her to a private high school, the New Life Christian School, and she had blown up at him. Her dad had gone to that school and complained about it hundreds of times and now he wanted to send her there? She hadn’t wanted anything to do with that school, and looking back she saw how quick she had been to fight. She realized she had avoided conversation entirely in exchange for shouting and spite, and those final poisonous words that still haunted her. More than anything she wished she had said something meaningful or at least not something so petty and cruel. A lifetime of memories tainted by one final awful conversation.

Her father had been an EMT and religiously kept his jacket hanging on the hook by the door. If it wasn’t on his person, it was on the hook. When on call he would often have to leave without notice. When asked about it he would smile and just say that it was good to always know where your jacket was hanging.

During that last fight, just as things were reaching their worst, the call came in. He tried to apologize and explain that it was his job and that lives could be on the line, but little Lexi wouldn’t hear it and she had said the thing that still keeps her up nights.

“You care more about your fucking job than you do about your own daughter. I’d have to be dead or dying on the street for you to give a shit.” She had said it with the intent to hurt, and it had worked. She could see it on his face as he put his jacket on and opened the door.

“We’ll talk about it later,” was all he said as he walked out the front door, but the time to talk never came. That had been the last time anyone saw her father alive. Later that night his ambulance was in a head on collision and had run off the road where it caught flame. There was concern of forest fire but the local fire department was able to contain it without much damage. For the Johnson family, there was nothing but damage. There was no body to recover and they were forced to bury that horrible empty casket. She had insisted on being a Pallbearer at the funeral and that disgusting lightness of the casket was something she would never forget. With the other people carrying their share, the thing seemed to almost float. It should be heavy, she remembered thinking, it should be heavy but it weighs nothing because he burned up while trapped in that car and while he burned he was probably thinking about those nasty things I said before he left.

The television conversed with itself as Alexis and Connie ate their meals. It was always the news even though Alexis supposed it might as well be anything. Still, she never changed the channel. Every minute or two Alexis’s eyes would gravitate to the window again and out over the acres of moonlit corn, swaying dreamily with the wind. She ate her sandwich without tasting it until something in the television’s chatter caught her attention. A news story.

This is why you always leave it on the news. You were waiting for something like this even if you don’t want to admit it. She thought spitefully as she listened to the newscaster speak.

“The body of ten year old Christian Ferris was discovered this morning after a desperate overnight search. The body was found near the Braxton River Conflux by Sheriff Deputy Greg Owens at approximately 7AM. Reportedly the boy, nearly unrecognizable, suffered multiple lacerations consistent with that of an animal attack. Authorities warn citizens to exercise caution…” The newscaster droned on but Alexis had stopped listening. She had heard enough to know she wasn’t going to be finishing her dinner.

Her eyes moved again out the window and then to a tall metal case in the corner of the room. The metal case was locked and she thought of the key hanging from a hook by the stairs. It’s always good to know where your key is hanging, she thought joylessly. She had a feeling that tonight she would be using it. She got up and decided she wanted to keep the key by her side just in case.

She turned the key over in her hand as she half listened to the news continue the story about the boy and how the wounds were similar to that of a group of campers who had met their end the month before. Listening to the news, she knew there would be talk in town that night of hunting parties and possible curfews. She knew this just as she knew there would also be a very different kind of talk, from a very different sort of people.

Up in the hills not so far from where Alexis sat and where Connie finished the last of her bowl of kibble, there were people who still called the woods their home. People who had lived there for generations in isolated small groups, hunting and providing for themselves. They occasionally came into town for supplies and always drew stares from people wherever they went.

As secluded as these hill people were, they had their own ways of keeping tabs on what went on in the area. Alexis knew their talk tonight would not involve curfews or anything sane. Any conversations they might have this night would certainly revolve around the demon that shares their woods. The creature who had just recently fed on innocent blood and by the will of God would leave them be for another cycle. They would talk of the thing they called the Dwayyo.

It was then that Connie started barking at the back screen door and nearly gave Alexis a heart attack. She called Connie hush, a phrase the dog knew well and usually responded to with the eager obedience of a well trained show dog. This time, however, Connie ignored her completely and kept on barking. She had her nose practically pressed up against the back screen and was barking in fast successions out into the night.

