The Wolfman

by Nicholas Pekearo

  Just then, a feeling like lightning came over me, and I winced. I squeezed shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, it was nighttime.

  The wolf was giving me something. A memory.

  It knew where the shack was. The wolf had passed it before on one of its travels. It was not far from where I lived, about a mile into the woods past Old Sherman Road.

  I emerged from the woods and crossed the road. The first car I saw was an old Chevy. It had been a long time since I’d had to hotwire a Chevy, but I hadn’t lost my touch.

  Berger Street dead-ended at Old Sherman, just like most streets did, and as I pulled up in my stolen Chevy, I saw the Mach 1 parked at the end of the street. I pulled over.

  “Jesus,” I mumbled, “knock me the fuck down.”

  I came up to the black car slowly, gun raised. I was hoping he’d be in there playing with himself, or doing something that would occupy his hands just as much.

  No luck. It was empty. I didn’t see him anywhere. He had to be at the shack. I could feel it in my bones.

  If I could, I was going to try to subdue the sonofabitch. If that didn’t work, I’d shoot him in the foot, force him to handcuff himself. Hopefully, he’d cooperate. He wouldn’t be dealing with a girl. He’d be dealing with a very angry man with a rifle. With that, the beast could have its way with him. And if I had to kill him myself, then so be it. I’d never killed a man before, but I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  I ducked behind the Mach 1. That way, if he was in the woods, he wouldn’t see me. My heart was beating like a drum, and I was sweating like a pig. The holes in my skin where the bullets went in felt like they were being rubbed with salt. Every breath was an exercise in pain. The flames of hell were licking at me, getting ready for the big burn. I looked through the car’s windows, all frosted and covered over with road dirt, hoping to see something highly incriminating, but all there was was a bunch of designer clothes and a few cameras. A Polaroid camera.

  I came around the side of the car slowly, crouching. I had the rifle pointed into the trees, paying great attention as to whether anyone was watching me. Windows. Treetops. Bushes. The barrel of a gun could be pointing at me from anywhere. It made me think of my time in the war.

  I had been ambushed once in the green. That was what was on my mind as I crossed the threshold and stepped into the woods on the far side of the road. I was young, then, and I didn’t see it coming. I couldn’t let it happen again.

  I measured my paces, and moved carefully into the woods. I didn’t want to step on any branches and give myself away. In ‘Nam, a sound like that would have spelled doom. No one was going to get the drop on me now.

  I went in deeper, till the road behind me was a dirty gray line in the distance. The sounds of birds and chipmunks filled the air. Up ahead I saw a squirrel jump from one tree to the next. Light came down in brilliant little bursts. The rest of the ground was hidden in shadow.

  I became conscious of the sound of my own labored breathing, the smell of my own sweat. Somewhere, I could smell animal shit. The noises of the town were absent and behind me, and maybe never to be known again.

  The tension was palpable. I was working on a level of awareness that made me think of Sergeant Hooper. As I continued forward, ever vigilant, a spiderweb tapped me in the face, and became stuck because of the sweat. I couldn’t blow it off, and in that one moment my senses were so heightened that the feeling of that thing made me crazy.

  I rested the rifle in the crook of my right arm and pulled away the webs with my hands. I heard a noise behind me. I knew it wasn’t a deer—it was a man.

  I turned quickly and fired blindly.

  There was no one there. Taking the rifle in both hands, I stared down the sight and did a scan. I ran in the direction of the noise.

  No one in town would have heard the shot, and if they did, they would have paid it no mind. It was just me and Anthony out there. In the distance, through the maze of trees, I could make out the shack. I had one shot left. I had to make it count.

  I heard another noise to my side, and I began to turn to fire, but I wasn’t quick enough. I saw a pair of hands holding a log, and the log was speeding toward my face. After that, all I knew was darkness.

  Before I found the strength to open my eyes, I was roused from a deep slumber by the screaming of my limbs. I felt as if I were being stretched on a rack. Hell, I was almost afraid to open my eyes. I wasn’t sure if what I would see would upset me too much, and for a second, I even had the thought cross my mind that the Vietnamese had gotten ahold of me.

  “Wake up,” said the American voice. “Wake the fuck up, you filthy redneck. Or I’ll really get to work on you.”

  My eyelids broke the seal of sweat. My vision was busted in two, but soon joined up again. There was a bright light coming from the front that hurt, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw it was a lantern.

  Anthony stood before me, leaning against the wall, and he had a long butcher’s knife in his hand. He was playing with it, twirling it in his fingers, flicking the blade, picking under his manicured nails with it. He was wearing all black, like a burglar. Black running pants, a black sweatshirt. Black sneakers. For all I knew, he was wearing black underwear too.

  I tried to move, but I couldn’t. For a second I was worried that I was paralyzed, that he’d done something nasty with my spine. But I could feel, and I became aware that I could move my fingers. I then realized I was tied to a chair. My ankles were taped to the legs of the chair, my chest and waist to the back, and my arms were handcuffed behind me. I could feel the metal digging into my wrists, like old friends who always had to borrow money at the worst possible time. An extension cord was tied around my neck. The cord ran behind me, and the other end was tied to my feet. If I tried to bend forward, I’d choke. The bastard was ingenious. Anthony was smiling.

