The Beast of Barcroft

by Bill Schweigart

  “I’m sure Mrs. Benavides will be comforted by that.”

  Pasko ignored the barb and focused his attention on the young mother again. “And yes, ma’am, the department is working with the National Zoo. They have agreed to send,” he continued, glancing at Ben, “a qualified representative to help us in capturing this animal. We’re using the full resources of the department and taking every available measure to neutralize this animal.”

  When Ben realized he wasn’t going to get any answers, he left. He made it to the parking lot when Cushing called after him.

  “Hey! Are you fucking happy?”

  “Not particularly, no. What’s your problem?”

  “You said you weren’t going to mention anything.”

  “Four days ago.”

  “So you throw the department under the bus, so, what, you can scare the shit out of everyone?”

  “We found the guy! Doesn’t that entitle me to be kept in the loop?”

  “Do you give a shit that there’s an active investigation, that his family might not have been notified yet, or that they could have been in that meeting?”

  “Is any of that true?”

  “No, but that’s not my point. I’m asking if you care about any of that. Or do you only care about being right?”

  Ben had opened his car door, but slammed it shut and spun around. “I care about being taken seriously, because I am right. I asked you that first night if Manny had gotten taken by that thing and you looked at me like I had a penis growing out of my forehead. Now, is it him?”

  “We’ve already established that you looked half-crazy and smelled like piss. And you acted like an asshole, so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised now that you truly are an asshole.”

  “I’m sorry I fell into a puddle of greyhound piss when a fucking mountain lion killed my dog, Officer! Now, was it Manny?”

  She stared at him, eyes blazing with fury, but she said, “Yes.” Then, in a low, controlled tone, “You want to be in the loop? Fine. The body had his identification in a zippered pocket. What clothes we could recover off the body matched his wife’s description. She was notified a few days ago, but at her request, it’s been kept out of the papers. It’s horrific to them, the particulars. She doesn’t want her kids to hear about how it went down. Now everyone and their brother knows thanks to your little stunt in there. How long do you think it’ll take for her kids to hear about it on the playground?”

  Ben took a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry about that. I am. But I am telling you there is something very strange going on here. First, Manny. Then a few days later, Hazel. All inside a couple of weeks. That’s not to mention my dog and the dozens of other pets,” he said, pointing to the bulletin board at the front of the Barcroft Community House, crammed with flyers of missing cats and dogs. As he pointed, Jim emerged from inside the building, looking around. He nodded and started toward them.

  “Something is preying on this neighborhood.”

  Cushing sighed. “Yes, a mountain lion! I get it. I believe you now, are you happy? And in Hazel’s case, it was probably heart disease.”

  “So the rats came after she died? You know that for a fact?”

  “What, you think they killed her before she died? Invaded her home en masse and attacked in a swarm?”

  “Maybe.” It was Ben’s turn to stare at her. “Yeah.”

  Cushing chuckled. “Okay, X-Files.”

  He wanted to tell her about the eyes, but every time he opened his mouth, he lost more credibility. He considered pushing the rat issue, but she would tell him that it was a code enforcement matter, and he would retort that his code enforcement contact was, until a few days ago, rotting in a drain. Over Cushing’s shoulder, Jim called out, “Where are you going? It’s just getting good!” and a massive shape shot across the street and tore out his throat.

  Jim never saw it coming. The blur spun him 360 degrees and when he whirled back around, his torso was ripped open and blood coursed down the front of his shirt.

  The blur had torn Jim’s windpipe as it sailed past him. His throat looked black in the night, save for the flashes of crimson caught by the streetlights. For a moment, Jim’s disbelieving eyes met Ben’s, then he crumpled in the middle of the street.

  Ben tried to speak but the words careened in his head like lotto balls, and he could not draw one into the chute and out of his mouth. He heard gurgling and a whistling sound, then nothing but the staccato clacking of claws landing and recovering on the blacktop. Unaware of the danger, Cushing continued to glare at Ben, ready to counter his next slight. By the time she sensed the commotion behind her, the beast was on Jim again, burying its large, heavy head in his neck and thrashing.

  “Shoot!” yelled Ben finally.

  At that, the creature bolted down the sloped street, toward the dead end of the woods, Jim clamped in its long muzzle. Ben charged after them. To Cushing’s credit, she recovered quickly and was a half-step behind him as he ran. “Shoot, God damn it, shoot!” he yelled again. No sound came from Jim. No screams, no curses, no pleading. How could he? thought Ben. With what? Ben chased after the beast, screaming at Cushing. But when he noticed Jim’s lifeless body floundering, doll-like, in the beast’s maw, he knew it was too late. All that mattered now was stopping the killer before it escaped into the woods at the bottom of the lane.

  Cushing must have felt the same way. In one fluid motion, she stopped, drew her sidearm, sighted, and fired two rounds at the blur. Ben saw the leaves rustle on either side of the mound of fur. Warning shots, to scare it off.

  The beast stopped just before the dense tree line of Four Mile Run. It dropped Jim and spun around, its back arched and hackles raised. It emitted a low growl and bared its fangs, and Ben saw that it was not a mountain lion at all but a massive wolf.

  Screams from the top of the hill. The Community House emptied, the people from the meeting drawn by the gunshots. They stumbled into the street to discover the avenue wet with gore. Instead of slipping into the woods at its back, the wolf charged.

  Cushing sidestepped and followed it with her weapon, but the wolf darted between them, ruining her shot. Ben dodged and watched it pass. The long muzzle, the heavy head, the massive shoulders—from his nature shows, he recognized it as a gray wolf. Its body was slender but powerful, easily twice the size his dog had been, and in the profile of that broad, heavy head burned a single, orange eye. Ben caught a smell like that of a swamp and then the beast was gone, pumping up the hill, back toward the Community House.

  Cushing pivoted and bolted after the creature, leaving Ben at the dark end of the street. But there was nothing he could do. Neither for her nor for Jim. Jim’s head, barely attached to the rest of his body, lolled in the direction of the woods. Ben walked around to that side and crouched beside his friend. His clothes were soaked through with blood, making the places on his torso, neck, and face that had been ripped apart indistinguishable from the places that had not. The windpipe was laid bare, the carotid artery torn, and just above the bloody mess, Jim’s eyes, stark white and wide, stared out in shock.

  Ben could not see over the rise in the road, but he could imagine his neighbors’ terror at the hellhound bearing down on them. He imagined them scattering, the wolf darting among them, changing directions on a dime. He thought of Lisa then, six blocks over from this very spot, completely unaware and waiting for her husband to come home from a mundane neighborhood meeting. Or was she at work tonight? Is that how she would find out, when the ambulance brought her husband in on a stretcher like so much meat?

  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 fr
uitless 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.”

  Chapter 16

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 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 fo
r 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.”