Kornwolf

by Tristan Egolf

  One hour later, twenty miles west, in the steadily darkening afternoon, he had managed to alienate most of the Intercourse Market’s outdoor livestock vendors. Having started out casually, broaching the subject with palpably brazen nonchalance, he’d been quick to pick up on the sweeping derision his inquiries seemed to be eliciting. Before long, he’d felt less at home in the stands than he had at the paper that afternoon. Being spurned by the Plain Folk was highly unsettling. It made Owen feel like a cancer cell. He was suddenly given to wonder if Jarvik’s reason was altogether intact. In avoiding his questions, these people were not only unresponsive—there was hostility. Which couldn’t have come as any surprise. The Plain Folk had always been ill-disposed toward the press. Jarvik must have known that.

  Yet, checking back into the office was unreassuring. The old man had stepped out for dinner.

  Thus, Owen took the initiative to follow up several reports from the previous week.

  The first was a breaking and entering call from the “venison farm,” a fenced-in, four-acre pasture stocked with exotic deer. The farm was privately owned by an elderly couple, Robert and Nancy McConnel—according to whom, their herd of seventy rare and, primarily, imported animals had been terrorized by a loping, bipedal “freak of creation” for the past two weeks. When asked to elaborate, the couple fell silent, as neither, it turned out, had sighted the creature. Nevertheless, Mrs. McConnel was willing to go on record as stating that, based on events of the week before, the sounds she had heard from the yard after midnight (howling above the stampeding herd) undoubtedly / certainly / had to have been that “thing” in the paper: “Jesus help us.”

  It wasn’t much better a mile down the road, where a local tavern—the Dogboy—owner, an aging coot with a widow’s peak, reported a “one-man pack of dogs” having scattered garbage all over the parking lot. Several regulars claimed to have spotted a “creature” on leaving the bar that week—and while no one could say what it looked like for certain, or even agree on the species, for that matter, going consensus held that the newspaper’s Blue Ball Devil was close enough. As far as Owen could tell, the Dogboy’s owner was speaking in dead earnest.

  Owen left him a contact number, one he was free to give out to the locals.

  Finally, he drove to the Holtwood Development, a ten-acre neighborhood under construction a mile down the road, between Smoketown and Bird-in-Hand. There, amid eyesore module foundations in varying stages of half-assembly, a contractor hoarsely explained how the houses had fallen prey to nightly sabotage. And no, Bigfoot wasn’t suspected—or any fraternity prank, for that matter. One needed only consider the “evidence” left behind to confirm as much: a purplish goo, some kind of spray paint, marking the sides of several plows. In other words: people (gasp) and the contractor reckoned he knew just whom: “Them hippies.”

  As though on cue, Owen’s clunky cell phone rang in his jacket pocket. It was Jarvik’s assistant reporting a “riot” on 341, back east, toward Intercourse. Leaving the contractor, Owen climbed into his Subaru and took off, bewildered by now. Since when had The Basin gone apeshit, he wondered. This place was amazing. He couldn’t believe it.

  He arrived on the scene of the “riot” to find that the road had been sealed off and traffic rerouted toward Bareville and Ronks, to the north and south. He parked his car and walked toward the scene of what looked to be a fairly serious accident. A telephone pole lay across the road. A clean-up crew was attempting to move it. Aside from a couple of Lamepeter troopers, a tow truck driver and some volunteer firemen, only a handful of elderly locals with cardboard signs remained on the scene. These were the hippies, no doubt: as defined by exercising their right to assemble—though most of them, based on appearance, had probably been too old to draft even back in the sixties. Owen had trouble coaxing a clear account of proceedings from anyone present. The most he could ascertain was that a “crazy-ass Dutch boy” had challenged an eighteen-wheeler to a game of chicken in an open buggy—and, afterward, paid a terrible price in a brutal beating by one of the cops.

  The farm boy’s name, as determined through a call to the Lame-peter precinct, was Ephraim Bontrager. No further details regarding his case were available. The suspect was being “interrogated.”

