Midnight’s Fables

The Point Pleasant Cryptid

The scale of what Midnight is has begun to dawn on you, a creeping feeling in the pit of your stomach. Something about those vast shadowed beasts that lurked between the stars in this other universe of Elves from so, so long ago... you somehow come to understand that whatever Midnight is, whoever it is... they are of a far more ancient darkness than those shadow monsters. You begin to realise that your host and tour guide may just be an eldritch God.

“Take your time, let me know when you’re ready,” Midnight smiles at you jovially. Again, it is a figure without form or expression, merely a hollow cut out of reality, a black hole into which you may stare. They have shape, yes, but that is all. An outline of darkness, a silhouette given life. Yet in its menacing, androgynous voice, you can hear a playful smile. The smile of a thing that thinks horror and fear and death and suffering are toys with which it may play. The smile of a thing that does not understand what you are, because you are far too small and insignificant for it to comprehend.

A Human cannot fathom the perspective and experience of an ant because it is too narrow, too small, too primitive. In the same way, this thing cannot understand what it is to be Human, not because you are so difficult to understand, but because at all times it is aware of far more eldritch horrors than a mind as insectuous as yours can begin to comprehend.

And you are trapped in its clutches.

You can leave at any time, it has claimed, and yet... to do so would mean your immediate death. Death, or eternity as the one-person audience to an eldritch horror’s puppet show...

This might well be worse than death, but at least this is something.

So, with a heavy heart, you nod. “I am ready.”

“Good,” it croons. “Pick an item, what story shall I tell you next?”

“May I wander around more, find something interesting?” you ask, and Midnight nods emphatically.

“Please, please,” it grins. “Be my guest.”

And so you begin to wander around for a time, up and down the endless aisles of stuff. The detritus of life. All the things that people adore so much, that they put so much care and attention and love into; favourite hats, a child’s toy, a family heirloom, the umbrella that was in hand on the most important day of a mortal life... things that on their own might seem mundane. In this place, they take on an eerie quality, because you have now come to understand that each and every one of these boring, everyday items, holds a terrible story of death, tragedy, and horror.

One item in particular catches your eye, an axe-like weapon with a small head and feathers and little leather tassels and beads hanging from the length of its handle. You point to it, and ask, “what about this one.”

Midnight has no face, yet somehow you can see it turn stony and cold. “I do not wish to speak of that one.”

“Why not?” you ask.

“That tale is one whose owner refused to tell me it. I went to Naat’áanii Chaske and petitioned to him for weeks to tell me the story of the Skinwalker he slew. He would not tell me it. His people did not trust outsiders with their culture and their knowledge of secret things, like Skinwalkers. Furthermore, I think he recognised me as a dark spirit, though I wore a mortal raiment and hid my form, I do not think he was fooled by my disguise. For weeks I all but begged him, and every time, he refused. In the end, I stole his tomahawk and left. I had hoped to extract the tale from the object itself, but I could not. I tried to go back and view the event for myself, but something kept me aback. Perhaps it was one of my siblings, I suspect The Historian to be the culprit, but I do not know. So, I possess the artefact, but not its story. It happens, sometimes. Some stories are difficult to come by, especially if they are the sort of story that does not leave survivors. I can only go to certain Realms to petition the dead for their stories, and they are often Realms in which the dead wander unchecked, making tracking down a specific soul difficult. Please, find another item, ask me for another story.”

“How did you come by the stories you have told me so far?” you ask.

Midnight sighs. “It depends. The tale of Edgar and his hunger I extracted from the object memory of his skull. Body parts often remember chapters from the life they were once part of – especially the endings – and so when I took his skull from his frozen corpse, I extracted its memory for that story. For the tale of Mabel Eade and Bloody Bones, I took that tale from Mabel herself as she drowned in the waterlogged pit. The tale of Joseph and his worm, I took from the object memory of his camera and the photographs it took. And for the Elves who died in deep space, accidental victims of the things between their stars... I was there. I am of a greater darkness than those shadow beasts, but they were ultimately inspired by me and my own creations. I work hard to gather and curate the stories in my museum.”

You shudder at that thought.

Midnight enjoys all these stories, but the idea of it going to their victims and, as the creature itself put it, ‘extracting’ their horrors... you feel as though this shadow of a figure is itself somehow culpable for the horrors you have heard.

