Night Howl

by Andrew Neiderman

  The man didn’t come in his direction; he did nothing to threaten him. He simply shook his head and went back upstairs. After the man was gone and it was completely still in the basement playroom, he came out and boldly went to the door to inspect what had been done. The latch wasn’t unlike some of the metal devices he had used during the tests. He felt confident that when the time came for him to leave, he could leave. He turned and studied the surroundings again. He was hungry and thirsty. He went back to where the pipes under the sink leaked, but he was impatient with the tiny amount of liquid available to him. He didn’t know what was in the bottles on the shelves under the bar, but he knew from his experiences in the lab that bottles often contained liquids that were tasty, if not refreshing. He often watched the man and the woman pour some of these liquids together into a bowl and serve him the bowl.

  Without concern for the voices and footsteps he now heard above him, he went forward and seized a bottle at its nape. He brought his head back and then forward hard and fast, releasing the bottle from his teeth at the same time. It hit the tiled floor and the glass broke. Its contents rushed about. Careful to avoid the pieces of glass, he lapped at it. At first the taste was bitter and unpleasant to him, but his thirst was great and he ignored that. When he swallowed the liquid, he lit a fire down his throat and dropped the fire into his stomach, but surprisingly, he didn’t mind it. In a strange way, he enjoyed it. It made him curious and he licked at what remained. For a few moments he just stood there contemplating how it made him feel. Then he remembered his hunger.

  Under the bottom shelf behind the bar was a small carton filled with bags of potato chips, pretzels, and a mixture of nuts and raisins. He had been fed from bags, so it was logical to him that what was in these bags could be eaten as well. He dipped into the carton and chumped through the cellophane packages, spilling the contents on the floor about him. He tasted everything. The salty potato chips and pretzels brought back his thirst even more fiercely than it had been before and he went for another bottle, smashing it the same way, licking up its contents carefully.

  This feast was one of the most interesting dinners he had eaten. He didn’t like all the flavors, but most of the foods seemed to satisfy him, although when he sat back, he couldn’t help imagining the opened side of a rabbit or the deep red flesh of a deer. Freshly killed forest animals filled him with a strength and energy that brought all of his senses to an ecstatic height. He loved the feel of the blood on his jaws and the way the meat softened in his bite. There was no challenge in this food, but the liquid ... the liquid was different. It was like drinking fire, and fire was something he had always feared.

  They had taught him about fire early on. As a puppy he had once been curious enough about a flame to go up to it to sniff it. Suddenly it seemed to turn his way, reach out for him. It barely touched his nose, but it sent him howling into a corner. The pain was so great and lingered so long, he never forgot it. Just the sight of fire froze him in fear.

  But this, this was different. He felt as though he had conquered it. It made him proud; it made him boastful. He was about to howl his exaltation when he reminded himself of where he was. By now the footsteps above had grown louder and the number of them had increased. He went around to the front of the bar, sprawled out on the carpet again, and pressed his snoot in and under his extended front legs as though he had to keep himself from making any sounds. Indeed, he did snort and hiccup. He gnawed at some of the carpet and then, for absolutely no reason he could think of, he rolled over. He liked the feeling, so he did it again, this time the opposite way. Once again it was good. He repeated it until he grew dizzy and tired.

  He felt the acid building in his stomach. It rose up his throat so quickly he had no time to swallow it back. Before he knew it, it was in his mouth and he opened quickly to release it in a small puddle on the rug. He stood up and backed away from the sour scent, but the acid built again and rose again and another puddle was created. He did it twice more at different spots on the carpet and then retreated to a corner under the stairway, where he spread out and lowered his head. He closed his eyes to keep the room from spinning and kept himself as still as he could. It felt better not to move, and his stomach started to settle.

  He slept in short spurts, each one bringing with it a montage of terrible images. He felt and saw the prongs being pressed into him. He saw himself completely ensnared, tied down, his legs against his stomach. He could barely move his head. He saw the flashes of light and envisioned himself moving down the narrow corridors, some of which had led to painful experiences. The first time they put him down a maze shaped like a Y, he mastered the two distinct choices so quickly they had to create a maze shaped like a pitchfork to give him more of a challenge. The additional choices didn’t confuse him, so they tried deliberately to deceive him by plugging the wire into the steak meat. He didn’t understand the meaning. It filled him with anger. He heard them laugh at his barking and he retreated. The next time, however, he looked for the wire and they took him out of the maze.

  Faces and sounds flashed before him. Each time an image woke him, he lifted his head and looked about fearfully, and each time it took him a few moments to remember where he was. His head felt heavy, so he lowered it and tried for sleep again. Finally, he had a peaceful ten minutes. That restored him and when he awoke after it, he didn’t seek any more sleep. He stood up, shook his body and urinated, directing his stream against the electric heat panel. Relieved, he thought about the people upstairs.

