Thor

by Wayne Smith

  “No interruptions while Sheriff Jensen is here,” Tom said to his secretary as he closed the door.

  He sat down behind his desk and the two of them looked at each other for a moment. Finally Tom said, “Ball’s in your court, Art. What can I do for you?”

  “Not gonna make it easy for me, are you?” Sheriff Jensen said with the same rueful smile. “Okay, first of all, this isn’t an official visit. This is strictly between you and me. Badge comes off right now.” He removed his badge and slipped it into his pocket, then tossed the tabloid on the desk with the front page facing Tom. The headline screamed, EXPERTS CONFIRM! SASQUATCH ATTACKS OREGON FAMILY, KILLS FAMOUS NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER!!!

  “They’re really behind the curve,” Art said. “The National Evening Star has already made the connection with the murdered girl outside Ted’s cabin. They also found out about Ted’s girlfriend disappearing in Tibet. So now ‘experts’ have confirmed that Bigfoot and the yeti are one and the same. I tell you, it’s bad enough to get evidence from newspapers, but these fucking rags aren’t even real papers, and they still know more than I do. I’m supposed to go before the grand jury tomorrow — you did get your subpoena, didn’t you? Good. Well, there you go. I’d like to know what you’re going to tell them, Tom, but more important, I’d like to know what I’m going to tell them. Can you fill in any of the blanks here?”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Can’t you just tell me what happened?”

  “I told your deputy what I know, Art,” Tom said. “I really can’t say any more. I’ll answer any questions I can, but it has to be this way. What do you want to know?”

  Sheriff Jensen sighed and said, “Okay. Who killed Ted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who do you think killed Ted?”

  Now it was Tom’s turn to sigh. “Okay. I think, in the final analysis, the creature that attacked my family killed him.”

  “‘In the final analysis,’” Sheriff Jensen said, weighing the meaning of the phrase. “How about in the immediate analysis? His wounds don’t bear any resemblance to the wounds on that girl — except for one — the fatal throat wound. The other wounds are particularly disturbing. He was stabbed repeatedly with a knife. His blood is all over your daughter’s bedroom, in fact, it’s all over your house and property. It would appear that our ‘sasquatch’ was your brother-in-law in a monkey suit.”

  “If you say so,” Tom said.

  “Dammit, can’t you help me at all?”

  “Art, I know this sounds like bullshit, but if I told you what I knew, not only would you not believe me, you’d think I’m crazy.”

  “Maybe so, but you’re not holding back to maintain my high opinion of you. You’re protecting someone.”

  Tom pressed his lips together tightly for a moment and said, “I’m sorry, Art.”

  “What was he doing out in the woods at night, three miles from the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why was he naked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you follow him into the woods on the night of the attack?”

  “I saw him leave the garage after dark and go into the woods. I wanted to know what was going on.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing. He lost me in the woods, and then that . . . thing came after me. I ended up in a tree. I never saw Ted again until the next morning.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sheriff Jensen said, pulling a small notebook from his shirt pocket. Reading as he spoke, he said, “You apparently waited until the officer left that morning, then went back into the woods with a shotgun. An hour or two later, you called my office to report you found Ted’s body about three miles from your house. How did you know where to look?”

  “Is this really off the record? ‘Cause if it is, I don’t know why you’re asking me questions you already know the answers to. I told your deputy, I followed a trail of blood. And I waited for the sun to come up, not for your deputy to leave. As I recall, your deputies weren’t exactly eager to search in the dark.”

  “Yes, but my deputies didn’t know Ted was out there, and you didn’t volunteer that information.”

  “I didn’t know either. Like I told you, Ted lost me out there. How was I to know he didn’t come home while that creature had me treed?”

  “But why didn’t you mention it to anyone?”

  “I had other things on my mind. My family had been attacked, almost killed. I’d forgotten all about Ted.”

  “You understand, Tom, I’m just asking what the grand jury is going to ask.”

