The missing hunter's place was actually located someways outside of town. And Desmond had decided to use the parking structure available in town. This meant he had to walk the nature pathway accessible from the hunter's place to get to the main drag in town. Having done this Desmond questioned his own need for doing so. Perhaps he didn't want to be seen parking near the place...thought Desmond. He somehow felt more safe, more secure using the parking structure in town. It wasn't that much distance to cover on foot anyway.

It was late June, a time when the foliage along the nature trail when it was green and lush. He noted some overly large polypore fungus growing on some old-growth trees as he wandered. He wondered how long it had been there. He had used the trail recently to visit his hunter friend before the disappearance. He didn't recall seeing the fungus in that particular spot before. And, he noticed as he continued walking along that there seemed to be more to it. Some of it seemed to be pretty close to the ground, too.

Like the amateur naturalist, Desmond was particularly keen on observing the wildlife as he would walk along. He wasn't seeing much of anything to note. There didn't really seem to be any wildlife at all. He thought his walk along the path was oddly silent. He also noted that despite the lusness of the trees and shrubs, the lower growth foliage was thin. Almost non-existent, like it had been destroyed or something.

Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw a young cottontail dart out of the shrub beside him. Which was unusual, he thought, they usually dart out before they make any encounter. Then he saw another. Then another. And then saw several more. He continued to see the rabbits darting out beside him along his way on the trail. It must be a banner year for them, Desmond thought. He thought it unusual, too, that some of them looked particularly mangy and ill-fed. He feared that some of them were carrying rabies or some disease. Desmond soon waved off this flagging fear as simple nonsense.

Even at the near end of the trail, as he headed into town, he still kept seeing the rabbits. By that time, he had lost count. Then they disappeared as he headed for the edge of town and off of the trail and merged into the eventual pedestrian traffic. By the time he got to the parking structure, he realized that he must have seen as many of the rabbits as he did people. What also struck him, was that he seen no other wildlife. Not even a bird, nor an insect. Vaguely troubled, Desmond located his car, got in and drove and paid the parking attendant and left the structure.

Even thought it was daylight, he saw two rabbits - mangy ones at that - running across the highway as he drove home. Unusual, he thought.

The disappearance

What happened to him? Thought Desmond, the missing hunter's friend. A missing persons report had been filed and unceremoniously investigated by the local police. They never turned up anything on the missing hunter. He had quite simply vanished, for lack of a better word.

When the police searched his place, they had not let any other persons in, per standard procedure. After the investigation, after his family had come to inspect his place, Desmond managed to gain access to the hunter's place.

Desmond had requested a long lunch break from his supervisor explaining the circumstances of his friend's disappearance. The supervisor, an understanding man, merely shrugged his big shoulders and told Desmond to take as long as he needed. The supervisor looked back down at his cluttered work desk and silently went about his business. Desmond said thanks and left immediately for his missing friend's place.

It was a short and uneventful trip. Desmond found the place and got entry with a key he had obtained from a family member of his missing friend. The apartment was dark and quiet when he got there. Shades were drawn and the lights were off. It was very quiet in the building and Desmond suspected that there was absolutely no one in the building. It felt a little eerie. Desmond fought off the feeling of the creeps and looked into his friend's kitchen.

He flicked on a light switch, the only one in the kitchen. The kitchen was neat and tidy, like his friend had been. There were no dishes in the sink. Everything had been put away. The table had a napkin holder on it and salt and pepper shakers. There was an insurance bill laying torn open on the table. Desmond looked inside the finger-torn envelope. The bill was still in there - it had been due yesterday. Nothing else in the envelope.

The stove and range were clean. There were some magnets holding old notes on the refrigerator and a shopping list. No calendars, nothing with dates on it that gave Desmond any idea as to what his friend had planned recently. He looked in the refrigerator - there were some plastic containers and some coldcuts, cheeses...His friend never ate any takeout food. He looked in the freezer compartment and noticed the ice cube trays were empty. There was some ground beef, frozen dinners and what appeared to be some kind of small game in freezer wrap... He examined the game, it didn't look like a bird. It looked like a small animal, like a squirrel or a rabbit...

The garbage container and dishwasher were both empty. The police might have gone through the garbage for evidence, Desmond thought.

Desmond inspected the single bathroom and bedroom. Everything was neat and clean. He looked in his friend's bedroom closet and checked his clothes hangers. There were a couple of empty hangers. He noticed that his friend's hunting jacket and cap were missing. He looked for his friend's napsack and found nothing. On the floor of the closet he noticed two lamps. He must have went on a day trip, Desmond thought.

