Bill listened intently for the sound of footsteps, the sound of a door opening across the road, of someone’s concerned voice, but he heard none of it. Not a single sign of a helping hand. Solace would have no part of him. He would have given up the use of his legs just to hear one measly person ask him if he was okay.
He listened for the sound of the creature’s pain, the sound of movement on asphalt. He didn’t hear any of that either.
After a spell, he deemed it safe enough to move and opened the passenger door. He got out slowly. He had his gun drawn and pointed, but his hand was shaking so badly he wouldn’t have been able to hit one of the houses across the way even if he wanted to. He came around the open door without closing it. The headlights brightened the cracked and sun-bleached road ahead of him. All else was darkness.
There, lying motionless in the road, was the creature. Its blood glistened like heavy red wine, like a rich merlot, on the hood of his white car. The blood steamed, and Bill didn’t know why. He touched the hood of the car, and the metal wasn’t that hot at all. It barely qualified as being warm. Bill swallowed and turned his gaze back to the beast. He didn’t want to get too close, but his curiosity was working on him like all hell. It was almost like he was rubbernecking at his own demise.
He took a few more steps and took in the sight before him. Hehad never seen anything like it before, except maybe in some crazy old horror movie the kids once made him sit through. Hell, he probably thought he’d just killed Bigfoot. He read about such things in the cheap newspapers he bought at the supermarket.
He took another step. Blood pooled at his heel. He looked at the houses, saw not a single light brighten a single room. There was maybe only one other time in his life that he felt so helpless and alone, and the thought of that one other time made him shudder. He probably thought about getting himself to the hospital, but what would he say?
A new worry gripped him: that he’d get battered with so many incessant, insensitive questions at St. Francis that he’d end up dying before they even got the chance to go to work on his unique and ghastly wounds. Apparently, it was never bad enough for Bill Parker to find something new—even hypothetical—to tense up about.
Some people might have found that quality endearing about him, I don’t know. I myself wasn’t a big fan of his, which I’m sure is quite clear at this point.
He looked down at the creature before him, studied it for a moment, and maybe after just a few seconds, he thought he saw its hand move. Bill Parker took a step back and rubbed his eyes, smearing blood across his face like a mask. He wasn’t sure if his mind had just played a trick on him or not. He couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
He looked again and saw the beast’s chest rise, then fall, and finally heave with labored breaths. Smoke rose from its slackened, toothy mouth as if a candle had been blown out somewhere deep inside it. Bill stumbled back till he was against the open car door. He heard the beast breathe again. He heard his own blood dripping, splashing against the cracked tar, the black ring that held the wilderness back from the town it surrounded—the little town that grew up in the middle of it like a tumor.
The beast’s eyes opened, all bloodshot and inhuman. It raised its head, and those awful, haunting eyes peered into the soul of Bill Parker. It was in that gaze that he saw his own death. Bill Parker turned and ran.
Bill Parker disappeared into the woods. Branches beat against him like skinny arms, clawing at his skin, his clothes, and not far behind, he could hear those same branches twist, crack, and give way for the creature that pursued him. He could hear its howls reverberate off the trees, off the bones in his ears. He could hear them echo across the night like battle horns. His speed was gone, and all the strength he had was left as a trail of crimson drips behind him.
The salt in his sweat made him squint, and before long he could hardly see where he was going, but it was too dark for it to matter that much. He felt the ground shift beneath him, and he realized he was starting to head down a long slope, so he sped up and let gravity do some of the work his legs could hardly handle. Wind licked his face, and he smiled. He wasn’t sure why.
His ankle got caught in a web of crooked vines growing up the side of an oak tree. He fell face-first in the black and moistened soil and rolled the rest of the way down the slope. When his back finally came to rest on flat land, he realized that his body hadn’t registered the pain. He didn’t feel the throbbing in his arm anymore, and he didn’t even feel the slightest ache from falling so hard.
He knew then that he was dying.
