Unfinished Creepypasta: "I Hunt Monsters. It's not as cool as it sounds." (Patreon)

This is a story that came to me spontaneously...but only its first half. The second half isn't merely unfinished, but doesn't even have a concept yet! I've been considering inviting people to come up with their own continuation or monster as kind of a mini writing contest, but I'm not sure. Another thing I've considered is reworking it into basically just a rundown of multiple "cases," like the author's "top ten," but maybe I write too many things that are list format like that.

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What comes to mind when you hear the words "monster hunter?" Maybe it's the gaming series of the same name, or maybe you're picturing some Van Helsing looking character tracking down werewolves and vampires. The bosses like to think of it that way, and whoever he works for certainly thinks what we do is a big enough deal to keep most of the world in the dark somehow, "Men In Black" style.

But very few careers in the world are as glamorous as their public image, and we're no different. We don't fight zombies or demons or chupacabras or anything that exciting. We don't even know if what we fight can rightfully be called "monsters" at all, besides the fact that the things we deal with seem more or less alive, in some sense, and that they're not easily explained.

This probably still sounds romantic to you. Unexplainable creatures! I get it, but you want to know what my last job was like?  The last "monster" we cleaned up? I really do mean "cleaned up," since we slew the beast with nothing but hydrogen peroxide and a mop, and while the office called it a "Class 4 Contaminating Plasmodiform," we all agreed the moment we saw it (and smelled it) that its name should be The Asscheese. Yeah, it did actually kill someone...but near as we could tell, that's only because it left enough stinking grease around their house that the poor bastard slipped headlong into a marble countertop, and what likely began as a Class 1 had spent about a week, by our estimate, slowly growing over the body, engulfing his left arm and almost everything from his chest on down in a white, chunky mush you'd never guess was alive if not for the subtle way it rippled, like a sheet of maggots in slow motion.

Maybe you're wondering why anyone would bother to cover up a case like that. Something that looks more or less like dog vomit, moves like a snail and has all the killing power of a dropped banana peel isn't the kind of discovery that upends society's understanding of the universe, no...but then we started scrubbing the thing off the body, and the flesh underneath wasn't simply eaten away. Wherever Asscheese had been feeding, or whatever the hell it does, the guy's skin was entirely covered in pale, pink bumps, maybe the size of my thumbnail, and every single one of those bumps had the same subtle, pointed ridge in the center, right between the same two shallow, round depressions, just above the same tiny, horizontal crevice. The Asscheese had turned that dead man's skin into a mosaic of miniature half-formed faces, and I can't possibly guess how, or why, or what would have happened if we hadn't interrupted the process.

We're basically kept as ignorant as we can possibly be without it hampering our work. We operate out of a cheap office space under a manager who's changed so many times, I've given up getting to know any of them by name, and we have no idea who really employs us beyond that. Whoever they are, they advertise us as simple ghost hunters, psychic investigators or even "unconventional pest specialists," and the majority of calls we get are obviously just about a really big cockroach or a suspiciously creaky staircase, so those get patched through to mundane bug guys or spirit mediums we have some sort of local arrangement with. When we hear something like "I didn't know who else to call" or "I don't even know what I'm dealing with," that's when we start listening. When someone has a problem weird enough to call what they think is a ghost hunter, and they still aren't sure they're in the right ballpark, that's usually the real deal. 

A hypothetically organic or sentient entity that defies explanation by natural law. A "monster," because we just don't have a better term for that.

But god, there are days I'd kill for it to just be a really big cockroach. If you thought The Asscheese sounded bad, you should have been there to see why we called one of them the Pusbucket, or why "Mr. Squelch" put me off spaghetti and meatballs to this day. Not all of them are just disgusting, but they're always confusing or disturbing, and some of them are definitely more dangerous than a banana peel. Those little faces growing out of that dead guy might be an image that'll stick with me, but I still have nightmares about the Dancing Teeth incident, and I never needed an asthma inhaler until we faced The Blacklungs. One time we got called out for a "weird tree," which is about as good a description as any, and found out the hard way that it slowly dissolved anything caught in its shadow.

At this point, maybe some of you have the same question seemingly every trainee has by the time they've learned this much: they almost always ask me what's the weirdest thing I've ever seen on the job. Or maybe they ask about the most dangerous, or if any of them really and truly terrified me. The answer to all of the above is the same one, and if you're also wondering why I'm only now blabbing about all this to the internet, well, that ties in too.

Yeah, I'm gonna get into some deep shit for it, maybe even "disappear" or have a little "accident" any day now; I can't help but notice that I've never seen any of our callers ever again, even if I drive by what used to be their homes. But there's a case we're nowhere close to solving, and it's getting worse, and people deserve to know what to look out for. If they're gonna have me wacked or whatever it is they do, I don't really give a shit at this point.

It's a case we officially call a Class 9 Ambulatory Evacuator, and whatever that sounds like to you...I promise you it's worse than that.