We inherited a demon. The Jersey Devil isn’t a myth… it’s been hibernating under my childhood bedroom for three hundred years.

I apologize for taking so long to update everyone on my previous post: I found a well hidden in my basement. I thought my father was a hoarder… he had been building a seal. It took a long time for my hand to heal well enough to type everything out; it’s still not 100%, but more than that, I just didn’t want to think about what had happened to my brother and me. Even doing what I could to make my waking hours too full for intrusive thoughts to squeeze through, I had zero control of all this horrific shit manifesting as nightmares. I knew that suppressing it all wouldn’t have a chance of working out in the long run, but avoidant personality types are gonna avoid, right? So here we are, a few months later, and I’m praying to whatever the opposite is of the thing we found in the basement that putting this to Internet paper will exorcise it from my subconscious and let me sleep in peace.

With thoughts of my mother’s “misplaced” white-gold ring nagging at me that morning, I was jolted with a memory: when I was growing up, dad said the devil can make you do things like you’re sleepwalking. I shuddered and, pushing it from my mind, with the help of a couple of dad’s pry bars, we were able to budge the stone lid — unholy sepulchre, my internal monologue unwelcomingly autocorrected, hoping we weren’t unearthing a tomb. It was heavier than it looked, but with persistence, accompanied by a resonant grinding, we finally budged the oversized manhole cover enough to tip toward the basement floor, where it fell with a thud. I instantly stepped back, feeling an unexpected primeval pang of anxiety at the sight of the stale darkness that had opened before us.

My brother, less of a chickenshit than moi, stoically set down his pry bar to unpocket his phone, using its flashlight to illuminate the well. Still tightly gripping my own pry bar like a half-ass Gordon Freeman, I crept beside him as he hovered his phone across the aperture. After all of the hubbub… it wasn’t much to look at. Through a thick stream of dustmotes excited to be freed for the first time in who knows how long, walls made of cobbled stone continued about eight feet to a dirt floor. The well was dry — but, most importantly, and mercifully, empty.

“Welp, so much for that.”

Feeling silly, I set the pry bar down, expending nervous energy by twisting my ring back and forth. I thought about how mom used to do the same when something was bothering her. My internal monologue intruded, once again: mirror, mirror, on the wall, I’ve become my mother, after all. Flooded with bittersweet relief, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. That was when everything went wrong.

Growing up, I had to take prescription antacids. Now, still between health insurances, I pay for overpriced over-the-counter pills from CVS… why is being poor so expensive? I digress. When I was about twelve, I came down with a stomach bug so bad that it landed me in the hospital. While I was there, they wouldn’t let me take my normal antacid, instead providing a generic from the in-house pharmacy. I had a bad reaction to it; nothing terrible, but my limbs became rigid, extremities taut, and I involuntarily threw my head back, thrashing from side to side on the stiff, starchy mattress. It had been similar to when I’ve endured sleepless nights with restless leg syndrome, but altogether unlike anything I had ever experienced before or since. Until that morning. My hand snapped across the void like a wet towel, launching mom’s ring down the well with a series of pings as it ricocheted from cobblestone to cobblestone until noiselessly cratering into the bed of sand waiting at the bottom.

My brother looked at me like I was an idiot. I felt like an idiot. He didn’t even need to say it. What the hell just happened? Why did I do that?

There was a long moment of silence. He continued to stare. Struggling for words, I broke it, blurting out: “I-DON’T-KNOW-WHY-I-DID-THAT-I-DIDN’T-MEAN-TO-I — ”

Before I could struggle to continue, my brother raised his hand, sighed, and walked upstairs to go outside to the still-undug shed (mind you, this occurred during the February snowstorm that swept the Northeast) that housed dad’s ladder. I called out, asking if he wanted help. The basement door opened and closed without response. Not wanting to be left alone down there — the whole situation was giving me the creeps — I hightailed it upstairs. After a moment, I returned downstairs and grabbed the two snow shovels we had both forgotten. I felt, having caused the upcoming dilemma, that it was the very least I could do.

