The Monster of the Northern New York Woods

For Shawn Nolan

I.

We were hardly given respite from a nightmare on our little farm, in early Barron’s Atlantic, 1886.

My mother had purchased a property there with the noble intention of settling a farmstead, and, with time, construct a matriarchal house to rival the patriarchies at the southern end of the state. She inherited a mighty estate from my late father, who had partnered with Warburg and Morgan on their nascent ventures.

She afforded my schooling until we were given the attention of a man who had studied with my father in Yorktown, and wanted to freely expand my education by virtue of his affection. This man’s name was Silas Larson.

Mr. Larson, on our informing him we were to travel north to the Barron’s Atlantic property, alerted us of a monster greatly witnessed there called “The Monster of the Northern New York Woods”.

He grasped my shoulder and gently spoke to me one evening. “Larisa,” he said, “if you are to travel up to those treacherous places where no man — or woman’s — soul may survive, I insist you keep your study keen and inherit the presence of your father’s revolver. He bestowed it to me. Your mother...” He briefly paused. “This gun is forged by esoteric magicks, blessed by the light of a thousand full moons. The monster, so I hear, is something of a were-beast, and those creatures repugn such artistry.”

He supplied the weapon in an ivory case, and then looked at me with worried eyes. “Please, Larisa,” he advised, “don’t let your mother steal this from you. It is yours and yours alone. By all the gods there were and yet to be, I swear your father wanted you to have it!”

In such hallowed and breathless tones he insisted I possess the weapon — that doomed weapon — that would see the end of my life and my mother’s, and not of the wretched beast he had spoken in such incredible terms.

I had no choice, then, but to accept it.

II.

I was informed by my beloved maid, Ballestra, that the sightings of the beast continued following our purchase of the property in Barron’s Atlantic. We were to bring our servants — ladies only, by my mother’s expressed rule — to our farmland north. The beast, which was supposedly dormant for decades following the War of Independence, was reawakened by the eager surveying of the State, as they had annexed territory for their development.

The acquisition, as we were informed later, was from a cruel section of wilderness that seemed propagated by disaster — murdered calves, kidnapped children, lynches of escaped slaves, and the like. The State and Immanuel Barron, the landowner, wanted to put an end to such chaos and plot a town there.

And my mother had heard...

When we had arrived at our modest residency, formerly the property of Mr. Barron’s mother, I cradled the revolver Mr. Larson gave to me within the hem of my skirt. I had told no one about it. If my mother were to find out, our heads would roll.

“This is all very good,” my mother, who had finished surveying her property, declared. "I wish to have a few moments with my daughter.”

The servants departed, and I stood there alone with my mother in the vestibule leading to the upstairs floor.

“Larisa,” she told me, “you are to give me the weapon you have hiding in your clothes.”

I lied, and told her I possessed no such thing.

She arched an eyebrow and tightened her grip on me like a madwoman.

“You tell me, girl. That fool Larson was an idiot to trust a man’s instrument to you. You have no place with such a weapon. Now give it, before the clothes I gave you I dare take back.”

I was horrified. I told her I possessed no such weapon, as she said, and I insisted she let go of me, lest I screamed.

“These servants won’t come back, girl, lest I pay them to,” she said. “Now, the gun, and the ivory box it came in.”

How did my mother know of such things? For years I was convinced she possessed powers akin to a witch. It was far too late to let my wonder dawdle, however, for already she had reached for my waist and felt the revolver handle hidden there.

Her look was cruel.

“A man’s weapon for a mannish girl,” she cussed. “Do you know how to use it, then?”

I told her I did not.

“A man gives you something you don’t know how to use then you’re not even a woman — you’re a child.”

“Mother...”

She called to Ballestra and our housekeeper, Alice. They both appeared at the vestibule like a sudden wind.

“Remove my daughter’s clothes. Present her the clothes of the farmhand. She wishes to be a little boy with no aspect of her femininity.”

“Mother!”

The two women blanched so much their skins could’ve been mistaken for newly washed sheets. Alice, the older, had spoken first. “Madame...”

My mother’s venomous eyes focused on me.

“You see? You see what your secretive desires do to others? Your father would have known it, and now you. Undress her, girls.”

I looked solemnly to the wooden floor beneath me, wondering what my future would look like here in the new territory of Barron’s Atlantic, and dreading the monster I was urgently warned about dwelling in its woods.

When I had undressed and let my clothes fall to the floor, I demonstrated to my mother that I knew how to handle the gun, and how it would weigh in my hands when it was loaded.

She would let me keep it.

III.

