The Beast of Barcroft

by Bill Schweigart

  “Maybe Garfield didn’t get the memo? What if someone screwed up his den and he relocated here?”

  “Hello? The screaming, the stones?” She cupped her hand to her ear. “Nothing.”

  “I can’t let you go in there.”

  “ ‘Let me’?”

  “I’m not going to let you crawl in there and get mauled.”

  “Not when you can maul me in the rose park?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on.”

  “Are you going to give me a boost here or not?”

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Ben relented, cupped his hands for her boot, and boosted her up to the entrance.

  The pipe was large enough that she could crouch and make her way in without getting on her hands and knees. She turned around and flashed a wide, satisfied smile down to him.

  “Don’t get eaten,” said Ben.

  She pulled her shirt over her nose again and ventured inside. Within two steps, her smile vanished. The rot was sharp and overpowering in the close confines of the pipe, funneled right to her with no fresh air to dissipate it. It was all she could do not to throw up. She shone her light forward, hoping to find the source without getting much closer, but it was a small flashlight and the beam gave way to pitch black after ten feet.

  She inched forward carefully, in a crouch, one hand pressing the shirt to her face, the other hand aiming the light forward. A small stream and a layer of slime ran along the bottom of the curved tunnel, and slipping would not help her situation. Whatever was causing the smell was upstream and the water was polluted. After advancing ten feet, Lindsay’s beam revealed a sharp turn ahead to the left. Where the tunnel veered out of sight, the water passed over a heap, bloated and half-hidden around the bend. Ben’s dog. Or maybe a deer. It wasn’t until she was nearly upon it that she realized it was wearing flannel.

  She gasped into her shirt and staggered backward.

  “You okay?”

  She maintained her balance and fought the urge to vomit. She turned toward the gaping hole of daylight twenty feet back down the pipe to Ben.

  “It’s a body!” she yelled into her shirt.

  “What?”

  “A bod—”

  The attack flattened her. She saw the circle of daylight, then nothing. Utter black. It took her a moment to register what was happening, and when she tried to scream, her face was pressed into the rotten drain water.

  Then came the thrashing. It was on top of her.

  It wrenched her back and forth with blinding speed, rattling her brain in her skull and scrambling her thoughts. She had no time to be scared, and when coherent thoughts came, she fought to fit the fragments into context. Ambush from behind. Neck strike. Consistent with mountain lion. Ben was right. She wondered why the biting did not hurt more. The punctures, the teeth. She heard the animal growl then, low and frustrated, as it shook her into the sides of the drainpipe and back down into the water, and she remembered the backpack.

  For a moment, it gave her hope. She fought to slip out of it then, but the animal slammed her into the walls and she could get no purchase on the slick surface beneath her. And the backpack was not tearing. It was not until she saw the blessed circle of daylight recede that she realized she was being pulled deeper into the throat of the tunnel and she panicked. Once around the bend, she would never see daylight again. She felt the other body against her leg and knew she was next.

  She heard frantic splashing in front of her and saw Ben scrambling toward her on all fours. She reached out and grabbed his hand. He clutched her wrist with both hands and pulled, but he had no leverage in the muck. Now the beast pulled them both toward the elbow in the tunnel as a single unit, but with one arm held in Ben’s, Lindsay now had a fixed point in all of the thrashing, and she slipped her other arm from the pack. As her shoulder wrenched free, the shaking became less intense. She grabbed Ben’s wrist with her free hand then, and when she had a firm grip, she freed her other hand. The pack shook free, and as she was released from its grip Lindsay and Ben shot forward as if flung from a catapult. Behind them, they heard the animal tumble backward, ricocheting off the walls. Although she felt it more than she heard it, the pipe’s walls reverberated with the low, electric growl of the beast.

  Shaken senseless, Lindsay was too dazed to get her bearings. She felt something tugging her again, this time Ben, yanking her by her belt and her arm. There was no up or down, left or right. There was only the blessed circle of light, getting bigger now. Still, there was twenty feet of muck separating her from the gaping circle of daylight, closer now, but an apex predator, disturbed in its den, was closer still. The low, frustrated growl became a high-pitched shriek and in the confines of the tunnel, it sounded like propeller blades drawing closer. She was on all fours now, mindless of the stench and the slime, scurrying like mad. She and Ben pushed and pulled each other the last few feet to the lip and spilled out into Four Mile Run.

  Ben pulled her to her feet and shoved her across the stream, away from the pipe. She dashed up the opposite bank as he hurled rock after rock into the pipe, yelling obscenities. Finally, he was on the bank next to her and they clambered up the steep face of the valley until they emerged onto the higher W&OD trail, panting. With the stream and enough distance between them, they collapsed on the trail, chests heaving, keeping their eyes on the drainpipe’s mouth below. They were both caked with mud and slime and soaked through with rancid water, shaking violently. Ben turned to her. He looked like he had crawled out of a toilet.

  When they caught their breath enough to stand again, they headed south.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about that fucking kiss.”

  “Deal.”

  —

  Lindsay felt foolish in the Virginia Hospital Center emergency room, separated from the rest of the beds by a curtain, clutching a thin cloth gown to her chest as a nurse irrigated her back.

