The Jersey Devil

by Hunter Shea

  The whole town looked to the Willets as the models for the simple, honest American family. If only they knew the glue that held them all together.

  * * *

  Bill Willet met his wife, Carol, for lunch at their favorite diner. Carol had an appointment at the bank and Bill said he had to talk to their insurance agent about making some changes to their homeowner’s policy.

  He’d stopped at the barber, greasing Phil’s palm with a ten-spot to bump him up so he could get to the diner in time. A couple of the men waiting griped, all older with less hair on their head than Bill had on his nuts. Phil told them to pipe down. They were retired and had no plans, while Bill had to break his back so they could buy local and feel better about themselves.

  Carol reached across the table and ran her hands over Bill’s freshly shorn head. “I love it when it’s fuzzy,” she said.

  “There seems to be a little less fuzz every time I come here,” he said, spooning out a chunk of ice cream.

  Bill smiled, giving the acting performance of a lifetime. If Carol only knew where he’d actually gone before the barber.

  The weird circular movement his hand had been making off and on had been easy to conceal and explain away, to himself at least. It must have been a pinched nerve or pulled muscle. Hell, he’d been pulling and pinching things every day on the farm.

  But when he began to lose his train of thought, forget simple words and names, and found it hard to follow a simple story in a newspaper, he got concerned. Not wanting to alarm Carol or the kids, he’d made an appointment to see Doc Stasolla. The man took enough blood to feed a nest of vampires. He brought up two words Bill had never heard of before—Huntington’s disease. He explained how it was a degenerative disorder of the brain, how it affected motor and mental skills, and even though it sounded dire, he could be wrong. If he was right, they were making great strides in treating the disease.

  Walking to the barber, Bill looked up Huntington’s disease on his iPhone.

  It was bad. Suddenly, he had the immediate urge to take a shit, but there was nowhere to go. He jammed the phone in his pocket, trying to put everything out of his mind.

  He said he could be wrong.

  But if he was right . . . Shit. Bill would end up a twitching, mush-brained vegetable.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  His father liked to say he was as tall as he was wide, though that was a bit of an exaggeration. He was all muscle from a lifetime working on the farm. People who didn’t know him veered away from him because he looked meaner than a rabid raccoon. A lot of that was due to the harelip that gave his face a dastardly turn. Those close to him knew that he was just a big softy. His daughter, April, was the one they should watch out for.

  It was all going to be taken away by diseased cells as they ate away his brain.

  No. Stop thinking the worst. Doc’s been wrong before. Remember when he told us Ben just had a bad case of the flu when he was ten? He never once thought it was Lyme disease until we took him to that specialist in Westchester. Doc’s not infallible, and he is getting older.

  Ben. Now there was a worry they’d been gnawing on a lot. The son who returned from Afghanistan wasn’t the same man they’d watch leave when Obama swore to end the war. Fucking liar, just like all the others. Ben had always kept to himself, but even more so since he came back. There were things he wasn’t telling them. It was tempting to try to force them out, but Bill knew they had to wait until he was good and ready.

  And now there was this.

  No point telling Carol. Not yet. Wait until the tests come back.

  “Will you take that gum out of your mouth?” Carol said.

  Bill chuckled. “I didn’t even know it was in there.” He wrapped it in his napkin. He went through two packs of Big Red a day. It beat smoking and was a hell of a lot cheaper. Hey, at least he didn’t have cancer, right?

  Carol’s phone vibrated. She swiped her thumb across the screen, read for a bit and frowned.

  “Bad news?” Bill asked, dipping a French fry in brown gravy.

  “No. April sent me a link to a report on a Jersey Devil sighting.”

  That made Bill sit up straighter in the booth. “That makes three in just the past few weeks.”

  Carol nodded. “She said she’ll tell your father and Daryl at dinner. You think it’s time?”

  Bill got quiet, thinking things over. Old Boompa was definitely going to take notice, but he’d be cautious. He’d waited almost sixty years. He wouldn’t go crashing headlong now. But he didn’t have another sixty years ahead of him.

