JRZDVLZ Read online

  © 2017 by Lee Klein

  Book design © 2017 by Sagging Meniscus Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Set in LTC Garamont with LATEX.

  ISBN: 978-1-944697-32-7 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-944697-33-4 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943620

  Sagging Meniscus Press

  web: http://www.saggingmeniscus.com/

  email: [email protected]

  “A Mob’s a Monster; Heads enough, but no Brains”

  —Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1747

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  CONTENTS

  Note to the Reader

  Accursed Birth

  Widow of the Island

  I am the Leeds Devil

  A Vortex of Pandemonium

  The Dream of Pure Water

  Phenomenal Week

  Solid Face

  Note to the Reader

  Streaks of phosphorus, a reptilian chicken, a hybrid of man, rat, and heron with the horns of a ram and the sculpted physique of a dumbbell enthusiast ... an unkempt crowd paid a dime to see something along these lines, a weird and horrific beast sure to force squeals from deep inside them, but when the threadbare curtain rose, they laughed. My story could begin with a curtain rising on a pathetic rendition of me in February 1909, and then I could describe what happened to the animal onstage, slathered in green paint, a pair of antlers atop its head, makeshift wings across its back, heavy-buckled shoes on its paws. Or I could begin in mid-January 1909 when headlines in New York and Chicago proclaimed “New Jersey on alert! Mass hysteria!” after a snowy week yielded hundreds of sightings of a retriever-sized rat with wings and a chirping bark, a Jabberwock with eyes like blazing coal, a beast of fur and feathers with the face of a German Shepherd. My story could begin with reports filed for every supernatural encounter just five days after the largest New Jersey Pine Barrens landowner died on January 11,1909, a man who dreamed of channeling freshwater from an enormous aquifer beneath his land to every faucet in his choleric hometown of Philadelphia. Or I could begin my story nearly a hundred years later, with my final appearance in beast form—an eyewitness account of which a prestigious national magazine published a few years ago, inspiring me to set the record straight. Or I could begin, quite naturally, on the day of my most unnatural birth, when I, the thirteenth child of Mowas Leeds, devoured my family (save one sibling) moments after my arrival into this world on the night of a raging nor’ easter toward the end of October, 1735.

  A composite of thirteen beasts in a single body, a chimerical advance on the ancient Chimera, or perhaps no more than a prank of a famous early American, I’ve arranged this story as I am. Yet even after compressing some two hundred and seventy-five years into something resembling a straightforward progression, I feel the need to apologize for its form. Maybe my unusual shape and the persistent repercussions of unfortunate early experience make me yearn for start-at-the-start/end-at-the-end convention? Stiff and flightless, my wings like pungent drapes, my tail an ancient and inanimate cable of flesh, at this point I believe an unassuming storyline accurately portrays the convolutions of truth. You may prefer a more monstrous monster, of course, a gargantuan brute who stalks with Cyclopean single-mindedness scrumptious human beings like yourself. If so, please realize that what follows relates a tender creature’s quest for a semblance of acceptance. As such, instead of introducing myself as some apoplectic fiend, I hope these apologies prepare you for the storms and silences to come. A unique creature, or so I once thought, I’ve stitched together this undulating composite of memory, conjecture, speculation, projection, hearsay, fantasy, and fact. Whenever encountered in beast form, like the brightest stars of a constellation, my parts were recognized before the whole: similarly, as elements of this story accrue and come alive in your imagination, if you sense a reasonably coherent human spirit rise from the words, I’ll have successfully reclaimed the complexities of my life from the simplifications of legend.

  Adam Merriweather

  2017

  Accursed Birth

  SOLDIER EMERGED from the cave of night. He stood at my mother’s door and gasped with dehydration and hunger, though his stomach did not seem hollow.

  “Please keep me till dawn,” he said. “I’ve lost my fellow sentries. A strange cry in these pines, as though legions of abysmal phantasms formed a choir and merged their voices into a single sound.”

  “My husband lately crossed the bogs to the west never to return,” my mother said. “Maybe this cry felled him?”

  “Such coincidence must be linked to the beast we pursue.”

  “A beast?” she said.

  “An unseen threat against which the Crown cannot defend. We shake as though from cold despite warmth in the air.”

  “Wandering in the dark only improves thy state by chance. Settle in as we heat soup for comfort.”

  “I extend the security of my presence on such a horrid night.”

  “It was peaceful before you appeared,” my mother said.

  “Until I heard the beast’s wounded, diabolic howl. Without a notion of its presence I would conclude myself mad to perceive such clamor.”

  How fantastic for my mother Mowas to entertain a man offering security and intimations of what might have happened to her husband: not face down in the tide but fated to encounter this scream, perhaps no more than a transparent shimmer that sliced the air and enveloped man and beast in unknown and inescapable space.

  The soldier described subterranean expanses beneath the pines. In these endless lairs in limestone rock, a beast that roamed long ago may endure. Perhaps now, with so many arrived from across the ocean, some unseen enemy defended its home.

  “Could this beast be related to those impressions they found last summer after the floods?” said Mowas. “Those colossal prints of claws?”

