The Chupacabra (1st.Twisted Tales)

FEATURED in The Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: The Horror of a Birthday - Editor's Picks, by willwilcox, July 27, 2011

FIRST PLACE IN TWISTED TALES CONTEST BY Arakun the twisted raccoon , AUGUST 2011

HONORABLE MENTION in the Supernatural Writing Contest by pinkbarbie, October 2011

FEATURED in The Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: The Perfect Monster - Editor's Picks, by {suser:Squirrelly-Me likey Cowbells!}, December 7, 2011

FEATURED in The Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: Demons masquerading as angels - Editor's Picks, by  Arakun the twisted raccoon , July 11, 2012

Story Featured in Grave 3 in "Invalid Item" , March 2013

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FEATURED in The Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: Truth or Myth of The Urban Legend - Editor's Picks, by Kate - Writing & Reading , May 10, 2015

FEATURED in the Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: Urban Myths - Editor's Picks, by NaNoNette , July 1, 2015

FEATURED in the Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: Lovecraftian Horror - Editor's Picks, by willwilcox, August 5, 2015

FEATURED in The Writing.Com Newsletter - Horror/Scary: There's someone in the house! - Editor's Picks, by  Arakun the twisted raccoon , August 19, 2015

HONORABLE MENTION in the Horror Round Winners in the Genre Times Four Contest, by pinkbarbie, August 29, 2017

When I was a boy, I had an electric train made of cast iron. My father gave it to me for Christmas. While I watched it go round and round in the tracks, I saw that the number on the train was 999. The train was red and it had a small transformer. It went under bridges and tunnels, around lakes and trees, and I could stop it, make it go backwards, then forwards. I decided its destination. I would spend hours playing in my room, after school.

I added many cars to it and a caboose. Each car was 9 inches long. The engine had a cow catcher in front and it was black. It looked like dark rotten teeth. I had a fascination for trains and so did my father, but he never played with me – and my mother -- my father told me, had made a pact with the devil and had left when I was very young.

Looking back now, the number 999 was special. If you inverted it, you’d get 666. Sometimes, I’d sit in the inverted position and just stare at the train while it moved, mesmerized. I would put characters inside the cars: little toys or pieces of my sandwich, but I almost always thought about that number. Sometimes I’d think of an imaginary person, tied up with ropes on the tracks and wonder what would happen—not to the person—but to the train if it followed its way. One day, when I was 33, I took a train to West Texas and then down to Mexico. It traveled through 3 states until it came to Chihuahua, after 6 days. Right after I arrived, I got very sick on the hotel’s porch because of the water. I spent 9 days in the dark and dirty hotel’s room, feverish and throwing up and dreaming of Pancho Villa. I reckon I never fully recovered or was never myself again after that. I had so many things to do; I had chances for prominent things, but all I really wanted to do was to follow the 999 concept – it wasn’t the 1000 but, on the other hand, it was not a devilish concept of faith. You have inside of you enough to defeat yourself. You can never escape though; get away from a passion or ideas or from your red devils coming in from the darkness.

And so I ended up my life in Chihuahua, Mexico. I lived there, and never really accomplished anything but stare at the mountains from the distance – especially from her room. I never pursued my dreams and never followed the train home. I should have but I wanted to get lost in Mexico. I did. This is the story I have to tell you now so listen. I wish I had another. Surely somebody bought me a headstone – that is, if they found my pieces or my carcasses scattered somewhere in that distant desert.

The day I met her I knew my fate was set. She was the inverted number of my train. She was the 666 concept, she was the devil itself but disguised in beauty. I really don’t know what attracted her to me. Her name was Manuelita. I don't know why, but I immediately thought that her name had 9 letters. She looked at me from the distance and walked towards me slowly - as if she could read my thoughts; as if she could read my thoughts moving inside my head. My words and soul were being pulled by an invisible cord that would never break. I thought to myself - was this love? One night, when I was about to die, I asked her why, and she replied in a deep, hoarse voice – a voice that wasn’t hers anymore: “I smelled you.”

