The Devil's Colony

by Bill Schweigart

  The figure seized him by the ankle.

  “Home,” choked Lance through broken teeth, blood already running down his throat.

  The figure dragged him into the trees.

  Chapter 1

  As he gazed at the sleeping form beside him, Richard Severance thought the last thing he needed was to fall in love, but he accepted that the matter had been decided for him in Barcelona. The timing could not have been worse, but like everything else in his life for the past two years, there was no getting around it, only through it.

  Two winters ago, a cryptid chewed up a chunk of an Arlington suburb called Barcroft. To the authorities it looked like a series of unconnected animal attacks, but with the help of Lindsay Clark and Ben McKelvie, Severance discovered it was something far worse and the discovery had nearly cost him his life. A year later, sightings of a strange creature were reported in the waters of Lake Superior and he sent Lindsay and Ben to Bayfield, Wisconsin, to rendezvous with his old friend Alex Standingcloud to investigate. Just as the Barcroft cryptid had not been what it had first seemed, neither was the culprit in Bayfield. Or culprits, rather. Had it not been for the intervention of the local Ojibwe, the Northwoods would be overrun by a horde of otherworldly predators the team coined “redmouths.” And there was still the question of that thing in the water…

  After Wisconsin, he fled to Barcelona. He made sure Lindsay and Ben were home safe, and that Alex and new ally Davis Holland were secure; then, at the first available opportunity, he had Erica fly him across the pond in the Gulfstream.

  It was his favorite escape. He was naturally restless and could not remain in one place for too long, but the old city had so many different personalities, he only had to wander a few blocks before his surroundings changed completely. But this trip, that worked against him.

  He stalked the beach on the peninsula of La Barceloneta, but gazing at the Mediterranean put him in mind of the brave Ojibwe dead on the frozen lake. He took the Skycar to Montjuïc and walked among the gardens and hills, but the proximity to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and its antiquities put him in mind of the small chest containing supernatural horrors that McKelvie and Holland had brought to him. He then found the first Metro stop and took the train to Vallcarca station and climbed the steep hill up to Park Güell. The park was originally designed to be a gated community for the rich of Barcelona, but Antoni Gaudí, the inspired Catalan architect whose playful fingerprints were all over the city, had turned it into a public park for all to enjoy. Populated with his dreamlike gatehouses and sculptures and interspersed with lush greenery and gardens that overlooked the grand old city, it always reminded Richard that no matter how much money he had, the best things in life were indeed free. But as he entered the park, he was greeted by its signature fountain, perched at the entrance, bejeweled in ceramic tiles and gently burbling water.

  The dragon slayed by Sant Jordi—Saint George.

  He sat down next to it and laughed, and when he stopped laughing he wrestled with a lump in his throat. Not only had he confirmed in the last year and a half that such things existed—at least to himself—but he had also come to see that they were decidedly evil as well. He watched others crowd around the fountain, snapping selfies with the gleaming dragon. A testament to imagination, where anything seemed possible, now seemed like a threat and he suddenly found that he had little stomach for Gaudí’s luscious park. He walked back down the hill.

  He decided to stop beating around the bush and go to Parc de la Ciutadella, to which Gaudí had also contributed. It had always been a favorite, a park in the center of the city, with a lake, a zoo, and a museum of zoology. But what fascinated him—what delighted him—was the Cascada, the waterfall with a magnificent arch and the statues of animals and mythological creatures surrounding it. This park was everything a young Severance had ever wanted, all of his interests on fabulous display in a single bucolic, breathtaking location, offering hope and promise.

  Now it offered nothing but dread and despair. These things were real now. It was an overcast afternoon and the fountains were not operating at this hour. Instead of jets of water streaming from the griffins’ mouths, the statues were still. Severance could see the mold, the lower half of their beaks stained black with it. He had never noticed it before.

  A little on the nose, he thought.

  By now he was desperate. Gaudí himself seemed to be dogging his steps, an imp following him around the city, goading him on. Just one more chance. Towering above the city, Richard saw the Basílica de la Sagrada Família and thought, What the hell?