Alexis called again for Connie to hush, and once again the dog ignored her. A growing weight started forming in her stomach and she gripped the key harder in her palm. She got to her feet to go fetch Connie when her barking stopped and turned instead into a concerned whimper. Alexis watched the dog back away from the door and against the far wall, never taking her eyes from the screen door, and Alexis knew it was time to use the key.

The key slipped into the lock and turned without the least bit of resistance, as it always did. Alexis pulled her dad’s old Winchester single-shot rifle from its rack and looked it over. Of course it looked exactly the same as it did when she last put it there, but she liked to check all the same. Reaching to the upper shelf of the gun cabinet, she pushed aside the box of standard rounds and took down her box of special bullets.

She didn’t rush. Alexis never rushed. She loaded the gun with the same care and caution she always had, since her very first gun safety course all those years ago. Rushing never helped anyone, she reminded herself, and finished the job with a steady hand.

Connie was still fixed on the back screen, and Alexis had to push her away with her foot in order to squeeze through the door. Once on the porch she stood for a long moment and looked over the cornfield and felt the breeze on her face. She knew it wasn’t the right time to think so, but the breeze really was wonderful here in the summers. Her small, isolated country house set against so many acres of uninhabited field wasn’t chosen because of the nice breeze or a scenic view on clear days, but it most certainly had both. Those were things that Alexis just considered perks of the job.

Careful to keep her finger off the Winchester’s trigger, she turned off the safety, sat in her porch chair and watched the corn for what seemed like hours. Some nights when she did this, she truly would sit there for hours and nothing would happen. She would go back inside at sunrise, unload her special bullets, and lock the rifle back into its cabinet. Then she would usually make herself a couple eggs with some juice. She would skip the usual morning coffee and sleep though most of the day. Those were after the nights when nothing happened, but tonight didn’t feel like one of those nights.

The job, as Alexis has come to think of it, was really no job at all. She certainly wasn’t paid for it and the job had been instituted by no one other than herself. A better word for it might have been responsibility, but another equally appropriate word would be curse. There would be talk of the beast in the woods from the hill people tonight, to be sure, but there would be no talk for Alexis. She only planned for action and intended to kill the thing they called the Dwayyo.

Moving to this house was originally only meant for observation, maybe even contact if she was lucky, but things had changed. Too many people had died in that time and too many of them had been children. Now she understood that there were no options and the thing must die, so on nights like tonight when the moon was full and bright she stood guard.

She kept her eyes on the edge of the cornfield where the thing had come before. It knew she was there and in the same way she stood lookout for it, the creature seemed often to be doing the same. Alexis wondered if it did this consciously or from some kind of buried instinct. She hoped beyond hope it was the former but felt in her true heart it was probably the latter. Either way, it had marked her.

A sound out in the field caused Alexis to tense and rise to her feet, rifle ready. She stood that way for a full two minutes but heard nothing else. Probably a deer, she thought, and sat back down. The night, she thought glumly, was still young.

III

Alexis had stumbled on the Dwayyo the first time the same way all poor souls do, by unhappy accident. The only difference was, she had lived.

Camping had been something Alexis loved doing with her father when she was young, and after he was gone she kept it up. Mostly because she enjoyed it, but also because it made her think of him, especially when she camped in the Maryland hills where they had gone years before. It was one of these solo camping trips about five years before when she had first seen the creature. The sound of heavy footsteps woke her inside her tent and her immediate thought was bear. She had bear mace and quietly pulled it out her bag and slowly unzipped the front of the tent. Looking out she could see nothing and she crawled out to take a better look around the campsite. Standing on four legs and with the arch of it’s back at about six feet tall, was the thing the hill people call Dwayyo.

At first look she thought her idea of a bear had been correct because of the size of the thing and because it was dark, but after only a second she realized it was something else entirely. Foamy saliva dripped from its maw, exposing teeth that could snap bones with no effort at all.

Whatever this thing was seemed much more like a wolf, and the only real word her brain could latch onto was something so unacceptable she forced it back, unwilling to use it to categorize the thing staring at her through red, murderous eyes. Eyes that looked, she thought, so oddly human. The word, of course, was werewolf, and no matter how much time has passed since that day she had never since settled into using it freely. She braced for the thing to lunge and tear out her throat, but instead the red glow of sunrise appeared over the trees. The creature started to back into the woods, all the while keeping its hellish gaze locked on Alexis. Finally the beast turned and walked away. But before it could disappear into the woods, instead of returning to cower in her tent, Alexis found herself following the creature.