  Lindsay had agreed to be taken to the emergency room only after she convinced Ben to let her shower first at his place and borrow some sweatpants and a sweatshirt. His phone had been smashed, and hers was still in the tunnel, probably worse off and waterlogged, so they could not call for a ride, let alone the police or the Arlington Department of Health. They had trudged through his neighborhood with the sun going down and the wind picking up, wet, shaking with cold, and caked in mud. Even after her piping-hot shower and a cup of emergency-room coffee, she was now half-naked, wet, and shivering all over again. The solution used to irrigate her wounds was shot at a high pressure, and it stung her raw back. What stung worse was her pride.

  “You just have some minor lacerations, no puncture wounds,” said the nurse. “Pretty lucky, considering.”

  Lindsay didn’t answer. She didn’t trust her own voice.

  “I’m Lisa,” the nurse continued. “I’m a friend of Ben’s.”

  Great, thought Lindsay.

  “What were you guys doing out there?”

  Lindsay cleared her throat. “Being incredibly stupid.”

  “Well, I got that much.”

  Lindsay smiled. “Cougar hunting.”

  “Try the bars next time.”

  Lisa turned for the door, but Lindsay cleared her throat and asked, “Could I maybe borrow your phone for a minute?”

  The nurse smiled and removed a cellphone from the pocket of her scrubs.

  Faith was in mid-laugh when she answered and said, “Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Lindsay.”

  “Oh my God, Lindsay, I can barely hear you!” There was loud music in the background and what sounded like cheering. “Did you get a new number?”

  “I’ll explain later. Can you meet me at—”

  “You should totally meet us at Carpool! Everyone is here and Taylor is making us piss our pants.” At that, Lindsay heard an explosion of laughter in the background. She had never heard Taylor’s name before and had no
idea who made up us.

  “I can’t come out,” she said, pushing her voice as loud as it would go without quavering. “I’m in the emergency—”

  “Babe, I so can’t hear you. Call you later, okay?”

  The line went dead. Lindsay stared at the phone for a moment, then handed it back to the nurse.

  “Bad connection,” said Lindsay.

  “Right,” said Lisa, walking out of the room. She returned with a doctor, a woman who looked to be Lindsay’s age but regarded her patient over the chart and the rims of her eyeglasses as if Lindsay were a child. The doctor stitched a gash below her left shoulder and another above her right buttock, administered a rabies vaccine, then a tetanus vaccine for the filthy water the gashes had been exposed to. Finally, she prescribed some antibiotics that Lindsay would have to take several times a day, with strict instructions to watch the lacerated areas, and return immediately if there were any signs of infection. “And stay out of sewers,” she added. Lindsay agreed and got dressed.

  Ben was waiting for her in the emergency room with a female police officer. It sounded like a heated conversation when she approached.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Just a couple of stitches. We can go.”

  “Just a second,” said the officer. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Ben had already given her the drainpipe’s location. The cat was probably long gone by now, escaped deeper into the tunnel and out through another exit, wherever that might be. Lindsay told the officer as much but reiterated that sending patrol officers around the pipe at night would probably not be a good idea. If the cat was still in there, he might be guarding his food. If he had not taken it with him.

  “If that food is what you say it is, we can’t wait.” She looked at Ben. “Next time, leave this sort of thing to the professionals.”

  Ben pointed at Lindsay. “She’s the National Zoo’s assistant curator for great cats. I had to go to the Smithsonian to get someone to take this seriously. And she found it. With a body. When the Arlington police are that professional, maybe I can stop carrying a baseball bat to take out the trash.”

  Lindsay was impressed he remembered her exact title, but at the moment the last thing she felt was professional. She had paid her own way through Michigan State’s zoology program, working nights and volunteering as a docent on weekends, then again through Cornell for her master’s. After, she bounced from zoo to zoo, working her way up from a keeper to assistant curator at smaller zoos. After years of work and study at smaller regional zoos, she finally won the coveted assistant curatorship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo, only to let the very animal she specialized in get the jump on her in an uncontrolled environment. She thought it was sick, and therefore acting inconsistently and unpredictably, but that was no excuse. Today had been a disaster on every conceivable level. She had gotten cocky and it nearly killed her. With everything she knew, after everything she had seen, it had happened again. She knew she should be grateful that she was alive, but mostly, she felt humiliated.

  In the car, Ben asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Why are you in a pissing contest with a cop?”

  “She didn’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t believe you until I saw the hair sample.”

  “You weren’t a bitch about it.”

  “Nice.”

  Ben gave a wry smile. “In my defense, I was pretty agitated at the time.”

  Ben drove north on George Mason and pulled into a twenty-four-hour pharmacy.

  “Ben, I’m fine. Really. I can get the pills by myself.”

  “I know you can, but I’m going to watch you fill the prescription,” he said, pointing to the chrome, Art Deco diner across the street, “then I’m going to watch you take it with some greasy diner food.”

  She ordered a farmer’s omelet, he a burger and fries. Tired and deflated, she barely spoke as they waited for their food. Ben was quiet as well and stared out the window, his second cup of coffee nearly drained in front of him. As their food arrived, she found herself suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. Tears welled in her eyes and the more she tried to stop them, the more they came.