  He purchased his tickets and stood in line, pressed into the crowd of tourists, anonymous. As he did so, he looked up at the ornate face of the colossal, unfinished church. Richard had no use for God, but he respected craftsmanship. And from what he knew of Gaudí and his masterpiece, it was as much a temple to nature as it was to God. Once inside, the tightly packed line of people unfurled itself silently throughout the church. In the main nave, he stared up into the forest of columns designed as trees and began to feel some of his restlessness dissolving. He found a long stone bench where the crowd thinned and sat down to look at the stained-glass windows. For a while he tracked the day’s progress through them, the sun washing the church in a kaleidoscopic yet serene display. One color flowed into the next, seamlessly, like floating inside a rainbow. Richard lost time. He only realized he had been there for hours when a tour guide shook his shoulder gently.

  He got up and stretched, wishing to linger, but the crowds were being ushered out. Time to go. He fell back into the river of people, now streaming out of the church, and understood that not a single one of them had a clue. Most believed in a supreme being, and some perhaps believed in unexplainable things that walk among us. They believed, but they didn’t know. Richard Severance knew, and he and his friends were the only things that stood between them.

  So now all that was left to do was get good and drunk.

  Richard chose to outrun his restlessness with red wine, losing himself in the Gothic Quarter. He started on Las Ramblas, with its colorful crush of tourists and vendors, but he remembered that he hated tourists and vendors. It reminded him of Bourbon Street cutting through the French Quarter, so he fled deeper into the neighborhood, letting the warren of narrow streets swallow him. Just when the mobs and the wine and labyrinthine streets began to produce a sort of vertigo, he emerged into a wide, beautiful square rimmed with neoclassical buildings. It was like stepping into nineteenth-century Europe. If Las Ramblas was a river roaring through the Gothic Quarter, he felt he had floated into a tranquil cove. On every side of the broad square was a string of restaurants, and he found a seat that afforded him the best view of the plaza. He ordered more wine and watched vendors shoot tiny, silent aerocopters with LED lights into the air. Up they flew, then floated back down to earth, spinning on bright, multicolored rotors. More vertigo and he found himself thinking uncharitable thoughts, chiefly that he had spent much of his life, and some of his fortune, chasing monsters and yet some random clown from Arlington was always first in line to step up and see the wonders of the universe. What was so special about Ben McKelvie?

  Richard knew that wasn’t the true reason for his restlessness. He had indeed spent a great deal of time looking for answers to questions, and now he had a few. No, if he wanted the rest, he knew he would have to face unfinished business at home, and that his restlessness was actually fear.

  He laughed again and that is when he heard a woman’s voice say, “Please tell me I haven’t chosen a restaurant with a madman. I’ve already ordered and it’s much too nice of a view to leave now.”

  Richard turned around and saw a woman sitting alone a table away. She wore her hair up, and glasses, as well as a dark blazer and a thin white scarf. It amazed even himself how he could always go from morose to piqued in the presence of a beautiful woman, like turning on a light switch.

  “I’m sorry, I just realized I was lost,” he said.

 
“You’re in the Plaça Reial.”

  “Very helpful.”

  “Barcelona,” she added.

  He smiled.

  “Catalonia, an autonomous community of Spain,” she continued.

  He raised a hand. “Okay, okay.”

  “On the continent of Europe…”

  “On the planet Earth?” he said.

  “Now,” she said, sipping her wine, “you’re just being a smart-ass.”

  Her name was Miranda Mahajan. They left the restaurant together and strolled through the streets of the Gothic Quarter, talking all evening. He knew within seconds that she was far too formidable to get into bed that night, but beneath the reservoir of wine and the depression below that, something stirred within him. When he listened to her taunting him in her clipped, deadpan speech, he felt giddy. Eventually they emerged back onto Las Ramblas and followed it south to the water, where they watched the sun come up over the sea. He remained in Barcelona for the rest of the week, sleeping in and trying to busy himself during the day while Miranda was at a developmental finance conference, then picking her up as soon as she would allow, eating long meals together, visiting museums and churches with her at night, and riding the Ferris wheel at the Tibidabo amusement park. At his insistence, and despite her protests, she flew home on his jet.