I was not particularly handsome, but I was no match for her. I was very tall, slim, had a long face, with a salt-and-pepper hair and goatee, little narrow slits for eyes, dark green, and small, square glasses. I had kind of drifting eyes, people said, and I always seemed suspicious. Before I met her, I was waiting for that right moment in one’s life but… I had waited too long. Once, I kept telling myself that I’d have a small farm in West Texas where I’d sit by a pond, full of ducks, watch the leaves fall into the water and follow them with my eyes – as I did with my train, and wait for the end. I was so tired of the pain. I hadn’t. Because of her; because of her raw beauty and pure evilness. 666. How can one describe a person with… a number? Even though being a Kabbalistic number it didn’t matter, it described her completely. That number hit my heart like bullets. Oh so painful. Why did I say yes?

She was standing by the front door – as if waiting for me. Our eyes met. Time froze. Nothing else mattered. She was stunning. Were we both thinking about the same thing? She wore a red dress and moved oh so softly. I think I never saw her walk, she floated. She brought herself into my line of vision and took over the whole space. She could take over your whole vision, you know, and of your mind and… eat your heart.

She told me she could help me, save me. She told me the pain would stop if I went with her. She knew how to stop it. She had helped others. She laughed. She asked if I wanted her help. I said… yes. She smiled and I noticed that in all that beauty, she had but one flaw – one front tooth was missing. Later I learned that you have to say… no. Ooh if only I knew what was going to happen to me! She held my hand and I was lost forever.  She took me to her house, in the woods and far away from town. While we walked under the trees, she would stop sometimes and look up at the moon. I thought I caught a glimpse of madness, but how could such a beautiful woman be mean? My father once told me, when I was very young, that we only needed to protect ourselves from human beings, not from animals. Ah if he only knew the truth - the devil doesn't come dressed in a red cap and pointy horns. When I entered her dark house, I should have noticed the signs, but I was too in love to notice. It wasn’t a woman’s house – it was more like a hiding place, full of torn pieces of clothes, hats and shoes. There must have been so many before me.                                                                       

She gave me a warm thick, green healing potion; she told me it would cure me - but it didn't. How could I have known?  It was to... paralyze me. I was doomed. She told me it was made with herbs from the woods, handpicked by her. She knew how to make secret “healing” potions – taught by her ancestors. I should have worried then, when she used the word ancestors. Why is it that when we are infatuated, we don’t see the truth and hide the signs in secret boxes, in secret spaces in our hearts? I only noticed, much later, that her hands, when she touched me again to tie me up to that table, were colder than ice. Why don’t we see beyond… people’s eyes? She was not human. She wasn’t warm. She was a monster. She was a legendary, mythical cryptid. She was much older than the human race or maybe older than the world’s urban legends.

When I woke up, I was naked --- tied to a long wooden table in the middle of the dark room only lit by a warm fire coming from the fireplace. Some of my clothes were there, burning and so were my boots. My wallet was melting, and I saw my plastic, twisted smile while my driver’s license melted to ashes. I was trapped. I was her blood. She was sitting on a rocking chair and slowly and calmly started to tell me her dreadful story of horror – my horror.

She knew that she and her kind were ancient, and had first come from Peru and from Chile and maybe from the many caves in South America. She told me that she wasn’t extraterrestrial as people believed, and she laughed about that… strange belief. They had fled from the Spaniards toward the mountains. They had to run; the Conquistadores were making them become slaves, raping and killing them. They were monsters, those foreigners. They fled with their goats. Many were killed but most of her kind survived in the dark caves, deep in the forests, for centuries. She breathed deeply. She got up. She sniffed... me. She looked different. When I tried to move, I screamed because it was only then that I noticed the deep bite marks in my arms and legs. I was her prey. I was her need. Her eyes were glowing an unusual red color in that dark room which caused me fear – and nausea.

