“Nice,” I said.
He showed me another.
This one was of a tree.
“Is this in the park?”
“No,” said Anthony.
The tree was massive, but lightning had cleaved it clean in half some time between now and who knows when. As it stood, it was a ten-foot-tall pillar of wood, probably about five feet across.
He asked, “Do you know this tree?”
I looked at him like he had farted in an elevator.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know every goddamn tree in the world?”
He didn’t respond. He handed me another shot. This one was a close-up of the same tree. A crest was apparent in the wood. It was an elaborately carved heart with two crossed arrows darting through it at angles. In the center were the names Johnny and June, and even the names were carved elaborately.
“Damn,” I said.
“You like that? Those carvings go into the wood about a quarter of an inch. Whoever did that spent a lot of time working on it.”
“Never seen it.”
“It’s south. In the woods. That’s my cover shot for the book.” Anthony glowed as he inspected his own work.
“You can keep those,” he said.
“Fabulous.”
I folded the pictures and stuffed them in my back pocket, which made him flinch visibly. I smiled.
“Any word on the guy that was eaten in the woods?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“That’s too bad. You think there’s any way I could get a shot of the guy’s car?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Either his wife got it back, or it’s been impounded. I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone would go to the trouble of finding out for you.”
“What about with this dead woman? Any news on her? Or I guess it’s not just the one, the way the papers are talking….”
“I know what you know.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, man, no offense. I only mean to say it’s like you seem to have your finger on the pulse, you know what I mean? You know what goes on around here.”
“What do you care? It’s not like you live here….”
“I don’t want to sound shallow, but this is great material. I mean, here I am driving through the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden the bodies start piling up. I couldn’t write this stuff if I wanted to, but I could still make a book about it, since that’s what I’m doing anyway. If they think this Rose Killer guy has moved on, then there’s no point in me sticking around any longer than I have to.”
“You don’t strike me as an intrepid reporter,” I said.
“Never planned to be,” he replied.
“Well, like I said, Jersey boy, I know what you know. However, I will say this: It’s only a matter of time before this sick fuck goes down hard. I guarantee it.”
“How do you know? Do they have a lead?”
“Fuck leads, Liberace. We got monsters in the woods, remember?”
What bothered me more than anything was watching Pearce run himself into the ground, just like he did every time something went down in this town. It didn’t matter that the federales were in town, or that they went so far as to manipulate the newspapers and the words that were coming out of the mouths of the talking heads on the local news shows. It didn’t matter that they had all the technology and headshrinkers in the world, not to Pearce. Day in and day out, he pored over his evidence, his thoughts, the section of land he was charged to protect. When the time came, he wanted it to be none other than him slapping the meat hooks on this guy. So he went to the Crowley property every damn day and just walked around. Walked around and thought. Maybe, he thought, he would get lucky and find a business card.
I spoke to him on the phone that evening.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“Going back up to the property,” he said. “Just stopped at home to get some grub. Martha made some meat loaf. Enough for a battalion, actually. I’m loading up my Tupperware with it. If this fucking town was willing to pay more overtime, I wouldn’t have to do this surveillance crap myself….”
“You’d do it anyway.”
“But I’d be getting paid.”
“You’re hiding out in the bushes on your own time?”
“Of course,” he said, as if I had just asked the stupidest question of all time. “The feds are going to be trying some proactive stuff soon. They’re going to be pulling together some kind of press conference on the TV, but it’s going to be more like some kind of subversive attack on this guy, to try to draw him out of hiding. But these bastards come back to the scene of the crime, Marley. The feds have honest-to-God proof of that, so, hey. You never know. I could get lucky.”
“You got lucky with the Polaroid stuff,” I said. “Before that, those goons didn’t even know he took pictures.”
“It’s not enough,” he said. “It won’t be till I have him in my holding cell. The feds ain’t Danny Pearce.”
“Good one.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but not as good as leaving a note in my jacket, right?”
“Oh, you found the note, eh?”
“No, asshole, the wife did.”
On the inside, I laughed. On the outside, I said, “Well, isn’t that a shame. I hope she took it well, you cheatin’ on her with such a chesty girl and all.”
He said, “Marley, I’ve never met anyone in my life who pushes their luck like you do. Balls like a gorilla.”
“You’d know,” I said.
“I know more than you think. Like how you went through my files the other night.”
“Shit, man, how the hell did you know that?”
“I’m a detective. It goes with the job. And I know you more than you think.”
I had nothing to say.
“Nothing to say for once? It’s about fucking time,” he said, and he laughed. “Now I can die happy.” I laughed too, nervously, because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, or if he was just fucking with me.
“Keep smoking, and it’ll happen sooner than you think.”
“I only fell off the wagon the one day, Marley. Martha saw to
that.”
“Good. That’s why she’s your better half.”
“Don’t I know it.” He paused. Then: “I got a good feeling about this case. I’ll see you in a few days.”
“Take it easy, Danny. Get some sleep.”