  “They have dug around those sites and there found evidence of an unfathomable behemoth, its snout like that of a mallard, but wingless, with a backbone and tail as long as from here to the path out front.”

  “A relative of this monster could still be alive?” she said.

  “If it exists, like so many monsters it may only wish to inhabit a paradise beyond the incursions of man, and so when threatened it strikes to restore its isolation.”

  My mother’s eldest son asked to spend the night on guard. His hands held axes. But Mowas sent him to sleep, saying the soldier would keep the peace.

  Her eldest daughter delivered a warm bowl to my mother, who thanked her and handed it to the soldier, who blew at its steaming surface. Relief entered his eyes as the broth calmed his blood.

  “Care for your sisters and brothers,” Mowas said to my doomed half-sister, “and once they’re asleep put yourself to bed and forget all you have heard. The morning shall restore our safety, and this good soldier shall protect us tonight.”

  They whispered once alone. The night was cool and quiet. They sat side by side, uncommonly alert. She said she felt not much grief for her lost husband. Life on the salt marsh with a dozen children had turned her into an impression in stone herself.

  “And might you ever return to life?” the soldier said.

  “Doubtful.”

  “It is a time for the improbable, perhaps.”

  He seemed restored, and considering the threat at large, my mother was not wary. She welcomed this man. His unleveled accent soothed her.

  The soldier held her, an arm around her shoulders. He pressed his side to hers.

  “We must be strong and alive,” he said, “and not yield to temptation that does not make us stronger and
more vital. Your strength is clear, so let’s bring life to your blood.” He kissed her cheek. She froze. He turned her, found her mouth, warmed and wet it, and made her smile.

  She was no longer in control. He led her into the pines. She wanted his weight on her, and then she had it.

  Another child was soon inside her. She told her husband’s brother about the soldier and what he had said. Daniel Leeds told others and soon word passed through Estellville and beyond. She was jeered for falling for this soldier’s tale, succumbing to a loyal militiaman.

  A pale pastor appeared who threatened her, who could not make her dispel her belief in the unseen, who scoffed at the idea of an enormous beast, who when cursed by Mowas informed her that the child she carried would be born a devil. The beast the soldier mentioned, his words would manifest inside her as artful manipulation transformed into terrible fact.

  “End the life of this child now,” the pastor said, “and your own life, too, before we do it ourselves.”

  My mother’s eldest son, Japhet, was armed with an ax. At her brother-in-law’s house, they related the pastor’s threats. Titan, Daniel’s son, composed a tract against this righteous man who sought to replicate the witch hunts of Salem, who blurred the distinction between church and occult, his belief in both too strong to champion integrity or strength of mind, a purveyor of impossibilities all honest insight must reject.

  What mattered most was protection of Mowas, abandoned by Daniel’s brother, manipulated by a crafty soldier of the Crown. Fears he instilled in her mind as he discerned her weaknesses and worked on them, as wicked as any devil. They agreed to unite against iniquities perpetrated by representatives of colonial oppression.

  A squadron of the humblest sort guarded Mowas’s home. They surrounded it in a brambly obstruction so any evil seeking entry had to breach what now seemed a fortress. Those who supported the extraction of Mowas Leeds and her unborn child, those loyal to no force beyond their fear, heard of this armed formation and decided to wait and see. Perhaps those around her compound would beat back the devil she delivered, the militia protecting the colony from Mowas Leeds herself.

  All remained stable until an October night when a cruel nor’easter forced the men guarding the house to seek shelter, abandoning their post despite imminent entry into the world of the cursed child Mowas carried.

  II

  The midwives saw in the candlelight my mother suffering as never before, shrieking so each in attendance remembered the tale of that beast in the pines. They thought the soldier perhaps had only heard a woman giving birth, cursing, even forming sounds that seemed to say Let this thirteenth child be born a devil if I am released from this pain.

  Her last newborn had slipped from her with no more than squinted eyes. But now poor Mowas would not survive if this continued. So much breath escaped with each scream it must have emptied her, the atmosphere charged with passion, expressions so contorted they sent currents of cruel air bursting off the walls as the gale hammered the shutters and daggers of rain pierced the roof.

  My mother pushed and prayed and cursed and bartered for release from the force inside her. Midwives squeezed her soaking hands as I breeched. My voice joined my mother’s cries. The midwives cleaned me and placed me on my mother’s chest.

  Nothing is more traumatic than the first moments of life. Everything ahead. The shock of first light. Pushing, pulling, no control. Heartbeat quickens, hysterical birthing body, wailing far off, muted. Snip of the cord, blurry vision, senses opening, first breaths.

  My mother’s expression transformed from relief to horror as my shape shifted: softest skin turned scaly, long leathery wings burst from my shoulders, a tail extended as long and as hairless as a rat’s, my cute little newborn face elongated and nostrils flared as gummy black jowls like a retriever’s formed to imperfectly conceal the sharpest teeth.

  My wings spread to shade the room from candlelight. My claws entered the midwife who first touched me. I consumed her, as well as her colleagues, before I feasted on the body that had made me. As sentimental as a rampaging warrior, I flew down the steps toward my brothers and sisters. I devoured every last one until carnage was all there was.

