[FEATURE] FINDING GIGANTOPITHECUS BY ASHLEY STOKES

2/9/2021

Bolam Lake in Northumbria is supposedly haunted by an eight-foot yeti with red eyes that in 2003 spooked several anglers, dog walkers and a couple having al fresco sex during a camping trip.

Finding Gigantopithecus
by
Ashley Stokes

It’s sometime in the summer of 2011, and I am a 41-year-old hard-drinking, mightily disappointed and practically unknown writer living in an ex-council flat on the outskirts of Norwich’s Golden Triangle area. Unable to sleep, as I often am, I find myself on the quiet side of midnight channel-hopping again when I should be tucked up and dreaming uneasily. I am dogged by a recurring feeling. Something still might happen tonight. I might receive a call, an email, a message that might, if not change everything, at least lessen the weight of it all, the last fifteen years of trying to make it as a working fiction writer when I could have easily become a lawyer or a journalist and not had to nail my demons to the screen every day for zero pence a year. It is in this semi-alive state of mind that I stumble upon an episode of the new Discovery Channel series, Finding Bigfoot.

It’s rubbish, obviously. The bigfoot they investigate is a dark figure filmed as it shambles behind some kids playing in a river or canoeing or something. Caught on a camera phone, it’s a smudge, a hazy blur. To use language that I’ll later become very familiar with, it’s ‘shot with a potato’, it’s ‘blobsquatch’. If it’s not someone mucking about in a bear suit, it could easily be a moderately tall man in a black parka merely out of focus. But, boy, are the team arguing the toss over this. Every disturbance in the mud, every broken twig or nick on the bark is unquestionable evidence that changes the whole course of science. How serious are these people? How earnest and needy?

It’s here the writer’s question ambushes me.

What if?

What if this phenomenon happened not only in backwoods America, in North Carolina, Oregon and Alaska, etc., but in my home town of Sutton, Surrey?

I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of a ten-year race and chase, a contest with a hairy beast that would run me ragged, lure me into the woods, have me lost in the brambles and stinging nettles – but, in the end, I would emerge blinking into the light with some sort of novel about the perils of living in your own head, as well as the more important issue of whether a gigantopithecus lives in north Surrey. It will also connect me to vast imaginative spaces, open up all sorts of storytelling possibilities that lead me back to what originally thrilled me in fiction. I will retrace my steps back to weird horror, and, though it might seem perverse, a much happier state of mind. I will recover my lost sense of self and direction.

The next day I scribble out some character sketches and ideas in my notebook. Four characters – Kevin (my true believer), Gorgo, Maxine and Derek Funnel – come to me very easily, along with the name of the legendary beast, The North Surrey Gigantopithecus. But I soon feel an idiot and shelve the idea. It’s not serious and I am supposed to be a serious writer. My last book, The Syllabus of Errors, had been laced with images of a fascism that lurks in the English suburbs ready to pounce and purge us of our better natures and instincts. It had things to say.

I give up on the Gigantopithecus idea.

Most ideas wither.

It’s good that they wither.

Fools rush in…

A few months later, The Sun and the Daily Telegraph are reporting a bigfoot sighting in Tunbridge Wells, complete with an artist’s impression that looks like a child’s drawing of Chewbacca, and supported by loads of stories of bigfoots in Kent that go back to the war.

I may be on to something after all.

The beast is amok.

A year passes and I commit to writing the story. I start it as a short story using a text-and-footnotes format I’ve used a couple of times already (in A Short Story about a Short Film, in The Syllabus of Errors collection, for example). I borrow a field report template from America’s Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and have Maxine, the scientist and sceptic of the team, write up a new sighting. In footnotes, Kevin vigorously refutes her conclusions, using shonky reasoning, magic thinking and conspiracy logic, plus a lot of shouting and haranguing. Bigfoot guys are angry, and they don’t like being contradicted. This makes them sad in both senses of the word. I work this out early.

As Kevin’s voice starts to overwhelm the short story and push it into first novella then novel territory, three things occur to me.

