Night Howl

by Andrew Neiderman

  He went for his rifle.

  He paused in the hallway by the telephone table before leaving and turned Ethel’s picture to the wall. You don’t have to see me doin’ this, he thought. He laughed at himself. Funny, the things an old man livin’ alone all these years would do. But he couldn’t help it. So much in the house and on the land had spiritual qualities for him. Charley had wanted him to give away all her clothes, but he couldn’t do it. What was the rush, he thought, even though he knew very well she would have wanted it that way; she would have wanted her clothes to go toward helping some poor soul. Forgive me for that one too, Ethel, he thought, and he went out the back door.

  The sun had fallen faster than he had expected. It surprised him; he hadn’t thought it was this dim out when he’d peered through the window. Must be my eyesight, he thought. Or maybe the world always looks brighter to me from the inside of the house. The idea made him laugh. He paused on the back porch, checked to be sure the rifle was loaded, and started down the short wooden steps.

  If it was a dog, he didn’t think he would have to shoot it. What he expected and hoped to do was scare the animal off so that it would never come back. It would run off and follow the road into town where maybe the police would pick it up or someone would take it in, some store owner who’d feed it scraps and keep it in the back of a store.

  If it was a dog, he could call the dogcatcher, but as usual the stray wouldn’t be around when he arrived and then he would take his time returning. Naw, there was no better way than handling your own problems yourself. That was the difference between men like him and men like . . . men like his son Charley. It made him sad to think it. He walked on toward the barn.

  Somewhere from one of the shadowy corridors of his mind, he could hear Ethel saying, “You be careful, Ken Strasser. You’re no young bull anymore. Don’t go around acting like you are. You’re foolin’ nobody, least of all me.”

  “Right, right,” he muttered. He shook his head. Didn’t the shadow cast by the silhouette of the barn look long and dark, though. He almost wished he’d brought his flashlight along. Goin’ to need it inside there, he realized. Probably will have to go back to fetch it anyway. Oh well, he thought, might just shake him out of there without much trouble.

  He crossed into the shadow and moved like a shadow himself.

  He heard the man coming even before the man emerged from the house. He was keen about any sounds in the rear of the building. Whenever he was in the barn, he was well aware of where the old man was at all times. Either he saw him move about the grounds, or he saw his shadow in the windows, or he heard him in the house. He wasn’t afraid of him as such; he was simply alert and conscious of everything around him, more so than he had ever been. His senses were extraordinarly sharp, his perception far beyond anything he had ever known.

  He had created a place for himself near the partially opened barn door. When he first discovered the hideaway, he brought large mouthfuls of hay to this location and created a warm and comfortable bed for himself. From this position, he could look out at the house and the yard and he could see and hear any potentially threatening movement.

  As soon as the old man emerged from the house, he got to his feet. He knew that what the old man was carrying could inflict great pain and even death. He wasn’t sure how he knew this. The realization came to him from a pocket of awareness fed by information gathered during some earlier time of his life. The intellectual process was quick and his resultant anger immediate. A low, threatening growl began in the base of his throat; he held it there in check, recognizing the need for silence.

  He backed a few steps away when the man drew closer. In these few moments he was carved of stone. He remained outside the small ray of light that entered the barn, so that even his eyes were unseen. The old man paused a few feet from the door. He swung the rifle from the side of him so that the barrel faced the door.

  “Hey,” the old man yelled, “Get the hell outta there!”

  He didn’t move. He heard the old man curse and then saw him come forward. He backed farther away, rubbing his body against the door, keeping himself close to it. When the old man slid it further open, he moved along with it as though he were attached to it. That made him invisible. He hoped that was all he would have to do. Attacking the old man wasn’t part of his plan . . . not yet. But the old man entered the barn, rifle up and ready.

  “Where are ya?” he shouted. “I know you’re in here somewhere,” he muttered to himself. He started to turn.

  Before this, anything he attacked had been forewarned. His growl served as an announcement. The prey or the antagonist had an opportunity to bring up its guard and feign off his first thrust, or at least to block it. But this time he came out of the darkness, a fist of darkness, himself. He was an extension of the black, the air turned into a solid mass of muscle and bone.

  He struck the old man in the chest and drove him back out of the barn, where he fell backward, the rifle flying over his head and bouncing somewhere in the yard. Still, he didn’t growl. Once again, he lunged in silence.

  Ken Strasser was confused by the blow. He wasn’t sure what had come at him. The force of it was overwhelming, but the silence was shocking. It couldn’t have been a dog, could it? Yet, when he looked up from the ground, that was just what it was . . . a large German shepherd, leaping in the air.

  It never touched Ken with its mouth. He didn’t even have to push its head away. This was like some kind of nightmare gone wild. He almost thought he had been attacked by a man dressed as a dog. The animal, or whatever it was, landed over his torso and dropped the center of its weight right over his face.

  He pushed up with all his might, but Ethel was right—he was not a young bull anymore. The strength in these arms could serve to dig holes for tomato plants and maybe run the Rototiller over the ground, but even that was getting hard to do; he had to stop so often to rest. Pressing into this animal was like pressing against a solid wall. He couldn’t budge it an inch.

