I stand, a bit wobbly, hoping to God that the little piece of .22 caliber inside my head doesn’t decide to shift due to getting walloped by his Louisville Slugger of a walking stick.
“That dog looked a lot like the one that ran away from me a year ago,” I say. It’s a lie, but then, as much as I don’t want to admit it, I think it’s quite possible some kind of animal instinct was causing me to be just a little more attracted to a canine than I am normally comfortable with. That is, when you take into account the fact that I usually consider myself a normal, well-adjusted, human being. Never mind the fact that I’m a head-case. I don’t do dogs. But something’s going on inside me. Some kind of infection or virus, and standing there on the cold bank of the Hudson River, I think it best I head back to my place. Before I decide to take a bite out of this strange man dressed in very old clothes.
“I’m going home,” I say.
He smiles, holds out his free hand.
“Spare change?” he begs. “I have none of the more recent currency.”
I shovel through my pocket, find a ten dollar bill. I give it to him.
“All I got,” I say. Then, “I don’t usually pay people who cold cock me with a tree branch.”
“Think of the defenseless dog.” He smiles, his round face beaming under a mat of thick black hair and an equally thick pair of Elvis pork chop sideburns.
“God’s creatures,” I say. “Great, small, and lethal.”
Strange man turns and walks the opposite way.
I head home, hoping that I don’t run into that cute dog along the way.
***
Inside the loft, I shut the door behind me, lock the deadbolt, close the drapes, take the phone off the hook and slide into bed. It doesn’t take me long to pass out and enter into another reality altogether.
I’m back in the cemetery. Standing over a freshly excavated plot. There’s a casket that’s been laid inside it. The lid is opening on the casket. A figure appears. But it doesn’t look human. It looks more like a dog or a wolf. It jumps out of the rectangular hole and stands its ground bearing its fangs which drip of thick, runny mucous. Its eyes are beaming into me. Not eyes at all, but bright white lights that beam into me.
I run. It follows, snapping its powerful jaws at my feet. I keep on running. But not fast enough, so that I feel the piercing sting of a powerful set of fangs entering into my left ankle…
The dream shifts.
I’m standing on the riverbank. That same dog or wolf is also standing on the riverbank, maybe one hundred feet up ahead of me. I know I should be turning and running away from the animal, but instead I begin running towards it. I’m running faster and faster than I’ve even thought myself capable. That’s when I begin to realize, I’m not running on two feet. But four. Four paws to be exact. Four paws from which a series of long, sharp claws extend. That bite it’s given me has somehow changed me. Infected me.
I can smell the animal up ahead of me. Smell its sex. Smell the raw meat and blood that’s still lodged between its own fangs from its last fresh kill. I hear its heart pounding in its chest.
Then a man appears.
He’s of medium height, thick black hair, and wearing old fashioned clothing. He’s holding a walking stick in his right hand. The beast turns and spots the man. The beast growls and howls at the man before lunging at him, ripping his chest wide open with his claws and jaws.
The man screams.
I want to save him. But I also want to join in on the kill at the same time.
I don’t know what to do, so I make a turn for the river and jump in. I doggy paddle all the way out to the river’s center where I begin to sink. Down and down in the gray blue water. When I release a breath, the cool water fills my lungs…
I awake with a start, my entire body covered in a sheen of sweat. It’s dark out, which means I’ve slept the entire day. More than the entire day. The cell phone is ringing, but it’s taken me a while for the rings to register.
I jump out of bed, go to the kitchen area of the loft where the cell is set on the island. Catching a glimpse of the digital read-out, I can see that it’s Detective Miller. I pick the phone up, thumb Send.
“Moonlight,” I bark.
“You still with us?” Miller says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, catching the reflection of the green and red lights on a tanker that’s slowly moving up river towards the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
“I’ve called three times in the last hour. No answer. I was about to send a squad car to your joint.”
“What’s so important you gotta wake me before work?”
“I’m already at your present work-place.”
“The cemetery?”
“We got ourselves a situation with your new client.”
“Sam Baker? What happened?”
“He’s had his heart ripped out from his chest cavity. That’s what’s happened.”
I feel my legs go wobbly.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Make sure you eat very a light breakfast,” he says. “It ain’t pretty ’round here.”
I hang up, feeling the thick hairs on the back of my neck rising to attention.
***
By the time I arrive at the cemetery, the EMTs are back. Miller is standing over an open grave while a crew of uniformed cops are traipsing all around the property. Two blue and whites are also present, their flashers competing with the full moon to illuminate the green grass and gray headstones.
There’s not one body lying on the ground but two. The both of them covered in rubber sheets.
I give Miller a wave and proceed to the first, far smaller body. Uncovering the sheet, I’m shocked to see that the body doesn’t belong to a human being at all. But a dog. A German Shepherd. Its throat has been violently lacerated, probably from a bite. It’s staring out at me with an open mouth filled with white fangs and black, now dead eyes. I cover the animal back up and proceed to the second, larger body.
