The Beast of Barcroft (11 page)

Ben heard a high-pitched scream then and squeezed his eyes shut. It was piercing and more urgent than everyone's confused shouts and cries, and then it went silent. That shook him from his stupor. At any moment, the wolf could come back down the hill to collect its prey and escape into the woods and he was the only thing between it and the cover of Four Mile Run. He looked for something to defend himself with, a stick, a large rock, but saw nothing. He realized then how fruitless it was. He knew with crushing certainty and dread that if the beast wanted him—and in his heart he knew that it did—he was dead. If not here then it was just a matter of time. He was marked. They all were. He decided to go back to his friend's side and wait. Soon, he heard sirens, and after a few minutes a breathless Cushing crested the rise and jogged toward him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He shook his head. Then he took another look at Jim's mangled body. “What happened?”

“It ran into the crowd. I couldn't get a shot off. Not before…” She cleared her throat. “Pasko got a few shots off, but it fled north on Buchanan. We couldn't keep up. There…there was an old man…”

“Stuart.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

F
RIDAY,
N
OVEMBER 21

Lindsay got the call just after midnight and was in her car, heading south over the Key Bridge, in under ten minutes. Earlier that evening, Faith had shown up at her apartment after hitting the Georgetown bars hard, so she neither stirred at the phone nor when Lindsay got out of bed and dressed. Ben's front door was open and she walked in without knocking. A double beep, from the burglar alarm, announced her arrival.

“Back here,” came a voice from the rear of the house.

All of the lights were on. She moved through the den and past the kitchen, to find him in the sunroom that overlooked the backyard. His rusty red shirt contrasted sharply against the airy colors of the room—beige and light blues—when she realized the color of his shirt had run onto his arms, beading in the hair there. He was sunk in a couch, holding a glass in one hand and rolling something shiny over and over again in the other. It looked like a badge. He did not look at her when she entered, but stared straight ahead. He did not seem to be looking at anything in particular.

“My dad took me camping once too,” he said, as if picking up the thread of an earlier conversation. It took her a moment to realize he was. “He wasn't an outdoorsy kind of guy and neither was I, but we tried once. Went to the Pine Barrens. You ever been?”

She shook her head.

“It's just this huge swath of pine forest right in the middle of New Jersey. This rural oasis the size of Rhode Island, right in the middle of the densest state in the union. The soil is really sandy, and there were lots of forest fires long ago, so the area is dominated by these stunted pine trees. There are lakes and rivers running with cedar water. Blueberry bogs, cranberry bogs. Ghost towns. Almost no people at all. Say what you want about Jersey, but the Pine Barrens is this strange, beautiful place. It's otherworldly.

“Otherworldly,” he said again, looking in her direction for the first time. “I can appreciate it now. Unfortunately, it's also the home of the Jersey Devil. You've heard of that, haven't you?”

“The hockey team?”

He smiled a weak smile.

“Most definitely not the hockey team. It's our Loch Ness Monster. Our Bigfoot. No two descriptions are perfectly alike, but some features are pretty common. Two legs. Cloven hooves and a forked tail. Small arms with claws. The head of a horse, sometimes a dog, but always with horns.” He spread his arms, tipping his drink. A small stream dribbled from the glass to the couch. “And giant wings like a bat's.”

“Sounds like a myth with an identity crisis.”

He tilted his glass toward her. “So Dad takes me camping. We get the tent set up and a fire going, and night falls. And the pines come alive with sound. Owls hooting, crickets chirping, raccoons rustling around in the dark. And he tells me the story of the Jersey Devil for the first time. Said he heard its screams as a boy himself playing on the Delaware River. He swore he had friends who saw footprints. He laid it on pretty thick. Really making up for lost time with the campfire stories. But he completely misread his audience. It terrified me. I cried and cried. I made him sleep in the car with me. He was pissed—I mean, it took forever to set up camp—but he did it. He did it. For me. He always slayed the dragons for me. He's gone now, but the dragons…”

“Ben, what happened tonight?”

“Did you know in 1909 there were so many sightings of the Jersey Devil in
one week
that they closed schools in southern Jersey? No lie. For a week, eyewitness accounts crisscrossed the state. Walking on roofs, attacking animals, scaring people. There was mass hysteria about the
Jersey Devil,
of all things. Factory workers stayed home. Can you believe it? In the twentieth century. A hundred years later, I couldn't even get people to believe in a fucking bobcat.” He drained his glass.

