Doc Webber thought it was funny.
Jerad groaned at the headache stampeding through his skull and headed west for Centre Street.
Hell, it wasn’t his fault he was celebrating, was it? Wasn’t everybody in the village? There was a free-for-the-asking ale at the Inn, and it seemed like every house had something going once the day was done. And why not, he wanted to know. Why the hell not? After all, it’s not every day a war hero comes back to Oxrun in one piece, not every day anyone comes back from the War at all.
Christ, it was hot!
Besides, he knew Lawrence Drummond, knew him well. Tended his father’s garden well enough, polished and scrubbed the sick old man’s carriage while the old bastard was away even though it weren’t his job, watched the old lady wither and die when her little boy took off to fight the Rebs. Hell, a man was entitled to let folks know how happy he was after all the grief, the killing, the boxes he’d seen in the mail car on its way to Hartford.
A crime, that’s what it was; and a worse one when he saw Mister Larry step out of the train coach just four days ago, just four hours ahead of his gallivanting brother.
Christ, he must’ve aged a hundred years down there. His brown hair was streaked grey, his face thin, his left arm in a sling, and a crutch propped under his right to hold him up. Jerad found out later, at the Inn, that Mister Larry had been at Shiloh just last April, had caught a minie ball in the ankle that had shattered the bone. Couldn’t walk a lick without he had that stick of white pine jammed into his armpit.
Damn, what a crime.
Damn, it was hot.
At the corner he paused to let the headache do its work while he puffed for a breath. If he headed south to Chancellor Avenue he’d be on the way to the Inn and some solace for his aches; if he crossed right over he’d be heading home and no telling what the old witch had up her sleeve.
He spat on his palm, clapped his hands, watched the spray.
South it was, then, and the hell with the old bat.
Past darkened shops, in and out of trembling streetlamps whose gas burned a faint gold, a faint blue, while the hot night air pressed his white homespun shirt against his lanky back. His boots cracked on the pavement, his shadow slithered alongside, and he could hear beyond the stores, in the houses, laughter, music, a town gone mad just because a boy come home.
A boy who looked as if he had walked hand in hand with Death, and Death cast him away; a boy who took several disturbing minutes before he recognized Jerad and shook his hand at the depot. Jerad had grinned; the boy’s hand was deathly cold.
No surprise there. War does that to a man. He’d seen it in his own Dad when the old man came back from fighting the British in Canada before Washington was burned. Never said a word from a moment he walked in the door, right arm gone at the elbow, right eye a vacant hole. Never another word until the day he died.
Lordy, he thought, and shook himself like a wet dog, crossed the street and hurried past the white clapboard police station. His shoulders hunched, his stride lengthened, and he was near to Devon Street and the Inn when he heard footsteps behind him.
He peered over his shoulder.
Mist drifted out of the trees, settled on his stringy hair.
His right hand bunched into a fist. You couldn’t be too careful these days, you sure couldn’t. For every hero like Mister Larry who came home, there was a dozen more, ruffians, cutthroats, scoundrels angry at the world and taken it out on every man what moved. They didn’t have much of a trouble with that here, not until a few days ago when a band of them had wandered right up the middle of Centre Street, terrorizing the ladies, snatching watches from the men. Would’ve been terrible, too, hadn’t it been for Lucas Stockton. A giant of a man not known for his temper. A policeman. He had waded singlehandedly into those ruffs and pounded their heads into mush, hauled them off to the station and made them sleep it off two days before personally seeing to it they found their way out of town.
Can’t be too sure, no sir, he thought as he checked the man coming toward him, lurching slightly, finally leaning heavily against a tree.
Jerad grinned. Nothing to worry about here; it was only a fellow imbiber. He retraced his steps, one hand out for assistance before he saw the man’s face.
“Good Lord in heaven above,” he exclaimed with a quick look around to be sure no one else had spotted him. Then his voice dropped to a scolding whisper. “What are you doing out here? You ain’t supposed to be here, you know that. Good heavens, don’t you have any sense a’tall?” He grabbed the man’s unprotesting arm and led him across the street, away from the Inn, toward the man’s home.
