DEEr JErky thE VidEo

I do my best to blend in

WATCH THE VIDEO 👇 I tried to do something more… rustic…

The text of the story is below.

Also, at the bottom of the post, I’ll attach some pictures, info, and a poll.

Purchase the full book in the US from ingramspark DEEr JErky and OthEr Cryptids, or there is an Amazon link

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There is a deer jerky farm about two hundred yards from my bedroom. I can hear them yelling at all hours. It is usually not a yell of distress, but more of a plaintive moan. There are around twenty or thirty of them behind a short fence. I don’t know too much about all the different species of deer, but these are, in my estimation, “of an exotic variety.” For the most part, I treat their existence in the same way I treat a lot of truths about this town; I do my best not to think about it too much. This dawn, however, the sounds and tumult were different. This dawn, I was forced to think about those deer. Their noises were urgent. A series of sounds echoed differently. Different in such a way that I felt my active attention was required.

I put on my vest, pants, and boots. I tucked my hair under an old cap. I left the front door, lit a cigarette, and began walking toward the ranch. Within a few seconds, I rounded the corner of our short driveway. Down the slope, I could see an old woman sitting on the ground by the fence. She was just off the road. She sat calmly on the ground facing the deer. She had a Mossberg 500 on her shoulder. The business end was pointed upwards towards the sky.

I paused for a moment.

I know I appear strange to these people. Although I do my best to blend in, I’m never quite sure how the locals will react to me. For the most part, two very distinct types of people live in this area: locals and city folk. I’m one of the exceptions; I don’t fit either option.

Based on the scene playing out before me and the distressed animal sounds still reverberating around, something was clearly very wrong. I wanted to be of some assistance, although under most circumstances, I am not capable of much. I am even less helpful when it comes to animal husbandry or executions. I proceeded towards the woman with intentional caution; I didn’t want to spend the rest of the weekend pulling buckshot out of my ass. I waited...

I watched her long enough to see that she was sobbing. Her head was tilted down towards her chest. She was shaking; deep breaths mixed with shallow gasps. The deer were making more intense and stranger noises as I approached: shrieks, bellows, whines. I jingled the keychain on my belt loop and cleared my throat loudly to announce my presence. The woman heard the intentional sounds of my approach and looked up for a second. She took in the breadth of me without even a slight reset of posture.

I heard her murmur, “ain’t nothing you can do.”

I cleared my throat again and said, “What was that?”

Even though I had heard her fine the first time.

She repeated herself and pointed a puffy little paw toward the deer behind the fence. Her nails were cut short; not manicured but painted candy apple red. There was a desperate resignation in her slight hand gesture; the red nails emphasized this movement.

The deer, all of them, were crouched down; limbs tucked underneath them. They were all oddly specific with their poses. It was a mournful spectacle. They cowered, shook, and cried. Their heads were cocked towards us, which is typical for deer, but still unsettling. Deer have such inquisitive expectancy in their gaze. They watch as if they anticipate cruelty or harm.

The burgeoning sunrise and residual moonlight made their eyes glow yellow. A smaller deer with a single antler stood at the edge of the pack; It disappeared. It vanished, only not really; it more folded in on itself, cranked and collapsed into blank space. It happened in a blink; I didn’t register this occurrence with the full impact it warranted. Almost as an instinct, I took off my cap and leaned a step closer to the fence. I wanted to see what happened from a better vantage. The old woman stopped me with the barrel of her gun across my waist. I felt the cold metallic pressure before I saw the gun.

I gazed down the barrel of the gun towards her.

She shook her head and slowly mouthed “No.” I looked back through the fence, and I saw another “vanishing.” I took in this version of disappearance with a far more vivid and detailed understanding.

I felt the disappearance first, like a plunge. The ambient air pressure shifted, and something like smoke aspirated, filling the air. This was not morning mist, but wet heavy smoke. It moved intentionally. It was a being. The smoke was a living thing. Whatever was taking the deer was, at first, visible only via the reflection of light. The remnants of the strawberry moon still shone, making sections of smoke glow white, but not a white I had ever seen before.

Something about this lack of familiar color mocked life… ridiculed creation.

I began to make out shapes; some were round with a flat base like a dome. The shapes were too amorphous to be a land animal. Things shifted and oozed. Segments moved with jerks and stutters. There were other appendage-like things attached to it; mouths that stretched out cylindrically. These “mouths” never strayed from the body of the form, though. They grew outwards without motion, like a maudlin heave, or sigh.

I could feel it watching.

I felt a primordial sense of being preyed upon, as if we were all being stalked from above. This entity, whatever it was, felt more like a being of urge, not a being of matter. The sound that emanated from this monstrosity froze the deer. It was a grinding halt to all noise. A vacuum of physical order replaced what I once knew as aural resonance. This removal felt like thousands of tons of concrete falling onto a titanium floor: clanging, bashing, and bending with fury. There was a sharp malodour…an assault on all cleanliness. It was the stench of death, but not the death of an individual. It smelled like death as a perpetual phenomenon. I would have screamed, but my throat would not open. Because of this vocal seizure, I began to retch and choke.

A lone hart was close to it...too close.

The aura surrounding this entity spread, and the buck wasn’t strong enough to pull away. The wet smoke had him. The smoke’s mouths heaved, and the buck was instantly ensnared. This enigmatic horror was tearing its way through him; blisters and boils started forming on his skin. His face was frozen. He was locked into a contorted confusion; head cocked, eyes horrified but anticipating death. The vacuum that stifled natural sound faded, and I could hear the screams of agony coming from what remained of that deer. The blisters had blossomed into crimson flowers or fistulas. He was being shredded or boiled alive from the inside out. This conscious semi-material pestilence had invaded and conquered his entire body. I was robbed of my spatial awareness.

I fell forward. Was the fence gone? Where was I standing? I panicked and scrambled backward like a silverfish toward a tub drain.

I remember the feeling of sand under my fingernails as I clawed along the blacktop back toward my home. The entire valley had gone stark white, uncanny white. I flung myself back onto the rotten wooden steps that droop upwards to my porch. The grain of the old wood scratched against my nose.

Now fully clothed in bed, the sheets were soaked through with sweat. My boots spread grit and gravel on the top sheet. I held my hand in front of my face; my fingernails were split and bleeding. I felt dried snot around my nostrils. My eyes and throat itched and burned.

I heard a rooster crow, a dog bark, and the plaintive moan of a deer. A gun blast rang in the distance, followed by a brief silence. The next sound I heard was the exhaust of a speeding car on County Route 7G. The morning commute had begun.

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