The hunter

My name is David Nelson, I am a bounty hunter. But not human bounty, no. I hunt something much less predictable. I hunt animals, ones that have attacked people, I track them down and either capture them or kill them. But sometimes people pay me to hunt things that aren't so easy to explain, such as the Chupacabra, or Bigfoot. Recently I have had many people who wanted to hire me to hunt the Slenderman, I turned them down. I am a man of morals, I knew Slenderman didn't exist and I wasn't going to take their money and give them nothing in return. Recently I launched one of my more unusual expeditions, and while I came back empty handed I was left with quite the tale. I was hired by a woman to hunt a creature that she claimed had saved her life. She wouldn't tell me the details. She wanted it alive, and she assured me she could offer adequate compensation. Against my better judgement I agreed. As always I said goodbye to my wife and three kids and headed out to whatever isolated location my target called home. After I left I pulled out the folder my researcher had given me on the creature. I am not exaggerating when I say this thing looked like something straight out of hell. It had the general form of a man but it wasn't, it was a shark. It was depicted in a hunched position with blood covering it's hands and mouth. It's eyes were soulless and full of hate. I had been put on the trail of supposed fish-man sightings before, they were actually fairly common but this one was different. It's most unusual feature was a pair of horns, like the devil himself was said to have. That was the kind of detail I didn't like to see, when people make stuff up, they tend to keep their claims pretty standard, like bigfoot or nessie. Everyone sees the same thing because it's all in their head. All based on some original hoax, which was based on reality so it would seem plausible. On the other hand when things start coming up mismatched, there is a good chance the witnesses were seeing something. The woman hadn't had the foggiest idea where this thing was, but my behind the scenes research man had narrowed it to a small strip of coastline about 20 miles east of where she lived. I grabbed my rifle and traps and got into my truck. Just five minutes after arriving on the scene I had already gotten a lay of the land, I noticed an old lighthouse nearby and headed for it. As I got closer I could see why it was abandoned, there were caves under it's foundation and the entire thing had sunk about ten feet into the ground. Now it doesn't take a genius to see that this was clearly the best place for this thing to reside. I tried to venture down carefully but I slipped, I'm not as young as I once was. At the bottom I could hear heavy breathing. Not like the the huffing and puffing of a tired runner, more like the breathing of something large. It was dark, so I pulled out my flashlight and looked around. A glint of metal caught my eye, it looked like gold. At first I thought today was my lucky day, but as I held my flashlight on it it disappeared for a second and came back. Then it moved. As what I was looking at stepped further into my light I suddenly became very concerned. The reason the gold had disappeared was simple, it wasn't some loose pirate's dubloon hidden in the basement of an old lighthouse. It was a gold sphere in the left eye socket of the very creature I was hunting. That isn't in the picture I thought as I looked around for my rifle, it was on the ground only a few feet behind me. I grabbed it and turned to face the beast but it had already reached me. It grabbed the barrel of my rifle and yanked it from my hand, hurling it across the room. In it's other hand was a knife. No, it wasn't holding it, the metal blade seemed to come from beneath the creature's skin. It put it's face right up to mine, the gold eye turned in it's socket as it looked over me. Then it stood up and began to walk away. What I did next almost surely should have gotten me killed. I yelled at it 'What, you don't got the stomach for me? Don't like yer' meat this tough?