The Monster of Chokecherry Hollow

(1982)

From Preliminary Notes by Stanford F. Pines

I wish my laboratory assistant were not quite so nervous, nor quite so prone to superstitious beliefs. To write fairly, though. F. is the most accomplished electrical and mechanical engineer I have ever known. More, his overcoming of severe familial and social disadvantages in becoming so is amazing and worthy of respect and admiration.

These are only preliminary notes, and when time comes to record them more formally in my Journals, I shall edit them properly. However, since these jottings are personal, intended only for my eyes, and not official, I may dilate a bit on what I mean.

Fiddleford Hadron McGucket was born to a poor hog-farming family in Tennessee. Though possessed of a brilliant mind—he literally cannot recall a period in his life when he was unable to read and write, having picked up the skills before he had turned four years old, and he was always a savant where mathematics is concerned—his prospects seemed severely limited. The rural high school he attended was of inferior quality (because poorly funded and small), and only through the kind intervention of a favorite teacher did Fiddleford avoid the common fate of his siblings and cousins—all of them dropped out of school before their junior year to become farmers, moonshiners, or hunters and trappers.

From what he has told me, Fiddleford was initially headed toward becoming an automobile mechanic. To be sure, the country needs such skilled laborers, and far be it from me to look down on a worthwhile vocation. However, Fiddleford had the potential to use his mind and skills in vastly more productive pursuits. Because of the kind intervention of a favorite teacher, joined with the interest of the local physician, Fiddleford earned a college scholarship just valuable enough to allow him to attend Backupsmore University, where I met him.

Let me be honest with myself. My initial impression of Fiddleford was that he would never amount to much. He spoke in a pronounced hillbilly dialect; he amused himself in the dormitory by playing his banjo; in moments of excitement, he would lapse into a weird ritual of slapping his legs, chest, and shoulders that he called "hamboning" and that he insists to this day conveys intricate meanings to those familiar with it.

However, despite my unfavorable first impression of him and his shyness around me (for a long time he called me "City Slicker")—we somehow became friends. I think that my initial liking for him sprang from a moment when we were working as lab partners in a chemistry class. As we prepared a titration experiment, Fiddleford said suddenly, "Dang my cats, you done got yoreself a prime case o' polydactyly! Don't that make some activities a mite difficult?"

I explained that, yes, having twelve fingers made touch-typing extremely hard for me to master, though finally, by dint of holding up my extra pinkies, I managed it—though even today I find I often resort to a four-finger method that is just as fast. Fiddleford "recollected" that his pinkies did not emerge until he was sixteen, and for the first months he found having ten fingers "almighty awkward."

We performed the titration experiment, and when the unknown solution reached neutrality, I took out my slide rule—calculators then existed, but they were expensive and I did not at that time possess one—but before I could even begin, Fiddleford announced, "Concentration of barium hydroxide is .125 moles per cubic decimeter."

"Let me just check that," I said.

Lo and behold, the instant calculation that Fiddleford performed in his head was absolutely correct. I recall that our lab instructor was most impressed—we finished the experiment hours before any of the eleven other lab teams had even completed the titration—and told us, "You two outsiders make quite a team."

And yet with all that, Fiddleford's own predilection lay more in applied science—micromechanics, advanced electronics, and the like—than in theoretical physics or chemistry. One evening Fiddleford asked if I could come to his dorm room to help him with an intricate piece of engineering. Though my own gifts in that area were modest, I agreed to assist, and over the course of some weeks we created a device that—well, to be honest, did I knew not what. When Fiddleford said it was finished, I asked, "What is it?"

In answer, he switched it on. A cathode-ray imaging tube lit up green. A modified keyboard that Fiddleford had taken from an electric typewriter was an input device. I watched as Fiddleford entered a complex calculation. He pressed a key, and instantaneously the machine solved the mathematics. "It's a computermajig," he said.