Later that afternoon, we returned from the shed, slightly frostbit, plus one sliding aluminum ladder. Before leaving, my brother rolled aside an old tire and let out a soft “holy shit.” Leaning against the corner, like it was the most perfectly normal decoration in the world short of a fake houseplant, was a goddamn battle axe. It looked ancient: three feet tall with a handle made of wrought iron topped by a spiked end, and a massive rust-covered blade with a porous, almost pebbly surface.

Before I can utter a word, my brother said: “It’s the Blood of the Barren.”

I blinked. “Like, bog iron?”

“The blade is made of bog iron, yeah, but this isn’t just some flea market find. This is the actual Blood of the Barrens battle axe.”

I was transported to my bedroom, directly above the basement, over twenty-five years prior, in bed listening as dad regaled me with the true story of what became known as the Jersey Devil: a terrible creature that scoured the pinelands, with tales in oral tradition of it ravaging the local Native tribe dating to the onset of the Little Ice Age. Out of necessity, they worked with the European settlers that colonized the land to smith a defense: the Blood of the Barrens. Forged from the same mud and clay that made man, they believed bog iron was a living metal with a soul and sort of tactile memory that connected it to the land; the Pine Barrens themselves turned into a weapon.

I was floored: “Holy shit, wait, that’s real? Doesn’t it belong in a museum? Or at least the local historical society? Is that legal to own? What’s it doing in dad’s shed?”

My brother shook his head but didn’t answer one of my five questions. He was troubled; it looked like he knew more than he was letting on. He must have been speaking to dad more than I realized. I decided to let him revisit it when he’s ready: given my contributions to the day’s events thus far, I was the absolute last one to be giving him hell over anything.

We left the axe in the shed (another item I wasn’t yet ready to risk a tetanus shot over), returning to the basement to retrieve the ring. It was a tight fit for my brother to squeeze his big ass down the ladder, but he made it. Using his phone light, the white-gold gleamed in the dirt. Without enough room to bend over, only squat, he reached out, gradually grasping the ring: “Gotchya!” It was at that point my brother lost his balance — we’re old, I’m in my thirties, he’s in his forties, I’m surprised we don’t fall more often — crashing ass-first through the pit’s cobblestone wall and into the pitch black.

I didn’t have my phone or flashlight with me, all I could do was scream his name. Thankfully, after a few stressful seconds, he grunted out: “It’s okay. I’m alright.” A glimmer of light came from the hole at the bottom of the hole: “Christ, it’s real.”

“Excuse me?” First the axe, now what? “What else is real?!”

The only response was his light flickering away from the opening. This was just like him, to be so caught up with tunnel vision that I don’t even get through. Letting out a groan that can only be described as seeping dread, I swung a leg over the well wall and went after him. Shimmying to the side of the ladder on the bottom, I cautiously stuck my head into his new entrance. A dry, sulfurous draft hit my face from within, accompanied by an eye-watering wave of some rancid animal smell worse than an uncleaned chicken coop. Before my eyes could adjust to the fetid darkness, a hand grabbed my shoulder. I shrieked. My brother hardly noticed as he crouched nearly behind me, around the slope of the well wall, illuminating a troublingly deep expanse punctuated by stalactites and stalagmites that looked like the needly teeth of some deep-sea enigma.

Still struggling to comprehend everything around him, he was only half-paying attention as he muttered: “I’m not going to pretend I understand half of it, and I remember even less than that.” I couldn’t help but smile. Dad talked a lot, and it went pretty late into the night. Sometimes I’d doze off mid-story and wake up without him realizing. I was beginning to suspect I hadn’t been the only one. “He told me this house was built as a capstone to guard a natural cavern that had been blocked up by some seventeenth-century settlement. I thought it was just a story; I couldn’t imagine a cave could withstand the structural integrity needed for a two-story house. But here we are…”

Thinking about the battle axe sitting in the shed, I felt he was significantly burying the lede. “Wait. What exactly were they protecting?”

