Chapter Text
“I swear to god, I am not going to New Jersey.” Ryan announces to an almost empty conference room, hands over his eyes.
Shane looks up from his Macbook, lovingly stickered with fanmade BUZZFEED UNSOLVED drawings, sympathetically over his glasses. The west coast sun warming his face. Ryan tilts back farther into the chair, not removing his hands, as his friend looks at him.
Brainstorming or not. he thinks, I don’t want to leave the city for a while.
“It's just a suggestion, I mean we already covered bigfoot.” A small smile plays at Shane’s voice, “but I heard,” he leans slightly over to Ryan “that there was a recent sighting!”
Ryan groans into the empty air, and lets his hands slide down his face, getting a good look at Shane. His hair seems to be sticking straight up, his shirt just slightly unbuttoned, but he looks excited. They’ve been brainstorming new video ideas after running around abroad after Jack The Ripper, locking themselves in a room for almost a dozen hours, looking for whatever stuck. And finally they came down to the ‘List of cryptids’ on Wikipedia.
“We could be hot on the trail!” Shane jokes. “You and me! Face to face with the devil.” he spins the Macbook to face Ryan, showing off a news article that shouts Is the Jersey Devil in Galloway Township? In large black letters.
Ryan takes one look at the smoking gun photo displayed. “That’s a pinata in a tree.”
Shane breathes through his nose and closes his eyes, just for a moment, and then gives Ryan a good-natured look. “I think it would be fun.” A pause, “pinatas are fun!”
Ryan smiles despite himself, curling forward to place his elbows on the table, and spins the laptop back to Shane. “Let's stick to local.”
---
“Look, Ryan, lo- RYAN.” Shane's voice echoed throughout the room, as he retreats wildly from the doorway like a firecracker in a bottle, his flashlight shaking in his hand. Backing straight into the camera man filming behind him, chaos ensues, and Shane whoops even louder for Ryan to look into the room he escaped from. Ryan quickly follows him out, no worse for wear, looking horrified.
“Why did you have to provoke it!” Ryan shouts in Shane general direction, “no ghost is going to like you shouting that you had sex with its mother!”
Shane is dancing about the room, skittering around corners and shining his flashlight at the now-empty room in front of him, joking around.
“I wanted to know! The public just wanted to know!” as he moves back into the camera’s frame. Ryan’s already bent over, wheezing with laughter, filling up the room with relief. “How else are we gonna know if he killed his stepfather if we dont ask the hard questions?”
Ryan is slick with sweat, still laughing off his fear, and playfully shines a flashlight onto Shane’s face “Just making some fucked up inquires at a ghost.”
“What’s he gonna do?” Shane dramatically shines the flashlight onto his own face, “become The Terminator and kill me?”
Above, a light fixture falls and collides with the floor next to him. The scream blows out the audio recording.
Ryan jumps suddenly from the sound, flinging his headphones off in the process, and looks around wildly. Final Cut Pro warns at him as his headphone jack disconnects and Shane's voice booms from the speakers “Oh fuck! He is The Terminator!-”
Shane scrambles to pause the audio, but can already feel every desk mate looking at him. Grimacing, hunching down to hide, he plugs his headphone back in. Messenger beeps at his attention.
ShaneMadej 413: hey
ShaneMadej413: so I was just looking over our next list of things
that we have to film
ShaneMadej413: and we seem to have hit some dead ends.
Ryan looks at the ceiling, the audio files play in his ears, Shanes laughing voice only heard by him alone. They had researched many possible cases, really interesting ones, but there just wasn't enough to cover them properly. Not in the time they had anyway, having to stack them into next season while waiting for emails to be returned and permissions granted. Ryan cracks open the Word document that holds whatever was left from the last brainstorming session and stares at it for a decent thirty minutes.
ShaneMadej413: You there?
Ryan leans forward slightly to type out a response, the office seems to still, he pulls the worst idea from a pocket and splays it out to Shane.
RyanBergara 612: How about The Jersey Devil.
---
The storm goes on, throwing tantrums, shaking down trees for all their worth. Crows fly, hand over fist, trying to keep close to their nest within the branches. A flashlight waves desperately through the dark, rain beats down, and a pair of park rangers press through the forest.
“Of course,” Ranger Navarro shouts into the wind “it has to start fuckin’ raining when we’re like a mile out from the station!” They move forward on memory alone. Navarro tilts their head back to look at their partner, sticking on their heels as usual, and is greeted with a beam of light to the face.
Navarro curses immediately as her partner, Cait, twists her flashlight out of their eyes. “We’re really close! It's fine!” She gives a holler, “It's not like were lost!”
They roll their head forward, only glancing down at their compass keychain, still trying to follow the signs posted on the trees around them. The Pine Barrens hasn't been slammed with a storm like this in months, maybe years, and it was aggravating that the distress call was faked. No one was there at the campsite that night, it was their off-season for campers, and yet the voice from the phone call sounded to be in agony.
They moved forward, soil turning slick beneath their feet, as the forest seems to drop down slightly and open into a sparse field. The ranger station just beyond, simple and squat, but illuminated and dry. Cait launches herself ahead of the other and slides down the slight drop, holding onto a branch to keep from slipping onto her back. Navarro follows suit, taking one step onto the angled ground.
Above, the forest screams.
Navarro reaches out to a branch to stead their feet and it recoils from their palm, a howl runs an outline into the bark. That's not the fucking wind.
They look up.
---
The windows are open. And Los Angeles floats in with the still air. He curls over the bulletin board, tacking up tiny print of the painting of the devil, right above a folded over map. Itimmediately drops under the weight.
“Fuck!” Ryan mumbles to himself.