I recognize the face right away. What’s left of it, that is. What hasn’t been chewed down to the bone. Sam Baker, the caretaker. My employer.
Replacing the sheet, I stand. My entire body is quivering and I’m not entirely sure why. Being the son of a mortician, I’ve been looking at dead bodies my entire life. Some of them more mutilated than Sam’s. To me, death and the violent means by which it is sometimes administered should have the same effect as shopping for paper products in the grocery store. Just another everyday occurrence. But not this time. Not now. Not inside this cemetery.
“Theories, Moonlight?” comes the voice of Detective Miller.
I don’t answer him. At least not right away. Instead I’m feeling something pasty on my hands. I look down at them and view them in the light. They’re covered in blood. In fact, my shirt is also stained with blood. Lots of it.
“Cat got the tongue, Moonlight?” Miller says, slowly slipping his service pistol from his shoulder holster. Then, cocking his head over his shoulder at the uniforms. “Boys!”
One of them comes around behind me, grabs both my arms, barks at me to get down on my knees. He cuffs me. Cuffs me so hard the metal breaks the skin on my wrists.
“I’ve been home in bed!” I shout. “I slept for fifteen hours straight.”
I feel a boot heel smashed against my back and I go down onto my face, kiss the dirt. The sting from the cuffs cutting into my wrists shooting up and down my arms.
“We found some hairs on Sam’s body, Moonlight. Match the same one I found on you early this morning in my office.” Crossing his arms over his chest. “And Moonlight, you take a bath in blood today?”
“I can explain that,” I say. But my mouth is pressed so hard against the ground it comes out sounding, “I ’splain sat.”
“Help him up,” says Miller. “Hear what he’s got to say.”
The cop does it. Not without sending more pain shooting up my arms.
“Let’s have it, Moonlight.”
; “I had a steak before I went to sleep this morning. Some of it got all over me.”
The cop behind me laughs.
“You believe that shit?” he says.
Miller smiles.
“I like you, Moonlight. You know I do. But business is business and we’ve got to take you in and process you and swab the crap out of you.” Pulling a small laminated card out of his pocket. I was a cop once. A good cop. Without having to ask, I know the card contains the Miranda Rights. He reads, “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right—”
He doesn’t get the through the second “right” before the beast sprints across the lawn, lunging over the open grave and back out into the darkness. Not just a beast. More like a wolf. A wolf on steroids. A dinosaur-like beast. So big, its fangs so thick, white and long, its eyes black and glowing. Miller, the cops, myself…We stand beside the open grave, stunned.
The cop behind me draws his pistol. The other cops follow.
“Hold your fire,” Miller orders, “until we know what the fuck is going on.”
We hear a howl. It’s so loud and piercing it rattles my bones. The cops search for something to aim at.
Then in the darkness, a pair of glowing eyes staring at us.
One of the cops aims for the eyes and shoots a single round. But the bullet has no effect. The eyes start moving towards us. The growling beast charges.
“Shoot!” Miller screams, raising his weapon. “Somebody! Everybody! Shoot to kill!”
***
Like a bull goring a matador, the beast attacks the cop behind me. I fall to the ground while it snaps its jaws on the cop’s neck, severing half of it in a single bite. Miller and the other cops drop to their knees, begin discharging their weapons into the wolf-like animal. But this beast isn’t going down anytime soon.
I crawl away from the carnage that is happening only a few inches away, feeling the arterial blood that belongs to the dying cop spraying my legs.
The attack takes only a few seconds before the cop goes from screaming to gurgling to quiet. A quiet that is filled with death. The gunfire is rapid and never ending. Cops changing out their empty clips for new ones. The shots rattle my eardrums. But the sound is not loud enough to drown out the noise of something else. Something I never would believe if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes from down on my chest on the wet, now blood-soaked cemetery floor.
A second beast that also emerges from the out of the cemetery’s darkest depths.
***
The second beast does something extraordinary.
It doesn’t come after me. Or one of the APD still shooting at the first beast. Instead, the second beast goes after the first beast. Lunges at it, right for the neck, planting its own long, half-moon shaped fangs into the fur-covered flesh. I roll myself onto my back and along with the cops, watch the action unfold not in fear, but in pure astonishment.
The shooting has stopped now while the second beast bites and claws and tears into the first.
It doesn’t take long before the howling first beast is silenced and its blood spreading over the chewed up cemetery lawn like spilled syrup. The second beast backs away from its mutilated pray, shoots us a glance with its own black eyes, its jaws wide open, dripping blood and saliva. I’m no expert at reading into animals, their eyes, their movements, their sounds, their expressions. I’m just a head-case former cop who barely survives as a second rate private detective. But I can tell you this: Those eyes speak to me. To us. The eyes say, “It’s over now.”
Turning away from us, the second beast jumps over the old gray headstone, and runs off into the moonlit night.
***
For a few seconds we hold our ground. Stunned. Until Miller gets his shit together and screams, “Officer down! We need a medic!”
The cops scramble and go about their work like what just transpired before our eyes is your average local liquor store robbery gone bad. Sitting up, my hands still cuffed behind my back, I stare at the cop and the dead beast and I know it’s too late for both of them.
