- [Narrator] I know something you might not know.
It's not exactly a fact that I can just tell you,
like how conservation efforts in northern Michigan
had caused an explosion in the great wolf population,
or that my frigid state's abandoned copper mines
were not the place we had intended on going caving.
I still remember that night in a bar where
in a day's fury of whisky shots between the both of us
he first pitched the idea that I should join him
on his yearly upper peninsula hiking escape.
I remember how I had reluctantly agreed, despite my plans
to spend that particular weekend glued to the couch.
That elated pat of approval which nearly spilled my drink is
one thing that sticks in my mind quite fervently.
We'd managed to be great friends for years
despite the fact that I was a homeboy,
and he strictly found happiness outdoors.
This was due in part to the fact
that we were both booze hounds.
Only then I found myself thick in uncomfortable snow gear,
ensnared by a blinding blizzard which seemed to
all but inhibit his movements.
The only light in the sky was dull red of twilight
glowing above the snow-capped evergreens.
The equipment we carried was making my joints ache.
Even though he offered to shoulder most of the burden,
I carried no less than my fair share,
since he had provided it all.
We planned to set up camp overnight,
then explore the caves in the morning.
Which required gear for camping, cooking, and climbing,
creating a hefty rustle with each step,
crunching the new-fallen snow.
What I know is more of a concept that I can only hope to
elucidate through careful construction of context.
I only ask that you judge my actions introspectively
as I attempt to explain myself to you.
Slowly but surely, we had drifted from the trail
as a dizzying number of trees and snow covering the
twisting path left us constantly second-guessing
ourselves to where we were at.
Even a meticulous eye on the compass
couldn't help us keep walking straight through
the haze of biting wind and obfuscating white.
When we happened upon that clearing, we had no choice
but to set up shelter amongst the stumps of
that logged section of forest, leaving me
increasingly grateful to be lugging around
our large, insulated dome tent.
Even as I stood shivering through the harsh fury,
he had set up a structure within minutes on his own,
only breathing a sigh of relief
once we'd both crawled inside.
Pouring the whiskey we had brought would be dangerous
in this cold, so we focused instead on huddling amongst
the thermal sleeping tents and dim lanterns.
I had set aside my complaints of discomfort
as we swept through stories and trail mix,
just like any typical night at the bar.
What I know is, as underlying as not only necessity,
but as nature itself, I will tell you what I know
because it could be said in one word.
The howling began at a distance barely even registering
in our minds, just another faint cry of
the many creatures we shared the forest with.
The first time it was loud enough to interrupt our stories,
the shiver crawled up our backs and he reached
and turned the dial of the lantern, just in case.
We were quieter now, our camaraderie suppressed
to a dull whisper, becoming more and more sparse
until being finally overtaken by silence.
The last cries of the peak had not sounded far away,
though enough time was passing for security
to peek its timid head, only to withdraw once more
as a growl made our eyes shoot open.
I remember how my chest ached as we knelt by the
plastic window, unzipping the canvas covering,
appear out in the distant lines of trees beyond the stumps.
Nausea gripped my stomach when I carried the sight,
with the first pair of eyes cutting through the darkness,
reflecting the moon's pale glow.
More and more pairs were quick to dot
that treeline lingering just outside.
I nearly screamed when he suddenly clenched my wrist
to pull me outside before we were completely surrounded.
We ended up leaving our gear behind except
for a light rucksack of caving equipment.
Refusing to enter our line of sight, the eyes and snarls
dashed menacingly along the conifers as we sprinted
further into the man made clearing,
already wheezing as my coat fluttered behind me,
the twigs snapping under my foot.
We thought that we were lucky to have encountered
this cavern along this log-side hill.
A rocky burrow created through narrow,
horizontal passages into a mining tunnel below.
When I placed my hand on the unassuming mound
for support as we fled, my stomach dropped
at the sheerness of the pit within.
To enter would mean a fall of at least 50 feet,
though it would be our best chance of evading the predators.
So we both braced ourself, I could scarcely even breathe
looking down into the snow-banked excavation.
Every instinct tried to pull me back,
crying out, don't jump, you idiot!
It was all my stupid idea.
What I know is...
Hunger.
Hunger isn't a feeling you get right before dinner
or after skipping breakfast or lunch.
I would've claimed to have felt hunger before now,
but it was only discomfort.
Hunger isn't just a dull ache of an unfulfilled routine,
but a fierce agitation of the body
that wastes away without reprieve.
It takes absolute present, consuming every thought.
It becomes unequivocally lost in their own hunger.
