Report #4218 5777I12

Patrick Starkman’s account of “something in the wash” near Speedway.

Interviewer: Ruby May Valentine, archival assistant at Ordway’s School of Library and Information Sciences.

Transcription by Ruby May Valentine, archival assistant at Ordway’s School of Library and Information Sciences.

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Starkman: I promise I’m not crazy.

Valentine: Never said you were. Besides, I’ve had my fair share of hallucinations, and they don’t usually leave behind eggs. Especially not eggs that look like that.

Starkman: Right. So you’re, what, gonna test the eggs then yeah?

Valentine: Well, actually, I was thinking of making omelets for my fellow staff.

Starkman: What?

Valentine: A joke. Yes, we’re going to “test” the eggs. Anyway, can you explain more about how you acquired them?

Starkman: Right. So, I’m a frog enthusiast. I go out looking for frogs to take photos of them and note their species. I just think they’re neat, you know? Anyway, I was down in the wash below the bridge on Speedway a few nights ago. The area is often damp so it’s a great place to find frogs. Especially during monsoon season a few days after a good rain. It’s a great place to take photos of other wildlife too, but I mostly go for the frogs of course.

Anyway, I usually bring my friend Tommy Sharpe with me when I go down into the washes just to be on the lookout. Not a big fan of being spooked by a mountain lion or javelina on my own. The excursion was going pretty well when we came across a weird pile of eggs. I say weird because they didn’t look like anything I’d recognized. They were bioluminescent and crystal clear. In fact, they looked like a crystal. I picked one up and was surprised by them not only looking crystalline but feeling smooth, cold, and hard like a stone. I would’ve thought they were some sort of weird rock if it weren’t for the glowing embryos in the center. The strange thing was they looked somewhat like a chicken embryo, but they didn’t seem to be forming beaks. I took photos of them and then popped a few into my bag. I usually try not to disturb the wildlife, but this seemed like a new species of something or other. We figured we’d head out as this sort of beat anything else we could find that night.

We started walking back when we heard a blood curdling scream coming from somewhere in the bushes deep in the wash. It sounded human so we thought someone might’ve gotten hurt. A lot of homeless people pitch tents near the edges of the wash. I think it’s probably better than getting harassed on the street by the police or the fire department. Anyway, we thought maybe it could’ve been one of them getting attacked by an animal or something, so we followed the sound. As we got closer, I guess you could say the sound found us. I’m not the best at describing things but I’ll do my best here. Can you imagine a bird for me? Now imagine if a bird was seven feet tall and roughly human shaped. Now imagine if the bird had no feathers, too many teeth, and long fleshy talons extending from its weird human-bird hands. That’s what came at us. I didn’t know how to react. Unfortunately, I threw the only thing I was holding at the fucking beast. My camera. My extremely expensive camera. I still feel like an idiot, but I think that’s what might have saved us. It hit the weird freak bird-human thing just right and the flash went off. It just stopped in its tracks and started screaming louder and louder. We booked it straight out of there. I wish that was the fucking end of it. We got in the car and started driving as fast as we could.

We got pulled over a few minutes later. The cop asked us the usual “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Of course we knew. I think I must’ve been going 90 miles per hour. I said we’re kind of in a rush could you just give me a ticket and get on with it. He looked pretty mad about that comment. He asked us to step out of the vehicle so he could conduct a sobriety test and search. I obliged. During the test though, I noticed someone running towards us in the distance. I didn’t think much of it as they were pretty far away. Maybe it was just someone jogging. He confirmed that we were clearly sober, found nothing in our car, and started to write us up when we were back in the car. That’s when I saw the fucking thing again, in the rear-view mirror. The cop started screaming, I think he might’ve pissed his pants. That’s when the thing sunk its teeth into his neck and ripped out a grotesque chunk of flesh. It didn’t stop there though. The thing knocked him to the ground and began cutting into him with its talons. It was absolutely fucking horrific. I started the car back up and just kept fucking driving. We ended up driving all the way to Phoenix that night. We crashed at a hotel and that was the end of it.

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This is the sort of thing I used to laugh at when I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the wash bird had migrated this far south. I guess we’ll have to deal with that at some point.

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