The point of his work no longer mattered; he hardly even remembered what he had been researching when the accident happened. There had been goats and bleating and a great screaming, perhaps from his own mouth?
All that had mattered afterwards was how bright and noisy cars were, and that he destroy them. But that had been years ago; he liked to think he had re-evolved since then. Now he was occupied with higher goals. He was, or had been, a reasonable man. If he could not remember the nature of his work, he could not expect others to remember it. But he could expect others to remember him.
These kids thought he was a made up thing. They replaced his raw power with a cartoonish axe and laughed at the havoc he had wreaked. As if it was a joke—as if he was a joke. A story to be told around a campfire.
And these boys even had a campfire. Six teenagers out in his woods, drunk and smoking and telling “ghost” stories. Throwing their empty bottles to shatter against the trees. Laughing at him. They were planning to impersonate him for a prank, with one of them wearing a hideous rubber goat-head mask to scare some gullible friends.
There was obviously no resemblance between the boy in the mask and him. He was a prodigy of science. He was not a joke.
Braying, he leapt from where he had been watching them. Most of them escaped, crying and screaming. It was all right, because they knew. They knew what he had done in the labs, how important it had been.
The boy in the mask did not escape. He ran straight into a tree, unable to see it through the eye slits in the goat head. When he fell prone to the ground brown and green glass shards bit into him. “Help” tried to gurgle its way from his lips.
The doctor’s teeth were blunted after the experiment, but a goat’s jaws were strong. He lifted the sobbing boy’s head towards his mouth. The human skull was a weak thing. The pissant ignoramus would be digesting for a long while in the four-chambered stomach of the Goatman.
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Gabrielle Friesen is deeply invested in monsters and androids, and very frightened of large bodies of water. She has had work featured in Hello Horror Magazine, the Devilfish Review, and in 18thWall’s anthology “Those Who Live Long Forgotten.”
Gabrielle can be found at http://monsterrepository.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter @GaelleFriese.
Image by Sarah