“A few days, I’ll sleep. Now, not so much.”
He hung up.
That ended up being the last time I ever spoke to the man.
It was just before midnight. Night had settled upon the sky like a calm black sea. Up high, forcing itself through the darkness, was the full moon. I could feel that moonlight tug at my skin like a baby’s fingers, but I held it at bay on the other side of the curtains that hung from every window and were each drawn tight.
For me to change from my usual, happy-go-lucky self to a plain old creature of the night, I actually have to come in physical contact with the moonlight. The transformation never happens automatically, so until I was good, ready, and confident that most of the population was at home and sleeping, I sat around the house with a book.
I was reading The Captive and the Fugitive. Proust. In French.
I had once killed a Frenchman. It wasn’t something I was proud of (just kidding), but the hell of it is that from that day on, if I heard two guys talking in French (not likely in the deep South) I knew what they were saying. And I could read Proust without its being translated. What a world.
I also knew Greek, Mandarin, and Spanish, apparently.
I haunted the used bookshop over on Markson Street from time to time, but all the books I had in the house were thoroughly hidden behind heavy boxes in the bedroom closet. In case anyone ever came in, like Pearce did, I didn’t want anyone to ever think I was someone who could read. The less people knew about me, the be
tter. It was bad enough that half the town knew my real name.
The pain of the transformation from the world’s greatest chef to a being that eats only raw meat is almost indescribable. When people actually come apart from the inside, they usually don’t live long enough to have a sit-down with somebody and verbalize what the experience was like. If I had to put it into words, I’d have to say that it’s like feeling each and every one of my bones shift and rotate inside me, and then shatter into dozens of pieces, all throughout my body. After that, it’s like feeling those sharp little pieces try to pass through all my pores like kidney stones. That would pretty much do it.
It isn’t a pleasant feeling, but I used to experience a pain far worse, back before the beast and I came to work together, and that was the pain that would come with the evening of the full moon and grow stronger and more unbearable as the hours passed. It was like the most hellish of chemical withdrawal symptoms—the running shits, the pukes, and the twitchies—and the only way to relieve that pain was to let the light of the moon touch me. However, seeing as how I didn’t used to want to change, this was a real catch-22. Coming in contact with the moonlight meant I had to break down and give up. It meant I had to allow myself to change into a life-snatching monster. Psychologically, this didn’t do me any favors. With the withdrawal pains gone, the pain of changing wouldn’t feel that bad, because I at least knew it was temporary.
If not for this pain—this torture—that attacked me like a mob and compelled me, sooner or later, to touch the moonlight, I would’ve locked myself up somewhere, and I never would’ve let the beast do what it did to all those innocent people all those years ago. Because of the pain, though, I had no choice.
I was never man enough to conquer that pain, to shrug it off and wait for a new morning to come, and it was so amazingly internal, so undying, so beyond any other pain I had ever felt, that I am quite sure there has never been a man alive who had the nerves and the stamina to endure it. I never could, and a lot of people aren’t here anymore because of that.
One night, I tried. This was back in ‘75. I was twenty-two years
old.
I was already on the road at that point, and I was as close to insanity then as I’ve ever been. For the better part of the seventies, I was on a righteous quest to find a cure for what I had become. My mission led me from one end of the country to the other, but all my leads—the rumors of witch doctors, of magicians, of allpowerful Indian shamans—either turned into dead ends or turned out to be frauds. There were a couple of people I encountered—one a medicine man in New Hampshire, and the other an unbelievably ancient German man, a hundred and thirty years old, who was kept in the basement of a nondescript apartment building in San Diego. He wielded powers and abilities not of this earth, but even they were unable to help me, and I realized then that I was beyond all hope. My chances of saving my soul fell away like sand through my fingers, and I was lost.
Then there was Maine. I encountered a group of people up in Maine that I thought might be the answer to my prayers, back when I thought my prayers would be answered. But it turned out to not be so, and I don’t ever talk about what happened in Maine.
Anyway, back in ‘75, I was up in Saratoga Springs for a while. It had been raining all day, so it was hard for me to tell when true night was coming. I was drinking whiskey in the park they have up there, with all those nasty, sulfurous springs all over the place, when all of a sudden, the pain hit my guts. I heaved the half of the bottle I had inside me back into the bushes and ran. I had to get away from the sky.
I broke into a two-story home a few blocks away. I figured I could hide in the darkness for a while, but before long the family came home, and I ducked out the back way. It was better to find another cover than to be around children.
I soon found myself back on Broadway, and at this point, I could barely walk straight. My depth perception was starting to get funny, and I knew I really had to get inside somewhere. I figured I ought as well try to get myself arrested. They could lock me in a cell, then I’d have no choice but to deal with the pain, and in the morning, if I made it, there would be one less dead body on my hands. I went into a clothing store and started knocking racks over and cursing at the women.
This kid that worked there came up to me and said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store.”