  He stopped his effort because the animal wasn’t doing anything else to harm him. He expected it would get off him at any moment and run away, but it didn’t. It rolled its body slightly, just so it could lean more of its weight against his face. Its coat was soft, but the scent of it was definitely dog, and not domesticated dog but dog that had been out in the wilds, dog that had been rained upon, dog that had dried in the sun, that had traveled through the forest, that had slept on the hay in his barn. All these odors were familiar to him. They greeted him like a montage of the natural world he had known and loved so long, only now they presented him with a most extraordinary kind of life-threatening problem. Why was this dog so contented with simply staying this way?

  He pushed against it again and he turned his body from side to side to throw if off, but he might as well have tried to move a car. It was as though a decent-sized man had decided to sit on his face. The indignity of it all occurred to him, but that indignation was short because he quickly realized that his breathing was being cut off. As difficult as it was for him to accept, he was being smothered to death by a large German shepherd; what was most frightening about it for him was the realization that the animal seemed to know exactly what it was doing.

  He gasped, closed his eyes, and gave a final push. The results were the same ... failure. His lungs began to ache; his mind reeled. The last thing he thought of was Ethel’s picture on the telephone table in the hallway. Thank God he had turned it to the wall.

  “I have a very surprising, maybe even very stupid thing to tell you,” Sid Kaufman began. The chief of police sat back in his chair. When Sid asked to see him privately with the door of his office closed, Harry Michaels’s interest was piqued.

  “Don’t be afraid to say somethin’ stupid, Mr. Kaufman. I hear a lot of that nowadays.” He smiled at his own sense of humor, but Sid only nodded. “Sit down, sit down. You look awful. That leg acting up?”

  “It thumps away, but I wish that was all of it.” Sid took the seat and f
olded his hands on his lap. “I don’t even know how to start this.”

  “Just start it. That’s usually the best way,” Michaels said.

  “My son . . . my son, of course, has been having nightmares.”

  “Sure.”

  “Yesterday, he insisted that King had come to the house at night and sat by his window, whining for him to come out to play. The dog would do that sometimes.”

  “King was your dog? The one that. . .”

  “Yes. Like I said, Bobby had been having nightmares, so I just assumed it was that.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The kid’s kinda bright. Top of his class, reads two grade levels beyond his age.”

  “I gotcha, but bright kids can have nightmares too, Mr. Kaufman.”

  “Oh sure. What I mean is, he stuck to his story and then took me out to where he claimed the dog had been.”

  “A young Charlie Chan,” Michaels said. He took a cigar out of his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth without lighting it. “Doctor forbids me to smoke, but I like to pretend.”

  Sid smiled. “Anyway, I saw a paw print where the earth was soft.”

  “Paw print? You mean, a dog’s paw print?”

  “Uh huh. Just about King’s size, too.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought the dog could have made that anytime.”

  “Sure. That makes sense.”

  “Even though it looked very fresh.”

  “Maybe it was another dog.”

  “I’m getting to that. This afternoon, when I came home, my wife . . . my wife was quite upset. She told me she heard King barking ...”

  “Mr. Kaufman,” Michaels said, leaning forward, “you keep saying King, but that was the name of the dog that was destroyed, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. You’re getting me a little confused.”

  “Well, that’s because I am. She also said she came out of the house and looked at the doghouse and saw King in it.”

  Michaels stared at him. Then he moved the cigar from the corner of his mouth to the center and back to the corner again before taking it out.

  “Saw?”

  “My dog.”

  “Your dead dog?”

  “Of course, I thought it was just another German shepherd.”

  “Of course.”

  “Even though one dog won’t usually go into another dog’s doghouse. I learned that afterward. I called my vet.”

  “You did? So what does that mean?”

  “I began to call all the people who live on our street. There are a few with dogs, but no one has gotten a German shepherd recently. I reached everyone but Ken Strasser, so I went down to his place, but he wasn’t around.”

  “Old Ken. He’s probably with his son, Charley. You know Charley?”

  “Just a nodding acquaintance. I didn’t see any signs of a German shepherd at his place, though.”

  “So what’s your point, Mr. Kaufman? I don’t mean to sound rude, but. . .”

  “Well, it’s kind of a weird coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “What is?”

  “Another German shepherd haunting our house.”

  “Haunting? Might be a stray. We’ll have the dogcatcher make a few passes on your street.”

  “I was thinking maybe it was more than that . . . maybe someone’s playing a sick joke on us.”

  “Oh God, Mr. Kaufman. That’s stretchin’ it. I don’t know.”

  “My wife’s pretty upset.”

  “I can see why. Tell you what: I’ll send a patrol car up there two, three times a day and once or twice at night. He’ll have a spotlight on the vehicle so he’ll be able to keep a good lookout. And I’ll call the dogcatcher for you, just as I said.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I know you people have been through a mess, but you can’t let it get the best of you.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And I’ll speak to Charley or Ken later tonight, just to be sure Ken didn’t take on a dog.”

