Finding Monsters: A Night That Broke Reality

Daniel and I were the typical seventeen-year-old idiots who mistook existential boredom for epic adventure. That summer night, after the last drop of alcohol evaporated along with our teenage dignity at his family’s country house, we were chosen for a sacred mission: to find alcohol at two in the morning in unfamiliar territory. In the city, we knew every convenience store that sold warm beer at champagne prices without asking questions. But out here, in the middle of nowhere, we had no idea how the rural black market for cheap liquor worked.

Our first stop was a gas station that looked like an abandoned set from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, manned by an old guy who had probably seen three generations of functional alcoholics be born, grow, reproduce, and die. While we filled up the tank of Daniel’s Tsuru—a car that defied the laws of physics by still running—the old man offered us two options with the casualness of someone selling loose cigarettes: a house a few kilometers away where we might score some alcohol, and farther out, a clandestine bar where “special gatherings” happened from time to time. His eyes gleamed with that ancient malice only possessed by old men who’ve seen too much and decided the world deserves exactly what’s coming to it. Like the Oracle of Delphi, but specializing in directions toward self-destruction.

We headed toward the first location while Burzum’s black metal turned the nocturnal silence into a symphony of Nordic despair at deafening volume. Daniel drove his ancient Tsuru like it was a Sherman tank navigating enemy territory, and I watched as skeletal trees rose on both sides of the highway like sentinels of some kingdom forgotten by modern civilization. The more disturbing the music—those wails Varg Vikernes recorded between murders and church burnings—the more we enjoyed it, as if we were genetically programmed to find aesthetic beauty in the utterly macabre. The scenery outside competed admirably with the desperate screams blasting from the speakers, creating a perfect harmony of auditory and visual horror.

Occasionally, we played our favorite prank: turning off the car’s headlights completely and driving blind for seconds that felt like cosmic eternities. It was suicidal stupidity that injected pure adrenaline into our bloodstream, an automotive Russian roulette we played with death itself. In those moments of total darkness, the civilized world vanished entirely, and it was just the two of us and the statistically real possibility of becoming a headline in the local paper: “Two Teens Die in Crash Chasing Illegal Booze.” I suppose at seventeen, death feels more like a philosophical curiosity than a tangible threat, an abstract concept that only happens to other people. Darwin was right about natural selection.

Following the cryptic directions from the gas station oracle, we turned onto a dirt path barely marked by white pebbles, like breadcrumbs in a perverse version of Hansel and Gretel—the kind the Brothers Grimm wrote for adults before Disney turned them into family cartoons. To any satellite observer, we would’ve vanished from the civilized world as if the earth had swallowed us. We arrived at a metallic structure shaped like an abandoned communication tower, grotesquely silhouetted against the night sky, and next to it was a wooden house that looked like it was built from the wreckage of a Victorian shipwreck. A kerosene lamp faintly illuminated two men sitting at a long table covered with empty bottles of brands you’d never find in any supermarket. Their party had started hours ago, and judging by their chronic drunkenness, they’d probably been celebrating something no sane person would consider worth celebrating for days.

When Daniel turned off the Tsuru’s engine, the two men stood up with the perfect coordination of drunk veteran marines and pointed rifles at us that looked like authentic relics from the Mexican Revolution. In rural Mexico after dark, urban laws and civil codes of conduct don’t exist; only the primal law of the most armed and paranoid prevails. A dog positioned itself between us, growling with the ancestral fury of someone guarding the last sacred bastion of rural humanity. We raised our hands in the universal sign of peaceful surrender, explaining our noble boozy mission with the respect due to any spiritual quest, but our armed hosts responded with mocking laughs that sounded like hyenas feasting on carrion. Though we insisted we had enough cash to pay inflated prices, they informed us the alcohol was completely gone and, as urban outsiders, we weren’t welcome in their tribal territory. The metallic sound of cartridges being chambered convinced us immediately that rural hospitality had very specific limits, and we were about to learn them the most traumatic way possible. I distinctly remember hearing the ominous click of their guns and seeing a winged figure cross the sky just as a timid lightning bolt briefly lit up the scene. Confused and clearly unwelcome, we retreated quickly with the dignity of a strategic withdrawal.