  Ben looked out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Stop beating yourself up,” he said. “Trust me, it doesn’t do any good.”

  Lindsay shook her head and gave her eyes a rough swipe. “Ah! All right, I’m done. The cat was probably going to be put down anyway, but because dumbass me let myself get attacked, it’s official. Some professional…” Her chin quivered as she struggled with the last words.

  “When they put it down, I’m going to dig it up and shoot it again.”

  “Ben, you do realize it’s my job to conserve these animals and not butcher them?” She looked out the window, but no matter how indignant Ben made her, she still felt selfish. Her mind kept returning to what Curator Bankbridge would say about this. She had doomed a cat—even one that very likely was a killer—and her reputation, and it was nobody’s fault but her own.

  “And my job is an analyst for the Department of Defense.”

  “Sounds utterly fascinating.”

  “It’s excruciatingly dull. My point is, I’m a details guy.”

  “So?”

  “So this cat, this thing rather, is not a normal cat. And as much as your heart bleeds for it, it needs to be put down.”

  “I’m sorry about your dog, but it’s the cat’s nature.”

  “Look, I’m not such an asshole that I can’t recognize the…beauty of such an animal. I get it. All I do is watch Discovery Channel. I mean, a mountain lion in my backyard? Totally amazing. I can’t put my finger on it, but something was…off.”

  “You were terrified.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Ben, it’s okay to be scared. It’s completely understandable.”

  Ben slammed his coffee cup on the tabletop. The waitress ambled over to wipe up the mess and refill his cup. She gave him a dirty look and mumbled the word decaf as she walked away.

  He rubbed his temples. “I’m not fearless. I’m not a tough guy. I was on…happy pills.”

  “They’re not working.”

  “I’m not on them anymore.”

  “Reconsider.”

  He waved her off. “Look, what I’m saying is they took the edge off of things. Leveled everything out. It was like I was there, but I was watching myself, one ‘me’ removed. I was shocked, stunned, speechless…all of it. But by the time I got scared, I was already chasing this thing that had my dog in its mouth. Finally, when I was out of breath and it doubled back, it could have ripped my throat out, but instead, it stopped just short. As close as you and I are right now. Watching me.”

  “It’s bizarre behavior for sure, but we’re likely dealing with a dangerous—but most likely sick—animal.”

  “It was more than that. It was…wrong.”

  Lindsay leaned forward in their booth. “My family took me camping once when I was a little girl. All of us were in a tent, me, my parents…and I couldn’t sleep. Then I heard this rustling in the leaves outside. We’d been camping at this spot before, and I’d seen raccoons at night, so I didn’t think anything of it. Then I heard this low, heavy grunt and I knew it wasn’t a raccoon. I felt it. I slipped out of my sleeping bag, grabbed the flashlight, and pulled down the back flap of the tent. I shone my light out and ten yards behind the tent something settled on a mound. Then the mound itself moved and two eyes shone right back at me. I froze. It was a black bear. Now, black bears are generally harmless if you don’t corner them or mess with their cubs, but I was eight or so and let’s just say I didn’t have access to Wikipedia at the time. All I could do was turn off the light. I was terrified. Then I realized, I didn’t want to not know where the bear was, so I turned the flashlight back on. The bear actually settled down then, just took a rest in the leaves behind the tent, and watched the light. I tried to whisper to my parents
, but no sound came out. After a while, it stood up with another grunt and ambled off, totally disinterested. It looked at me one last time, then disappeared over the ridgeline behind our tent. Even though I was scared, I felt like this creature was actually dismissing me.”

  “No.” Ben shook his head. “I’m telling you, this was different.”

  “It’s natural to anthropomorphize.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I was there today.”

  He met her eyes over his coffee cup. “So was I.”

  “Embarrassing as it is for me, it was acting in defense of its den. In other words, normally.”

  “You said yourself it wasn’t a normal spot for a den.”

  She sat back in the booth and sighed. She looked out the window, but felt him staring at her, waiting for a reply. Finally, she snatched the menu from the table. “You want dessert?”

  —

  Exhausted and full, they pulled into Ben’s driveway near midnight.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive? You can crash on the couch.” He touched his heart and held his hand up.

  She laughed. “I’ll be back in Georgetown in ten minutes.” She remembered his break-in and the prints in his basement then. “You want me to walk you in?”

  Ben shook his head. “No girl has ever offered to walk me to my doorstep before.” A wry smile touched his lips. “No, I’m fine.”

  They got out of the car, both of them looking around instinctively. When they each realized what the other was doing they laughed. Lindsay crossed the lawn toward her car and Ben headed toward the door. He called after her.

  “Other than the horribly awkward kiss, the discovery of human remains, and the mountain lion attack, it was a pretty good day.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to mention the kiss.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I can mention it. You’re forbidden.”

  Suddenly, she ran to him and threw her arms around him, squeezing him hard. “Thank you,” she said, then jogged back to the driver’s side of her car before he could hug her back.

  She started the car and he tapped the window.