Prologue
It all began with a pile of exsanguinated bodies at the edge of Penllergaer forest. We’ve all heard the myths, the legends, the scary stories whispered around the campfire. Red eyes, tentacles, fangs and a human flesh diet; monsters. The things that go bump in the night, hide under your bed, inside your closet.
Running to your parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night, scared that the boogie man was outside your window but in reality it was a tree branch tapping against the glass in a rhythmic fashion, dancing along to the breeze. Wasn’t it?
Monsters have been the subject of the scary, the macabre, the horror for years; tales to keep children in place, fear induced conformity. A figment of people’s imaginations, created by the storytellers, brought to life by the creative. Novels and movies and TV, oh my.
That was until they found the bodies. Drained completely of blood and nothing to indicate the cause except for two tiny pinpricks on each of their necks. Police; baffled. Forensic examiners; confused. The investigation was over before it even started, absolutely no leads and zero forensic evidence was to be seen.
Then the children started going missing. Every child that went into Penllagaer forest never came out, was never found and never returned. No body, no evidence, no anything. Police, search and rescue, volunteers in droves scoured the entire area. Leaf beds were overturned, bodies of water were dredged, every tree was looked behind and every bush was pawed through. Nothing.
Speculations were wild. Theories ranged from the macabre to the outlandish. The media was soaked in the stories and nothing else was covered except for the bizarre occurrences by the newspapers, TV, social media. Tiktok accounts were springing up left, right and centre trying to decode, debunk and demystify.
The authorities did the only thing that they could think of; they shut the forest down to the public. Nobody was allowed in. Of course, when someone says “you can’t” there are those few who reply with “watch me”.
It wasn’t until one evening when a Tiktok influencer by the username of HarryBangles decided that he was going to go into the woods at night to try and find the source of the mysterious happenings of late. He was live streaming the event, thousands of people watching, just him and one of his friends who worked with him to create his videos, a single beam of light to guide them.
They had made it into the deepest part of the forest, past the small lake, past the waterfall and onto the trail leading towards the other side of the forest. The forest was blanketed in darkness, their voices echoing through the trees, a steady stream of comments coming in on screen talking about the various levels of stupidity that was being exhibited by the two men at that moment.
Then...
Lintel457: What was that? Did anybody else see that?
GracefulOwl: I saw it. Guys get out of there
More and more people began to comment, the panic levels rising in the chat as the boys in the woods went on, unaware of the collective freak out that was happening. Then they stopped in their tracks, the single beam of light resting on a figure in the centre of the trail.
They called out to the figure, the face turning, ghostly pale in the flash light, eyes blinking slowly, black against the milky skin. Then the figure smiled, revealing fangs. That was the last thing the live stream saw before the phone was dropped but the stream didn’t end until their screams turned to gargling, turned to whimpering and then... silence.
After the infamous attack on HarryBangles the monsters started to become more invasive, more species emerging from various places all over the UK. Vampires, werewolves, goblins, spirits, demons. Utter chaos ensued as attacks were rife and the authorities were not prepared in the slightest. Why would they be? Up until that moment, the monsters were just stories and the only time nightmares had ever come to life was in a Goosebumps book.
Enter the Horrorities Enforcement Agency (HEA). A slapped together band of ragtag misfits that specialised in the mythological, supernatural and otherworldly. The government, unsure of what to do at that point, gave them funding to create a team that would hunt down, capture and dispose of the creatures they found.
Add into the mix anthropologists. People who wanted to study and observe the creatures. No funding for them; the government wasn’t interested in the preservation of creatures that were killing off humans in their thousands. What did they do? The only thing humans knew; they commoditised it.
With a vast level of determination, a huge amount of petitioning and one very wealthy, university led backer, the Horrorlogical Society was formed with accompanying university degree, leading to the grand opening of the UK’s very first university led, scientifically founded ‘Zoo of the Otherworld’.
Contain, maintain, detain. The motto the society used to settle the public’s fear sat above the zoo in gold embossed lettering.
Other countries caught on quickly to what the UK was doing and soon enough, other countries were creating their own zoos and supernatural agencies to catch the fast emerging monsters. Capture methods, containments and weapons became more sophisticated, exceeding the normal evolution of inventions tenfold. The HEA was inundated with requests for creatures and soon after the zoos emerged, creature import and export businesses had become rife, tourism had shot through the roof with people booking their zoo visits months in advance and the monster attacks began to dissipate to levels that the UK government deemed appropriate and ‘normal’. Morbid curiosity, despite the terrors of late, still ran through the human race like a fast spreading virus. Wonder piqued, appetite for the bizarre insatiable. The zoo was a massive success.
Creatures, monsters, things. The mystery in the dark was brought out into the light and the horrors turned into forms of entertainment for all humans to stare at, gawp at, laugh at. Fear no longer held the public’s heart, no no. Fear was gone, and instead replaced with complacency.
However, when you stare danger in the face without fear, only then do you know true arrogance, and that’s when you’re in the most danger of all.
