I know how it may sound. I hardly would believe it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. But, it’s true. There is a monster living in those woods. One that would seek to undo everything that we would call joy or happiness. It would be best if you listened to me. It is coming here; a beast beyond words, though I will try to use them in order to make you understand what must be done.

I see you laughing. You have been since I arrived here in this ward. Please heed my warning. It is coming. It will not rest until all that have seen it are consumed. It will not rest until everyone here is killed. I will die. You will die. Everyone here will perish by it.

My story starts simply. A group of friends and I were driving out into the woods. Our friend, Johnny, had a cabin in the woods, and we planned to stay there over the weekend. It was something his family-owned since the Civil War. They didn’t like to visit it, though; apparently, it was built on cursed land. We scoffed at the idea. Cursed land, we said, what a joke. Even if it were cursed, we thought that it would only make it a fun adventure. If only we knew then.

There were five of us in total: myself, Johnny, Bill, Kate, and Sarah. We all drove up in Johnny’s truck. It was a big blue 4-wheel drive truck. It technically belonged to his father, but he was allowed to borrow it that weekend. His father loved that truck and always took good care of it. At only one and a half years old, it was in near pristine condition. The only condition was that it could not have a scratch on it by the time we returned.

The forest was very dense and only continued to get thicker as we drove into the depths of it. The farther we went into the woods, the closer the trees seemed to get to each other. They almost looked like thick bars of an ever-shrinking prison cell the deeper and deeper we went in. The leaves were so thick that they seemed to swallow the sunny sky in darkness. It was unnatural. It was unnerving. It should have been a bad omen. We heard no birds sing and no crickets chirp. We laughed about how eerie it was.

The cabin was run down. Why wouldn’t it be? It hadn’t been visited for years. Johnny’s grandpa was the last one to visit it, sometime in the ’60s or ’70s. He came back a changed man, shaky and scared of his own shadow. He would die a few days later in a gruesome manner—something about torn flesh and a contorted form. Stuff we thought to joke about at the time. Of course, he would die so gruesomely after visiting a cursed cabin. We had a good laugh about it. If only we knew.

We hopped out of the truck and began to unload our stuff. Johnny and Bill threw our sleeping supplies in the cabin while Kate and Sarah ran to a nearby river and jumped in the water. We soon joined them and goofed around in the water. Splashing and flailing about, all while laughing. We didn’t even notice the lack of life in the river. No fish and no bugs. Thinking back to it scares me.

When we got tired of that, we went back up to the cabin to dry off. Bill started a fire, and we began to roast marshmallows while drying ourselves by the fire. A horrifying whistle came howling through the trees. It screeched and groaned in an unholy manner. The ground seemed to rumble as the sound seemed to shake us deep to our cores. It spooked us at first, but we laughed it off once we realized it was the wind.

The day ended with us looking around the cabin. The inside was a treasure trove. So many things were sitting around from many different periods in time. There was a rifled musket from the civil war, a stash of moonshine from prohibition, a trench knife from ww1, a typewriter, and so much more. Everything was in pristine condition as if it had been forgotten there in haste. After a while, I found a book buried under a pile of garbage.

It was probably meant to be hidden or thrown away with the garbage. If I had known, I would have left it in its resting place. It gave off some twisted energy as if it wanted me to pick it up and open it. It made me uncomfortable enough to walk away. Instead, I picked the book up and admired it. It was a black book with a golden spiral spine. The front cover had some text, but I couldn’t read what it said. The text was made with gold lines and twisted into a language I neither could read nor make a guess at what it was. I should have dropped it right then.

The book felt like it was calling me to open it. I knew this and thought that I should set it down, but it was no use. It felt as if two invisible hands reached out and helped me slowly open the book up. They rubbed up against my wrists then gently guided my fingers to start peeling back the cover. I flipped the book open. The pages fluttered as if they knew which page they wanted to open too. It stopped on a page stained with blood. On the page was a picture of a duck.

I dropped the book and backed up against the wall. Everyone looked at me as the book made a sharp bang on the ground. I had sweat running down my face and was out of breath. Then I looked back to the book. The page was now blank. They ran over to see what was wrong, so I tried to play it off as me tripping over some of the junk laying around. It wasn’t too hard. I thought it was silly at the time, and they would only make fun of me if I told them what had happened. To be honest, I thought it was me imagining things as I looked back at the blank page. I laughed to myself as I closed the book back up. I laid on a shelf and gave the front cover one last look. To my surprise, I could now read the twisted text. ‘The Cluster Duck’ is what it said.

We turned in for the night shortly after that. I was a little uneasy, but I kept it to myself. With all the horror stories about this cabin, they would find it ridiculous if I shared my worries. So, we went along with our plans to sleep in the cabin. We had to push some of the junk out of the way and lined our sleeping bags on the floor. It wasn’t comfortable, but it worked. We soon drifted into sleep. Our sleep was short as banging on the cabin door woke us up. Slowly we were forcefully woken up as the banging kept going on and on. It rattled the cabin and shook all the way to our bones.

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Bill was the bravest among us. That was an undeniable fact. If anyone were going to face this danger, it would be him. He walked up to the door and swung it open with a strong push. The door made a loud bang with the cabin’s side that seemed to echo through the woods. There was no one there. We were only greeted by the extremely quiet woods and the darkness of the night.