  “Thanks, Art, but don’t forget that you’re also responsible for finding out what happened, and the jury’s going to ask you one or two questions, too.”

  “Dammit, Tom, I resent that! I came here to help you, I’m putting my ass on the line just by being here! Now I’m being straight with you, and I’d appreciate it if you could try being straight with me! There’s no stenographer here, this is your office, I’m not taking notes, and as a lawyer you know damn well I can’t use a thing you tell me as evidence. But if it makes you happy, I’ll pull out my pen and take notes while I ask you one question on the record. Okay?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you kill Ted?”

  Tom laughed out loud.

  “You’ve got to be joking! You want to know if I ripped his throat out with my teeth? You want to check my mouth? Maybe I didn’t floss all of his trachea out from between my incisors. Jesus Christ, you must be desperate.”

  “Tell me what you know, Tom.”

  “Tell me what you know, first.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? I’m your only suspect, right? So press charges; I’ll file under discovery, and you’ll have to tell me everything you know. So what do you have to lose?”

  Sheriff Jensen thought for a long moment. Finally, he said, “If I tell you what I know, will you tell me what you know?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Christ, you’re really being an asshole about this.”

  “I’m sorry, Art, I really am, but it has to be this way.”

  Sheriff Jensen stared at him for a moment and said, “Okay. But I never told you any of this. I came here officially, just asking questions, and you didn’t answer any of them, and that’s all that happened.”

  “That’s all that happened,” To agreed.

  The sheriff consulted his notebook.

  “Whatever happened in Nepal was a major turning point in Ted’s life, but when I tried to look into it I ran into a stone wall. I called the Nepalese constable who interrogated him; he insisted on knowing Ted’s condition before he’d tell my anything, and when I told him Ted was dead, he just said, ‘Then the matter is settled,’ and clammed up. He seemed awfully relieved to hear about Ted’s demise, and obviously didn’t give a damn about helping me with my problems.

  “In any case, as soon as Ted got back to the States, he put his Seattle home up for sale and moved into his summer cabin permanently — or at least until the hiker’s body turned up. But the most revealing change was in his phone bills.

  “Before Nepal, all his long-distance calls were either to your house or business-related: magazine editors, foreign embassies, ticket agents, that kind of thing. After Nepal, all the business calls stopped, but his long-distance bill went up. For the first two months, he called libraries and bookstores almost every day. He started with the biggies: the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and big bookstore chains. By the third week, he’d worked his way down to obscure dealers in out-of-print books, and occult bookstores. Seems he was only interested in the history — not fiction — of werewolves, but none of the books he found satisfied him. Apparently, the folklore says werewolves were witches, warlocks, that kind of thing, and they changed themselves deliberately with potions and spells. He wanted to know about people turning into werewolves after being bitten by one, and there’s nothing li
ke that in the literature.

  “Eventually his research changed direction. Just curious . . . did Ted ever mention Robert Harris while he was living with you?”

  “No. Who is he?” Tom asked.

  “He was a Hollywood screenwriter in the ‘thirties. I never heard of him myself until I started calling people on Ted’s phone bills. It seems Ted became obsessed with this guy, who’s been dead for some time, by the way. Ted spent about three solid weeks calling friends, relatives and acquaintances of Harris, starting in Hollywood and going back to the East coast. He wanted to know anything he could find out about Harris’ private life. I finally did a little research of my own, and . . . well, it’s really kind of stupid, but in 1935, Harris wrote the first Hollywood werewolf movie. A mostly forgotten little effort called The Werewolf of London, in which an Englishman turns into a werewolf after being bitten by one — in Nepal.”

  “So what are you saying?” Tom asked. “You think Ted was a werewolf?”

  The sheriff laughed. “Give me a break, Tom. I’ve met some pretty superstitious people in my time — and I don’t mean good-luck charms and astrology, I mean people who believe in witchcraft and ghosts and demonic possession — and even they don’t believe in werewolves. No, I’m afraid I’m not ready to make that leap.”

