Verdancy

Read a Verdant Except Below

Then she noticed something strange. An odd angle to the legs. They pointed forward and down into the ground instead of sitting upright. The angle of the legs caused small mounds of soft moss to bunch up in front of each hoof. Emie struggled to reconcile the angle of the legs with how the animal must have been standing. Was it leaning…

Then the legs bent and pulled. An action that levered a face forward. A face Emie could finally see clearly.

It was not the face of a deer. 

Emie took an involuntary step backwards at the sight of the amphibious features. It had a wide mouth with thick, wet lips below a small nose. Its skin looked wet with a sheen of moisture that gleamed dully in the waning light. The mottled green skin appeared stretched hastily across the face. Like it hadn’t been put together quite right.

Then another shuffling pull of the creature's legs revealed two small black eyes. Crescents of white sclera appeared and disappeared as the eyes rolled back and forth dancing in the sockets, searching.

Emie’s panic crescendoed. Those eyes shattered her paralysis and she dropped upon the blanket of moss beneath her. Emie wriggled her body in an attempt to sink herself into the ground and hide from the monstrosity.

The monster continued to pull itself forward. A furred body, not unlike that of a small deer, though hideously bloated and irregular, emerged next from the shadow. Two large webbed feet wobbled into the light behind it. The feet pushed upwards with each pull of the hooves generating a shambling hop. A movement that was slow and awkward.

The head panned left towards the path Emie had taken from the cabin. The path she needed to take back home. Its beady black eyes calmed and then lethargically followed her footsteps from a few short hours ago. 

Emie noticed, as if from a distance, that her fingers were digging painfully into the wet earth beneath the moss, finding rough rocks under its surface.

At the same time she noticed that one of the eyes had stopped moving.

Maybe it had never been moving at all. One eye tracking the path back home while the other remained stationary. 

Staring right at her.

The massive wet mouth suddenly dropped open.

Emie didn’t register the scream that ripped itself from her throat.