We returned to the highway, cursing the endemic rural paranoia, and continued toward the second location promised by our gas station oracle. A few kilometers later, a colonial mansion appeared on the roadside, completely shrouded in darkness but with distant voices suggesting nocturnal human activity. We got out of the car and circled the structure to the backyard, where we found something that completely redefined our teenage understanding of clandestine parties. It wasn’t exactly a nightclub but rather a pre-Hispanic architectural ruin with what looked like a natural cenote at its center, surrounded by human figures barely lit by the full moon. A perfect circle of motionless people staring into the stagnant water. All you could hear was the group obsessively repeating a hypnotic mantra: “It has always been here.” Over and over, like a scratched vinyl record playing the same phrase into infinity.

Then we saw it with terrifying clarity: they had a completely naked woman in that filthy, greenish pool, and the attendees watched her with the religious solemnity of participants in an ancestral ritual predating Christianity by millennia. There was no modern music, no social laughter, no civilized conversation—just an atmospheric tension you could cut with a butcher’s knife. Suddenly, a seismic crash shook the entire night, and one of those giant, centuries-old trees began to move as if awakening from a millennial slumber, like a living entity that had been dormant under the guise of ordinary vegetation. The people in the circle reacted with genuine excitement, like kids on Christmas morning, while the woman in the cenote began desperately pleading to be let out. Her voice broke with pleas no human should ever have to utter. Lightning started filling the sky with unnatural frequency, as if the weather itself was responding to what was about to happen.

That’s when we saw it descend from the night sky: a creature that defies every known zoology textbook, deliberately placing its primal claws on the ground while unfurling membranous wings that definitely didn’t belong to this world or this geological era. They weren’t the wings of a modern bird but something reptilian and primordial, as if evolution had taken a completely different path in some forgotten corner of Earth. The thing—because there’s no other word to describe it—approached the cenote with calculated movements, observed the woman with the scientific curiosity of a collector of rare specimens, gently picked her up in its limbs like someone plucking a delicate flower, and took flight into the absolute darkness of the night sky. The woman’s desperate screams faded gradually into the distance as lightning flashed synchronously with each powerful flap of that impossible creature’s wings. Meanwhile, the attendees chanted their hypnotic mantra with even more religious fervor: “It has always been here, it has always been here, it has always been here.”

Daniel and I ran to the Tsuru with the athletic grace of two terrified gazelles fleeing a prehistoric predator. Alcohol was no longer remotely a priority; now we just wanted physical distance between us and what we’d just witnessed with our own eyes. We knew instinctively that no one would ever believe us, and honestly, we were starting to doubt our own mental sanity and the objective reality of what we’d experienced. On the drive back to civilization, we passed an artificial dam whose surface acted as a perfect silver mirror under the direct moonlight. There we saw it one last time: the winged figure crossing the rural landscape with the natural grace of a demon in its element, heading toward a distant plateau until it vanished completely into the total blackness of the horizon. The lightning kept illuminating the night every time the creature flapped its membranous wings. Daniel and I looked at each other in silence and, trying to process the impossible, automatically repeated the words we’d heard: “It has always been here.” As if it were the only logical explanation for the inexplicable.

We never spoke of that specific night with our friends who stayed at the country house. Some silences are more eloquent than any desperate confession, and certain truths about the nature of reality can only be shared between those who have looked directly into the primordial abyss and discovered that the abyss, indeed, looks back with personal interest. Twenty years later, when I hear news about inexplicable disappearances in rural areas, I always think the same thing: it has always been here, waiting, feeding, selecting. And we, civilized humans, simply choose not to look up on moonless nights.