Estimated reading time — 13 minutes

It was early October. Acorns were raining down on the tin roofs and cheap ravaged asphalt shingles of the mobile homes around Lake Junior in Interlachen, Florida, like mother trees were dropping their kids off to make their way in the world. Across the lake the entire sky was illuminated every few seconds as lightning flashed and the night threatened to open up. It looked to me like a framed painting with twisted moss-covered branches of giant oaks reaching for each other. I looked at the Harvest Moon. I had 16 poems up there on NanoFiche. The Minerva Archive of the Lunar Codex had landed on the dark side March 6th and would be there for perpetuity. I was proud of that, but that and 10 bucks bought me a cup of coffee on this planet. I was sitting in a dirty old umbrella chair that used to be blue watching my dog Gypsy find her way in the dark, save for strands of moonlight. Gypsy was cute in an ugly way or ugly in a cute way, depending on where you stood. She looked like the result of a one-night stand between a Maltese and something that didn’t belong with a Maltese. She was completely deaf, partially blind, and made the strangest hacking sound I had ever heard any living being make and it was always immediately followed by the sound of vomit splattering. But the strange thing is that it was all dry. Nothing ever came out. It was just sound effects and she did it about every 10 minutes, even in her sleep. It was weird. If I lost sight of Gypsy for a split-second I would panic. She was tiny and old and not too steady on her feet, so I knew I could get to her quickly if need be. I just needed to know where she was.

My family hated me for buying my place in Interlachen because I did it behind their backs since I knew they would try to stop me. It’s just a run-down mobile home put together in 1995 that I refer to as my “hideout”. A guy like me needs a place to escape to. Still, they saw it as a monumental betrayal and never let me forget it. The guy in the double-wide to the right of my place was a registered sex offender. I didn’t know any details other than the victim was a minor and I only knew that because I like to know who my neighbors are, so I looked him up which led me to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department arrest records. Whatever he did happened long ago, but it still introduces him. If you didn’t know his past, you’d think he was a nice enough guy. He keeps telling me about a movie he wants to write about a shoe cobbler who saves Christmas by making Santa a new pair of shoes out of reindeer skin that allows him to fly on his own. I’ll be first in line for that cinematic gem. The couple that lived in the house to the left of me, the Hoods, are dead. That’s their greatest accomplishment. They died three months apart. They were bad people, so I didn’t shed any tears when I got the news at my family home in Miami. Mrs. Hood was quite the bitch. She was a big heavyset woman who would sit out in front of her house and yell threats at anyone she happened to see. I had a wooden privacy fence put up to block her out and she would yell threats at me anyway, like “That fence won’t stop us! We’re gonna get ya!” and “We’re gonna burn ya down!” Lovely things like that. I told the cops but they shrugged it off. One day some teenagers were tearing up the dirt road out front on their ATC 90s and Mrs. Hood told Mr. Hood to throw rocks at them. He did, got arrested, and sat in the Putnam County hoosegow for almost a year because he couldn’t make the $1500 bail and no one would help him out. While Mr. Hood was in stir, Mrs. Hood took up with some scumbag drug dealer. I saw him once, and that was more than enough. Eventually, Mrs. Hood bailed out Mr. Hood but got a restraining order against him. That’s love. Mrs. Hood was found dead in April. The drug dealer vanished. Mr. Hood moved back into the house and was found dead in July. Last I heard the deaths were still under police investigation, but that Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have any certificates from Mensa hanging on their walls. I’m just glad I don’t have to hear those constant threats anymore. It’s hard to threaten people when you’re six feet underground.

Mrs. Hood was found outside in the back down by the lake. Mr. Hood’s body was found in the bedroom. I heard Mrs. Hood was discovered about three weeks after she died, which was strange since Mr. Hood died three months later. I’m not a vindictive person but when I heard about Mrs. Hood’s rotting corpse, I envisioned the whole scenario: 10 minutes after she died flies arrived and laid thousands of eggs in her mouth, eyes and nostrils. 12 hours later the eggs hatched and the maggots started eating through her tissue. 12 hours after that, beetles showed up and ate her skin. 48 hours later mites, millipedes and spiders arrived and started eating the bugs that were already there. Mrs. Hood’s corpse became sort of a buffet. And then there were the changes to the body where at the moment of her death there was that one last gurgling sound known as the “death rattle”. Her muscles relaxed, her sphincters lost their tone, bladder and bowel contents were lost. After a half hour her skin became almost purple. Her arms and legs turned bluish. Her eyes flattened. Four hours later, rigor mortis set in starting with her eyelids, her face, her jaw, her neck and then the rest of her body. Rigor mortis of her jaw made me happy, so she could shut the hell up permanently. At 24 hours her head and neck began to turn a combination red and green color and that spread to her entire body. Her face started to become unrecognizable as her corpse began to stink as it rotted. Her body swelled and fluids leaked out from her well-worn vagina and her overworked mouth. Hair, nails and skin fell away exposing muscle and fat. If she had been discovered one week later her skeleton would have been exposed. What mattered to me is that she stopped threatening me. If it took her rotting corpse to make that happen, then so be it. Good riddance.