“Lord, you’re a terrible sight, if you don’t mind me saying so. What an awful sight. If you’d be me, my wife’d do more than take the skillet to your skull.” He laughed, and pointed at the already bedraggled bandage around his head. “Lord, this is something, really something.”
They turned left at the Northland Avenue corner, and moved down the quiet street to a large white house set back behind an iron fence much too elaborate for the land it enclosed.
“Lord,” Jerad muttered, fumbling with the gate latch. “Lord, the lights is still on, they must be looking all over for you. Tell you what — I’ll tell 'em you was with me, we had a bit too much, and I was helping you walk it off. Sound okay? They ain’t gonna know any better, sure as hell not.”
The latch came unstuck. The gate creaked inward. Jerad turned to help the man through, and fell back against the fence.
But not fast enough to keep the claws from ripping through his throat.
“I have always been a damned reasonable man,” Lucas Stockton insisted good-naturedly, waving an arm so wildly the rest of his companions at the bar had to duck to avoid having their heads taken off. “I am as reasonable as they come, and then some.”
Laughter made him scowl, despite the fact that he knew it was done kindly, even affectionately. He didn’t much care for being joshed. It smacked of lack of respect. It smacked of people trying to get on his good side because of his size, and because of his new position. And today, tonight, respect was finally his after years of study and patient work, years of attempting to give something to the Station in return for all it had given him.
Today the village council had appointed him the first chief of police.
Yet he wasn’t foolish enough to think that rousting that gang had nothing to do with it.
“My dear sir,” said portly Oliver Crenshaw, barely able to stand, his four-in-hand askew and his frockcoat pushed back by one imperious hand, “you are not reasonable. You are . . . you are beyond reason. You are —”
“Drunk,” someone called from the front of the large room.
Crenshaw wheeled about, blinking, his thick blonde hair blinding him until he clawed it away. “Who said that?” he shouted. “Lucas, I demand you arrest that man! It’s slanderous, that’s what it is! How dare he speak to the authorities in that boorish manner.”
Lucas shook his head and hunched himself over his tankard, wishing he had taken his own advice and stayed home with Ned and Mrs. Andropayous. His housekeeper had fixed the three of them a lavish meal, had even despite her inclinations placed a decanter of brandy on the table for the toast. But when it was over, Ned, already a strapping fifteen, had asked the old woman for a story about the way it was in her homeland. Lucas had smiled, pleased that the boy took his learning where he could, and came over to the Inn to see his old friends.
Thinking, a little wistfully, how pleased they would be at the appointment.
They were, in their own way — they jeered and teased and let him pay for nothing, and were not quite the same friends as he had that morning, before the meeting. Not quite the same, a little more distant.
He wondered if Johanna Pendleton would feel the same way.
His head buzzed, his hands stiffened from holding the pewter tankard for so long without lifting, without drinking, and he recognized the signs — time to leave, to head home and let M
rs. Andropayous crawl into her own bed.
Hell, he thought, why the hell couldn’t Madeleine be alive to see me? Why hadn’t he the nerve to call on Johanna?
It took him over an hour to leave the crowded, dark-paneled room, to accept mocking condolences and sincere handshakes, to break out the door and stand in the street to breathe the muggy air. His shadows cast from the two lanterns either side of the entrance crossed like sabres on the pavement, doubling his six-and-a-half feet, tripling his two hundred pounds. He grinned. It was impressive, he had to admit it — a giant of a man, he announced to himself; a giant that bestrides the streets of Oxrun Station with the vigilance of a god.
“Oh lord,” he groaned, though not entirely unhappily. “Oh lord, I’m drunk.”
He started to whistle, the first few bars of ‘All Quiet On The Potomac Tonight’ so out of tune he shut himself up.
The foliage shifted, husking damply. The scrape of his soles on the pavement rasped too loudly.
“Drunk,” he whispered.