  Owen returned to the office at dusk. But the office would bring him little relief.

  To start, the Associated Press had been calling all day for verification of text. Demands had been made to speak with “the lucky reporter.” Congratulations were offered: “most convincing hoax in years,” and “should go down in the books with Nessie.” One caller had asked what the suit was made of, applauding the editor’s sense of humor. Another deplored his sheer audacity and willingness to stop at nothing for sales. For most of the afternoon, Jarvik’s assistant had kept her cool while fielding questions. Along about five, however, someone had called her a hayseed. From there, she had lost it.

  As Owen entered the copy room, most of the rest of the staff appeared equally frazzled. He walked down an aisle of partitioned cubicles, feeling the glares from every side.

  Telephones all through the building were ringing. Even the weatherman’s line was tied up. And not just with press calls, either. As many complaints had been pouring in from locals—some in urgent need of assurance, some in jabbering, high-flown panics, the rest either tickled pink or disgusted, with glimpses of vague uncertainty between. Several subscribers had threatened already to cancel their daily delivery service in opposition to what they considered the creature’s “pornographic” namesake. Others were simply embarrassed—one lady claiming a brother in Yorc had been teasing her. As well, the game warden, Kratz, had phoned to complain that he, too, had been swamped with calls. Everyone seemed intent on discrediting him as the “hoax’s” perpetrator. But, as that went, Kratz hadn’t taken the photograph. He was demanding a public disclaimer.

  And then there was the mail—by fax, by telegraph and, later, by post it would flood the office.

  Throughout the week, Owen would come in to parcels from every enthusiast geek of the paranormal this side of Billings: allegations of similar “sightings,” and going speculation per this one.

  Someone in Blue Ball was willing to wager the Jersey Devil had come to town. But the problem with that was: the Jersey Devil, by legend, had the head of a horse, the wings of an eagle and the body of a giant serpent. The Blue Ball Devil looked more like a mud-thrown kangaroo with a scorched pompadour. So then, perhaps the fabled Goat Man: one caller certainly seemed to think so. Years earlier, according to a Michael Hoober of Windmill City, Virginia, a neighbor had clipped the beast while driving home on a back road, late one night—and even had a wiry clump of hair that was pulled from the radiator grill to show for it. The catch was: the Goat Man, a laboratorial fugitive gone amok in the hills, was described as having the upper body of a man, and the legs and hooves of a goat. Here, too, the descriptions clashed. A closer match, one anonymous source contended, was Mo Mo, the half-man / half-ape creature from Louisiana, Missouri. While closer to the Blue Ball Devil in appearance, there was little to account for the distance between them, or the fact that Mo Mo hadn’t been spotted in over twenty years. And so with the Beast of Truro, a savage, catlike creature from Massachusetts. And Saskatchewan’s mythical Red Coyote. And El Dientudo of Buenos Aires … The list continued: a regional entity / legend from most existing cultures, and hundreds of former marching band geeks here at home to keep them all on file.

  Owen wound up at a loss for anything even remotely similar in profile. The Blue Ball Devil, as urban myth and enigma, appeared to be one of a kind. The only related reference on file—three one-paragraph blurbs on the subject, all of them upward of twenty years old—had been pulled from the Stepford Daily Plea’s archives. The microfiche files had been milked for their worth, and from them was woven to print the tale of a creature—what one local farmer was quoted as calling a “wingless goblin with quills”—purported to have wandered the eastern half of the county in 1974. The creatu
re was said to have rendered extensive, community-impacting levels of crop damage. None of The Plea’s current staff members, not even Jarvik, as the longtime city editor, could tell him much more than that. And being that Lindsey Cale, the reporter who’d covered the story originally, was dead (her car gone into a roadside ditch in the early eighties, cause unknown), Owen would have to rely on the here and now in following up his story. Which should have been simple enough: the calls that were pouring in to the paper at present were not in reference to previous sightings so much as they were in regard to a creature trashing their compost heaps that week.