He looked at his friend's stereo and television, they had a very slight layer of dust.

Desmond finally took a look in the living area. Everything looked very normal... There were copies of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life by the easy chair. Desmond sat in the easy chair and leafed through the magazines. He noticed pages were torn out of F&S and were missing. He looked up the missing pages in the table of contents. Field Dressing the Rabbit - or something like that was the title of the missing article.

He sat and thought about his missing friend and his whereabouts. He must have been hunting, thought Desmond. Where had he been hunting? He sat back in the easy chair and thought for what seemed like an hour or two. Desmond got up and walked out the main door and used the key to lock it being him

Desmond drove back to his job and waved at his supervisor when he got. His supervisor waved back and gave Desmond the "OK' sign. Somebody walked up to Desmond and asked he wanted to get coffee. Desmond told his coworker he had to finish something and asked the coworker if he would bring him some. The coworker agreed and left Desmond to his work.

For the rest of the afternoon, Desmond quietly worked and sipped his coffee and thought about some ideas about where to look next for his missing friend.

The Warren

It was getting dark, a time when the crepuscular creatures of the natural world rise up, start moving about and hold sway over their environment. A time when old men - dozing on their back porch - arouse and fold up their summer chairs and retreat into their homes. It was the most ancient of instincts basic in all sensible creatures. To either explore - or retreat - or move on when the sun's last rays turned the sky into a gray-blue background and everything was shrouded in shadows. The shadow itself, being mysterious and otherworldly, though still a natural thing bringing a supernatural feel to this world.

Most sensible men having retreated into the safety of their homes this coming night, the lone hunter was still on the prowl. Not having found any suitable quarry earlier in the day, for some reason, he chose to stay on the hunt until he found his prey. But prey never comes to the hunter, the hunter must find the prey. Sometimes the hunter stumbles on something else. This time it was something like prey, but not quite. Something like rabbits, but with no rabbits around.

Strangely, the hunter sensed that he had finally found their territory. At least, it felt like their territory. Territory that some prey animal - in this case, the rabbit - might be occupying.

The dusk was getting quite dark now. The last bit of daylight dissolving into the greyness of the evening. There were hardly any clouds, nor weather, to speak of. But this dusk seemed a little bit darker than normal, the lone hunter thought. He scanned the darkness a bit and perceived he had found a great open clearing that he did not recall in his previous hunts.

The clearing seemed to be new to him, but not all that recent. Grass, woodvines, and other weeds were covering the ground. But they seemed young, almost fresh. Like they had recently been mowed down and allowed to grow for a couple of weeks, or some period of time like that. He could perceive no tracks nor trails in the great, fresh clearing. There was what seemed like a familar sight of trees in the background. And, if he strained his ears, the very distant sounds of the outskirts of his town, some miles away.

The hunter realized it was now getting very dark and he still had no kills to bring home with him. His creel was empty. He realized that the getting home now would be difficult. He hadn't spotted any holes nor tripping hazards on the ground, but what if he came across something in the clearing. What if he tripped over some exposed roots in the woods ahead of him? Damn, he thought, what am I still doing out here? Did I pack my lamps? He took off his pack and looked through it in the now encumbering dark. He couldn't find his lamps. Had he packed them? Damn. Something like fear began to creep up on him. Damn again, feeling a little foolish he tucked his growing fear in his emotional backpack and found some fortitude and began heading, trophyless, back to the edge of the wood and in the distance, home.

It was cooling, too. He thought the air was a little too chilly for the season. Then he thought of that ancient curse, about the thrice-damned. He giggled and tried to laugh it off while heading home in the darkness. There was a gibbous moon in the sky, but like the gibbous moon, it reflected just barely enough light.

He continued his course in the growing darkness. He realized that what he had thought was a familiar stand of trees, now, simply wasn't. What the hell was it, it looked like a stand of trees, in the distance, now it wasn't he thought. It was big. It was looming. And feeling still a little foolish, monstrous. It wasn't a stand nor a grove, but a mound. He had never seen this out here before.

The thing appeared to be solidly made of grass and dirt. It was packed, almost hard, like it had been there for some time - but not in an age of years. He put his hand out - yes, it was solid. He looked around. It had a length and breadth of several yards. It was big. Why hadn't he seen this mound - or was it a hillock - before? He looked around for signs of humanity and digging equipment for clues. Nothing. It looked as though noone had been here before him. In the collapsing dusk, the mound-thing seemed strangely quiet. Like it was some sleeping animal, just about to stir. What a queer feeling, he thought. I need to shake this off and get moving.

