Chapter Text
It was the Sunday before Halloween when Castiel first saw the creature.
He’d been having a normal enough day up until then. A slow morning of coffee and grading essays; a quick lunch of vegetable and hummus sandwiches on rye bread; an afternoon chat with his parents, who called every Sunday afternoon because they were old-fashioned like that. As it always did, his productivity tapered off as the day grew longer, and he changed into shorts for a jog.
After a few minutes of stretching on his front porch, Castiel set off down the road. He usually took the same route: up the gentle hill to the west until he reached the rural two-lane highway, then a double back for home. It was about four miles total. When he was feeling especially ambitious, he might run a little farther to the nearest town, but the return trip was always the same. There weren’t any other roads into or out of Castiel’s part of the swamp than the one he lived on, so he saw the same scenery on his jog every time.
It wasn’t bad scenery, all things considered. Ancient, gnarled trees crowded in thick on both sides of the road, their leaves breathtakingly vivid with the changing colors at this time of year. Dreamlike mist had a habit of settling over the marsh on cloudy days, as it did now, hanging like tendrils from the tree branches and telephone lines. And aside from the furtive squeaks and chitters from the underbrush, the woods were quiet. Not a human sound to be heard, other than the wheels of an occasional lost motorist looking for Taunton.
Granted, there was a huge cemetery about half a mile from Castiel’s property, but he’d never been as spooked by graveyards as most people. It was fronted by a crumbling stone wall encrusted with blue lichen and lush green moss, and county records indicated that it dated back to a family plot begun in the 1700s. Castiel was looking forward to digging into the local myths and legends about it—old resting places for the dead were always tied to rich folkloric traditions—but that would have to wait until he settled into his new position.
The cemetery was creepy at night, sure, but there were reasons to not walk around alone at night in isolated areas that had nothing to do with ghosts. All in all, Castiel was grateful for its existence. It had turned off other buyers and helped him get a rock-bottom deal on his new house. After a month and a half of living here, he’d gotten used to seeing it on his runs. It was almost like a welcoming neighbor who waved from his front porch as you passed.
Castiel ran all the way to the Gas-N-Sip in Lebanon, the hamlet a little further up the highway from where his road emptied out. He rested for a few minutes before turning back. It was a warm day for October, overcast but humid, and he was already drenched in sweat by the halfway mark. He’d jogged five miles by the time the cemetery was coming into view again. Tired and sore, he decided to walk the rest of the way home while enjoying the last of the daylight.
That was when he saw it.
At first, Castiel didn’t notice anything unusual when he glanced at the front gate of the cemetery, as he always did when he passed. Visibility was poor: it was half an hour until sunset, the clouds and mist were as oppressive as ever, and the trees around the graveyard were even denser and more foreboding than in the rest of the forest, if that was possible. But something made him look again, and he stopped cold when he realized what he was seeing.
A creature.
It was tall—a little taller than Castiel, maybe 6’1” or 6’2”. It seemed to be completely nude, with smooth, hunter green, hairless skin. It was standing just outside the cemetery’s open gate, its posture relaxed, and for a second Castiel thought it hadn’t spotted him.
Then it turned in his direction, and its eyes—wider set and more bulbous than any human’s—glowed bright green.
Castiel tore off down the hill. He ran faster than he’d ever run in his life, even though a minute ago he’d thought he barely had the energy to limp home. After a few hundred yards, he chanced a look over his shoulder to see if the creature was following him. To see if those glowing green eyes were closing in.
The road was empty, but Castiel didn’t let up until he was back inside and the front door was locked behind him.
He scurried around the house, checking that every door and window was secured. He considered barricading the front door with the Hoosier cabinet—an antique that his mother had insisted on because, according to her, the kitchen didn’t have enough storage space—but decided to watch and wait. The creature hadn’t chased him, so it probably didn’t even know where he lived. Hopefully.
