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A lot of people want to know where I was for the two months I went missing. And I know I’ve said I don’t remember. I do remember—I just thought no one would believe me if I told them. Now I feel like I owe an explanation to everyone who helped me recover, especially Uncle John and Dr. Ensley and the people who found me nearly dead on the roadside. So I’m going to write it all here exactly as it happened. You’ll probably think I’m crazy. I’m not. I know what I experienced. And I’m certain one day you too will see these things yourself and experience terror so great you’ll want to die to escape it.
* * *
It all started with the accident. When I woke in the hospital, Sergeant Daniels was standing over my bed. He was tall and bulky and serious looking with his state trooper hat casting a shadow across my sheets. He told me my parents were missing, which made my head start throbbing even more than it already was. I had to close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. When I opened them again, he took a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket and asked me to try to remember everything that had happened. So I did.
We’d been to Disney World down in Orlando for a few days and were late getting back because of construction on Interstate 75. I was in the back seat of Dad’s Jeep Cherokee. Right before it happened, I remember noticing the digital clock on the dashboard reading 1:11 a.m. We’d been off the interstate for nearly an hour, driving Highway 98 toward our home in Perry, Florida. Mom was asleep against the window of the passenger seat. I wasn’t supposed to be awake, but seeing Dad driving so quiet and alone on the empty highway made me uneasy.
“Then there was something in the road,” I said to the state trooper. “Dad turned the wheel and then I don’t remember anything else.”
“What was in the road?” the trooper asked me.
The question made me see flashes of something. Like a movie playing with scenes missing. Scenes I didn’t want to remember.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Like a tire? A bag of trash?”
The movie flashed in my head again, and I closed my eyes and forced it away.
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“How big was it?”
I shook my head. The trooper waited, his pen hovering over the notepad.
“You said something was in the road,” he continued. “There’s no report of any obstacles on the highway at the scene.”
“It was standing in the road,” I said.
“Then it was an animal? A deer maybe? There’s lots of deer in the hammock.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t a deer.”
“A wild pig? Maybe it was a wild pig.”
“It was standing,” I said.
The trooper studied me, not writing anything. “You mean on two legs?”
I nodded.
He lowered his pen.
“A person?”
I didn’t want to describe what I’d seen. I didn’t want to remember it at all.
“Son, was there a person standing in the road?”
Then I couldn’t keep my thoughts to myself with the trooper towering over me and staring at me like he was.
“It was right there in our headlights. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. It was too big. It was as tall as a basketball goal, and its shoulders were as wide as three men put together. Its arms hung down to its knees, and it was covered with black hair. Everything was covered with hair except for the face. It had a man’s face. Except for the eyes. The eyes were black too.”
Relief settled over me. Surely the trooper could give me the answer to what it was I’d seen that night.
“Like a bear?” he said.
The momentary relief I’d felt vanished. I shook my head. Suddenly I felt like crying.
“It wasn’t a bear,” I said.
“There’s black bears out there. And they can stand up.”
“It wasn’t a bear,” I said weakly.
The trooper started to say something else, but didn’t. Then he lifted his pen and started to write, but stopped. He put the pen away and lowered the notepad.
“You don’t know what it was, do you?” I said.
“I think maybe you need to get some more rest. Then we can talk about it again later.”
“Did they find my parents yet?”
“No,” he said. “But they’re still searching the river.”
“But you think they’re dead.”
He hesitated. “We don’t know that yet.”
* * *
The day after my visit with the trooper, there was a short article in the local paper.
COUPLE MISSING AFTER CRASH; BOY RESCUED
FANNING SPRINGS — On Sunday morning at approximately 1:00 a.m., a Jeep Cherokee traveling westbound on US Highway 98 sideswiped a telephone pole and swerved off the roadway, plunging into the Suwannee River west of Fanning Springs. The driver was Adam Parks, 43, of Perry, Florida. Passengers were his wife, Hazel Parks, 44, and their thirteen-year-old son, Adam Jr. Emergency personnel were unable to locate the parents. Search and rescue efforts in the area are underway. The doors of the vehicle were all open, and the boy was found unconscious at the side of the road. He was treated at the scene and transported to Chiefland Medical Center, where he is in stable condition. According to the boy, the family was returning from a trip to Disney World in Orlando. He has told police his father swerved to avoid a collision with a Sasquatch-like creature standing in the highway. A state police spokesperson said they had no comment at this time.
A Sasquatch-like creature. Those were their words, not mine. I didn’t even know the word Sasquatch. Had I known the problems it would cause—just the suggestion I’d seen such a thing—I would have never opened my mouth about it.
BEAST. Copyright © 2020 by Watt Key.