What does it mean that those shadows are based on it and its creations? That very idea unsettles you to your core.

“Come,” Midnight bids you, uninterested in your internal struggle. “Let us find another tale I may tell you.”

You continue to wander a while longer through Midnight’s endless museum, with its dark lights and towering columns.

After a while, you spot something that catches your eye. A grainy photograph printed on thin paper with rough edges, as though it had been cut out of a broadsheet. It depicts a sketch of a tall, dark winged figure, like the silhouette of an angel but with a far more menacing appearance.

“What’s that one?” you ask, pointing. Midnight followed your gaze and nods.

“Ah, yes, the tale of Jackson Venture of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It features a creature which you may well have heard of. Even I do not know where he came from, but ever after this story, he became a herald of doom who warned people from the path that might lead to their demise. Perhaps this tale is why...”

***

Jackson clutched the newspaper cutout in his hand. He knew it was just a sketch. Of course it was. The four people that had originally seen the creature hadn’t brought a camera with them.

But Jackson was better prepared. He had a camera, a torch, and plenty of spare batteries, and he held close the bag that contained them as he climbed over the fence where the two couples had first seen... it.

For weeks now, he’d been sneaking out here in the night, desperate to see the thing with his own eyes. He had memorised the news story’s title; “Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something” and the sheer mystery it included filled his teenage heart with an excited heat, ample enough to battle the mid-December cold.

He lay down in the field, dubbed the “TNT field” by the locals because it supposedly had once contained a WWII munitions plant and, according to local legend, there were still explosives, undetonated and forgotten, buried beneath the grass. Jackson didn’t think that likely, after all this was a prime spot for couples to sneak off to in the middle of the night to get frisky. He’d already stumbled on three different couples that had been lying in the field in the dark over the last four weeks since his little expeditions had begun. If there were still explosives under the grass, surely they’d have gone off by now and sent a handsy couple to meet their maker?

Whatever the case, Jackson wasn’t afraid. Not of the TNT at least. He was hunting a monster; a giant bird-bat-moth monster.

He remembered again the description one of the witnesses had put in the paper; a slender, muscular seven-foot man with white wings and hypnotic, glowing red eyes.

And he was going to get a picture of it.

Whatever the hell it was.

There had been other reports too, from loads of people that had seen it, describing all kinds of weird phenomena in relation to the creature. TV static and buzzing, a missing german shepherd, dark figures seen soaring through the night... One man had even shone a flashlight at it, and claimed its eyes reacted to the light like bicycle reflectors.

Some people had claimed it was a freakishly big heron, or a lost crane that had stopped on its migration route, but Jackson wasn’t convinced. Nobody could look at a bird, even a big one, and think it was a man, could they? No way.

This thing, whatever it really was... it was real.

There! What was that? A swooping sound, like huge wings carving through the air!

It was coming from above and... if Jackson looked up and squinted, he could see something black passing in front of the stars. Its shape was impossible to tell, but it was there, it was something! Quickly, he turned his torch up towards the shape and readied his camera and...

The bird squawked and flew on by.

It wasn’t big, it was just a lot closer than he’d thought. It looked like a hawk or maybe a kite or something. A cool find, and any other time he might have been excited to see the bird, but disappointment filled his heart as he saw the perfectly normal, perfectly common native bird flap off through the night and disappear beyond the trees.

Jackson sighed heavily and settled back down into his position, lying in the grass behind the fence which separated the field from the road.

Stupid hawk, or whatever it had been.

At least, he supposed, he hadn’t wasted photographic film on the stupid thing.

Hours more passed by in the cold, dark winter, and soon enough Jackson was shivering, despite the warm coat he had wrapped himself in. Sleep was for the weak, he kept reminding himself. He could sleep when he was dead. He was on a mission, and he needed to see this monster. He would not rest until his task was done.

CRUNCH!

Nearby, something heavy impacted the ground with a sickening sound, like a pile of sticks snapping all at once, mixed with the wet sound of tearing flesh. Jackson leapt to his feet and spun about towards the noise, his torch trained on a dark mass that lay still in the grass about twenty feet away. With electric trepidation tempered by dogged excitement, Jackson approached the motionless, lifeless pile of fur and meat and blood that slowly oozed crimson onto the grass.

It was a... a dog? A german shepherd, just a normal... a normal dog, like the one that had gone missing!