She kept what she hoped was a safe distance, but the wolf thing was much faster than her and before long it had lost her completely. She kept running, unsure why exactly she was doing this. Maybe, she thought strangely, it had something to do with what she had seen in the wolf’s eyes. The red glow of the sunrise was softening to a light orange, but even with the extra light she couldn’t seem to find the creature anywhere.

Alexis stopped and looked around and realized she was probably lost. She hadn’t been keeping track of where she had been going, but if she was going to be lost she thought, at least she was going to be lost in the daytime. That was far better than the alternative, and so she pushed on. Finally the treeline broke and she found herself in a clearing like something she would have expected to read about in one of her childhood fantasy stories. The clearing stretched in a rough circular diameter of about thirty-five feet, the grass a lush, vivid, almost aqua green. Even through her shoes, Alexis could tell it was as soft as any she had ever felt. On the other end of the clearing stood a man. He was covered in mud and naked, but Alexis wasn’t threatened. She was staring at his face and feeling like she was losing her mind.

It was a face she saw every day of her life. In the photo she kept hanging in her apartment, the man was smiling and standing next to her and holding fishing poles and she was holding the smallest fish you had ever seen. It was her father, Matthew Johnson, but his face was sunken and insane. His cheekbones were like that of a corpse, his body so riddled with scarring and filth it was impossible to tell what kind of shape he was in. One thing she was sure about was that this was not the body of an older man, as her father should be. He still looked more or less the same age as the photograph, which of course was impossible.

Then Alexis saw something she tried to convince herself for weeks was something her mind had made up. His teeth were far too long and sharp, saliva running over them, and then something changed. The teeth shortened and seemed to retract into his gums at the same moment a second row of teeth pushed past them. The second row of teeth appeared normal and after only a couple seconds had replaced the first set entirely.

From her father’s face bulged a set of wild staring eyes that, to Alexis, looked like he was frightened. For a long moment they just stared at each other, each with equal expressions of confusion.

“Dad?” Alexis called to the man who looked more like some kind of reanimated ghoul. The man flinched and looked for a moment like he was going to run but didn’t. He looked terrified now. He looked around as if searching for some kind of explanation. She took a step closer. “Dad, is that you?”

The man turned and took off into the woods with a speed you would have never expected a man to be capable. She didn’t even try to chase after him, and just stood in the clearing and watched him go. It was him, she thought over and over. She knew it was. He had two sets of teeth, she thought madly and almost laughed out loud. She had seen him change. No matter how much she hated that monster movie word, she knew what her father was.

She walked back with no clue if she was walking in the right direction. Soon she broke through the treeline again, but this time she was at the edge of a cornfield and a gravel road. She followed the road which led to a long driveway and a small house backed up against the corn field. In the front yard there was a for sale sign.

Five years she had spent in the house obsessing over finding her father again, and she never succeeded. She took countless day hikes and marked maps where she had checked but found no where he could have been hiding. That is not to say she never saw him, but never on any of her hikes, and never during the day.

The only times she saw her father were on nights of the full moon when he chose to visit her. He would loom, a wolf the size of a grizzly bear, behind the first few feet of corn so that all she could see was his shape and the occasional glint of the moon from its eyes. Alexis never dared approach him in this form, and so far at least it had done the same for her. It seemed only to want to look. It had marked her, and Alexis knew why. She was part of his pack.

She wondered how much of her father’s human mind was still left, but then she would think of finding her father in the clearing and the look in those bulging eyes. She didn’t like to think of him that way. But then she would think about how it came to look at her from the edge of the corn. Surely some part of him was still there, or at least she hoped.

That hope kept her going for years. But that was before all the hikers, and the campers, and before Christian Ferris who was only ten. That was before she knew about all the death. That was before she started to think of her life in the house only as the job.

It was a job nobody else could be qualified for but her. She had spent years feeling guilty about that childish fight with her father, feeling as though she had been the one to send her dear old dad out on that call and to his death. Though it hadn’t been his death, had it? Not exactly, but in many ways this seemed far worse. It was too late to fix any of that now, but this? This was something she could do. This was something she could make right. She stood on the porch holding her single shot loaded with one of her special bullets, waiting for her father to show himself. Connie was still whimpering inside the screen door and Alexis realized that the sound of the crickets and the tree frogs had stopped. She knew she wouldn’t have to wait for long.