  “Welcome back, Marlowe Higgins,” he said in a low voice that was throbbing with anger.

  “Prettyboy,” I said, like that was his name.

  “I guess you’re the lucky chap who found the one guy in this shit-box town that everyone is looking for. You look like you had one hell of a day,” he said, pointing at my various wounds.

  “You could say that, you fucking devil.”

  “Take it back, it hurts.” He laughed. “You know what they say. Sticks and stones. Sticks …” He sliced me across my left cheek with the knife. “… And stones!”

  I cried out. He laughed, then licked the blade clean.

  “You look like you lost a lot of blood already, so what’s a little more? Besides, that one was for taking a shot at me.”

  Deep inside, I could feel the pull of the moon tugging at my bones, trying in vain to lure me to its light. I was in no position to oblige.

  “Enjoy your final moments, Marlowe. Make your peace with God and all that shit. While I have a smoke, why don’t you come up with a last request like in all the old movies, huh?” He pulled out his cigarettes from a hip pocket and lit one up. “I could never be accused of being a bad sport.”

  I started looking around. We were in the shack. That much was obvious. The slats in all the walls had spaces between them, and nothing was coming through except a cool breeze and the smell of the evening. Darkness. It was night.

  The wood floor was covered in dust and dried blood. Blood was splattered everywhere, and there was too much for it to be just mine. Rose stems were scattered in a corner, their flowers gone and used in horrible ways.

  Color photographs were pinned to the walls. I recognized Josie Jones in some of them, and the teacher in a few others. In some, they were alive, in some, they couldn’t have been. In some, they were clothed, and in some, they were naked. The rest of the pictures must have been his other victims. In the corner behind him, a camera rested atop a tripod like a bird of prey. More than any weapon, that camera seemed to be his accomplice in this whole sordid affair.

  I brought my head back and saw there was a window behind me with a strip from an old rug nailed ove
r it. If one thin beam of moonlight could hit me, I’d change, but with things the way they were, I was fucked. Anthony could very well kill me.

  I had to ask myself if things deserved to be any other way. Anthony had destroyed dozens of lives, and, if he were to survive another night, would probably go on to kill another one, two, or even a handful of innocent people before he was apprehended. But in that darkened one-room shack were two monsters. I had ended lives in the hundreds, and if events tilted into my favor, I would be responsible for perhaps thousands more before I perished of old age. We were each of us as bad as bad can be, neither one any better than the other.

  We were two sides of the same coin. It didn’t matter that I had tried, had, to a large degree, learned to control the wolf and had built a life for myself on the most salted and rockiest land. I had done the best I could given my circumstances, but I was still inhuman. So was the Rose Killer. No matter how hard each one of us tried to blend into the world around us, we deserved no part of it, and it would be much better off without the both of us, and when we were both dead, I knew we’d have the chance to maybe laugh about the old times in a very hot climate.

  The fact was that the Rose Killer targeted and murdered people because he thought they were evil. I did the same thing. We both hunted. Neither of us could help doing the things we did, but the difference between us was that he liked it. Pearce’s death wasn’t my fault. It was Anthony’s. That’s why, I decided, he had to die.

  “Hey, Anthony,” I said. “What was with the church break-ins?”

  He turned pale. “How do you know about that?”

  “They don’t call me Nancy Drew for nothing.”

  He thought for a minute, then put his cigarette out underfoot.

  “That’s not something Anthony wants to talk about right now.”

  “What does Anthony want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes darting like frightened fish.

  “Where’s my rifle?” I asked.

  “In the corner. I may kill you with that. Or I may cut you in half. See if you’re as gutsy as you act.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “You have a wicked sense of humor, Marlowe.”

  Being almost immortal does that. He’d have to get truly severe on me to put me down for good. I thought he was the type of guy that wouldn’t have a problem with that.

  “How did you find me?” he asked. “I mean, how did you know it was me?”

  “Marshall Falls, Anthony. You have a big mouth. That Polaroid box you left behind was traced back to a mom-and-pop shop down in New Mexico. It was that simple. That, and you hate women. I put two and two together.”

  “How did you find out about the box? I thought your friend on the force had died.”

  “I bet that didn’t break your heart, seeing as how you used his grave as a fucking …”

  “A frame,” he said. “I never met a cop I liked. By the way, I put the bitch on his grave for you. You made me very angry that night by hitting me in the face. The bitch was the one who had to suffer for it. Now it’s your turn. And what were you planning on doing? Blowing a hole through me like Charles Bronson?”

  “Actually, I was going to tie you up first, but you stole my routine. This right here is the exact opposite of what I would’ve liked to have happened.”

  “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  “Does it matter? One of us is going to die here tonight. You know that, right?”

  “I know. I’m the one with the gun.”

  The camera on the tripod made a noise. It was a video camera. He was filming this, the sick bastard that he was. “You took pictures of all the girls?”

  “Damn right. They’re mine forever. All mine. No one else’s.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Anthony. Tell me what happened to the eyes. Help me understand.”