Before he could fully articulate to himself the ideas that now flooded his mind, Jackson whipped out his camera and began snapping pictures of the dead animal, which lay twisted and broken in a thoughtless heap. Its body had been mangled by symmetrical rows of teeth and a deep, circular stab wound. Jackson was careful to make sure he got plenty of polaroids of those strange bite wounds and their unsettlingly symmetrical shape. There was no way to discern between the upper and lower jaws; the bite marks left by both were identical, but...

Jackson turned his attention back to the sky, and began trying to take photographs of any shape he could sense which moved through the blackness above; be it real or imagined.

And then he saw it.

It was huge. Seven feet at least, maybe eight or even more. Slender, with a strong athletic build. Naked, but not indecent, and covered in a thick coat of fuzzy black hair. White wings, shaped like a moth’s, extended to either side covering a total ten or more feet, and two small, furry antennae protruded from atop its large, round head. Its face included a vertical mouth and proboscis like a butterfly, and two huge red eyes, like those of a giant insect, protruding from its face.

It was...

It was...

It was real!

Picture after picture after picture. The night flashed again and again with light so bright that Jackson was blinded by his own camera as he took dozens of photographs of the rapidly approaching monster.

Unseen by Jackson, blinded by the camera flashes, a huge, muscular hand sailed through the air and swatted into the boy’s side, like the hand of a Human squashing an insect.

The teenager and his camera went flying in opposite directions, his polaroid photographs sent flying through the air as he lost his grip on them and crashed into the grass almost a dozen feet away.

Jackson rolled to a stop, blind in the dark night, his torch flickering weakly somewhere off to his left, casting an eerie dim grey glow upon the towering figure that came lurching towards him.

Jackson did what anybody would do in that situation; he leapt to his feet and ran away as fast as he could, blood surging through his body, heart hammering in his chest, vision dark and blurry, unable to see where he was going. He didn’t need to know where he was running. Just... away.

Behind him, huge wings swept through the sky and seemed to grow closer and closer. Jackson knew there was no escaping it, no getting to safety, no-

BOOM!

The boy didn’t even have time to consider the risks of where he was before the landmine detonated.

Some locals heard the disturbance and phoned the authorities. There was no sign of the mutilated german shepherd, or of the monster. Just the remains of Jackson, some pieces still twitching, and his few belongings scattered about the field. They gathered up most of the polaroids, but none of them showed anything beyond static and out-of-focus blurs, like something had interfered with the camera and damaged the photographs. They found the camera itself, which had been smashed from being dropped, and his backpack and the torch and spare batteries. And, scattered across the field along with the polaroid, they found this newspaper cutout, the sketch that had inspired Jackson in the first place.

It wasn’t long before the authorities deduced what Jackson had been doing, but how he had come across the landmine, nobody was sure. Local legends aside, there weren’t supposed to be any active explosives still in the area. Had Jackson just been unlucky enough to find the only one left? The authorities decided that such must be the case, but I do not think so. And I do not think The Mothman put it there either. I think something else killed Jackson, something that Mothman did not know about. From the so-called monster’s perspective, he was just eating his dinner when a strange boy accosted him with a dizzying bright light, before blowing himself up.

I do not think Mothman caused Jackson’s death.

But I do not think he ever forgot it either.

Perhaps that is why, in the decades since, Mothman has always appeared to those in danger before catastrophe. Warning people of the imminent collapse of the Silver Bridge a year later. Appearing in Moscow before the Russian Apartment Bombings of 1999. Always before disaster. Always, perhaps, before the same disaster. Perhaps Mothman is no herald of doom at all, but the pursuer of a destructive force. Wherever this disastrous spirit goes, Mothman follows, hoping to warn its victims before his unseen enemy can spell their doom. Perhaps, in all this time, he still has not forgiven himself for the role he played in Jackson Venture’s demise.

***

You feel hollow after that tale. It feels somehow unlike the others, perhaps it is Midnight’s concluding speculation but... it seems to you now that Midnight is almost personally proud of that tale, as if the creature had a hand in its unfolding.

You cannot help but wonder if the unseen enemy of Mothman, is in fact Midnight itself.

You have no reason to believe Midnight would not go to any length necessary to get a good scary story. Are you now trapped in the home of a creature that would kill a child like that for its own amusement?

Without a shadow of a doubt, you know the answer to that question.

Yes.

Yes it would.