October 18, 1994 I should be dead. Every morning since the house, I wake up expecting to find that this is the afterlife. A punishment. Some endless fever dream stitched together from pain and fear. But the pain is too real. My left arm is gone. I can still feel it sometimes. Fingers that aren't there twitching in the cold. A phantom itch in a hand that now exists only in memory. I remember what happened in fragments. The closet door bursting inward. The smell. God, the smell. Wet earth. Rotting grass. A slaughterhouse left to fester in summer heat. I remember the thing reaching for me. Not claws. Not hands. Something else. I remember teeth. Then darkness. I woke up in a ditch nearly a mile from the house, half-buried beneath leaves. My arm was nowhere to be found. It could have killed me. It chose not to. That's the thought that keeps me awake. The thing is playing with me. Watching me. Guiding me. Today I found where it sleeps. Or where it goes. The forest changes around that place. The trees lean away from it. Birds refuse to land nearby. Even the insects are scarce. The entrance was hidden beneath a rocky hill. A crack in the earth wide enough to crawl through. I followed the smell. Inside I found bones. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Deer. Bears. Coyotes. Human. The human bones were piled separately. Neatly. Almost respectfully. As though they meant something to it. Further inside were marks on the stone walls. Long grooves. Not scratches. More like something enormous rubbing against the rock over and over for years. The strangest thing was the hair. Dark, coarse strands caught in the stone. Animal hair. I thought maybe a bear at first. Then I found a skull. Not human. Not entirely. It looked wrong in ways I can't explain. Partially crushed and ancient. The shape reminded me of livestock. A cow, maybe. But the proportions weren't right. The eye sockets were too large. The jaw too long. The teeth... The teeth looked almost human. I know how insane that sounds. I didn't stay long. Something had been in that cave recently. The floor was wet. Fresh tracks led deeper underground where my flashlight couldn't reach. Hoofprints. At least I thought they were. Each one was split like a hoof. But stretched. Too long. Too narrow. Like whatever made them had once been a cow and had slowly forgotten how cows are supposed to walk. I heard breathing from the darkness. Not loud. Patient. Waiting. I left immediately. As I crawled out, I noticed something carved into the stone above the entrance. At first I thought they were random scratches. Then I realized they formed a shape. A head. Long-faced. Heavy-jawed. Horned. A crude picture of a cow. Or at least what someone who had only heard stories about cows might try to draw. I think I know what it is now. Or what it used to be. God help me, I think the creature is some kind of cattle. Not a diseased animal. Not a mutant. Something older. Something wearing the memory of a cow the way a corpse wears skin. Something that learned the shape but got parts of it wrong. And I think it knows I've found its home. Because when I returned to camp tonight, there was something waiting beside my fire. My arm. Cleaned. Arranged carefully on a flat stone. And beside it, pressed into the dirt, was a single hoofprint.
