"I am here to talk to Stroud. Laughing More sent me."
"I'm Stroud." He extended his hand, but the old man did not take it, lifting his palm instead in the traditional gesture of greeting. Stroud returned this.
"I am Sam Warren. My tribal name means nothing to you. My little girl married Billy Kerac, and now my family is in danger."
"Oh, yes, Chief More told me about your situation, but I assure you the police are watching your house very carefully."
"This does not trouble me," said the stern old man, whose skin resembled dried leaf.
"Then what can I do for you?"
"She--Laughing More--thinks I am an old fool. She told me I should talk to another fool."
Stroud half smiled and said, "Meaning me?"
"Yes. Can we talk freely here?"
Stroud introduced Arnold and said that Arnold could be trusted. The old man began a tale about Wendigos, and, as an excuse to leave, Bob Arnold asked if anyone besides himself wanted coffee. After he was gone, the old man continued.
"Kerac was not a bad man, and now he is a wild animal. It is the work of the men who are wolves, the Wendigos."
"Then you believe they exist?"
"It is something that is hard for many to believe, but I saw such creatures once with my own eyes and have never forgotten. I saw many of them, in a bunch."
"How large a ... a bunch, Mr. Warren?"
"Fifty, like buffalo, on the move."
Stroud wondered at the old man's story. He seemed a gentle man, but he also seemed out of his head.
"I knew you would not believe me, so I have brought you my pouch."
"Your pouch?"
"Strong medicine." He opened a leather bag and poured out its contents. "After I watched them all move off, I was curious about their hiding place, and I went into a cave there. I know it was foolish, but I was a boy then. I found a dead one there, but it was far too heavy to carry off, so I took these things from it."
Stroud was staring at a fang, and a thick dead finger with a huge claw attached. It was definitely an apelike or manlike finger, and the claw was far more than a long nail. It was like that of a bear. "Laughing More said you doctors study the hair of the beast and cannot determine what kind of hair it is. Take this to your doctors. Let them examine it, if you do not believe me."
"Are you sure you want to part with this?"
"For the good of my people, and yours, I must."
"And Laughing More sent you to me?"
"Yes, and now I will return home."
Stroud asked if he would like a ride. The old man was in baggy cotton trousers and a plaid shirt with a ripped, brown leather coat over this. He wore his hair braided beneath an old-timer's hat. "No, I must walk ... good for the heart. Stroud, there've always been Wendigos ... but now their numbers are growing, and they're coming down from the woods ... Killed all of Kerac's animals and others' ... and now people."
He left, and something of the old man remained behind, filling the room and filling Stroud's mind.
Cur ... no, Ker ... Ker-something ... Kerac.
Kerac could not remember how he had gotten into the city; he could not recall how he had gotten the bloody wounds in his limbs that stung like so many bees, the pain spreading to his muscles, immobilizing him for most of the night and day. He was feeding on a bone, all that was left of the fleshy meat he had torn from a forgotten source. He feared the light in this environment and knew he must wait until nightfall to go on ... but to where? Where had he been going? There had been a need, an urgency to get somewhere, but now he didn't know what that need or that place could be.
Those hunting him had gone by in a boat along the river, doing a cursory search of the delapidated old area. None of them from the night before had come onto the concrete shore. He'd shivered, wet and cold, most of the night, hiding deep within the broken-down walls of a strange, dark structure. Across from him, directly in his line of vision, were the staring red and peeling eyes of an army of horses, all hard and cold to the touch. Something about the hard, lifeless animal touched a faint but resounding chord in his brain, something to do with a Kerac.
On another side of him were dirty, old and empty trash pails, stacks and stacks of delapidated posters and doorways ... hundreds of multicolored doors standing on end, ripped from somewhere and dumped here. There was a wide, dark avenue just beyond, a valley lined with booth after booth to hide in just like the one he lay in now. Overhead, on wires, scraps of paper-thin, odorless flesh, batlike in appearance, flapped in the wind, suspended against the faint light that came from a noisy street not far away.
He heard the gentle lap of the water nearby. His lair was a good one. It had grown dark out. It was time to hunt and to feed.
He crawled out from below the cover of the weather-worn carnival booth when he heard a loud, crashing noise. He guessed from which direction it came and started away from it. He heard a similar noise, and another and another. It was a rattling, clanging, frightening noise and it grew louder and louder, and nearer and nearer, now coming from all sides.
He crouched and made his way to another booth, hiding there, staring out in all directions when he saw movement. They had found him. They were circling and closing in. His heart began to race, and fighting back the pain of earlier wounds, he raced to yet another booth along the fairway. They were closer still, the noise now deafening.