He turned over and dragged himself over to the base of a very tall pine tree. In the darkness, he couldn’t even see the top of it. In a matter of time, he thought, he might be able to climb that tree to heaven. He scooched himself till his back was against the tree, and then he waited. There was nothing else to do.
In the dark, he heard it coming. He knew it was over. Just as night turns to day, I know that he knew there could be only one exit from those woods, and that was in a bag, if he was lucky. In his head, he asked God why such a fate would befall him. He knew why, deep down, and I truly believe that’s why he began to cry.
The beast’s job was easy. The gunshot wounds it had sustained were already a distant memory; the entry holes the bullets had ripped into its hide were at this point nothing more than pinpricks on its surface. All it had to do to track Bill Parker on his last, pathetic run was breathe. The scent of the dying man was like a guiding light in the dark.
It came to him, approaching slowly, toying with the man or just observing, I’m not sure which. Even after all these years, I’m not sure how that thing feels about anything, or if after so many years of being around the human race, it’s come to perhaps mimic some of our little behavioral traits. That’s something for me to think on the next time I have nothing else to do.
The beast circled around him, around the tree, growling. Bill Parker shifted in the dirt, and murmured prayers he hadn’t thought about in years in a high-pitched squeal under his breath. He got most of the words right. The beast came back around and paced before him like a man not sure what to do. The beast swiveled its shoulders as if loosening a knot; then it crouched down and brought its face up close to Bill’s, sucked in the fear that leaked from the man’s pores like vapor. Bill thought the thing smelled like a wet dog. The beast thought Bill smelled like barbecue.
Bill Parker tried to talk. I wonder what it was he would’ve said if he’d been able to get the words out. Would he have asked what it was, or why it was, or who it was? Would he have asked if he was going to hell? Would he have asked for forgiveness, or would he have launched off a final round of expletives like all the tough guys in the movies do?
The beast watched Bill struggle for a moment, at first with a curious air, then with something that could’ve passed for amusement. It smiled the most horrible smile that Bill Parker could ever have imagined. Drool dripped from its fangs, and a blast of stinking air rushed up from the beast’s chest and hit Bill in the face like fumes.
Bill raised his one good arm, but before he could level the gun at his target, the beast grabbed him by his wrists with its two big, hairy hands and sank its teeth into the soft meat of Bill’s neck. A blood-arch pissed itself from the wound like a stream, and before the blood hit the ground, Bill Parker was dead and gone.
The beast drew back and tore a chunk of flesh away from the throat. It chewed, swallowed, and roared. Then it went back for seconds.
In the night, the life that inhabited those woods kept its distance and left that unnatural creature to its own devices. Its only company was the wind, carrying a trace of every single body in the world, and death. The moon watched like a quiet God, a beacon, a partner. But make no mistake. I was the wolf’s keeper, its warden, and I called the shots.
The name I was born with was Marlowe Higgins. Due to some rather extraordinary life circumstances, I haven’t always gone by that name, but I’m going to tell you a story, so I suppose I ought
as well give you some facts to work with.
I’m a white male with long brown hair and a mustache that just won’t quit. I have a little scar under my right eye left over from a childhood injury that came about during a rather heated game of Wiffle ball. If not for that mark, I could have been anybody, anywhere, but still, I had little trouble making anonymity my greatest ally.
Where I’m from doesn’t matter, because it could have been right in your own hometown or a thousand miles away from you, and whether or not I got laid on prom night doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with anything either. There’s only so much you need to know and even less I care to talk about, but the one thing that should be said, I suppose, is that I’m a werewolf, and I have been for the better part of my life.
What I’m about to tell you happened back in the spring of 1993. Sit back, and let the pain and the suffering begin. It seems to be what I’m good at.
ONE
I am a man who is apt to have bad dreams. In my dreams I am not falling, or drowning, or even being roasted on a spit or some such thing by the Vietcong, who, at the time of the war, were rumored to do piss-awful things like that to the boys they caught.