My strolling through the woods on the outer edges of our property almost didn’t result to much that following winter. I had kept my father’s revolver closely at hand and almost shot a vagrant out in the woods. He cursed me up a storm, and proceeded to tell me I was foolish for handling such a weapon without the proper education. He asked me my name, to which I didn’t reply.

“Very well, young miss,” he proceeded to tell me, “if you desire to hunt, perhaps it’s best if you received some lessons.”

“I’m looking for the monster that is said to haunt these woods.”

The vagrant’s face paled.

“The — the monster, miss? There’s no monster from what I know but a lone wolf that stalks these woods. Ageless and imperial. Folks took to calling him ‘Jupiter’, on account of the god when his paws land thundercracks, howls as he sets the ghosts a-trembling. That’s old Jupiter.”

I was puzzled when I heard the vagrant’s story, for I believed the monster was a greater and more inconceivable beast than just a wolf. “Wouldn’t I have heard stories about a wolf, if that’s indeed what it was?”

An alert, hard look made the whites in his eyes outshine the forest. “An indecipherable horror lurks in these woods, miss. It may be Jupiter to some, yes. But to most others — others I have endeared to call friends, miss, in other times — I cannot recall the words they used to describe the thing but I can recall the hatred. In their eyes. It burns.”

He raised a sleeve to his left arm and I saw it was utterly disfigured, product of a hateful blaze that consumed most of his flesh there.

I had once seen eviler stuff when my mother and I visited a veterans’ hospital in New York. I saw the mangled brothers of war firsthand...

The man, perhaps, detected my fortitude, and observed me still as he rolled down his tattered sleeve.

“Which way is your home, girl?”

I told him I was not very far off.

“Oh,” he said, “the beast you seek is further still. Further on..."

I hesitated to say the following thing, which made me lick my lips once before I spoke, and braced myself for his reply.

“My mother,” I said, “is cruel. I wish to kill her by leading her into these woods, and be stricken by the monster. Can it be done? I wish to know if it can be done.”

I showed him the revolver as it sat on the palm of my hand. I can already tell his expression was one of absolute surprise (his pulpy mouth showcased an astonished “O”). I went on.

“I don’t wish to kill the monster, but domesticate it.”

The transient was paralyzed by the notion. He repeated the word slowly, as if that was the first time he’d ever encountered it. He squinted, as he repeated the word “domesticate” again and again.

I remember a long pause seemed to fill the space before us as he had studied me with a look of confusion and, perhaps, horror, that I had ever seen outside of my supposed family. I imagined his perception of me had completely changed.

But then again, it was unkind to presume.

“You want to hunt, young woman, you want to hunt,” he exclaimed.

He licked his own dry, dirty lips (which I imagined tasted horrid) and looked me in the eyes one final time.

“You found your monster.”

IV.

The people who migrated to Barron’s Atlantic in those days were mostly poor. I would be approached by some of them regarding the possibility of employment at my mother’s farm.

Many times, however, our conversations would be punctuated with an eerie howl arising from the mists of our property. People would pale at the sound of it, banishing any notion of employment from their minds. Such was the situation that subsequent spring of 1886, when my mother sought female workers to till her land, but none dared approached her for fear of the monster.

My mother, lewd to the point of vulgarity, approaching me one evening and, smirking, mentioned that the man’s weapon I had hid in my skirt must be faulty, for all the times I had gone and fired, the same moaning howl would assert itself each night, as if no weapon could stop it.

My mother delighted at witnessing my apparent frustration, and advised the girls of our house to acquire guns and learn to use them. “My daughter feels indignant at her failure as a hunter,” she declared. “I feel compelled to action — we will learn to shoot together! We’ll kill the fellow my daughter couldn’t kill, and we’ll roast his bones on a spit come summer. Once the town-girls see this they’ll know our farm is safe, and we’ll have hands. Did you hear me, Larisa?”

Of course I heard. I heard her all too well.

The girls and I practiced our shooting along the western fence, using honeycombs for targets we found in the basement.

We gave each other nicknames during our exercises. Ballestra we called “Honeybee” for her inexperience; Alice we called “Stinger” for her wit; Emmalise we called “Honeysuckle” because she sucked the honey off her fingers after she setup the targets; and I, I was called the “Queen Bee” since I was their very patient teacher.

Some months later, when a man was brutally murdered in town, we volunteered our skills as a search party to hunt down the beast. My mother had organized it all herself.

But I fully expected her to lead us into those woods.

What I didn’t expect was the “Hive Girls” — as we affectionately called ourselves — were as thrilled as I was when I had told them about my once-secret plan for murdering my mother. They had grown aggrieved of her attitude towards them over the years, and they decided to terminate their employment with her in aggregate.

That is, except for Alice...

She would tell my mother everything.

V.