Castiel sat down at his computer, making sure his phone and car keys were nearby in case he had to call for help or make a break for it. He started googling cryptid sightings in Hockomock Swamp and the larger Bridgewater Triangle. Bigfoots, ogres, dwarves, pterosaurs, ghostly panthers, giant snakes…nothing on green humanoids with glowing eyes.
Next, he searched for spectral phenomena. Ghosts, poltergeists, wisps, orbs, shades, revenants. He’d seen the creature outside a graveyard, so some connection to the dead—or the undead—seemed logical. But none of the images or descriptions seemed to line up with what Castiel had seen.
Nearly two hours passed before Castiel felt enough distance from the encounter to formulate a skeptical explanation. A fallen branch, a trick of the light, a fatigue-induced hallucination, a person in a Halloween costume: Castiel knew all these old standbys like second nature. His dissertation had been on the cultural experience of the paranormal, so he doubted there was any rational explanation that he wasn’t intimately familiar with. And years of studying the paranormal had taught him two things. The first was that witnesses tended to remain adamant about what they’d seen, even when they themselves believed that what they’d seen was impossible. The second was that there were no truly unexplainable phenomena in the world. Everything in the universe was subject to natural laws, with the sole exception of the human mind. Each person experienced reality within their own unique subjectivity, and that was where the richness of the paranormal came from.
By nine, Castiel had calmed enough to eat a small dinner of penne with broccoli and marinara. He still wasn’t able to focus on his essays, the period drama on Netflix that he was halfway through, or anything else that wasn’t a pair of glowing green eyes. Ever since he’d moved here to start teaching at Hockomock College, he’d felt the eerie but easily dismissed sensation of being watched whenever he was running through the surrounding woods. Now he was wondering if he’d dismissed it too easily.
Castiel lay wide awake in bed through most of the night. He drifted off sometime in the pre-dawn hours and dreamt of the tall, smooth-skinned creature, standing outside the cemetery, gazing after him as he jogged past. He woke up with a start and didn’t fall asleep again.
Monday was one of Castiel’s teaching days. He had two courses: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, a survey lecture that was one of the department’s core requirements, and Myth and Folklore, a 300-level seminar that permitted more discussion due to its smaller size. He also had office hours after lunch. Despite his sleep deprivation, he was able to carry off all his duties without any major hiccups, and he left the social science building in the mid-afternoon with the quiet mind that came with a long day’s work.
That serenity lasted for only seconds before thoughts of the creature returned.
As he did anytime he had unanswered questions, Castiel turned to the nearest library for answers. Given Hockomock College’s location in the legendary Bridgewater Triangle, it was no surprise that its librarians were custodians to a vast collection of paranormal and folkloric literature, along with archival material relating to the same. The college’s trove of firsthand accounts of paranormal encounters had been one of the unique draws of working here.
Castiel spent hours looking for any stories of green, smooth-skinned humanoids with glowing eyes, with as much success as he’d had the night before. That was, until he came across a 2009 article in The Swamp Gas, Hockomock College’s humorously named student newspaper.
The article was entitled: “Freshmen report sightings of ‘Salamander Man’ in Bunker Cemetery.”
Castiel dug into the article with interest. For decades, spending the night in Bunker Cemetery—the graveyard on Castiel’s road that he hadn’t even known had a proper name—had been a common dare among local teenagers. But beginning in the late summer of 2007, thrill-seeking kids began telling stories of a bizarre entity that no one had ever seen before. It was tall, human-shaped, with smooth skin and phosphorescent green eyes. It never vocalized or gave chase. One of the freshmen had provided a sketch of said Salamander Man, and Castiel knew at once that it was his creature.
Even for the Bridgewater Triangle, these tales were pretty out there, which perhaps explained why the story was never picked up by wider media or the paranormal researcher community. For one, humanoid amphibians were a fairly obscure cryptid in this part of the world. Stereotypical swamp monsters in North America tended to be piscine Gill-men, shapeless consumptive blobs, or tentacled Lovecraftian horrors, not entities that were the same size and shape as a human being but with differently colored skin and bright eyes. For another, teenagers were the least credible witnesses of supernatural phenomena for any number of reasons, and smart money was always on a fabrication or an embellishment where they were concerned.