  The sounds had grown softer, fewer. He sensed an emptying. He heard the school bus when it stopped in front of the house and he listened keenly to the thin, excited voices of the children. After it was gone, he waited patiently. He was about to conclude that there were no more footsteps when he heard Clara Kaufman approaching the basement door. The click of the doorknob sent him into a very slow kneel. His eyes widened; his ears perked. He sniffed the air and caught her scent and then he heard her first footsteps on the stairway. It was too late to hide.

  Clara paused when she had descended only a little more than a third of the stairway. The way the stairs had been built, anyone coming down them wouldn’t become fully visible until he or she was nearly halfway down. Clara saw only a portion of the basement playroom, but it wasn’t what she saw that made her hesitate. She knew her house as well as she knew her own body. As soon as she fully inhaled the air, she stopped. This wasn’t the way her basement always smelled. It had the odor of one of those cheap bar and grills downtown. What the hell did that boy and his dog do down here? she wondered, continuing her descent.

  She stopped again when she saw the bags of pretzels, potato chips, and mixed nuts and raisins strewn about, the putrid puddles on the carpet. Sid had only mentioned a torn box of bacon bits and a broken glass. Why would he neglect to mention all this? She nodded and smiled.

  “Just like him to try to diminish the impact,” she muttered. She had to love him for it. He wanted to get on the road before she started ranting and raving about the mess. He knew how she could be when it came to cleanliness and order in the house. “You coward, Sid Kaufman,” she added. She turned, deciding she’d better go back up and get a pail of hot water and some sponges.

  Then it occurred to her. Bobby and the dog couldn’t have done this recently enough for the puddles to still be wet. The carpet would have absorbed it. Sid didn’t tell her about this because it wasn’t here when he came down! The realization sent a terrific chill up the back of her legs and into her spine. She felt her legs weaken. That odor . . . that odor was definitely the odor of spilled whiskey. Something had happened behind that bar.

  She was caught in a dilemma: she wanted to rush back up the stairs and slam the door shut behind her. Some siren of instinct had begun to send warnings into her consciousness, even though she had yet to confront anything threatening. On the other hand, her curiosity as to what had caused this mess and this horrible stink pulled her toward the bar and deeper into the basement. Her possessi
veness that characterized her feelings about the house filled her with indignation. Anger rose to confront fear. She looked back once at the still opened basement door, turned toward the basement again, and continued down the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she turned.

  Once again he sprang out of silence. He had to learn the value of that only once for it to stay with him forever. That was part of the beauty of what he had become. He had been slinking against the wall, moving toward the stairway in tiny, quiet steps, muted further by the softness of the carpet. When he leaped through the air at her, he pushed himself up and out with such a well-coordinated movement it was as if he were made of a single, powerful muscle. His legs and thighs, his sides and back all joined with the power in his neck to make him into a new breed of giant bird.

  He had his head lowered so that the center of his skull would strike her like a giant fist. The point of impact was well-plotted; he hit her on the left side at the center of the ribcage. The blow sent her flying backward. She hit the wall with her right shoulder, and her neck, still loose and relaxed as it was before the instant of attack, didn’t tighten fast enough to prevent her head from snapping to the right and striking the wall as well.

  She went unconscious immediately and slumped to the floor, falling first into a sitting position, her arms limply at her sides. Then she toppled over to her right. A small trickle of blood emerged from the right corner of her mouth where her teeth had come down hard into her lower lip. She hadn’t even had time to release a cry. The whole affair, except for the clunk of her body and her head against the wall, was done as if it were a scene in a silent movie.

  He waited a moment, watching her closely and looking for any signs of life. When she didn’t stir after a few seconds, he stepped up to her body and sniffed around her face, putting his nose right up to hers. He licked the trickle of blood and then sat back, contemplating his achievement. This, too, had been so easy. She wasn’t any smaller than the woman in the laboratory, but at times, he had had such fear of that woman. The memory of her stirred the anger in him and he transferred that rage to this woman before him. He snarled, hoping she would move, hoping she would do something to challenge him.

  When she did nothing, his fury subsided. He went to the foot of the stairs and looked up at the opened basement door that led to the interior of the house. Then he looked back at the unconscious woman. He didn’t feel safe with her behind him in the open. He wished there were a cage to put her in, like the cages that trapped the animals in the laboratory. He thought about the other room, the darker, colder room of cement floors and walls, and he made a quick, logical decision, just the way he had been taught to do it—lining up the possibilities, weighing the positive and negative of each, and concluding. Once the conclusion was made, there was to be no hesitation.

  He went directly to her right arm. It had fallen with her palm facing upward. He took the small, limp wrist into his mouth and clamped down firmly on the bone. His sharp teeth pierced the skin and the taste of blood filled his mouth. Then he backed toward the doorway to the other room, dragging her along with relative ease. Her head bobbed on the carpet and her legs straightened out, one shoe coming off and then the other. In a few moments he was into the room of darkness. She seemed to move more easily over the cement floor. He paused, looked to both sides, her wrist still in his mouth, her arms moving along with his head and neck like the appendage of a puppet with broken strings.