Gypsy rubbed up against my leg. I walked down to the lake drawn to the lightning flashes on the other side. Gypsy followed making her crazy hacking sound and that vomit splatter sound that never really happens. The sky was gorgeous and dangerous. The critters in the trees and weeds by the water’s edge had a real symphony going. Pig frogs, cicadas, limpkins, crickets and katydids all chimed in. It seemed part music, part back and forth conversation, with several unanswered mating calls. It’s their world and their language. Me, I’m just passing through. I couldn’t see one of them, but I knew their voices. In the house on the other side of the sex offender (registered) was my friend Ann. Ann has a rooster with lousy timing who crows at midnight instead of at the break of dawn. Ann’s house is an old concocted triple-wide which is dark inside all the time. However, I could see a light was on through her bedroom window which meant she was either reading a sci-fi novel or watching a bad horror flick from the 1950s, usually “Attack of the…something or other”. We had that passion in common. Ann is a witch. If you don’t know, there are three types of witches: white, grey, and black. The white witch is good, grey is selfish, and black is evil. Ann didn’t fit into any one category. She was able to eerily switch “colors” depending on her mood and objective.

I heard what sounded to be a slight splash and as the sky sizzled with another bright flash of lightning, I saw something move several yards away in the lake. The neighbor on the other side of the Hood house had seen a baby alligator in Lake Junior the previous year, and typically where there’s a baby, there’s a mama. But as far as I knew the baby had only been seen that one time by that one neighbor and I never heard another word about it. A trapper was called out after the sighting, so maybe that ended it. I turned to head back to my single-wide mansion when I felt something tap my foot. I assumed it was Gypsy. I was right. I looked down and lost my lunch…and my dinner. It was Gypsy’s head, mid-scream (if a dog can scream) and eyes wide-open. Startled and frightened, I kicked Gypsy’s head away from me. It landed facedown in mud. I reacted out of fear, and I felt awful for doing it. It still haunts me. Something darted into the weeds but I couldn’t make it out. I saw it peripherally, and it was literally gone in a blink.

My best friend in Interlachen, Rex Fowler, a retired carny who ran freak shows in Coney Island before “escaping” (his word) to Florida had told me about a local mythical monstrosity known as “The Bardin Boog”. Bardin was the next town over. It was founded by Hazard Bardin who operated a turpentine distillery there around 1900. “Hazard”. It figures. There is a combination gas station/grocery store/hardware store called “Bud’s” which is the hub of the town and the main source of stories and rumors about the Bardin Boog. Rex said you could walk into Bud’s at any time and whoever was there would start right up talking about the Boog. There were various descriptions and perspectives of the Boog. All the “eyewitnesses” to his (or her or its) existence had died off except for the renowned “Ma Lady”. She was 96 years old and Rex told me she would come alive telling the tale. The first sighting of the Boog was in the late 1940s just after World War Two when stories of gremlins causing mechanical failures in military aircraft were pretty popular. But the Boog was no gremlin in an airplane. “He” was a swamp resident, a local anomaly.

The next morning I called Rex and told him what had happened to Gypsy. He said he suspected the Boog and we should talk to Ma Lady. He came right over. I got in his truck, and we got onto State Road 100 and headed for Bardin which was only 16 miles away. On the way he lit a “ciggy” (his word) and told me what he knew about Ma Lady. He said that she had been a feral child, abandoned by her parents in 1930 in Etoniah Creek Forest where she climbed trees to escape predators and ate plants to survive. Like “most” feral children she had great difficulty mastering language and fitting into society. He said that he had seen her growl and hiss when she felt threatened or agitated. When she was discovered by a ranger, after a legendary fight which ended with her being hog-tied, she was turned over to the state of Florida and placed in a third-rate facility where she learned some social interaction (although she never liked or trusted people, and kept her distance from them for most of her life) and basic speech, which she developed hanging around Bud’s, the apex of linguistics that it is.