Then, he thought he heard in the long, long distance a male deer make a single baying call in the night. It was a long ways off. I really must be quite alone he thought. He though again, and began to examine the mound more closely in the spreading darkness.

He thought he heard baying again. But, it wasn't it was...a deep rumbling sound. And then he heard ... scratching? What the hell was it?

He looked aroung the bottom edge of the mound, where it seemed to meet the flat, fresh plain. He found a hole. It was very wide, but not very high. In the dark, he could not tell how deep it was. It's just a hole, I guess, he thought.

Then, in the hole, he thought he saw a reflection of the gibbous moon, and then again, and then again. It must be some water, he thought. But where did the water come from? It hadn't rained nor stormed in this area - it was relatively dry.

Then, the glinting reflections seemed to inch forward. He kept looking and did not move an inch. Yet the reflections kept coming and moving forward, and forward, and forward... And suddenly, the large furry mass was upon him. And it smelled, it smelled awful, like some ancient dead, wet animal carcass. And it had claws, and teeth. By the hundreds, and the swirling mass of darkness and fur pulled him inside. And further, and further, until the hunter could be seen no more.

The Hutch and the Nightmare

One summer when I was of a very young age - an age when memories of our youth first start to penetrate our consciousness - my parents bought for me a Florida White. The Florida White is a breed of rabbit with all white fur and pink round eyes in a round head. My father even built a wood-framed hutch enclosed by chicken wire just for this rabbit. I had not even asked for a pet rabbit - or at least I don't remember asking. The hutch was an even greater surprise. Such things are unexpected at a very early age.

I remember handling the rabbit and it seemed bigger than a rabbit should. Perhaps the pet rabbit was too big for me. As rabbits will sometimes, it resisted my clumsy attempt to pick it up. I cannot remember what gender it even was. It struggled violently against my caresses and - it fell out of my arms onto the pavement below where the hutch had been erected. I remember the rabbit landing on its oh-so-round now flattened head.

The next morning I went out to the hutch to check on my rabbit. I remember seeing its round, unblinking eyes. I tried to stir the animal, but it wouldn't move. My rabbit was dead. I remember reacting to this first death with terrific passion. My parents found the whole thing quite funny. Unmoved by my loss, the rabbit was never replaced and the hutch torn down and forgotten - until now.

That night I had had a dream about the hutch. I was walking towards the little hutch, while it grew to match my physical-dream proportions - as things sometimes do in dreams. I looked around for my rabbit, but could not see him. I turned to look at the wall in front of me and saw a wild rabbit. The rabbit was dead and hanging from a peg by its hind legs. Its eyes were wide open and unblinking. I continued looking at the dead rabbit. Slowly, the rabbit began to twitch gently - even though it was quite dead. The twitching motions eventually became full-blown jerking movements. The dead rabbit's jerking became so violent that it shoots itself off of its death peg. As it landed on the floor of the hutch, it shook with a sickening ersatz vitality that would not stop. Other rabbits, all of them dead, began falling to the floor of the hutch and were all jerking back and forth and up and down with the same wrenching vitality.

I put my hand over my mouth, to choke back the vomit that was fighting its way up from deep below in me. The rabbits continued to fall to floor without cessation. Eventually, the bodies grew to such a pile that they began spilling out of the hutch's door. Backing away from the still moving, still growing pile of bodies it continued to swell and expand. Night fell, with a reddish afterglow in the sky, and the mountain of dead fur and flesh grew and grew and grew.


The mountain eventually grew to cover the ground around me and obscured almost all of my view. The rabbit corpses tumbled and tumbled until they formed a twisting, whirling furred maelstrom. The maelstrom continued swirling and growing as it swallowed whole trees, bushes, fields, animals, birds, houses - sweeping away everything in sight.

I backed up and back into my house and to my bedroom window and continued to watch - still choking - this tremendous, filthy engine of the macabre. And after it had consumed everything in sight, it started belching out its half-digested, grisly meal. At first, it came out as a white, mucosal fluid. Then followed by a rancid, brown catarrh. Then a black, thick pitchlike tar began to emit and cover everything. The tar became a spewing ichor. I awoke when it and the rabbits began spilling into my bedroom window.

I jumped out of my bed in a start and flew directly into my parent's bedroom. I fell upon my mother sobbing incoherently and uncontrollably. My mother awoke and tried to ask what the hell was going on, but seeing my state she tried to console and comfort me. I sobbed in her arms until the dawn. My father looked on dispassionately with a bemused look on his face. I later overheard him comment to my mother about all the fuss over a g******d animal.