My son’s unearthly cries continued.
“My God, Richie—” I shouted, moving to take him in my arms, but at that instant he turned to confront me.
The front of his jacket was sliced to shreds. The fingers of his hands had grown out to nearly twice their length. The nails were curved down into sharp talons. His hands were elongated, covered with a mat of long, bristled, dark brown fur.
His face was that of a wolf.
Richie was gone, replaced by this…thing.
This was the face of the beast I had seen through the window: a hateful, yellow-eyed visage consumed by cunning if not devious intelligence.
He pulled himself erect, regarding me like a wary dog. His body had been forced into a longer, bonier frame; there was a sharp bend at the shoulder where it met the neck, almost humping the back into the head. It was a physique that gave the impression of immense and concentrated power.
The creature that had been my son snarled at me and tensed. I searched his eyes frantically for some sign that my boy was still in there but found nothing except deep yellow hate.
“Richie,” I pleaded, but at that moment he struck.
If the transformation from my son to wolf had been complete, I would surely have been killed. The lower part of his body was still pushing into shape, and so he jumped at me awkwardly, with the legs of a twelve-year-old boy. He landed in front of me instead of upon me, and I threw him aside with my forearm. He staggered and fell, his legs collapsing. As he landed, the legs of Richie’s jeans ripped through their seams. The new, powerfully muscled legs bulged out. His sneakers burst apart, revealing long, powerful hind feet.
The hammer was four feet behind me, next to the couch. I scrambled to retrieve it. At that confused moment I could have done the beast in. But the sight of what my son had become prevented me; the vision of this thing still in the rags of my son’s clothes, wearing his body, stayed my hand, giving him the opportunity to recover.
He pulled himself into a crouch a half-dozen feet from me, and regarded me sullenly.
I thought of my son’s pleading with me to kill him, and now I knew what he meant.
And then something happened to give me hope. The creature squinted through the rectangle of one of the cellar windows at the brightening day and flinched. A look of uncertainty crossed his face. Like a drowning man I clutched at the debris of my memory. Didn’t werewolves in the movies change back to men during the day? Wasn’t it the Moon—and then only the full Moon—that held sway over their affliction? I remembered reading actual cases of psychological lycanthropy. The Moon was always involved. Now the Moon was gone—could it be my son would reemerge?
In answer, the wolf snarled, turned abruptly from the window, and leapt at me again.
Again he landed in front of me, but this time he did not fall. He raised one forearm and swung the long curling knives of his claws at me. I feinted with my left hand, then, praying that the blow was hard enough but not too hard, I brought the hammer down on the exposed left side of his head.
He collapsed with a grunting cry.
There was a roll of good, stiff lamp cord in my workshop, and I trussed him up, using tight knots, binding all four paws together from behind. I rolled him onto his side and stood regarding him. I knew my son, knew the shape of his body, and this was no longer him.
His bright eyes opened and his jaws snapped out at me. He missed, and I stepped back as he flailed upon the floor, trying to break the bonds.
I walked to the cellar stairs and sat heavily on the first step. The wolf’s eyes followed me with sullen malice; then he resumed his attempts to free himself. He sounded like a rabid animal, and I stared at the shredded rags of my son’s clothing that remained on the wolf’s body.
“Oh, Richie,” I sobbed, “what in God’s name is happening?”
The wolf stopped its exertion and gave me its chilling stare.
I stared back, unbelieving, and the early day wore on.
CHAPTER 5
The Reckoning
In the late afternoon I decided to go upstairs. I dreaded what I would find, including the remains of my wife. But the rest of the world was up there also, including the food that would ease the hunger that had begun to gnaw at me. There was a radio upstairs; there was a television. My access to the government that must surely be aware of this horror by now, if not in control of it, was upstairs. I had heard no further sounds since the beast had left the night before, and I assumed the house was empty. Even if it wasn’t, I was determined to face whatever dangers lay above, in the hope of rescue and possible salvation for my son (wasn’t it possible that the government already had the problem in hand, and that a way would be found shortly to return my son to humanity?).
The wolf had fallen into a fitful sleep. I went as close as I dared. The lamp cord looked secure.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered, telling myself I was talking to Richie, and then I turned to go.
I gripped the hammer in one hand. My two back pockets held a flathead screwdriver and a carpet knife.
At the top of the stairs, keeping as quiet as I could, I pried the boards from the door using the hammer and screwdriver.
As I pulled the second two-by-four away from the frame, I thought I heard a sound from above. I waited a twenty count. There was nothing further so I resumed yanking the board away with the peculiar ripping sound that only nails released from wood make.
I lay the two-by-four aside and slowly turned the doorknob. It went a quarter turn, then resisted. It was then that I remembered that I had locked it from the other side. There was no way of unlocking it from the cellar side.
I spent the next half hour gouging the lock set from the door, first gently using the screwdriver, digging into the soft, cheap veneer of the door, and then, giving up all pretense of quiet, hammering on the screwdriver, and then, in frustration, taking the hammer to the side of the knob until the entire mechanism gave in and broke. The knob on the other side of the door fell to the floor, leaving me with the other knob in my hand, and a four-inch ragged hole in the door.
