by Gary Paulsen
Obeying instinct, Amos now made for the phone in the upstairs hall. He showed classic phone-answering form: arms and legs pumping, tongue out to the side, a little spit flying back. There was a good chance he would make it by that all-important second ring.
Or there would have been a good chance.
Except.
His sweat pants were still down around his ankles because he had been examining the scratch on his rear end.
He was moving forward at close to terminal velocity—or his top half was, but the bottom half couldn’t keep up.
He started down.
One scrabbling, clawing hand caught the doorknob and opened the door, and he went through, propelled forward by his tangled, driving legs.
He snagged the phone from the wall on the way past and looked up in horror to see that he was aimed at the open bathroom door—the bathroom was straight across from his room—and worse, at the toilet.
Headfirst.
He slammed the phone to his ear. “Hello …”
And was going to add: “… Melissa,” because he was certain it was she, but the speed with which he was pounding forward and down at the same time drove his head cleanly, perfectly into the toilet.
For a moment it seemed the toilet was going to win. Amos’s arms and legs flailed, and the phone flew into the tub, then bounced back as the cord jerked it out into the hallway. In a spray of water Amos fought his way free, scrabbled back into the hallway on all fours, his sweat pants still down around his ankles, and he captured the phone once more.
“Amos—is that you?” Dunc’s voice was on the other end.
“Dunc? I was sure it was Melissa.”
“I’m sorry. I should have known. How are you doing?”
Amos looked down at the water dripping, pulled his pants up, and stood. “About normal.”
“We need to get together.”
“I’m grounded. My folks are gone for the day, but I can’t leave.”
“Grounded? Because a monster kept you in a tree all night?”
“Well …”
“Well what?”
“I didn’t tell them about the monster. I thought it wouldn’t be believable.”
Dunc sighed. “Amos—what did you tell your folks?”
“That we were kidnapped by Peruvian money-launderers who needed us to help count drug money.”
“And you thought they’d believe that?”
“It was all I could think of on short notice. It was better than my second choice—I was going to tell them we’d been kidnapped by a UFO and they held us for hours while they performed unspeakable surgery through our navels with a long needle, trying to learn the secrets of the human race. I just couldn’t work it into the conversation.”
Dunc snorted. “I don’t blame them for grounding you.”
Amos shook his head and cleared the water out of his hair and eyes. “What did you mean when you said we have to get together?”
“I’ve been doing some research down at the library this morning, and I think we may have a problem.”
“You mean you got up this morning and went to the library?”
“No. I was up all night, remember? There’s something we have to investigate.”
“I hate that.”
“Hate what?”
“When you say that—‘we have to investigate.’ I always get in trouble when you say that.”
“Not always.”
“Always. Every single time. And it’s going to happen again, I can feel it.”
Dunc ignored him. “When your folks grounded you, did they say you couldn’t have company?”
“Not exactly. Dad said I couldn’t do anything that was fun for the rest of my life. But that doesn’t count here—I’m sure this isn’t going to be any fun.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Dunc hung up before Amos could say another word, which was just as well because Amos had been about to tell him not to come.
Amos replaced the phone and moved downstairs. When Dunc said he would be right over, he meant it, and Amos was hungry. As a matter of fact, he felt as if he were starving.
I haven’t eaten, he thought, since I was born. They don’t make enough food.
He moved to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
“Leftovers.”
Leaning against the door, he polished off a pound of potato salad, half a meat loaf, and a full bowl of macaroni salad.
And he was still hungry.
In the meat tray there was a full pound of hamburger, extra lean, that his mother was saving for spaghetti that night.
Amos stared at the meat.
Strange, he thought, how good it looks, lying there, all raw and fresh. Little bits of blood in it were mixed with pieces of meat and fat, just ground up and waiting. Perfectly good bloody meat, just going to waste.
Amos ate the meat. Raw. The whole pound. And licked the paper wrapper, and when he was finished, he went into the living room to move to the door. Along the way he spied a small rug in the hallway by the door.
Scruff was lying there, his nose curled in under his tail.
Amos moved to stand over the dog.
Scruff looked up, lifted his lip, and growled. There was once a time when Amos would have moved away. Scruff’s favorite hobby was removing pieces from Amos.
Now Amos didn’t move. He looked down at Scruff. He lifted his lip and growled at the dog.
