I was first assigned to the Fisherville neighborhood in 1974, after the first reported death. Male, late fifties, caucasian. They just found him on the tracks, shattered in two, his limbs hanging limp from the sleepers. I was called into active duty not long after, fresh out of training and with a simple job assignment: make sure it never happens again.

Funny how those things go.

If only I knew how out of my depth I was. How could I? At first, it was manageable enough. A lost kid here, a hiker there. I turned them away without a lot of trouble. I hoped they would get the message; they didn't. 1977--a pair of twins were trying to climb the trestle. One of them slipped and got cut on the way down. They knew they were in trouble; when I came to help, they both scurried away. I'm told one of the kids didn't make it; he was found bled out at the bottom of the tracks, and the other one a few feet ahead, with a fractured skull. Alive, but barely.

When he came to he said things. Confused things. Things about a dangerous goat-man in the area. Utter nonsense. Dangerous, too.

Can't say that, after that, I didn't pay more attention to the area, though. Not out of fear of something lurking in the shadows, mind; I just kept my eyes open. Kids can be dead quiet when they want to. You get so used to their screams, that when they're being sneaky, they slip right past you. I wanted to avoid another tragedy, that's all. But the tragedies kept on going. 1980, January and May. 1981. 1983. The legends circulated. The Pope Lick Monster, they called it. A nine-foot-tall behemoth brandishing a rusty ax. I was naive back then; I fed into the story when I could. I underestimated the bravery, and idiocy, of the human being--I thought scary stories would scare folks away, but all they did was attract more of them. The eighties were a fucking nightmare.

The assignment was already taking its toll on my psyche. I started to become paranoid, scared of the dark. I came out less often, turned fewer people away, and to my shame, sometimes I avoided them altogether, just out of fear of causing another accident. Another '77.

Accidents. That's the word, isn't it? They were accidents, the lot of them. I knew they were. Kids taking risks, adults being stupid, me failing at my job. I asked for reassignment, but they were unwilling to consider it. 'It's a cushy job,' they told me, 'and we have nobody else who can do it as well as you.' But I knew they did. But nobody wanted to watch over the Fisherville trestle; nobody wanted anything to do with the curse of the Pope Lick Monster.

So I stayed. And the longer I stayed, the more I believed. The evil goat-man. The curse it carried. How it prowled in the night, ax in hand, trembling in anticipation of the next grisly scene... it started to hit close to home.

And the deaths kept piling up.

I was relieved of duty in the mid-nineties; November of '96, to be precise. It took months of pleading and over two decades of service before they even considered it, but eventually, I made it out. I managed to convince the higher-ups that my job was counterproductive, that all I did was stoke the flames of the Pope Lick Monster legend--flames that had become a wildfire much too long ago.

It's not a good feeling, throwing twenty-two years of your life away. To do your best, and still know you've caused more harm than prevented. The fence is there now. It outperforms me in every way.

Sometimes, I still wonder. What if they were right? Maybe there is a Pope Lick Monster. Maybe he does cause those 'accidental' deaths; maybe it's malice. After all, there are so many things I could have done to prevent them.

I could have walked away.

I could have stayed hidden.

I could have sawed off my horns.

But stubbornly I stayed, unwilling to disobey my commanding officers. I am complicit, in one way or another; every single accident, every single death from that fateful day in '77 until the end of my assignment in '96, they're all my fault. My responsibility. My burden.

I'm the Pope Lick Monster, and I'll burn in Hell.