Account 01: Going Hunting

Background information

• Name: Alex Martinez
• Pronouns: They/them
  
• Date: February 30, 2020
• Occupation: Accountant
• City of residence: Atkins, Michigan
• Date(s) of account: 2018
• Subject of account: Strange occurrences at a part-time job

Account

When this happened, I was an accountant. I worked part-time for a small, local company in a small, semi-isolated building. I came in mostly on Mondays when my boss, Samuel Sims, called and asked me to come in and fill out whatever paperwork had to be done. I usually came in at night, when it had already gotten dark and the majority of staff, Samuel included, had left. I had known Samuel for a long time by that point, so he wasn't opposed to giving me a set of keys so I could come in when I was able. Truth be told, though, being alone in the dark made me pretty uncomfortable. I generally parked on the grass rather than in the nearby lot to avoid walking any further to my car than necessary.

The exact details of the company where I worked aren't important. What is important is that Samuel was a hunter. He had a deer skull hanging up on the wall where I turned to the left to go into the office. Could have been a replica, though. I'm no hunter, and I can't exactly tell the difference.

 

One night, as I had gone to my accounting job and was about to enter the office, I saw that there was a second deer skull up on the wall, located directly to the right of the first. It was a little surprising to me, as I'd been working there part-time for several years by that point, and the deer skull had always been hanging up alone.

I started to get an uneasy feeling. It didn't feel like the skull was watching me, or like there was a cold spot indicating a ghostly presence, or anything stupid like that. I wasn't opposed to hunting, at least not within reason, and lowering the deer population a little was probably for the better. I didn't feel wrong around this second deer skull for any sort of moral reason, or any other reason I could find.

I felt wrong, and that was it.

I shook my head and soldiered on as I went into the office to work. I knew there was no point getting hung up on deer skulls that I thought were probably fake anyways. After all, although I knew next to nothing about hunting, I assumed it was at least frowned upon to hang up trophies from kills in random company buildings.

Despite my rationalizations, I kept thinking about that second deer skull. Something about it had made me deeply uneasy, but I couldn't place exactly what.

After that, I continued going to my part-time accounting job once a week, usually on Mondays, and tried to forget about the second deer skull. By the third week or so since it first showed up, I'd managed to do just that.

Then the week after, I got a call from Samuel. He said to come. He didn't say much more than that, which I found a little strange, since he usually talked for five minutes before he actually asked me to come to work.

Samuel's voice sounded scared, although I couldn't figure out whether that was actually the case or whether I was just imagining it through the staticky crackle of the poor connection. For the same reason, I wasn't sure whether it was just my imagination or whether his unusually brief call had mentioned something about hunting.

Despite the strange circumstances of the call, I headed to my accounting job, which took about five minutes. As always, I parked on the grass. When I walked into the building, I saw that there was now a third deer skull hanging up on the wall.

I was no longer sure that I'd been right the first time I saw the second deer skull. I did feel like I was being watched.

I knew it was stupid to be scared of fake deer skulls. I knew it was stupid to think anything was wrong just because a call from my boss was a little weird. I knew all I had to do was go into the office and act like nothing was going on.

When I went into the office, I found Samuel slumped over in his chair, covered in bloody scratch marks that looked horrifically infected. He was dressed in a camouflage cap and jacket, and there was a rifle sitting on his desk.

I screamed and fled the office, trying not to look at the wall with the deer skulls mounted on it as I ran out of the building, trying not to pay attention to the snapping of branches beneath my feet as I went to my car.

I heard a raspy laugh from behind. In spite of my fear, in spite of my better judgment, I turned to look.

There was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a torn brown jacket standing in the doorway of the building's meeting room, which I could see through the clear door to the building itself. Although he was, as I've said, huge, he looked emaciated. His scratch-covered skin looked diseased and gangrenous, almost rotting. It was hard to tell in the dark of night, but it seemed like he had this expression of feral excitement on his face, the way a predator feels when it knows that it's found its prey

"I have a question for you, Alex Martinez," the man growled. "Have you ever gone hunting?"

Immediately, I got into my car. I drove until I was home, drove faster than I knew I should have, but even after I arrived at the apartment building and went into the room I shared with my boyfriend and shut and locked the door tight behind me, I could not shake the feeling that I was being followed.

No, not followed. Hunted.

Analysis
This account was written by my enbyfriend Alex. Actually, this was the first account of the supernatural that I've ever believed at all. I say this for a few reasons, or rather, the absence of reasons not to believe Alex.

I knew Alex wouldn't intentionally deceive me about something like this, and as far as either of us can tell, they don't suffer from any mental illnesses or have family history of it, aside from anxiety. Alex doesn't use any drugs except for their prescribed anxiety medication, so it's not as though this account was the result of drug use either.

As far as I'm concerned, we've ruled out just about any plausible explanation resting on Alex's account being false, deliberately or otherwise. Still, this account could still be written off as a horrifying and apparently motiveless but ultimately mundane murder. However, that isn't what the police found when Alex called 9-1-1 after returning to our apartment.

You see, when the police went to Alex's former workplace, Sims' body was nowhere to be found, nor was there any hair, DNA, blood, or anything else. All that they found aside from Sims' hunting rifle sitting on his desk and a few chunks of green fabric on the office floor was a trail of rot across the floorboards from the chair where Alex had found Sims' body to the clear door to the outside, as well as four deer skulls hanging on the wall.