Rex turned down 309D and told me that Bud’s was a short ways up ahead on our left. The road leading to Bud’s was lined with memorial crosses for those that died in car crashes at those specific locations. Or maybe the Boog got them. It wasn’t a bad road at all and I saw at least 50 of those crosses. So maybe it was the Boog. If it was, that Boog sure as hell knew his business. I considered out loud rhetorically that maybe it was Diablo, the Hoods pitbull that killed Gypsy. Pitbulls are illegal in Florida for a reason. People say it’s the owner that shapes the dog’s behavior. There’s truth to that, but I saw a pitbull rip a poodle to shreds once and the pitbull’s owner was good to that animal, so some wires definitely don’t touch. Diablo was a mean one. He would snarl and snap at me and hurl himself against the short chain-link fence that separated him from my jugular before I put the privacy fence up. Maybe he was still roaming the neighborhood terrorizing people and other animals after the Hoods shuffled off their psychotic coils. But Rex told me Diablo had been euthanized. When Sheriff “Gator” DeLarch entered the Hoods’ house after Rex’s wife, Faith, our mail carrier, reported their mail piling up, overgrown weeds, and one hell of a stench, he discovered that Mr. Hood was partially mummified, and Diablo had consumed three of his limbs and a good portion of his torso. So much for man’s best friend. As long as they’re fed, they love you. Diablo certainly loved Mr. Hood. I imagine he left that one arm so Mr. Hood could wave goodbye.

Rex pulled up to Bud’s. We got out of the truck and were greeted by Bud himself who seemed a safe distance from sober. I noticed he was wearing a handmade amulet around his neck. He spit tobacco chew which made me queasy and bummed a cigarette from Rex. Ma Lady was sitting on a bench by a stack of old tires. She was wearing a dirty yellow shawl and smoking a pipe directly under a “No Smoking” sign. The bench she was sitting on had a hand-painted sign next to it that said, “Sit Long Talk Much”. Rex whispered something to her while I was looking at the Community Bulletin Board that had seen better days. There were ads for hares to stew, yard work, junk removal, pet and farm sitters, and a rusted thumbtack barely holding up a leaflet warning that if you didn’t find Jesus soon, Hell’s fire and eternal damnation is in your future. Terrific. Just when things were going so well. Speaking of warnings, next to the front screen door was a badly handwritten sign that stated: “If we ain’t got it, you ain’t need it”. Even the signs are illiterate there. Ma Lady motioned me over with her cane and stammered, “City b-boy…Heard the B-B-Boog m-murdered yer m-mutt. Tore his head c-clean off.” I felt queasy again. Rex grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me into the store. “That old vulture won’t win any awards for subtlety,” he said. “Let’s get some pop and see what she knows.”

Inside Bud’s was interesting: tomatoes in one bin next to screws next to wilted lettuce next to a cucumber crate full of rusted iron nails next to rotting bananas next to shoe boxes full of cabinet hasps next to expired cans of salmon next to a coffee can full of steel wool pads. I didn’t notice any flies when we were outside. That’s because they were all inside. They were swarming in there. We bought some “pop” as Rex called it (I call it “soda”) and as we turned to leave, the woman who was running the place while Bud was outside staggering and spitting tobacco, started talking about the Bardin Boog like a bad tour guide. I noticed that she was also wearing an amulet just like Bud’s. Rex cut her off and we thanked her. She asked if we wanted “Bardin Boog” T-shirts for free. She said she was giving them away for free because the cartoon printing of the Boog on the front of the shirt was very bad, very light, and could hardly be seen. She was right. Even squinting I could barely make it out. Free is free, so we took her up on her offer (It’s still the most comfortable shirt I own). We sat on the bench across from Ma Lady, sipped our “pop”, and asked if she thought the Boog was still alive and would he travel the 16 miles to decapitate my dog. She puffed her pipe and pondered. After several beats she said it was possible that the Boog was still around, but despite what she said before about him murdering Gypsy, she really didn’t think the Boog would travel more than five feet to kill anything, adding “The B-Boog is old, you know. He’s r-really old. If he’s alive.”

