Joshua Ginsberg is the author of Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure (2020), Tampa Bay Scavenger (2021), Oldest Tampa Bay (2022), and co-author of Secret Orland: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure (2023). His work has appeared in numerous print and online publications including Trembling with Fear (The Horror Tree), The Chamber Magazine, The City Key, 365 Tomorrows, Atlas Obscura, Travel After Five, and on his own blog, Terra Incognita Americanus. He currently lives in the Town n’ Country neighborhood of Tampa with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell.
CONSUMED
by
Joshua Ginsberg
You’ll smell it long before you ever see it. That was what the guidebook said about the skunk ape, which it went on to describe as a far more pungent, Florida swamp-dwelling version of sasquatch. Curt had read half a dozen books on this particular cryptid since Wendy had agreed to join him and go searching for it. He wanted to be prepared for anything, especially as it had been so long since he’d had someone to share an adventure with. Someone ravishingly gorgeous, available, and, if he was reading things right, very much interested in him.
He shook his head and tried to chain those thoughts up in mental manacles. It was just too dangerous for someone with his affliction to even begin to entertain any amorous notions.
They had met in October in Orlando, when they had both been attending the Spooky Empire convention. The night before the start of the event, they found themselves together in line for Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, but both were too shy to say more than a few words in passing. The next night, however, they ended up on the very same ghost tour of the city, and decided it was kismet. For the next few days they were inseparable. They stayed in touch after she flew back to Connecticut and he drove home to Ruskin, and it was then over many late-night text conversations and phone calls that they discovered their true shared passion wasn’t hunting ghosts, but cryptids.
“Wait, what was that?” she whispered, putting a soft hand on his shoulder and gesturing with her chin towards where she’d heard a sound.
Probably just a bird or smaller mammel, he though. It was still too light out for the night vision goggles, so he leaned closer to her to better peer out into the dense overgrowth of the Everglades. He inhaled the scent of her shampoo, bodywash, and sweat – an intoxicating mix that made his pulse race.
“I don’t see anything…” he smiled, “but we still have time.”
Time, he thought. Always watching the time. Measuring out what passed for a life now against the lunar cycle. But he did still have time, it was still ten days until the full moon, under which his bones would bend and break and reshape themselves as the wolf returned.
He looked into her glistening brown eyes and realized he needed to tell her. Before anything happened, like it had with his fiancé. He still felt the rage and shame of it, awaking to the mess he’d made of her. Of everything.
“Wendy, there’s something I need to tell you, and it might sound, well, crazy. It’s just, it’s been a long time since I felt this way about anyone, and I need to tell you. To warn you…”
She gave his arm a calming squeeze and tilted her head. “…that you’re a werewolf?” she asked quietly.
Curt was lost in his own anguished monologue and rambled on without hearing her for a moment. “… and I’ll totally understand if you don’t…want to… wait. Wait. Did you just, ask…?”
She smiled and nodded, her dark hair bobbing as she did so.
“You, you… knew…this whole time?”
“Yep,” she said with a nonchalance so refreshing and sincere that Curt thought he might melt right there into the watery muck around their boots.
“Wait, are you one too?”
“Well,” she replied, “I’m something else too. But not what you are.”
“What, what are you?”
“One of one. I don’t really think there’s a name for what I am. Mostly I’m pretty normal and human-like. Except I can’t digest normal food. And I always know when I’m around another cryptid, or some other sort of supernatural thing, cause it makes me kind of giddy.”
“What happens then?”
“Wanna see?”
“Uh, yeah! I’ve never met anyone else like me before!”
“Well, ok. It might be kind of weird though.”
“Trust me, I’m ok with weird. Passing an engagement ring because you ate the finger you put it on? That’s weird. And I’ve totally been there.” Carl’s words nearly ran over each other in their haste to escape his mouth. Another thing like him? The odds must have been infinitesimal.
She stretched her neck and rolled her head. Then, with a pop, she unhooked her lower jaw, which grew in length until it hung below her breasts. There were rows upon rows of triangular teeth, like a shark. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites should have been showing, but there was another set of eyes there. The pupils were just slivers, like a snake’s.
“Woah!”
Curt could fit his entire head inside her now cavernous, open mouth. He marveled at all those serrated teeth, all the way back to where they ended and her gullet began – a yawning void that stretched on without any visible end. And then, he saw nothing at all as she snapped her jaws shut with the force of a conibear trap, breaking his neck instantly. She proceeded to shuck Curt’s still twitching body from his clothing as easily as an oyster from a shell. Her razor-sharp teeth and uniquely designed digestive system did the rest.
…
Sometime later, as she lay back on the waterproof tarp they had set out hours before still feeling bloated from her meal, she belched into the rapidly darkening, new-wound and old bruise-infused sky.
“Skunk apes,” she chuckled. “Everybody knows those don’t exist.”