In those days, computers were quite bulky. Backupsmore possessed three mainframe machines, which operated by tape drives or punch cards. Fiddleford's creation sat on a desktop. At first, its performance was limited to calculations, but eventually Fiddleford wrote routines that allowed it to do everything from creating printed documents, like a glorified typewriter, to analyzing problems in mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences with lightning speed. It was, in fact, a mainframe computer boiled down to an astonishingly small device. "One o' these days," Fiddleford told me proudly, "ever' home in America will possess a Fiddleford household computer!"

(More recently, when F. came up from California to be my assistant, he brought a gift: a special computermajig he'd built just for me, with a modified keyboard to accommodate my twelve fingers. I can even record my Journals on it, though I find typing slower than just jotting down notes with a pen and legal pad. Anyway, it is emblematic of his thoughtfulness, and I was quite touched.)

This is all very rambling—hence my predilection for mining these rough notes, condensing them in more straightforward form for my formal Journals.

Reading over what I wrote yesterday, I realize that I spent a tedious time with what writers of fiction call, I believe, "exposition." I shall endeavor to come more to the point.

I have already written in these notes of how a few days ago F. and I traveled, by a devious route, to the enormous, domed mountain beneath which lies buried an alien craft. I call the location "Crash Site Omega." Our quest was to recover a piece of advanced technology that, as nearly as I can determine, was used by the inventors to allow their spacecraft to exceed the speed of light. Because of its dimension-warping properties, however, I plan to incorporate it into my grand invention, the Portal.

Anyway, we took the hidden pathway to the place, via a subterranean tunnel (whether completely manmade or partly of natural formation I have not yet determined). That route proved far more difficult than simply traveling overland, but I could not shake the feeling that someone might be trying to follow me. I need not remind myself that I tend to be paranoid when it comes to the possibility of others stealing my discoveries. Enough of that.

My goal here is to explain what happened to us as we were returning to my home via an aboveground route, through mainly forested areas. Except for drumming woodpeckers and birdsong, we heard no sound of animal or human activity anywhere nearby—just the occasional very distant and faint noise of lumberjacks wielding their axes, but that came from far off in the woods.

We were coming to a modest clearing in the woods within only three miles or less of my home. I knew it because Boyish Dan Corduroy (now grown to man's estate and a truly impressive physical specimen) warned me about it during the time when he was working on the construction of my house.

The place has something of the aspect of a crater some half-mile across, a circular depression in the earth perhaps fifty feet deep at its center. I speculate that it may be either an ancient volcanic caldera (the crash of the spacecraft caused some vulcanism, I'm sure) or an impact crater, perhaps resulting from the spacecraft's bursting through the surrounding cliffs and sending building-sized chunks of stone whirling high and dropping hard. However, I cannot easily reconcile these possibilities with the age of the crash site, which I am certain is thirty million years, with a 5% margin either way.

It may not be of impact or vulcanian origin, of course. It may be merely a sinkhole formed when underground water wore away a layer of sedimentary stone, allowing the surface to settle.

At any rate, Dan called the place "Chokecherry Hollow." The surrounding forest is almost all coniferous, but in this broad depression only scrub undergrowth and chokecherry trees—few actually tree-sized, indeed almost all of them hardly more than shrubs—flourish. The chokecherries bear fruit, much too sour and acidic to eat when ripe (though I'm told they can be made into delicious jams and preserves). Somewhere in the hollow, Dan says, is a cavern, not overly large, difficult to discover because its opening lies concealed behind a thick growth of brush and vines.

In that cavern, Dan swears, lurks a monster. The creature haunts the deep woods, Dan told me all those years ago, but always returns to its den in the crater. He called it the Monster of Chokecherry Hollow, and in attempting to describe it to me, he said, "It's hairy, but also kinda scaly, like a dang giant lizard and mean-lookin'. It's got stuff growin' on its skin, toady-stools and such. Horrible eyes. It's kinda a crossbreed, I guess. Half a goblin and half a—one of them things that in World War II, pilots said pestered them on airplanes."

"A Gremlin?" I asked.

"Yeah. It's sort of a Gobgrem," he said.

