Diner story time.
So, morning rolled around and I decided to check out that Diner down the road. "Buckhorn Baths Breakfast". I don't even have a joke for that.
Whole place had this old-western style feel to it. Raw wood pillars and red felt carpeting. Waitress was a real doll. Damn fine coffee. Had a lot of cups of coffee in my time, and that was one of the best. Would've bought cherry pie too, but who the hell eats pie for breakfast?
Anyways, I chatted up with the lady that owned the place. Shirley, I think it was. Older gal, probably late fifties or so. Kind of what you imagine when you picture an old lady, complete with a big wig and glasses. She said she'd been in the town for nearly fifty years, and I asked what she knew about the Antler thing. I need to get a better name for that. Antlers? Buck? I'll keep working on that.
She said she'd heard about it, and that she'd seen it herself once when she was a girl. Said that one night, out on her daddy's farm, she'd gotten woke up when the dogs started barking. Went out to see what it was, and out at the edge of the woods was this thing. She said it was tall, with a big bulbous head and a pair of long, intricate antlers. She said that the antlers actually seemed fluid, like they moved on their own.
Shirley said that, just then, she started getting a really nasty headache. She passed out, and when she woke up, she was in the hospital. I asked her why, and she showed me one of her hands.
She was missing three fingers.
The doctors told her that, based on the wounds, it looked like something had tried to bite them off. They tried to keep the whole thing on the DL, but she said she overheard the doctors saying the teeth marks looked almost human. One of the fingers was already gnawed off, and they had to amputate the other two.
I was taking my notes when she mentioned something really interesting.
She said that the town reverend, a man named Parker, had visited her while she was in the hospital. He told her that a wolf had come out of the woods and bit her fingers off. Her father said the same thing too, and that the Reverend was really smart about these kinds of things.
That was that, she said, and she didn't see the monster for a long time afterwards. She said that she only saw it one more time after that, and that was when it was watching her from the road one night, coming home from the diner. I got the exact spot where she saw it. I'll take a look when I get a chance.
Paid the bill and took off. Got some of the coffee to go. Ran into some drunk asshole stumbling through the parking lot. The waitress was changing shift at the time, and while she was getting in her car, she told me that was "Old Matt Zadok". The town drunk.
How fascinating. I didn't even know having a "town drunk" was still a thing.
