The Wallingfield Beast
…Isn't much of a threat, unless you're a potato
It loved blackberries.
That was the first thing Sarah Carterhaugh observed. This…thing, this gangly nine-eyed beast with a gaping, toothy maw that went all the way down its long neck to its collarbone loved blackberries.
And blueberries.
And strawberries.
Actually, it seemed to like any kind of fruit or vegetable. She had photos of it gnawing on carrots and celery, and one instance where it picked up a head of lettuce, opened its mouth wide and took a bite out of it like it was an apple. Sarah wasn’t entirely sure, but it sounded like it was making little happy munching noises while it ate.
This was not what she’d expected when she’d set out to write an article about Wallingfield’s resident cryptid. Her editor Dominic had sent her some grainy video of the thing, eyes glowing eerily in the dark as it wandered through the woods.
He was utterly convinced this was the shot in the arm their paper needed. The thing that’d revitalize it, draw in new readers. Their very own Loch Ness monster. “Picture it,” he’d said. “Wallingfield Monster Terrorizes Town. 72-point font, front page. Get me quotes from frightened residents.”
She’d spent the whole drive there ready to write about a fearsome predator. Hikers gone missing in the woods. Traumatized hunters. Strange noises in the night. Residents afraid to leave their homes after dark. Maybe even sightings of the thing going back decades.
What she got was a gentle forest creature placidly nibbling on clover.
It didn’t help that it looked like a deer, what with that slender build, the antlers, the general shape of its head and ears. The limbs were overlong, almost stilt-like. It had long-fingered, clawed hands in place of hooves on its front legs, but it didn’t seem to walk upright. The only thing she’d ever seen it use those hands for was picking fruit out of trees.
There were plenty of quotes from residents. ‘Terrified’ wasn’t exactly the tone of them.
“Oh, Munchie?” Mrs. Hill from the organic co-op had said, not even looking up from her inventory. “Sweet thing. Keeps getting into my heirloom tomatoes. I’ve started leaving the bruised ones out for him. Can’t sell ’em anyway, so he might as well have ‘em.”
“It knocked over my compost bin at 3 AM,” admitted Jim Ferris. “Gave us a bit of a scare. But then it ate everything that fell out, even the coffee grounds. Actually cleaned the whole mess up, so I couldn’t be mad.”
Sarah flipped through her notes. So far she’d interviewed twenty-five people and there were zero reported deaths. No injuries. Ten told her they’d been feeding it. The town had several nicknames for it: Munchie, Deerbert, Legs McGee, and most popularly, Wally.
“Wally likes zucchini,” eighty-two year old Constance Birch told her, sounding as if she were just talking about her grandson. “The big ones that take over your garden in the summer. He does the whole town a service, really.”
‘Wally’ was basically the town pet. He’d shown up maybe ten years ago and had never hurt anyone. If anything, he ran away from anything that tried to hurt him. The stories she’d gotten included him playing with people’s dogs, munching on fruit salad at family barbecues, being petted by children and getting chased away from a bird feeder by an ornery tuxedo cat with a stubby tail named Lucy.
Truly terrifying. And by that she meant Lucy, who apparently had a habit of beefing with anything larger than her.
Lucy was all of seven pounds.
Dominic was going to have a coronary.
Sarah wasn’t willing to give up yet. She’d set up cameras, hoping to catch some unsettling images of the creature. Something usable. Anything other than ‘weird mutant deer eats zucchini and gets chased by cat’.
‘…Maybe I should just write a piece about the cat,’ she thought.
There were a few photos that could work. It had white fur, and seemed to have a faint, ghostly glow around it in the dark. Pair that with the luminous eyes, long legs, and the antlers, and it looked like something otherworldly. Another shot had it bending down, mouth fully agape.
She’d just crop out the watermelon someone had left for it to eat. As long as all those teeth were in view, that was what mattered. Maybe write up a fluff piece speculating on the nature of the thing but not really committing to anything beyond that. Less horror, more mystery.
Something bumped the back of Sarah’s head, followed by a huff of warm air that smelled sweet, like fermented berries.
Wally was right behind her when she turned, muzzle inches from her face, nine glowing green eyes blinking slowly at her. Not angry, not frightened, just curious. She hadn’t even heard it — him — approach, which was a hell of a trick for something his size.
The bag of dried mango slices in her backpack. She’d brought it along as a snack and completely forgotten it was there. Sarah laughed, making Wally’s ears flick.
Figured that this thing would sniff it out.
Sarah unzipped the bag and grabbed a piece of dried mango, holding it out to the beast.
“Here, you want some? It’s fruit. You like fruit.”
Wally gently took the mango, quietly munching on it while she reached up with her other hand to scratch by the base of his antlers. He leaned into it, nine eyes squinched shut in the universal manner of animals enjoying scritches.
Felt a little like getting to pet a unicorn.
“Good boy, huh? Yeah, you’re a good boy.”
Eventually the mango slices were gone. Wally licked the last traces of fruit off her hands and lolloped off into the woods again. Sarah was left behind with her cameras and a ‘frightening encounter’ that was anything but.
It was Constance Birch who put the last nail in her story’s coffin.
“Found this in my attic years ago,” the old woman said, sliding a laminated square of yellowed newsprint across the kitchen table. “Kept it because I thought it was funny.”
Sarah picked it up.
THE LATEST THING IN MONSTERS.
It Looks Scary, But Is a Harmless Vegetarian.
She stared at it for a long moment.
“How old is this?”
Constance shrugged and refilled her tea. “Old. Older than me, which is saying something, but it’s definitely talking about our sweet Wally.”
Sarah set it down on the table. Somewhere outside, she could hear Wally’s happy munching noises. Decades ago, another journalist had sat down at a typewriter and typed out basically the article she was going to have to write. Had probably made the same trip she’d made. Asked the same questions. Gotten the same utterly un-scary answers.
“Dominic is going to kill me,” she grumbled to no one in particular.
“More zucchini bread?” asked Constance.