"Kerac ... Keeeerrrraaaaac!" he heard a voice call out as if it were inside him. It so frightened him that he leaped from his hiding place and saw the gray and black figures with their lights encircling on all sides. He raced at one who screamed, shoving him down and continuing on, faster and faster. But the voice in his head he could not escape as it said, "Keeeeerrrraaaaac! Keeerrrraaaac!"
The chant sent him loping over a high fence.
"Fire! Fire!" he heard one of them shouting. He felt a ping graze his calf and something lodged into the fence beside him, and he was over the side, racing for the lights.
Car tires screeched in response, horns blowing as he raced for the darkness of an alleyway. Under the sodium vapor lights, Kerac's hairy body took on an alien glow. Cars collided around him. Men were coming over the fence in pursuit of him, swearing at one another.
"Fire!" he heard another shout, and suddenly he felt something sharp and painful strike his back. He tore at it with his claws, ripping it from him and throwing it down, where it shattered.
He saw a dark hole and crawled into it, knocking garbage pails over himself as he did so, his mind reeling in unfeeling circles when something like a heavy blanket clanged over the top of him and the metal cans.
"We've got him! We've got the bastard!" shouted Abe Stroud, waving the others on. Bob Arnold stood at his side with the dart gun that had fired the projectile that had struck Kerac between his shoulders.
"Yeah, but what the hell is it?" asked Arnold.
"A werewolf," said Stroud. "Or at least a man who thinks he's a werewolf."
The lights revealed an enormous, hairy humanoid below on the concrete steps where a drunken woman opened her door on the scene and screamed at the thing at her feet.
"Do you have a cell at Animal Control that will hold him?"
Arnold said, "Yeah, sure we do. We've got one we've never used ... for a bear."
"I want him secured there. How long before the drug wears off?"
"Fifteen minutes tops, but we can use the stun on him now."
"Stun him enough, we'll kill him."
"Christ, Stroud ... this thing ... this ain't no man."
"What in hell is it?" asked one of Arnold's guys.
"Treat it as you do a dangerous pit bull that'd like nothing better than to rip off your arm and eat it before your eyes," said Stroud. "It's already killed twelve known."
"Maybe we ought to just put this thing down, then," said Bob Arnold, a look of disgust coming over his features as he stared at the writhing, intoxicated form of the wolfman. Its body hair covered most of its features, but the white palms,
the eyes above the protruding snout, the erect way in which it had run, were humanlike.
Stroud said, "No, we can't chance it. If there are more like him, like the old man said, we have to know about their existence; we have to know how many there are. We may have to kill him in the end, but not before we are sure."
"This is too damned big for Animal Control, Stroud."
"If we turn it over to McMasters and regular channels, Bob, we'll never learn the truth."
"You're asking me to write this up as a dog-catching operation? I don't know if I can do that."
The Animal Control van was backed into the area.
"Please, Bob ... just until we know the extent to which these ... things exist. A couple of months ago Kerac here was a man, like you and me. Now look at him."
A plaintive howl escaped Kerac where he lay. Arnold sounded bitter and annoyed, but he shouted, "Careful with this one, guys; let's load him up. Keep your stunners at hand, but remember two blows at once could kill the ... the thing. And we don't want that."
With that the men began hefting Kerac's half-conscious body as Kerac's wails brought people to their windows. Kerac was quickly got from sight and both Stroud and Arnold shouted to the lookers-on that they'd had a run-in with an escaped gorilla that didn't like the Shriners' company. People shouted remarks back, but soon disappeared.
"You really think you can get this past McMasters, Stroud?"
"Maybe not, but if we move fast, who knows." Stroud knew that McMasters was up all night and most of the day with the sewer dredging. If he acted quickly, he could conceivably return Kerac to the scene of the original crime, to the very spot where Kerac had first become a werewolf. In doing so, he could possibly locate the pack--if there was one.
He'd just have to be absolutely certain he didn't lose Kerac. And he'd need lots of help. Help from Anna More and Lou Cage, who'd gotten back today.
-12-
Abe Stroud held a light on Kerac there in the unlit cinder-block basement room at Animal Control, amazed at what they had captured. He'd read of rare sightings of creatures like Kerac, mythical man-beasts that recurrently appeared in rural places in France. In 1929, headlines had read, "Lionlike Creatures Fired on by Police, Leaving Hyenalike Tracks, Unharmed by Mere Bullets." He had heard of the Mineola ape, a creature that was seen by a dozen policemen in Mineola, Long Island, fired on but unharmed in 1931. The creature was described as walking upright, like a man, about four or five feet tall with a brown chest--like Kerac's--covered with coarse, bearlike hair. Like Kerac, the so-called Mineola ape was said to have a long, wolfish, gray face. Some ten people within a three-day period saw the mysterious animal. Police officials thought the "ape" was a baboon or gorilla that'd made an escape from a menagerie or traveling circus, but there had been no such carnivals in the area. It escaped into the forests and was never seen again.