And his voice was the only sound he could hear in the dark.
Immediately, not liking what the ale had done to his nerves, he swung around the corner and headed up Devon as fast as he could without actually running, to the small red-brick cottage where Ned was born, where Madeleine had died; he stopped on the porch, turned and looked back at the street, at the sleeping village it represented.
His. By damn, it was his for the protecting.
Then he heard the baying.
It came from his left, on the other side of the Avenue, rising sharply above the trees toward the waning full moon. He listened, puzzled, first thinking it nothing but a dog until the baying rose again, deep and imperious, claiming the moon for its own. He squinted, and brushed a hand down over his coat. It was a wolf, by god, no question about it. Probably over in the woods down beyond King Street.
A third time, that set off every dog in town; not angry, not joining, but a terrified howling that brought a chill to his spine and a crawling dread that broke his arms out in gooseflesh. He swallowed, wishing it were the drink that made his throat abruptly dry.
It was an odd time of year for wolves to be prowling so far south, so near humans; he listened, and did not hear the door open behind him.
“Jesu Cristu,” a quavering voice whispered.
He looked around at the old housekeeper and saw her clutching a wooden cross.
Chapter 3
“You do not listen to me,” Maria accused, giving him a stare that made him feel ten years old. Her unidentifiable accent was not as thick as it had been eight years ago, but it sounded worse whenever she lost her temper, or decided her fragile pride had been deliberately injured. “And what do I know, eh? I’m just an old dying woman you pulled in off the streets. A charity. I give you a reason for God to be pleased.”
“Maria, for heaven’s sake.” Exasperation closed his eyes, turned one hand to a loose fist. She was a wonderful woman, no question about it, but there were times when he wished she would give her tongue and temper a rest. “This is all nonsense. You are not a charity, and I don’t care if God is pleased for it or not.”
“Blasphemy,” she accused.
He nodded, accepting the condemnation mutely, knowing another word would bring a scathing sermon down on his aching head.
They were inside, he seated at the bare oak kitchen table. A fire in the stove defeated the open back door, a kettle boiling on the grate made him sweat just thinking about it. But he said nothing, not the way she was behaving since they had returned from the porch. He leaned back in his chair, unbuttoned his shirt, and watched the tiny woman bustling about, muttering to herself, every so often slapping a hand against her brown skirts.
“You know me,” she grumbled. “I never dream. I never tell lies. You know me. Now you think I am ready to go to the mountains, to die.”
He threw up his hands, looked to the ceiling for support.
“That’s all right,” she said stoically. “It is fine that I am old. I will not burden you much longer.”
“Maria, you’re going to live forever. What’s all this talk about dying, for god’s sake.”
“You are Chief of all the police now. You have to know about such things.”
“I think I know a little about dying, don’t you?” he said, reminding her of how she’d come to be with him and his son in the first place.
“That is one thing, that is a natural death,” she said, turning at the stove to fix his gaze with her black eyes. “This is something new. Something you will have to learn about, Lucas, and you are not going to like it.”
He smiled. She was incredible, Maria was. From the neck down she was wrinkled and wattled and spotted with age, with less weight on her than a chicken, with more force in those tiny lungs than the worst storm he’d ever heard. But her face was what marked her, and what made him choose her from all the applicants after Madeleine had died of the fever in ’52, ten years ago, when Ned was only five.
It was a smooth face, lean and dour, touched by deep black eyes blacker for the solid crown of white that passed for her braided hair. Age was there, but no creases; tragedy was there, but no tears. It was, for all it had suffered, a beautiful face.
And Maria, he thought, was a beautiful woman.
She spoiled his son unmercifully and ruled Lucas like a tyrant and from the third anniversary of Madeleine’s death had a sedate, proper, but earnest procession of young women in by her own invitation, ostensibly for Sunday dinner, and belaying her Romany background by virtually turning down the bed whenever he mentioned in passing Johanna Pendleton’s name.
