The river in the photo was very clean, and the swans still held their graceful postures.
But in the upper-right corner of the sky, a blurry black shadow was stretched very long.
It looked like the afterimage of a bird that hadn't been captured clearly, moving so fast that it only left a faint streak on the photo.
“What's this? It's blurry,” Fei Meng muttered. Thinking her hand had shaken, she raised her camera to take another one.
“Holy shit!!!”
Just then, a sudden exclamation erupted from the crowd. A local white man walking his dog shouted, his voice filled with terror:
“What the hell is that up there?!”
The crowd's attention was instantly drawn away.
Dozens of people looked up at the sky in unison.
Then, a wave of exclamations burst out one after another, mixing several languages into a din like a boiling kettle:
“Amazing! A huge eagle? ...No, wait! What is that?!”
“Look, is that a plane? No, the shape is too weird, and it's flying way too fast!”
“Oh my god, what is that? That's not a bird at all!”
Fei Meng also looked up.
The black shadow was flying over from the direction of the Pine Barrens at an extremely high speed.
Within a dozen seconds, the thing went from a tiny black dot in the distance to a clear outline.
It was not an eagle, let alone a plane.
Its body was a full size larger than the largest golden eagle.
It was about 1.2 meters tall with a wingspan of 2.5 meters. What it spread was not feathered wings, but leathery, membranous wings like a bat's.
It—or rather, this “creature”—had an elongated horse's head with a pure black mane, and its eyes were two pools of crimson slit pupils.
Its torso was beast-like, covered in short, stiff black hair.
Its forelimbs were beast claws with curved, sharp talons, while its hind limbs were donkey hooves.
Most importantly, it dragged a long, forked, serpentine tail behind it.
A deathly silence fell over the path for two seconds.
Everyone froze in place.
Those holding phones, feeding swans, walking dogs, painting, performing... every single one of them had their mouths agape, heads tilted back, their minds completely blank.
No one could comprehend how a creature that clearly did not belong to this world could suddenly appear in reality.
“Woof! Woof! Woof!”
The golden retriever barked frantically, tucking its tail and fleeing for its life. The white man also snapped out of it immediately, abandoning his dog to bolt toward the buildings:
“There's a monster!!! HELP!!!”
But he was a step too late.
The thing circling in the air suddenly folded its wings, diving straight down toward the path like a bolt of black lightning!
The white man was carried high into the sky.
“Run!!”
Someone screamed at the top of their lungs.
The crowd erupted into chaos. A Latina mother pushing a stroller screamed, shielding her child in her arms as she turned and dashed toward a roadside coffee shop.
The elderly Japanese women were so frightened they dropped their Instax cameras on the ground, huddling together as they shrank back.
The French couple didn't care about taking photos anymore either, holding hands as they retreated behind the crowd.
Fei Meng subconsciously took two steps back, but her finger reflexively pressed the record button on her camera.
Her instincts as a media student overrode her fear. She even forgot to run, trembling as she raised the camera, her lens locked onto the black shadow.
The thing was too fast.
Screech—
“AHHHH!!!”
The man carried into the air let out a heart-wrenching scream, dangling in mid-air and struggling desperately.
Keke-keke—
The creature let out a non-human cackle, flapping its wings as it carried the man higher and higher.
Ten meters, twenty meters... until the man's screams began to fade.
The people below stared up at the tiny figure in the air, their faces pale, almost forgetting to scream.
Fei Meng's hand holding the camera was shaking, and the footage was violently unstable.
Then, she witnessed a scene she would never forget for the rest of her life.
The creature's claws suddenly tightened.
Crack—
The clear sound of bones snapping echoed from mid-air, as crisp as a dry branch being snapped in half.
The man's screams cut off abruptly.
The next second, a red “rain” showered down from the sky.
Warm, copper-scented blood.
Mixed with bits of flesh and shredded cloth, it pattered down onto the path, the railings, and the tourists' clothes and hair.
It was like a sudden, crimson shower.
Splat.
A piece of shredded flesh splashed into the latte cup held by the French girl.
It was a human finger.
The severed end was a bloody mess, and a ring was still on it.
It just bobbed up and down in the cup.
“AHHHHHHHHH!!!”
...
The commotion by the river seemed to please the monster.
It glanced at the humans hiding inside the buildings, circled once in the air while still clutching the mangled corpse in its talons, and finally let out a sharp shriek as if to assert dominance:
“Skreeeech—”
Then, it flapped its membranous wings and turned to fly back toward the Pine Barrens, moving as fast as a bolt of black lightning.
Only a messy path and a crowd of trembling, terrified survivors were left behind.
