Gather ‘round and hear the legend of the Queen Anne’s County Goat Man. He was born – or created – in a secret lab on the grounds of the NAIL (National Agriculture and Industry Laboratory) Farm. Some say he’s a clone, born in a test tube from raw genetic material taken from a mutant goat. Others say he started as a government employee who asked too many questions and was surgically spliced with a mutant goat. Still others say he’s the natural-born spawn of a pervert scientist and a mutant goat. In any case, there was definitely a mutant goat involved.
One day the Goat Man escaped the NAIL Farm and made his way into the woods around Gardenpath, where he lives to this day. No one has seen the Goat Man up close and lived to tell the tale; we only know he’s still roaming the woods because of brief glimpses captured on trail cams. What we do know is that many hikers have gone missing in those woods, which are less than three miles across and not particularly dense.
Safe to say, the Goat Man murders any hiker unlucky enough to stumble across him.
It’s October and I’m tramping through the woods, listening to a book on tape (a ghost story) and admiring the carved pumpkins that have been set along the trail for the Pumpkin Walk later tonight. The Pumpkin Walk is the only time you’ll catch me in these woods at night, surrounded by dozens of other Gardenpathers as we file down the narrow trail lit by jack o’ lanterns on either side. In the blackness of the night woods, the glowing orange faces and shapes will drift free of their gourdly contexts and look like a sea of floating ignes fatui. But right now, they’re just pumpkins on the ground.
The narration of my audiobook is accompanied by occasional sound effects. The characters are walking in the woods too, and the crunch of their footsteps on autumn leaves keeps making me look over my shoulder.
I don’t believe in the Goat Man, of course. Of course I don’t. But when I come across a wooden, hand-painted sign tacked to a tree with the words YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GOAT MAN TERRITORY scrawled on it, I can’t help it. I pause the tape and take off my headphones.
The crunch of autumn leaves underfoot isn’t coming from my headphones this time.
He is ahead of me, some ten yards off through the trees. He is tall, at least six and a half feet. His neck is long and his head is massive, a pale goat with horns like scythes. His body is clothed in ordinary human clothes, albeit filthy and ragged: a red plaid lumberjack’s shirt, acid-washed denim, work boots, work gloves. I don’t know if I’m surprised that he has hands and not hooves.
The Goat Man hasn’t seen me. I walk backward as silently as I can, moving behind trees to block myself from his line of sight. A squirrel rustles through a fallen branch and I spring into a run, hopping over dead limbs and zig-zagging and trying to move fast and sound random simultaneously.
Out of Goat Man Territory, close to houses and the street, I slip on a muddy patch and fall. Instinct throws out my wrist to break the fall and I break the wrist instead.
For this reason I am in the hospital during the Pumpkin Walk, and will have to take a friend’s word for it when she tells me that a volunteer dressed as the Goat Man in flannel and jeans was part of the attraction this year.
It’s February and I’m delivering Valentines to Gardenpath residents on behalf of the City Council. Each Valentine is a pink envelope containing coupons for local businesses and reminders that the library and community center offer free workshops to youth and senior citizens.
It is technically illegal to hand-deliver anything to a mailbox if you’re not with the Postal Service, so I have been knocking on each door in the hopes of handing the Valentine over to residents in person. Several of them have been home; for the others, I tuck the little packet somewhere visible but not obtrusive, like into the handle of a watering can.
The last house on Southeast Avenue is very close to the woods. Unlike most of its neighbors, it has no welcome mat, no cheerful decorative signs or lawn ornaments. Still, someone lives there. I knock on the door and wait. No sound comes to indicate any activity inside the house. I’m descending the steps when the door opens.
“Yes, what?”
The man standing in the door is incredibly old, tiny and stooped. But the most notable thing about him is his forehead. It must have been many years ago, but something hit him square in the middle of the skull and cracked it in two. His forehead is sharply concave in the middle and rises to two points at either corner. Whatever did that to him must have affected his eyes, too: his jaundiced sclerae are barely visible around huge golden irises, and his pupils are horizontal coin slots. All that together with the ragged little beard on his chin, and, well…
“Meh,” says the old man when I hand him the Valentine. He snatches it away, retreats back into the house and slams the door.
I stand on the front lawn, aghast. This whole time, the legend of the QA County Goat Man has been talking about some poor old man with a head injury? It’s like finding out a joke you told was actually racist. I feel horrible.
“Are you sure?” my friend asks me later over soup at the Fireside Café.
“It seems like too much of a coincidence otherwise.”
“You’re talking about Harvey?” says a snooping old lady at the next table over. “Yeah, that’s where those Goat Man stories came from all right. When I was a kid, we used to play ding-dong-ditch at his house just to see him come out.” She shows no shame at this admission.
It’s July and I’m tramping through the woods, listening to a book on tape (a love story) and trying to follow a hand-drawn map to a time capsule buried fifty years ago at the edge of the NAIL Farm property line. I pass the GOAT MAN TERRITORY sign, now barely readable since the letters had been painted on and not carved. The map is hard to follow and way out of proportion. Already today I’ve gone more than a mile out of the way before I realized and had to double back. Especially with the City Council’s rules about not maintaining the trails, it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s an overgrown hiking path and what’s a natural deer trail or even a trick of the light.
It's threatening to get dark by the time I reach the creek that runs around the Farm, but I’ve come this far already with my map and my hori-hori. I reach what should be the right general area and turn the map over. On the back is a picture of a grove of trees with one spot circled. For an hour, I walk around the area, taking different vantage points and holding up the picture to compare. Of course the trees don’t look exactly the same as they did fifty years ago, but it’s close enough with some of the bigger and older ones that I finally think I’ve found it.
I start digging. The light is really running away fast now, but I don’t want to try to find this place again. I might as well get the capsule now.
Long, faint shadows criss-cross the ground as I dig. He moves so quietly I don’t notice the larger shadow at first, the looming shape with the horns.
This is not an injured old man. This is not a mask. The Goat Man of Queen Anne’s County is behind me. The scraped tin of the time capsule glints in the dirt under my hands.