My dreams are a little more fucked than that. I have no soul, and the godforsaken beast that had replaced it does more than take lives. It takes their spirits. So when I plop myself down on my lumpy mattress at night and go to sleep, I don’t dream like normal people do. Instead, I experience the memories of people who aren’t around anymore to remember their own histories. What makes a dream bad isn’t reliving how they died; it’s remembering how much my victims loved the men, women, and children they left behind in this world. In my dreams I miss these widows and children as if I knew them. I have been responsible for the deaths of over three hundred people over the years. Consequently my nightmares are legion.
On the morning of May 1, I awoke from one of my bad dreams because the radio alarm clock went off by my head like a gunshot. I was cold but sweating, and that wasn’t unusual. I looked around the room to get my bearings. It took a second to remember where I was, what year it was. I soon came to recognize my bedroom, and a razor slice of a grin appeared on my face because Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” was playing on KBTO, but, aside from that one saving grace, it was another day in the life that no one in their right mind would ask for.
A thin sliver of sunlight came in through the curtains andburned on the floor like the glowing edge of a heated knife. There were two windows in the bedroom. One was facing east, the other south. I had nailed the both of them shut when I moved in. The air smelled like old and rotting books. A combination of water damage and a few hundred old newspapers stacked up in the guest room helped create this scent, which was far preferable to how the house used to smell. I pulled back the damp sheets and stumbled across the creaking floorboards to the bedroom door. The door was closed, and I had a quarter balanced on the doorknob and a glass ashtray on the floor below it, so if anyone jiggled the handle at night, I’d know it by the noise of the coin dropping into the ashtray. I palmed the quarter, stuffed it into the pocket of the shorts I wore to bed, and moved the ashtray aside with my foot. Then I went down the short hallway to the bathroom.
I had a quarter resting on the bathroom doorknob as well, just in case anyone snuck in through the bathroom window. The bathroom window was the only one in the entire house that wasn’t permanently sealed, because I liked opening it when I did my business. It helped more than you could ever imagine. If I ever crap on a plane, all those funny little masks would probably drop down in the aisles.
I jumped in and out of the shower to wash away the sweat, and when I got out I combed my long, awesome hair, which at the time came down to the middle of my back. Looking at my face up close in the mirror, I decided to do a little tidy-up work on my handlebar mustache. I saw a couple of gray hairs in there that I didn’t believe should be so eager to come to fruition. I was forty years old, but a history of longevity ran in my nasty blood—despite the two packs I smoked a day—and grays in the face seemed to me to be redundant little creatures that hadn’t earned their place yet.
My little house on King Street was down on the southwestern edge of town, constructed at the very end of a cul-de-sac. The houses were spaced far enough away from each other that I had never felt obligated to say hello to the poor fools who had the misfortune of living to my left and to my right. My house was what they call ranch-style, and it was made of wood so gnarled by time that it looked like it was made of boards that fell off other houses. All the glass in the windows was rippled. Out front was a little driveway—no garage—and a few bushes I never trimmed. They looked like afros in the wind. Out back I had a dead tree that my neighbors always bitched about because they were worried it would fall down in a bad storm, but I liked my dead tree. You could always see the birds crapping from its limbs with that blank look in their eyes, and the squirrels running all around its girth as they played their daredevil games. Further, I liked it because it would be impossible for a sniper to hide in it.
The woman who used to live in the house had been very old before she died. Or maybe it would be better to say that she was very goddamn old by the time she kicked off, but the point of it all is that she’d had cats. A lot of fucking cats. I’m told that when she died in that house, those cats went to work on her after a few days of having no other source of food. Sometimes I swore that I could still smell her deep in the fabric of the couch.
