Mindy screamed as Martin grabbed a chair. He brought it up over his head, slamming it down on top of the wolf’s head. The creature howled in annoyance before swatting Martin across the room, his body colliding with the sheetrock wall.
Dazed, but very much aware, Martin watched as the beast devoured his daughter, her cries quickly silenced. Martin was screaming, his mind unable to comprehend what it was seeing.
The wolf-thing, its face caked in red gore, revealing pieces of his wife and child, their clothing too, howled.
The beast approached Martin as he cringed against the wall, all but giving up, wanting to die.
The creature raised its paw to strike a killing blow when it froze, then slunk to the floor as if it lost its bones. Rolling over dead, it shrunk, once again becoming a cute little plush toy.
* * *
Brad watched television that night; the story he’d been waiting for presenting itself. The reporter spoke of a grisly scene. A young girl and her mother were savagely attacked and killed, allegedly murdered by Martin Biggs. Husband and father to the deceased. Brad watched as Martin was dragged away in handcuffs, covered in blood. He kept repeating that his daughter’s stuffed animal, a wolf, did it. It was dangerous and needed to be destroyed.
Brad picked up the telephone and dialed the old woman’s number. When she answered, he simply said, “Thank you. Now my family and I can rest in peace.” He placed the .45 caliber handgun to his head and pulled the trigger.
JESUS WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN
SIMON McCAFFERY
For Isaias and Claire
Before my brother and I boarded the old yellow Bluebird school bus for the four-hour ride through the rolling limestone Ozark foothills to Raven’s Den Baptist Summer Camp, my father handed me a ten-dollar bill—a good chunk of money in 1975—and offered this terse advice.
“Peter, Nate, if anyone asks you if you’ve been saved, say ‘yes.’ “
“Yessir,” we muttered.
He absently patted Nate on the head and we hauled the battered old suitcase we shared and ourselves onto the bus. Dad stood there a moment, then walked back to the car. Our mother was ill and he’d aged a decade in two years. His clothes hung on his tall frame and he moved through most days like a sleepwalker. We found seats near the front and watched Dad drive slowly away toward our small farmhouse off rural Star Route highway, the caramel-colored station wagon kicking up dry July dust when he left the main paved road.
Rather than cram the ten-spot deep into a front pocket of my blue jeans, I folded the bill into a small square. It went into my right sneaker below my socked foot. We’d moved around like nomads, settling briefly in cities and small towns alike before moving on, and I’d been shaken down (or held upside down like a chicken bound for the soup pot) by more than one bully hoping for lunch or allowance money.
Eventually the bus pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and we rumbled out of town past the courthouse, the sole gray-stone bank, the Ben Franklin Five and Dime and the single traffic light. Nate settled down with a well-read copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the cover featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolfman in “House of Frankenstein” hanging on by a staple. I peered over the duct tape-bandaged vinyl seat back and recognized several kids from the small consolidated school and the Presbyterian Church my family attended in a nearby town. No serious troublemakers. They were clustered toward the back, pretty amped, horsing around and swapping their best dirty jokes, speculating about which girls would be attending camp and which would wave a fellow right past second base. I nodded at Danny Bray and his brother, Cal, then sat back and stuck my nose in a Ray Bradbury paperback (S is For Space). I slipped gratefully into the story of a scientist fretting over his friend who lies encased in a giant scaly green-gray carapace until he hatches, wingless, and soars up into the stars.
Within an hour, a sweltering lethargy fell over everyone inside of the bus. Many of the windows were open, but the air was stifling. Most of the boys were napping, sweaty and damp-haired, too tired to swap baseball cards or tell more tall tales of teenage conquest, lulled by the sound of the bus’ tired old engine grinding through the twisting hills.
We arrived at the camp gates close to suppertime, the sun still riding well above the jagged tree-line.
* * *
“My name is Brother Sanders. Welcome to Raven’s Den. Grab you gear and follow me. Orientation is at the main tabernacle in ten minutes sharp, then supper. Let’s see some hustle now.”
