What started as a day like any other would soon become the battle of the century,
and at the centre of it all was a teenager named Lindsay Banks. She was a relatively
normal kid with a quiet life, and of course, she was a huge fan of The Infographics Show. Three
videos fascinated her in particular, namely, the ones concerning three terrifying monsters created
by Canadian horror artist Trevor Henderson: Siren Head, Cartoon Cat, and Long Horse. She’d
become obsessed with the characters, and wanted to consume any information about them she could find.
Things had gotten so out of hand that it was starting to affect her schooling.
As Lindsay sat at the work desk in her bedroom, trying to make sense
of the algebraic equations laid out on the page in front of her,
she found she just couldn’t hold her focus. As the hours dragged on, Lindsay felt herself
growing increasingly tired. Before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep on top of her homework.
She found herself standing in the courtyard of her high school,
enveloped by total darkness. She attended one of the smaller local schools,
sitting out on the edge of a vast forest, with practically no civilization around.
It was a night of perfect dark - not a single star in the sky. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
Then suddenly, she heard it. The rattling of bones, and soon she saw it- a seemingly
infinite stretch of bone, the endless parade of vertebrae
that the monster-obsessed teen knew could only belong to one creature:
The Long Horse. Its countless bony coils hung suspended in the air, defying all laws of physics.
The creature’s skeletal head bowed out of the sky to meet her, tufts of black hair flowing in
the cold breeze. She was frozen, just staring at it, as its bones clicked and clattered,
like cracking knuckles. Thanks to gaining an expertise in all things Long Horse from her
Infographics Show viewing habits, she knew this could only mean one thing:
Something terrible was going to happen soon. But what? The length of the Long Horse’s neck,
and the sound of its clicking bones, indicated some approaching tragedy - but the otherwise
silent beast didn’t have the power to indicate any of the specifics.
Moments later, Lindsay woke up, her algebra homework stuck to her face. She looked at her
alarm clock and saw, to her horror, that it was already past 10:00 AM - she was late for
school! The details of her strange nightmare were already fading into the ether as she got dressed,
grabbed her backpack, and started running to school. Thankfully,
the building wasn’t far from where she lived, but Lindsay already feared she was in serious trouble.
If only she knew the full extent of that trouble...
When she approached her school, everything seemed eerily quiet.
Maybe it was the grim feeling of last night’s visions finally weighing on her, but Lindsay felt,
deep in the pit of her stomach, that something was different today. The first
confirmation of this belief came to her when she walked up the steps to the front gate,
and found that inside the school’s main foyer, all the lights were off. The inside
of the school was almost completely dark, save for the odd rays of light piercing in through
half-shuttered windows. Was the place closed? Had she gotten her days mixed up?
A quick check on her Smartphone revealed that no, it was currently 10:30 AM on a Wednesday.
Something really was amiss here. She turned on her phone’s flashlight and began creeping down the
halls, hoping to find some form of normalcy hidden amongst the strangeness. Deep down, Lindsay felt
terrified, but tried her best to quell the worst of her assumptions. She’d just watched too many
YouTube videos. Monsters aren’t real. There has to be some kind of rational explanation for this...
That’s when she reached the door of Classroom 6C,
where she was supposed to be taking Mr. Wither’s algebra class at this very moment. However,
when she opened the door, she saw that the room was totally empty. This was creepy enough,
but what truly caught her attention was the sheen that her surroundings seemed to have under
the intense beam of her phone’s flashlight. Like everything was covered in a thin film of liquid.
It shone red. Blood! The whole classroom was covered in blood!
Lindsay’s breath caught in her throat. She was so scared that she couldn’t even scream.
However, as she began backing away from the bloody classroom, she heard a tinny giggling echoing down
the hall behind her. Lindsay gulped, and turned to face in its direction. Her eyes widened in horror
at what she saw: A huge, pitch-black figure with skin that seemed to move and undulate like ink.
Its long, rubbery arms, terminating in grasping white gloves, were stretching out towards her.
She’d recognise that killer smile and huge,
staring eyes anywhere. It was Cartoon Cat, and he was coming right for her!
Pushed on by a sudden, intense burst of adrenaline, Lindsay ran in the other direction,
out towards the courtyard and away from the cartoon monster chasing her. Had the
creature taken her entire school? How was this possible! She knew that Cartoon Cat was an evil
monster of pure sadism, but this seemed like a step too far even for him. Still,
she didn’t have time to consider these questions with the monster still on her tail.
She could hear it giggling, and its huge, bloody teeth chattering, right behind her.
Lindsay could practically feel its hands extending to grasp her
when she finally breached the door out into the courtyard.
But she wasn’t out of the woods yet. In fact, she was quite literally in them.
As we mentioned earlier, Lindsay’s school sat on the edge of an expansive evergreen forest.
