by Hunter Shea
When he’d interviewed the witnesses, he wasn’t shocked to learn that they were all city dwellers with scant experience in the great outdoors. They weren’t accustomed to coming across any wildlife bigger than a raccoon. Bear encounters were frightening, and easily misconstrued by a brain that was misfiring while allowing the bladder to empty its contents.
“Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Norm said, drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He’d spend the weekend working on a couple of articles, then a blog post, reassuring folks that the Grassman was not a threat to those seeking to bond with nature in Ohio.
Of course it wasn’t. If there’d been an actual Grassman, Norm was pretty sure his ass wouldn’t have been out there. At least, not alone.
“Hey, Salem, you mind g-going out to get some groceries? The cupboards are pretty empty,” he said to his black cat, perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Salem followed him with his wide, orange eyes. Norm’s neighbor, Pam, always watched the lazy ball of fur when he was away. She made sure there was plenty of food for the cat. It wasn’t lost on Norm that the cat was taken care of far better than he had ever been.
“Or maybe you’ll share your Fancy Feast with me.”
Salem made a contented cooing noise. Norm patted his head.
“You always were generous.”
He put a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage and biscuit in the microwave. While he waited, he spotted himself in the small oval mirror he kept by the fridge. His eyes were bloodshot. His goatee that hung six inches from his chin was kept from going wild and woolly with a series of different colored rubber bands. Norm stepped back, rubbing what was becoming a considerable beer gut. He’d be forty-two in the fall. There were aches and pains that came with the age, but he could still motor when he had to. Hell, he’d just backpacked and camped in a mild wilderness for a week without any ill effects.
The Modelo was what was making him feel old today. He loved his beer, but it was starting not to love him back.
Norm plucked his straw hat from the kitchen table and plopped it on his head. The hat, for some reason, made him feel whole. He knew he looked like an extra from Hee Haw, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass. The hat had become part of his brand—the brash cryptozoologist who’d been featured on more cable shows than he could count.
His hook was his ability to remain impartial while still retaining his childlike wonder and fascination with tales and sightings of creatures both strange and mythical. When he was young, his father had pulled him aside one day and told him in confidence about his encounter with a Bigfoot while hunting in East Texas. He’d only mentioned it that one time, but it had been enough. Norm exhausted the library’s stash of books on Bigfoot, lake creatures and Thunderbirds. When online bookstores came along, offering a worldwide library of tomes on the unexplained, he dove in headfirst. He went and got a degree in zoology so he’d have a broad knowledge base of all known creatures, their habits and habitats. With that in hand, it would be easier for him to separate the known from the unknown.
And now here he was, hungover but with a decent check in his bank account from the state of Ohio, talking to his cat while wearing a straw hat.
The microwave dinged. He set the sausage aside to cool. His stomach growled. He wasn’t sure whether it was from a craving to tear into the patty of processed meat or a growing need to expel last night’s party.
“Let’s liven this day up a little, sh-shall we, Salem?”
The cat crept down from the window and made figure eights around his legs.
Norm booted up his laptop, opened his iTunes account and clicked Play on his Shooter Jennings playlist. Waylon’s wayward son growled out his mix of country and Southern rock while Norm bit into the sausage.
“Jimmy D-D-Dean, where did you go wrong?” Norm dropped his breakfast onto the plate with an eye roll.
He must really be awake now. The stutter came back as sure as night follows day the moment he was truly and fully awake, as if his awareness of himself and his place in the world was enough to smack the confidence straight from him.
Salem jumped up on the table, putting a paw on the laptop.
Opening up his e-mail, he saw over four hundred messages. Sure, a few were spam, but he got a lot of emails from believers and skeptics alike. Being unplugged for a week wreaked havoc on his in-box.
“Why don’t w-w-we write to Sam first?” he said. Salem meowed.
Norm and Sam Willet had been friends for the past ten years, ever since he’d gone to Pine Bush in New York to film a piece on big cats roaming around the farms up there in a place where there should be no big cats. He’d met Sam Willet when he and the crew visited his farm to take some B-roll. It turned out the old man had an incredible story of his own to tell, so long as the young cryptozoologist kept it hush-hush. Norm had proven himself a worthy confidant, and the two had been corresponding by e-mail ever since.
Whereas Norm had an interest in a wide range of cryptids—land, air and sea—old Sam was fixated on one particular nasty little creature. Norm had promised to keep him apprised of any mention of the beast.
Just last night, Norm had read an online article from a mid-Jersey paper about several campers hearing something unnatural in the woods. One of them was brave enough to leave the tent, looking up at the night sky just in time to catch the fleeting form of a winged creature that shouldn’t be.
It was the second Jersey Devil sighting in as many weeks.
Maybe, Norm thought as he typed, we have the start of something we can both sink our teeth into.
Chapter Five
“This is not one of your better ideas,” Joanne whispered, sitting upright, still zipped in her sleeping bag.
A chilling, distant cry of an animal had woken her from a light sleep. Her heart felt as if it were pounding out of her chest.
Noah rolled over to face her.
“What?” he said.