  I eyed the chimney and shot into the storm.

  Need for comfort insulted by a howl into my newborn face. Reasonable post-partum terror, I now suppose. What was there to do but use claws and consume the entirety of their insides? These Leeds so liquidy fresh. Each heart a still-beating delicacy surrounded by lungs so light on the tongue. My first tastes.

  One, two, three, four, I lost count, so many, each smaller than the last, easier to open and devour, and then into the open air, rain-washed clean, leathery wings responding to winds, firing me away, but where?

  I soared to see how my body responded, above the clouds, a universe of stars, unbridgeable distance, breathing difficult, flying upward, up. I descended under intermittent flashing to make a life in cool rain and mist. Disordered, seething terrain. Where to stop, if ever, and retreat, away from those I had bloodied, who overburdened my light body in flight. Down to the river, an overhang of rock, a safe place to recover before the first day of a life of sorrow.

  Oh why, I wondered. Sense formed as swiftly as my body transformed. The first woman who touched me did not deserve what I did. Those other women, children, brothers, sisters: mistakes I made. Mountainous debt. Regret, regret, my first sensible thought. All I wanted was to make amends for lost control.

  But what if mother and midwives had cooed? What if they had placed my snout to a breast while humming a soothing song, caressing the stripe between my curling ram horns? Would I have acted differently if they had acted differently?

  I was all reaction: surging blood, primal disorder, unable to compose myself until all else calmed. Beneath an overhang of rock, salty tears from glowing red eyes, the sun risen, I tucked my snout into wings to sleep, but I could not sleep.

  In the red-tea river water I saw a reflection—in the center of those glowing eyes, pools of blue, solitary, repentant, sorrowful, the most human part of this animal composite that originated the language I heard in my head, this inaudible internal speech.

  I tried to speak but only snorted. A wail muffled by shame. Like an automatic apology, endless lament streamed at once, an unintelligible expression of pain, regret, apology, a narrow blast of hope that penance might restore original innocence.

  Two weeks of regret in the wilderness beneath an overhang of rock, subsisting on rabbits and birds, lonely, curious, I elevated over parcels tended by farmers. Easy meals of livestock. In and around Estellville, all forms of humanity tempted me to see if they were brothers and sisters too.

  The house where I was born had boards on windows and doors. Limbs had fallen across the entrance in the brambly obstruction, blocking the entry of anyone on foot.

  I returned down the chimney. The carnage had been cleared but the floors were still streaked. This would have been my home, the youngest of thirteen, or so I later learned.

  Nostrils as sensitive as a bloodhound’s, I took up the scent of those who cleaned the house, sniffed along the path, followed tracks these men had made.

  I soared atop an extraordinary oak. Its limbs were thick, each fanning to create a space beneath suited for meditation, the way air hangs in a cathedral. They would reduce it to timber no sooner than Winchester Abbey might be quarried for stones.

  In nearby printing quarters, two young men labored, bound by blood and duty, to announce what had happened on the day of the birth of Mowas Leeds’s thirteenth son. They planned to present the impossible as absolute fact. They worked as though all lives depended upon it.

  “I cannot see returning to calendars and trifling practicalities after pushing this account into the world,” said Titan.

  The cousins, each on either side of the press’s bed, lay type, watching an account stabilize in letters. Disordered reality, shock, impassioned attempts at articulation of an impossible scene retold and transcribed into flowing pen str
okes on parchment, as ordered and unassuming as any affectionate expression if standing above it. But closer to the page, each word came into focus and revealed such horrors.

  “It becomes easier to believe when set in type,” said Japhet. “These words put our family to rest.”

  “Yet gashes of fear shall open in readers. How I envy their current state.”

  “But better to recognize the threat.”

  “Reports arrive of slaughtered livestock, unfamiliar prints. Something is present, I am sure of it.”

  “We are devoted,” Titan said. “For my cousins I dedicate these pages before we join the hunt to avenge them.”

  They would not see me if they stepped from their printing quarters and considered the crown of the royal oak. But a hundred yards away, perhaps. So much made so little sense but I comprehended their words. In exchange for my strange shape, I had received such comprehension, as well as extraordinary endowments of hearing, smell, sight, and access to the thoughts and feelings of certain humans for whom I had an affinity. Streaming thoughts and feelings resonated as though they were my own. But an uncommon swerve indicated they were not my own. My mind on free wander, shades of sense and images arrived that had no place in my memory, and yet I could ignore them no more than that which I saw and heard.

  “If you read this account in Poor Richard’s, would you think it a hoax, akin to the account of witch trials in Mount Holly? We must make it clear that we are honest.”

  “We present this account with no more sensation than we find in it,” said Titan.

  “I would disbelieve myself but dare not. I now perceive a world charged with the potential for inordinate violence.”

  “But do you believe what Dr. Thorpe and I say about the fleeing beast? The midwives sent me through the worst moments of the storm to run for him and as we galloped in return we saw it shoot from the chimney into the night.”

  “I believe it if you saw it.”

  “And I was not alone.”