But none of that definitively meant that the witnesses back then hadn’t been telling the truth. None of that meant that they hadn’t seen what Castiel had seen.
After subsequent searches failed to produce any follow-up reporting, Castiel printed out a copy of the article. He checked out three books: Cryptids of New England and the Maritimes, A Place Where Spirits Dwell: Legends of Hockomock Swamp, and The Wonderful World of Amphibians. Then, he drove to Mansfield to meet Hannah for dinner.
He and Hannah had been friends since junior year of college, a little over a decade now. They’d lived together in Cambridge for a while after graduation—he in the early stages of his PhD, she and their other housemate working downtown—until she moved to the West Coast for a guy. She was married to said guy now and living in Foxborough, where both of them were teachers at the same private school. Castiel got along with him well enough, but he was the type of man from the Boston suburbs whose main conversational wheelhouse was commentary on the city’s sports teams, and the two of them never had much to talk about. He also had the blandest palate Castiel had ever met, which was a great excuse for him and Hannah to go out to dinner without him every other week.
They were most of the way through their meal when Castiel gasped.
“Aliens!”
Hannah stared at him. “What?”
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? He should’ve done more searches on alien sightings in the swamp. A green humanoid would read as an extraterrestrial to most people. It was so obvious, yet he’d focused solely on folkloric cryptids because of his own research biases. He was becoming one of those pointy-headed academics who couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
“Please tell me you’re not becoming like that History Channel guy. You already have the hair for it.”
Castiel patted down his hair self-consciously, but it just sprang up again. He sipped his water, trying to calm his racing nerves.
“I saw something yesterday,” he said. “By the graveyard.”
Hannah broke off a piece of her samosa. “Something? A UFO?”
“No, just a…creature. The size of a person, but not a person. It was green with green eyes. I thought it was a cryptid, but maybe it’s an alien.”
“Oh no.” Hannah shook her head and clucked. “I knew moving out to the middle of a swamp with no one else around would be bad for you.”
“I know how it sounds. Believe me, I know how it sounds as well as anyone. But I saw something. I know I did.”
“You saw a green monster. And said green monster was maybe an alien?”
“I thought it was an amphibian humanoid.” Castiel retrieved the article from his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Five years ago, some local teenagers reported seeing a ‘Salamander Man’ in that cemetery. The first sighting was two years prior. That sketch—it’s what I saw. I’m sure of it.”
Hannah looked over the article, humoring him. She handed it back.
“Do you want Jonathan and me to come stay with you for a few days? Or just me, even?”
She sounded concerned, and probably not because she thought the creature was a danger to Castiel. At least, not a real-life, physical danger.
“No, I’ll be fine. But thank you.”
“Everything’s okay at work?” she said, after a few seconds. “It’s not more stress than you anticipated?”
“It’s fine. Teaching’s fine. Colleagues, fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Okay.” She served herself more rice, scraping the serving dish longer than she needed to. “What about dating, though? Have you started seeing anyone since you moved out here?”
“What are you saying? That I’m imagining cryptids to fill a man-shaped void in my life? That I’m a sad, lonely eccentric?”
“Oh, no,” Hannah soothed, and it was obvious to Castiel that that was exactly what she was saying. “No, honey. But I still wish you would meet Mick. Jon’s friend, the soccer guy? I know you prefer taller guys, but he’s really nice….”
Hannah extolled the virtues of Mick, the overpaid high school soccer coach with a sexy accent and a cute butt, for the remainder of the meal. Castiel sighed and nodded along. He did his best to put Hannah’s mind at ease and hugged her in the parking lot at the end of the night. On the drive home, his headlights struggling to cut through the mist as the marsh grew thicker, he realized that he’d just bumped up against the reflexive skepticism that so many of his fieldwork informants had encountered upon revealing their brushes with the paranormal to those close to them. The older he got, the more he appreciated life’s exquisite ironies.
