by Glenn Rolfe
Randy instinctively put his hand to the gun on his hip.
“Whoa. Hey, I’m leaving.”
He watched the guy back away with his hands up. A cold rush of adrenaline pumped through his arms and chest. The hand on his shoulder startled him.
“Oh sorry, Randy. What was that all about?” Rita said.
His heart hammered. “Nothing.”
“You okay? Your hand is shaking.”
He still had his hand on his gun. He raised it and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, I think I’m going to take a stroll down to Mel’s and grab something to eat.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
He didn’t answer. He just kept rubbing his mouth and chin. “I’ll be back.”
Wes exited Jenner’s Grocery with a can of Mountain Dew and a copy of the Coral County Sentinel. The stories were separate. There was one for the guy out on Christie Road and another for local teen Keith Turcott on Bixby Drive. There was nothing about the incident at the park. Not today anyway. He wondered if he’d be able to get something out of the Turcott kid’s parents. It was a shitty move, but he didn’t drive all the way up here for nothing. He called the hotel.
“Hey,” Joel said on the other end.
“Hey, did you get anything out of the coroner?”
“Nah, but he seemed real edgy. Hightailed it back inside after I mentioned the word werewolf.”
“You what?”
“I knew he wasn’t going to give me anything. It got a rise outta him.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just about what I got here too. Sheriff was out. Deputy Hines escorted me out of the building.”
“Shitty.”
“Yeah, but I’m calling because I need you to do me a favor.”
Wes pulled his car into the Turcott’s driveway. Joel had found the address on the internet for him.
The garage looked like something exploded inside. Most of the door was gone. Wes grabbed his digital camera from the front seat and snapped a few pictures. He glanced at the trailer next to it, checking the windows to see if anyone was watching him. Satisfied no one was, Wes checked the area in front of the garage for animal tracks. There had been no mention of the beast being involved, in the paper or on the newscast this morning, but he had a feeling.
“Can I help you?”
He spun around at the woman’s voice and tucked his slim camera into his back pocket. He waved to the woman in the doorway. “Hi. Mrs. Turcott?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, my name’s Wes Kaplan. I work for a paper out of New Hampshire. I know this isn’t the ideal time to speak with you, but would you have a couple minutes to spare?”
“I…I already told the sheriff everything…I…”
“I just have a couple of quick questions, ma’am, and then I promise I’ll be out of your way.”
She looked dazed. He could smell the booze on her breath. He jumped at his chance before she could turn away or say no.
“What happened to the garage door?”
Her gaze floated to the garage and then out toward the forest over the small field that led away from it.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you…”
“Do I…”
“Do you believe in the supernatural?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever did that was not from around here.”
“Did you see it?”
“I heard his screams…” She disappeared in the memory.
Wes waited for her to return.
“When I came to the door…I saw it bust through the garage and run out there…”
“What did it look like?”
“It killed my boy and then it ran out there.” She pointed toward the woods.
“You saw it though. What did it look like?”
“It killed my boy.” She was gone. Tears rolled down her red cheeks.
“Thank you, Mrs. Turcott. I’m sorry for your loss.”
He left her in the doorway. She stayed there as he got in his car, staring out into the woods beyond. The goose bumps on his arms told him he had his story.
Chapter Thirteen
By Thursday, life in Gilson Creek had returned to normal. The sound of birds chirping came just before the sun’s golden glow crested the horizon and signaled the dawn. The Donavans across the street followed shortly thereafter. Allan Donavan made his way across his creaky porch, in a worn-out housecoat, to see where the paperboy lazily had planted his copy of the morning Coral County Sentinel. The more genteel types—like his neighbor Marv Thompson—found copies of the New York Times on their stoops.
Joe nodded at both men. Mr. Donavan waved back. Marv the asshole did not.
Joe met the morning the same way he always did. He leaned against the support beams of his front porch that were in dire need of being repainted. He liked to breathe in the mornings, telling himself it gave him a sense of things to come. He wasn’t sure how or why he did this exactly—it was just one of his daily rituals.
He heard car after car roll down his street, blaring the sounds of Wild Ted’s Morning Meds as they passed by. Some people liked to get their mornings off and running with loud rock music, but Joe thought a cup of Folgers did the trick just fine.
Life hummed along as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, though if anyone had seen the bodies of Brian Rowel, Keith Turcott or Mike Ouellette, they would have known better.
The Coral County Sentinel ran obituaries on Michael “Old Mike” Ouellette and Keith Turcott. For Old Mike’s they went with the generic, but acceptable, mountain lion story. Despite the fact that there hadn’t been any mountain lion sightings in Maine since Gilson Creek’s last series in 1997, and in all of Maine since 1938, people went along with it. There was no mention of the severed arm, the gnawed-on chest cavity or the massive damage inflicted to the face of the deceased. Keith Turcott’s obit simply stated that he died from injuries suffered in his garage.