Brother Sanders was the Horseshoe Bend basketball coach who also taught science. They were the reigning state conference champs; our little town could barely field a complete team. Sundays he served as a deacon at the Baptist church. He was one of the camp counselors, and liked to brag that he had saved more sin-shriveled souls than most full-time pastors. He stood over six feet tall with russet-colored hair, hazel-steel eyes and a square jaw. A silver plated whistle hung around his thick, sun-reddened neck. He kept a close eye on the attending varsity and junior-varsity players, but the rest of us might as well have been invisible. I silently prayed we wouldn’t be bunking for two weeks in his cabin. Summer camp was supposed to be fun, not a prep school for the Marine Corps.
We walked up a stony hill, past a large covered concrete slab filled with rows of long wooden tables with bench seats and an attached mess shack. A path to the east ascended to higher ground, and presumably, the tabernacle. We crested the hill and descended, passing numbered cabins nestled between pines and tall mature oak trees to either side of the path. Below us the late afternoon sun sparkled on the lake. I saw an archery range and aluminum canoes stacked on racks near a wooden dock.
We stopped at a cabin on the boy’s side of camp—lucky number 7. Coach Sanders consulted his clipboard.
“Wilson, Hanson, Brenner and Brenner (my brother and I). And the Brays.”
My heart lifted at the lucky break. Making friends in a small rural community isn’t easy if you weren’t born and bred. The Brays were six-generation cattle and hog farmers, but Danny and his younger brother, Cal, had gone out of their way to befriend us. I sat next to Cal in our sixth-grade schoolroom, and Cal and Nate were fourth-grade classmates. Danny was in awe of my complete set of Aurora glow-in-the-dark monster kits—particularly the Wolfman and the Forgotten Prisoner of Castle Mare—and I in his woodworking skills. He’d shown me how to carve a rubber-band powered paddleboat and string a sapling bow strong enough that mom took it away the first time she saw me fire a homemade arrow an inch into the barn wall.
“Mr. Bray, can I count on you to help Mr. Wiles and keep everyone in line?” said Coach Sanders. Basketball was a regional obsession and Danny was a budding junior squad star.
“Yes sir.”
Mr. Wiles emerged from the cabin, blinking in the sunlight behind his thick eyeglasses, a short, heavyset man in faded green pants that were cut down to shorts, camp T-shirt and white knee socks. He had a round baby face, but a friendly smile. Another break; he didn’t look like a ball-buster like Coach Sanders.
“Hello, boys,” he said softly. “Go on in and stow your gear. No time to unpack now. Bunks aren’t assigned but I guess you can sort that out among yourselves.”
Coach Sanders gave Wiles a slightly disapproving nod and strode away.
Taking Wiles’ hint, we hurried into the log cabin. It was jewel-box tiny but I loved the smooth honey-colored wood walls bearing the carved initials and graffiti of former campers (JAKE T. & CINDY D. and BILLY WAHLS ‘68), the high raftered ceiling and the small four-pane windows looking off into the deep ravines and woods. Danny and I took the bed closest to the door, flipping to see who got the top bunk. Danny won and that was okay by me. The floor was concrete slab like the roofed picnic area. Roll off of your bunk while dreaming of CINDY D. or go sleepwalking and you’d crack your skull like an eggshell. Cal and Nate bunked together, and the remaining boys, Ricky Wilson and Bobby Hanson, flipped best out of three. Bobby won the high bunk and slung his dead older brother’s green
Army duffel bag onto the top mattress. The story went that Bobby’s brother, Hank, had joined the Army straight out of high school, but had died in a Jeep accident while stationed in Germany. He’d been a star shooting guard and had received a hero’s burial.
“Boys, we’d better get up to the tabernacle,” Wiles said, looking like the last thing he wanted to do was jog up the hill in the humid soupy air. “We don’t want to be late for opening prayers.”
We hustled up the path double-time. Later we would trudge up that hill, dreading the nightly prayers and brimstone orations, wishing we could slip away into the fragrant pines. At that moment, we had forgotten the long boring bus ride. I was thinking about that cool shimmering expanse of lake and those canoes.
I thought it might be a pretty fun couple of weeks after all.
