The New Octobers

For almost all of human existence, October was the month of monsters. Before it was even called October, people knew to fear those 31 nights and the horrors that would come from the darkness. 

Then came people like me. We're nothing special, really. Just people who have survived an encounter with a monster, maybe even killed one, and emerged with most of their limbs and enough of their wits to record the details of their victory and pass that knowledge on. And we did, through the stories, and we carried them to the people so they could learn and defend themselves. 

And it worked. Despite our physical disadvantages as an individual, we humans working together are the most cunning, lethal, and ruthless creatures in this world or the next. 

The popular ones were easy: sunlight or dismemberment for vampires, silver weapons and wormwood for werewolves, and those thinned out first. Every villager today knows how to deal with them. Of course, they still lose a few here and there, but more and more would survive every October, while fewer and fewer monsters would attack the next. 

Still, there were challenges. Getting people to understand that you cannot hurt a Kappa at all until you have managed to spill the water from the bowl in its head is easy to say, but it's a different thing to remember that when something like a human-sized snapping turtle bursts from a a peaceful, babbling brook and snatches your child in its beak. 

Or that a water kelpie can be driven away by traditional weapons, but if your bare flesh makes any contact with its skin, you will be stuck fast and dragged along while it races into the churning sea to drown you, and then devour you at its leisure. 

And the ahuizotl, which at a distance looks like a dark, spiky-furred dog, until you get close enough to see its human hands at the end of each leg, and one more at the tip of its tail. It will lure you to the river's edge by crying like a baby, and then drag you under. 

Humans seemed to have a lot of trouble with the water-based ones, now that I think more on it. Perhaps because we do have a fascination with boundary conditions. We are drawn to them. Perhaps it was us who first came from the darkness into the lands of the monsters, and they just never forgave us for it. 

It matters not, not to me. For most of the people in most of the world, the monsters are gone. But not for me. 

Somewhere, somehow, the monsters learned that it was no accident that they had lost the ancient war. They learned about the storytellers that told the tales that bound the people together in the slavering face of their nightmarish foes. This they learned, and they have spread their own tales amongst their horrid kind. 

And now they come for the storytellers. 

So this October, as the first night falls, I sit and wait. I leave the front door of my modest cabin ajar to the night, and I sit by the hearth, although the fire in the hearth itself is out. The windows are unshuttered. I sit and wait for my visitors.

In the beginning, my home was practically a fortress. Still, they always got in, eventually. And made such a mess. I am old now, and I don't have the energy to spend each day rebuilding. 

So I sit here, every night, with my axe in my lap, in the long darkness of October, and I wait.

Sometime around midnight, I hear the flap of leathery wings, followed by a soft "whump" in the front garden. Something very large pads towards the front door, and slowly pushes it open. There is a low snarl, like that of a great cat. I stand up, my joints stiff from the cold, my axe at the ready, and I am shaking with excitement. I think it's a manticore. 

I've always wanted to see a manticore. 

-For LP