The Beast of Barcroft

by Bill Schweigart

  Cushing hit the sirens and blue lights and drove over the curb and onto the sidewalk to get past the fire trucks and engines that now blocked the street. At the top of the block, she made a right onto Pershing and drove toward the Barcroft Community House and Four Mile Run. Once they were free of 3rd Street South and the burning house, all became dark and quiet again. She cut the sirens. From the back of the car, Lindsay stared out the window. The street sank as they headed toward the hollow of Four Mile Run, and so did her confidence. The blue lights spun. The world was aslant. It added to a feeling of vertigo. And she was in the back of a police cruiser, heading toward dark woods to find a creature that had tried to kill her three times now.

  The road bottomed out before rising again toward the Community House.

  “Down here,” said Ben. “Cut the lights.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” said Cushing.

  The officer turned right onto 7th and the world kept dropping. As the car pitched forward onto the steep dead-end street, Lindsay felt as if she had just crested the top of a roller coaster’s track, ready for the bottom of her world to fall out. She did not want to go into the woods, but she wanted out of the car. Cushing drove right to the dead end, the guardrail, the border between the sane world and the beast’s territory.

  Cushing cut the ignition, and with the lights out, all was silent and dark. She pulled her patrol rifle from the center rack between the front seats.

  “Whoa,” said Ben.

  “An AR-15 ought to even the odds a bit.”

  Lindsay took a deep breath, then tried the door. It was locked; she had forgotten she was in a police car for the moment. When she looked through the Plexiglas partition into the front seat, she saw Cushing watching her. The officer exchanged a glance with Ben, who nodded then faced front. They exited the car.

  Cushing fit her head and arm through the rifle’s two-point sling. Ben walked to Lindsay’s door, but he made no move to open it.

  “Open up,” said Lindsay.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You motherfucker.” She yanked on the door handle. “Open it! I’m going too!”

  She pounded the windows with her fists. She kicked the door. She pulled on the handle over and over again until she thought it would come off in her hand. When she was finished, she was crying. “I saved you, you asshole!” She screamed, “I can help!” She was furious and tired and afraid and secretly relieved, but most of all, she felt stung. Betrayed. When she looked at Ben through her tears, she saw his hand pressed flat to the glass. He looked at her as if she wasn’t cursing him. That same look, his face unlocked.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She could barely hear him through the glass.

  “I saved you.”

  “In every way.”

  “Let’s go,” said Cushing.

  Ben turned around. He joined Cushing at the edge of the woods, and then they were gone.

  Chapter 27

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  The pair descended the short path away from the car, leading to the trail. Branches swirled and pressed in on them in a gnarled tunnel that snagged at their clothing. Soon they were on the trail, Four Mile Run below them.

  “Now I know why you never called,” said Cushing.

  “Had my hands full.”

  “Not the wolf. Her.”

  “It’s not a wolf,” said Ben.

  “And that’s not an answer.”

  “You never asked a question.”

  “You really are an asshole.”

  “Maybe. Give me your pistol.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” She looked up and down the trail, holding the AR-15 close to her body. “Which way, Animal Planet?”

  “Down there.” He pointed to the dark hollow of Four Mile Run below them.

  “The drainpipe is north.”

  “I don’t think it’s going back to its holt.”

  “You said it yourself it holed up there before. It’s already taken one kill there.”

  “I think it’s going to head south. Out to the river and out of here for good.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s frustrated. Pissed. As much as it wants to kill me, I think it’s more sick of being on a leash. I think it wants to leave. There’s a chance we could head it off.”

  “Shouldn’t we go farther south then, make sure we don’t miss it?”

  “If it’s at all close down there, I don’t think it’ll be able to pass me up before it leaves.”

  “That’s your plan? To be bait?”

  “The second half of the plan is where you shoot it. Can I trust you to do that before it eats me?”

  “I’ll think about it.” She peered down into the gorge. “There’s no better way to get down there?”

  “Maybe, but there’s no time. And I don’t want to wander around here in the dark looking for it.”

  “Fine. After you.”

  “Stacy, seriously…thank you.”

  “I’m not doing it for you.”

  Ben approached the lip of the gorge and peered down into the darkness. Four Mile Run flowed between boulders thirty feet below. He looked across the gorge, through the trees. An apartment complex. Behind him, a sleeping Barcroft. This stream cut into the earth like a gash, right between neighborhoods. As he began to scramble down, he looked back at Stacy.

  “It’s not like that, you know. She’s gay.”

  “Wow,” said Cushing, shaking her head in the darkness. “Good thing you know about monsters, because you clearly don’t know anything about women.”

  Ben went down first, using the weeds, rocks, and toward the bottom, the riprap to keep from falling. They made slow progress in the darkness. At places it was steep, nearly vertical. They were both clinging to the cliff face when an air horn split the night’s calm.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “After last night’s community meeting bloodbath,” she called down from above, “the media has been all over this. They’ve dubbed it ‘The Beast of Barcroft.’ There’ve been hunters out here since this morning.”

  “Hunters in Arlington? Are they nuts?”