  For his follow-up article, therefore, he gathered the choicest reports from the previous days, and, with minimal formatting, gave them to Jarvik.

  The old man couldn’t have been more pleased.

  He burst into laughter on reading the text. He dabbed his face with a handkerchief, giggled, then nodded approvingly. “This will do.”

  Owen went home feeling relatively satisfied, if intent on a few basic changes.

  For one thing, he wanted his story, for as long as it ran, to be more than a public ledger. One time around, that format worked. But the impact would lessen with repetition. He would have to find a new angle, somehow. He would have to explore The Basin …

  More confusingly, he didn’t know what he was after, exactly. What was he getting at? Mass hysteria? As in: the provocation thereof?

  —Most likely, yes.

  But, theatrics aside, was that justifiable?

  —Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong thing …

  Beyond all of which, there was also the matter of what exactly did he “believe”? Now, there was a question worth considering.

  When his mother had called him to talk that morning, things had been plenty confusing already. Explaining to her the situation had proven no easy matter for Owen. Mostly, she hadn’t been able to figure out where he was coming from, why he was doing this. By her estimation, he was one of what he called those “paranormal geeks” himself. Yet his tone was imbued with the glee of a prankster.

  Moreover, she couldn’t have known the extent to which he and his coverage were having an impact.

  On Thursday morning, however, that changed—as the story began to appear in newspapers all across the nation, including her chosen daily in rural Connecticut. “Beelzebub in Pennsyltucky”—disgusted, she quoted the lead by phone. And a caption beneath the photo: “It Came From Blue Ball.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny.”

  Even though neither term was Owen’s, his mother was sure to blame him for both.

  What she didn’t, and couldn’t, have known was that Owen, despite his giggle on breaking it down, had questions himself—and couldn’t entirely write this matter off as a hoax.

  On first appearance, he’d taken the motion detector photo for having been staged—and brilliantly so: far and away the best thing ever to come out of Stepford. But after a day in The Basin, he’d been given to wonder—not so much by the tavern and deer ranch debacles, which barely held water, but owing more to the hostile reception afforded him that afternoon at the market. Those vendors had been more than simply unfriendly. They had been spooked. There was no doubt about it.

  Whatever the case, he was certain of one thing: the Blue Ball Devil was a bonafide smash—a syndicated humdinger, national copy. And as a result, in spite of his initial resolve on returning to Stepford to begin with, Owen found himself back in reporting as never before.

  He felt like a rock star.

  An estimated three hundred papers across the country had printed the story and photo. There was talk of coverage in Europe too. And on TV: at one point, a network executive called to speak with “the werewolf reporter.” A late night radio DJ from Texas had gotten himself in trouble for claiming the creature was Uncle Shrub in drag.

  A brick had been thrown through the station window.

  Just down the street from The Plea, the Press Room Deli was humming with talk of the matter. On stopping in before work that day, Owen had silenced the room completely. While standing in line, he could feel their contempt in a noxious, stifling cloud all around him. Slowly, their conversation resumed, but in hushed mutters, with awkward pauses.

  Bess, a sickly attractive, chain-smoking thirty-something from Format approached him.

  “Man,” she squinted unsmilingly, leaning forward to whisper. “These people hate you.”

  For what it was worth, he hated them back—especially Kegel, the junior editor: chronically dour, with a bulging vein that divided his forehead in times of duress: Kegel, the Stepford Anus incarnate …

  That afternoon, he pounced on Owen straight out of the elevator: “Mister Brynmor.” He sidled up, waving some papers. “I don’t know how it’s done elsewhere, but here we staple submissions. It’s clear that you haven’t consulted your style book.”

  Blam.

  He probably went golfing every Thursday.

  He would make working the bag less torturous.

  For Sunday’s edition, Jarvik ordered a “week in review” piece—intended not only to recap the story’s development to date, but to focus as much on worldwide coverage the photograph, and thereby Stepford, was receiving: interviews with recognized “experts” in Tucson who claimed that the beast was an astral traveler, to locals from Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, who yodeled of Pumpkinhead’s return.