Against his better judgment, Castiel slowed down as he approached Bunker Cemetery. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to see; there weren’t any streetlights on this stretch of road, and the fog rendered even his brights useless for illuminating much beyond the graveyard’s rusted front gate. He rolled to a stop, tapped the locks for all four doors even though he’d already done that three times since the restaurant, and peered through his window.
A minute passed, and Castiel felt—no, he was sure—he was being watched.
Another minute passed, and Castiel thought he saw a glimmer of green glowing through the mist.
A third minute passed, and Castiel turned off the engine, stepped outside, and walked towards the road’s centerline. He left the door open behind him in case he had to turn tail and run.
Closer now, and past the glare of the headlights, he was even surer of what he saw. Two green eyes, watching him from somewhere inside the graveyard, too far in to make out anything else. They hadn’t moved since he’d arrived.
“Hello,” Castiel said, in a voice that would carry. “My name is Castiel. I saw you yesterday. I think you saw me. I…would like to talk to you.”
The eyes didn’t move. Castiel waited. He repeated to himself the article’s only description of the creature’s behavior: it neither spoke nor gave chase. While the former was disappointing, the latter suggested that it might not be a malevolent entity. Perhaps it was even friendly. Or lonely.
“We don’t have to talk,” Castiel said, after some time. “Not if you don’t want to. We could just look at each other. From a safe distance, even.”
The eyes disappeared, and for a moment Castiel thought he’d scared the creature away. Then, they emerged again—larger, brighter, closer to the cemetery’s dilapidated stone wall.
“I’m sorry I ran away yesterday.” Castiel took a single step forward. “You just surprised me. I’ve lived here for a while now, but I’d never seen you before. If you’re my neighbor, though, it’s only polite for me to say hello.”
There wasn’t any movement for what felt like minutes, and Castiel was ready to conclude that this was as far as they’d get tonight. And that was fine. He didn’t have a clearer picture of the creature’s identity, but at least he’d confirmed it was real. It wasn’t a log or a trick of the light or a hallucination. The enormity of that—the discovery of a living, breathing cryptid right down the street from him—was quite possibly the most significant paranormal discovery in history. He could deal with some taxonomical blue balls for a little while.
But then, just when he was about to head back to his car, the eyes began to move.
First, they rose up, which made sense. They’d been watching Castiel from a height shorter than him, which implied that the creature had been hunching or even hiding behind the waist-high wall. Next, they proceeded to the graveyard entrance, passing under the collapsed archway, pushing through the gate with a slow, mournful creak. Finally, they materialized from the fog, coming to a stop at the edge of the road. The creature’s full form was finally visible now in the twin beams of Castiel’s headlights, and Castiel’s breath caught.
“Hello.” Castiel waved, modulating his voice into as much evenness as he could manage. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The creature remained completely still, its eyes watching Castiel’s hand. Now that Castiel was getting a good look at it, he could take stock of its appearance at greater length. Not only was it tall, but it had strong, broad shoulders; muscular arms; a wide chest that tapered to narrow hips; long, thick legs; and a bald head. Its skin looked darker than before, though that was no doubt influenced by the available light, and Castiel could see now that it was coated in some kind of moist sheen that made it glisten.
After a while of observing him, the creature lifted its own hand and mimicked Castiel’s wave. Its fingers were unwebbed and inhumanly long, yet the motion of the wave seemed uncannily like that of a person. Castiel suddenly wondered whether he was the butt of some extended Halloween prank being put on by the locals. Maybe a whole crew was filming him right now for a funny video.
Before Castiel could devote much thought to that unpleasant possibility, the headlights of another car crested the hill and started bearing down on him. It was breaking the speed limit, and Castiel quickly strode towards the creature, thinking only of getting out of the road.
