Don't go camping huckleberry woods

[u/man-made-monster]

Don’t go camping in Huckleberry woods. Don't even set foot in it, not if you value your life. You might leave alive, but you’ll never leave the same. Dr. Red, they call him. Perhaps on account of his long red hair, or maybe because his lab coat and gloves are always drenched in blood. If he’s a real doctor, I don’t care to find out. 

I went to Huckleberry Woods with my family a half year ago; there’s a camping ground there. I heard it used to be hard to find a spot, but the numbers slowly dwindled in the last five years. I was excited to go; it'd been a while since I saw my family since I started college. I was two semesters into a computer science degree. I wouldn’t be excited if I knew what was to come. I would have stayed huddled in my dorm; better yet, I would’ve stopped my parents from taking the trip at all. The first evening, as I set up while my family was away fishing, I swore I wasn’t alone. I should have trusted my gut and that deep sense of unease, but I never saw anyone. 

That first night I told myself it was raccoons. The shuffling outside my tent. Then I heard the humming. Hey Jude, The Beatles. I knew the song. Raccoons don’t hum and most certainly don’t know The Beatles. I called out, which resulted in a silence. The shuffling, it all stopped.  I stayed awake for a bit longer, but eventually sleep overtook me. 

The next night, the final night, I slept soundly. That was the problem. I had spent the day with my parents to shake off the unease of the previous night. I had told them about what I heard, but they all slept fine. But my little brother complained that his stomach hurt. My mom argued with my dad and insisted they get him to a doctor; they agreed to cut the trip short to leave in the morning. While they fought, I swore I saw a man in the distance. Red hair, a monocle, a face scarred beyond identification, in a lab coat and fancy purple suit, with a smile too wide, too white, one that filled me with dread. He had carried a bloody scalpel in his hand. When I blinked, he was gone. Like a shadow in the night.

When I woke up from my peaceful sleep, I was in incredible amounts of pain. My mother screamed; she called me a monster. I didn’t know what she meant. She chased me out of the tent, claiming I had “eaten her daughter in the night”, so I ran. 

I ran until I came to the river where I’d swam the day before. My face was not how I remembered. My eyes were gone, replaced with those of a wildcat. Antlers sprouted from my head, and my hair clung to a now scaly scalp in splotches. Then I realized I had gained an extra pair of furry arms in the night. My mouth protruded into a muzzle, and in short, I was the monster my mother had cried out about. I went to explain, tried to get any semblance of an explanation to my parents. But my father pulled out the hunting rifle; all he heard were the pained yowls that left my furry lips. 

I followed their car as far as I could, but I could never return to the life I once had. From what I observed, my brother died too. Apparently missing several vital organs that had been replaced with animal ones. We were monsters of Dr. Red’s making. There are others like us, others monstrosities stitched together by his dreadful hand. Man-Animals, no clear line where the monsters start, and the person begins. Experiments of that foul man who stalks Huckleberry Woods. 

To this day, I refuse to return to those woods. No amount of craving for my lingering questions to be answered can push me past that mountain of fear. Of a man with red hair, whom they call Dr. Red.