  “Rednecks running around with rifles, scientists from the zoo trying to trap it, thrill seekers…I’ve been out here all day clearing out idiots.”

  At least it can’t ambush us while we’re vertical…unless it’s already down there waiting. One thing at a time, Ben thought. Finally, he landed on a small lip of marl next to the water. A moment later, Cushing dropped down next to him. In one fluid motion, her rifle went from hanging by the sling in front of her to raised and ready.

  They looked around. It was not quite a box canyon, but it felt like one. There were only a few ways to escape, running north or south with the river, over the jagged, uneven rocks and marl, or back up the steep face. Ben doubted the kushtaka would allow them the careful minutes either option would take. But he did not plan on escaping, and at least there was no way for the beast to sneak up on them.

  “There,” said Cushing, pointing.

  There was a small clearing, right in the middle of Four Mile Run. A patch of ground the size of a car, large enough for them both to stand on. Even better, he thought. They scrabbled over the rocks until they reached it.

  The night was cold and clear. The stars shone overhead. They had that in their favor too, he thought.

  They waited. A steady breeze blew from the north. They stood back-to-back, as much for warmth as for protection, Cushing with her rifle pointing south, Ben clutching the can of hair spray in one hand and a lighter in the other, watching north.

  “Be careful with that thing,” she said.

  “I don’t care if it’s a squirrel, I’m cooking anything that moves.”

  After a time, Ben felt his adrenaline slowly fade, replaced by exhaustion and heaviness in his limbs.

  He looked over his shoulder at her. He saw her standing at the ready, peering down the trench. Beyond her, the ravine meandered down the dark channel cut into the ea
rth. A large boulder stood at a bend in the ravine, then the stream flowed out of view. Riprap armored the walls along the bottom of the hollow. Weeds shot out between the crevices toward them.

  After a long while, Ben squinted at his watch. It had been nearly an hour.

  “Stacy, I’m sorry you’re involved in all of this.”

  He felt her shrug.

  “It’s my job.”

  “This is way outside of your job description.”

  “Let’s say I believe you…what is it?”

  “A shapeshifter. Native American folklore. Kind of like a werewolf, but a wolf isn’t its only trick. Seems it can tailor itself to whoever it attacks. I’ve never been much of a cat person, and neither was my dog, so that could account for why it was a mountain lion. You should have seen Hazel at the meetings; she hated rats with a religious fervor. And Jim always joked about wolves. Then last night, it came back to my house. It came as Jim.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “I swear,” he said, turning around to face her, “this thing likes to mess with your—”

  Ben could have sworn the boulder at the bend in the channel had been against the cliff wall. Somehow it had detached itself from the cliff face and now rested a foot from it. He was contemplating how long the boulder had been there when two orange eyes came alive in it.

  Chapter 28

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  They had been gone for less than two minutes and Lindsay had already screamed her throat raw, thrashed inside the car, and completed a thorough inventory of the items in the backseat. None of those courses of action freed her from the back of the cruiser. Her fury at being left behind, her abject terror of the beast stalking its prey out there in the darkness, her body coursing with nervous energy, all amounted to nothing. The window was impregnable.

  She pounded the flat of her hand against the window until her vision clouded with tears. She curled up on the backseat. Never had she felt so impotent. Not even in the grotto, watching the polar bear burst a man’s head like a melon in front of a crowd of children. Even that, she was simply a witness to, not a participant. It had simply happened to her. But wasn’t that what her life had become? A series of things that happened to her? Had she not let that attack unmoor her? Afterward, she stopped charting a course and simply floated from job to job, a piece of jetsam in her own life. The National Zoo was her first promising job since the attack and even that had been old colleagues putting in a good word out of pity over what happened in Baltimore. She was swept up by currents stronger than her, like Faith, who always picked the restaurants and chose what nights to spend together and never introduced Lindsay to her friends or really declared to Sissy or anyone else that they were a couple. Her fencing coach echoed in her head.

  You are hardwired to be one of two things: an attacker or a defender.

  Now she was not even a defender anymore. At best, a bystander. At worst, a victim. She lashed out with her foot and kicked the door.

  “No!”

  It felt good. There has to be a way, she told herself. The anger, the fear, the adrenaline—she just had to channel it. She lay on her back and placed both feet against the passenger side window and placed both hands over her head, bracing against the opposite door. She brought her knees to her chest and was about to kick out the window when she heard a noise and looked up to see Jim tugging on the driver’s-side door handle.

  He smiled.

  She lunged for the inside door handle, but there wasn’t one. “Oh God,” she moaned, then pushed back to the far side of the cruiser, waiting for the door to open, for the hulking thing to grab her. Lindsay screamed. He pulled the door handle again.

  Nothing.

