Legend of the Capra Monster
Words by Chris Nelson | Illustrations by Dylan Fowler
Directed by Ben Giese & Chris Nelson | Cinematography by David Chang & Daniel Fickle | Edit by Daniel Fickle
The boy searched his father’s eyes for a familiar anything but found nothing, and he strained to remember the eyes he had seen and known that same morning, but he remembered nothing. The man sat in an unblinking daze as his eyes followed the cold bottle of beer spinning on the lazy Susan, set just off-center and sweating in the summer midnight, and as the dad reached for the bottle, the boy studied the scars on his father’s hands. The boy remembered the stories that his dad had told about how he had gotten them, and he realized those were probably lies, too.
The next morning the police would pull the bodies of his three friends from the mangled wreckage of Pete Norman’s Mustang, and they’d say it was a drunk-driving crash, and no one would question it as the truth. The town would weep at candlelit vigils, and the local newspapers would publish tragic stories about the teenage lives lost too young, but the boy would know the truth: His best friend and the girl he loved were torn to pieces by a campfire ghost story, and he lied because he was told to do so.
The boy caught his reflection in the kitchen window but didn’t recognize himself, with two black eyes, a broken nose, and a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his neck. The sight turned his stomach to knots, and when he closed his eyes, he saw her and the flayed skin on her bloody face, and he saw the eerily human eyes of the godless creature that had killed her.
The boy started to cry, and his father slammed his beer bottle against the table and stood up, and then he stumbled into the living room, clicked on the television, and spun the top from a crystal whiskey bottle. The boy trembled as he asked, “What are you going to tell Mom?” and his father sighed, turned off the television, and walked back into the kitchen. The man took a long, slow pull of whiskey before he crouched down next to his boy, who cowered as his father tried to caress his face. The man spoke in softly slurred whispers:
“Don’t worry about your mom, because she knows nothing about it, and she never will. All these years I lied to her because it was my duty to my country, and you’ll lie to her because it’s your duty, too. I was a kid like you when this all started, and I was naïve and didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and I regret so much, and I committed evils that cannot be forgiven, but I never had a choice, and now neither do you. What you saw can’t be unseen, and you shouldn’t be alive, but you are because I love you, and I would give anything for you.
“If you don’t trust me, I understand that, but listen to what I’m saying and know it’s the truth. My son, I so badly wish none of this had happened, and that you had gone with your mother and sister and me to the lake, and we had watched the fireworks like we always do. Your mother and your sister will be home soon, and we’ll tell them the stories we have to, and they’ll tell you how much they love you. I promise that they’d thank you for doing what you’re doing, but you can never say anything to them or anyone else, Billy. Everything will be OK, I swear it to you, but you can never say anything about what happened tonight. Do you understand me, son?”
It was July 4, 1992, but the morning hadn’t started like every other Fourth of July morning before it, because 18-year-old Billy Wick stayed home from the annual family trip to Lake Pueblo so he could ride dirt bikes with his best friend Kyle Morgan, who was moving away from their small mountain town in Colorado to start summer school classes at Brown University. When Billy asked his dad for permission to stay back, the old man smiled and said, “Your mother will shit a brick, but if you promise that you won’t have a party at the house or go looking for trouble, we’re good.”
Billy’s friends always said how lucky he was to have a dad like his, and Billy knew it. Every morning Billy’s dad rode to the military base on a Panhead chopper that he built when he was about Billy’s age and had returned home from Vietnam, and every night when he came home he danced with Billy’s mom in the kitchen as she finished cooking dinner. His dad had dozens of tattoos, all faded beyond recognition, and he wore his long, brown hair in a tight bun on the back of his head and refused to cut it, no matter what his superior officers said.
Billy loved and admired his dad more than anyone, because his dad was the smartest, funniest, most caring human he had ever met, and he was nothing like the other military dads that Billy knew. He taught Billy how to ride motorcycles, do yoga, and shoot guns, and once a week he read to Billy and his little sister from any book they chose, from speeches by Malcolm X to step-by-step instructions from a Clymer manual.
Billy stood in the driveway and waved goodbye to his family as the Wicks’ Buick Roadmaster backed into the street, and Billy’s dad rolled down his window and hollered, “Be good!” When the wagon disappeared from view, Billy ran back inside, pulled on his riding boots, and stole four bottles of beer from the fridge, and he wrapped them in a T-shirt and shoved them into his backpack along with a water bottle full of fuel, some fireworks, and a small bag of crab weed that he’d found on the floor at Pete Norman’s graduation party.
