Cycle of the Werewolf Page 3

  Once he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, he wipes his hands on the front of his shirt to make sure they’re dry and won’t slip. Then he uses the rail to go hand over hand to his wheelchair. His useless scarecrow legs, so much dead weight, drag along behind him. The moonlight is bright enough to cast his shadow, bright and crisp, on the floor ahead of him.

  His wheelchair is on the brake, and he swings into it with confident ease. He pauses for a moment, catching his breath, listening to the silence of the house. Don’t shoot off any of the noisy ones tonight, Uncle Al had said, and listening to the silence, Marty knows that was right. He will keep his Fourth by himself and to himself and no one will know. At least not until tomorrow when they see the blackened husks of the twizzers and the fountains out on the verandah, and then it wouldn’t matter. As many colors as there are on a dragon’s breath, Uncle Al had said. But Marty supposes there’s no law against a dragon breathing silently.

  He lets the brake off his chair and flips the power switch. The little amber eye, the one that means his battery is well-charged, comes on in the dark. Marty pushes RIGHT TURN. The chair rotates right. Hey, hey. When it is facing the verandah doors, he pushes FORWARD. The chair rolls forward, humming quietly.

  Marty slips the latch on the double doors, pushes FORWARD again, and rolls outside. He tears open the wonderful bag of fireworks and then pauses for a moment, captivated by the summer night—the somnolent chirr of the crickets, the low, fragrant breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees at the edge of the woods, the almost unearthly radiance of the moon.

  He can wait no longer. He brings out a snake, strikes a match, lights its fuse, and watches in entranced silence as it splutters green-blue fire and grows magically, writhing and spitting flame from its tail.

  The Fourth, he thinks, his eyes alight. The Fourth, the Fourth, happy Fourth of July to me!

  The snake’s bright flame gutters low, flickers, goes out. Marty lights one of the triangular twizzers and watches as it spouts fire as yellow as his dad’s lucky golf shirt. Before it can go out, he lights a second that shoots off light as dusky-red as the roses which grow beside the picket fence around the new pool. Now a wonderful smell of spent powder fills the night for the wind to rafter and pull slowly away.

  His groping hands pull out the flat packet of firecrackers next, and he has opened them before he realizes that to light these would be calamity—their jumping, snapping, machine-gun roar would wake the whole neighborhood: fire, flood, alarm, excursion. All of those, and one ten-year-old boy named Martin Coslaw in the doghouse until Christmas, most likely.

  He pushes the Black Cats further up on his lap, gropes happily in the bag again, and comes out with the biggest twizzer of all—a World Class Twizzer if ever there was one. It is almost as big as his closed fist. He lights it with mixed fright and delight, and tosses it.

  Red light as bright as hellfire fills the night . . . and it is by this shifting, feverish glow that Marty sees the bushes at the fringe of the woods below the verandah shake and part. There is a low noise, half-cough, half-snarl. The Beast appears.

  It stands for a moment at the base of the lawn and seems to scent the air . . . and then it begins to shamble up the slope toward where Marty sits on the slate flagstones in his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his upper body shrinking against the canvas back of his chair. The Beast is hunched over, but it is clearly walking on its two rear legs. Walking the way a man would walk. The red light of the twizzer skates hellishly across its green eyes.

  It moves slowly, its wide nostrils flaring rhythmically. Scenting prey, almost surely scenting that prey’s weakness. Marty can smell it—its hair, its sweat, its savagery. It grunts again. Its thick upper lip, the color of liver, wrinkles back to show its heavy tusk-like teeth. Its pelt is painted a dull silvery-red.

  It has almost reached him—its clawed hands, so like-unlike human hands, reaching for his throat—when the boy remembers the packet of firecrackers. Hardly aware he is going to do it, he strikes a match and touches it to the master fuse. The fuse spits a hot line of red sparks that singe the fine hair on the back of his hand, crisping them. The werewolf, momentarily offbalance, draws backward, uttering a questioning grunt that, like his hands, is nearly human. Marty throws the packet of firecrackers in its face.