She put her hand on his, the one with the badge, and stopped his twirling. “You said it was a wolf?”

He looked her in the eye. “This time.”

“You're in shock.”

“So are the dozens of witnesses. It's in the police report. It's public record.”

“I'm just trying to wrap my head around all this. First a mountain lion attacks, then a wolf? In Arlington?”

“Not just Arlington, Lindsay.
Barcroft
. And you're forgetting something. Hazel and the rats.” He told her about the eyes then. That he couldn't sleep the last night he saw her, how he had run out of his house in the early morning to the dark spot where he had first seen the cat's glowing eyes, and then had seen that same glowing again tonight.

“Maybe I'll make a drink myself,” said Lindsay.

There was a bottle of rum and a bottle of Coke on the counter. She fixed two and handed him one. She sat beside him on the couch and stared into the same middle distance and sighed.

“I used to study bears.
Ursus maritimus
in particular. Polar bears. After
my
camping trip, I was fascinated. I got my undergrad at Michigan State, and I was getting my graduate at Cornell, but I changed my concentration. Before getting the job here, I was interning at the Maryland Zoo. One Friday, I was in the polar bear grotto, giving a lecture to some third graders on a field trip. It was indoors, behind a giant glass wall that viewed the bears' swimming pool, below the surface of the water. It was like an underwater cave. I remember it was really hot that day, and I was happy to be down there instead of topside, in the sun. It was blue and cool and quiet. Very serene. I was in the middle of my little speech with my back to the glass when I heard the kids giggling. I thought one of the bears had dived in and swum up to the glass behind me. Like they always did. When the kids wouldn't stop pointing, I glanced over my shoulder.

“I saw a pair of legs, treading water. It's not possible for someone to fall into the enclosure; he deliberately scaled many barriers to take a dip in the pool. This kind of thing happens more often than you think in zoos. There's no shortage of extreme animal lovers or mentally ill people or drunks or just plain assholes that need to get up good and close to tell the animals just how much they love them. Ninety percent of the time, the animal doesn't know what to make of it, and handlers or park security can get the person out of the habitat without incident.

“I knew as soon as I saw the splash behind him that this would not be one of those cases.”

She took a long pull on her drink.

“It's funny, what I remember. The bear's legs, bicycling through the water toward the guy. The children thought it was a show. They had no idea what was coming. But I knew. Even from the other end of the pool, underwater, and through all the churning of the water, I could tell it was him by his massive paws. Our largest male. ‘Snowball,' if you can believe it.

“I tried to rush the kids out of the grotto then, but there were people queued up behind them in the narrow cave entrance, and some sick bastards were trying to push their way
in
to see the show, so the kids couldn't leave. They were trapped. I screamed at them to turn around. To close their eyes. Some did. I should have taken my own advice.

“At some point, the guy must've realized it was a bad idea because he was facing us then, his sneakers pumping and squeaking against the glass. When Snowball reached him, the impact drove the man underwater and I saw his face for the first time. Young guy. He got his head above water after that for a second, but Snowball had him in his forepaws and was pumping with his back. When the guy was pushed under again, his head was in Snowball's mouth. He saw me then. We locked eyes for a second, but Snowball found a good grip and the man's head came apart in a cloud.”

Ben said nothing. Lindsay swirled the glass in her hand, the ice clinking. “It was like a giant screen. As it was happening, I kept telling the youngest kids that it wasn't real. It was just a movie, I told them. It was all I could think of to say. A few of the adults took pictures.”

“Who was he?”

“Just some guy. His name was Travis Riley. No history of mental illness. Just had a bad week…something about a job or a girlfriend. Both, I think. Witnesses topside said he was in his own world. Not when I saw him though. He knew exactly what was happening when he saw me.”

“I think I remember reading about that. Gruesome. And Snowball?”

“Still there. Still a favorite. It's been years. The thing is, I know in my heart it wasn't the bear's fault. This guy entered Snowball's habitat. In the bear's mind he was defending himself and his territory. It was just doing what it does, the most natural bear behavior in the world. It's all on this guy. I knew that then and I know it now. Even so…I couldn't do it anymore. I had to switch. So,” she said, “cats. And here we are. For years though, the whole scene would occasionally replay in my mind, usually when I didn't want it to. Stress can do funny things to a person.”