She started by breaking my legs with her powerful arm. How could a person – no, a woman, be so strong? I fainted. When I woke up and while she touched my skin, she continued with her story as if nothing had happened to me. Her eyes were yellow now and looked like goats’ eyes or was it the devils? I tried to move, but I couldn’t. I was not myself anymore. I was hers. She told me that her kind had survived for generations, spreading all over South, Central and some parts of North America; Texas and New Mexico.  Some had gone to Brazil and Puerto Rico. There were Oh so many of them now, hidden in forests and caves. Yet, centuries ago, when all their goats died because of a parasite responsible for scabies, her people started attacking, eating and drinking the blood from the animals that roamed near their caves. It was then that they started to… change. It was then when they noticed people and smelled the scent of their blood, blown by the wind. It was then that they noticed the need – for blood, to survive during winter. It was then that they became the” goat suckers” – becoming monsters in the full moon cycles. Cold bloodiness; searching for warmer climates. The survival of the species. She was ageless, she told me, and she had seen so many of my kind – she had mutilated more than a million. Calmly, she told me about her brother, too. Her brother had managed to escape on a ship to Puerto Rico. Many years later, she knew he was safe when she overheard people talk in town about satanic cults and the killings of small animals in the small town of Moca, near Canóvanas. She immediately knew it was him. Some farmers reported seeing him, late at night, standing erect in the moonlight. They had even given him a name – El Vampiro de Moca. She knew he would somehow... survive. She knew her “people” were safe, spreading in the Caribbean. Traveling in ships, hiding in dark places, crawling in the night’s sky. Some called her people coyotes, hairless dogs or even Kangaroos. She laughed. Her stomach growled – she was hungry. She became impatient, restless. What was she waiting for?

I looked at her. I cried. She lovingly wiped my tears, caressed my damp forehead and said: “Soon. It won’t be long now.”                                                                                                                             

She looked at my big hand. She licked her hairy lips, held my hand hard, crushed it and ate my hand with one bite, but I felt no pain. I heard the noises - of my bones, breaking and crushing to sawdust inside her immense jaw. Was it the potion? Or was my fear so deep that I was numb? I felt nothing but I saw it all. My nerves and veins were like strands of colored spaghetti dangling from my poor limb. How could I have known? How could I know what she really was? Beads of sweat popped up along my forehead; the sweat was rolling down my face, and I was shaking the old wooden table. Her red eyes glistened in the lights, and she looked at me with a painful, longing - knowing insane hunger. While she caressed my stomach with her cold hand she told me that some of her kind were completely transfigured  – they stood  erect on their hind legs with two upper appendages armed with long, sharp claws. They were different from her kind, she said, they were furry brother-creatures with an elongated snout and a longer tail for balance and, of course, sharp fangs.  People believed that they would emit a toxin that was used to paralyze the prey and soften the insides to be sucked out easily. It wasn’t hearsay – it was true. The most perfect species in the planet. This time people were right.  The toxin was like a poison spider-type attack, she said softly. She sniffed the air, agitated. She looked at me, licked her mouth and let out a blood curdling howl that echoed in the woods and caves outside her window. Was she warning other predators of her territory? What could I do to save myself?

I saw my white, bare feet. Would she eat them now or later? While the blood dripped from my cut limb, she licked her disgusting lips and sucked my red, thick blood, avidly. She drooled and sucked more blood and this made her... grow in size. Not a single drop of my blood was lost. She suddenly became a medium-sized heavy being, the size of a small bear or wolf, with a horrible, big row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the long, ugly tail. She was part reptile, part an ugly, hairy, leathery scaly greenish-gray creature. Her back had sharp, dark pointed spines, hairless. Her hands – now claws were covered with my blood; her pronounced eye-sockets – no one could bear the sight and not go mad.

She – it hissed noisily and looked... greedily at me. She came closer and the sulfuric stench was unbearable. I threw up. I was breathing heavily. My heart was nearly exploding in my chest. Her panther-like nose and face were expanding and stretching out. The skin was… somehow peeling off. Her enormous mouth opened, and I saw a black forked tongue and large massive fangs, shining at me. She grabbed my other big hand and bit it hard, twisting her face violently. When she lifted her head, I saw two puncture wounds in my limb, in the shape of an upside-down triangle, and I knew that she was going to bleed me dry, suck me to death. I just knew it. As she struck me again, ripping my chest, cutting my flesh and finally biting me under my chin... I desperately gasped for air.

“What... are you?”, I struggled to ask her.

“I am a Chupacabra.”

“Why me?”

“The blood scent of your kind is… so sweet… ”, the vicious and legendary blood sucker responded while it violently peeled all my skin off, tore my intestines open, cut my organs, ripped and ate my heart and sucked the life out of my veins while the moon, high in the dark sky, changed from orange to yellow and  to white.  While dying, I heard a train in the distance. 666 or was it 999?



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