School was done for the summer. The teens of Gilson Creek flocked to Emerson Lake en masse. Joe knew Sonya and her friends would spend most of their days there too. He’d give them the days in which to do so. The beach closed at dusk, but Joe was already planning to supply the lake with a deputy to make certain the water and sand were vacated by dark. Summer was supposed to be full of promise and good times, but for Joe it looked like another season of silver bullets and dread. The next full moon was in twenty-six days.
For Nick Bruce, summer’s promise and the idea that anything was possible made him want to stay anywhere but inside.
Wes called him that morning to make sure he was okay and to let him know that he and Joel had managed to scrape together a terrific article for Friday’s edition of the Crypto Insider. His Full Moon Monster was going to be front-page news again. Wes said that if Nick was interested, he’d love to have him stay on the story.
Nick hadn’t returned Wes’s phone calls. He’d only started to feel better this morning. He cleaned the bite on his arm. The wound was no longer black (if it had ever been black), and it appeared to be healing quite well. The teeth hadn’t sunk in as deep as he’d originally thought. He felt there was no need to go to the hospital. Whatever infection there might have been had run its course.
Nick entered the kitchen. His mom was sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and thumbing through one of her entertainment-gossip magazines. She looked him over. “Good morning. Feelin’ better?”
“Yeah. This coffee fresh?”
“It was an hour ago.”
“Good enough.”
He poured a mug of her burnt Blueberry Cobbler and joined her at the table. He watched her gaze fall to the bandage on his arm.
“Did that happen in your car?”
“My car?”
“Yeah, AAA guy dropped it off Sunday morning. You get in an accident?”
&nb
sp; “Not exactly.” He remembered the blown tire. “I got a flat.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“Some animal bit me while I was changing the tire.”
“Animal?”
Her face went pale.
“What? I’m okay. It wasn’t even that deep.”
“It was probably that mountain lion that killed Old Mike and that man on Christie Road.”
“Mountain lion?”
“Yes. And that’s where the AAA guy says he picked your car up.” His mother scooted out of her seat and to his side. She hugged his head the way she used to when he was little. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
He shrugged out of her hold. “I’m fine, Mom.”
“We better get you to the doctor.” She made a move for her car keys on the kitchen counter.
“Jesus, Mom. I said I’m fine.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that. Now, come on. We’re taking you to see—”
“No. We’re not.” Nick shot up to his feet. The chair slid across the floor and slammed into the cupboards. The little tree of mugs rattled.
His mother took a step back.
“I’m okay. I just need some air.”
He left her standing in the kitchen, grasping her keys. Outside, he stopped at his car. He forgot to ask her where his keys were. He decided to walk it off. Whatever it was.
He’d never really raised his voice to his mother. That had been his father’s thing. He, Daniel Bruce, had been the hard one. The big-mouthed macho loser. Until he turned into a ghost and vanished from both of their lives. Good riddance. Nick would never be like his father.
He reached the end of his street. Part of him wanted to go home and apologize to his mom. Let her take him to the hospital for her peace of mind. The woods across the street called to another part of him. Something deeper, primal. He sniffed the air—something musty lay beneath the scent of pine and dirt.
He stepped off the pavement and onto the path. For being laid up for the better part of a week, he felt spry, loose. He broke into a jog, and then into a sprint. He felt free…and hungry.
Chapter Fourteen
Melanie Murdock’s Thursday morning commenced as always with a packed house and Wild Ted’s morning program playing over the speakers of her busy establishment. They were playing best of shows for the next couple weeks while his band went on the road.
This morning, Mel’s Café was humming along with its full roster of regulars, the majority of which were devouring an order of the “Best Stack in Town” and unconsciously nodding along with or tapping a foot to an Aerosmith classic. Melanie listened to Kenny Larson, Pat Caron and Bob Dube, a three-man work crew for Elias Construction, snorting, chuckling and making juvenile comments about what they’d like to do to her or her young waitresses if they got the chance. They didn’t think she could hear them.
Two tables over, Allan and Dot Donavan were enjoying their orders of eggs and bacon. Allan took his sunny-side up, with a black coffee. Dot had hers scrambled, with a hot cup of Earl Grey tea. Both were well into the seventies and Mel found them completely adorable. They just sat quietly, eating the warm food before them, feeling comfortable and more than happy just to be sitting together sharing another beautiful morning. Alex McKinney sat alone in a corner booth, half-awake and waiting for his brother Josh. They would blast through a quick meal of bacon and hash, as they always did, before heading down the street to open the auto shop for the day’s business.
Mel listened to the conversation between Kemp Peaslee, Timothy Harper and Kylie Potter, who were all perched on their regular stools, commenting to each other about the abnormal heat wave that was supposed to start today, but mostly they spoke of the horrible death of Old Mike. They shared stories of his nonsensical ramblings and about the many separate occasions when they had each picked him up, walking or stumbling along the side of the road, sometimes two towns over, not even sure where he was or what he was doing there. Mel even added her tale about the time she’d found him passed out in front of the café doors.
