The Jersey Devil Read Online Free Page B

and camped in a mild wilderness for a week without any ill effects.
    The Modelo was what was making him feel old today. He loved his beer, but it was starting not to love him back.
    Norm plucked his straw hat from the kitchen table and plopped it on his head. The hat, for some reason, made him feel whole. He knew he looked like an extra from Hee Haw , but he didn’t give a rat’s ass. The hat had become part of his brand—the brash cryptozoologist who’d been featured on more cable shows than he could count.
    His hook was his ability to remain impartial while still retaining his childlike wonder and fascination with tales and sightings of creatures both strange and mythical. When he was young, his father had pulled him aside one day and told him in confidence about his encounter with a Bigfoot while hunting in East Texas. He’d only mentioned it that one time, but it had been enough. Norm exhausted the library’s stash of books on Bigfoot, lake creatures and Thunderbirds. When online bookstores came along, offering a worldwide library of tomes on the unexplained, he dove in headfirst. He went and got a degree in zoology so he’d have a broad knowledge base of all known creatures, their habits and habitats. With that in hand, it would be easier for him to separate the known from the unknown.
    And now here he was, hungover but with a decent check in his bank account from the state of Ohio, talking to his cat while wearing a straw hat.
    The microwave dinged. He set the sausage aside to cool. His stomach growled. He wasn’t sure whether it was from a craving to tear into the patty of processed meat or a growing need to expel last night’s party.
    â€œLet’s liven this day up a little, sh-shall we, Salem?”
    The cat crept down from the window and made figure eights around his legs.
    Norm booted up his laptop, opened his iTunes account and clicked Play on his Shooter Jennings playlist. Waylon’s wayward son growled out his mix of country and Southern rock while Norm bit into the sausage.
    â€œJimmy D-D-Dean, where did you go wrong?” Norm dropped his breakfast onto the plate with an eye roll.
    He must really be awake now. The stutter came back as sure as night follows day the moment he was truly and fully awake, as if his awareness of himself and his place in the world was enough to smack the confidence straight from him.
    Salem jumped up on the table, putting a paw on the laptop.
    Opening up his e-mail, he saw over four hundred messages. Sure, a few were spam, but he got a lot of emails from believers and skeptics alike. Being unplugged for a week wreaked havoc on his in-box.
    â€œWhy don’t w-w-we write to Sam first?” he said. Salem meowed.
    Norm and Sam Willet had been friends for the past ten years, ever since he’d gone to Pine Bush in New York to film a piece on big cats roaming around the farms up there in a place where there should be no big cats. He’d met Sam Willet when he and the crew visited his farm to take some B-roll. It turned out the old man had an incredible story of his own to tell, so long as the young cryptozoologist kept it hush-hush. Norm had proven himself a worthy confidant, and the two had been corresponding by e-mail ever since.
    Whereas Norm had an interest in a wide range of cryptids—land, air and sea—old Sam was fixated on one particular nasty little creature. Norm had promised to keep him apprised of any mention of the beast.
    Just last night, Norm had read an online article from a mid-Jersey paper about several campers hearing something unnatural in the woods. One of them was brave enough to leave the tent, looking up at the night sky just in time to catch the fleeting form of a winged creature that shouldn’t be.
    It was the second Jersey Devil sighting in as many weeks.
    Maybe , Norm thought as he typed , we have the start of something we can both sink our teeth into.

Chapter Five
    â€œThis is not one of