  They had locked her in. Thankfully, Cushing had also locked the entire cruiser too. Lindsay could not get out but no one could get in either. The kushtaka regarded her with its glowing orange eyes. She was closer to it now, in this form, than the night before, when she had first spotted it in the yard. It was tall and broad, and shared the features of the man she remembered now from the first community meeting, on the night she first got mixed up in this. He had been one of the vocal ones, angry like Ben. It loomed over the car and was backlit by the streetlamp at the end of the street, but she saw it clearly enough. It was covered with patches of coarse, tawny hair. Or fur. She could not tell. It was fully upright, but images of missing links and grainy photographs of Bigfoot flashed through her terror from the recesses of her memory. It mimicked the movements of a man but with no real grace or ownership. Most of all, she was transfixed by those eyes, glowing orange. They shone right through her. Like it’s reading my mind, she thought. The beast smiled then, revealing a mouth crowded with too many teeth, as long and sharp as a wolf’s. It bent at the waist suddenly, as if seized by cramps. It sank from view, beneath the window. Even through the sealed doors and windows she heard the horrible crackling sounds.

  Then nothing. She inched closer to the driver’s-side window. When she heard nothing further, she moved closer still and rose as much as the cruiser’s roof would allow.

  Just then, an enormous shape shot up and fell against the car. The impact knocked her back and she landed hard against the far door. When her head cleared, she saw that the beast was against the car. She saw two massive paws, with five long, curled claws extending from dark pads. Even though they were tawny—the wrong color—she knew instantly what she was looking at. Bear claws. Not just any bear, she thought. A polar bear.

  The same claws, the same long muzzle and neck. Still, even panicked, she noticed that it was smaller than a real polar bear, less than half its full size and not well fed. Its size was closer to that of a black bear. In her stupor, she made the connection that when it was a wolf, it was enormous. For a man too, it was massive, but as a bear, it was a smaller specimen. It has restrictions, she thought. It can manipulate its mass—redistribute it—but it can only work with what it has. Its biology may be unfamiliar, but all biology was science.

  She did not need science to remind her of the polar bear’s powerful hindquarters. The rocking of the car was evidence enough. It shook her out of her stupor. The clacking and screeching of claws against the glass raised the hair on her neck.

  The bear heaved. The window cracked.

  She also did not need to be reminded what a motivated polar bear could do to a human. She had her memory for that. And apparently, inexplicably and cruelly, so did the beast. She resumed her position on her back, brought her knees to her chest, and exploded them outward against the passenger-side window.

  Nothing.

  She kicked again.

  At the driver side, separated by spidering glass, the bear loomed. Helplessness flooded her limbs. She kicked again, desperate to keep her kicks from disintegrating into panicked flailing. My legs against one window versus some mystical fucking polar bear’s strength and claws at the other?

  She closed her eyes and kicked again. If she was going to break free, she had to ignore the bear, the horrible rocking and splintering of the glass. She imagined her legs as pistons. She remembered all of those hours fencing, hours spent sparring—crouching—and the power of her thighs. She became angry. She heaved her legs against the passenger-side glass and felt it give just as the force of the bear’s thrusts crunched the driver’s-side window. She gathered her legs back up to her chest once more, focused, and with a scream deep from her core, punched the glass out with her heels. She bolted upright just as glass fragments from the driver’s side exploded into the car, followed by the crash of a wide, thick paw. She heard the popping sound of its claws as they punctured the upholstery where her head had just been. The bear lunged its head, jaws snapping, into the vehicle as she scrambled toward the opposite window. She sprang out of it and toppled to the ground. The cruiser shook as the bear thrashed inside.

  Suddenly, an air horn pierced the air and the car went still.

  She looked toward the sound and saw an elderly woman standing in the doorway of the house at t
he base of 7th Street, the house closest to the woods.

  The woman shouted, “Move it, girl!”

  Lindsay bolted for the house as the bear attempted to back its way out of the car. Lindsay was halfway up the lawn when the bear had freed itself and began to trot after her.

  The woman sounded the air horn again and the bear charged.

  The old woman stepped aside and Lindsay plunged through the front door. As soon as she made it, the woman slammed the door behind her and flung a dead bolt into place.

  Lindsay grabbed the woman and backed from the door.

  “Thank you,” said Lindsay breathlessly, “but we’re not safe. We have to get out of here.”

  “I told him,” said the woman. “I told him.”

  “What?”

  “That county man. I told him there were too many animals around here that shouldn’t be. No one believed me.”

  “I believe you.”

  Lindsay inched toward the door and peered through the peephole. She expected to see two glowing eyes staring back at her. Whether in a man’s face or a bear’s face or some new nightmare’s, she expected to see those burning eyes. She wagered she would dream about them for a long time to come, if she survived, but there was nothing in the circular, distorted view of the peephole. She ran to the nearest window in the front room and pulled back the curtain.

  The beast was gone.

  Lindsay collapsed into a chair. The house was incredibly warm, overwhelmingly warm, thanks to a fire in the front room. Feeling momentarily safe, she realized how exhausted she was. The woman peered out the window as well, and once satisfied the beast was gone, returned to the fire.

  “Where are the officers who belong to that car?”

  “In the woods. To go after the…bear. If you hadn’t been here, ma’am…you saved my life. Thank you.”

  “We’re not going to have a problem, are we, miss?” asked the old lady.

  When Lindsay looked up, she saw the woman brandishing a fireplace poker, its sharp tip dusted gray with the ash of her latest fire.