When Vince woke up on Saturday morning, he didn’t think much of the fact that the space beside him in the bed was empty. With eyes still shut, he stretched out his left arm and found the pillow cold and the sheets thrown back. Emily was probably up and running errands or digging in the garden or chatting with the neighbours.
Vince drifted in and out of sleep. He didn’t know how much time had passed before he swung himself sideways throwing his legs over the edge of the bed and pressing his feet to the hardwood floor. After his morning routines—minus the shave—Vince stepped into the kitchen, wondering what he should make himself for breakfast. That was when he had his first intimation that something was wrong. He couldn’t say what. Just a feeling that things were off.
He put bread in the toaster. He set a plate on the table. He pulled a jar of marmalade from the fridge. He reached to the top shelf for a coffee mug. Wait. Now he knew why things felt off. Emily always had the coffee maker going early on a Saturday morning. Vince was used to waking with that wonderful pungent aroma playing in his nostrils. But this morning the coffee maker was empty.
Vince called for Emily. Munching on a slice of toast, he went from room to room. He checked the back yard, then the front yard. The car was still in the garage. Her purse was on the low table by the front door. Vince called Emily on her cell phone and heard a ringing from the bedroom where she had plugged it in the night before to recharge the battery. Maybe she had taken Goldie for a walk. He called for the dog but there was no answer. That must be it. Emily had taken the dog for a walk.
Vince settled into his favourite chair with the morning paper and a fresh cup of coffee. Emily would probably be back by the time he had caught up with the news of the world. On the international front, things were as insane as ever: desperate men launching home-made rockets and planting IED’s; gunships retaliating by slaughtering pregnant women and babes in arms. On the local scene, banality was the order of the day: a city councilor caught with his pants around his ankles, an auditor’s report filled with tales of waste and corruption. As Vince was leafing through to the crossword puzzle on the back page, a small item caught his attention: since the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there’d been an increase in Sasquatch sightings. Vince shook his head. What people weren’t willing to believe!
By lunch, there was still no sign of Emily and Vince was starting to worry. He called her sister. Maybe she’d gone over there. He called her best friend who lived two streets over. He went next door and asked if maybe she had dropped by for a chat. But nobody had seen Emily. There was a dark black feeling gathering in Vince’s gut.
After lunch, Vince phoned the police. He didn’t know what else to do. He sat in the living room, staring at the wedding photo on the mantel, twiddling his thumbs, standing to pace the floor, waiting for the police to arrive. After an hour, he got tired of waiting. He fixed himself another cup of coffee even though he knew it would only make his feelings of anxiety more acute. As he was pouring cream into his coffee, a knock came at the door—a firm, authoritative knock that made him leap up and splash coffee on his hand. He answered the door while sucking a red patch of skin between his thumb and forefinger. There were two of them standing there, a man and a women dressed in their night-blue uniforms, clean-edged and efficient.
The woman did all the talking: “We had a missing persons call?”
“Mmmmph.”
“You Vincent Karsh?”
“Mmmmph.”
“Mind if we come in?”
While the woman spoke, the man looked all around the entrance way and living room. She asked when Vince had last seen his wife. What was her normal routine? Had they been arguing lately? How had they been getting along? How was the marriage? Because … and she looked Vince straight in the eye as she spoke … almost all missing persons reports turn out to be domestic dispute issues.
Meanwhile, the quiet one—the man—noted the precisely arranged furniture, the well-polished hardwood floors, the careful arrangement of figurines and crystal on display in a cabinet. Without speaking, he took the wedding photo from its place on the mantel and inspected it closely.
“You been married long?”
“Seven years.”
And the police officers looked at one another as if Vince’s answer was somehow significant.
“Is that coffee I smell?”
Vince invited the officers into the kitchen and as the woman followed him to the percolator, the man said he was going outside to poke around the yard for a minute. The woman kept up with her questions—about Vince’s job, Emily’s job, his son off at university, money issues, pressures from in-laws, relations with neighbours, any skeletons in the closet, affairs with old flames, addictions. All the while, she looked around the kitchen: the spotless countertop, the wrought iron table with its sparkling glass tabletop, the hand-sewn place mats, the shelf of antique lamps, the old pine buffet.
The man came back inside: “I see you live on a ravine lot. Ever been broken into?”
“Once. But that was maybe four years ago.”
“Mmm.” And he nodded. He raised a hand as if to show Vince something. “I found some of these on a branch out back.”
Vince leaned in close to see what the police officer was talking about. It was a strand of hair, thick like wire and brown.
“Emily’s hair is blond.”