  He decided to put her in the corner behind the water heater. Once he got her there, he released her wrist and her arm fell to the floor, the wrist slapping the concrete. He studied her for a moment. There was no scent of death, but her stillness made him think that she wasn’t far from it. He nudged her once with his snoot just to be certain and then stepped over her body and went to the doorway. There, he looked back into the darkness. Confident she was no longer any possible threat to him, he sat up, took the door handle into his mouth, and pulled the door closed.

  He waited a moment and listened keenly for any sounds in the house. There were none. He approached the stairs and began his ascent toward the door. When he reached the top and stepped out into the house, he turned sharply and pressed himself against the basement door. It slammed shut. Then he looked about slowly. Although the human scent was strong, there was no movement, no sign of any other. He went forward into the house, confident that the entire domain was his to do with as he liked. There was food here and comfort and things to explore.

  They hadn’t come out as he had hoped they would, but he had done something better—he had come in. Of course, he understood that others would come in, too. They would return. But that thought didn’t frighten him. Instead, it stimulated the pleasure of the predator. He had only to wait.

  Sid Kaufman wasn’t comforted by his car radio. He put thousands of miles beyond those of the average driver on the car during the course of a year and he had become quite dependent on the radio for company. There were times when he wanted to pick up hitchhikers, but he always hesitated to do it. Clara, worried about some of the things that could happen to him on the highways, had made him promise not to give strangers lifts. Sometimes he felt terribly about passing up what was obviously a college kid trying to get home or back to school, but he couldn’t help it. So the radio was all important—the music, the talk shows, the news. Actually, he concluded, the radio could keep a citizen very informed if he used it well. There were times he wished he had a car phone so he could call in and give his opinions, too. Frustrated, he often carried on whole conversations with an imaginary passenger. As far as that part went, today was no different.

  “I shouldn’t have left them,” he muttered. He turned to his imaginary passenger. “The horrible incident with King was still too fresh. I should have called Carl Pearson in New York and told him I couldn’t go. Why didn’t I do it?”

  He didn’t have any satisfactory answers for himself. The sky ahead of him was gray and overcast; he knew soon he would be riding into rain. The dreary propsect fit his mood. Usually, when he was on a highway like the New York State Thruway, he put on the cruise control, setting the speed at just over the speed limit; but this morning, in deep thought, he forgot about that and paid no attention to just how fast he was traveling. That is, until he went through the radar trap. He looked down at his speedometer and cursed. He was going seventy-five miles an hour. Sure enough, the state policeman parked ahead was in the road waving him to the side.

  He had no defense and told him so.

  “My mind wasn’t on my driving. Sorry,” he said. The policeman was silent. He looked at Sid’s license and registration and then went back to his vehicle to write the ticket. When he returned, he had his comment.

  “When people don’t have their minds on their driving, they get into accidents and hurt themselves and others, Mr. Kaufman.” He handed him the ticket.

  “Yeah,” Sid said, his face reddening, “but if you went through what I’ve been through these past couple of days, you wouldn’t have your mind on your driving either.”

  The policeman ignored the comment. He politely explained that Sid could pay for his ticket or contest it. The state patrolman’s even, matter-of-fact tone of voice annoyed him. It was as though he were giving Sid directions about finding some address.

  “Well thank you,” Sid said, “you’ve been very kind and considerate.”

  The patrolman’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond. He waved Sid on and went back to his position. To catch another forgetful idiot, Sid thought. Actually, the incident had a good effect—it took his mind off his guilt for a while. He reminisced about other tickets he had gotten and about the ones he’d escaped. He recalled the time he and Clara and Lisa (Bobby wasn’t born yet) had driven to Florida. They were pulled over early in the evening in North Carolina and Clara put on a beautiful performance, explaining that Lisa had to go to the bathroom and they were closing in on their motel for the night. The cop must have seen or heard something that struck home, for he let them go wi
th only a warning.

  Clara was really a very resourceful person, Sid thought; thinking this helped to relieve his guilt too, for he truly believed that she could take care of things while he was away. He looked at his dashboard clock and envisioned what she was doing. The kids were off to school; she would go down to the basement and clean up the mess and then . . . that mess; there was something about the whole thing that bothered him. It was like a tickle at the base of his spine. He couldn’t quite reach it, but it wasn’t all that annoying. It was just there. But what? What?

  He was a great deal more careful about his driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and he was glad that he was. It seemed to him that there were many more highway patrolman out than usual. Must be quota day or something, he thought. In any case, he pulled into Boston on time and reached his destination according to schedule. Once he set his eyes on the project, he was able to put everything else aside. He had that ability to concentrate, to direct his attention solely on the problems at hand. It was what made him successful in his job—the ability to avoid any distractions.

  The company was called Star Products. He went right to the president’s office and introduced himself to the secretary. Almost immediately he sensed a familiar fear and distrust in her face. He expected that she, being secretary to the president and owner of the company, knew Sid’s purpose and had warned some of the management staff. She also knew that he might very well make some recommendations concerning her own job. But Sid was used to this. In fact, to be honest about it, he had to admit he even enjoyed it to a certain extent. He enjoyed the feeling of power that came from being able to instill such fear in some people, especially those who made a great deal more money than he did.