Bill stepped out of the cabin and looked around. The banging had been going on until moments before the door swung open; no one should have been able to get away fast enough. Yet, it was quiet. Too quiet. Bill walked a few more steps out and looked around some more. He shrugged and turned back to us. He laughed and said that it must have been the wind and began to walk back in.

Then a duck emerged from out of the shadowed woods. It waddled into view with a loud quack that got all our attention. Bill turned around suddenly. He seemed to jump from the sudden loud noise. He laughed when he saw the duck waddle toward him. The duck continued its charge to my unsuspecting friend. Then another duck came out of the darkness. And then another. More and more ducks suddenly began to fill the area. They began to flap their wings.

What happened next is the hardest to describe. The ducks all seemed to take to the sky and form into an amorphous shape of feathers and quacks. The swarm seemed to take the form of a person; then, it took the form of a beast. It kept switching between recognizable shapes of people or animals and amorphous shapes.

Bill suddenly began to panic and started to run back to the cabin. It was no use, however. The swarm suddenly descended upon Bill like a wave, and he was surrounded in a flurry of feathers. A scream from him tried to call out over the chorus of quacks that echoed through the previously quiet woods. Then the swarm dissipated back into the darkness. The ducks vanished from view, and all that was left where Bill stood was a pair of shoes that sat up perfectly where he had been.

We, naturally, slammed the door shut. It had three locks on it, and we locked each one as hastily as possible. At this point, we exchanged panicked words about what we had just witnessed. It was just jargon at first, but after a while, we began to speak clearly. We had no idea what to do. Johnny suggested we stay in the cabin for the night. Sarah thought we should try to make a run for it. Kate was balled up in the corner crying.

Our panic was interrupted by more banging on the cabin. This time it wasn’t just at the door. It was on the walls and the ceiling. Dust seemed to fall around us as the cabin shook like it was experiencing an earthquake. The banging rang from all sides until a crack formed in one of the walls. Then it suddenly stopped. We turned in horror to the crack as it opened up into a small hole. A duck’s head came through the hole and quacked. We screamed.

Johnny shouted to grab a weapon and run to the truck. Sarah grabbed the musket, Kate grabbed the trench knife, and Johnny grabbed the moonshine and the lighter we had used for the fire. I grabbed the typewriter. We hastily unlocked the door and rushed out of the cabin. The truck was parked several yards away, and I did not know if we would make it.

Surprisingly, it was tranquil. The ducks were nowhere to be seen as we sprinted to the truck. It was easy to get to the doors. We should have realized something was wrong, but at the time, we were all too scared to think that clearly. We got in the truck, and Johnny turned the key. The truck sputtered but wouldn’t start. He turned the key again. The truck made its best effort, but it would not start. Johnny cursed.

We all took a deep breath as we realized it was quiet. We were safe for the moment. Johnny popped the hood and hoped out. We all joined him as he lifted the hood. It was probably a bad idea, but we thought to look at the engine with him for some reason. He lifted the hood the rest of the way so that we could figure out what kept us from getting away. Under the hood, a duck sat on a shredded engine that resembled a head of lettuce. It looked at us and quacked. We screamed. A storm of feathers flew out from under the hood as Johnny tried to slam it shut. He wasn’t fast enough as the feathers engulfed him.

I threw the typewriter at the storm and began to run in the other direction. It, of course, did not have an effect. The other two followed me. We ran and ran for what seemed like forever before I turned back. Sarah was behind me, but there was nothing else. There was nobody else. Somewhere along the way, we had lost Kate. I clenched my teeth and turned forward. At this point, all I had to do was keep running.

We ran and ran. From behind us, the sound of wind and quacks seemed to get louder and louder as it drowned out the woods’ silence. The trees seemed to get closer and closer until we reached a point where they sat in a line that was too close together to be natural. They pressed closely together. We stopped with the sounds of the quacks getting closer and closer.

I squeezed between the trees with all my might and managed to push out on the other side. I tumbled on the grass for a moment before I regained my footing. In front of me, the river was rushing with a fast current. I imagine it was the same river by the cabin, but this section was more violently whipping by.

Sarah called out to me. I turned around. I had been able to pass through the section of trees that I went through, but she had not been so lucky. She was stuck in between the trees and was panicking as the sound of quacks got closer and closer. I ran up to the trees and tried to pull her through. She didn’t move. I then tried to push her back. She should be able to pass through where I did. She still didn’t move.

The echoes of quacks grew louder and louder. With a deep breath, she managed to pull one of her arms out from between the trees. Then, she shoved me as hard as she could. I was not prepared for it and went rolling through the grass into the river. The current instantly swept me away.

From here, I imagine you know the rest of the story. I washed up miles away and began telling my story. The people laughed at me. As I kept talking, they began to give me concerned looks. Then I was brought here for you to laugh at my story as I tell it. It was better when people treated it as some prank, but now you all realize I was deathly serious.

You may be chuckling but look behind you. There is a duck right there. It is already too late. I see it waddling here out of the darkness. And now it is forming a swarm. Hey, you should know there is no use running. It already followed me all the way here. Oh, there goes the doctor, and here comes the swarm.