Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

provoked. In one case, from 1924, a group of miners in the Pacific Northwest shot at what they thought was a gorilla. That night, their cabin on Mount Saint Helens was pounded by a group of these same hairy giants, throwing stones. In 1967, a logger in Oregon watched as another shaggy giant pulled one-ton rocks out of the frozen ground and ate the ground squirrels hibernating under them.

The biggest proof against these monsters is, none have ever been captured. Or found dead. With all the hunters in the wilderness these days, people on motorcycles, it would seem one would bag a Bigfoot.

The bartender comes by the table, asking who wants another round? And Mandy Somebody shuts up talking, like what she's saying is a big state secret. With him standing there, she says, “Run a tab.”

When he steps away, she says, “Do you know the Welsh term gerulfos?”

She says, “Do you mind?” Twisting herself to one side, putting both hands into her purse on the seat beside her, she takes out a notebook wrapped with a rubber band. “My notes,” she says, and rolls off the rubber band, looping it around one wrist for safe keeping.

“Have you heard about the race the ancient Greeks called the cynocephali?” she says. With her notebook open, she reads, “How about the vurvolak? The aswang? The cadejo?”

This is the second half of her obsession. “All these names,” she says, staking a finger on the open page of her notebook, “people all over the world believe in them, going back thousands of years.”

Every language in the world has a word for werewolves. Every culture on earth fears them.

In Haiti, she says, pregnant women are so terrified that a werewolf will eat a newborn, those expectant mothers drink bitter coffee mixed with gasoline. They bathe in a stew of garlic, nutmeg, chives, and coffee. All this to taint the blood of their baby and make it less appetizing to any local werewolf.

That's where Mandy Somebody's thesis comes in.

Bigfoot and werewolves, she says, they're the same phenomenon. The reason science has never found a dead Bigfoot is because it changes back. These monsters are just people. It's only for a few hours or days each year they change. Grow hair. Go berserk, the Danish used to call it. They swell up, huge, and need room to roam. In the forest or in the mountains.

“It's kind of like,” she says, “their menstrual cycle.”

She says, “Even males have these cycles. Males elephants go through their must cycle every six months or so. They reek of testosterone. Their ears and genitals change shape, and they're cranky as hell.”

Salmon, she says, when they come upstream to spawn, they change shape so much, their jaw deforming, their color, you'd hardly recognize them as the same species of fish. Or grasshoppers becoming locusts. Under these conditions, their entire bodies change size and shape.

“According to my theory,” she says, “this Bigfoot gene is related either to hypertrichosis or to the humanoid Gigantopithecus, thought to be extinct for a half-million years.”

This Ms. Somebody just yak, yak, yaks.

Guys have listened to worse shit, trying to get a piece of ass.

That first big word she says, hypertrichosis, it's some inherited disease where you get fur growing out of every pore on your skin and end up working as a circus side show. Her second big word, Gigantopithecus, was a twelve-foot-tall ancestor of humans, discovered in 1934 by some doctor named Koenigwald while he was researching a single huge fossilized tooth.

One finger tapping the open page of her notebook, Mandy Somebody says, “Do you realize why the footprints,” and she taps her finger, “photographed by Eric Shipton on Mount Everest in 1951,” and she taps her finger, “they look exactly like the footprints photographed on Ben Macdhui in Scotland,” and she taps her finger, “and exactly like the footprints found by Bob Gimlin in northern California in 1967?”

Because every lumbering hairy monster, worldwide, is related.

Her theory is, people around the world, isolated groups of people, carry a gene that changes them into these monsters as part of their reproductive cycle. The groups are isolated, they stay alone on tracts of wilderness, because nobody wants to become a towering, shaggy half-animal in the middle of, say, Chicago. Or Disneyland.

“Or,” she says, “on that British Airways flight, halfway between Seattle and London . . .”

She's referring to a flight last month. The jet crashed somewhere near the North Pole. The pilot's last communication said something was tearing through the cockpit door. The steel-reinforced, bulletproof, blast-resistant cockpit door. On the flight recorder, the black box, the last sounds include screams, snarls, and the pilot's voice screaming, “What is it? What's going on? What are you? . . .”

The Federal Aviation Administration says no guns, knives or bombs could possibly have been carried aboard the flight.

The Homeland Security Office says the crash was most likely caused by a single terrorist, high on massive amounts of some designer drug. The drug gave him or her superhuman strength.

Among the dead passengers, Mandy Somebody says, was a thirteen-year-old girl from the Chewlah Reservation.

“This girl was headed for”—she pages through her notes—“Scotland.”

Her theory is, the Chewlah tribe was sending her overseas before puberty hit. So she could meet and maybe marry someone from the Ben Macdhui community. Where, tradition holds, giants with gray fur roam the slopes above four thousand feet.

Mandy Somebody, she's full of theories. The New York Public Library has one of the nation's largest collections of books about the occult, she says, because a coven of witches once ran the library.

Mandy Somebody, she says how the Amish keep books of every Amish community on earth. An inventory of every member of their church. So as they travel or immigrate they can always be among, live among, mate among their own kind.

“It's not so outlandish to expect these Bigfoot people keep the same kind of inventory books,” she says.

Because the change is always temporary, that's why searchers have never found a dead Bigfoot.