Billy opened the garage door and threw a leg over his Yamaha DT-1, and then a brand-new, 5.0-liter Mustang convertible—white over cream with a white top, exactly like the one from Vanilla Ice’s music video—stopped at the foot of his driveway. Pete Norman revved the piss out of the V-8 and turned his bleached-blond head toward Billy and said, “Don’t you know motorcycles are for douchebags?” The car was a graduation gift from Pete Norman’s dad, who owned a local Ford dealership, and there were still flecks of paint on the windshield where his parents had written, “Congratulations, Class of ’92!”
Billy hated Pete, and the car didn’t much impress him, either, but it bothered Billy greatly that both Pete and the car seemed to impress Caitlin Newman, the perfect girl next door who had moved in six years ago and spent every day with Billy and Kyle until high school started; she snared the attention of the senior boys, and it changed everything. Billy always wanted Caitlin, but the only interest she ever showed in Billy was when she kissed him at Pete’s graduation party, but the morning after she woke up next to Pete, and the two had been inseparable since. “Why aren’t you on your way to the lake?” Caitlin asked as she opened the passenger door. Billy dropped his weight onto the Yamaha’s kickstarter and said, “I’m going to be late to see Kyle,” and tore off across the Newmans’ front lawn.
When Billy arrived at the trailhead, Kyle was sitting next to his bike, smoking a cigarette and writing in his pocket notebook, blissfully unaware of how long he’d been waiting. He was overjoyed to see his friend, and even more so when Billy proudly showed off the beers that he had stolen, and Kyle suggested that they toast to their ride, so they did and chugged two beers.
In a haze of blue smoke, the boys rode wild and free along the only trails that either of them had ever known. They raced at full throttle through the trees and skinny-dipped in the creek, and they battled with bottle rockets and roman candles, and in the shadow of the other they rode deeper into the prairielands.
They stopped when they reached the rusty, overgrown school buses parked at the far edge of the old Wheeler Dairy, because their fuel tanks were dry, and a few miles down the road there was a gas station. They stripped off their sweat-heavy gear and sat in the grass, and they cracked their warm beers and watched the colors of evening burn orange. Kyle looked across the pasture at the dairy and said, “How the hell can anyone believe a killer military monster lives in that shithole?” and Billy laughed.
He remembered when his dad first told him about the Capra Man, an eight-foot-tall, half-man, half-goat hybrid that lived beneath the dairy. Billy was nine years old when he woke up in bed and saw his old man standing over him, swaying like a buoy in the swell. His dad pulled back the sheets and said to get up and join him in the garage, and the boy sat on his father’s workbench while his father paced from wall to wall and told his son about Adam Ryans, who in 1923 bought the dairy and spent millions of dollars in renovations, but only three years later he went belly up after his prize bull was found dead with a knot of barbed wire in its stomach.
A few years later, Ryans had mysteriously died during a trip overseas, and rumors spread that he was a secret agent for the Office of Strategic Services, which became the Central Intelligence Agency, and that beneath the Wheeler Dairy he had built a secret laboratory where he was creating super soldiers by splicing animal genomes into human DNA. He said the experiment went awry, and Ryans destroyed three of the four super soldiers that he had created, but the last humanoid escaped.
After that night, Billy always knew when his father had had too much to drink, because he spouted off other sci-fi theories about the dairy, like that there were teleportation devices hidden under the milking machines, or there were state-of-the-art workshops building highly classified, covert spy planes, or that there were snipers in the hills who shot rock salt at trespassers. Billy indulged his father’s occasional binge drinking and his vibrant paranoia, but Billy knew the Capra Man wasn’t real, because the summer before high school he had snuck into the dairy’s two-story milk house with Caitlin and Kyle, and they saw no military men or mad scientists or monsters.
A twig snapped in the trees behind Billy and Kyle, and then the bushes rustled and something growled deep and low and fierce. The boys jumped to their feet, and Kyle held his bottle by the neck and shattered the bottom half against one of the buses just as Caitlin poked her head out from the brush and said, “Boo!” She laughed hysterically until Pete walked up behind her and kissed her on the neck and ran his fingers up her skirt. She stopped laughing and pushed his hand away, and asked if the boys had more beers, because Pete only had vodka.