That was when his light went out. While my brother fumbled with his phone, something stirred in the darkness. A sharp series of clacks, nearly masked by what sounded like the thick rustle of leathery curtains. Then came a weird, almost gurgling noise; it was the croak I heard last night. Let me tell you how I prayed it was an underground river being aerated and not, like, a raccoon or something. Trash pandas are cute, but homegirl don’t play with wildlife. How much does a rabies shot cost when you’re uninsured? I don’t want to find out.

This was followed by a heavy dragging noise, metal on stone. A chain? Without saying a word, my brother grabbed my hand. Startled, it brought me back to the last time I had felt this scared. It was Mischief Night, and my brother had taken my hand, leading me through the local cemetery we used to pass to get to school. He told me there was a surprise, something I had to see for myself. While my classmates were teepeeing the veepee’s house, my brother took me to an row of graves in a forgotten, seldom-maintained corner of the graveyard. The sun was fast setting as he led me down a walkway overgrown with itchy, knee-high weeds, stopping in front of a tombstone from another century. Towering over my child self, inscribed upon the weathered granite was my first, middle, and last name.

I screamed. He took off. I chased after him, crying the whole way home. Mom and dad were so mad at him. But not me, I was just hurt that he could abandon me. How could my big brother do that to me? I guess that’s sort of his modus operandi — the graveyard, Afghanistan. In the moment since he had grabbed my hand, I had twisted myself in knots, fuming over things that happened decades ago. I was snapped to the present when I realized my brother’s gradual pressure had increased to a near-vice. And while mine were clammy with sweat — the subterranean heat, unaffected by the winter storm, was stifling — his were dry and rough, like cheap beef jerky. My heart was rising in my throat; it didn’t feel right.

“Stop squeezing my hand so hard, you’re hurting me.”

There was a deeply unsettling pause before he responded: “…I’m not holding your hand.”

I didn’t scream that time. I couldn’t. It felt like the heart that had been rising in my throat was suddenly clutched by an icy cadaver. I sprinted, not consciously thinking, only trying to put as much space as I could between me and whatever the fuck that was. It didn’t take long for me to trip face-first over my own feet. I hit the cave floor hard, knocking the wind out of myself. I coughed and spat out a mouthful of dirt, struggling to retain my air in a cloud of sand.

I quieted down as soon as I could manage, rubbing my eyes clear and listening to the echoey darkness. While I was grateful not to be impaled by a stalagmite, I couldn’t help but feel something was trying to lure me and my brother apart — and it hadn’t just started in the cave. I thought about the missing white-gold ring (“the devil can make you do things like you’re sleepwalking”). I thought about my brother, a teenager, saying he wasn’t leaving for Afghanistan; he was leaving to get away from the constant negativity in this house. I thought about mom and dad’s arguing, present since before I had been born, had taken an uptick after he left for the military. I thought it was because they couldn’t fight with him anymore, and they took the stress out on each other — but what if, with fewer people to feed from, the pull on each became stronger? It drained mom and dad’s spirit, killing them both, and my brother left me behind before it could get him.

But that’s not true. My brother didn’t leave me behind. He did what he had to do, and I chose to stay. And that’s on me.

Holding onto a certain sense of power that comes with finally taking accountability, I stood with newfound resolve, took control of my breathing, and waited. I could no longer hear that harsh, dragging croak or sense any movement. Without warning, a blinding light flashed from across the cavern. It seemed like my brother couldn’t get his phone’s flashlight working, but was able to achieve flash photography. In that instant of brightness, I saw it crouched on all fours, crawling behind a fence of scattered stalagmites, splashed in their spikey shadows as if from the perspective of some monstrous mouth. Staked to the cave floor with a short, thick iron chain extending to a rusted collar, it resembled no turn-of-the-century sideshow gag; it was a starved, prehistoric anomaly with milky, staring eyes: a predator waking from a reptile-like state of brumation to feed.

With the light gone as quickly as it had appeared, I squeezed my eyes shut, holding the brief afterimage I saw of the cave’s layout in my mind’s eye, before sprinting past the bound creature directly into the waiting arms of my brother. Without hesitation, he launched me through the hole, and I crashed into the aluminum ladder. I hightailed it up with my brother behind me.