I didn't pay much attention, I'm afraid, because Dan has spoken of other most improbable supposed monstrous creatures, most notably the Hide-Behind, whose only activity is to spy on humans without ever being seen.

However, I heard the tale of the Chokecherry Monster at the beginning of my sojourn in Gravity Falls. Now, after so many years spent investigating anomalies, I am not so certain that I can discount the existence even of the Hide-Behind.

At any rate, as of yesterday I can no longer deny the existence of the Gobgrem—that name seems unwieldy. I shall call it the Gremloblin instead. I cannot deny its existence because Fiddleford and I discovered it, with dire results.

It happened like this: About mid-morning, as I assured F. that we were on the final leg of our return journey, we came to the lip of the depression. Gazing across it, seeing the stunted trees and shrubs all bearing red fruit, I paused as something stirred in my memory, and I said, "This must be Chokecherry Hollow."

"Huh," F. said. "Back home, folks called 'em chuckleyberries."

"A species of wild cherry," I told him. "Too sour and bitter to—"

I broke off because F. was holding up a hand for silence. "Listen, Ford," he said in a whisper.

I held my breath, straining to hear whatever sound had disturbed him. I shook my head to indicate that I heard nothing.

"It's sort of a rhythmic susurrus," F. said. Though he usually speaks in folksy tones, he is capable of a more elevated vocabulary, especially when he's concentrating. He held up a finger and raised and lowered it as if conducting an orchestra of sloths playing a waltz.

Then, following his rhythm, at last I heard it. "Breathing," I whispered. "It's coming from over there."

I started forward, but F. caught my sleeve. "We might better just go on our way," he said softly.

"Someone could be lying over there hurt," I told him—though in fact I had begun to suspect that Dan's story of a monstrous goblin-like creature might have a kernel of truth.

I crept forward about thirty yards and spotted something stretched out on a sort of nest of dried grasses, sleeping in the sun. It did not correspond in every detail to Dan's old story, but I could easily guess that this creature was the one he referenced. It lay on its side, curled up, but if it stood erect, it would be between eight and nine feet tall. Its skin was a dark shade of gray-green on the dorsal surface, with a lighter green belly. Its feet were ape-like, more like human hands than animal paws, and its forepaws—well, really, its talons—had sharp claws. It had a massive head with a squarish jaw and huge pointed ears.

With F. some yards behind me, I settled quietly down and began to sketch the creature. From these thumbnail jottings I will prepare a more finished rendering for my Journal. Note to self: be sure to pack a small SLR camera for these expeditions!

Unfortunately, it wakened and stirred, standing up and staring around with strangely red eyes. "Run!" I heard F. yell. With a roar, the creature bounded toward him, ignoring or perhaps not noticing me. I sprang up and ran after it.

It seized poor Fiddleford by his upper arms. He continued running even as it lifted him clear off the ground. Had it not been a terrifying moment, it would have looked amusing, like the Saturday cartoons [THREE WORDS BLACKED OUT] someone I knew in childhood loved.

I saw the creature turn F. around in its talons and feared it was going to snap his head off—but instead it merely stared at him. F. began to scream, then to gibber. At a range of only ten feet, I cast about for something to throw that would distract the monster, and the only thing to hand was my canteen, filled earlier that day from a spring. I hurled it with all my might.

The creature must have caught my movement in the corner of its eye, because it whirled toward me and, keeping its grip on F. with its right talon, tried to swat away the missile with its left. It smashed the canteen, which ruptured and splashed it with water—

And instantly, it metamorphosed, growing larger and suddenly sprouting a pair of batlike wings. Memo to self: Note that fighting a Gremloblin with water is not effective.

With both its hands grasping F., the creature sprinted up to the lip of the depression and sped through the trees. I ran as fast as I could, just behind it.

I had not realized it, but that side of the land suddenly gave way to a steep escarpment, a cliff dropping down for many feet. The leathery wings beat, and realizing it was about to fly off with my assistant, I leaped onto its back.