The boys said they didn’t, but she told them to stay anyway, despite Pete’s protests, and when they finished their beers and the half-empty bottle of vodka, Caitlin pouted and whined for more booze. Billy reached into his backpack to grab his baggie of weed, but before he could Pete took out a blunt, lit it, and passed it to Caitlin. She closed her eyes as she filled her lungs with smoke, and Billy stared at her milky legs and her plump red lips, and as she exhaled and slowly opened her eyes, she looked at Billy, and then past him to the dairy, and she said, “Let’s go visit that monster.”
Kyle groaned and protested and suggested that they go back to Billy’s to drink more of his dad’s beer, but before he finished Caitlin had hopped up and pranced across the emerald field toward the milk house, the studs on her leather jacket reflecting golden in the last minutes of daylight. A few seconds later, Pete sprinted across the grass like a bull in heat, and he grabbed Caitlin just as she reached the door, and she squealed in delight as the two of them disappeared inside. Billy stood up and took a step, but Kyle grabbed his hand and said, “I’m not sure who Caitlin is when she’s with Pete, but the fact is she’s with Pete, so let it go, and let’s go home.”
Billy wanted to listen to his friend, but he was terrified what Caitlin might think of him if he didn’t follow, so he shook off Kyle and hugged the tree line toward the dairy, and Kyle sighed and followed. As Billy pulled open the big metal door, Kyle joked, “If this really is a secret military base, they shouldn’t leave the back door unlocked.”
The failing light cast long, dark shadows across the white tile floors and the water-stained walls of the two-story milk house. It was a big building, five rooms deep with a huge tile staircase that connected the main room to the upstairs. It was unkempt and decaying, with crushed beer cans scattered about the rooms and poorly spray-painted pentagrams and sulfur crosses scrawled across the windows and plaster. In a few of the upstairs rooms the floors had rotted away completely, and in the far corner of the back room there was a gaping hole in the floor, where other kids swore they had seen the monster, but there was nothing.
Caitlin and Pete were laughing in an upstairs room. Kyle sat himself on a ledge, lit a cigarette, and took out his notebook, and Billy started up the staircase, and when he reached the landing, he pretended not to hear her moans. He tiptoed through the hallway and peeked inside rooms until he saw Pete’s pale white ass, and Caitlin bent over with her hands pressed against the wall.
Billy felt sick. He wanted to turn and leave, but his feet wouldn’t move. He wanted to scream, to stop them, but instead he leaned against the wall and said nothing, adrift in his imagination as he listened to her hurried breaths and the slaps of skin. A minute later Pete let out a long, slow groan, and Caitlin laughed, “Oh, it’s OK, premature Petey.”
Pete turned bright red and punched the wall behind Caitlin, and he fumbled to pull up his pants as he raged out of the room. Billy quickly ducked into the adjacent room as Pete stormed by and stamped down the staircase, muttering obscenities and kicking empty beer cans as he disappeared into the back of the milk house. Kyle yelled up, “Can we please leave now?”
Billy peeked out of his room as Caitlin walked out of hers, and as she adjusted her skirt, she smirked and said, “Maybe you should’ve joined us and finished what you started when you kissed me at Pete’s party.” Billy stammered to apologize, ashamed of himself and embarrassed, but when he opened his mouth, he said, “You’re the one who came on to me, Caitlin.”
She giggled and cocked her head to the side, and said, “Is that how it happened?” She slowly started toward Billy, and she put one hand against the boy’s chest and ran her other hand through his hair, and she said, “I saw into your heart, Billy, and for so long I hoped you’d grow a pair and tell me what you felt, or make a move, but you didn’t, so I did, and guess what? You were still too scared to do anything about it, because you’re a scared little boy, lusting after me like all of the other scared little boys, and none of you know how you feel, and none of you actually care about me.”
Billy felt broken. He wanted to show Caitlin that he really cared for her and prove to her that he wasn’t a scared little boy, so he gripped her by the shoulders and kissed her on the lips, and Caitlin kissed him back and pulled him in tighter. Billy turned savage for her love and kissed wildly, and he tasted the salt of her sweat and felt her breasts pressed against his fast-beating heart, and he didn’t hear the footsteps rushing up the staircase.
