"The Oram County Whoosit"

art by cottlestonspye - http://cottlestonpye.deviantart.com/art

by Steve Duffy
originally published Shades of Darkness, 2008

Oram County, Virgina - 1924.

Fenwick, a photographer, is there to cover the arrival of Horton Keith, a noted author/journalist of Mark Twain-ish sort, who's coming to town to cover the discovery of the body of a strange creature in a coal mine.

Keith is cynical about the whole thing, expecting something along the lines of a carny mermaid.  He's even more cynical when he discovers that the body of the thing is NOT at the courthouse, as its supposed to be, but stashed away in the home of Lamar Tibbs, who found it and claimed it as his own.  What IS at the courthouse is the huge chunk of coal the body was found sealed in.  And when Keith sees that, it gives him pause.

He explains to Fenwick.  Back in 1898, Keith followed other adventurers to the Yukon in search of gold.  There, he and some other seekers found instead the body of a strange, prehistoric creature.  They thought it dead - wrong!  The revived creature caused a fair share of trouble, and the gruesome deaths of several before flying away into the night.

And the imprint in the coal in the courthouse, almost like a mold, is of exactly the same type of creature.

That night, Keith, Fenwick, the mayor et al answer an emergency summons to Lamar Tibbs place, and witness the monster's rampage before it, too, escapes into the night.

This is a very effective story.  Duffy captures a certain Twain-like voice, which set me up for a humorous tale.  Thus my surprise when it turned out to be as dark a Lovecraft riff as I've come across.  It's also genuinely Lovecraftian while very different from HPL - that rarest of combinations.  A winner!