The Ozark Howler Is From Outer Space
The Southern monster is from way outside Fayetteville…
The first thing I noticed about the man was that he wasn’t wearing a mask over his mouth and nose. Not that I could see his mouth and nose, but there wasn’t any cloth covering them. Instead, the lower half of his face was obscured in shadow, no matter which way the light in the parking garage struck the rest of him.
As we talked, he shifted his weight back and forth across the hood of the 1980s Thunderbird he was sitting on. He was beyond nervous. He seemed like he was about to rip out of his skin.
“You’ve got it all wrong.” These were the first words he spoke to me.
Then he laid it on me. “This Ozark Howler you keep on looking for, it’s not from around here. This is just where it happened to land.”
His appearance unnerved me, so I cast my eye on the street below, where a pair of men stood by a dark blue Lexus, parked in space 7651, in front of some pink and purple crepe myrtles. A few seconds after I began to watch them, they turned their heads to look in my direction. Nervously, I waved. They didn’t look away when I did this, but neither did they wave back. They just stared.
The man standing next to me kept talking, not seeming to care that I was looking away. “The Howler arrived on this planet almost 500 years ago,” he said. “A small Spanish ship on the Mississippi River observed the descent of the beast’s craft three decades before Hernando de Soto officially discovered the Big Muddy. The captain of the trading vessel kept meticulous records, and described its spinning lights heading westward at a high speed.”
This was one of those things that, once I’d heard it, I wondered why it never occurred to me before. The Ozark Howler is one of the most bizarre monsters I’ve ever heard of. It’s got big shaggy fur, glowing red eyes, and a pair of sharp horns… but it’s not a big cat, not a bear, not a goat, not a bison, not a hyena. It’s something a little bit like these creatures, and yet something… else.
Then there’s the sound that the Ozark Howler makes. It’s always described as weird, chilling, and downright otherworldly. So, what if it might actually, literally be otherworldly?
“Where is it from?” I asked. “What is it doing here?
“I don’t know where it’s from,” he replied, “other than the fact that it’s not from this planet. As to what it’s doing here, we think that it’s sending reports. Military satellites have detected repeated signals from near the border of Missouri and Arkansas. The exact location of the transmission spot changes every time it’s observed, but the destination is always the same: Somewhere in the Pleiades, the constellation also known as the Seven Sisters.”
He gestured up at the dark grey ceiling above us. “Of course, each of the starts in that constellation are light years apart from each other. It’s impossible for us to tell for sure which of them is the intended target.”
“The content of the signal hasn’t been translated, but it’s complex and non-repeating. What’s more, its patterns are strikingly similar to the sounds it makes here on the ground.”
“I’m sorry, but what sounds are you talking about?”
“The howl. The cry of the Ozark Howler. It seems to be using the same grammar as the signal that’s beamed out into space.”
The man with the strange shadow over his face reached across the hood of the Thunderbird to hand me a card.
“The Sawmen don’t approve of me telling you about this,” he said. “They think they own the Howler and everything connected to it. We in the Order see things differently. We think people around here ought to know what’s going on. Contact me if you have trouble.”
With that, he stepped into the Thunderbird, turned on the ignition, and drove down to the garage entrance.
I turned to look down again at the men standing by the Lexus, but they were gone.