  They go off in a banging, flashing train of light and sound. The beast utters a screech-roar of pain and rage; it staggers backward, clawing at the explosions that tattoo grains of fire and burning gunpowder into its face. Marty sees one of its lamplike green eyes whiff out as four crackers go off at once with a terrific thundering KA-POW! at the side of its muzzle. Now its screams are pure agony. It claws at its face, bellowing, and as the first lights go on in the Coslaw house it turns and bounds back down the lawn toward the woods, leaving behind it only a smell of singed fur and the first frightened and bewildered cries from the house.

  “What was that?” His mother’s voice, not sounding a bit brusque.

  “Who’s there, goddammit?” His father, not sounding very much like a Big Pal.

  “Marty?” Kate, her voice quavering, not sounding mean at all. “Marty, are you all right?”

  Grandfather Coslaw sleeps through the whole thing.

  Marty leans back in his wheelchair as the big red twizzer gutters its way to extinction. Its light is now the mild and lovely pink of an early sunrise. He is too shocked to weep. But his shock is not entirely a dark emotion, although the next day his parents will bundle him off to visit his Uncle Jim and Aunt Ida over in Stowe, Vermont, where he will stay until the end of summer vacation (the police concur; they feel that The Full Moon Killer might try to attack Marty again, and silence him). There is a deep exultation in him. It is stronger than the shock. He has looked into the terrible face of the Beast and lived. And there is simple, childlike joy in him, as well, a quiet joy he will never be able to communicate later to anyone, not even Uncle Al, who might have understood. He feels this joy because the fireworks have happened after all.

  And while his parents stewed and wondered about his psyche, and if he would have complexes from the experience, Marty Coslaw came to believe in his heart that it had been the best Fourth of all.

  “Sure, I think it’s a werewolf,” Constable Neary says. He speaks too loudly—maybe accidentally, more like accidentally on purpose—and all conversation in Stan’s Barber Shop comes to a halt. It is going on just half-past August, the hottest August anyone can remember in Tarker’s Mills for years, and tonight the moon will be just one day past full. So the town holds its breath, waiting.

  Constable Neary surveys his audience and then goes on from his place in Stan Pelky’s middle barber chair, speaking weightily, speaking judicially, speaking psychologically, all from the depths of his high school education (Neary is a big, beefy man, and in high school he mostly made touchdowns for the Tarker’s Mills Tigers; his classwork earned him some C’s and not a few D’s).

  “There are guys,” he tells them, “who are kind of like two people. Kind of like split personalities, you know. They are what I’d call fucking schizos.”

  He pauses to appreciate the respectful silence which greets this and then goes on:

  “Now this guy, I think he’s like that. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing when the moon gets full and he goes out and kills somebody. He could be anybody—a teller at the bank, a gas jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road, maybe even someone right here now. In the sense of being an animal inside and looking perfectly normal outside, yeah, you bet. But if you mean, do I think there’s a guy who sprouts hair and howls at the moon . . . no. That shit’s for kids.”

  “What about the Coslaw boy, Neary?” Stan asks, continuing to work carefully around the roll of fat at the base of Neary’s neck. His long, sharp scissors go snip . . . snip . . . snip.

  “Just proves what I said,” Neary responds with some exasperation. “That shit’s for kids.”

  In truth, he feels exasperated about what’s happened with
Marty Coslaw. Here, in this boy, is the first eyeball witness to the freak that’s killed six people in his town, including Neary’s good friend Alfie Knopfler. And is he allowed to interview the boy? No. Does he even know where the boy is? No! He’s had to make do with a deposition furnished to him by the State Police, and he had to bow and scrape and just-a-damn-bout beg to get that much. All because he’s a small-town constable, what the State Police think of as a kiddie-cop, not able to tie his own shoes. All because he doesn’t have one of their numbfuck Smokey Bear hats. And the deposition! He might as well have used it to wipe his ass with. According to the Coslaw kid, this “beast” stood about seven feet tall, was naked, was covered with dark hair all over his body. He had big teeth and green eyes and smelled like a load of panther-shit. He had claws, but the claws looked like hands. He thought it had a tail. A tail, for Chrissake.

