Behind the Science: The Leeds Devil

Behind the Science: The Leeds Devil The Leeds Devil in Salem's Daughter is one of those creatures where the first question is whether the town is even looking for the right thing. Children are disappearing, people are talking about a monster in the woods, and then Anna and Braden find something horrible enough in a man's house that everybody decides the mystery is solved. Except it isn't. The creature is real, and somebody has been feeding it. I like that the book lets Anna and Braden get that wrong before they figure it out. They don't walk into town, identify every piece of the problem and fix it. Michael Burrow is hanged, Anna is still uneasy, and then she ends up in the caves with the very thing people were prepared to dismiss as a story. Lucas is alive down there. The monster they were supposedly done worrying about is close enough that he has to keep her quiet to avoid attracting it. Visually, this version has a pretty unpleasant combination of features. Membranous wings, long grasping fingers, a mouth full of sharp teeth, fur along parts of the body and armored-looking patches around the shoulders. We actually see it take flight, so the wings aren't just there to make it look more demonic. But I wouldn't start calculating a flying speed or a wingspan from a comic panel. We aren't given the measurements or the internal anatomy to support that. If you tried to build something like this as an animal, flight would be one of your biggest problems. Wings have to produce enough lift to carry the body, and the animal needs the muscles and energy supply to keep using them. Giving a large, heavy-looking creature batlike wings doesn't automatically solve any of that. Real bats have forelimbs adapted into wings. This thing has a separate pair of arms to reach for people while the wings sit behind them. You're already dealing with a very different body plan. Its behavior is easier to follow than its biology. It eats, hunts, searches the cave and pursues Anna and Lucas when they escape. It can be physically injured. Braden puts a knife through its eye, and it keeps coming. That doesn't tell us the exact limits of its durability, but it does tell us a serious injury isn't enough to end the encounter. The human arrangement around it is what makes this particular version worth discussing. Samuel claims the town's prosperity came through a pact, and he's been offering people to the creature. That's his explanation, not a scientifically demonstrated relationship between feeding a monster and improving the local economy. The bodies and the victims are real within the story whether his justification is worth anything or not. Samuel eventually discovers how little protection that arrangement gives him. The creature attacks him, too. Anna ends the fight with an incantation and a burst of supernatural power, leaving it burning away. By then, Braden has tried shooting it and stabbing it, and he's running out of useful options. This is one of those encounters where the gunfighter very much needs the witch beside him.