Kornwolf (9 page)

“Besides which,” he kept on, “they don't know a thing about farm equipment.
And
they can't write.”

These were the circumstances into which Owen had blundered haphazardly, however strange. Even though he probably knew less about farms, and farming equipment, than anyone in town, he had managed without even trying, somehow, to land a position writing about them. Which, in general, seemed to be one of his stronger and more consistent talents. “The luck of the Celts,” his grandfather called it. Despite the fact that he hadn't exactly been offered a shot at deposing the mayor, he
had
secured a job he could not only live with, but work without blowing his focus.

Or so he had thought on accepting the offer.

Then he had gone to the game reserve.

From there on, nothing had happened as planned. And nothing had been short of frantically paced.

His second day on the job, Friday, October 8th, as the perfect example:

He was called to the office at two p.m., an hour early, on Jarvik's orders. Two other daily reporters were present, neither of whom extended him a greeting, or even a handshake, upon introduction. They both seemed annoyed with him right off the bat. And so did Jarvik's assistant editor, a pasty-faced honky named Timothy Kegel. They all struck Owen as miserable assholes.

Then he found out why they'd been called in.

The
Blue Ball Devil Returns
edition had already gone into four printings. By evening, a fifth was expected to go to press, with further demand projected. Regional TV was phoning nonstop,
along with a paper from nearby Rudding—and numerous local residents calling to verify similar “sightings” of their own.

So much for the cozy reception, thought Owen: his basket looked like a public spitoon. It would overflow the next morning, when the
Philth Town Inquiry
ran his story, front page … No doubt, the regular staff was irate. And not without reason. After all, who was he?—this Owen Brynmor, this slovenly kid drifting into their midst on an unscreened, trial-run basis, apparently, to fall under some kind of cracked and delirious favor of their aging city editor—who, incidentally, introduced him as “someone who might help you idiots think”—then go on to triple circulation by landing an AP smash on his
first
report—and with tales of Bigfoot, no less …

They all looked insulted beyond their capacities.

Owen himself found it hard to believe.

Beforehand, of course, he'd expected a smash. There was no way this story could
not
have sold. But to watch something actually rip as intended was a rare and genuine marvel to behold. Twice in the past, he had lost what should have been national copy to turn of luck—the first to a presidential scandal, the second to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He knew not to blink till the check had cleared—and even then, with residual caution.

Jarvik, on the other hand, was openly thrilled. (Tripling circulation tends to have that effect on city editors.) Having called everyone into his office, he assigned his regulars each to a task—two of them to telephone duty, and the third, a furious Kegel, to screening messages, while Owen, overtly exempt from the old man's disdain, was encouraged to follow up his story. He could start by reporting to the Intercourse Market to verify rumors of livestock attacks.

Already, Owen could feel the resentment building around him. He left quietly.

Outside, in the car, his window jammed. While rolling the handle, his fingers locked up. Nicotine: worse than he'd ever imagined
possible, hurting like none of these people could … Day number two. It would never get worse. This nightmare would never seem more insurmountable. He would feel crazed, overdriven and sick for the next thirty hours, with little improvement. His hand would continue to wander involuntarily, à la Dr. Strangelove. The sweat would continue to roll in flashes. His heart would continue to palpitate violently. He would be tempted to give up, but wouldn't be able to. He would feel optionless, ruined: either back to the toxins, or life as an unending heart attack.

This would take years to get used to.

The coming week had been put on reserve for expected trauma to mind and body—compounded by which, the effects of his workout with Roddy that morning—his first afternoon at the West Side Gym—were beginning to register. He hadn't been out of the club for an hour. Yet already, both of his lats felt torn. Hard as The Coach had pushed them—and, Jesus, he certainly hadn't shown any mercy—Owen was having a great deal of trouble just lifting his keys to start the ignition. His arms and legs were a throbbing mass of quivering, mashed and achy muscles. Earlier, coming down the stairs, his knees had threatened to buckle beneath him. Now, he felt nauseous—so out of shape, it was something of a miracle the session hadn't killed him. There was no oxygen high on this trip. He wasn't enjoying the pump, so to speak. The only reward was a fleeting reprieve from the nicotine cravings. Which wouldn't last.

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 creature 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.