  “This one would have to be along in years, at least four or five,” Sid said.

  “Okay,” Michaels said. He put the cigar back in the corner of his mouth. “Seems a shame that smokin’ has to be so bad for ya, don’t it?”

  “Yes.” Sid smiled. “Thanks for being understanding.”

  “No problem. Just take care of yourself and tell your wife we’ll be cruisin’ along your street.”

  “I will. Oh, one other thing,” Sid said after he reached the door. “No one else on the street has seen such a dog about. You’d think that if it was a stray, someone might have seen it, too.”

  “That’s a thought, Mr. Kaufman,” Harry Michaels said. He took the cigar out and used it as a pointer. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Thanks again.”

  After Sid Kaufman left, Harry Michaels sat back in his chair again. People sure can get wacked out of joint, he thought. This was one for the books.

  “I’ll meet you back at the institute at the crack of dawn,” Qwen said. “Just the two of us is all we need. That is, unless this here dog of yours returns tonight,” he added. That twinkle was in his eyes.

  Keven knew the trapper was playing with him. “About six then?”

  “That sounds right,” Qwen said as he got out of the car. He lived alone in a small two-story house just outside of Margaretville. Kevin thought the seclusion fit a man like Qwen. A hound dog, tied near a doghouse on the side, began to bark a greeting.

  “You going to bring your dog along?”

  “I am now. Somethin’ tells me we’re gonna need all the help we can get. Bring something of the animal’s—a collar, piece of bedding, somethin’ Maggie can sniff and get a hold of.”

  “Okay.”

  “See ya,” Qwen said and closed the car door. Kevin watched him walk toward his home and then he backed up, turned around, and headed for the institute.

  There were no signs announcing what it was; there were only signs warning intruders away. The building, which had once served as a home for the elderly, was bleak and unattractive. Nothing had been done to the landscape except for the construction of a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence all around the grounds. The agency had chosen the place because it was ideally adapted to what they required. Rooms had been redesigned to fit their needs, and equipment had been brought in. By the time Kevin had arrived, it was ready for the research and the experiments. When he saw how isolated the structure was and how deliberately obscure it had been kept, he was impressed. It gave him a renewed sense of the importance of their work, of how much their value had increased because of the success with the mice. If what they did could become transferable to people, human progress could take a giant leap forward. Everyone knew that a major ramification of that leap was power. Their discoveries, his discoveries, would be as important as the discovery of nuclear fission.

  The security guard at the gate came out of his booth. As soon as he recognized Kevin, the guard opened the gate and Kevin drove up to the parking lot by the front entrance. He could see the lights were still on in his laboratory, and he imagined Ann was feeding the animals. His twenty-four-year-old assistant had taken the security breach rather personally. She was a perfectionist, a brilliant mathematician and logician who usually became emotional only over her work. The others had nicknamed her “Mrs. Spock,” after the fictional character in Star Trek. Kevin couldn’t blame them for it. He didn’t really like Ann; there was nothing feminine about her. Her hair was cut shorter than his; her skin was sickly white. She never wore makeup, and the only time he had ever seen her out of that antiseptic lab robe was when she had first arrived. He thought it was possible she slept in it. But she had come highly recommended, and now she was an enormous asset.

  After he got out of his car and entered the institute, Kevin walked through the lobby and went directly to Dr. Bronstein’s office. The director had said he’d be waiting in his office. Kevin knocked and then entered. The fifty-f
ive-year-old scientist looked up expectantly from a folder on his desk. His thin, graying hair looked disturbed again and Kevin smiled to himself, thinking how the director often ran his fingers through his hair nervously whenever he became engrossed in a new thought. It was as though he would stroke his brain into becoming more efficient. And wasn’t that what it was all about?

  “We’re going to start again in the morning,” Kevin said. “Just Qwen and me.”

  “Why just the two of you?”

  “He wants it that way.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “I think we were told right. He looks damn authentic. He’s pretty smart, too. He’s figured out that we’re not after just any lost dog.”

  “How much did you tell him?”

  “Practically nothing, but I don’t know how long I can keep him in the dark. Besides, once we find him . . .”

  “You have to be careful, Kevin. Can’t expect a layman to comprehend what we’re about.”

  “I know.”

  Bronstein thought for a moment and then sat back.

  “Maybe you’d better take Gerson with you,” he said.

  “Qwen wants only two of us.”

  “We’re paying him. Besides, with the kind of combat training Gerson’s had, he might be of some aid out there in the wilds. I’ll tell him to be ready. What time?”

  “About six. This Qwen is a kind of peculiar fellow. It wouldn’t surprise me if he refused to take him along.”

  “Gerson’s peculiar, too. That’s why they assigned him to head up our security. Maybe they’ll get along. Be careful out there. I’ve been going over Ann’s report,” he added, indicating the folder on his desk. “Apparently opening a door was quite basic for him and someone must have left that hall window open just enough for him to get his snoot into it so he could push it up.”

  “No, he’s not going to have any problem getting out of a building.”