Perhaps this would be the one place she could escape the rampaging monster that’d just
destroyed her school. Lindsay ran through the tree line and into the forest, as the
giggling and chattering became distant behind her. She ran, tears streaming down her face,
until there was a silence that felt closer to safety than any moment since she’d woken up.
But it wasn’t long until that silence was broken by something just as horrible,
crackling out over some old speakers.
“NINE. EIGHTEEN. ONE. CHILD. SEVENTEEN. REMOVE. VILE.”
Lindsay would recognise that garbled, electronic nonsense anywhere. She turned to see it looming
over her, easily forty feet tall. Its flesh was rotten and mottled. Its limbs were impossibly
long and thin. Up above, the creature’s megaphone head contained sets of filthy
teeth that gnashed and gnawed. It was the one and only Siren Head, standing right next to her.
Naturally, she screamed, and started running in the other direction. Siren Head darted through
the trees after her, its gnarled fingers stretched out and ready to receive its prey.
Lindsay kept running, not knowing what else she could do. The only options were to run and hope.
And just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
Cartoon Cat, all vicious grins and wriggling limbs, appeared amongst the trees in front of her.
Suddenly, Lindsay was trapped between two of the most terrifying monsters in the Hendersonverse,
with no way out. With Siren Head advancing towards her from behind,
and Cartoon Cat charging in from the front, all she could do was fall to
her knees and try to prepare herself for whatever unthinkable fate was coming.
Siren Head reached down towards her with its terrible hands, ready to strike...
But Lindsay never felt its hands upon her. She looked up, astonished, and saw the wriggling
arms of Cartoon Cat stretching out and grabbing Siren Head. It wouldn’t be denied the prey that
it felt it was rightfully owed, and it was willing to fight for it. Immediately, Siren Head lunged
towards Cartoon Cat with startling speed, clawing at its inky flesh. Siren Head was quadruple the
size of Cartoon Cat, but Cartoon Cat had the edge in terms of intelligence and brutal cunning.
As Lindsay cowered and watched in horror, Cartoon Cat’s arms ensnared Siren Head,
stretching and wrapping around its body like tentacles. In response, Siren Head dug its
long fingers into the inky membrane of Cartoon Cat’s head. The ferocious pseudo-feline never
stopped smiling, not once. Even when Siren Head tore off its head, and dropped it to the ground.
Cartoon Cat’s arms went limp, and fell away from Siren Head’s body, as inert as rope.
Siren Head shook the last of them off, victorious, and turned its attention to Lindsay.
She began backing away, almost frozen in terror, as the creature approached - spitting hateful
nonsense from its crackling megaphones. Siren Head could be faster than the human eye could
perceive when it wanted to, but when all it had to deal with was one lowly human,
it could afford to take its time and savour the fear. Of course,
as any animation aficionado will tell you, it takes a little more than a simple decapitation
to keep a good cartoon down. While Siren Head was inching towards the terrified Lindsay,
Cartoon Cat was rising up and putting its head back on, as though it were little more than a hat.
Before Siren Head could even realise what was going on, Cartoon Cat leapt onto his back,
and sunk its teeth into the creature’s mottled flesh. The monster screamed out of its speakers,
trying to reach behind itself and yank the snarling cartoon monster off of its back.
But the Cartoon Cat wouldn’t let go. It just kept sinking its huge teeth further into the
rotted body of Siren Head. It was an unstoppable force going up against an immovable object:
Both powerful flesh avatars of even greater cosmic nightmares, each with their own terrifying powers.
Cartoon Cat, a malleable, shapeshifting sadist that seems immune to all physical damage.
Siren Head, a giant, lightning-fast monster that could make short work of everything from
families to military squadrons. They wrestled and brawled in the darkness of the forest,
Siren Head’s claws digging and Cartoon Cat’s teeth carving. The one thing Lindsay knew was that,
regardless of which one of these two titans won, neither result would be good for her.
That’s why, while the monsters fought, she decided to make a final run for it.
She turned and sprinted out of the forest, the sounds of deranged cartoon giggling and violent
radio static fading into the distance behind her. Eventually, she managed to escape past the tree
line and the now-empty school, and run back into the centre of town. Only there would she be safe,
though the nightmares of the horrors she’d witnessed would stick with her for years to come.
Later investigations found the true scope of the tragedy that’d occurred that day:
400 children disappeared, along with over sixty teachers. No suspects. No witnesses. Nothing.
Only Lindsay knew the truth, but who could she possibly tell?
Her obsession with the monsters dried up after that. Nothing quenches a thirst for horror like
encountering the real thing. She never found out what transpired between Cartoon Cat and
Siren Head that day - who won that fight, if either of them did, would remain a mystery.
Though there was one factor in all this that Lindsay couldn’t quite shake:
Long Horse, perhaps the real winner in this whole conflict.
It had been him and his warning after all that saved her life.
Check out “Siren Head - Explained” and “Cartoon Cat - Explained” for more information on Trevor
Henderson’s monster masterpieces. You never know, it may save your life...