Once on the basement floor, just to be safe, we retracted the ladder before my brother beelined for the stairs. I followed, demanding to know where he was going and what else he knew, when I realized we were walking outside to the shed. I scurried around him, leaning against the door before he could open it: “Listen, I realize that it’s sort of your MO to run into danger without a word of consideration, but I would really appreciate a little communication around here.”

My brother stopped and let out another sigh. “Look, it’s difficult for me to talk about, well, anything, really. My natural inclination is to just put as little distance between my problem and the solution as possible.”

I didn’t say anything, allowing him to go at his own pace.

“Like it or not, we inherited a demon. I may not know much about feelings, but I guarantee you that it’s feeding off of our negativity.  We broke the seal. Our options are rebuilding it, not that it was doing much good, to leave it down there for my children’s children —”

My left hand, the same one that flung off the ring, began itching something fierce. “Or?”

“Or we grab that axe and end this tonight.”

When he put it that way, how could I refuse? Recognizing it held some inexplicable domain over electrical currents, we opted to bring dad’s old kerosene lantern. My brother hauled the axe inside, explaining its lore. Our ancestor had been a metalsmith who forged a binding alloy capable of destroying it: “The Jersey Devil was born of the Barrens, and can’t be killed by steel or silver — only something of the very earth it sprang from.” He indicated the battle axe. “Bog iron.”

“Bog iron,” I agreed. “How did they manage to trap it down here? And why didn’t they kill it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, replacing the aluminum ladder down the well: “Maybe once we’re done, we can grab an Ouija board and find out.” I guess as much as dad liked to tell stories, maybe we could have afforded to listen a little better.

Before continuing, he awkwardly turned to me: “Listen, before we go down there, I just wanted to say that I know things haven’t been the same between us since I left for Afghanistan, and, well, I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t because of you or anyone else; it was just something I had to do. I wish things were better,” he paused. “And I love you.”

My family was never one to say “I love you” to one another. We knew it, we felt it, but we never said it. This was my first time hearing it from him. I continued to scratch my now-raw left hand, but to my astonishment, didn’t cringe into myself from embarrassment. I don’t know when the last time I heard that was, and I didn’t realize how badly I needed to hear it. My eyes welled, this time for a good reason: “You have nothing to apologize for, you were just living your life. It takes two to maintain a relationship. And I love you, too.”

We hugged, and now that whatever had been brewing between us had been addressed, it caused an emotional shift within us that changed the atmosphere. We were still scared, but it became a burden we could now share and embrace together, as a team.

I began to feel lightheaded as we descended. I stopped, cradling the lantern and resting my head on one of the rungs. I thought about the harsh, guttural voice that I heard in my sleep the prior night, like a vulgar form of German. An intrusive thought, perhaps, though I couldn’t help but wonder what was intruding. I was unable to pursue that thought any further when my hand began to throb. My brother, already crouching through the cave opening, looked back: “Everything alright?”

Overcome by a sudden, horrible impulse racing down the electrical current of my nervous system, I shouted: “Grab the lantern before I smash it!”

He stood, dropping the axe and grabbing the lantern’s base, but, as if it had a mind of its own, my left hand wasn’t ready to let go. He pulled and, being nearly twice my size, we tumbled through the hole, into the cavern.

My brother quickly stood, wrenching the lantern from my grasp. Looking about, the Devil was nowhere to be seen. He turned to me as I remained on the floor, struggling to contain my left hand, holding it by the wrist as it desperately tried to claw at my face inches away.

My brother and I exchanged a glance, then his eyes turned to the axe. He set down the lantern beside me, picking up the battle axe with both hands. I gritted my teeth and nodded, pressing the back of my alien hand against the cold, rocky floor and pinning it down with my knee. He raised the Blood of the Barrens to face-level before shakily turning it upside-down, and plummeting the spike into the palm of my rabid hand. I howled as the wrought iron simultaneously felt like a flash freeze and burning white heat, instantly cauterizing the wound. My fingers curled like a dead spider while steamy black ichor oozed from the seared hole, the portrait of a stigmatic antichrist.

My brother pulled the driven blade from my palm and dropped the axe, kneeling as he took my head in his hands: “Are you alright?”