  “Let’s just hope it’s getting real close,” he said, scratching at his side, wondering how long it would be until he could no longer control his hand.

  Just focus. Even if you do have it, this Huntington’s disease (should I ask if it’s something linked to people who hunt?), you’re okay now. Maybe things are happening now for a reason.

  They finished their meal in silence, each running through mental checklists. Three was a lot in such a short time span. Of course, it could be three hoaxes, one inspired by the other.

  Or could it be what they were waiting for? The dark cloud was on the horizon, and they’d been preparing to do some serious storm chasing.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’m all B-B-Bigfooted out at the moment,” Norm Cranston said to Terry, his agent, over lunch at Villa Italia. Terry lived and worked in Brooklyn. He flew down to meet Norm in North Carolina once every few months. They’d been seated at one of the few outside tables. A slight breeze kept blowing Norm’s napkin off his lap.

  “It’s a quick in and out,” Terry said before shoveling garlic and cream coated gnocchi in his mouth. “You fly to Washington on a Thursday, you’re home by Saturday.”

  Norm sighed. “I haven’t even been back from Ohio for a week yet. I’m not getting any y-younger. Seven days in the wild takes me twice as long to recover. I missed my bed. I missed my toilet. I’m just tired. The last thing I want to do is h-h-hop on a plane across the country just to look at nothing so the Vacation Channel can edit it to make it seem like it’s the place to go for amateur m-monster hunters.”

  Terry pointed at him with his fork. “You’re getting jaded.”

  “And you want to get paid, no matter h-h-ow I feel. Look, I’ll take the next gig after this one. Just let it s-slide, okay?”

  A pretty girl walked by their table, hips swaying seductively in a very tight skirt. Her eyes lingered on Norm’s straw hat. He thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, but she was gone before she made the connection. He was king of the nerds thanks to his public appearances talking about mythical animals, but every now and then a woman totally out of his league would come his way, wanting to know what it was like to be on TV.

  “Because you look like shit, I’ll give you a break this time,” Terry said, emptying his wineglass and signaling the waiter for a refill.

  Norm pushed a meatball around his plate. The pasta smothered in Bolognese sauce seemed to have expanded exponentially in his gut.

  “Ah, Terry, you’re a p-p-prince,” Norm said. “And thanks for the compliment.”

  “You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

  “Funny thing is, that’s all I’ve been doing. I didn’t sleep out in the woods. My back was killing me the ww-whole time. Plus, I forgot to bring my acid reflux meds, so my insides were burning. I told you, I need time to get back to s-stasis.”

  “The History Channel is thinking of sending a crew to you in a couple of weeks. They want to do a segment with you on that fish.”

  “What fish?”

  Terry gesticulated with his hands as if he could mold the fish in question from thin air. “You know, the big one that was dead for like a million years.”

  “The coelacanth?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. It’s some special about animals that people thought were extinct but weren’t. You know the routine. They shoot for a whole day, you get a few minutes airtime. The usual pay, w
hich isn’t bad for sitting in your living room looking respectable.”

  Norm ran his hands down his long goatee. It was a reassuring tic he’d developed over the years. He knew he did it, but didn’t feel the need to stop. What was the sense of growing facial hair if you couldn’t stroke it while looking thoughtful or, in this case, intrigued?

  “Sounds good to me. Book it if th-they confirm.”

  Terry clapped his hands, his way of signaling that subject was done and moving on to the next order of business. “Okay, now let’s talk about your book. Crypto Press is hot nuts to hear what you have up your sleeve. That last book on the skunk apes sold really well for them. If they can get two books from you a year, everyone will be happy.”

  Norm wished the book contracts paid well, but they were really labors of love. In this day and age, the value of the writer seemed to shrink with each passing year, while idiots who starred on reality TV shows were thrown cartloads of cash to have some poor slob ghostwrite their salacious autobiography or cookbook. He was in a strange position, being a person on reality-based programs, but no one wanted to hear about his sex life or his recipe for lasagna. The only thing juicy about his story was the anti-anxiety pills he took before appearing on camera to stifle his stutter. And considering he went through about one prescription, thirty pills in all, a year, that hardly qualified as a drug scandal.

