Minerva's Owl

My little cousin Minnie is a talented artist but the owl painting was by far her worst work. I'd been working with her all summer and I could honestly say it was the only one that appeared to be done by a girl her age. She was just six years old but already showing talent that was impressive, bordering on prodigious.

The main issue was that the proportions were just not right. It had a pronounced neck and shoulders, giving it an almost human shaped silhouette. She'd drawn it flying against the sky, so it was hard to get a sense of scale, but it felt like she'd painted it to be very large. The feather pattern was all wrong, it didn't have the white face and golden back of a barn owl. The face was pale, but the rest of the body was a sickly grey. Honestly, it skeeved me out.

I tried to break it to her gently, telling her the sky looked great and peppering in a few compliments before I said, "So what made you want to paint an owl? Did you see one, or did you look at any pictures while you painted this one?"

"Yeah I saw one! He lives in the woods, but he comes to the house at night," she replied.

"That's awesome!" I told her. "So, it's great to work from your memory, but sometimes if you can't look at something for too long, you might need to look at some pictures too, because it can be hard to remember all the details right."

"I don't need a picture, Sally," Minnie said. She rolled her eyes in that sassy kid way. "He poses for me."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"When it gets dark out, he comes to my window and we look at each other," she said, playing with her blond curls absentmindedly.

That was absolutely the creepiest way she could have put it, but kids are bad at explaining things so I decided not to probe further.

She continued, "I painted that when he was here. But I made it daytime 'cause I wanted it prettier."

"Do you want to take a look at some pictures of owls during the day?" I asked, "since you mostly see him at night?"

Minnie readily agreed to this, and we went to the computer. I wondered if maybe the one she was seeing was a juvenile. Some of the adults did have a bit of of grey to them, but the babies all had lots of grey down and a lanky, skinny look.

"Do you think the one you see might be a baby?" I asked her as we scrolled through more pictures.

"No," She replied bluntly.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because that would be a BIG baby," she said, then laughed. "When he looks in my window, his feet are on the ground!"

She looked back at the computer screen and studied the pictures some more. "These owls are very pretty," she said carefully, so as if not to offend them. "But, my owl doesn't look like them. He's special."

With that slightly terrifying description, I decided we should call it a day. I was worried she was getting bored with painting lessons and was maybe making up some stories to get attention.

I told her to go play with her friend next door, hoping that would help her de-stress. This left me alone, as my Aunt Ruth was still at work. I decided to grab my camera and see if I could spot any owls.

Aunt Ruth's house was in the foothills of Appalachia and the forest around it was absolutely stunning. It wasn't completely in the middle of nowhere, a five-minute walk either direction up the road would get you to the neighbors, but if you went straight back behind the house and up the hills, that was pure wilderness.

I went to school in the city so it was a literal breath of fresh air to spend the summer there. I was studying art and pretty decent at landscape painting, so Aunt Ruth was acting like it was a big favor of me to come spend the summer with her and help Minnie with her painting skills. Really though, spending time in a lovely little house in the woods and eating home-cooked meals every night was my slice of heaven.

I walked the trails I knew, following creeks when I went off-trail so I wouldn't get lost. I came upon a family of three deer grazing and got some awesome close-up shots of a red-tailed hawk. I also snapped more creek and forest pictures than I would ever realistically get time to paint. I didn't see any owls, but that was alright.

That night, I prompted Minnie into telling her mother about her owl over dinner. I expected Aunt Ruth to find it a bit funny the way I did, but she looked worried.

I asked her about it after Minnie went to bed.

"I mean, she's got to just be making stuff up cause she's bored right?" I asked. "I think maybe we've been pushing her too hard."

"My little Minerva will let you know if she's bored, trust me. She'll say it in the middle of company, it's awful." We shared a laugh at that. "But, I don't like what she was saying. I'm not saying I believe her, but, well, when you live out here you see some strange things." Ruth crossed her arms at that and frowned a bit.

"Like what?" I asked, perhaps too eager to hear about any creepy happenings.

"Hon, you wouldn't believe me if I told you," she smiled just a bit, Aunt Ruth always looked younger when she smiled.

"I would! I promise!" I said.