Pete cinched Billy around the throat and pulled him off Caitlin, and then he punched Billy between the eyes, and when Billy dropped to the floor, Pete kicked him in the ribs, over and over again. Caitlin screamed for Pete to stop, and when she dug her long nails into his thick neck, he swung around and backhanded her, and she collapsed on the floor. Pete raised a foot to stomp down on Billy’s throat, but before he could, Kyle ran down the hallway and shoved Pete, who stumbled backwards and tripped over a door jam and fell into a room where the floor had rotted away. Pete dropped almost 20 feet and hit the white tile floor with a sharp, wet smack, and his blood quickly spread through the grout.
An uncomfortable dark settled inside the milk house as Kyle sprinted toward the staircase and yelled, “Get the fuck up, Billy, we need to help him!” Billy sat up slowly, and when he looked over at Caitlin, she was sobbing uncontrollably with her legs tucked against her chest, and her head hid between her knees. Billy crawled over to her and put his hand on hers, and when she looked at him, he saw the huge red handprint painted across her perfect, blotchy face.
Then Kyle screamed, and when Caitlin and Billy looked over the edge of the rotted floor they saw him standing at the foot of the staircase, and they saw a long, bloody drag mark that trailed across the tile to a corner of the room, and there sat a giant, spindly creature with coarse black hair, and in its yellow claws it cradled Pete’s lifeless body. In that moment Billy realized that the stories his dad told were true, and the Capra Monster was real.
It sat hunched forward with its shoulders slouched low and held Pete like a doll. It had long bone horns that curled and twisted up like ivy, and a head the size of a horse’s, with a long, thin, wrinkled snout covered in scars. Its hooved legs were as long and as bony as its arms, and it had the barrel chest of an ape and the eyes of a tortured man.
“We need help!” Kyle yelled as he sprinted toward the front door. The Capra Man let out a horrible howl and stood tall and terrifying, and it reached out and grabbed Kyle. The creature whipped the boy against the metal door, and then slammed his limp body against the floor, and then the monster fell quiet and stood above the body, frozen until Caitlin screamed. When the monster saw Billy and Caitlin, it thrashed and wailed, and then it picked up the boys’ bodies, put one under each arm, and ran toward the back of the milk house and disappeared into the hole in the floor.
Caitlin covered her mouth with her hands, and tears ran over her white knuckles, and Billy was drowning in fear, too, but he knew he needed to get help if he wanted to save his best friend.
Billy tugged on Caitlin’s arm and tried to stand her up, but she yelped and pulled away from him. Billy bent over and looked her dead in the eye and said, “I can get us out of this,” and he laced his fingers with her, and he pulled her to her feet.
They tiptoed through the hallway and stopped after each step down the staircase, listening for the Capra Man, but they heard nothing. They moved deliberately and quickly, and as they set foot on the first floor Billy felt a twinge of hope, but then Caitlin ran for the door. As she grabbed the handle and pulled it open, a deafening wail boomed through the walls, and the monster came bursting out from the black, and pounced through the rooms of the milk house and grabbed the girl. For a moment it held her softly and studied her sweetly, but then it shrieked and dropped Caitlin to the ground and began clawing at her body like a dog digging a hole in dirt.
Her fingernails scraped against the tiles as she tried to escape, and she screamed for Billy to help, but the boy didn’t move, because the sight of her terrified him: the gashes across her chest, the skin hanging from her arms, the eye ripped from its socket. She screamed at him again, and he cried out, “I’m sorry,” and he ran through the front door.
He ran across the overgrown field, and he ran past the buses and jumped on his motorcycle, and as he did, he felt a sharp pain in his neck. He fell into the grass, and he heard heavy footsteps running toward him, and voices, and then everything went dark.
When the boy opened his eyes he thought he glimpsed her, alive and unmarred, but then the small concrete room he was in started spinning, and he retched and nearly fell off the side of his cot, but his father was there to catch him. The old man took deep, fast breaths and shook his son to attention, and he told the boy they only had a few minutes to themselves, and that his son needed to listen well if he wanted to leave that place alive.
He told Billy that he had been shot with a tranquilizer dart, and the creature he saw was the Capra Man, and the Wheeler Dairy was a top-secret underground military base, and the Capra Man was an experimental super soldier who had escaped after World War II but was recaptured in the late ’80s, and the military had held him in a cell beneath the milk house until tonight, when it broke free and was subsequently shot dead by soldiers.