* * *
That night I lay in my bunk, unable to slip completely into sleep despite the long, strange day, when I heard a quiet creak in the darkened cabin. It sounded like something heavy shifting on the metal cot, on the far wall by the cabin door. The cot Mr. Wiles slept on. At lights-out Wiles had drawn shut the dusty, crimson shades across the two small windows. Now they admitted only a faint sliver of moonlight. I slowly withdrew my left wrist from the blanket and peeped at my Timex. The luminous hands read a quarter past one.
A large shadow rose and slid across the far wall.
I froze, thinking for one paranoid moment that we hadn’t been lucky at all. What if we were bunking with a crazed molester?
The shadow carefully opened the cabin door and slipped outside.
I lay there playing ‘possum. Several slow minutes ticked by.
I sat up and when my eyes had adjusted to the gloom I peered toward Wiles’ cot. Kids have visual acuity their parents have long forgotten they ever possessed. The sagging old aluminum cot was empty. Empty except for Wiles’ coke-bottle glasses, which lay folded on his pillow.
Probably Wiles had a late-night call of nature. Our grandfather had visited us once when we lived in Philadelphia and he got up all night long to pee, the toilet tank hissing and refilling, hissing and refilling. Bad prostate, our father had said, though neither of us understood what that meant. Raven’s Den cabins weren’t equipped with toilets. You could visit the segregated restrooms behind the dining area or find a tree.
When our chaperone didn’t return I thought about waking Danny, but he’d dropped right off to sleep after Wiles flicked off the lights, calling out to the girls’ side of the camp — “Good niiiight, girls!” —out the west window. We’d all snickered at that, coming from the rotund, comical camp counselor.
I waited for Wiles to return since I couldn’t sleep, but the next thing I knew Danny was shaking my shoulder.
“Get a move on, Brenner! Revile in ten minutes!”
He was grinning like a prankster speaking to his victim. I remembered that he’d attended the camp last summer. Wiles was dressed and instructing the younger boys on how to make up their bunk beds. I wondered if Sanders would be by to inspect like a Drill Instructor.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I tried to recall something I’d dreamt the night before after falling asleep waiting for Wiles. Something about red gold-ringed eyes and a shape floating down from the roof of one of the moonlit cabins, but it blew apart in the clean white sunlight streaming into the cabin.
That day set the routine for those that followed. We assembled in the grassy quadrangle near the tetherball and softball diamond and a magnified voice echoed across the camp from a nearby bluff. Startled, we looked up to see the camp minister, Pastor Jerrod, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hoisting a battery-powered bullhorn, standing on the precipice of ancient seabed layers of rock, looking down at us.
“RISE AND SHINE, CAMPERS!” he bellowed.
Pastor Jerrod led us in a daily prayer as we stood with heads bowed, then ten minutes of calisthenics. The basketball players performed the jumping jacks and push-ups easily by rote while the rest of us sweated. Ricky Wilson collapsed after three ass-humped-in-the-air push-ups but Coach Sanders didn’t notice. We dusted ourselves off and marched to the long green picnic tables to be served breakfast after another prayer (un-frosted cornflakes and runny Navy scrambled eggs, which Nate refused to touch).
We hiked, collected leaves to be flattened and identified, played murderous whipsaw tetherball and tossed clanking steel horseshoes, measuring and arguing minute distances for every point. We asked to play Smear the Queer and were turned down. We struggled into musty lifejackets and canoed across the deep green lake, trying to run down surfacing turtles. Some of us stripped down to our shorts and swam from the dock. When chubby Ricky climbed back onto the dock he gave us all a half-moon, and that became his camp nickname. Chief Half-Moon. He wore it with pride.
For lunch we ate hot dogs drowned in ketchup and relish, and told more tall tales. We tried to make eye contact with the cutest girls eating on the other side of the pavilion, and enlisted a couple of the younger kids to courier notes.
By evening, happy but footsore, all I wanted to do was stretch out on my cabin bunk and read comic books until lights-out. Instead we marched back up that stony hill to the tabernacle.
Two hours later we shuffled back in the dark and collapsed in our bunks. I guess I hadn’t known what to expect, but I now understood the simple wisdom of our father’s advice.
Things started mildly with opening prayers and a few hymns—”When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Jesus In The Morning.” We sang that last one every day, sometimes twice. It rapidly became apparent that our real mission at camp was to fervently love and serve Him in the Morning, in the Noontime, and When the Sun Goes Down. And every minute in-between.