Her son, who lived over in Edenburgh, decided to rent the place instead of selling it outright, and when I moved in about three years prior, it took me a long time to keep those cats from coming around all the time. There were holes in the walls and in the floor where they’d sneak in, but I eventually found all those holes and sealed them up. I didn’t want any cats in my house, especially cats that had supped on human flesh. Even though it had been years since I’d gotten them all out, it was as if their phantoms lived on, because whenever I turned my head, the furniture would be covered with clumps of orange hair. It was unbelievable. I always wondered if there was a hole somewhere that I didn’t know about, or if those ornery little bastards had a set of keys for the front door.
After checking all the windows, I put on a pair of jeans and slipped my skull-and-crossbones belt through the loops. I put on a Sabbath shirt, a flannel over that, and then I laced up my construction boots. I grabbed my keys, locked the four locks on my front door, and got in the truck—a blue 1983 Chevy flatbed. There were so many rusted-out holes in it that it looked like some hunters had mistaken the truck for an elephant and emptied their scatterguns into it.
I turned the key and cursed. Doing these two things at the same time was almost like a prayer in and of itself, because God came down every morning to help make the piece of shit move. The engine groaned like it had arthritis, and I headed out.
I drove to the corner and took Picket Street east—a quiet, tree-lined street of one-story homes and the occasional nursery or doctor’s office. There wasn’t another car on the road as far as I could see. It was very early, and anyone who was up at the time was probably at church, where, as I understood it, they gave people free coffee.
I wasn’t quite awake yet. I was picking at this piece of sleepysand in the corner of my eye that didn’t want to go. I was picking at it so much that it began to irritate me like a sonofabitch. It just got worse and worse. I shut my eyes real tight, and when I opened them up again, I saw that damn Indian in the middle of the road up ahead with that damn plastic bag slumped over his shoulder, full of all the cans he had picked up off the streets, like a bum.
That woke me up real quick.
I hit the brakes and jerked the wheel left. I missed him by a foot, if that, though I don’t know why I was so merciful. I stopped the truck and gave him the evil eye through the open passenger window. He was in a dirty black suit that he must have taken from a dead body. On his feet was a pair of cowboy boots.
He wasn’t a young man. He seemed practical
ly ancient, but his age was anyone’s guess. His white hair was as long as mine, and in a ponytail. He looked back at me like he thought the whole thing was a fucking joke. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, me almost hitting him with the truck.
“Hey, you old bastard,” I yelled out the window, “what the fuck are you doing?”
My general distrust and hostility toward the natives was genetic in origin in the sense that my singular disorder evidently stems from a deranged red man whose vicious streak lives on through me. More presently, I had never had a good encounter with a native. Wherever I went, I felt as if they could smell the curse I carried inside of me, almost as if they saw me in a way that no one else could, could observe the inhumanity lurking beneath my flesh, and they hated me for not only what I was but why I was as well. Or at least that’s how it felt.
In his halted way of speaking, the Indian responded, “What … does it look like?”
“Looks like you have a death wish,” I replied. “Stay off the road. Next time, I won’t swerve to miss you.”
He pointed his sawed-off broomstick with the nail hammered through one end at me like it was a baton and said, “You have more important things to worry about … than me, paleface.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ain’t too tired to take you to town, old man.” I felt like getting out of the truck to clobber the sonofabitch. “You looking for trouble?”
“No, no,” he said. “Trouble … is yours to find. Not mine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Arright, you cryptic bastard,” I mumbled. “You want to talk like that, fine. Just stay off the fucking road.” He smiled. I flipped him the bird and took off.
I drove north on Hamilton Road to this little newsstand just off Main Street. I said hi to Gus, the old fellow who owned the place, and picked up copies of Evelyn’s two daily papers—the Harbinger and the Post—and also a copy of USA Today. From there I went east on Main till I got to Grant. There was another little newsstand over there where I picked up a few more newspapers, but not local ones. These papers were from other cities, and some were from other states. I didn’t like buying all my papers at one place. I wouldn’t want someone wondering why I read so goddamn much.
The Wolfman Page 2
