The Monkey's Paw

Granted. It was an exceptional storm. A storm that meteorologists would study and publish papers on, in the hopes of making that one breakthrough that would catapult them from obscurity to prominence. None would ever make that ascension. The smart ones would give up their pursuits before it consumed them to the point of obsession. Leaving this aberration for the conspiracy theorists to debate if it was caused by some weather control device operated by some government, secret society, or aliens. The storm was, after all, quite simply impossible. So localized that did not even register on the instruments of nearby weather monitoring stations. So short lived that the only evidence that it ever took place, aside from the destruction, were the handful of videos from the eye witnesses.

Unlike the tornadoes and hurricanes typically used for comparison, this storm was not a cacophony of violence surrounding a core of relative tranquility. The videos clearly showed the exact opposite. A calm swirling of air gentling rusting leaves surrounding a vortex of destruction that limited itself to a single house, in the most uncanny way. Within the vortex, the house was being pulled apart. Lifted in a thousand tiny pieces, straight up into the sky, never to be seen again. Eventually, enough of the house had been removed to show a person in the middle of all the chaos --standing huddled, clutching something too small to make out in the videos-- and then they were gone. Taken so fast that they were there in one frame and gone in the next. Conspiracy theorists heralded what happened next as proof that this was a targeted attack and no natural phenomenon. The storm dissipated. Within seconds after the figure vanished from the screen, the swirling dirt fell to the ground, the trees stopped swaying, and all that could be seen where the house once stood was a pristine deck and a fence painted with the bloody remains of that lone person seen briefly and yet forever immortalized in the annals of the mysterious and unexplained.