  I am, Tom thought.

  “On the other hand,” Art continued, “Ted had obviously made a few leaps of his own. Maybe he killed Marjorie and couldn’t handle the guilt, and ended up in some sort of delusional state where he convinced himself he really was a werewolf. And maybe, in order to maintain the delusion, he kept on killing.

  “Everything points to your late brother-in-law as a psychopathic killer. The hiker who died outside his cabin wasn’t killed by an animal; it looked more like a ritual murder. The killer tore her throat out just the way a wolf might, tore her body open with wolflike claw and tooth marks, and even left wolf hairs at the scene. But wolves don’t remove people’s hearts and leave everything else. Only humans do things that irrational.”

  “Jesus,” Tom said quietly.

  “And not a word about this to anyone. That’s the one thing we’ve managed to keep quiet. Now, as far as you brother-in-law’s death, the tooth marks on his neck don’t match the ones on that girl, and there was no ‘surgery’ performed on his corpse. No open torso, no missing organs. Although we did find a lot of hairs around the body.”

  “And?”

  “They match the hairs found on the hiker.”

  “So?”

  “So they’re from his monkey suit. He put it on, attacked your family, then ran into the woods, where he took it off. Probably buried it, or we would’ve found it by now. He was on his way back when . . . someone . . . stopped him.”

  “Someone?”

  “Your dog also followed him into the woods, but he didn’t wait until sunup. When you went looking for Ted, or whoever, you found the dog, too,” Sheriff Jensen said. “But the dog was only a few hundred yards from your house, nowhere near Ted’s body.”

  “He was weak; he’d lost a lot of blood.”

  “He’d lost something else, too. All the blood that should have been on his face from his fight with our hairy friend.” He consulted his notebook again. “Says here he was found in the creek bed, behind a neighbor’s house. His face was wet, as if someone had washed it with creek water, and his body was conveniently lying on a slope with his head low and his wounded leg high, as if someone had placed him in that position to minimize blood loss and keep his brain supplied with blood.”

  “Is that how it looks?”

  “We do know that Thor attacked Ted the day before he died.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think someone found Thor somewhere else, somewhere that would have gotten him in trouble — like next to Ted’s body. And that someone carried him far away from the body and left him for one of my deputies to find.”

  “Sounds awfully complicated,” Tom said. “Why not just take him home?”

  “Because that someone couldn’t afford to answer questions about where he found the dog. Because that someone was a lawyer, and he knew what would happen if he were caught lying to a law-enforcement officer.”

  “Do you have any evidence to back up that theory?”

  “I’m not looking for any,” Art said quietly. Tom turned to face him with an expression that said, “Thank you” and “I’m sorry” all at once.

  “So anyway,” the sheriff continued, “after Thor attacked Ted — the first time, the time we know about — you called Animal Control and had him taken away. He was scheduled to take a long nap the next day.” Tom bit his lip hard, as Jensen had expected.

  “Now things get strange again. A kid shows up at Animal Control after midnight, breaks in and releases a large number of dogs and cats. Of all the animals released, though, only one belonged to a family with a twelve-year-old boy: Thor. A deputy arrives on the scene and catches a glimpse of the kid. His description, while sketchy, matches your son. And yet you and your wife swear your kids were home all night.”

  “They were,” Tom said, looking out the window as he spoke. It was getting difficult to look Art in the eye.

  “And now I find that you called Animal Control the next day and told them the whole thing was a mistake, and you were keeping Thor after all.”

  “I can do that,” Tom said. “There was never any determination by Animal Control that Thor was dangerous; they took him because I asked them to. I filed the complaint, and I withdrew it.”

  “I see. Tell me, how does Janet feel about Thor?”

  Tom looked at him sharply, and said between clenched teeth, “Thor saved her life. He saved the whole family. She appreciates that.”

  “Yeah. I guess she would. By the way, no one has seen your dog since that night. Where is he?”