I sniffled through tears, managing to nod. Truth be told, it was sore, but it did feel better, like after the removal of a particularly nasty splinter — or an embedded tickhead.

As my brother knelt over me, I heard the sudden pull and break of a chain, followed by a gurgling croak as its shadow rapidly loomed upon us. Freed for the first time in centuries, the Jersey Devil spread its leathery wings, extending its neck to a length I didn’t expect possible from its outward anatomy, mouth opened with a horror of teeth prepared close around my brother’s neck. Staring at one another, his pupils dilated in terror as he registered what was about to happen.

I didn’t have time to think. With my left hand, I backhanded the everloving shit out of my brother directly in his face, knocking him to the side. Now, nothing stood between me and the lunging Devil. We locked eyes as it snapped its jaws down on thin air, spraying me with wretched breath. If there was any discernible confusion on its face, it didn’t have time to register as I grabbed the lantern and swung, smashing it across the demon’s face with a crash of glass and the burst of flames.

The demon threw its head back in agony, letting out an ungodly wail. My big brother stood with his left eye squeezed shut behind the Jersey Devil as it fell to the ground, thrashing. He heaved the Blood of the Barrens above his head, bringing its full weight crashing down upon the demon’s neck — cutting its fucking head off. Its hide hissed as the flames dissipated, and a horrible-smelling black viscous discharge pooled beneath its severed head, jaws still reflexively opening and closing as it lifelessly bit off its own tongue. The tongue began to crawl away like a worm until I stomped on it.

Later, after bandaging my hand — with a black eye of his own, courtesy of moi (he was not only grateful to be saved, but proud, it was one hell of a shiner) — we went back down and wrapped the smoldering corpse into a blanket, hauled it out through the hole onto the well floor, and hoisted it up with eighties workout equipment, a pull-down machine. From there, we dragged it up the steps into the backyard. It was early morning, and the sun was rising by the time we set the bonfire. Neither of us necessarily planned on talking about that night, but who knows if it will come out some drunken evening when the kids are older. But that can wait. 

We tried to look at the flash photography he took while I was escaping our first encounter, but capturing its image seemed to have corrupted the entire device. He tossed the phone in the fire, saying he would have a fun explaining that to insurance. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have so much money that you can afford to have insurance for your phone, but I digress.

“I almost forgot to give this back to you.”

In my brother’s hand was my mother’s white-gold ring. I instinctively reached for it, but retracted my hand and shook my head: “Keep it. You saved my life. The least I can do is let you give it to your wife; we both know how much she wants it. Besides, it will help get you out of trouble for the broken phone and the black eye. That’s the one you’re going to have a hard time explaining.”

My brother smiled for the first time since our day started nearly twenty-four hours prior: “Yeah, she does, and yeah, it probably would. But mom wanted you to have it, so I think you should hold onto it.”

I hope this exorcism of self has been successful, and I can rest easily again at night without hearing that demon’s evil tongue. Just typing it all out has helped, and I recommend anybody else who has survived a traumatic experience to try doing the same. We still aren’t sure exactly what to do with the Blood of the Barrens, but I rest better knowing it sits at a place of honor on the living room mantle, ready and waiting, should any of the Jersey Devil’s siblings surface. I still don’t have full sensation in my fingers, but at least the scar on my palm hasn’t leaked any of that horrible-smelling black ichor for a few weeks. Some wounds never fully heal.

On the bright side, my brother has been bringing my nibblings over at least once a month. We’ve busted out the old PlayStation games (with my hand, I am largely relegated to rooting for the home team), watched old horror movies (strangely comforting in the face of what we’ve experienced, especially introducing them to MST3K), pulled out boxes of Men to play with, and we’ve both regaled them with stories of folklore and adventure, just like their pop-pop. I’m sure they don’t believe half of it, but that’s probably for the best. Things aren’t perfect, but my home and my life are the fullest they’ve been since mom and dad were still here. It’s been a good spring, and shaping up to be an even better summer.

I was eight years old when I lost my brother. I was thirty-three when I found him again.