"Listen Sally," Aunt Ruth said. "When you see something strange or unnatural out in the woods, it's not always for other people to hear about. It sounds silly to talk about, and then you start to believe it less the more you tell it. You feel a need to throw in stuff about how, maybe you really saw something else, or maybe you were drinking that night. And it's important not to do that. Sometimes it's important to keep something to yourself, so you remember it really happened the way it happened."

I could understand that, a bit. I'd had my share of scares in the creepy old house I lived in as a kid: doors opening, things moving when no one was home, stuff like that. Whenever I told someone, well, I had to do it as kind of a joke even though as a child it gave me so many nightmares. Aunt Ruth knew all about that, my Mom and her talked all the time. "I think I know what you mean," I told her. "You remember the house we lived in back when I was a kid? The one with all the ghosts?" I said, wiggling my fingers in a silly way at broaching the spooky subject of ghosts.

"I do," she said. "And, I remember your mother being terrified. She laughs about it now but back then she didn't think it was funny." Aunt Ruth smiled and wiggled her fingers back at me. "And, neither did you. Not while it was happening."

That night, Minnie fell asleep with her paintbrushes all over the place. I couldn't judge, there were nights where I'd left oil paint to cure on my brushes when I was tired, a cardinal sin among some artists. I decided to clean them for her so she could get a fresh start whenever she was feeling up to it. It was just tempura paint, which came out easily with water and a bit of dish soap.

The bathroom in Aunt Ruth's house had a window in it. It had always creeped me out. She insisted that we were in the middle of the woods so it didn't matter to have it covered. While I was cleaning the brushes, I deliberately faced away from it.

I was cleaning a bunch of little brushes at once, rubbing them over the inside of my palm in small circles to get the soap out. They started making a quiet squeaking sound, something about the soap and the bristles makes that noise if you're really scrubbing them. Since I was washing a bunch of little ones at once it sounded like a flock of tiny birds in the palm of my hand.

I don't know why, but I very quickly got the feeling that someone was watching me. I turned to face the door and saw neither Minnie nor Ruth, so that left only that awful window.

I took a deep breath, stilling my heart for whatever I might see. Maybe a person with a crowbar ready to smash the window and come in, or perhaps a bear, upright and curious, separated from me by only a thin pane of glass that would in no way contain him.

But when I looked up it wasn't a man or a bear, but something much worse. I felt a jolt go up my spine, like I'd missed a step and my brain was trying to catch up. It was little Minnie's Owl, and boy had she done a good job.

The thing looking in the window had the pale face of a barn owl but the eyes were bigger, taking up more of the face than they should. It was hard to see in the dark but it did look very grey, not white and gold. I realized with a sick feeling that it didn't appear to be perched. In fact, it looked very, very large, large enough to have it's feet on the ground. It cocked its head as I examined it and there was a definitive, almost human-like neck there.

I didn't dare get closer, but if Minnie was right and it was touching the ground, it had to be three or four feet tall.

It shuffled its wings. They looked heavy, devoid of any down and they were thick near the base, like it had arms hiding just below the surface. I thought for a moment that it had to be someone in a costume but the way it moved... that just wasn't possible.

I stepped back toward the hall and it reached out with its wing to touch the glass. And at the joint of its wing were three long, lanky clawed fingers.

After that, I ran straight to bed. I pulled my blinds shut and taped them closed. I don't know why I didn't try to get Aunt Ruth, I should have. But I was an adult too, what was she going to do? Would she even believe me? I should have at least taken a picture.

I don't know how long it took me to fall asleep but I must have at some point.

The next day when I woke up, I had convinced myself that there was a rational explanation: it was either a person in a costume and I was just scared out of my wits, a spirit or ghost of some kind, or it was a mutant.

The third idea seemed most likely to me. Even though it was tall and very creepy at night, I didn't think it could pose a serious risk to me.

Daylight has a way of making things that are scary at night feel silly. The shadow in your closet becomes just a coat that's fallen, the beast in the woods is almost always a stray squirrel or cat, and the monster you see peering through your window at night could be a very interesting photo subject during the day.