Firstly, the legend of a bigfoot-style creature living in the grey suburbs where I grew up is intrinsically funny and does make me laugh (a lot), though kind of hysterically, like I’m trying not to admit something. This might sound self-congratulatory or self-indulgent, laughing at your own jokes, but if the writing doesn’t make me laugh I assume it won’t entertain anyone else.

Secondly, the idea of some ancient, reclusive, powerful and inscrutable beast living unseen and unstudied in the forests of the Earth is, at heart, both frightening and mythic. I can sense how the pursuit of it might drive someone mad. The madness of pursuit is the horror element, not the existence of the monster itself.

Then, as I design North Surrey Gigantopithecus lore for Kevin, I start to have flashbacks to my late childhood, to the sense I had of a more exciting ‘mysterious world’ being just out of reach (in my teens, I often felt I’d be much happier and involved living in the distant past or far future; satisfying this longing determined pretty much everything I read or watched until I was about sixteen).

I grew up on 2000AD, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who and Target Doctor Who novelisations, the Claremont-Byrne Uncanny X-Men run, the Armada Ghost Book series, the John Mills Quatermass, and a lot of other fantastical stuff as well. I also liked non-fiction books about ghosts, mysteries, cryptids and UFOs that presented the paranormal as certain, not contested. It strikes me, looking back at that time now, a time, of course, with relatively little TV and no internet, how the weird and strange mingled with the real and – to me, just about able to read a newspaper – boring news.

At a time when TV and newspapers had more authority, the mysterious could become the profound, the revelatory rather than the dismissably crankish. Nationwide, the current affairs programme that followed the six o’clock news regularly broadcast items on, say, the increased frequency of sightings of Satan in the south-east of England immediately after something about new traffic lights being trialled in Weybridge, as if these items were of equal resonance. You would be wise to prepare yourself for both slightly longer waiting times at junctions and a sudden manifestation of the Goat of Mendes, especially if you own an outdoor shed. The Daily Express, which my parents bought, always had reports of cigar-shaped UFOs swooping across the South Downs, or square-headed aliens winking in and out of existence in Reigate or Dorking. In the more restricted 1970s, we emerged into a world of dread and fear, where strange things lurked behind the mock-Tudor houses and in the hedgerows and coppices. I vividly remembered the 1980 ITV series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, with its monumental-sounding theme tune and serious discussions about unexplained phenomena. Memories of its episode ‘The Missing Apemen’ would feed directly into Kevin lore and eventually add another layer to the story. It’s not just, what if there is a bigfoot in Sutton? It’s also, what if that lost world of seventies exotica is the real world after all? The thing is: I soon work out that this lost world is not just the real world to Kevin. We are not alone.

If I thought I had invented the idea of bigfoot research teams in England, I couldn’t have been more wrong. There have been reports and sightings across the UK. There are groups and teams everywhere. There are people who not only swear blind that they’ve seen a relict hominid in England, but also that the sighting was the defining moment of their lives. There are folkloric and ancient accounts of wildmen and woodwose and the odd hairy scamperer carved on a panel in a church somewhere in the sticks, but modern sightings also proliferate. Bolam Lake in Northumbria is supposedly haunted by an eight-foot yeti with red eyes that in 2003 spooked several anglers, dog walkers and a couple having al fresco sex during a camping trip. These accounts attracted the attention of the British Hominid Research Organisation and the Centre for Fortean Zoology in Exeter. The latter reckon they saw it and it was massive and possibly made out of shadows.

Even closer to home for Kevin and me, the Surrey Hills are home to the Box Hill Ape, a sighting of which made the Daily Star in 2020. In 2012, a driver reported a ‘dark figure with no features’ that ran across the dual carriageway opposite North East Surrey College of Technology, which is where Kevin took a computer course in the late eighties and was traumatized by the girls nicknaming him the Skunky Gibbon.

The beast is real, as Kevin would say. We’ve seen it loads of times.

