Monster hunting - Leo Lyubavitch

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child, drew them from the path, deeper into the emerald embrace of the woods. There, amongst the fallen leaves and whispering pines, they saw it. A fleeting glimpse of azure skin, no larger than a man’s hand, scrambling for cover.

      The creature, barely twelve centimeters tall, possessed an otherworldly fragility. Its skin, a smooth, unsettling blue, was mottled with darker patches around its face and neck. Crimson eyes, startlingly large in its tiny head, stared out from beneath a pair of elongated, almost vulpine ears. A delicate, rodent-like nose twitched nervously. Webbed membranes, thin and translucent, stretched between its slender digits. And that sound – a high-pitched squeak, like the brittle cackle of an ancient crone – continued to pierce the quiet of the woods.

      With a blanket, they gently captured it. For a day, perhaps longer – accounts vary, blurring the edges of memory with the fantastical – the creature remained their captive. It refused all sustenance, its ruby eyes fixed on some distant, unseen horizon. Despite its diminutive size, it seemed to possess an unnerving intelligence, a silent awareness that transcended its physical form. Then, as swiftly as it had entered their lives, it was gone.

      A Spanish parapsychologist, drawn by the whispers of the extraordinary, acquired the tiny corpse. Preserved in formaldehyde, a silent testament to the unknown, it became the subject of intense scrutiny. Photographs, grainy and ethereal, surfaced, capturing the world’s attention. John Altschuler, an American scientist, and Dr. Luis Linares, a Spanish physician, examined the remains. Their verdict: genuine, yet unclassifiable.

      Was it a grotesque twist of nature, a teratological anomaly riddled with pathological abnormalities? Or, more tantalizingly, was it a glimpse into a hidden world, a previously unknown species, a testament to the boundless diversity of life?

      The Girona Gnome remains an enigma, a whisper in the wind, a question mark etched into the landscape of the strange. Its existence, fleeting and mysterious, continues to haunt the fringes of scientific understanding, a reminder that the world still holds secrets waiting to be unveiled, secrets that challenge our perception of reality and ignite the flames of wonder.

      *****

      The Catalan forests held their silence, thick and impenetrable as pitch. The air, heavy with the scent of pine and damp earth, felt viscous, clinging. For days I’d wandered these woods, a lost soul driven by the obsessive need to find the Girona gnome. A single eyewitness account, a blurry photograph – that was all I had. But I believed. If it had been seen once, it existed. And if one existed, there could be others.

      The sun had long since set, leaving behind only the ghostly light of dusk. The forest had transformed, becoming ominous and threatening. Every rustle, every crack of a branch sounded like a warning. I pushed through the deepening shadows, catching on thorny bushes, when my gaze fell upon something… unusual.

      A small cave, hidden beneath an overhanging rock, seemed to pulse with a faint light. I approached cautiously, my heart pounding against my ribs as if trying to escape. Inside the cave, a fire danced on a crudely built stone hearth, casting bizarre shadows on the walls. And around the fire… there they were.

      Small, no taller than a child, they were creatures with long beards and pointed ears. Their skin was the color of earth, and their eyes gleamed in the half-light like tiny embers. They wore rough clothing made of hides and leaves. One held something gleaming – a golden goblet, encrusted with jewels. Noticing me, the gnomes froze, their eyes fixed on me with undisguised curiosity and… wariness. One let out a piercing whistle, and in an instant, they were gone, vanished into thin air. Only the smoldering fire and the golden goblet, lying on a stone, remained.

      With trembling hands, I picked up the goblet. It was heavy, cold, and… real. In that moment, I knew I had found something incredible, something that would change the world. But with that realization came fear. Fear of what this forest concealed, fear of what I had awakened. I was no longer the hunter. I had become the prey.

      I turned to return to my camp, but then I caught a strange scent, sweet and intoxicating, like fermented fruit. It hung in the air, enveloping me, seeping into my lungs. My head began to spin, my thoughts became muddled, and my legs grew weak. The world around me swam, colors faded, sounds became muffled, as if I were sinking to the bottom of a deep lake. The last thing I remember is a feeling of incredible lightness, and then… nothingness.

      Waking was abrupt and painful. I opened my eyes to a gray, overcast sky. My body ached, my head throbbed as if a bell were ringing inside it. I tried to sit up and discovered, with horror, that I was completely naked. Around me was only damp earth and stunted vegetation. I didn’t understand where I was or how I had gotten there. The memories of the previous night were blurred and indistinct, like a dream.

      I shivered. The cold pierced me to the bone. I tried to remember what had happened, to reconstruct the chain of events, but there was only fog in my mind. Suddenly, the image of small, stocky figures flitting through the forest surfaced in my memory. Gnomes? Had I really met them? Or were they hallucinations brought on by that strange smell? I didn’t know what to believe. Reality and fiction were so intertwined that I could no longer distinguish one from the other. Fear, dull and viscous, began to rise again from the depths of my soul. I was alone, naked, and helpless in the heart of the wild mountains, and I felt as if unseen eyes were watching me from behind every tree, from behind every stone.

      Yeren

      The mists that shroud the remote peaks of Hubei Province hold secrets whispered for centuries. These whispers tell of a creature that walks upright, yet is not human; a being that echoes both the familiar and the utterly alien – the Yeren.

      For generations, tales have been spun around flickering fires, tales of a hulking figure glimpsed through the dense foliage. Towering between six and eight feet tall, some say even ten, the Yeren is a behemoth cloaked in long, shaggy fur, most often a deep russet or dark brown, though whispers persist of sightings of a spectral white coat. Its hair, a thick, coarse mane, hangs several inches long, framing a face that sits uneasily between ape and man – flatter, more primal, yet unsettlingly humanoid. Long, powerful arms dangle almost to its knees, while its legs, though built for bipedal movement, hint at a capacity for swift, quadrupedal bursts of speed, evidenced by the deep, elongated, almost ape-like tracks it leaves behind – tracks over forty centimeters long, rounded at the toe as if designed for climbing and running. These prints, five-toed yet simian in shape, tell a silent story of a creature at home in the vertical world of the forest.

      The Yeren’s voice, when heard, is a chilling counterpoint to the usual symphony of the wilderness. A sharp, piercing cry, it echoes through the valleys, a sound that speaks of both power and something profoundly other. While local lore paints the Yeren as a fearsome predator, some scholars within the hallowed halls of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who entertain the possibility of its existence, theorize a more benign dietary preference: berries, nuts, insects, and the occasional raid on a village cornfield. They envision the Yeren living in mated pairs, sometimes in small family groups, a hidden community mirroring our own, yet existing just beyond our grasp.

      Since 1920, over four hundred reported sightings have been meticulously documented by Chinese authorities, each adding another layer to the enigma. Some cryptozoologists draw a tentative line between the Yeren and the extinct Gigantopithecus, a colossal ape that once roamed these very mountains. Others, venturing further into the realm of speculation, propose that the Yeren is a relic hominid, a forgotten branch of our own family tree, stranded in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Still others, clinging to a more conventional scientific framework, suggest a new, undiscovered species of orangutan.

      But regardless of its true nature, the Yeren remains a potent symbol of the

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