  Somewhere in the article, mention was made of a bid for the photo’s original negative (quoted at $2,000) being surpassed by a TV executive’s offer. In truth, the original bid had been placed by a comic book collector from Delaware, who, like his corporate competitor, had been referred directly to Dwayne Gibbons. Apparently, Gibbons, who owned the original negative, had not received their calls—or at least had yet to benefit by them—as, Sunday morning, he phoned The Plea to complain. “It says here two thousand dollars.” His tone was belligerent. “What’s this about?”

  He wanted to speak with the “author” in person—and, yes, he had news—an update, of sorts. He was down at the Dogboy, east on 21.

  Owen hung up.

  He knew the address.

  The tavern was nearly empty at that hour. Most of the regular crowd was sleeping. A couple of stoolhuggers sat at the end of the bar. The air smelled of lovely tobacco.

  The barkeep, a ruggedly fierce-looking woman, came over. She looked at him blankly.

  “I’m here to see someone named Dwayne Gibbons,” he told her.

  She nodded, turning.

  Behind her, down at the end of the bar, a figure sat up. He was wearing a hood.

  “The reporter’s here to see you,” the bartender called to him, jerking a thumb toward Owen.

  The figure let out a belch. Then, getting up: “So he is.” He started to weave down the aisle. “You think he’ll buy me a drink?”

  Owen nodded to the bartender.

  “One for yourself?” she asked.

  He nodded again.

  As Gibbons approached down the length of the bar, Owen turned for an introduction.

  “I’m Brynmor,” he said. He held out his hand.

  Sliding onto a stool before him, Gibbons looked back in silence, frowning. “I know who you are.” He wiped his chin.

  Gradually, Owen dropped his hand.

  Right off, he didn’t like what he saw. There was something overtly obscene about Gibbons. More than shady, he was all-out beady-eyed.

  “Look,” he commenced, producing a paper. “It says here an offer for two thousand dollars.”

  “That offer was forwarded straight to you,” said Owen. “I gave him your number myself.”

  Gibbons blinked. “It says here offers.”

  “—were forwarded straight to you, as I said.”

  Surely, this weasel had more to say.

  The bartender brought over two pints of beer.

  Owen placed a five on the counter.

  Shaking his head, Gibbons continued with a forced, unnaturally casual leer. “The way I see it,
you owe me some money.”

  Owen stared at him, trying to pinpoint the physical features that most repulsed him—maybe the way his eyebrows intersected just over the bridge of his nose—or his scrawny neck, marked with cuts and a horribly razor-burned Adam’s apple—the way his back was bowed to a permanent C—his darkly tobacco-stained lips.

  Yet even in combination, none of those features surpassed his venomous gaze.

  It was disappointing to think that the Blue Ball Devil, and thereby the current renown of Stepford (let alone Owen’s career), had been triggered by one with the eyes of a viper.

  “You won’t get a dime out of me,” said Owen.

  He stood up. Twenty-five minutes he’d wasted driving here. “Check your answering machine.” He chased his beer in clear disgust.

  Gibbons cracked a hideous grin: you could follow it back to his fortieth aunt. “I didn’t expect a dime out of you,” he said. “I was talking about your boss. But now that you mention it—” Sliding his empty glass across the counter, he nodded. “Buy me another drink, and I just might tell you something.”

  The bartender cut in. “Don’t buy him anything, mister.”

  Furious, Gibbons glared at her.

  Ignoring him, she added, “He’s just trying to tell you what everyone in here already knows. And that is—”

  “Shut your mouth!” snarled Gibbons.

  She followed up: “The Devil was here last night.”

  Until then, Owen had been intent on walking out with no further remark.

  He lifted a finger. “Give him a drink.”

  A heap at the end of the counter sat up.

  “And that one too,” Owen added. “And one for yourself.”

  He pulled up a stool and sat.

  They were silent at first, the four of them hitting their beers, until finally, the bartender spoke: “It came in at midnight.”