“What... what the hell is that thing?! The Jersey Devil? Isn't that supposed to be fake?!” Fei Meng leaned against the railing, sliding down the post to sit on the ground, her face incredibly pale.
“No one told me that studying abroad meant I had to worry about demons on top of mass shootings!”
The camera was still clutched in her hand, the record button still active.
The entire process just now had been captured clearly, from the demon diving and grabbing the man to crushing him in mid-air.
With trembling hands, Fei Meng stopped the recording, opened her social media app, and uploaded the video.
The caption was just a single short sentence, her fingers shaking so much she could barely type:
“Jersey Devil is real. A man died right in front of me. Bathgate River, NJ.”
Fei Meng did not know that in the next hour and a half, this video would garner forty million views, rocket to the top of the US trending topics, and turn the entire North American internet upside down.
She knew even less that this was only the beginning.
Nobody knew.
...
West Texas, along the Rio Grande.
The midday sun beat down mercilessly, and a dry, hot wind swept dust across the wilderness.
This was the US-Mexico border. The north bank of the river was Texas, USA, while the south bank was Coahuila, Mexico.
The border wound on endlessly, with vast oak forests left completely unguarded.
As a result, illegal immigrants crossed the shallows here year-round, and various bizarre disappearances frequently occurred.
...
Martha Colvin rode her chestnut horse, Cowboy, slowly along the barbed-wire fence of her ranch.
She was forty-two years old and the owner of this ranch of over three hundred acres.
Her husband had been shot and killed by drug traffickers while patrolling the border five years ago.
She guarded this ranch alone, raising over two hundred Angus cattle, her character tough as nails.
She wore a faded denim shirt, jeans tucked into cowboy boots, and carried a Remington 870 shotgun slung over her shoulder.
The gun stock was worn shiny; Martha took it wherever she went.
The border was not peaceful.
There were border-crossers, drug traffickers, cattle rustlers—all kinds of people.
Without a heavy weapon on hand, a single person could never guard such a massive ranch.
She was out to inspect the northern fence today. Yesterday, a ranch hand had reported that the fence in the northwest corner had been cut open.
—Some illegal immigrants might have slipped in, so she had to check it out.
Cowboy walked leisurely, his hooves leaving a trail of shallow prints in the sandy soil.
As she neared the oak forest close to the river, Martha suddenly pulled the reins.
An old white RV sat parked at the edge of the woods, its body rusted and painted with faded patterns.
The door hung wide open, swinging back and forth in the wind with a harsh, creaking sound.
Many items lay scattered around the RV:
A pink children's backpack, a few diapers, half a bag of tortillas, and a shattered water bottle.
Everything was strewn about in a mess, as if the owners had left in an extreme hurry, not even having time to grab their luggage.
Martha's right hand immediately went to the gun stock on her waist, and with a clack, she chambered a shell.
She had seen plenty of border-crossers, and most of them were sneaky.
But it was rare to see luggage dumped all over the ground, unless they had encountered some emergency, or... danger.
“Is anyone there?” Martha's voice echoed in the empty river valley, carried by the wind toward the water.
There was no response.
Only the rustling of the wind through the reeds and the rushing of the river.
Cowboy seemed to sense something. He pawed the ground uneasily and let out a low whinny toward the river.
Martha dismounted, tying the reins to a nearby oak tree.
She gripped her shotgun tightly, cautiously stepping toward the RV.
The inside of the RV was even messier.
The bedding had been pulled back, the blanket thrown in a crumpled heap on the floor, and half-eaten tacos sat on the small table.
The driver's side door was open, and the keys were still in the ignition.
It looked as if a family had been eating inside just a moment ago, only to be dragged out by something the very next second.
They had left so quickly they hadn't even pulled the keys out.
Martha's heart sank.
Just as she was about to back out and call the police, she suddenly heard crying.
It was a man's weeping, heavy with a Mexican accent, ragged and gasping as if he were about to suffocate.
Martha instantly grew alert. Raising her shotgun, she stepped into the reeds.
The reeds grew taller than a person, dense and suffocating.
The mud beneath her feet grew softer and stickier, carrying the dampness of the river, and a fishy stench grew increasingly potent.
After walking for about two minutes, she reached the end of the reeds, opening up to a wide backwater bay.
And then, Martha saw the man.
He was squatting on the muddy riverbank, clutching his head and crying hysterically.
He looked to be in his early thirties at most, unshaven and dressed in tattered clothes. His knees and elbows were scraped raw, covered in mud and blood.
Hearing footsteps, the man whipped his head up.
