“That’s strange.”
“Very,” Pearce said, flashing those teeth.
He’d gotten them cleaned when he stopped smoking.
“Maybe it was a yeti,” I said.
“Don’t joke about that,” Pearce said. “And not only that, we got shell casings. Shots fired. We got blood in the car, on the car, and out on the road. We got a trail of blood going into the woods, but for weeks we’ve had guys scouring those woods, and they didn’t find anything.”
“Was Bill in the same vicinity as the gun you found last week?”
“No. I mean, who knows, man? The thing with bodies in nature is …” Pearce stopped and looked at the kid, then asked, “You got a sensitive stomach at all?”
“Me? No, no, no …” Anthony stuttered. “Please, continue.”
Anthony got up and came back to the counter.
“Okay,” said Pearce, “the thing with bodies in nature is that as a body gets ripped apart, gets lighter, the parts get scattered. Some animals will carry body parts to where they’re comfortable eating, and because of that it gets hard to figure out where a person actually, well, dropped down. A good dog could help with that, or …”
Pearce trailed off, thinking. No one said anything. After maybe a full minute, he continued.
“These two kids found his skull out there in the woods. They had gone out to mess around without their parents finding out. What luck, huh?”
“I guess it killed the mood,” I said. “But that’s all they found? Just a skull?”
“Yup. Well, a couple hairs. That’s how we know it’s Bill. We got claw marks, maybe bite marks, all over the fucking thing. They don’t look like any kind of marks I’ve ever seen….”
“You know, Danny, I don’t know if you’re looking at a murder here,” I said.
“I know, but this ain’t right.”
“Could have been a bear for all we know.”
“I know, but … shit.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the kid, interjecting himself, “and stop me if I’m wrong about anything. From what it sounds like, some guy got in a shoot-out with a wild animal, got dragged into the woods and chewed up. Is that right?”
“No,” said Pearce.
“What’s wrong with the story?” I asked.
“C’mon,” said Pearce, “it’s not like King Kong lives in a little house in the woods. There’s no such thing as a shoot-out with an animal.”
“I don’t know. It sounds good to me,” I said. “Aside from the shoot-out part,” said Anthony. Pearce said, “I know it sounds good, but …”
“But what?” asked Anthony.
“There was only one trail of blood going into those woods. Whatever happened out by that car … I don’t know. It almost feels like what happened at the car was a separate incident. If Parker encountered some kind of animal on the road, where was the body? Why did Parker go in the woods if he was injured? Why wouldn’t he go to a house? Why did he take the gun with him?”
Evelyn wasn’t a place known for its high mortality rate. Hell, it wasn’t known for anything, but Pearce, being the fresh detective that he was, wasn’t exactly Columbo when it came to crime-solving.
“You don’t know he took it with him,” I said.
“True, and with that, it makes this whole thing even a little more fucked up.”
“It could have been wolves,” I said. “Wolves,” repeated Pearce.
“Wolves,” shouted Anthony. “I’m going cross-country, and I step into the fucking animal kingdom over here. What kind of town is this?”
No one said anything.
“I guess this passes for interesting in a small town, right?” he asked me. “I swear, I was planning on passing through here by the end of the day, but seeing how things go around here, I think I’ll stick around awhile. See how this plays out.”
“What’re you? Fucking Angela Lansbury?” said Pearce.
“Priceless,” said Anthony. “This is going in the book, I swear. You guys have got to let me take your pictures.”
Anthony went back to his table and picked up his camera.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’re not taking pictures of anybody.”
“Yes I am,” he said. “Don’t you want to be famous?”
“What’s the story with this guy?” asked Pearce.
“He’s making a coffee table book about his fucking road trip.”
“What is he, Kerouac? I don’t want my fucking picture taken.”
“Maybe you should arrest him.”
“For what? Being a pain in the ass?”
“He’s from Jersey. That alone’s a good excuse.”
“I can’t do that.”
“He tried to put his finger in my ass before you got here. How about that?”
“I’d arrest him for that if it were anyone but you.” Then: “You know what this reminds me of? The Bill Parker thing? Remember when that guy disappeared a couple years ago? Carter? It was the same thing with him. Found a piece of him in the park after he’d been gone a month. Same damn thing as this.”
“We are in the middle of nowhere, Danny. This doesn’t have to be a mystery. Shit like this happens more often than you think.”
“Do your twenty newspapers a day tell you that?”
“Please,” interrupted the kid. “Look at the camera. I’m gonna start snapping with or without your permission, guys.”
Pearce and I looked at each other, smiled, and then we both flipped the bird at the camera. The flash went off three times in rapid succession.
“Speaks volumes,” said the kid. “I swear, this place is amazing. I’m here for an hour and I’m already caught up in a horror story.”
I looked at Pearce.
Bill Parker’s ghost haunted the corners of his brain, crying out for answers. Pearce chewed his nicotine gum, thought of his baby, his town, and what—or who—had devoured our upstanding townsman, Bill Parker.
“You have no idea,” I said.