  “Maybe,” Kenny Franklin says from his place in the row of chairs along the wall, “maybe it’s some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you know.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Neary says emphatically, and nods his head to emphasize the point. Stan has to draw his scissors back in a hurry to avoid putting one of the blades into that beefy roll of fat at the back of Neary’s neck. “Nossir! I don’t believe it! Kid heard a lot of these werewolf stories at school before it closed for the summer—he admitted as much—and then he didn’t have nothing to do but sit there in that chair of his and think about it . . . work it over in his mind. It’s all psycho-fuckin-logical, you see. Why, if it’d been you that’d come out of the bushes by the light of the moon, he would have thought you was a wolf, Kenny.”

  Kenny laughs a little uneasily.

  “Nope,” Neary says gloomily. “Kid’s testimony is just no damn good ’tall.”

  In his disgust and disappointment over the deposition taken from Marty Coslaw at the home of Marty’s aunt and uncle in Stowe, Constable Neary has also overlooked this line: “Four of them went off at the side of his face—I guess you’d call it a face—all at once, and I guess maybe it put his eye out. His left eye.”

  If Constable Neary had chewed this over in his mind—and he hadn’t—he would have laughed even more contemptuously, because in that hot, still August of 1984, there was only one townsperson sporting an eyepatch, and it was simply impossible to think of that person, of all persons, being the killer. Neary would have believed his mother the killer before he would have believed that.

  “There’s only one thing that’ll solve this case,” Constable Neary says, jabbing his finger at the four or five men sitting against the wall and waiting for their Saturday morning haircuts, “and that’s good police work. And I intend to be the guy who does it. Those state Smokies are going to be laughing on the other side of their faces when I bring the guy in.” Neary’s face turns dreamy. “Anyone,” he says. “A bank teller . . . gas jockey . . . just some guy you drink with down there at the bar. But good police work will solve it. You mark my words.”

  But Constable Lander Neary’s good police work comes to an end that night when a hairy, moon-silvered arm reaches through the open window of his Dodge pickup as he sits parked at the crossing-point of two dirt roads out in West Tarker’s Mills. There is a low, snorting grunt, and a wild, terrifying smell—like something you would smell in the lion-house of a zoo.

  His head is snapped around and he stares into one green eye. He sees the fur, the black, damp-looking snout. And when the snout wrinkles back, he sees the teeth. The beast claws at him almost playfully, and one of his cheeks is ripped away in a flap, exposing his teeth on the right side. Blood spouts everywhere. He can feel it running down over the shoulder of his shirt, sinking in warmly. He screams; he screams out of his mouth and out of his cheek. Over the beast’s working shoulders, he can see the moon, flooding down white light.

  He forgets all about his .30–.30 and the .45 strapped on his belt. He forgets all about how this thing is psycho-fuckin-logical. He forgets all about good police work. Instead his mind fixes on something Kenny Franklin said in the barber-shop that morning. Maybe it’s some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you know.

  And so, as the werewolf reaches for Neary’s throat, Neary reaches for its face, grabs double-handfuls of coarse, wiry fur and pulls, hoping madly that the mask will shift and then pull off—there will be the snap of an elastic, the liquid ripping sound of latex, and he will see the killer.

  But nothing happens—nothing except a roar of pain and rage from the beast. It swipes at him with one clawed hand—yes, he can see it is a hand, however hideously misshapen, a hand, the boy was right—and lays his throat wide open. Blood jets over the truck’s windshield and dashboard; it drips into the bottle of Busch that has been sitting tilted against Constable Neary’s crotch.

  The werewolf’s other hand snags in Neary’s freshly cut hair and yanks him half out of the Dodge pickup’s cab. It howls once, in triumph, and then it buries its face and snout in Neary’s neck. It feeds while the beer gurgles out of the spilled bottle and foams on the floor by the truck’s brake and clutch pedals.