There was a scuff of graveyard dirt, the croak of the gate’s hinges. Before Castiel even reached the other side, the creature had vanished into the night.
“Wait!” Castiel cried.
The car whizzed behind him, slowing only momentarily where Castiel’s Subaru was parked on the side of the road. Castiel wrestled with his decision for less than a minute before he returned to his car, retrieved his flashlight, and turned off his headlights.
“Hello?” Castiel said, once he reached the gate. He shone the flashlight on the ground, looking for tracks.
There was no response, of course. The creature didn’t speak. And yet, Castiel strongly suspected that it understood him when he talked, so he’d keep trying to communicate with it.
“Hello?” Castiel ventured a few steps into the cemetery. “I’m sorry about that. I was startled by a car coming down the road. I didn’t mean to startle you, too.”
Castiel moved the beam back and forth, finding a path through the necropolis. The centuries had cracked and weathered most of the slabs, though he could make out a few dates and, occasionally, names. One denizen, marked by a weeping angel statue, had only lived from 1834-1838, and another headstone a few yards away read “Winchester” and nothing else. The fog seemed to only grow more impenetrable as he ventured deeper in, and he found himself marveling at how far into the forest the cemetery extended. At least a hundred souls had to have been laid to rest here.
“I hope you don’t mind me inviting myself in,” Castiel said. “I know it’s a little rude, but I just wanted to clear up what happened back there. So, if you could just give me some sort of sign that I didn’t ruin everything…although, you don’t talk, so I don’t know what that would be.”
Minutes passed of nothing, and Castiel felt increasingly sheepish at how solicitous he was being towards the creature. Maybe Hannah was right. Maybe what he really needed was to go out on a date, and this burgeoning obsession with the creature was all just sublimation. Even if he and Mick didn’t hit it off, the worst first date imaginable wouldn’t be as one-sided as his current situation.
Castiel looked around with his flashlight. He was pretty far from the road now, and it was probably best to not go any further. With the moon and stars invisible through the trees and his headlights turned off, all he had to get back to his car were the beam in his hand and his sense of direction. The latter would only become less reliable the more he wandered around.
The swamp was silent—unnaturally so, Castiel thought. All at once, the stupidity of his actions hit him. He was chasing a virtually unattested cryptid into its territory at night, alone and unarmed. The creature outweighed him by 30 or 40 pounds, easily, almost all of which looked to be muscle, and that was on top of any other abilities it possessed. One of those was the extreme speed with which it had eluded him—speed that could just as soon be turned on him if he attempted to run away.
Castiel swallowed. No one even knew he was here, though he supposed his abandoned car would lead them to his body if it came to that.
With a shudder, Castiel began flicking the flashlight at his feet, searching for a way out. He turned on his heel, and then he saw them.
Glowing green eyes in the pitch darkness, a few feet away. The only part of the creature’s form that Castiel’s beam illuminated was its huge, outstretched hand, which dripped with some kind of fluid that made him instinctively afraid.
“No,” Castiel whispered. “Please.”
The hand slowly reached through the beam, aiming for his face. With a shriek, Castiel sprinted in the first direction his legs carried him. He made it several yards before stumbling into a tombstone and dropping his flashlight. His ankle turned. There was a hot whipcrack of pain, and he screamed again as he fell into the dirt.
The flashlight came to rest against one of the graves, shining back towards Castiel. He crawled a few inches towards it before glancing over his shoulder.
The creature loomed over him, every muscle of its powerful body even more intimidating from this angle. For the first time, a tail was visible, hanging limply between its legs and terminating just above the ground. Castiel stared into its eyes. The pain and fear were making him lightheaded, and the two points of bright green light swam back and forth in his vision.
“Please.” Castiel scrabbled at the ground uselessly as the creature crouched down beside him. “Please.”
He went limp when he felt the creature’s hands on him. The last thing he felt before he lost consciousness was the weightlessness of being carried, close like a newborn baby, through the mysterious night.