The way I saw it, if it was something supernatural, it wouldn't be lurking around during the day. It would probably be near the house anyway, not the woods. Plus, I'd been exploring the woods all summer and I should really be more worried about bears than some big, weird owl.

Over coffee I asked Aunt Ruth if I could take the day off to explore and she readily agreed. I think she was happy to give Minnie a break too, and keep her from making more awful nightmare paintings. I should have told her about the owl, she probably would have believed me. But, despite our recent conversation I would have felt silly talking about it. I could already feel myself taking the seriousness out of the encounter just by going over and over it in my own head. She was right. If I told her, I would feel a need to bring some levity, or tone it down, take out the bit about how it looked like it had fingers. Perhaps if I was going to venture into the woods I should do it while I was taking the situation as seriously as I could.

The house that I grew up in had given me a sense of doubt anytime I saw something that didn't quite fit the laws of our world. Yes, I remember that time I heard voices in my closet, and the time I watched something pull my sister's hair, but over the years I kind of started wondering if I'd made all of that up in my head. Years later, when I'd spotted a UFO with my friend we'd attribute it to the single glass of wine we'd both had. I think I wanted to find this owl to finally see something strange with my own eyes that I could believe in. Or maybe, I was just so eager to seek it out because I kind of was starting to believe that I'd imagined the whole thing.

I set out that day with a spare battery for my camera, some snacks, water, and bear mace.

There were sycamores down by the creek with massive hollow trunks that could have maybe been the creature's nesting site. The trees as a whole were lovely, with peeling bark and those big starry leaves. I didn't spot any owls hiding in the clusters though. I even turned the flash on on my camera and took a few pictures up the most notably hollow ones. The trees were cold inside and each time the flash went off I was expecting to see that big pale face staring down at me and I was waiting for talons to grab my hands in the dark. There were two caves nearby as well as an old mine-shaft, but I was not feeling quite adventurous enough to go into those.

I returned home empty-handed, leaving ample time before sunset. There were bears and cougars that I absolutely did not want to run into during the prime hunting time.

That night at dinner I thought passively about the owl visiting again. Part of me felt as if I'd probably just made the whole encounter up, or perhaps it was a vivid dream. Though, when I went to bed my blinds were still taped shut. I was feeling so bold, so sure that I'd just imagined the whole thing that I took the tape off.

I didn't wake up to anything peering through my window that night. No, I woke up to Aunt Ruth screaming.

Minnie was gone.

Ruth called the police. She tried to insist on going to the woods to look for her but I convinced her that someone needed to be here to answer questions. I took my bear mace, my flashlight, and I ventured into the dark. I didn't think to grab my camera.

I started thinking then about the brief possibility that I'd considered earlier, that the creature Minnie was so fond of was really just a person in a costume. I'd been quick to dismiss it, but what if someone had stolen her? The idea of a person dressing up like that and peering into a child's window at night was horrifying.

I'd like to say the seriousness of the situation quelled any fears I had of being in the woods in the dark, but that would be a lie. There's something primal in your brain that tells you not to be out in the woods at night, and that doesn't shut off for anything.

I decided to follow the creek. I was hoping the sycamores would be my best best to find the creature. Plus, the likelihood of getting lost at night was no doubt much greater, and the creek would be impossible to miss.

Progress was slow, but eventually I made my way to the sycamores. I stood and listened. Eventually, I called out "Minnie! Minnie, it's Sally. Can you hear me?"

I realized I should have been calling out this whole time, but I'd been trying to be as quest as possible without even thinking about it. Like I was instinctively hiding from something.

I moved on further, just a bit, and then I heard it start up all at once: screaming. It sounded like dozens of children all screaming at once or perhaps a whole litter of kittens being slaughtered.

Against all of my better instincts I ran towards the sound, well more like stumbled, the brush was thick. It pulled at my hair and snagged my jacket, thorns scraping my arms, then all of a sudden I was out the brush.

What I'd stumbled into was a clearing in the trees. It was lit clearly by the full moon, and the stars above unspoiled by light pollution. But, a single shooting star overhead was more impressive than both of those. It was the first thing I looked at, an orange, bright big streak of fire across the sky. It looked so close, and as it flew past I heard a kind of whistling and crackling sound. Soon it was out of my sight past the tree line, and my eyes finally found what was happening in the trees.