By the time we had time to go down the steep drop,
laying crippled in the snow and dirt,
the predators had undoubtedly moved onto a more accessible
meal, though my friend had landed on his forearm,
fracturing it as a result of the fall.
The clear agony in his stifled expression
made my skin bristle and crawl with sympathy.
And I could hardly stand to look at the swollen,
twisted limb that stood before me.
Even though we had rope and pitons,
climbing out was not an option.
I lacked a physicality to make the escape on my own,
and his injuries crippled him,
leaving us with only one option,
progressing further into the abandoned mines.
He guided my hand as I used the pitons and
straps from the harness to bind his arms
in a makeshift splint before helping him to his feet.
The air was completely still except for a burrow far above,
and the dusty beams and torches lining the shaft
had been long since abandoned.
Our only recourse was to start walking and hope for an exit.
Of course, hope is one of the many things that
hushed by deafening wails of hungry pangs in a weary body.
Time...
Time was the first of the things I began to lose track of,
as well as my sense of direction as the shaft
seemed to twist and loop endlessly,
intercut by maze-like and narrow tunnels
familiar, perhaps, to some long dead foremen.
I grew to despise our footsteps made as they echoed into
maddeningly unpredictable patterns against rock and soil.
We willed our bodies forward, certain that an exit
could just be around a next corner, until we became
too exhausted and stopped to rest, even though we
still held out hope to wander our way to freedom.
We rationed out what little water we had responsibly,
preparing to make it last as long as possible.
And so we continued, pressing on time and time again
with our tenacity constantly unrewarded.
I imagined the world outside carrying on without me,
not even noticing the fact that I hadn't returned
from a hiking trip days after the scheduled time.
Not even bothering to search the wet, muggy air of the caves
that stung my throat miserably, and the soles of my feet
stung horribly with each passing step.
At first my friend matched my resolve pound for pound,
encouraging me onwards, but before long I could see
that he too was slowing and growing weaker.
The fracture in his arm became even more swollen
than before, terribly discolored and leaking
a putrid, infected pus, but we still shuffled on
in our cycle of exhausted sleep and wandering.
Something changed.
Something changed, now we weren't even
speaking with one another anymore.
Our water reserves had run dry and a terrible hunger
choked out whatever resolve remained.
We could scarcely even move if we wanted to,
lying face to face on opposite sides of the mine shaft
in complete resignation to our fate.
The atmosphere was pure, visceral dread
as we both awaited the end in the cold darkness,
completely empty and alone.
Would we even realize it when we died?
My awareness was shrinking as I
faded in and out of consciousness.
Sprawled out on the tunnel's ground, I could barely
register the sickness which gripped my friend.
Only a short distance away,
he was completely drained of strength.
He couldn't fight off this infection
from his fracture much longer.
And it put a considerable toll on his health
as he wheezed and quivered, turning terribly thin and pale.
I could tell at a glance he'd be gone soon,
leaving me on my own in these winding, inescapable tunnels.
On the forefront of each thought was
my now intimately familiar hunger,
a sensation so powerful and exquisitely pervasive
that it completely overtakes the mind,
of crushing it into something primeval.
Some unflinching in its detachment
that could hardly even be called human.
I'm telling you that I know hunger
in the hopes that you will forgive me.
I don't exactly know when my friend died,
if it was starvation or infection that did him in,
or if it could've been avoided if we hadn't been
hidden away in these godforsaken caverns in the first place,
but every urge in my body focused to a point.
A disgusting proposal floating on the top of my
meddling hunger, all signs of life had all vanished.
And his pulse was entirely absent.
I recalled the wolves and how we had denied them
fulfillment from that oppressive hunger.
How I sought something similar and so completely perverse.
My fingertips danced over to the pallid skin
as I found myself having drawn too close,
investigating the cadaver and subsequently appraising it.
As much as I hate to admit it,
what use did he have for flesh anymore, anyway?
These thoughts could hardly even be called my own.
I wouldn't have been able to tear skin away
with my bare hands, not in my weakened state.
My tantalized digits drifted over to the splint,
pulling one of pitons free.
as my hands quivered in disbelief.
Hunger had completely strangled my appeals
to my frazzled mind that they made to decency.
The metal stake felt heavy in my hands and I closed my eyes
tautly, repeating to myself again and again,
he wouldn't feel a thing, just to steel myself.
My salivating jaw quivered as I positioned the
pointed tip to pluck three of the most
tender and accessible meat available.
There was only slight resistance from the soft surface
of his left eye as the membrane was breached by the stake.
The pitons in the section, smooth and swift
before being drawn back with a firm tug.