I stepped back and pulled the door open by the hole.
Quiet assaulted me. I knew I had awakened the thing in the cellar, but it had become very still, as though it waited to see what would happen.
I looked out onto the same view of the kitchen the cellar opening had always showed. But there was a violent difference. The kitchen was in a shambles. One end of the long table was covered with debris. A chair was knocked onto its back. A scattering of objects, mostly broken, including a little Dutch girl ceramic that my wife had treasured after our honeymoon trip to the Netherlands.
My transmogrified son, almost as if he could see through my eyes, let out a bray of triumphant glee from the cellar and resumed his thrashing about.
I stepped into the hallway, gingerly avoiding the broken frame of a photograph that had been knocked to the floor. It showed Emily, Richie and me at Disneyland. Richie’s arm embraced a costumed Mickey Mouse like a huge stuffed animal.
If those meteorites had fallen everywhere like they had here, I doubted Disneyland would be open today.
The house was deathly quiet. My mind produced creatures in every partial shadow—the broom handle protruding from its coffin-like closet became the thin long hand of a werewolf; the open oven, its defective bulb flickering on and off, was transformed into a repository of budding creatures hatching before my eyes.
There was wreckage everywhere. It was as if the thing that had performed it had done it for the sheer evil joy of destruction. I saw no signs of curiosity; no evidence of a search for knowledge. Only destruction. Vases had been broken into small pieces. The prints hanging in the hallway leading to the front of the house had been dashed to the floor, the glass broken, the etchings themselves claw-ripped. The bathroom door, for no apparent reason, had been torn from its hinges.
Warily, I approached the front of the house. Farther down the hallway, more smashed gewgaws, a Picasso poster sliced as if by
a razor blade. The telephone table jutted out from its nook at the edge of the living room. The phone lay on the floor beside it. Slipping my carpet knife out, I brandished it before me, edging toward the phone.
I had to pass the entrance to the living room to get at it. I knew this moment would come and had dreaded it. I almost expected the dead body of my wife to be waiting for me at the entrance, her lost limbs restored to her body, her eyes blank, bloody hand upraised…
I passed the entranceway and looked in.
I saw the Christmas tree torn to shreds, the gaping hole in the picture window, the box of ornaments deliberately desecrated, broken delicate shards of glass scattered everywhere—and nothing else. My wife’s body was not there. There was little blood, only a few dried, curiously anemic patches on the rug and walls.
I found that I had been holding my breath. I let it out again.
I went to the hallway and put my hand on the phone. A fantasy entered my mind. This is what would happen: I would call the police and they would come, and they would listen to my story calmly and would even examine minutely the broken part of the house, the burst hinges in the bathroom, the ripped etchings, the broken front window where the thing had imploded into the house, the pale blood stains. They would listen, and then at the end of my story one of them would call for an ambulance. They would tell me the ambulance was for my son. I would weep and thank them. As the ambulance arrived and then men got out of it with a straightjacket to put me in, I would shout, “Wait!” and then beg them to go into the cellar where my son lay tied up as living proof. One cop would look at the other, and then one of them would nod and give me the benefit of the doubt and go look. What the heck, they would think, it was only fair to make sure. But at that moment my son would call out, “Dad?” and appear at the top of the cellar stairs, completely normal, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He would look puzzled when he saw the cops and the funny-farm attendants, and then he would look at me and say innocently, “Dad, what’s going on?”
And then—
I picked up the phone and it was dead.
I checked the wires, and they were connected. I heard a lifeless hiss that stayed no matter what buttons I pushed. I tried the operator; nothing happened. I listened very hard for voices on the line, but I heard nothing but that faint, dull sound.
“Hello?” I said into it. I must have sounded like a desperate man. I must have sounded like a man who wanted his conjured nightmare to come true, who wanted the men in the padded Ford to come and take him to a place where they could shock him into the real world again.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
But this was the real world.
The new real world.
I hung up the phone.
I went to the living room and looked out through the broken front window. The car in the short driveway looked as if it had been demolished; the hood was up, the windows broken, wires and hoses scattered. Beyond the driveway, at the end of the fallow field, the crater still stood. It was empty and strangely dull, an empty hole in gray, empty dirt.
Someone was watching me.
I turned, my carpet knife ready, and saw the square eye of the television staring at me. The cabinet had been cracked, but the set was on, the sound down, formless lines of an unreceived channel filling the screen. The cable box lay next to it, intact.
Please, I whispered.
I ran to the set, nearly tripping over a broken lamp. My hand was trembling as it picked up the cable box and pushed the number for one of the national affiliates, turning up the sound.
There was a click as the button was depressed, and then nothing. The gray mass of formless lines continued.
I cursed, but then I examined the cable box and discovered that one of the wires into the box had been loosened. I fumbled it back into place, praying as I did so.