  “In my basement.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “He appears to be sick,” Tom said, still staring out the window.

  “Doc Warner, the vet who treated him, doesn’t think he’s sick. He says he’s just suffering from blood loss, complicated by a refusal to eat. At least, Warner couldn’t get him to eat. How about you?” Even from an angle, Jensen could see Tom’s eyes glistening.

  “No luck,” he whispered, and added, “I think he’s dying.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sheriff Jensen said.

  “Yeah. Well. Any more questions?”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Tom.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chapter 18

  Thor ignored the sound of Dad’s car in the driveway and lay in the cellar, staring at nothing, waiting for the end. He’d been there for three days, and had hardly moved the whole time. He hardly had any strength left anyway. He hadn’t eaten or felt a whisper of hunger since the day he bit Uncle Ted’s arm. He knew if he just stayed in one place and did nothing, his suffering would eventually end. He could feel himself getting weaker.

  After killing Uncle Ted, he’d awakened on a stainless steel table in a bright room filled with the powerful smell of disinfectant. Behind the disinfectant smell, the scents of cats and dogs — and fear. A familiar man in a white smock loomed over him, pulled a needle from his leg, and painfully shined a light into his eyes.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  Thor was startled to hear Dad’s voice.

  “He’s lost quite a bit of blood, and he’ll favor that leg until it’s healed, but he’ll be okay. Be sure you feed him plenty of red meat to replenish his blood. I’ve given him an IV to bring up his blood sugar, but he’ll have to replace his own blood. There aren’t any blood banks for dogs.” Thor recognized the veterinarian’s voice. He’d been here before, though he’d never understood why. The place scared him, and yet he knew Doctor Warner was a good man.

  He kept his eyes on the ceiling or the blank walls, unable to look at either man. Guilt lay on him like a lead blanket.

  No longer a part of any pack, he ignored the men’s
conversation, though he wasn’t quite able to ignore the sadness he heard in Dad’s voice. Dad left the room and talked to Doctor Warner’s phone, calling it “Janet.” Every time Dad said it, Thor thought his heart would tear in two. He lay on the table and waited to die.

  Some minutes later he heard the familiar deep rumble of Mom’s SUV as it pulled to a stop outside. Dad came back into the room and startled Thor by gently lifting him off the table and setting him on the floor at his feet.

  Dad’s touch sent shivers of revulsion through him. He was unfit to be touched. Dad should know better. Dad should leave him alone, let him die in what little peace he could find. He fled from Dad’s touch, crawled into a corner, and stared at the wall.

  But Dad wouldn’t leave him alone. He opened a door so Thor could see Mom’s SUV, with Mom sitting behind the wheel. He walked out to the car and called Thor to hop in. Thor ignored him.

  Exasperated, Dad came back and put a leash on Thor and dragged him to the car. Thor offered only passive resistance. He didn’t want to go with Dad, but he wasn’t about to growl or snap or show his teeth. He didn’t need any more guilt. He had more than enough already.

  Dad pulled Thor to the car and lifted him onto the back seat. As Dad was getting into the front seat with Mom, Thor leaped out the window and slinked off toward the bushes that flanked Dr. Warner’s office. Mom closed the car windows while Dad followed him into the bushes and dragged him out. Back in the car with no escape, Thor lay on the floor behind the front seat, hiding from Mom and Dad, but especially from Mom.

  Mom started the car and drove off, but they didn’t go to the House of Death, as Thor had expected, but home, as he’d dreaded. He just wanted to go where no humans could see his Badness.

  Dad got out and walked around the car to the passenger side. He opened the door and called Thor out. Thor stayed put. Dad muttered, “Dammit,” and dragged him out by his leash, and into the house.

  * * * *

  The cellar door opened and Dad came bounding down the stairs with his arms filled with Thor’s favorite canned dog foods, dog biscuits, a rawhide bone, a tennis ball, a Frisbee, a pound of pre-cut stew beef, and Thor’s dish.