She knew, for some quaint communities, town drunks were seen as eyesores or blemishes on the face of their small-town charm. Mel was happy that her people went the opposite direction. Most of her customers spoke fondly of Old Mike—Sheriff Fischer had once referred to him as a town landmark. To Mel, he was just another of Gilson Creek’s many colorful characters. He may have been eccentric, but he had always been harmless. His sudden passing was a notable and sad footnote to this early summer season.
Sitting alone at the counter, farthest from the loud discussion group was an old, haggard-looking man who could have easily been mistaken for a homeless person. Scraggly, long gray hair hung down to the middle of his back, matching an unmanaged beard that covered a face with numerous deep, leathery wrinkles and scars. Dark, distracted eyes stared through the breakfast before him. He was dressed in a long dark-green trench coat and wore a flannel shirt, stained work pants and a pair of combat boots. The fact that today was supposed to be in the high eighties to low nineties only accentuated his out-of-touch factor. He was picking at the breakfast she had set before him an hour ago—a piece of toast and a cup of black coffee.
The tattered-looking soul being ignored and left alone was none other than former Gilson Creek Sheriff Stan Springs.
Mel had learned plenty about the man over the years from various sources. He had accrued an interesting history of sorts since vacating his official post with the Gilson Creek Sheriff’s Department. He had unexpectedly resigned from his position as sheriff near the end of the spring of 1997, dropping out of sight from the people he had sworn to protect. He had told the Sentinel that he knew the town would be in the more than capable hands of his number one deputy, Joe Fischer, and that was the sole comforting factor that had allowed him to make the move so abruptly. Also he had no doubts Joe was ready for the job.
Seemingly overnight, one of the town’s most recognized and beloved public officials became a recluse. He spoke to no one, outside of the sheriff, following his resignation. Sheriff Fischer told her that Springs traveled down to Augusta and checked himself into the Augusta mental health facility.
Ever since he returned, he’d been different. Mel wondered where it had all gone wrong for the guy.
Stan Springs stared into his black coffee and replayed his history. He thought about his own unraveling. He thought about it every day.
He remembered the day he went into the loony bin. He told Joe Fischer that for the better part of the previous year, he had not trusted his own instincts or his own sense of reality, and things had finally reached the point where he had to face the hard truth. The reality he admitted to Joe, and to himself, was that the loss of control and state of distrust evolving within him had been building with more intensity over the long, cold winter. He’d done his best to hide his struggles, though he was sure Joe had noticed, but he no longer felt fit to work, let alone to defend his town or its people.
He was on his own, even though Joe tried to be there for him, and he knew the amount of responsibilities that were involved in being the sheriff, even of a town as small as Gilson Creek. Plus, Fischer already had a little girl to raise on his own. The young man had enough on his plate to tend to, without dealing with an old, senile bastard like him. Going to the mental health facility made the most sense. Going of his own volition, he could leave when and if he felt well enough to do so. Like the rest of the patients, he was on lockdown after 8:00 p.m., but he’d traded his way around that one.
Prior to checking in, his mind had become his own prison, where he could barely even recognize himself or his own thoughts. He had been having terrible visions at the time. Things he could not rationalize. Some came while he slept, and others, the ones that really shook him up, came while he was wide-awake.
For instance, he could be staring out his back window, at the thick forest that stretched out inf
initely, like an ocean of dark pine trees. He had always thought it to be a beautiful, breathtaking view. Only, now, he would see something darker. The once brilliant mass of pines would hold an aura of malevolence.
It didn’t make sense. There was no reason for thinking such things, but he could not vanquish the dreary feeling. He would see the forest as an army of horrible dead things that were making their way, inch by inch, closer to his property, coming to drag him out to whatever evil waited beyond.
At least, being in a facility, he wouldn’t be alone. He’d be looked after by psychotherapists and nurses. He packed a suitcase of clothes and car magazines, told Joe, and only Joe, that he was leaving and drove himself to his new safe house.
His irrational fears abated for the first couple of weeks of his residency, allowing his thoughts to return to simpler things: classic cars, John Wayne movies and the Red Sox.
Then along came the dark spring and summer seasons, and with them, the dreams. He remembered night after night of tossing and turning, waking up stuck to his sheets, from being drenched in sweat. He couldn’t tell if it was his own distraught mind causing these bad dreams, or the stories being recounted to him by Joe about the brutal deaths springing up back home.
Fischer came to him for counsel on the killings, and he felt obligated to listen, even though he didn’t want to. The memories were too much, but he was a man of honor and loyalty, and he felt compelled to help in any way he could, especially since he considered himself responsible.
Joe tried to explain the extensive damage he and his deputies encountered in each apparent attack. It wasn’t just the mutilation of the bodies, but also the damage to the car in the case of the McKinneys.
It was Stan who, with some reluctance, asked the sheriff if he believed in monsters. Ghosts, goblins, ghouls, werewolves—the things he had been seeing in his own tortured mind. Joe tried to laugh off such a foolish notion, but his laughter died with one look at the former sheriff’s face. Stan was deathly serious, and as much as he knew Joe wanted not to admit it, he could see in the younger man’s face that he too knew it was something supernatural. A werewolf.