  He replied, “I h-h-have something I need to look into a little more. In fact, I may be going up your way soon. There are some Jersey D-D-Devil reports that sound interesting.”

  “You’re going to the Pine Barrens?”

  As aloof as Terry seemed, Norm knew the man was fascinated by the things he studied and investigated. He beta read all of Norm’s books and had pretty good recall.

  “Yep. Never been there b-before. Never really had to. The Devil has been keeping a low profile for a long while.”

  “You think you live in the sticks? This place is like Manhattan compared to the Barrens. I went there a couple of times when I was in high school. You could drink and bang all night and there wasn’t anyone for miles to bother you. But at night, it’s creepy as hell.”

  “So you know all about the state pet monster?”

  Terry thought for a moment and said, “Just the basics. It was supposed to be the thirteenth child of old Momma Leeds back in the 1700s. When she finally pushed it out, it wasn’t human at all. It ate the family, flew off and has been terrorizing people ever since.”

  Norm bobbed his head. “Not b-bad. You’re just missing a few points. You see, when Leeds was in the worst of her l-l-labor with the child, she cursed it to God or the devil. The story goes either way. So does the b-birth. Some say the baby boy came out normal, then transformed into a creature that was part g-goat, bat and dragon. Others, like you, say it came out tainted by her curse, a living d-demon. It burst through the lone window in the Leeds home and plagued the f-family for many years. It feeds on livestock, stray animals, and takes delight in scaring people half to death, like a true devil.”

  “You don’t believe it’s alive, do you? It would be over two hundred years old.”

  “It could be a flesh-and-blood a-animal, one that had interbred with others, passing down its genetics. Or the whole thing could have been a c-c-c-over story concocted by the L-Leedses, who may have seen their child was deformed, killed it quickly and needed to explain why kid number thirteen wasn’t a-around. Or, maybe the kid did survive, someone with such unsightly physical traits that he’s lived a feral kind of life, maybe snatching a stray woman here and there to spread his seed. Either of those e-e-explanations seem more likely to me than a cursed child that transforms into a b-beast that seemingly never dies.”

  Terry sat back in his seat and looked up at the passing clouds. “You ever in your wildest imaginings thought you’d make a living off this kind of stuff?”

  Norm chuckled. “As a kid, I hoped, but figured I was doomed to work like my father and all the f-fathers around me. Trust me, I don’t take this for granted. Plus, there’s always the chance I’ll not only get to debunk a myth, but discover a new species. That wouldn’t be too sh-shabby.”

  “Well, better you than me on this little foray. Those forests are not for the faint of heart.”

  Norm sipped at his beer. “You’re just a city boy.”

  Terry waved him off. “That wasn’t it. I’ve been to a lot of places in my life, some of them remote and weird, but the Pine Barrens take the cake. If anyplace is going to have a strange creature living in it, that’s the joint. You’ll see. Fucking Spooky City.”

  His agent looked truly uneasy. That gave Norm a good laugh. “I’ll remember to b-bring my flashlight.”

  Terry waved for the check. “Do yourself a favor. Remember to bring your gun. If the Jersey Devil doesn’t get you, something, or someone, else will.”

  * * *

  When Wyatt pulled his father’s handgun from his pocket, Jackson and Alex took a step back, eyes glued to the steel death dealer.

  “Whoa,” Alex said. “Where did you get that?”

  “I know the combination to my father’s gun safe,” Wyatt replied, somehow feeling older than his twelve years holding the gun.

  “He’s gonna kill you,” Jackson said, reaching out to touch it. Wyatt swept it away, stowing it back in his pocket.

  “Only if he finds out,” he said. “And the only way he’ll find out is if you blab to your fat mother.”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Jackson said. He’d long since given up defending his mother. She was kind of heavy. She’d even started using those scooter carts at the supermarket this past year. She was also the town gossip, oblivious to the fact that most of the gossip floating around centered on her growing girth and how she was probably an unfit mother.