Then, as if on cue, Alexis saw something shift out in the corn. It was too big to be a deer and so she let her finger slip down over the trigger and raised the rifle halfway up to her shoulder. A massive shadow appeared behind a thin layer of corn as two animal eyes glinted at her from the darkness.

“Daddy, you did bad things... but I know it wasn’t your fault!” The shape didn’t move. Alexis tried her best to stay still even though she was starting to cry and her legs were beginning to feel like they were made of rubber. “It’s me, it’s Lexi! I know you know it’s me and that’s why you keep coming back so just… just come on out!” She choked out the last few words through a deep sob.

Alexis stood there staring at the monster in the corn for what seemed like a brief eternity, and then it moved. With the silent slowness of any great predator, it stepped out from behind the corn and stood, its powerful back arched over four legs like tree trunks. It was bathed in moonlight which glowed in its eyes like blue fire. A fire that said that those eyes had seen the truth of the world behind our world and had become furious with madness because of it.

“I love you daddy, and I’m sorry” she said under her breath, and pulled the trigger. The gunshot tore through the silence of the night and through the blast at the end of the barrel Alexis saw the thing move to the right faster than she had seen anything move in her life. The bullet grazed its shoulder and it howled in pain. I missed, she thought frantically, God damn this Winchester!

She had always thought about upgrading the old single-shot to something more modern, but it had been her dad’s gun and she had held onto it. It was a sentimentality she was now afraid would be her death.

The thing was confused and furious, spinning and biting at the fresh wound on its shoulder before turning back to stare at Alexis. There was nothing of her father in those eyes, only murder, and Alexis knew she had only one shot. Maybe. If she was fast. She reached into her pocket and felt the other special bullets. Silver bullets. There were four left, but there would only be time to load once. She ripped the bullets out of her pocket, but two of them caught the hem of her clothes and sent all four dropping down to the wood planks of her back porch.

Alexis watched in horror as the bullets dropped. She fell to her knees hoping to save them midair, which she found was nearly impossible while also holding the gun. Three of the bullets clattered onto the porch, but one vanished entirely and Alexis realized in an instant that the gaps between many of the boards were larger than her bullets. If she wasn’t lucky the rest would drop right through and then they might as well be on the moon.

The bullets bounced and rolled across the plank as she fell to her knees with a hard thud and threw her hands out to grab them. She wasn’t quite fast enough and she screamed out as she watched two more bullets roll and vanish into the blackness under her porch. She slammed her hand down and felt it close around the final bullet.

Alexis looked up and saw that the thing that was once her father was now barreling towards her on all fours. The blue flame in its eyes was growing larger by the second. Not much time now. She pushed the bullet into the chamber and slammed it closed in one movement. There was no time to stand up, so she brought the Winchester up to her shoulder and looked down the barrel. For the briefest moment she thought that the moon had simply gone out, and she was looking out over the complete blackness of a new moon. What she was really looking at, Alexis realized too late, was a creature so large that at close range blocked out all light. It was an immovable force, and the impact was like being hit by a bus.

The creature moved impossibly fast for its size and without seeing it first hand it would be hard to truly imagine. Its jaws closed down around her midsection, and the gun went off up into the night sky. Connie was barking uncontrollably inside the house as her mistress screamed. In a matter of seconds the creature and the woman in its jaws vanished behind the wall of corn. Her screams echoed and eventually grew faint, until the only sound left was Connie barking into the darkness.

The house was secluded, but there were still some who heard the shots and the screams that followed. Those whose homes are still settled deep in the woody Maryland hillside understood what those sounds meant. They had been watching the woman for some time, and they knew the interloper had been taken by the creature.

Soon legend of the woman spread throughout the families in the hills. From then on, when the moon was full and bright, the hill people would cower by their fires and listen to the distant howls of two creatures instead of one. To those who clung fast to the superstitions of their old religion, those howls sounded sorrowful. They sounded as if they mourned their own damnation, and perhaps they did. As those who still dwelled in the forest huddled together, brushed their children's hair and whispered them to sleep, they heard the mournful baying of the Dwayyos and knew in their true hearts that their hills were damned.