The board is clustered with images, printouts of stories, news articles, and even a tiny “I LOVE NEW JERSEY” keychain. The map is instead taped to the frame, covered in red ink circles and names, and he retreats to study his handiwork.
There is a pause. “Looks like a Pinterest board.”
The several eyes of the Jersey Devil stare back into his, sending out a feeling of tunnel vision. The devil was a rejected child, said to have killed its mother and the midwife after being born, disappearing into the Pines. Birthed over 200 years ago. Ryan leans back on the desk.
Recent sightings of this thing haven't been recorded since the 1900’s, maybe as late as the 1930’s, however there were a few cases of missing people up and vanishing in the Pines. Some had commented on the news articles that they were taken by the devil to be sacrificed.
He puts his full weight onto the desk and says into the empty office, “But why come back around now?”
“I don't know, maybe he’s hungry,” Shane leans in from the doorway as Ryan jumps in surprise, whipping around to look at him. “I didn't know you were this dramatic when you’re alone.”
Ryan immediately comes around the bend of the desk, annoyed, “God, don't disrupt me when I'm researching.”
“You’re staring at a cork board!” Shane raises his eyebrows while looking down at him. It’s close to the end of the night in the office and Ryan had been hogging the set space to put together the case file. Most of his research had been looking at Geocities sites and sending emails to park rangers, gathering some hard evidence.
“You’re not supposed to see the case before we film!” Ryan whines, shooing him away with his hands, “Go on! Go home!” and follows him through the door and into the hallway. Another picture of the Jersey Devil falls.
---
I write best on an airplane, Ryan remarks to himself, as Shane nuzzles asleep into his shoulder, acting out a voiceover in his head and imagining a slow camera rolling past him. Angled down from above, and hitting an open space, as woman turned towards window in the aisle seat, then turns towards the sound, a look up at the imposing being above, fear crossing over from the drink cart to her eyes. Body into Casket into Ground, Ah! My old self! I thought I killed you!
Shane’s hair flicks into Ryan’s nose while they’re flying 30,000 feet above Nebraska, and forcefully breathes out while typing at his keyboard. The passenger at the window twists his earbuds deeper into his ear canal, trying to not pry into what he’s typing. Between 1934 and 1938 in Cleveland, Ohio, near Kingsbury Run, 13 people comprised of 6 women and 7 men were killed by a serial killer.
Ryan takes a sip from the tiny water cup on his tray and rubs some sleep from his eyes, still exhausted from the nightmare of TSA. They were hitting the ground running after the plans for filming an episode in Orange County fell through at the last moment. Shane had picked up the slack by transferring the data from all the SD cards into a computer, while Ryan sat in a closet to record the voice over on a mic with a sock over it. Not one of their brightest moments.
One of their crewmates, Adam, traveling with them twists back in his seat to say something to Ryan, but pauses for a moment at Shane deep asleep in the crook of his neck. He takes a breath and says all soft “You want my peanuts?” and holds them between the divide.
“Thank god” Ryan takes them from his hands “some good fucking food.”
Adam laughs, taking a sip from his Red Bull. “So game plan is grab the gear, film us moving out to the hotel, and maybe getting some diner food, yeah?” Ryan makes a noise in agreement. Then dives into his jacket pocket, trying not to jostle Shane into waking up.
“Wait hold on, take my phone and record this,” he gleefully whispers, “He looks like a baby.” Smiling as he theatrically points and plays up Shane’s dead to the world state.
The flight attendant down a ways hides her face to laugh as she announces to god and everyone else “Folks, we are only two hours away now from reaching our destination at Newark Liberty International Airport, so we will begin moving the meal cart down the aisle…”
---
The first thing about Newark Airport is that it sucks. The second is that it’s cold. And third is that getting gear from the baggage claim is something that comes out of the corners with a portal to beyond.
Adam, who so graciously took the heaviest of the camera bags, comes back around with some tea to heat them up.
“Now, I am rested!” Shane gloats to them at their tiny table. The airport a flurry of movement, children grab hold of their mothers’ hands. Baggage claim sirens scream. Adam and Ryan eyebrows raise and smile mischievously.
“Have you checked snapchat?” Adam smiles to Shane’s rising realization.
“Oh no.” as horror takes over his voice. “What did you do?”
Ryan starts laughing quietly into his hands, Adam opens up the app and flips it towards Shane’s face- and snickers at his wide eyed reaction.
“Can’t wait to see that in the compilation” Adam titters out.
Adam’s phone retreats from Shane and he flicks back to the map, already packing up, “I’m gonna get the car, we’ve got like a two hour drive.”
Ryan places his head onto the table, ready for death.
The hotel itself is more of a motel, but it's got Wi-fi and clean sheets so he can’t complain, but it was made ever better by Shane’s realization that the bed was too short for his legs.
“I am not that tall!” he shouts into the air, laid face down while his feet dangle at least a foot out from the edge of the bed. “Many people are my height!”
Ryan pulls out his laptop from the bag on his bed and says “you are a nightmare height.”
The room itself was sparse, a strange beige yellow paint job, with double beds and a large vanity mirror. Adam made the fantastic discovery that there was a Whirlpool bathtub to only find it didn't work, to much dismay, but it had hot water and it was clean. They had ordered in, too tired to go hunting for a restaurant, The moon hung through the curtains like an omen.
Shane was already on his phone scrolling through emails, taking off his shoes with his feet, and thumped his face into the pillow “Wake me up when the Taxi guy gets here.”
Ryan glances up from unpacking his pajamas “I’m probably gonna be driving tomorrow.” Shane looks over at Ryan
“I thought we would take a Lyft to these places?”
Ryan gives a grin “Where we're going is very off-road.”
“Don’t do that voice! It's not like were going to do anything illegal!” Shane retorts.