There must have been dozens of them, a whole flock of barn owls perched in the trees at the edge of the clearing.

As my eyes adjusted I saw a human form just a yard or so away, and as I got closer I saw it was Minnie. "Sally, be quiet!" she whispered, coming closer to me. She looked calm, or even a bit excited about the spectacle. Just then, we heard the meteor land off in the distance, with a BOOM that shook the ground and made us both reach for our ears.

With the sound of the meteor gone, I heard the owls screaming uninterrupted once again. I knew barn owls didn't hoot, but I hadn't imagined their calls would sound nearly as awful as this. Minnie directed me to what they were watching, and what they were likely screaming about.

In the center of the clearing, was Minnie's owl.

"He's doing a dance," she told me. She gave a little smile about her friend's performance.

He most certainly was not dancing. The owl looked big, even bigger than the last time I'd seen him two nights ago. It was a large clearing so it was hard to get a sense of scale, but he looked taller than me, and what he was doing looked more like writhing.

There were indeed clawed, humanoid fingers at the joints on the ends of his wings. He had long scaly legs taking him in slow, pained steps in a circle, all the while he was shaking his body. There were white and grey down feathers falling off of him as he went, piling up on the ground.

The feathers falling off revealed more of the creature hiding underneath. Most of the feathers were gone off of its face now. It had big black eyes, bigger than an owls, like some kind of alien. It's wings had a thick bony structure along the ridge that I don't think was normal for owls, their bones were supposed to be light. It looked as if the wings were growing bigger but it was hard to tell with the stunted painful movements it was making.

A long screech echoed through the clearing and some of the other owls quieted. One of the ordinary owls flew down, landing close to the monster in the middle of the circle. The lone owl screeched again, and I wondered if this had been the creatures mate, owls usually stick together for life after all. I wondered if she'd had a history with him, had children. Had this owl been normal before whatever transformation it was going through took over?

The bold owl, who I'd decided was likely his mate, flew the short distance to the creature and perched on his shoulder. I finally got a true sense of scale. This thing looked about ten times bigger than the others, it had grown to be taller than Minnie, likely even taller than me.

As the female owl struggled to keep balance on the creature's shoulder, it snapped the creature out of its spell, stopping it cold. The beast looked at the her for a second, like it was trying to recognize her and failing. Then, it lashed out with it's awful clawed hand, the talons looking so much more pronounced than when they landed on the bathroom window such a short time ago.

The owl who'd tried to help the creature fell to the ground and the other owls grew quiet. With that, the creature let out a sound that did not resemble the screams of the other owls. Strangely enough, it let out a long low hooting sound, not a sound that his kind ever really make. It sounded bad, and wrong. Like it was a person trying desperately to make the sound it thought an owl would make. I wondered then if this thing had ever actually been an owl at all. It let out the sound again, longer this time. With that, the other owls quieted and began taking flight. The first few that began flying ignited the others and soon the flock was fleeing.

The creature watched them for a second, then turned it's eyes to the only ones who couldn't fly away. It looked to us. Minnie had grown quiet and for the first time, she seemed worried

"Why did he hit the other owl?" She asked, her voice quivered with concern as the creature began taking tentative, painful steps towards us.

As it got closer, I got a better look at the mottled gray skin beneath the sparse feathers that still clung to its face. Its flesh looked smooth and grey as it shone in the moonlight. That snapped me out of my trance. I grabbed Minnie's arm and squeaked, "Run!"

She listened, thank god. We stumbled through the brush, the thorns catching us both, but we didn't care. Behind us we heard the low, deep hooting sound, right as we burst through the trees to the creek.

We were able to go faster then, splashing through the water and stumbling over the gravelly sand. I heard the hooting behind us once again but it didn't sound like it was getting closer.

As we approached the house we saw blue and red lights, and Minnie yelled out, "Mom!"

We sprinted into the embrace of Aunt Ruth.

I lied to the cops. I had to, even though I knew Minnie would be telling them about what really happened. I said I'd found her in the woods and we'd gotten spooked by an owl defending it's nest. If I told them what really happened they'd think I'd been doing drugs with a small child in tow.