THREE
It happened overseas. The fact is that Marlowe Higgins died in ‘Nam. He never made it. On that night when the beast entered me, when I became, the Marlowe Higgins that had dreams of making it back Stateside, the Marlowe Higgins that loved baseball and motorcycles and had a girl named Doris waiting back home for him, ceased to exist. In his place was a shell, a husk, a host for the ungodly thing that had invaded him. Indeed, one can’t truly have a life when what lurks on the inside feasts on death.
I found that out the hard way.
Once I realized what I had become, I started drifting, going from place to place, town to town. I was a stranger on every street and in every city, and that’s the way I wanted it. The name I was born with was a worthless thing to me, and wherever I went I left a trail of blood and grated bones in my wake.
I was never able to go fast enough to escape the horror in my head, the truth of what I carried soul-deep. I alone was hell on earth, and knowing that I was responsible for the gruesome murders of so many innocent people was often too much for me to bear. Even in combat I’d never had the nerve or the desire to kill another human being. It disgusted me that the monster forced me to do what I’d thought I would never be capable of. What made it worse were the dreams I told you about. I started drinking out of necessity, and in my weakest moments, when the liquor wore off long enough for me to find the keys, I’d get on my motorcycle and see just how fast I could go.
I woke up in hospitals a lot those first few cursed years on the road. They chalked up my suicidal tendencies to combat shock, or whatever the hell the term was they were using at the time, but they never took it too seriously because I never got hurt that bad. I was lucky, they said. What it really was, and this bothered me immensely, was that it had just become harder for me to die.
My “accidents” on the black-veined roads of America began to get a little more elaborate. One time I hot-wired a semi and drove it through a gas station in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I woke up burned like a motherfucker,
handcuffed to a hospital bed. I was so burned up there was no way they could identify me. When the next full moon came, the handcuffs didn’t mean much to the beast, and it got us out of there, but not before butchering a handful of nurses and an eye specialist.
I woke up the next day in the cellar of a local antique shop, naked, as usual, and the burns that had covered a healthy portion of my body were gone. I woke up in immaculate physical condition, just like I always do the day after. I haven’t gotten so much as a cold in the last twenty years.
The blood on my hands made me a monster by proxy, an accomplice to the supernatural genocide machine that had affixed itself to my being. I couldn’t take it, so once I found my way out of Wyoming, I got myself a rifle. A Remington. With a little bit of liquid courage I strolled up to a pawn shop and threw a garbage can through the window. I made off with the first weapon I saw. I figured a nice, concentrated attack on my skull would be the ample dose to keep me down for good, and in doing that, I’d be putting the beast down too.
I drove this pretty ‘63 Monterey I’d wired out into the wilderness and found a spot on a hill that overlooked a stream. I was surrounded by trees, the pink-orange rays of the day’s dying sun. Brown leaves hugged the ground like a blanket, holding in its moisture so it could turn to ice in the coming frozen months, and the clear, chill water in the stream sent cool air up over the hill that passed through me like a prayer.
As night came on I loaded my rifle. I pressed the butt of it into the grass and rested my chin at the business end. I took a few deep breaths, then a few more, and just as the cold of night set in, I cursed myself for not having the stones to do what needed to be done.
I drove off to the next town.
That was the first time I ever put a gun to my head, but it wasn’t the last.
And so it went like that—going from town to town, stealing, working odd jobs, sleeping in dives or hot cars, drinking and fighting, trying to forget, being responsible for the slaughter of yet another poor soul because I was too yellow to take myself out, waking up, then doing it all over again.
It took the unfortunate death of my mother at the hands of a junkie in 1981 to change my life, and with it, the very nature of the beast itself.
I called her every so often from wherever I was. I guess she was the only person who really understood the fate that had befallen me, and she knew why I could never go back home. Sometimes I’d call and hang up. Other times I’d be crying by the time she picked up. Sometimes when I was crying, she’d hang up because she just couldn’t take it. Sometimes I’d call her with a fierce drunk on, and I’d scream.
One morning I called and a cop answered the phone. He asked who I was, and when I stated that I was the son of the woman whose house he was in, he told me she’d been attacked. He didn’t tell me she was dead, not over the phone. I thought there was still a chance for me to see her. I drove at a hundred miles an hour and got there by nightfall. That’s when they broke the news to me.
She had been coming home from work. She put the key in the front door, and the scumbag, or “the perpetrator,” as they called him, pushed himself in behind her, knocked her down. What it was supposed to have been was a simple robbery. A street thug intimidating an old lady bad enough that she’d give up where the cash was in the house and that would be the end of it. But things didn’t go down that way. He either thought she was lying when she said that was all there was, or maybe he just felt like doing what he did. Maybe he saw it as a perfect opportunity to say “fuck you” to the world. I didn’t know, and I still don’t. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What he did to her claimed her life before her heart stopped beating anyway.
They had his fingerprints, some stains left behind, as if he were a dog marking his territory. But that was all. He was just another faceless criminal. Another tragic tale of America’s youth gone awry.