But as I sit and stare from only a few feet away, I see something happen that is nothing short of miraculous. Or maybe, my eyes are playing tricks on me in the moon-glow and the thick misty darkness that surrounds it. I’m not even sure the cops are paying attention. To them, the fourth dead body that’s lying near the open grave belongs to a beast. Some kind of overgrown wolf-like dog. But from where I’m sitting, I can see that something is happening to the beast. It’s changing in all its death. I’m not talking about that final breath that seems to exit the lungs along with the soul. I’m talking about a physical change. First the fur begins to recede. Slowly. But then rapidly. The legs are the next to change. The paws and claws become hands and feet, the limbs become arms. The torso is next. It becomes the torso not of an animal, but of a man. The last thing is the face and head. The protruding jaw and fangs shrink to become a face.
But there’s something else about that face. I know it. I remember it. The round white face and thick black hair. The man dressed in old clothing who approached me on the riverbank this morning. The man from my dreams. The man and the dog. Now they both lie dead in front of a dug-up grave.
I close my eyes and open them again. As if I’m dreaming this whole thing up. Me, the head-case of Albany. Maybe I’ve finally hit my head one too many times. Maybe that little piece of bullet has finally shifted and I’ve become delusional. Maybe there never was a beast there in the first place. But a man who I…we…mistook for a beast.
“Miller,” I say, from down on the ground. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
I hear the sound of him stepping up to me. Behind me.
“I’ve seen some strange shit in my time, Moonlight,” he says. “But this beats the crap out of everything.”
He walks the few steps to the man’s body. He pulls something from his blazer pocket. A pair of APD-issued tweezers and a pair of baby blue latex gloves. He slips on the gloves and then bends down, the tweezers positioned between his forefinger and thumb. He pulls a strand of that same long, beast-like hair from off the dead man. Righting himself back up, he pulls a plastic baggy from out of his left blazer pocket, deposits the evidence into it, seals it, returns it to his pocket.
“You gonna unlock me, Miller?” I say. “My wrists hurt.”
“You know Moonlight, you really are a pain in my ass sometimes,” he says, coming back over to me, and unlocking the cuffs.
I stand, rubbing the scratches on my wrists. I fix my gaze on the four bodies. Three human and one dead dog. I know that out there somewhere is that second beast. The one that just might have saved our lives. I’m sure Miller knows it’s out there too, but he’s choosing not to say anything about it. Try writing the word “werewolf” in your report to the D.A. and you might just as well toss in your official letter of resignation, head straight to the nearest mental hospital.
***
I’m just about to head back to dad’s hearse and from there, the nearest gin mill when a car pulls up. A sedan with rental plates. Out steps a man wearing a fedora, a black leather coat and black gloves. His trousers and shoes are also black. He approaches the scene slowly but confidently, like he somehow belongs here.
Miller spots him after one of the blue uniforms points him out.
“Excuse me,” he barks. “This is a closed crime scene.”
“Must be a reporter,” I say. “But who put the word out on the scanners already?”
The man stops, reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out something that looks like a wallet. When he opens it, it proves to be his laminated identification.
“Roman Dalton,” he says, in an accent that takes me by surprise. I’m sure it does the same for Miller. “I’m a private detective from The City. I’m come to examine the scene if that’s alright by you.”
“It’s not all right by me,” Miller grouses. “Who the hell sent you? And all the way from England?”
The man works up a slight smile, returns the I.D. to
his pocket, takes a step forward.
“It’s not who sent me, Detective,” he says. “It’s why I’ve been sent for.” Then looking at me. “Hello Mr. Moonlight. I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”
I feel a twinge in my belly.
“How do you know my name?”
Slowly, contemplatively, he steps over to the bodies, stares down at them. Shakes his head.
“It’s a damn shame about that officer,” he says. “The caretaker I fully expected. His dog also.”
“How’s that?” says Miller.
“It was the caretaker who freed Van Rensselaer in the first place. And it’s his dog…this German Shepherd…who took an unusual liking to the undead. You might call it a fatal attraction.”
I picture seeing the man walking along the riverbank. I recall the dog. The dog I was somehow oddly, if not sickly attracted too. As if I made the impossible temporary transition from man to canine myself. They must have followed me home early this morning.
“Wait a minute. Who the hell is Van Rensselaer?” Miller asks. “And…did you say ‘Undead?’”
“Take a look at the inscription on that headstone.”
Miller and I both head over to it, careful not to step on the bodies, or fall into the hole.
***
Stephen Van Rensselaer III
Born November 1, 1764 – Died January 26, 1839
He shall be born again.
***
Once more I recall the man I saw riverside today. The man who was dressed in very old clothes. The man with the Elvis pork chops and the walking stick. It couldn’t possibly be the same man who was lying on the ground now. He’d be almost two hundred fifty years old. And anyway, he’s already dead. He shall be born again.
Full Moonlight: A Roman Dalton Yarn Page 2