“I know what I saw, Lindsay. And I need someone to believe me. I need
you
to believe me.”

“I do believe you. But just humor me for a second. Could it have been stress? Grief? Lack of sleep? The happy pills?”

He shot her a look.

“A trick of the light?”

“The killings, they're not just related…they're all the same. By the same hand. Or paw or whatever. And I'm next.”

“They're animal attacks, Ben. That's all, I promise you. I'll figure this out. Wolf attacks in Arlington? Two weeks after a mountain lion attack? You won't be able to keep the Smithsonian away this time. We'll figure this out and we'll stop it.”

Ben squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Something is
wrong
.” He looked exhausted and desperate.
Haunted,
thought Lindsay.

“You're going to feel a lot better once you take a shower and get a good night's sleep.”

“I'll feel better after another drink.” He pointed at her glass. She shook her head. He put the badge back in his pocket and left the room. As she waited for him to return, the backyard's floodlights activated. She walked to the window to see what had set off the motion sensor. Outside, a man stood naked in the middle of the yard, staring up at the house. His front was drenched in blood, smeared on his chin and mouth.

Ben came into the room then and saw the lights. “What is it?” When he joined her by the window and saw what she was looking at, he dropped his glass. It shattered at their feet.

“Who is it?” she asked.

The man lurched forward a step, lifting his chin and testing the air with his nose. As he moved his head, his eyes glowed.

Lindsay looked at Ben. She saw the horror on his face, but for a second, she thought she noticed a slight smile too.

“Jim,” he said.

He grabbed her by the wrist and ran toward the front of the house, snatching his car keys from the kitchen counter as they went. They burst through the front door and sprinted across the short yard to the driveway. He flung her into the passenger seat and she did not protest. Rather than run around to the driver's side, he climbed in beside her, punched his key chain, and all the doors locked. She saw why. A shape charged toward them from the backyard. Ben clambered over her into the driver's seat and fumbled his key into the ignition as it cleared the chain-link fence between the front and back yards in an easy bound. In another, it was up onto the hood of the car. A large gray wolf, its jowls and massive chest stained black and crimson. It emitted a low growl, punctuated by the high-pitched screeching of its claws peeling away paint from the hood of the car, which Lindsay thought sounded a thousand times worse than nails on a chalkboard. Pink foam sputtered from its muzzle and splattered the windshield, which the wolf tried in vain to slash. Lindsay recoiled in her seat, trying to catch her breath.

“Drive!” she screamed.

Ben threw the car in reverse and stomped on the gas. The car shot out of the driveway and the wolf slid from the hood with a final screech. As Ben cut the wheel to get into the street, he clipped Lindsay's car, parked on the street.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Insurance. Go!”

She looked out the passenger-side window in time to see the wolf rocketing toward her and slamming its body into the side of the car as if it were a rhino. Ben put the car into drive and punched the gas again. They roared down the street. Lindsay turned around and looked through the rear window and watched the wolf chasing them, but losing ground as they sped away. Ben took the corner hard and the car went on two wheels briefly before righting itself again. It wasn't until they were speeding east on Route 50 toward the District that she felt she could speak. She looked at his gauges.

“You're going eighty. It was a wolf. I think you outran it.” She had not meant to sound bitchy; she just wanted to exert a measure of control in what was now a world spinning way too fast.

“That wasn't a wolf.”

“I know.”

She looked at him. He met her gaze wearing a slight smile.

“That means I'm not crazy,” he said.

“If you were right about that, then you're right about it wanting to kill you.”

“I guess I'm batting a thousand tonight.”

She directed him to her apartment. As Lindsay fit the key in the lock, the door swung open. They both jumped back and yelled.

“Where the hell have you been and who the fuck is this?” asked Faith.

“I thought you were sleeping.”

“Well, I'm not.”

“This is the guy I told you about. The one with the dog? From your mother's meetings?”

“Who's her mother?” asked Ben.

“Sissy Chapman.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“What?” yelled Faith.

“You may want to call her,” said Ben. “She's had a rough night.”

Faith took a long look at him, her first, and saw the blood. Faith's hands went to her mouth. “Is she…?”