The Toolshed

Author's note: This story is part of the Breck Farm Anthology.
Breck Farm seems to be a nexus of horrors. From the urban legend Dog-Gone to the ghostly dream stalker Redmask, it seems no end of waking nightmares are drawn to that old campsite. This tale chronicles one such horror - the heinous experiments that took place in The Toolshed.
It's the early 1980s. Breck Farm was not a campsite by this point, but it was still a farm, and a successful one at that. While some of its land was used for crop growing, most of it was for rearing animals - cows, pigs and a few chickens. These animals were raised for slaughter, and the local abattoirs agreed that there was something in the meat that customers couldn't resist. Around 1982 the farm had several renovations, and multiple new buildings were built to increase productivity. This also meant that the older parts of the farm were locked off. One such area was the old toolshed. Previously used, as one might expect, to store tools, it was turned into a sort of man-cave for the proprieter of the farm, Martin Wallace. 
Business was booming until 1984. An outbreak of ASF swept through the farm, rendering almost half of the pigs there diseased, and eventually, dead. Martin, distraught at this, desperately tried to quarantine his remaining animals, but it wasn't long until there were only a few pigs left. Martin wracked his brains for a solution, and eventually one came. But it was so vile, so morally and medically abhorrent that he swore not to do it. But with his farm's livelihood on the line, he did the unspeakable. Martin took one of the pig corpses into his toolshed, and the next morning, there was one more pig alive. It shambled around with a dead look in its eyes, and the other pigs seemed absolutely terrified by it. 
Nobody at the farm understood how it could have happened - nobody but Martin. This was the first of many horrifc acts that Martin would perform.
In 1985 one of Martin's prized bulls was injured by a piece of farm equipment. Multiple farmhands pleaded to Martin to take the animal to a vet, but instead, under cover of darkness, he brought the dying cow to his toolshed, along with the corpse of a pig. The next morning, the bull stumbled out of the toolshed. Where there was previously a gaping hole in its side, skin had been grafted over the wound, and not its own. Bone poked through the flesh in unnatural angles. That wasn't the only 'modification' to it. The bull had previously wounded its hoof, and now, that hoof was gone. In its place was a pig's trotter, threatening to buckle under the weight. At the sight of it, several farmhands quit their jobs, which led Martin to take matters into his own hands.
Between 1985 and 1989, Martin continued his experiments in the old toolshed, taking any old or wounded animals and 'improving' them. Some of his experiments were so awful that I will not mention them in this story. Despite this, business was still booming. The only visitors the farm got were men from the slaughterhouse, and they couldn't care less how an animal looked, as long as it was alive. Eventually, word got out about Martin's experiments, and a team of journalists were sent to the farm to investigate. What they found was horrifying.
Every single animal at the farm had been maimed and mutilated beyond anything they had seen. Cows staggered around the farmyard, some with extra limbs grafted onto the sides, kicking wildly or hanging limp. Any wounds were covered with rusted stitches and festering skin grafts. The pigsty was a nightmare, with a pile of dead pigs in the centre - Martin's "spare parts". The pigs that were alive shuffled around with mismatched limbs and extra appendages. One sat in the corner, barely breathing. Its head had been replaced with a cow's.
The journalists immediately called for police backup, which arrived, storming the farm in force. They broke into the toolshed, and what was inside was even worse than the rest of the farm. Pig corpses sat on operating tables, their faces removed and brains exposed. Gator cables and electro-convulsive equipment littered the shed, some connected to twitching animal corpses. Some of these were butchered beyond recognition, with eight limbs and bodies covered with blood and stitches. Martin had brought countless animals back from near-death by means of electricity and heinous surgeries no sane doctor would ever think of performing on an animal. Martin was nowhere to be found. In an impulsive decision from the group, one of the journalists found a tank of gasoline and burned the building to the ground. All of Martin's creations were rounded up and shot. 
In the years that followed, Martin's estranged son, Ellis, took over the farm, turning it into a campsite. The horrors of the toolshed were mostly forgotten, but there was something that remained. Screams could occasionally be heard on the hot summer nights, like an animal in pain. Glimpses of some kind of creature in the forest. Those who have seen it say it resembles a cow, but with most of its back split open. Inside that gaping hole in its back, they say, lies the body of a man, his body connected to the cow's by cables and stitches. His limbs are the cow's limbs. His brain is the cow's brain. When he twitches, the cow twitches. When he screams, the cow screams. This is Martin's magnum opus, a way for him to live on in the very way he created his own mockery of life. Although, whether his 'livestock' could be considered alive is a question in itself...
Category:Beings