Creepy Short Stories

Skinwalker

Skinwalker (The Rake Spinoff)

My father told me a story once. I'll never forget it, for a few reasons. I think it's the first story he ever told me, as a child. Its also the story of how my grandfather died. But honestly, that isn't the reason.

You hear stories, on TV, or sometimes you over hear something in a public place. People talk about ghosts and aliens, and you think to yourself "that ain't real. They're making it up, or they're mistaken, or they're crazy." or something like that. You just can't believe it.

Until something happens. Something that brings it all together, connects the dots in a way you didn't think of before. Maybe it happens to you, maybe you hear the same story again and again, happening to different people. It doesn't take long for the world to become a lot bigger than you thought it was.

As I said, this is a story my father told me, but I never believed it, even though he swore up and down it was true. It wasn't until I started clicking around the internet I started to believe. I started to hear other stories just like the one my father told me. It didn't take me long to believe in The Rake.

That's not what my father called it, of course. He's never used the internet in his life, he wouldn't know what the consensus has taken to naming it. When he chose to call it something other than "it" or "that thing" He called it "Skinwalker" after an old Cherokee tale his grandfather told him.

But I'll tell you the story, the way he told it to me.

"We were out hunting one night." he'd tell me. "Coyotes. We'd kill 'em for fifty bucks a skin." they lived on a dairy farm, in Ohio. "They'd kill calves sometimes. We'd do it every night, because we needed the money. Sometimes, while we were out, we'd come on a Deer, and kill it. Our landlord didn't mind, and it could a feed our family for a few nights and save us some money."

"Anyway, we were done making our rounds and heading home, walking, 'cause we didn't have a car or some four-wheeler back then. We'd cut through the woods. That's when we came up on it."

"Blood, everywhere. Splattered on the trees, in the grass, in the creek, everywhere. At first, we figured it was a pack of Coyotes. We'd seen it sometimes, they can't scavenge and start hunting Deer or cattle. The worst was when they breed with feral dogs. But this wasn't like that.

See, when a pack of dogs, or wolves, or coyotes attack something, they do it right. They'll pick off one that's weak, or sick, or old, or just small. They'll hunt it, draw it into a corner, some place it can't get out off, and they'll run it right to the biggest one, the Alpha. And that deer will never see that Alpha. It might hear it, but it won't see it. It'll just notice that it's throat is gone, and then it'll drop dead. Its quick, its clean. That wasn't what happened here."

"Something had run up on a den of deer. Coyotes won't attack a den, wolves neither, because they'd get too much of a fight. There were three, I think, three bodies. Just torn apart. You'd see a head here, a leg here, a torso there. Predators don't do that. They don't leave behind scraps. What had done this hadn't done it for food. It had done it for fun."

"But we didn't know that. We saw a bunch of carcasses and we think its something we gotta take care of. I remember my dad telling me to go home; he thought it was a pack of feral dogs.

But I wasn't leaving him, and I damn sure wasn't walking through two miles of woods alone, with nothing but a twenty two and a pocket knife." he was only thirteen at the time, so a .22 rifle was about the only gun he could reliably use. "dad had the shotgun, and I wasn't going anywhere without it."

"It took me a while, to convince him, but finally we began tracking whatever did that. It wasn't hard, either, we just followed the blood. Either that thing bleed a deer before it got away, or it dragged one for a mile. I don't know. I know that I'd never seen my dad scared before that night."