By the end of the afternoon, the police officers agreed to file a missing persons report. They went back to the station with a recent photo which they scanned and distributed online—an APB which soon became a news story, hitting the local TV news by eleven o’clock. By seven o’clock the next morning, there was a gathering of neighbours in the Karsh’s back yard, all of them blowing on their hands and stamping their feet and downing gallons of hot coffee. They were going to do a search of the ravine. The police said this was premature, but when they saw how the neighbours were bent on doing their search, they brought in some experts to coordinate it. “Might as well do it right,” they said as they let two police dogs sniff at some of Emily’s old underwear. So, by eight in the morning, the woods behind the Karsh’s house were crackling with the sounds of radios and dogs barking and people calling out “Emily” and the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot.
Nobody found anything until after eleven when Norm, the next door neighbour, stepped in a big plat of poop. Nobody was sure what kind of animal would have left behind such a turd. Some of the neighbours were experienced outdoorsmen and they said the turd was too big to have come from a deer—even a big buck. And there was no way a farm animal like a cow could have strayed into a bush that thick. The men stood there, staring at the big heap of shit, scratching their heads and swatting at flies, and finally confessing that they didn’t rightly know what kind of an animal would have made such a mess. Whatever it was, they knew it was big, and so everybody should use caution. Although everybody was thinking it, nobody asked aloud the obvious question: could this animal—whatever it was—could it have harmed Emily?
Pushing further downstream another hundred meters, the dogs found an article of clothing. But something was wrong. In searches like these, what the police usually found were little scraps of cloth torn on jagged rocks or the bark of trees. Instead what they found was an entire top, untorn, neatly folded and laid out on a log.
“Mr. Karsh,” said one of the officers from the K-9 unit. “Can you confirm for us that this here article of clothing belonged—er, belongs—to your wife?”
Vince’s hand trembled as he took up the top. “I … I … Maybe … I don’t know … looks like something she’d wear.”
“But you can’t say for sure?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe it is.”
They followed the trail downstream. The dogs had picked up a scent and were barking and yipping around the entrance to a big culvert that tunneled into the face of a long ridge. It was a concrete pipe almost the height of a man and it was blocked by a gate of iron bars like the bars you’d see on a prison window. Except that two of the bars had been pried apart to create a space that even a police officer with a Kevlar vest could squeeze through. There was a trickle of water coming from the culvert and draining into an algae-rimmed pool of muck. Looking into the pipe was like looking into a cave: it was pitch black and the air blew back damp and cool. Vince shouted Emily’s name and it echoed from the darkness. Standing in silence, the searchers shuffled their feet and tried to avoid the wet pool of muck. Vince called again. This time the sound that returned to them was a grunt or a low growl.
“Emily,” he shouted.
He tried to crawl between the iron bars but a police officer pulled him back. “Let someone else go. Someone with protective clothing. We have no idea what we’re dealing with here.”
It was the officer who first answered Vince’s call. He’s the one who climbed through the bars and into the culvert. In one hand he held a flashlight; in the other, a can of pepper spray. The commanding officer reached through the iron bars and patted him on the back, reminding him to stay in constant communication. As the officer set off into the darkness, everyone else gathered around the entrance to the culvert to listen to the radio:
“Okay, so now I’m proceeding into the … ah, tunnel … I guess that’s what you’d call it, and, well, there’s a little water underfoot though not much and, well, a bit of a smell gets a little stronger as I move further in actually quite strong now kind of a what? What’s it like? Maybe a mix of BO and shit, only like it’s been multiplied or like you’ve had your head jammed up a cow’s anus. And … what the fuck? Holy Jesus?”
There was a roar like a lion and an ape combined. And there was a high-pitched scream too high to have come from the police officer. And there was the police officer, swearing and shouting.
Everyone heard a thud and the radio died.
Footsteps approached splashing through the water, kind of a limp, drag … limp, drag … The police officer came into view and threw himself at the iron bars. He was still clutching them as he fainted. There were three parallel gashes across his cheek, almost shredding the skin so it hung from his face. There were similar gashes on his thigh that went clear to the bone. Another police officer had to step through the bars to help the fallen officer out of the culvert.
The officer started awake, flailing as if he was in the middle of a fight.
“Easy there. Easy.” And two people held him down while a third applied pressure to his thigh.
“Oh Christ.”
“What’d you see in there?”
“Oh Christ. It was seven feet tall.”
“Was the woman in there?”
“And covered in fur.”
“The woman?”
“And claws like razors.”
“Was Emily okay?”
“Who?”