  Her son was, after all, in his friend’s yard wondering what to do with a pilfered gun.

  “Hey, I can go through the recycling bin outside my house and get some bottles we can shoot at. My father had some friends over the other night and there are a ton of beer bottles in there,” Alex offered. He had a couple of BB guns that they all shared from time to time, taking potshots at trees, the occasional squirrel and, if they really wanted to prove they were deadeyes, birds in flight. So far, the wildlife had emerged from their BB gun afternoons unscathed, though Wyatt swore he winged the hind end of a black squirrel.

  Wyatt nodded. “Yeah, that’ll be cool. Go fill a bag with them.”

  Alex sprinted out of Wyatt’s yard. His house was three lots over.

  There was no question as to where they were going to try out the gun. Wyatt’s backyard abutted the southwest demarcation for the Brendan Byrne State Forest. In fact, once you walked the fifty feet in his yard, you were met by tightly packed trunks of pine trees that seemed to stretch on forever.

  Last summer, the three of them had set out to see how far they could go while walking a straight line until they found another human being. Armed with a compass, full canteens, beef jerky and one of Alex’s BB guns, they’d marched until their legs were sore, falling far short of civilization. Exhausted, they drank their water, ate their jerky and shot all of their BBs straight up into the air for no discernible reason other than to see if any would hit them on the return to terra firma. The walk home seemed to take forever.

  It did teach them that the forest of the state park was like stepping into another world, one that was hidden from their own. They could have built a hundred-foot bonfire out there and no one would have known.

  Alex came back, the bottles clinking in the plastic shopping bag. A lock of his blond hair escaped from under his Nets cap. “Got ’em!”

  “Good.” Wyatt, who was taller and bigger than his friends, took the bag and headed for the woods.

  “How many bullets you got?” Jackson asked, hopping over a fallen tree.

  “There are six in the chamber and I grabbed four more,” Wyatt said. He knew he sounded cool as hell. Six in the chamber. He’d heard someone say that in an action movie
once. It felt awesome to actually mean it.

  “Won’t your father notice they’re missing?” Jackson said.

  Alex backhanded his arm. “Jesus, do you have to worry about everything? Stop being such a lame ass.”

  Jackson had always been the jittery conscience of their trio. Sometimes he annoyed the hell out of Wyatt. But today, even Jackson couldn’t bring him down.

  He helped ease his fears by saying, “Nah, my dad’s got like hundreds of bullets in the safe. Most are in boxes, but he’s got a few just sitting there. No way he knows how many are in there and even if he did, I can’t see him counting them.”

  Wyatt’s mother had been cleaning the house, some ’80s hair band blasting out of the Bose speakers in the living room. With the windows open, the music invaded the entire neighborhood. Wyatt knew they were getting to a good spot to shoot when he could no longer hear her old-people music. She even still wore faded black concert shirts she’d gotten back in the day. He thanked God she’d ditched the high, heavily hair-sprayed metal hair. But she was still embarrassing.

  They trudged along wordlessly for another ten minutes. Each was lost in the excitement and feeling of danger.

  “How about here?” Alex said when they came upon the rotted foundation of a house. All that was left were crumbling stones at four corners. The wood had rotted and returned to the earth long ago. There were lots of places like that out here. Wyatt’s father told him that the Pinelands were once filled with all kinds of factories and towns and even resorts. Things changed and the places were abandoned. He admonished him to never, ever, go into a structure that was still standing. They were dangerous places and could get him and his friends killed.

  “This is good. We could set the bottles up over there.” He pointed to a tree that had grown at a sharp angle. Must have been damaged by a windstorm decades ago. Now it looked like an old man’s crooked spine. A thick, wide limb was the perfect shelf for the bottles.

  “Come on, help me set them up,” Alex said to Jackson.

  Wyatt took the gun back out, unable to get over how heavy it was. For something so small, it felt as if gravity had a special affection for the gun.