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Jersey Devil

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

A chill wind was blowing through the town of Burlington, New Jersey, on the last day of October. For the children of Burlington, Halloween was almost as magical as Christmas. What could be better than sprinting from door to door, screaming, "TRICK or TREAT," at the top of your lungs so that someone might toss a bite-size Snickers bar or a pack of candy corn into your Halloween basket?

It was unnaturally cold in New Jersey that Halloween, but you could feel the excitement in the air. Every school kid, from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, was anxiously waiting for the final school bell to ring. Not only was it Halloween, but it was Friday as well, and that meant a full night of fun without the worry of getting up for class the next morning.

Children weren't the only ones excited by Halloween; the adults loved it too. It was a day to relive their childhoods. Who didn't like the idea of ghosts and goblins knocking on their door, smiling when they were rewarded for the costumes that they wore?

Of course, there were always some, like Ms. Beverly Ann Anderson, who found Halloween to be insufferable. Anderson was the old lady who lived at the top of the hill on Thirty-Sixth Avenue with her dog, Charlie. The house she lived in was like all the others on the block with the exception being that it was run down and in dire need of repair. The roof sagged in places, and a brown shutter hung at an odd angle, having come loose from its hinges on the right side of an upstairs window. The house was white, but time and the elements had stripped much of the paint from it, giving it the look of a cow or a harlequin-colored dog. In the front yard were the termite-infested remains of a warped picket fence. One spoke in three was missing or broken, and it hadn't seen paint in ten years. The backyard was surrounded by a rusty, chain-link fence. Intertwined with vines and falling apart, it did little more than keep Charlie confined.

Charlie was one of those dogs that barked at everything and everybody who walked by the fence. On a daily basis, neighborhood children walked by, teasing the dog and shouting wicked things about the woman who lived inside the house, a house that nobody dared ring the doorbell of on Halloween. The cut-through path that led from Thirty-Fifth Avenue to Thirty-Sixth Avenue, went right by old lady Anderson's yard and gave Charlie plenty of excitement.

If a child was unlucky enough to lose a ball in the yard, it was forfeited. Charlie was a biter, as several of the neighborhood children could attest to. The small, brown terrier mix loved nothing more than to chase children up and down the fence line. If he found himself outside of the fence, or if someone was foolish enough to try to retrieve a ball from his yard, the dog couldn't pass up the chance to attach his jaws to the children. The dog had been there for as long as anyone could remember, and some of the children, who had limited knowledge of the occult and witchcraft, claimed that Charlie was old lady Anderson's familiar, which was a pet that watched over things for a witch or a sorcerer. In some tomes of the occult, it was said that a witch who kept a familiar, usually a black cat, could gain even more power through the use of such an animal.

The woman in the house was mysterious and sightings of her only happened every so often. The neighbors knew she was there, because they could hear her yelling at Charlie from inside of the house. On the rare occasions when you did see the eighty-one-year-old woman, she was usually wearing her housecoat and slippers and was dragging her trash can to the front of her house, where it remained on the side of her front steps.

Never once did someone see the old woman when she didn't have a sneer on her wrinkled, leather-skinned face. Her messy gray hair and her gnarled fingers only helped to verify that she was involved in witchcraft and the occult. All that was missing was a pointy hat and a broomstick. To see her with either would have been proof of her communion with darkness.

Just like in every other town in America, the Crystal Springs subdivision of Burlington, New Jersey, was full of myths and misunderstandings. Both kids and adults alike made up wild tales about the woman. Some said she had killed her husband and kept him in a freezer in the basement. Some said that she snatched up little children, who made the mistake of walking the path by her house late at night.

None of it was true. The reality of it was that Beverly Ann Anderson was an old maid who had never married and had kept to herself.

In 1972, she had had a stroke, which accounted for the permanent scowl on her face. With no family left in the world, Beverly Ann Anderson was just an old woman who would have loved the company of children or the kind greeting of an adult, though she received neither.

There was no misunderstanding the troubled teen who jumped the guardrail at the end of Thirty-Seventh Avenue and entered the old Whitmore Cemetery. Just another kid who fit in nowhere, the young man fought authority at every level. Conrad Beyer had been a delinquent for most of his life. From age nine to seventeen, he had been suspended from school more times than anyone could count, and he had had three extended stays in the juvenile detention center in Camden. Upon turning eighteen he had stolen a car, for which he did six months in the county jail.

A short walk through a small patch of woods led Conrad to the edge of the cemetery. The ground under his feet was hard, and the leaves and acorns from trees crunched loudly under his shoes as he walked. No fence surrounded the cemetery, and even if one did, Conrad Beyer would have climbed over it to gain entry. The grass around the gravesites was tall, and many of the headstones were covered in mold or badly cracked. Some of them were missing altogether.

As the short, greasy-haired youth walked through the graveyard, he ardently searched for one grave in particular. For two hours, the troubled young man wandered the cemetery, looking at headstones and grave markers for the name of the one who might be able to assist him with his conjuring. It was said in many of the occult tomes he had read that the dead, those who were particularly evil in life, could aid the living with conjurations.

Squatting down over a crumbling headstone, which was covered in filth, Conrad discovered what he was looking for. The headstone read, "Samuel Leeds, may the Devil take him."

Clearing the debris away from the headstone, Conrad sat where he thought the man's coffin might be lying in the ground. He closed his eyes and prayed. Removing a small, leather-bound book from the inside of his jacket, the teen took off the rubber band that was wound around it, and opened it to a page that had been earmarked for the occasion.

He had stolen the book from a small antiquities shop just the year before, and ever since he had begun reading its contents, he had been hooked. Groban's Tome of Demons and Devils was well-known to those in the world of the occult, and the copy he had was invaluable. Inside of the book were notes made by a man who had understood evil and believed in the powers of Satan. Inscribed on the inside cover of the small book was the name "Samuel Leeds," the name of the man who was buried in the very grave on which the teen was sitting.

Studying the tome, the teen had come to understand the hidden...