Several of the camp counselors joined Pastor Jerrod at the lectern, telling tales of doomed heathen boys and girls gone astray and the excruciating eternal hellfire that surely awaited them. A crude drawing of the crucified Nazarene was drawn on a large blackboard, and one of the younger counselors used chalk to illustrate how every time you sinned, no matter how minor the transgression or white lie, long pins where pushed into Jesus’ pale flesh. The chalk squeaked until His thin body looked like a porcupine. By this time many of the younger boys and girls were sniffling. The warm air crackling with emotion and fear, we bowed our heads and Pastor Jerrod called all those who wished to be saved, or saved again for good measure, to come forth. Nate, thinking we were all meant to come forth, started to move toward the center aisle before I clutched his arm and gently pulled him back with a frown and slight shake of my head.
Plenty of the other kids left their pews and the counselors swarmed over them like furniture salesmen.
Every day we hiked and swam and worked on crafts, knowing what waited for us as the sun dropped below the hills.
On the fifth night, Wiles’ cot squeaked again well after lights-out, and this time I waited a minute and followed him into the moonlight. If he saw me or someone else asked what I was doing out after curfew I would say I had to use the bathroom and had gotten turned around in the dark.
It was a cloudless night and his broad cotton T-shirt was easy to spot under the nearly full moon. I watched him walk briskly to the far side of the camp toward the girls’ cabins. He’d left his glasses behind and I wondered how he could see where he was going. Well, well! We all liked Mr. Wiles, though everyone called him Mr. Toad from “The Wind in The Willows” —but it was hard to imagine him romancing one of the women chaperones.
Wiles walked right past their cabins and struck off into the woods.
I almost turned back, told myself how embarrassing it would be if I startled him taking a leak behind a tree. The bathrooms were on the other side of the camp and there were plenty of trees near our cabins. Curiosity won out.
I moved quickly across the open space and slipped into the trees, trying to avoid making any sound and praying I wouldn’t step barefoot on a nail-spiked old plank. I had done just that my first day on our farm, driving a rusty nail int
o my left heel to the bone. When my father used a razor blade to cut an X into the wound I’d screeched loud enough to be heard in St. Louis.
I glimpsed Wiles’ shimmering T-shirt ahead, moving through the black columns of tree trunks. He was heading deeper into the woods. I slowed, imagining what might happen if I got lost in these unfamiliar woods at night. The thought of having to shout for rescue and seeing the blazing fury in Coach Sanders’ eyes—and the disappointed expression on my father’s face after being expelled—was like a dash of cold lake water. Until he arrived I would probably be hung inverted from the tetherball pole or dropped off the preaching bluff.
At that point I lost sight of Wiles’ T-shirt moving like a Halloween ghost through the forest. I looked back the way I had come and could barely make out the roofline of the outmost girls’ cabin.
I was still hemming and hawing when a scream sliced through the night air from the deeper forest where Wiles had vanished. It rose to a shriek and then dropped to a guttural roar before echoing away. My blood actually froze in my veins and I damned near wet myself. That unearthly cry didn’t sound like a coyote or bobcat. A den of black bear in those hills was a possibility, but that sound—
I stood there, heart drumming inside my ribs, straining to listen. I didn’t hear the cry repeated, but I thought I heard something large grunting and moving fast through the woods. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like the crashing sounds were getting closer.
I turned and raced back to my cabin, not feeling the stones, rough twigs and pine needles under my tenderfoot soles.
* * *
In the morning we made our bunks and assembled outside for bullhorn revile and prayers. Wiles looked and acted normal. I’d peeked at his cot, expecting to see muddy footprints, coarse black hairs and pine needles like in a Stephen King novel, but the threadbare sheets were unmarked. No scratches or welts I could see on his pale arms and legs. He seemed hale and happy, and gave Nate and me a dollar for fetching him a Hostess bear claw from the snack bar before lunch. Wiles was an insatiable junk-food snacker, and because Nate and I always read a complete chapter from the Book of Acts around the campfire when asked, we became his favorites for errands. We were sitting pretty on money and made sure our poorer friends had a dime or quarter when their own funds began to run low.
Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) Page 8