Some of these reported encounters have a proper comedy vibe to them, if you believe that the soul of comedy is found in truth and pain. A woman who reported seeing the Sherwood Forest Thing on the Worksop-to-Nottingham road – massive, hairy, naked and holding the hand of an infant Sherwood Forest Thing – was most offended that she’d seen its furry willy and that it was allowed to display its privates in broad daylight. She posted this anonymously, of course. She was worried about what people would think of her, that she’d lost her marbles. A more chilling undercurrent can be sensed in many reports. Someone doesn’t want to admit what they saw in case no one believes them. People can believe they’ll be sectioned, exiled, written off as demented or deluded.

There seems to me to be an essential tension between what we want to believe and what happens to us when we believe.

The idea of bigfoot must be rooted in the (overactive) imagination (a vivid fantasy life is nourishing for some people, less so for others) yet bigfoot also speaks to some lost part of us. It stands for epic freedom, of living unhindered, escaping capture, existing as part of nature rather than as an abuser and consumer of the natural world. In going all out to hunt and observe it, you are owned too by its freedom, you belong at last.

On the other hand, most accounts of sightings, from across the world, not just from the south-east of England, have the logic of a weird horror story. Something outside of nature is glimpsed. No one believes or will believe us. We are increasingly threatened and fray at our edges. There is no resolution for us, only reverberations of the eeriness that initially threw us out of kilter. We may be enlightened. We may be doomed. We may be unable to tell the difference between doom and enlightenment. This is what we should be trying to describe, even though describing it is impossible.

The modern bigfoot phenomenon in America was kickstarted in 1958 when outsized apish footprints were discovered alongside a road near to Bluff Creek, California (site of the later Paterson-Gimlin encounter that featured prominently in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World). When the discoverer of the tracks, Ray Wallace, died in 2002, his children announced that he had faked the tracks. It was, after all, ‘just a joke’.

This has me wondering still. What is more terrifying: realising that you believed and dedicated yourself to this prank, followed the prankster until his end, until the squandering of your time and life is revealed as the punchline, that the joke was on you. Or that even when the joke is over and how it works has been explained to you, you still insist that it wasn’t a joke. You still find yourself alone in the dark, in the trees, night-vision goggles on, camera ready, alert and waiting, waiting for the return of that one last great thing that made sense to you, that offered out to you an understanding paw.

Gigantic by Ashley Stokes is out now from Unsung Stories.

Read a review of Gigantic by Run Along The Shelves

https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2021/9/2/gigantic-by-ashley-stokes

Gigantic by Ashley Stokes

“I wasn’t sure you would get this far, so thanks a million already. You opened the mystery bag… Inside the bag, along with this letter, is a dossier that describes the whole story.”

Kevin Stubbs is a Knower. He knows life hasn’t always treated him fairly. He knows he wants to be allowed access to his son again. But most of all, he knows that the London Borough of Sutton is being stalked by a nine-foot-tall, red-eyed, hairy relict hominid – the North Surrey Gigantopithecus.

Armed with a thermal imaging camera (aka the Heat Ray) and a Trifield 100XE electromagnetic field reader (aka the Tractor Beam), Kevin and his trusty comrades in the GIT (aka the Gigantopithecus Intelligence Team) set out to investigate a new sighting on the outskirts of Sutton. If real, it will finally prove to the world that the infamous Gartree-Hogg footage was genuine, and a British Bigfoot is living in suburban London: FACT. But what he discovers undermines everything he believes in – and forces Kevin to face up to his own failures, and the very real, very scary prospect that he might have got it all terribly wrong.

Ashley Stokes

Ashley Stokes was born in Carshalton, Surrey in 1970 and educated at St Anne's College, Oxford and the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Touching the Starfish (Unthank Books, 2010) and The Syllabus of Errors (Unthank Books, 2013), and edited the Unthology series and The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings (Unthank Books, 2016). His short fiction has appeared in, among others: Black Static, Tales from the Shadow Booth, BFS Horizons and Out of the Darkness (edited by Dan Coxon). He lives in Norwich.