The father didn’t look at Billy as he told the boy that Caitlin, Pete, and Kyle were gone, and that the people he worked for had intentions of killing Billy because of what he knew. He told Billy that he had worked out a deal for the boy’s life, but it meant Billy had to keep tonight a secret and lie about how his friends had died, and he begged his son to do what they asked.
Billy felt nauseated again, and he squeezed his dad’s hand and said, “I don’t know who you are.” His father looked at him with tear-filled eyes, and then the door to the room opened. A pot-bellied man in dark sunglasses, khaki shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt walked into the room, and when he did, Billy’s father stood up and saluted. “Sir,” he said, and then he dropped his hand and whimpered, “Please, Steve, it’s my boy...”
The man hushed the boy’s father and told him he needed a few minutes alone with Billy. The boy pleaded for his father to stay, but the old man assured him everything would be OK if he listened and answered any questions asked as honestly as he could. The father kissed his son on the forehead and walked out of the room, and a guard shut the door.
The man used his tongue to move a heavily chewed cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then he grabbed a small metal chair from the corner of the room and slowly dragged it across the concrete floor. He grunted as he sat down, and he unbuttoned his shorts and pushed out his gut, and he said, “Son, you are one lucky boy.”
The man spoke of “national pride” and “civic duty” and “America’s unflinching might and moral fortitude,” and he made clear the lengths to which he would go to protect the country he served. He said Billy and his entire family were dead if he didn’t do exactly as told, and the man told him to listen and listen well, but the boy couldn’t listen, because the boy wanted death, because he knew it was all his fault.
He should have gone to the lake, or gone home when Kyle wanted to, or ignored the shameful curiosity that lured him upstairs, or done anything to save any one of them from horrible deaths, but he didn’t. He ran away, and he was captured by the corrupt bastards who gave birth to an abomination—a living, breathing weapon, the devil stolen from hell —and those men had the power and influence to keep safe their sinister secrets, and one of those men was his father.
The man grabbed Billy by his hair and pulled his head backward and spit tobacco in the boy’s face as he yelled, “You listening, boy?!” and the boy nodded. He wanted to shout in the man’s pig face, because doing so would undoubtedly bring an end to his suffering, but he didn’t, because of his mom and his sister and what these men would do to them.
The man said, “I want you to understand exactly why you’re leaving this place alive tonight, and I want you to know exactly who your father is, because he is risking everything to save your life...he doesn’t know how to not be a hero, I guess. Without him I’m not sure we would’ve won the war in Vietnam.
“I met him as a snot-nosed grunt younger than you are now, hungry to kill for his country, and I turned him into a war god. I thought he was doping when he proposed the Wandering Soul operation, but I watched from the helicopter as whole villages fled from their homes, terrified by the voices speaking in their native tongue, telling the Viet Cong to desert the army to ‘save their souls’...the man is a poet. He knew how to get under that yellow skin, and the psychological combat tactics he developed are still being used by the military today.
“If your dad wasn’t your dad, you’d be dead, but he is your dad, and he’s a dear friend of mine whom I trust, and he is endangering his own life and the lives of your mother and your sister for you, and it will all be for naught if you can’t keep your fucking mouth shut about what happened here tonight. He says you can because you’re a good boy, and you love your country, but I’m not so sure. Is he right about that, Billy?”
The boy didn’t move, so the man slapped him and told him to speak up, and the boy said, “Yes, sir.” The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow, and he said, “Son, tonight you really are the luckiest boy in America.
“This country is the greatest in the world because of our solidarity in moments like this, when we choose to move forward together and keep one another safe. It’s really too bad about your friends, but I promise we’ll take care of them best we can, and it’s a tragedy that the asset broke free from its confinement, but, son, sometimes shit like this happens. Old Capra is usually a big softie, too, but maybe the fireworks spooked him, like they do dogs, and he got upset, broke loose, and raised hell, and now he has himself hid somewhere in the mountains.”
Billy asked, “I thought you shot and killed it?” and the man smiled and said, “You can’t shoot something that doesn’t exist, can you?” and then he knocked on the door and called for a guard. As the man walked out of the room, he turned back to the boy and said, “We’ll keep an eye on you, so make your country proud, son.”