I stared at the screen, but the picture had not changed.
I pushed a random number, then another. The first produced static, the second a scrambled picture. It was a station we didn’t pay for. I could not see the picture clearly, except to note that it was in black and white. But the sound was crystal clear. “Gee, Mr. Wilson,” a grating young voice was saying, and at that moment I would have paid my entire savings to get “Dennis the Menace” on that station twelve times daily.
Thank God I said to myself, Thank God, but a moment later my hopes were dashed when a button-pushing move across the spectrum of channels produced nothing else.
I went back to “Dennis the Menace” and left the television. I tried the stereo. If there were any signs of normalcy, perhaps I would find them on the radio. The cover had been broken from the turntable, but the receiver worked when I snapped it on. I was met by static. Starting on the extreme left of the dial, I moved slowly through the bandwidth. Loud static, soft static, loud static. Then, I was startled by a station playing “Beautiful Music,” a 1001 Strings version of a Beatles record. I noted the number and moved on. Nothing more until I came to a second station playing music similar to the first. I went on through more static. Then a soft rock station, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt. Nothing else.
I went back to the three stations, one after another. They played music. Nothing but music. No time check, no news. I looked at the television screen. Dennis had been replaced by a series of commercials, and then “Gilligan’s Island” came on to the scrambled screen. More commercials. Back to the radio. A few commercials on the soft rock station, followed by more music.
No live voices.
No one alive.
It was obvious the stations I was receiving were on automatic tape or satellite operation. I was ready to accept that there would be some disturbance in the normal course of things since the meteors had landed. But to think that there was no one left broadcasting within a hundred and fifty miles of me a mere day after the beginning of this assault was truly frightening.
I dialed slowly through the radio spectrum, coming across the two automatic stations only and, somewhere toward the right of the dial, what I thought was the very end of a word. I stayed at that spot. When nothing further emerged, I dialed slowly to the right and left of it but heard nothing further. Finally, I turned the stereo off.
Whatever despair I felt was overruled by my stomach, which drove me toward the kitchen.
There were the remains of a meatloaf in the refrigerator, along with a quart of milk. I devoured nearly all of the meatloaf greedily and drank half the milk carton. Then I took out a jar of pickles and a cellophane bag of apples. I ate three apples and one of the pickles, chewing on the last apple as I inventoried the rest of my supplies.
On the dry-foods shelf over the counter were two boxes of cereal and a bag of dried fruit. There were cans of fruit and beans. I remembered with regret that I was to do most of our shopping for the week today, including the grocery shopping for Christmas. There was already a turkey in the freezer that we would have eaten on that day.
I filled a glass with water and sat at the kitchen table. Outside, the shadows had lengthened. The sun was sinking, throwing the grim orange cast it always affected in December. It looked cold.
I had food for three or four days. I had water. The generator in the barn would run for a few days with the fuel I had on hand.
But…what about the rest of the world?
I knew nothing of the rest of the world. But even if I had, I knew that my first priority was my son. I could only hope that the process that had turned him into what he had become would somehow reverse. I would do whatever had to be done.
I took the last of the milk, along with the dried fruit, and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his side away from me, panting. I slid the bowl with the milk toward him with my foot.
“Something to eat,” I said.
He ignored me; when he rolled over it was only to seize the bowl in his mouth and throw it to one side. He growled with anger. He did the same when I put a few pieces of dried fruit down. He continued his struggle to free himself, turning his hateful eyes on
me.
“I’ll do what I can, Richie,” I said quietly and went back upstairs.
I stayed up there for the next four hours as it got dark. I kept one lamp on and managed to plug up the hole in the front window with the remains of the Christmas tree and a couple of broken sticks of furniture. There was nothing on the radio, and the television, predictably, showed one rerun after another with nothing but commercials and announcers’ canned comments between.
Finally, a sense of worthlessness overwhelmed me. For a wild moment I thought of going for help. It was obvious I could do nothing for Richie myself. If he didn’t eat, our stalemate would end in a deadly fashion for him anyway.
I had my coat on and was halfway out the door when the howling began. I thought for a horrid moment that one of the creatures had climbed through the hole in the window while I had been in the cellar and was standing behind me. But it was Richie, baying with such intensity that it seemed as though he stood behind me.
I left the stereo on and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his back, his body arched so that his deformed head was back at a grotesque angle toward one of the cellar windows through which the rising fat Moon shone.
It looked like the white eye of Satan, glaring above the hills. And, like one of Satan’s worshippers, my son paid loud homage to it.
In the near and far distance, I heard other voices, a rising chorus of chilling howls, and I knew that another night was coming, and that I was going nowhere.
In the sky, new meteors began to fall.
I retrieved my hammer, and as best I could, I re-coffined myself against the new night.
CHAPTER 6
The Other
Daylight.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. For all I knew, I might have had one beer too many the night before and fallen asleep on the couch in the cellar. Or, perhaps I had fought with Emily and had been banished for my crimes.
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