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“You mean that owl?”
She slapped his sleeping bag, hoping she got his chest underneath. “That wasn’t an owl. It sounded like . . . I don’t know . . . like a kid that’s been hurt really bad.”
Joanne’s father had been an avid camper. She’d grown up in the woods of Maine and New Hampshire. The cry of an owl or frightened fox was nothing new to her. What she’d just heard out there, beyond the flimsy safety of their tent, came from no animal she’d ever heard before.
Noah tried to put an arm around her. “Why are you freaking out so much?” His voice was thick from the six-pack of beer he’d had before they turned in. Joanne wished they’d kept the little fire going.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you have me in the middle of nowhere scouting out places where a monster has been said to live for a couple of hundred years,” Joanne said, pulling the top of her sleeping bag up to her chin. She knew she sounded ridiculous, but it’s how she felt.
“Oh, come on, honey, you know all those stories of the Jersey Devil aren’t real. Unless you’re talking about the hockey team.” He laughed, but she wasn’t amused.
“I don’t know. All the locals we talked to seemed pretty sure it’s real,” she said.
“They were messing with us. We’re outsiders. The moment I said I was starting a Jersey Devil camping tour, they went into their ‘fuck with the interlopers’ bit.”
“But there wasn’t a single person who didn’t believe in it. I was cornered by a woman in the restroom who practically begged me to stop what we were doing. She looked pretty sincere. I think if I stayed any longer, she would have started crying.”
Noah shifted so he was on his back, hands behind his head.
“There’s something else about the Pinelands I should have warned you about that may change your mind about all the local yokel tales of the devil flying through the night searching for victims.”
She shot him a cutting glance, but in the dark, she knew there was no way for him to see it.
“Oh, so you wai
t until we’re all the way out here to tell me the truth?”
“It’s not as if I lied to you, Jo. There’s just a teeny part I left out. The Wharton State Forest isn’t just the center of most modern-day Jersey Devil sightings. There may also be some pot farms here and there.”
“Are you kidding me?” Now Joanne was fuming. Illegal pot farms were dangerous places to stumble upon. They were always guarded by armed men who wouldn’t give a second thought to shooting you the moment you crossed their invisible line. When she lived in Maine, she’d heard stories about backpackers taking a wrong turn, stepping into dangerous situations. When people went in the woods and never came out, most people assumed they’d stumbled into a pot farm and were now fertilizer. It was a growing problem in the United States as demand increased. Naturalists were pro-legalization of pot more for their safety than for getting high.
Noah said, “Look, it’s just something I’ve heard. No one has any proof.”
Joanne thought back to their long drive through the endless, pitted roads of the Pinelands. They were literally in the ass end of God’s country. Yet, she’d spied a lot of nice houses, some of them brand-new estates surrounded by thick gates. What kind of work out here could net a person the money needed to build places like that? She’d bet her life that at least half of those amazing houses were owned by pot farmers.
Noah had camped about five times in his entire life. The Jersey Devil camping tour was a cool idea. There were other tours taking people to places the monster had been sighted since the 1700s, but none of them promised an entire weekend experience, sleeping in the very spots it called home. Thanks to all those cable shows, interest in creatures like the Jersey Devil was rising. Noah said that if Jersey Devil enthusiasm died down, they could always change it to a tour of haunted ghost towns in the Pinelands.
He needed her camping expertise, and she was glad to help.
But now his stupidity could get them killed.
“You have no idea how dangerous it is,” she said. “People die all the time hiking blindly.”
“But if we stayed on the trails, we wouldn’t get to the good spots.” He reached out to turn on the lantern. Joanne grabbed his hand.
“Don’t!”
“Why?”
“You’ll give us away, idiot.”
“Afraid the Jersey Devil will see us as he’s flying around?”
It took all of her strength not to scream in frustration. She loved Noah. She really did. But his whole man-child act was wearing thin now that they were both approaching thirty.
Joanne said, “If we’re on the outskirts of a pot farm, we don’t need a beacon drawing them to us. They might even know we’re out here now, making those noises to scare us off. They could have seen our fire earlier.”
“I think you’re being a tad paranoid. You sure you didn’t sneak off to one of those farms by yourself and take a few samples?”
She lay down and turned her back to him.
“I really wanna punch you right now.” Grinding her molars, Joanne contemplated socking him in the jaw if he said one more stupid thing.
She heard him rustling in his sleeping bag. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it before. I realize now I should have, considering you’re the expert out here. But this is a pretty famous location. An old glassworks used to be here, along with a little town. That town was plagued by the Jersey Devil for a whole month in the summer of 1823. They say it killed their dogs, chased kids and would scamper on the rooftops, clawing to get in at night. After the factory closed, the town was abandoned. A fire eventually wiped out all the structures. We have five more nights and campsites to scout. Please don’t be mad. If you want, we can pack up and leave right now.”
Her anger softened. He was really into this whole venture and could make it work—if his own stupidity didn’t get in the way.
“Is there anything else I should know?” she asked.
“That’s it. I promise. So, do you want to pull up stakes?”