My shaking fingernails were more than sufficient to tear
away the stake attached to the back of the round opening.
Leaving blood drizzling down his face as I
popped a macabre reward into my mouth.
It tore easily between my teeth.
A man's gotta eat, right?
The sustenance providing the corpse beneath my muck-covered
knees didn't even remind me of a friend anymore,
and the thought of his wife or children held
no place in my mind as I punctured the top of his
chest cavity with the piton before
dragging downwards towards the skin.
The sensation was like tearing a particularly
tough and clammy leather, and disembowelment
filled my soiled, clenching hands
with a variety of succulent meats.
Perhaps even then I had become something
completely different, something violently ravenous
as I lifted these greedy piles of what had been
my friend's insides into my salivating maul,
skin and organ alike devoured with wanted detachment.
Squishing heartily between grinding
things as I completely had given in.
I noted something else you might not know,
between my gnashing teeth and tearing fingers
was a dull sensation of being watched.
Unable to draw myself away from my first meal
in over a week, I grew tentative and tense at it,
increasingly apparent that myself was being
appraised by some unnatural presence,
being judged for my actions I had taken to survive.
Before I could dwell on this for far too long,
my meal was interrupted by a low rumbling laughter.
My filled mouth grunted with distress as I pulled myself
back to another wall of the mine shaft, scrambling away at
the realization that the laughter had come from behind me.
Much like the hunger, what I now know is something
I've had to discover and reconcile with
in my unnerving brush with morality.
I'd learned that there's a price to pay
for eating these flesh in these woods.
Surely my disemboweled friend begun to rise
as the separate flaps over his torso
begun to hang loose and open, allowing what gnarled viscera
that remained to spill forward onto the dirt below.
(ominous, dramatic music)
His missing left eye offered a disturbing view of the
howled and bloody caverns now exposed within his skull.
What -
what had I done?
You can't be serious, he snarled fiercely,
his face twisting with bemused rage,
like he might break out in laughter
or explode at any moment.
I could do naught but slink back with a guilty
whimper, my thoughts and reasonings
suppressed by this deafening hunger.
I could not even fathom what caused my friend to rise
or if this was some sort of hallucination, but what had
possessed his ravaged body was something unnatural.
Still, he pressed forward with his
supernatural, jerking movements,
flashing his reddened teeth as his words
bored holes into my head, blood, spit flying
from his frothing, enraged lips.
How could you go and do such a stupid thing,
giving yourself to him, what in God's name are you thinking?
I had never heard him take such an intense and hostile
tone in my life, as my lungs burned I hyperventilated
in the muggy air, my chest rising and falling radically
as my gaze locked with one of the remaining eyes
in that vindictive body shuffling towards me
until it loomed overhead creating
a splitting pain in each temple.
Just as the body descended onto me to pin me against a wall
I threw myself out of the way,
recuperating on my knees just a short distance away
before plunging back onto my feet and scrambling
down the open tunnel, desperate to escape this
mortifying consequence of my actions.
A terrified and guttural wail built in my throat
as my arms and legs pumped in reckless sprint.
Tattered boots smacking against the compact dirt
and echoing down the twisting caverns,
I knew only one thing, and that is I must run,
but I had no idea where to go.
Suddenly, the pressure in my temples burst forth,
sending me crashing to my knees in agony
before writhing on my back, twisting and thrashing.
I placed my hands on my head, I could feel twisted,
bony protrusions sprouting forth.
Pushing free from my skull with an awful grinding crunch
which made my eyes water and my teeth grit,
my wails throat's pain reverberated through the caverns.
Only to be answered by one creature,
a brown-cloaked figure loomed above me
as my head, wracked with agony.
A quiet observer who had only now drawn near.
Its head was a bleached deer skull
sporting an imposing pair of familiar looking antlers,
though the blinding pain which
wrecked every fiber of my being.
I couldn't feel any fear towards this creature,
instead just belonging.
There's a price to pay for satisfying
my hunger with such inhuman depravity.
And humanity was precisely the debt I had incurred.
Hunger had regressed my mind into something detached and
animalistic, and now I was changing to reflect that.
Now I belonged to the Medea.
Discarding the flesh peeling from my face and head in droves
I threw my head back in another stark cry.
(distant howling)
A cry for a hunt.
A cry to feed.
And let me tell you something.
There's only one thing I know now,
and it's a thing that I told you,
and it's a thing I can sum up with only one word,
and the only thing is I still know.
Hunger.
(howling)
(menacing laughter)
- [Announcer] Watch new scary vids
every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
(upbeat instrumental music)