After they left, I told Ruth everything. She seemed skeptical, but accepted our story. I think she half believed us, which is about all you can expect about something so strange.

The next morning, Minnie was still mad at me for lying to the police and I caught her trying to sneak off into the woods. She told me she was going to see if her owl and his wife were okay. I managed to talk her out of it only under the promise that I would go look myself.

I could have just hung out at the edge of the tree line for awhile and told her I'd checked, but once again the daylight and Aunt Ruth's skepticism had me watering down last nights events in my head. I was feeling curious, in a way that would probably get me killed some day. I wanted some answers about what had happened, if there were any to be found.

When I got to the clearing, the owls were gone from the trees. I walked up to the feather pile and found that it wasn't only feathers. There was the corpse of an owl among them. I couldn't be certain but I suspected it had been the mate of Minnie's owl, the one he'd hit who couldn't fly away.

There wasn't anyway to tell her apart from the other owls and even if she had had some defining feature, there wasn't much left of her. She'd been eaten.

I decided to bury her. I'm not sure why. I felt a sort of strange connection with her because I'd witnessed whatever had happened last night. There was a piece of slate nearby that served as a good shovel and the ground was soft from a recent rain so it didn't take long. By the time I'd finished, I looked up and saw two owls perched in the tree above me.

I wondered if owls remembered who had raised them. Did they mourn the dead? Maybe they'd been this owl's young. Or had they just shown up because of whatever strange force that had called them her last night? Maybe it was still calling to them.

I nodded to them as I left. One of them looked like its eyes were just a little too big, and that made me walk faster.

On the walk back I wondered about what had happened. Perhaps there was some kind of parasite that had taken over the owl? Or maybe some strange disease that made it turn monstrous. Rabies is the stuff of horror movies after all, but it only affects mammals, perhaps there's some kind of bird equivalent. But with how quickly it changed, the strange noises it made, that didn't seem to fit right.

I started to think about the stories that we as humans have that seem similar to what had happened. Stories such as werewolves, zombies, and vampires, ones that involve monstrous transformations or cannibalism in one form or another.

There weren't really stories about animals turning into monsters like that, at least as far as I knew. But animals couldn't really talk to each other the same way that we can. They can't pass down stories about monsters and supernatural events. They can't warn each other. The owls who had seen what had happened would remember, and perhaps it would foster a distrust of their own kind among them. But really, if what I'd witnessed had happened before, or would happen again, it wouldn't make the pages of owl history because such a thing didn't exist. Maybe other animals have monsters too, they just can't tell each other about them.

When I got back Minnie was painting again. This time the subject matter was less scary, it was the comet from last night. I wondered if, in her head she was already erasing what had happened, or convincing herself it was just a dream. But maybe she was still young enough to believe her own eyes, even if they told her things that did not seem possible.

I sat with her and told her that the owls were all gone and she seemed less worried than she had that morning. She said, "That's good. They probably all flew away then."

"So, if the owl comes back again, are you going to go with him?" I asked her.

"No," she said, working in some blue and purple into the night sky, making it prettier than it was in real life.

"Why not?" I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral so she wouldn't lie to me. I needed to know if she was going to put herself in any danger.

"I don't think that I should be friends with him anymore. When he was being all weird last night, it was kind of scary," Minnie replied.

"Did he come up to your window at all?" I asked her.

"No, but I close my blinds now. And Mom said I shouldn't make friends with animals because they can be dangerous. I think she might be right."

"I think she might be right too," I said.

I grabbed a few brushes and started painting as well. My subject was one of the big sycamores that I'd grown so fond off, I'd had enough of owls. I hoped that Minnie had too. But I worried that as the years passed she'd forget about her owl, and about the things that can lurk in the woods.

Sitting there on the floor I made a promise to myself. That when she was older I would tell her about the state that I'd found the dead owl in. I'd tell her that it had all been real, if she ever started to convince herself it had just been a childhood fantasy.

I know now that monsters can be real, and when she's older I'm going to make sure she remembers that too. Because not all animals can warn each other about the terrors that are out there, but we can.