The beast is back and this time he’s hungry — so hungry, in fact, that he tried to eat a house.
Forgive the drama. You know how I get when there’s a beast afoot. Let me calm myself and start from the beginning.
The woman’s name is Kit and she lives in a nice house along North River Road in Greene. One recent morning, she was awakened by the savage appetite of The Fiend.
“It was early in the morning, somewhere between 4:30 and 5 a.m.,” Kit told me. “I came right up out of the bed to this incredible sound like crunching metal. At first, I thought a tree had fallen on the shed out back. I thought maybe cars had crashed.”
No tree had fallen and no cars had crashed. Something was on the prowl, something that could be sensed even if it didn’t yet want to be seen.
“When the dogs went out later that morning,” Kit said, “they went out with the hair up on their backs.”
It was only later that the damage was discovered. In the back of the house — just under Kit’s bedroom window and next to a small block wall — the beast had left its mark.
“The siding was literally torn off of the foundation,” Kit said. “Something just tore it up — not down, up. The teeth marks go right through it. It was something aggressive; something that meant business. It was bold enough to come right up to the house.”
She paused in her recollection. You could almost see the chill of primal fear running up and down her spine.
“It had to be something strong,” she mused. “Short of a rabid Cujo, I have no idea what it might be.”
Another pause. Off in the distance, wind howled through the trees. Probably.
“If it’s capable of this kind of damage,” Kit said, “I wonder what’s next?”
Oh, yes, The Beast was back. Every five or six summers he returns to bewilder my days and haunt my nights. In 2001, he was on the prowl in Sabattus. In 2006, it was Turner. The beast has been heard screaming in Wales and howling in Leeds. In the woodlands of Auburn, it has been spotted with fangs gleaming in the setting sun.
Now it was in Greene and only God himself knew what damage the beast was prepared to do. The damnable creature had driven me to the bottle the last time, but this time it would be different. This time I would hunt it with clear eyes and a sharp mind. Probably.
I went to Greene. After introducing myself to Kit and her two golden retrievers, we went to survey the damage at the back of her house. The torn siding. the claw marks, the not-so-tiny holes where the wretched thing’s fangs had punched through the vinyl. The beast had been here, oh yes. Even in the full light of blazing afternoon I could feel him. In my mind, I sniffed his wild scent and heard the snapping of powerful mandibles.
I shivered in the torrid, midsummer heat, imagining what terrors were still to come. My inner voice was already documenting the terrible journey that had only just begun.
The horror. The horror.
Then, animal control agent Rich Burton walked up, took a look around the scene and said: “What we’ve got here is a groundhog.”
No, really, he said that. While I stood grimacing over Kit’s green acres — the way Quint grimaces over the shark-haunted sea — Berton took roughly five seconds to assess, diagnose and utter the name of a beast.
“Yep,” Burton said. “Groundhog. Look, you can see its burrow.”
And you could. The hole was right there next to the block wall, just below the mangled siding. A groundhog. A prosaic, non-terrifying groundhog had done all of this.
If my enthusiasm were a balloon, the whistle of its deflation would have been heard across the river in Lewiston. In the time that it takes Quint to crush a beer can, Burton had reduced the object of my long obsession from snarling, blood-lusting monster to nothing more than a wee, lumbering rodent so cartoonishly innocuous, it is sometimes called a “whistle pig.”
Summer of the Beast? Not quite. More like Summer of the Woodchuck, and that’s just not scary. Not scary enough to sell a million newspapers, anyway, or to create a buzz across the World Wide Web.
Insert sad trombone here.
While my beastly hopes were dashed, Kit was nothing but relieved. It wasn’t a monster living beneath her bedroom window, just an ordinary nuisance animal, dangerous only to wild grass and berries. In a fairy tale, this would be considered a happy ending. In the Chronicles of Mark, it’s a tragedy.
The Beast giveth and the Beast taketh away.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer and an intrepid Beast tracker. Insert triumphant trumpet here. And email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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