Joanne sighed. “No, it won’t do us any good to go stumbling in the dark.” She got out of her sleeping bag and rummaged through her pack. She took the bowie knife from a side pocket and placed it, in its leather sheath, next to her inflatable pillow.
“Jo, I really am sorry.” Noah caressed her shoulders, kissing the back of her neck. Staying mad at him was difficult. It was like being upset with a toddler for drawing on the walls. He didn’t know any better. At least that’s what she always told herself.
“It’s okay. In the morning, we’re going to carefully scout the area. If you plan to make this one of the campsites, we have to make sure it’s safe.”
He showed his appreciation of her forgiveness in one of her favorite ways, and when he finished, she drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, Noah shouted for her to wake up.
“Babe, come out here. You have to see this!”
Groggy, Joanne extricated herself from her sleeping bag, stumbling to get her boots on. The sun was out and there was a slight chill in the air. Noah stood by the fire pit they’d made, shirtless, hands on hips, looking down.
“Good morning to you, too,” Joanne said, wiping sleep crud from her eyes.
“Come here,” he urged, motioning for her to stand beside him. “Look at that!”
He pointed at two hoofprints by the circle of stones. They were too small to be those of a horse, but too big to be something like a goat.
“What do you make of that?” he said.
“I’d say some stray animal walked through here last night.”
He smiled, and it made her nervous.
“All right, now look up.”
She craned her neck back, staring at the branches of a pine tree.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“What should you see?”
Her breath instantly left her lungs.
“Holy crap, where’s our pack?”
They’d tied their pack with food on a very high branch last night. It was gone.
“Look a little higher,” Noah said.
She looked up and up until she got dizzy. There, at the very top of the one-hundred-foot tree, were the fragmented remains of their pack. Before she realized it, she was gripping his hand.
“I don’t think those were pot farmers last night,” he said.
Chapter Six
April Willet, tall as a model, her mousy brown hair trailing behind her, ran up to the tractor holding her cell phone out. The sun caught her wide, green eyes, sparkling like emeralds. “Ben, did you see this?”
Her big brother slipped his Beats headphones off and shut the tractor down. Just like his grandfather, he’d been listening to Dean Martin while he worked the cornfield this morning. He’d picked up the expensive headphones to save his ears from all the damage the farm machinery could do to him. And it was a good way to shut out the rest of the world.
“April, I got a lot to do today. Why aren’t you at the store?”
Willet Farms comprised three farms in Pine Bush. Old Boompa had built himself quite the little empire. They even had a combo farmer’s market and general store that April had been put in charge of when she turned twenty-one. They sold fresh produce, apple juice and ciders, honey, pies, jams, you name it. April preferred being in the store to working the farms, and she was good at it. In the fall, she organized hayrides, pumpkin and apple picking, and even did a little haunted maze come October.
“Brenda’s covering,” she said, handing him the phone.
“What is it?” he said, shielding the sun from the screen. It was almost impossible to see what she’d pulled up.
“It’s another Jersey Devil sighting,” she said as matter-of-factly as she would note a rabbit hopping out of a row of corn. “That makes three this month.”
Because she spent a lot of her time outside the store, tending to the produce they kept in wooden bins, her skin was bronze and smooth. Ben had caught his best friend, Steven, staring har
d at her a few days earlier. He hadn’t liked the look in his friend’s eyes, so he grabbed him by the collar and showed him the door a little rougher than he’d had to. They hadn’t spoken since. Sure, April was twenty-five, but he was still her older brother by five years and insanely protective of her. It was a miracle he’d let Alan marry her, not that April could be stopped once she set her mind to something—even marrying a dillwad.
Ben (his parents liked to joke that they’d named him after that movie with the rats) may have been the shortest in the family of giants and Amazons at five-seven, but he was also possibly the strongest. He definitely had the worst temper, even more so lately, which was why he liked to work out here alone with his headphones on. Well, he was never entirely alone. A pint of Johnnie Walker kept his pocket company most days.
Ben cracked his neck and took a swig from his bottle of water that had some splashes of whiskey. Everyone thought he drank iced tea—a lot.
“You stopped me for that?” he said, unable to hide the irritation in his voice. April looked as if he’d lashed out and smacked her.
“I thought you’d be interested,” she said. “Three is a lot, you know.”
He let out a deep breath and handed the phone back to her. “I’m sorry. It is?”
April grinned. “Big-time. If this keeps up, we’ll have another 1909 on our hands.”
Looking across the cornfield, feeling the weight of the work to be done, he said, “Okay, why don’t we all talk about it later at dinner?” He went to put his headphones back on, but she grabbed his arm.
“Boompa’s gonna fucking freak.”
“He just might, if three is as big a deal as you say it is.”
“Trust me. All right, go back to your plowing, young man. I’ll go tell Mom and Dad.”
“Ape, save it for dinner. They had to go out to do some stuff. They’ll be back later.”
For a moment she looked crestfallen, then she brightened. “I can’t wait to see Boompa’s face.”
She ran back toward the store, which was a considerable distance from the tractor.
Ben brought the big machine back to life.