“The woman we’ve been looking for. Was she there?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, laid out on, like a bed of straw or hay. She’d lost all her clothes but otherwise she looked fine.”
“Emily?” Vince yelled.
Everyone stared into the silence.
“Emily?”
There was the sound of heavy breathing, a deep resonant chest cavity, then a high-pitched: “Why can’t you all just fuck off.”
“You recognize your wife’s voice?”
“Yeah,” said Vince. “That’s Emily.”
The officer in charge turned and shouted into the culvert: “Emily Karsh?”
“Fuck off.”
“Mrs. Karsh, my name is Truman Capote. I’m—”
“I don’t care if you’re name is John Cheever. Just leave us the fuck alone.”
“Us? Is there more than one of you?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
“Mrs. Karsh. We’re here to help.”
“Well I was doing just fine without you. So fuck off.”
The commanding officer turned to Vince and asked if his wife was always so hostile. Without closing his mouth, Vince shook his head. Turning again to the culvert: “Mrs. Karsh, are you hurt?”
“Do I sound hurt? Fuck off.”
“You’re being held captive by a savage creature.”
“Fuck off.”
Officer Capote got on his radio and asked for Dr. Burgess to be escorted to his location. Dr. Burgess was a psychologist. Whenever there was a search, the police kept a grief counselor on call in case they should stumble on something unexpected like human remains. Even though grief didn’t appear to be an issue here, Capote thought a psychologist would probably be useful. It took a long time for Dr. Burgess to move downstream from her trailer to the culvert’s entrance. The problem was that she had shown up for work in heels and didn’t have time to change before going out into the field. As she walked along the riverbed, her heels kept sinking into the mud. By the time she arrived at the culvert, her feet were soaked and her shoes were ruined.
Officer Capote explained the situation. After a brief chat with the husband and a reluctant look at the fallen officer’s injuries, Dr. Burgess drew close to the bars covering the culvert. She tried to establish her own rapport and was met by the same hostility that everyone else had witnessed. There were guttural rumblings and high-pitched fuck-yous—the creature and the captive—the beast and the beauty.
Dr. Burgess turned to Vince: “Do you know what Stockholm Syndrome is?”
“You mean like what happened to Patty Hearst?”
“Exactly. It’s where the captive starts to empathize with the captor.”
“You mean to tell me my wife has a thing for that … that … thing?”
“It’s too soon to say, but it’s a possibility.”
Vince paced in front of the culvert entrance, kicking at stones and branches, muttering under his breath and nearly breaking his hand when he slammed his fist into a tree. This wasn’t possible. He and Emily were solid. Sure, they’d had their problems, like any other couple, but nothing serious. Well, there was the incident with the dog. But they had been drunk at the time. It didn’t mean anything. All he wanted was for Emily to come home. He turned and gripped the iron bars. “Emily, I love you.”
There was an angry roar that nearly knocked him off his feet, but no sound came from Emily.
The outcome of this situation has played itself out a thousand times before. The local farmers arrive with their torches and pitchforks. The beast may take a stand. But we all know the beast doesn’t stand a chance. This is a collective ritual to reaffirm the natural order of things. The beast gets sacrificed to make this happen. The penitent wife goes home to her husband, secretly glad to have stirred a little excitement into their otherwise dull lives, but secretly relieved because the excitement demands more energy than she can sustain. She falls asleep in her husbands arms but her heart is somewhere else. He tries to persuade himself that she still loves him, that the return to the natural order of things has been a perfect return. The husband may even believe this.
To be frank, nobody cares what the husband thinks. The end of this story illustrates why:
A second police officer went into the culvert, and when his head came rolling back to the gate, the police entered in swarms, tasers drawn, determined to bring down the beast. A few officers sustained grave injuries, but soon the beast lay seizing in a trickle of water, shitting itself as it went down, then rolling in its own feces until at last it came to rest. They shackled it, and while the woman lay naked on the straw and screamed in terror, they dragged the beast out into the evening light and strung it from a tree. They called the zoo, thinking the people there might have some notion what to do with the creature, but they had to wait a long time for someone to arrive and they were still enraged that the beast had injured their friends and had even killed one of them. So they doused its fur in gasoline and lit it on fire. But not before they noted one remarkable feature. As the creature hanged upside down in the forest, everyone could see that it was endowed with a splendid penis.
While the police officers and volunteer searchers climbed out of the ravine, the beast screamed through the flames and the woman cried until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and all the men agreed that it was perfectly obvious why the woman had fled into the forest with the beast: there was the reason, sticking straight out at them and burning orange, like a schnitzel on a bonfire.