The night my mother was killed — the night she organized that search party — would also see the deaths of two of my “Hive Girls”.

It would remain one of the most terrifying nights of my life, for my mother had learned of our murderous plot against her, and quickly arranged one of her own.

We would have therefore been doomed, were it not for the loyalty of a trusted, previously unnamed ally.

As such, this was what transpired that evening:

After my mother escorted us into the woods for what seemed many hours, she executed Emmalise in cold-blood.

Ballestra and I were held hostage by our fear.

My mother explained how she knew of our mission, and scolded me for my desires and their consequences. She was about to fire upon me when the monster struck. Horrified, as she turned to shoot it, I caught her by the neck and pummeled her with the grip of my father’s revolver.

The monster, I remember, howled happily.

I then returned my attention to the “Hive Girls”. After learning of Alice’s betrayal, Ballestra and I hurried homeward to stop her from alerting the authorities.

When we arrived, there was an upheaval at the town square. We witnessed Alice there, accompanying Immanuel Barron as he consulted with the State Governor. Another search party had already been assembled; gunmen had lined up by the dozens — “The Monster of the Northern New York Woods” would die this night.

When Ballestra noticed Alice in such surprising company, she became affrightened. I remember her tears well, for I’ve never seen her aggrieved so. She said: “My dear Baby (for that’s what she called me) our lives will soon be at an end. Alice holds the Barron’s ear, as he holds the Governor’s. We will be doomed to die for our plot!”

I calmed her down gently, and told her I would approach Mr. Barron as soon as he would be alone, for it was unlikely he would join the band in the woods. I would be proven right.

Ballestra hid whilst I secretly followed Immanuel Barron and Alice back to his estate.

The lights were ablaze inside, and as soon as he was alone in his salon, I approached him. He recognized me, and he recognized my father’s revolver in my hand. I raised a finger to my lips to silence him. He said my name. I said, “No. William Peters.”

William Peters had been better known to you as “the vagrant”. He was really my were- beast, not in fancy, but in truth. He had been the renown “Monster of the Northern New York Woods”, and I had seen him transform on many occasions. He had sworn to help me in order to exact vengeance on his father, the indubitable Immanuel Barron. He had fathered William Peters out of wedlock, and the boy was destined to die in the woods... were it not for a fateful encounter with a were-beast that haunted the forest since the War of Independence. The monster nursed him and raised him as one of his own, with the condition that he must carry the legacy of terror inherent in such creatures. As William Peters matured, so did his ability to transform at will, and he led a life akin to a double-agent in a war. In the end, I proved to be his valuable ally, after all others had betrayed him, and left him for dead.

His birth father was the only man from whom he sought vengeance.

When Barron understood — it was quick — I fired. I then turned and saw the Governor and Alice rushing towards me. I shot them.

Screams and footfalls shook the house. I felt a train was about to burst through the doors at any moment. I witnessed Alice, cackling, holding her bloodied bosom. I approached her but she waved me off.

“Tonight’s not your night then, girl,” she said. “Never was.”

I escaped.

I found Ballestra terrified in the cellar of the dry goods store where I had left her. She was babbling.

“Now we go back into the woods,” I said. “We hide there, near the bodies. My mother is devoured and William Peters deserves to know the fate of his father. Two vengeances were served to us this night.”

When we returned, William Peters saluted us.

He had lured the search parties away from this place, closer to Griffman’s Gorge, some miles away.

“If necessary I’ll howl and lure them back here.” He studied me. “If necessary.”

I informed him his vengeance was done. The price paid for assisting me with mine.

“My name?”

I said I made it very clear.

The rest is relatively well-known, since the events caused a shockwave throughout the country. How a state governor and a wealthy landowner were violently murdered, and a hardheaded heiress was devoured by a wolf the same night (I had “tasked” myself with finding her remains). No murders were committed in Barron’s Atlantic for a period of thirty-five years afterward, and the sorrowful howls of the northern New York monster were no longer heard.

I never saw William Peters again.

VI.

Such, then, were the circumstances of my death.

As I sat alone with my father’s revolver late one evening, I thought about the violence it helped me create. It had felt liberating.

But then, I remembered how my mother wanted freedom from men, and drove herself insane; then, I remembered the horror at Barron’s estate, how Immanuel Barron, upon hearing his son’s name, seemed to be slapped in the face by an awful realization —

Quite suddenly, the weapon I held in my hand discharged.

A pain blossomed in my abdomen.

I hardly believed the screams I heard later on were my own.

When I saw the light, and the present world darkened all around me, I felt sorry —

I wept bitterly for her.

I led her to her death, and now —

I see the moonlight.

The Monster of the Northern New York Woods is available on ebook, Substack, and The Lost Dreams.