Back at my place, Rex and I took a walk and stopped in front of Ann’s house. There’s a sign on her gate that says “The Heathen House” and another one that says “Warning: Hippies Live Here” and there’s a pentagram on top of the gate. It’s gutsy for the area, which is primarily redneck, or as I like to say, “Where a GED is a Ph.D.” There had been a shoot-out in that house with some drug dealers and two sheriff deputies a few months before Ann bought the place. The bullet holes were still everywhere. Ann and Jon had even written “Bullet Hole” with arrows pointing to them on the walls. Cats were everywhere too. Ann loves her cats, and they love her when they’re hungry. Alright, they love her anyway. She had told me after Mr. Hood became a buffet for Diablo, that when she dies her cats are more than welcomed to chow down on her. She had gotten an autopsy table from a friend of a friend who worked in a morgue and uses it to cut fruit and vegetables on. There are literally hundreds of screw-top Mason jars with potions and salves she made herself on shelves Jon had built, all around the ceiling. Jon, Ann’s housemate, had been an army sniper and after meeting her became a pacifist hippie. Jon believes a flying saucer with aliens aboard had miscalculated a landing and the saucer is at the bottom of Lake Junior which is around 60 feet deep. He sometimes borrows my 12-foot Tracker jon boat and goes out to where he thinks the saucer is with a fishing magnet. So far, nothing. He doesn’t want to be eaten by Ann’s cats when he dies, but he does want a Viking funeral on the lake when his time comes. Ann saw Rex and me out in front of her place and had Jon bring us in. Getting inside was no easy trick. There is a double-entrance that Jon had created, sort of like a short maze of chicken wire, rusted chain-link and barbed wire that you have to navigate and maneuver through just to get to the front yard. And you have to be careful that you don’t get cut on all that fun stuff. Once inside, Ann gave us some Empress gin and listened to my story. She teared-up when I told her what happened to Gypsy and told me that Gypsy’s death was collateral damage that shouldn’t have happened because the Boog wasn’t supposed to appear again after the Hoods were killed. She explained that the Hoods had captured four of her cats on their property, put them in a burlap sack, tied the opening, and tossed them in the lake to drown. Jon was out on the dock with binoculars looking for signs of the saucer or its occupants when he saw them throw the sack in the water, although he didn’t know what was in it at the time. Ann explained that the Hoods were killed for revenge, and yes, Ma Lady was the Boog.

Ann had known for many years that Ma Lady was the Boog when Ma Lady came to her complaining of strange headaches, fogginess and fatigue. She was a shapeshifter: anthropomorphic animal transformation. The night Mrs. Hood was killed; Ma Lady was at Ann’s place for help. Ann told Ma Lady to relax and focus on the physical features of the Boog as Ann prompted her. While Ma Lady focused, Ann took down some Mason jars from the ceiling shelves and combined Marsh Marigold, wolfsbane, and buckthorn. All severe irritants. She put joss sticks with rose oil in an eggcup packed with orange road clay and lit the joss sticks. She then placed a silver cord around Ma Lady’s shoulders. Ann explained that the silver represented moon magic and the life-in-death aspect of the transformation to the Boog: the scourge to leave the body. She had Ma Lady in a trance so that she was susceptible to the supernatural while there was a decrease in motor contact and sensory with the physical. Ann told her to negotiate; to ask the Boog for permission to enter its being. If the Boog allowed Ma Lady’s presence, she was to recite “Mutatio to quidam animal in animus que corpus corporis.” Together Ma Lady and Ann had to figure out all that applied to the Boog in order for the fetch; the incarnation to occur: It’s species, subspecies, hide color, underside hide color, genital color, eye color, claw length, cold or warm-blooded, tail length, body size, wings, wingspan, human teeth, human tongue, shape, scaly, hairy…whatever applied. The description came to light. The Boog was four feet tall but rarely stayed upright, preferring to move on its hands and feet. It was extremely fast on all fours. It had sharp black claws and three-inch canines that were razor-sharp. It had coarse brown fur and both male and female genitalia. It had an elongated coccyx, a serpentine tongue and small granular scales. The Boog was nothing to mess with.

Ma Lady’s etheric body in the form of the Boog would leave her physical body and travel at night. Unless there was a Harvest Moon, nights are very dark around here. Ann released the Boog to kill Mrs. Hood. Mr. Hood would pay when he got out of jail, which he did. And he paid dearly. The Boog had returned a few times since the Hood killings looking for leftovers, and very sadly, my Gypsy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But aren’t we all?

Credit: Howard Camner