  That was two months ago. Now she was in his stone mansion north of Georgetown, in his bed, where they spent most of their time.

  He always woke long before she did. He’d battled sleep since college, but with Miranda, he was at least happy to lie with her in the dark, watching her deep, dreamless sleep. Once she dropped off, he had never seen her twitch or heard her sigh or mumble. It was the most gorgeous slumber he had ever seen, and it was maddening. He wanted more than anything to spend the next few hours drinking her in, but he had important work today, an appointment he could no longer put off. He took one last, longing look at her outline, the perfect valley between her shoulder and hip, and then slipped from the bed to shower.

  As the water from the shower cascaded down the crisscrossing scars on his chest, he realized that there would never be the right time for falling in love, not really. The women he allowed himself to get close to usually ended up dead.

  As he exited his dark closet in his sharpest gray Tom Ford suit, he allowed himself a final glance of her—anything more and he might lose his resolve for the day ahead—and was surprised to see her propped on one arm, languorous.

  “Dressing in the dark, skulking out of here carrying your shoes…” she said. “How collegiate.”

  “Believe it or not, even I have business to attend to sometimes.”

  “This I have to see. Let me call in sick.”

  “Ah, but it’s a matter of utmost secrecy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Interview about a chupacabra?”

  “You watch too much TV.”

  “You’re on too much TV.”

  “You may be right, but duty calls. Dinner at Le Diplomate?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  This is the part where I’m supposed to say I love you, he thought. Instead he slipped out of the room with a kiss and walked downstairs to the extravagant kitchen he rarely used. He fixed two coffees and met Erica in the roundabout, where the Rolls was idling silently. It was April and the day had not yet decided which season it was going to favor, but there was a chill in the air.

  “We could’ve taken the jet, you know,” she said.

  “Most chauffeurs would say ‘thank you for the coffee.’ ”

  “I’m sure they would, but I’m a pilot, hence the suggestion of the jet.”

  While Erica was a gifted pilot, licensed on several airframes, she had many other useful skills to recommend her as well. Chief among them was that she only seemed to appreciate Severance’s wealth for the fact that it gave her access to his aircraft. Besides that, she spoke to him as if he were an idiot. It always amused him.

  “I need the time to think,” he said.

  She continued to stare at him. “Northwoods stuff?”

  “I need you on your toes today.”

  “Again, pilot. Not a fucking ballerina,” she grumbled.

  They drove in silence, Richard staring out the window as they drove north along I-95. Miranda was right: He was on too much television. He was savvy enough to know that his brand was associated with mild ridicule. He was incredibly wealthy—old, family money—and his fascination with animals began when he was a boy. It wasn’t until high school that he became interested in cryptozoology, a pseudoscience dedicated to the study of hidden animals. It encompassed animals found outside of their usual habitats or ranges, exceptionally large animals, or animals once thought to be legendary that actually exist. But there was a fringe aspect too, and Severance liked to dance in that gap between science and folklore.

  Still, he had done his due diligence, learning the real science of animals as a foundation, though he did nothing with it. Then, as a lark, a studio executive approached him to appear on a cable show about the potential science behind Bigfoot or some other such cryptid, and he said “Why not?” It turned out he and the camera had a symbiotic relationship—they devoured each other. He became a fixture of those cable shows, which, though fun, demolished his reputation among real zoologists. But what did he care? He wasn’t a true scientist and never pretended to be, and when he needed an animal fix, he just went to the National Zoo and gave a guest lecture, which is how he met Lindsay Clark, and then Ben McKelvie, and now they danced in the gap with him.