  “You never would, you fucking redneck.”

  “Try me.”

  He lit another smoke. “Women, Marlowe. More than any bullet or bomb, they are the most destructive force on this fucking planet. I hate them so much …”

  “Why the roses?”

  “Roses for girls. I think it’s funny. No one else seems to think so. Women’s eyes can lie to a man’s soul. They’re all demons, those eyes. And roses are truly beautiful creatures, aren’t they? Seems fitting enough, taking away the evil, putting in the … true.”

  “And you filmed all this?”

  “I’m documenting my journey. It’s all about … this is what happens to a man when he’s pushed too far. Watch the fuck out, because this will happen to you. That’s the point. This is me doing what I want.”

  “Do you even believe your own shit? You sound like a fucking lunatic.”

  His face shriveled up—I didn’t even recognize him—and he came at me with the knife again, screaming animal sounds I couldn’t understand. The wolf might have.

  He sliced me above my eye real deep, then planted the knife into a space between my ribs. It hurt so bad, I couldn’t even make a sound. He drew the blade back out, and it shone red with my blood. Within seconds, I could feel my organs filling up with blood. With that, I got light-headed. I was dying. I was actually dying.

  “And why the break-ins?” I asked, wheezing.

  He went quiet again, then asked, “Are you trying to stall me?”

  “I’m tied up and bleedin’ on the inside, prettyboy. Do the math.”

  “The break-ins were to make everything right.”

  “How?”

  “Holy water,” he said.

  “Holy water,” I repeated. “Holy water …”

  It must’ve thrown the beast off, that stuff. God knows how, and God knows why, but that had to be it. That crap must’ve “cleansed” the places or something. Washed away the sin.

  “I needed the holy water to help the girls. I’m not a bad guy. I killed them because they needed killing, but I’m not fucked up. I don’t think anyone deserves to burn in hell forever, so with the holy water … I figured I was saving them, you know? Taking them out, but only physically. See?”

  “Yeah, I see. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  Anthony swatted at my face with the knife again. I felt it run through the skin on my forehead. Precious blood ran down my face, and mixed in with the red pool that had formed in my seat.

  The wolf was a curse, but the one single thing that it ever did for me that could be considered good, or kind, or merciful, is that after all these years it has never allowed me to remember what happened the night that Doris died. But I remembered everything else. I remembered the oath I swore to my friend’s memory, and what had, in the end, brought me to that shack.

  Anthony let the knife fall from his fingers. It stabbed the floorboard and stood erect. The boards were riddled by bugs and warped by years of rain. The shack had been left abandoned and standing in the middle of nowhere for God knows how long so this parasite could bleed the town for all its worth from a quiet little perch that was lost in the green. He picked up the rifle, raised it up, and pressed it into my forehead.

  “Anthony, before you do me in, I have a request.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “I won’t be doing that today,” I said, “but you said I could get a last wish, like in the movies. I have an easy one.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’d like to see the moon one last time before I buy the farm.”

  He lowered the gun toward my chest. “Why?” he asked.

  “I’m a hopeless romantic. It makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Anthony said.

  He went over, gun over his shoulder, and pulled the rug from the window frame, sending dust into the air. White moonlight hit the ancient glass and came through silver. The dust particles lit up and shone like a million little stars in that silver light. Like fireflies. Like angels. Like answered prayers.

  It washed
over me, shocked me like a current.

  The blood that poured from my face began to bubble and turn to smoke. Anthony dropped the gun from his shaking hands and backed far away from me into the darkened corner of the shack. As he did so, he knocked the lantern off the hook in the wall with his shoulder. The light that came from it extinguished itself, died, and Anthony mumbled something low. A question lost to time.

  “Anthony,” I said with a voice that was no longer wholly my own, “there’s more than one creature that stalks the night.”

  Anthony began to scream. He turned and struggled in the darkness with the latch on the door, but the thing was rusted, and his shaking, sweaty hands had no force to guide them right in the darkness.

  Skin ripped. Muscles expanded. I screamed. My monster hands burst from the shackles he’d bound me in. The handcuffs bent, then gave way like rotten nutshells. With that, I tore the cord from my throat with the nails that had quickly protruded from the bleeding fingers of my right hand. The tape ripped away as my body grew, and I rose.

  Anthony fumbled for the gun and fired the last bullet. It missed me completely and went clean through the ancient glass. He tried to fire again, but it didn’t work. He sank to his knees, crying. Vengeance was mine.

  TWENTY-SIX

  His name was John Raynor.

  He was raised in Las Vegas by a domineering woman who, while being deeply religious, imbibed drugs and drink like her life depended on it. Like most people who grow up to be deranged, he seemed to find a secret joy in starting fires and shooting cats and dogs with a pellet gun. If he was able to catch them, he would do experiments.

  His earliest special memory was of his cousin, a girl named June. She was two years younger than him and was easily coaxed into games of doctor that went too far. He was acting out all the things he had seen his mother doing with strange men through the crack in her bedroom door.

  When his mother found out about what he was doing with June, she filled a tub with scalding water to scorch away the sin from his privates. The burns on his legs never went away, and from that day on, he only wore long pants.