I feel bad for that poor kid nowadays. He had terrible acne, and probably weighed a buck fifty soaking wet. I hit him with such a mean shot, his tooth was stuck in between my knuckles.
The cops came, and there I was in aisle five, surrounded by all the black, liquid crap that had slithered from my bowels. Instead of taking me to the jail, they put me in an ambulance. It took eight men to tie me down, and then they loaded me into the ambulance.
On the ride to wherever they were taking me to—either the hospital or the madhouse—I caught the light of the full moon through the window.
I changed.
The last thing I remember was the men screaming and the ambulance flipping onto its side and bursting into flames.
The next day, I woke up naked in a ditch far away.
I had to go back to Saratoga to gather up my stuff. Everything I had was in a shitty little motel room, but all my clothes and my keys were gone. I broke into a house and stole a pair of pants and a shirt.
Up in the motel room, I collected my few possessions into a bag and dressed myself in my only other set of clothes—blue jeans, a Beatles shirt, cowboy boots, and my leather jacket.
Downstairs in the lot was my motorcycle, the one I’d had for years, but it was worthless now without the keys. I did not yet know how to hotwire a vehicle. I walked it out of town, and when I came to a little pond hidden behind some trees on the side of the road, I rolled it in. The air was cold and sweet. The sky was gray. I felt like I’d lost the only friend I’d had anymore, the only thing that kept me free and human.
When I got back on the road, I stuck out a thumb. After a few minutes, a red truck stopped.
The driver asked, “Where are you going?”
I said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Canada,” he said.
“Sounds good to me.”
Since the beast and I joined forces back in the early eighties, the pain that blossomed throughout the evening didn’t hurt so much anymore. I’ve often wondered how much of it was psychosomatic, and how much was supernatural. It became a kind of buzzing feeling, like having to go to the bathroom, and as the years went on, I got to savor the feeling for the buildup that it was—the foreplay to a night of brutality and mayhem. And I always waited long enough to change for there to be a minimal amount of people out on the streets. The pain of changing has remained just as horrible over the years, but it can hardly be argued that I don’t deserve it, and maybe a little bit more.
I sat in my recliner. An old lamp rested on a desk against the far wall of the living room, illuminating just a quarter of the space. There were electric lights that ran across the ceiling, but they hadn’t worked for months, and I was always too distracted to get around to fixing them.
On the trunk in front of the recliner was my naked-lady ashtray, and the remote control for a television that picked up three or four stations, depending on the weather and the time of day.
The beating of my blood was like getting punched from somewhere deep inside. The heart pounded so furiously, so continuously, I almost felt like I was vibrating. I smoked my cigarette, and the carbon monoxide that those fuckers pack in there only made the pounding in my ears that much stronger. Someone could’ve gone at my door with a battering ram, but I wouldn’t have heard it over my own frantic heart. It was time.
I put the cigarette out in the naked-lady ashtray and went over to my front door. I unlocked the four locks. After that, I checked all the windows. Then I went to the bedroom.
I rolled up the old piss-colored rug that covered the floor and dragged it into the corner. From one of the dresser drawers,
I took out a plastic tarp and laid it out on the floor. I pushed my bed into the corner, and had forgotten that I had put the gun under the bed when Pearce came over. I slid the gun back under the bed with my foot. I was, after all, Mr. Safety.
I took off my nasty white T-shirt and threw it onto the stack of dirty clothes I had in the corner. I unfastened my brown leather belt with the silver skull-and-crossbones buckle and rested it on a chair. I took off my jeans and put those on the bed. They weren’t dirty enough to warrant getting put in the wash. My socks and undies, however, had earned their place in the laundry bin.
There was a night-light with a clown’s face plugged into the outlet in the corner. I flipped the small switch on it, and the night-light came to life. It glowed just above the floorboards. The clown had a white face, which was made a sickly yellow with age. It had black makeup around the eyes which made it look like it was sad, even though the mouth was frozen in a maniacal grin. The hair was orange, the nose was red, and the lips were red. It had on a green hat with a black band. There was a little yellow flower sticking out of the band.
That night-light meant more to me than anything else I had. It once belonged to Doris. She’d had it since she was a little girl, because no matter how old she got, there was something about the dark that scared her. I used to tease her that it was a wonder she was never afraid of clowns, but she loved clowns. For some reason, I was her clown.
The night-light had the job of guarding the house while no one was home.
I took the rubber band from my hair, and ran my fingers through my mane. I looked at myself in the mirror. Every once in a while, it was hard for me to believe I was forty fucking years old.
Up on the wall, the numerous articles I had put back glowed in the faint yellow light the clown gave off. Each was a cry from the public, a plea from the world at large for restitution; only the law wasn’t going to be the one dishing out the justice. Not that night.
Standing at the bedroom window, the moon yearning on the other side of the curtains, I felt that buried pain roll up my nerves, felt it lick my ribs. I breathed in deeply through my nose with my eyes closed, and then I opened the curtain.
The Wolfman Page 10