Kerac's snoutlike mouth was a gray muzzle, his elongated teeth behind the curled lip were inhuman in size and shape. The dimensions of his snout showed a preponderance on the mouth, and his horribly deformed hands and feet displayed the tough talons of a beast ready to tear Stroud apart if he dared come too close.
It was truly a remarkable discovery. Kerac's condition was no longer that of a lycanthrope, for he no longer enjoyed even a brief moment as a man any longer. The beast within had taken over wholly and completely. It was a phenomenon that destroyed all known laws of physics, and without Kerac as Stroud's physical evidence, no one--not even those looking at Kerac as Stroud now stared across at the beast--would be willing to believe it possible.
The enormous claws, which had already done so much deadly harm, shot out toward Stroud, and Kerac bellowed in a roar that shook the room.
"McMasters and the others get a hold of you and you're dead, Kerac! Is there any part of you left that understands me?"
The beast bellowed, a sad final note from the complaining brain before it sat in a ball in the corner of its cell. It looked for all the world like a bored ape in a zoo, but the coloration, the gray snout, and the wirelike brown and gray body-hair was that of a grizzled dog or wolf.
Stroud had read up on the history of man's superstitions regarding wolves, the greatest of all being that the bite of a wolf could turn a man into a wolfman. Most of the stories settled for medicine men who dressed in the skins of the dead animals, covering their faces with the dead snouts, frightening a primitive people into subjugation. But why, then, was the idea of lycanthropy and the wolfman so doggedly persistent in the human psyche? Suppose that the old Indian was right and had actually seen a band of roving wolf-people? Had one of them bitten Kerac during his journey into the forests with his charges? Had these creatures and not Kerac killed the hunting party, Kerac somehow surviving, only to become one of the wolf party himself?
Stroud had called Cage telling him to come secretly to Animal Control. Stroud knew that he could not long keep the fact of Kerac's capture from the authorities, but he knew men like McMasters wouldn't hesitate to place a bullet through Kerac's skull, since he was the worst kind of vermin in police circles--a cop killer. As soon as the P.A. policemen were murdered, 30,000 cops had but one aim in mind for Kerac.
Lou Cage came into the darkned room now. "Abe? You in here?" Cage found a light and turned it on. Kerac let out a bloodcurdling scream as the fluorescents caused great pain to his pupils. The creature covered its eyes in a mad scramble, forcing its muzzle nose into its fur, hiding within itself like a terrified dog.
"Jesus, Mother of God!" said Lou, staring at Kerac.
"Cut the lights, Lou!"
Cage did so, fumbling. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Not over an open line."
"What, is there some secret here?"
"Lou, he's no good to us dead. I want to fly him down to the mansion and--"
"Andover? You're going to take him to Andover? Stroud, you know the scene in Frankenstein where all the townsfolk come after the doctor's head?"
"Lou, I have good reason. I suspect there are others of his kind."
Lou Cage said nothing in the semidarkness; from up above, the two men could hear the wailing and noise of caged animals. Kerac was curiously quiet. "Strange," said Lou.
"What's that?"
"Kept denying it myself."
"Denying what, Lou?"
"The marks on the victims in that hunting party in Grand Rapids. All the work of the same monster, yes, but it didn't all add up. Like, some tears and rips were small by comparison to others--all clawlike, sure, but some were small, and so were some of the teeth marks, and I kept saying to myself, it doesn't add up."
"Then there's evidence that Kerac was not alone in his attack on the hunters?"
"Stroud ... I wasn't looking for it, but some of the wounds seemed to be made by smaller animals. I chalked it up to passing raccoons maybe, or a badger, you know? Sniffing at the bodies. They lay out there for several days ... but now ... I don't know."
"If there are others, and if they propagate, there would be young ones in the ... the pack."
"McMasters learns you're keeping this from him, Abe, and you could be jailed for obstruction; hell, both of us--for conspiracy to ... to ... what is it we're doing?"
"I've already arranged to take him out. Once we're established at the manse, you can send us some word on the blood samples you're going to take."
"Blood samples? Mind telling me what I'm looking for?"
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 12