When he saw the gun in Martha's hand, he was startled at first. But then, as if seeing a savior, he scrambled over on all fours, falling to his knees in the mud with a wet thud. Grabbing Martha's cowboy boots, he wailed in Spanish:
“Señora! Por favor, ayúdeme! Mis hijos… una mujer de blanco se los llevó al río!” (“Ma'am! Please, help me! My children... a woman in white took them into the river!”)
He was crying so hard he could barely breathe, incoherent, repeating “woman in white,” “took the children,” and “in the water” over and over.
Martha listened for a long time before she could barely piece together what had happened.
The man's name was Carlos, thirty-two years old, from a small town in northern Mexico.
After his family's farm was burned down by gangs, he had walked for three days and three nights with his seven-year-old son, Diego, and five-year-old daughter, Sofia, to reach the Rio Grande.
He had originally wanted to cross illegally into the United States to seek refuge with his cousin in Houston, Texas, to find a way to survive.
Just now, while they were resting near the RV, the two children had run to the river to play in the water while he was packing his bags.
He had just stuffed his passport into his bag when he heard his children crying. Running over, he saw a woman in a white dress taking the two of them away.
He wanted to chase after them, but when he looked up, the woman had already vanished.
...
“A woman in white?” Martha frowned. “What did she look like? Did you get a clear look?”
Carlos's body shook even more violently, his face filled with dread as his voice trembled: “No lo vi bien… estaba de espaldas, el pelo muy largo, el vestido mojado… se veía como si estuviera hinchada…” (“I didn't get a good look... Her back was to me, her hair was very long, her dress was wet... She looked bloated...”)
He pointed toward the deepest part of the backwater bay, his voice cracking: “Allí… ella está allí ahora mismo…” (“There... she is still there right now...”)
Martha looked in the direction he pointed.
The surface of the backwater bay was extremely calm, without a single ripple. The muddy river water was a dull yellow, and not even a single fish could be seen.
Martha spotted the woman.
She was standing in waist-deep water, her back to the shore.
She wore a long white dress, the hem completely submerged in the water and clinging wetly to her legs.
Jet-black hair hung down, covering her entire face, leaving only a glimpse of a pale, bloated chin.
Her two hands were thrust into the water, pressing down on two small heads, bobbing them up and down in the river.
It was the two children.
Diego and Sofia.
Their struggles had already grown very weak, their tiny hands feebly slapping the water's surface, on the verge of stopping entirely.
“Hey! Stop!”
Without a second thought, Martha raised her shotgun and fired a shot into the sky.
Bang!
The deafening blast echoed through the valley, startling a flock of waterfowl hiding in the reeds, which flapped their wings and flew into the distance.
Yet the woman in white acted as if she hadn't heard a thing, remaining completely still.
Martha cursed.
She wasn't a border-crosser; she was a lunatic!
No normal person could remain entirely unresponsive to a gunshot.
She gritted her teeth and lowered her barrel, aiming straight at the woman's back.
“I'm warning you! Let go of the kids! Or I'll shoot!”
Then she shouted it again in Spanish, her voice carrying an unquestionable toughness.
The woman still didn't budge.
Martha pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The shotgun packed immense power, the buckshot spreading out in a fan pattern.
At a distance of ten meters, her aim was impeccable; there was absolutely no way she could miss.
But what happened next was something Martha could not explain.
The lead pellets passed right through the woman's body as if she were a mere illusion, plunging directly into the river behind her and kicking up a spray of water.
The woman was completely unharmed.
She didn't even sway.
Beside her, the man slumped onto the ground, muttering with a vacant gaze: “Es La Llorona… es ella… la que se lleva a los niños…” (“It's La Llorona... it's her... the ghost who takes children...”)
Just then, the woman in white in the river slowly turned around.
Martha's breath caught instantly.
That was absolutely not a human face.
Her skin was a bloated pale white, puffy and shiny, like a corpse that had been soaking in water for months.
Her features were blurry, and her eyes had no pupils or whites—just two pools of murky grayish-white, as if covered by a layer of mist.
The corners of her mouth split wide open, stretching all the way to her ears, looking as if she were smiling yet crying at the same time.
Suddenly, a sharp, wailing cry exploded in Martha's ears:
“Ahhhhh—”
The shrill sound vibrated directly inside her head.
The woman's weeping was incredibly mournful, carrying a heart-wrenching hatred.
Martha let out a low groan, nearly losing her footing as the muscles in her face twitched uncontrollably.
In that split second.
The woman in white in the river turned into a translucent white phantom, flying straight toward Martha!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Rate on N.U.