Tonight, however, she was more on edge than he’d ever seen her. Hot water slopped from the cups, ran unchecked across the counter; the cups rattled in their saucers; the saucers hit the table so hard they almost broke.
A welcome breeze talked to the leaves in the yard, slipped inside and caught briefly at her hair.
“By God, Maria, you’ve got to calm down,” he complained when she looked fearfully at the open door. “I heard it too, you know. It’s only a wolf, nothing to be afraid of.”
She managed a twisted smile; a breeze sifted in and whisked around her skirts.
“Sit down,” he ordered kindly. A sweep of his hand captured the brandy, and he laced both cups liberally, astonished when she did not complain. Then his gruff manner softened. “I imagine it brings back memories, that creature out there.”
Maria hesitated before nodding, sipping at the potent tea as if it were iced cold.
“I would guess,” he continued when she appeared disinclined to talk, “that the mountains there are filled with them. I guess you saw them all the time.”
Another nod, less tentative.
He waited, hoping she would give him an answer, launch into one of her old-country stories that would take her mind off the howling.
She said nothing; her left hand protected her cup with a palm while her right caressed the wooden cross now dangling from a leather thong around her neck.
“Maria?”
“The wolf is a hunter.”
At last, something. “He is that, when he’s hungry.”
Her lips pursed, seemed to vanish, the veins on the backs of her hands bulged darkly and seemed to throb.
“This one,” she said, “is more than just hungry.”
The night returned to silence.
The dogs stopped their barking, returned whimpering to their sleep.
On Northland Avenue darkbright amber eyes focused on the bulge of the moon, watching as it made its way down toward the horizon, stretching bare branches into shadows against the stars, filling crowns and shrubs with a brief preternatural glow.
It watched, and licked its lips, and as the amber faded, as the greylight returned, the smells faded with it: the fresh grass and the tang of the leaves, the old brown cloth of the drunk man’s coat, the acrid bite of his worn boots, the fear-scent of his sweat. And the salty sweet aroma of the spill of his blood.
Taste faded, but did not die.
Now it was full; tomorrow it would be hungry.
And it didn’t mind a bit.
Constable Farley Newstone took his time walking up Northland Avenue. His dark uniform tunic was unbuttoned, his hair in mild disarray. At the moment he was busily refastening his collarless shirt and hoping no one was watching from back of the curtains. Behind him, on King Street, with its back to the woods beyond, was a small clapboard house with a woman just returning to her empty bed. No doubt she would be thinking about him, about the way he had handled her and how she had begged him wildly for more. He would have surrendered to the plea just to see the gratitude in her eyes, but her husband was due home and he didn’t want to be the one to hurt poor Charlie’s feelings.
He had left, then, with a loud kiss and a silent promise, and was fumbling back into his wrinkled uniform and grinning to himself, still feeling of the hot touch of her on his palms and praying that stupid old Charlie would take the night tour again tomorrow. Charlotte hadn’t exactly sworn that she would see him, but he knew her too well. She would, all right. She couldn’t get enough of him. She would see him without a doubt, and he’d leave her begging again.
He laughed aloud, shook his head, and glanced automatically into the yards he was passing. As always, in Oxrun, there was nothing out of place.
A sigh of boredom, then, a final brass button slipped into its place. He pulled his walnut nightstick from its sheath at his hip and tapped it against his thigh impatiently.
No, there was nothing to see. There was never any damn thing to see around here. Not even in the overgrown wooded lot between the Crenshaws and the Drummonds. The Chief — and that was a laugh, now, wasn’t it, that big ape a Chief, like he was in a city or something — the Chief wanted them to check everything these days, what with those ruffs prowling around and causing good folk a lot of trouble, and he supposed he should at least make a stab at checking the lot, but he didn’t feel like tramping through weeds and tripping over roots, getting his new low boots dirty and having to pry burrs off his coat and trousers. Let someone else do it; he wanted to get back to the stationhouse and get himself some water.
The Universe of Horror Volume 2: The Dark Cry of the Moon (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 2