Unfortunately, it flew away, notwithstanding our combined weight. I clung on desperately. Then, after a short flight, it banked over a cleared spot—a pasture—and crash-landed, partly demolishing a barn. With great good luck, F. and I fell free and a hayrick broke our fall. As we dug ourselves out, the Gremloblin flapped its great wings and flew away, back in the direction of its lair.

F. was in a state of shock. Somehow I got him to his feet and eventually we emerged on a road that led in the direction we needed to go. After some hours, we arrived home again. I had F. stretch out on the sofa and gave him a soothing cup of tea, with a soothing shot of corn liquor added (I do not know where he gets the stuff).

A grueling twenty-four hours followed. F. was severely traumatized, and only after repeated reassurances that we were now safe did he begin to speak coherently again. I gave him a mild sedative, and we talked far into the night, but for the longest time, F. wouldn't speak of his encounter directly.

He expressed a wish to return to Palo Alto, where his wife and infant son lived. I suggested that instead he bring them to Gravity Falls. F. likes it here, and I know where a small house is for sale that would suit the little family, and it is not terribly far from my home and laboratory.

Little by little I broke down his resistance and calmed his anxieties. And then he told me the most amazing story. I set it down here in his own words, as nearly as I can recall:

Ford, that thing—its eyes have a hypnotic power or something. They glow, Ford, and looking into them, you can't look away, you can't! And then you see flashes of terrible things, horrible, awful, things!

[In response to my repeated questions, F's agitation increased. His dialect began to appear, and his voice quavered pitifully]

I saw—look at me here, I'm a-shakin' like a jellyfish at a Holy Roller sermon—I seen myself, Ford! I seen me, d'ye understand? Only It wasn't me, not like I am! I done seen myself as a crazy old coot, butt of the town's jokes, everybody a-laughin' at me 'cause on account of I'd done lost my last marble! I—I'm sorry, I'm so upset—I was crazy, d'ye git me? My brains was all scramblified! I mean, I couldn't rightly remember anything! I barely even knew who I was or where I was! I don't want to be a crazy old man, Ford, I don't want to live that-away! That-there thing was a shore-nuff demon straight from Hell!

[He began to babble unintelligibly and to weep. He clung to my arm as if he were a toddler scared of some bugaboo closet monster. Despite my scientific interest, I began to feel pity for my old friend. Pity and regret for what I had led him into.]

F. could not recover his emotional balance. With difficulty, I persuaded him to let me give him a stronger medicine, a sleeping pill, and at last he fell into exhausted sleep and remained in that state for many hours. This morning he seems better, and I think he will accede to my suggestion that he bring his wife and son up to Oregon to live with him. I'm certain I can rent, or possibly even buy, that little house outright. It has been empty for three or four years. Possibly the Gnomes, who live not far from there, led to the previous owner's moving out. I understand that Dan Corduroy, who built the place, now owns it, and though in need of repair, it looks sturdy enough from the outside. Dan would more than likely be happy to sell it to me at a reasonable price.

[Later]

F. is calmer today and now is sitting on the porch, playing his banjo, an activity that always soothes him. He doesn't realize that while he slept—he was in bed until nearly eleven—I returned to Chokecherry Hollow alone and reclaimed my backpack and the alien device that will at last make it possible to activate the Portal we are building.

On my trip there and back I saw no sign of the Gremloblin. Doubtless it retreated to its lair, where presumably it dried, it shrank, and the wings became vestigial again. Possibly we frightened it nearly as much as it frightened F.

Anyway, I can hear Fiddleford playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" out on the porch. The alien device is stored safely in my laboratory. The pathway is open to completing the Portal, and then humanity's greatest discoveries await!

Poor Fiddleford. Like his banjo, he is just tightly strung. However, I have no doubt that our completing our great project will return him to serenity and happiness.

Indeed, as I ponder that, I think I shall allow Fiddleford the first opportunity to gaze through the Portal at the splendid worlds that must lie beyond this dimension. Imagine how pleased and proud he would be to become the first human being to glimpse the Multiverse in all its glory!

Yes, I shall certainly ask him to take the first look inside the Portal, as a matter of friendship and respect for all his help.

That would be the kind thing to do.

The End