  So much for psychology.

  So much for good police work.

  As the month wears on and the night of the full moon approaches again, the frightened people of Tarker’s Mills wait for a break in the heat, but no such break comes. Elsewhere, in the wider world, the baseball divisional races are decided one by one and the football exhibition season has begun; in the Canadian Rockies, jolly old Willard Scott informs the people of Tarker’s Mills, a foot of snow falls on the twenty-first of September. But in this corner of the world summer hangs right in there. Temperatures linger in the eighties during the days; kids, three weeks back in school and not happy to be there sit and swelter in droning classrooms where the clocks seem to have been set to click only one minute forward for each hour which passes in real time. Husbands and wives argue viciously for no reason, and at O’Neil’s Gulf Station out on Town Road by the entrance to the turnpike, a tourist starts giving Pucky O’Neil some lip about the price of gas and Pucky brains the fellow with the gas-pump nozzle. The fellow, who is from New Jersey, needs four stitches in his upper lip and goes away muttering balefully under his breath about lawsuits and subpoenas.

  “I don’t know what he’s bitching about,” Pucky says sullenly that night in The Pub. “I only hit him with half of my force, you know? If I’d’a hit him with all my force, I woulda knocked his frockin smart mouth right the frock off. You know?”

  “Sure,” Billy Robertson says, because Pucky looks like he may hit him with all his force if he disagrees. “How about another beer, Puck?”

  “Your frockin-A,” Pucky says.

  Milt Sturmfuller puts his wife in the hospital over a bit of egg that the dishwasher didn’t take off one of the plates. He takes one look at that dried yellow smear on the plate she tried to give him for his lunch, and pounds her a good one. As Pucky O’Neil would have said, Milt hits her with all his force. “Damn slutty bitch,” he says, standing over Donna Lee, who is sprawled out on the kitchen floor, her nose broken and bleeding, the back of her head also bleeding. “My mother used to get the dishes clean, and she didn’t have no dishwasher, either. What’s the matter with you?” Later, Milt will tell the doctor at the Portland General Hospital emergency room that Donna Lee fell down the back stairs. Donna Lee, terrorized and cowed after nine years in a marital war-zone, will back this up.

  Around seven o’clock on the night of the full moon, a wind springs up—the first chill wind of that long summer season. It brings a rack of clouds from the north and for awhile the moon plays tag with these clouds, ducking in and out of them, turning their edges to beaten silver. Then the clouds grow thicker, and the moon disappears . . . yet it is there; the tides twenty miles out of Tarker’s Mills feel its pull and so, closer to home, does the Beast.

  Around two in the morning, a dreadful squealing arises from the pigpen of Elmer Zinneman on the West Stage Road, about twelve miles out of town. E
lmer goes for his rifle, wearing only his pajama pants and his slippers. His wife, who was almost pretty when Elmer married her at sixteen in 1947, pleads and begs and cries, wanting him to stay with her, wanting him not to go out. Elmer shakes her off and grabs his gun from the entryway. His pigs are not just squealing; they are screaming. They sound like a bunch of very young girls surprised by a maniac at a slumber party. He is going, nothing can make him not go, he tells her . . . and then freezes with one work-callused hand on the latch of the back door as a screaming howl of triumph rises in the night. It is a wolf-cry, but there is something so human in the howl that it makes his hand drop from the latch and he allows Alice Zinneman to pull him back into the living room. He puts his arms around her and draws her down onto the sofa, and there they sit like two frightened children.

  Now the crying of the pigs begins to falter and stop. Yes, they stop. One by one, they stop. Their squeals die in hoarse, bloody gargling sounds. The Beast howls again, its cry as silver as the moon. Elmer goes to the window and sees something—he cannot tell what—go bounding off into the deeper darkness.

  The rain comes later, pelting against the windows as Elmer and Alice sit up in bed together, all the lights in the bedroom on. It is a cold rain, the first real rain of the autumn, and tomorrow the first tinge of color will have come into the leaves.