I wanted to take the world itself and throttle it like a baby. I was sick with anger. Not even in combat had I ever felt a feeling akin to the pure, unadulterated fury that coursed through me in the weeks following her death. I harbored the hope that the next time the beast came out, he’d wipe out the whole fucking city in one fell swoop, mark it on the maps as a red zone the way they would with Chernobyl a few years later.
On the night of the full moon, I was in the car I had at the time, parked on a dark road. I was naked. Clothes would get destroyed in the change—the beast maintained a human shape, but was so much bigger than I was—and I didn’t like to waste them. Outfits cost money, and I was consistently in the position of barely being able to feed myself, much less buy anything.
For the first time in my life I welcomed the beast. I looked forward to the lashing out that was about to happen. As night fell, the pain in my body grew stronger and stronger, just like it always did, but it didn’t bother me, not that night. It was just more fuel for the fire.
When the beast took over, I had no idea what was happening. I had no control over it, and I did not live the experience as it happened. I remembered what the beast did after a few days, or a week, or even longer, but I was just happy with (or at least resigned to) the fact that someone was going to get it bad. Someone certainly deserved it. Someone, perhaps, who had done something as bad as I had done.
When I woke up the next day, I was still in my car. Usually, I woke up in an unfamiliar place, so this was an oddity. I knew the beast had gone to work because the inside of the car was filthy, and I was covered in dried blood. I dressed in the clothes I had in the backseat, and then drove to the motel I was staying at.
The phone rang a couple of days later. I picked it up, and it was the police. They said they had to have some words with me. I figured they found out I was driving around in a stolen car. I didn’t care. I drove over anyway.
They sat me down and explained to me that a man, a boy, really, had been “attacked” by what must have been rabid dogs in the park. When they said that, my hairs stood up.
The detective said, “These dogs, whatever they were, they tore this boy to shreds. There isn’t a whole lot left, but his head and his hands were found intact. Some of the officers at the scene recognized the victim as a known burglar. For the hell of it, we checked his prints, and they matched the prints lifted from your mother’s residence.”
I said, “Well, knock me down.”
I couldn’t understand why the beast—which without fail had always struck as ruthlessly and randomly as a tornado—singled out the one motherfucker I wanted dead more than anybody else in the world. The more I thought about it, though, I realized what did it, and that was the desire. The want. The absolute and utter need that I felt in my heart and soul to make this filthy little devil pay. That was the spark.
Whereas every other time the full moon had rolled around I prayed for the beast not to hurt anybody, this was the one time I had called upon it with my prayers. This was the one time that I gave it a mission. A purpose. A target. With that, the beast had a goal, and with that, the quality of my life, as doomed as it was, got a whole hell of a lot better.
How it was able to fulfill its end of this operation became apparent rather quickly. Whatever it was—some ferocious demon or wrathful demigod—it had the physical properties and abilities of an animal. It worked on scent, on taste, on sound. The piece of shit that killed my mother left a scent. On that night when the beast struck back, it found his scent. From there, it was a simple matter of catching the boy on the wind.
My life is a black streak on a calendar, a sentence that has no end in sight. I go to bed every night knowing that when the reaper finally does point his rusty sickle at me, I’m going to spend the rest of time melting in my sins, but ever since that bloody night in my hometown, I have at least been able to live with myself. I wouldn’t call it apathy, and I wouldn’t call it peace, but at least I can sleep at night.
As for the dearly departed Bill Parker, he did something he shouldn’t have done. On one of his late-night drives, he side-swiped an old lady who came out in t
he road in pursuit of her cat Sprinkles. Bill was speeding, as he was prone to do, and didn’t notice her in time. If she had been in her prime, she probably would have survived, but the trauma was too much for her little body. She left behind two daughters and three grandchildren. It was a goddamn shame what happened.
The police had no suspects. The article in the paper urged the driver to come forward. Bill Parker never did, so the wolf and I went to work. I may be a monster, but as long as I’m the only one in town, I can live with that.
FOUR
As Pearce went to work on his second cup of coffee, Van Buren stepped out of the unmarked police car and climbed the stairs. Through the glass, he looked like a vampire in his dark suit and pale skin. He rapped on the glass door with his ringed finger, beckoned Pearce out with a wave, then turned silently.
“Guess I better head out,” Pearce said.
“How’s Mr. Happy?”
“I don’t know why you two don’t get along.”
“Don’t worry about it. Tell him I said hi.”
“I won’t,” Pearce said, and he walked out without paying. He was good at that. By my calculations he owed the restaurant somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million dollars.
“He doesn’t seem like a cop,” said Anthony after the man left.
“I know,” I said. “That’s how I put up with him.”
Anthony laughed and threw down a ten-dollar bill.
He said, “I’m off. You have a very nice restaurant here. And a lovely town.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Take a picture.”
“I plan to. See you around.”
He walked out. The bell jangled. When he got to the car, he took off his jacket and tossed it onto the passenger seat. He pulled out, heading west on Main. A minute later, Abe came out of the bathroom, seemingly as refreshed as he’d ever been.
“Perfect timing, you scoundrel. I had to deal with that prick the whole time he was here. I’m keeping this tip all to myself,” I said, waving the ten.
The Wolfman Page 5
