The Remains
Submitted by Vera Gray
The encounters began two months ago.
At first, the only sign of their existence was sets of sooty footprints that I discovered on my patio each morning. The footprints were no larger than a small child's. Obviously I found this strange, but I brushed it of as the neighbour's children playing in my garden. While it was strange that they would be playing in my garden and not their own, it was better than the alternative: someone trying to look for a way into my house.
This continued every day for the next week, and I had been ensuring that all of the doors and windows were locked and secure before I went to bed each night. While I felt unsafe and had considered calling the police, I was unconvinced that they could do much about someone leaving footprints on my patio.
I became more unsettled when I discovered the bird carcass in my garden.
Its head and body had been torn open, and all of its organs had been removed. One of the wings was missing, and the other wing had been twisted so that it was facing the wrong way. The bird had been left just outside my back door on the patio, and had been laid out neatly.
Only after discovering the remains of the bird did I start to feel more unsafe in my own home, but I managed to convince myself that it had just been a fox. However, it became more apparent that my house was under threat when I finally saw one of the creatures.
One night I was woken up by a loud crunching sound coming from the garden. It stopped as soon as I opened my eyes, but just as I was starting to believe I had imagined the noise, it started again. I sat up in my bed and listened. The crunching was wet, and as I continued to listen, I heard what sounded like tearing of flesh. I got out of my bed and looked out of my bedroom window; it was dark, and the clouds were obscuring the moon so there was very little light, but I could just about make out the outline of a humanoid figure hunched over on the grass in my garden, not far from the patio. I pulled on my slippers and ran downstairs to the back door. The figure was still hunched over, facing away from the door. While it was still dark, now that I was closer, I could make out more of the figure.
The figure had no clothes on, and their skin was unnaturally pale, faded, and cracked. There were scratches all over the figure's back. The figure was so skinny that their skin was pulled tight around their bones, making them more reminiscent of a skeleton than a living humanoid creature. There was no hair on their head, let alone the rest of the figure's body, and the figure's ears were pointed.
I opened the back door as quietly as I could, just wide enough to be able to grab the shovel that I kept leaning against the wall next to the door. As I was keeping an eye on the figure, who was still hunched over, seemingly eating something, my fingers eventually closed around the handle of the shovel,and I pulled it inside the house before slamming the door shut and locking it. The sound of the door shutting alerted the figure, and they stopped eating.
Horrified, I watched as the figure slowly raised their head and turned to face the door. The figure's face was shrouded in shadow, but I could now see that their fingers were unnaturally long, and had large black claws rather than nails. Then, without warning, the figure suddenly got up and ran at me.
I raised the shovel, ready to strike, but the figure slammed into the glass of the door and fell backwards, leaving a crack on the door where it had impacted. I switched on the room's light so that I could see the creature better.
It had a relatively human face, but its eyes were too large and sunken into the creature's skull. Its mouth stretched across the entire width of the creature's face, and there was simply a pair of holes were the nose should have been. The eyes were pitch black, and there was something red dripping from the corner of the thing's mouth. My gaze drifted to where the creature had been moments before, and I stifled a scream as I realised what it had been eating: on the grass was the remains of a human.
Immediately, I ran to the phone, keeping an eye on the creature which had now climbed back onto its fight and was standing on the other side of the glass, watching me. Unfortunately, I had to take my eyes off of it to reach the phone, as the phone was in the front room. As quickly as I could, I called the police and told them about the human remains and the creature. They told me to stay inside and remain calm; they would be there in seven minutes.
I hung up and returned to the back room. The creature had placed its hands on the glass, and was seemingly inspecting it, as if it was trying to find a way to bypass it in order to reach me. Still wielding the shovel, I began to block the back door with the furniture in the room; in hindsight, this was pointless as it was a sliding door, not a door that swung inwards, but it made me feel safer. I then sat in the far corner of the room, still clutching the shovel and watching the creature, while I waited for the police to arrive.
It was not long before I heard the sound of police sirens outside the front of my house. The creature heard them too, and ran away from the back door, hopping the garden fence and disappearing into the night, leaving the remains behind. The police rung the doorbell, and I got up to answer it, still holding the shovel.
For my own safety, I was taken to the station that night, in case the creature came back. However, I was unable to sleep, even though I felt safe in the police station. The creature's appearance still haunted me, and I could not get the image of it eating the human remains out of my mind. Instead, I sat in the chair for the rest of the night, gazing out of the window for any sign of the creature.
The police later told me that the remains had been that of a missing man named William Baley, who had vanished two months prior to the incident.
And now here I am, weeks later. There has been no sign of the creature since the incident, but be careful out there. I believe these creatures may be absolutely everywhere.
Note from the A.C.E.
While Vera's encounter could be chalked up as some other supernatural encounter, we believe that it is highly likely that what she was dealing with may have been an anomaly that we have encountered before. Its behaviour reflected that of a more primitive kind of that anomaly, as we have encountered this kind of anomaly where the creatures have displayed much higher levels of intelligence, but this may be due to separation from the rest of its pack, as Vera's account seems to suggest that the anomaly was alone.
We do not currently know what this anomaly is, but in future we hope to be able to capture and document it.