  Lately he was putting his tarnished reputation to work for him. Following the attacks in Barnabus, Minnesota, and Bayfield, Wisconsin, he bombarded the cable news shows, discussing changing environments and the encroachment of natural habitats, which forced animals and humans to meet with more regularity, all the while gently intimating the involvement of cryptids. It was like a dog whistle: The news would seize on it, blaze it in their headlines as clickbait, and everyone simultaneously rolled their eyes, thinking him a quack. Which is exactly what he wanted people to think. If Richard Severance, the cable TV cryptid quack, said something bizarre might be involved, then the public could dismiss it.

  He was in a funk by the time they crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the pair of red lights on each tower, still visible in the early morning light, glowering at him like twin sentinels. His cellphone rang. The voice on the other end gave him some quick details, confirming what he had already suspected.

  Game face, Severance, he thought.

  As they continued north into New Jersey, he shed his gloom, and when Erica turned eastward, in the direction of the shore, his nervous energy surged like an incoming tide.

  The diner was located outside Batsto, near Wharton State Forest. People only think they know New Jersey, he thought. Choked roads, smokestacks, gangsters. Yet there was the Pine Barrens, a massive swath of wilderness, about half the size of Rhode Island, in the heart of the state with the highest population density in the country. There were cedar lakes and rivers, cranberry bogs, tomato farms, and deep forests with, naturally, pine trees. Wheeling into the packed dirt parking lot of the roadside diner, someone could have been forgiven for thinking they were in the Deep South or the Northwoods of Wisconsin, not Jersey. The lot was mostly empty save for a few pickup trucks.

  Severance took a deep breath and let it out.

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Erica.

  He smiled. “Be yourself.”

  He exited the Rolls, buttoned his jacket, and walked inside. The smell of coffee and cinnamon overwhelmed him, reminding him he had not had much of an appetite leading up to today. He scanned the diner. At the far end of the counter, at the elbow, were three rough-looking customers drinking coffee and eating eggs. They regarded the severely overdressed trespasser with hard faces and cold eyes. One of them had neck tattoos that crept up his lower face like vines. He looked closer. Not vines, tentacles. Richard thought he could also detect symbols and numbers that were unflattering to
other races. He flashed a megawatt smile anyway. By the register, two unperturbed waitresses who looked to have seen it all barely gave him a glance.

  “Sit anywhere, hon.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m meeting an old friend.”

  And there he was. Sitting in a booth by the window, bathed in the morning sun. Henry Drexler smiled and waved him over.

  Chapter 2

  Bankbridge droned on and it was all Lindsay Clark could do not to scream. She sat in a conference room in an administrative building in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C. It was their weekly staff meeting, and as the assistant curator of Great Cats, she was obliged to be there. But these meetings were becoming harder to stomach. In fact, there was only a handful of people she could spend any length of time with without losing her mind. She knew it wasn’t fair, but after the wonders and the horrors she had witnessed, watching Director Bankbridge—seated at the head of the conference room table, imperious and talking down to his staff about the budget—made her want to pound her fist on the table. Better to tune out altogether.

  It was only when she heard the words tighten your belt that she realized Bankbridge was speaking to her. She sat up straight in her chair. Everyone looked at her.

  “Are we disturbing you, Ms. Clark?”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “As I was saying, we need to find some room in the budget and we’ll start with the Great Cats.”

  “Why me?”

  “It’s well run,” he said, offering a cool smile. “Most of the time.”

  She took it as a dig. She had taken more vacation than Bankbridge had been comfortable with. He knew she had a link to the zoo’s largest donor and, worse, had been on an assignment for him. Over the past year, she had sensed a change in his attitude toward her, perhaps driven by jealousy. Who wouldn’t want to go on assignment for an incredibly rich, charismatic public figure like Richard Severance? If only he knew, she thought. But she suspected that Bankbridge sensed there had been a shift in her as well. For her entire life, Lindsay had been a people pleaser, but that had changed. She was still changing, and though she was not sure into what, she knew it no longer involved appeasing petty bureaucrats. Or anyone.