Scruff’s eyes widened. He growled back.
Amos growled louder, made his eyes into slits, bared his teeth, and felt the hair go up on the back of his neck.
Scruff got up and walked away.
Amos watched him leave, his eyes slitted, a low growl in his throat. Then he lay down on the rug, curled up in a ball with his nose tucked up to his butt and went to sleep.
.4
“Amos?”
Dunc stood just inside the door over Amos, who was still curled on the throw rug sound asleep.
“Are you all right?”
Amos opened his eyes sluggishly and looked up.
“Oh—hi, Dunc.”
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Down there on the rug. What are you doing?”
Amos sat up, then stood. “I was tired, and the rug looked comfortable. I thought I’d take a little rest. What’s wrong with that?”
Dunc studied him, then shook his head. “Nothing—I just thought it was strange.”
Amos shrugged. “People get tired—especially after sitting in trees all night. At least normal people do. Not you, of course—what’s in the books?”
Dunc was holding a stack of books under his arm. “I brought them from the library. They have more there, but I couldn’t check them all out. I told you I was doing research.”
“On speed,” Amos said, nodding. “How to cut time when we make our candy run tonight. Good thinking. We want to keep up a good lope, get it up around sixty, or we’ll lose out. I wonder if any of them give meat for a treat.”
Dunc had started for the stairs and hadn’t heard Amos. “Come on up to your room—you’ve got to see this.”
Amos followed, dropping to all fours while he went up the stairs behind Dunc. His shoulders rolled easily while he moved. He stood upright at the top of the stairs and followed Dunc into his room.
“Man, you should do something about this place.” Dunc stopped inside the door.
“You’ve seen it before.”
“I know, but it’s always a shock.”
Amos’s room looked exactly as if somebody had thrown a grenade into it, then closed the door. Maybe two grenades. Perhaps, Dunc had once said, a bombing raid.
Once a week, forced by his parents, he pretended to clean it. He jammed everything under the bed. This had worked for a while, but after weeks, months, years, the bed couldn’t take it any longer. There were still toys beneath his bed from the time before he could talk, toys with rattles on them, jammed together with old dirty socks and underw
ear, a food container that had once held a cheese dip and that had grown and grown until it was almost alive, and Dunc swore that either the old underwear or the dip container had learned to growl if anybody looked beneath the bed.
Around the room were posters, models hanging from the ceiling, and the smell of—well, as Dunc said, everything.
Dunc’s room was always clean and orderly.
“Clear a place on the bed,” Amos said. “Spread the books there.”
Amos cleared the bed—a yo-yo, a slingshot, and a skateboard without wheels were there—and Dunc put the books down.
“I started thinking after I got home. Thinking about that—that thing that put us up the tree,” Dunc said. “I thought it might be some kind of wolf, you know, because it was bigger than a dog and had a kind of long snout.”
He paused. “I did a little checking on wolves at the library. Did you know that they don’t get as big as the one we saw last night? They don’t get much larger than a big dog. And their geographical range doesn’t extend this far south. There’s never been a substantiated attack of a healthy wolf on a human in North America.”
“How can you use words like that?”
“What word?”
“Substantiated. I mean, how come you use words like that, and I don’t even think those kinds of words?”
Dunc shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess from reading in the library. What difference does it make? The main thing is, I don’t think it was a wolf. So I started digging further, and I came up with some pretty strange things.”
An itch took Amos. Not just an itch, but the biggest itch of all time. Just in back of his ear. He’d never felt an itch like this, not even close. He scratched with his right hand, scratched and scratched, and it felt so good, soooo verrrry gooood.
His right foot started to thump on the floor.
“Amos,” Dunc stared at his foot. “What are you doing?”
“Unnnnhhhhhh … scratching.” He stopped scratching, and the leg stopped. “Why?”
“You just seem to be doing it a strange way.” Dunc shrugged. “I thought …” He shook his head. “Never mind. Now look at this.”
He turned back to the books.
“None of it made sense—the way the thing looked, the way it came after us, until I remembered there was a full moon last night.”
Amos nodded. “Yeah, it was full. So what does that mean?”
Dunc looked at Amos, waiting.
Nothing came.
“Put it together,” Dunc said. “Something sort of like a wolf, a full moon …”
“Oh.” Amos nodded. “You mean werewolves. That’s fine for movies and stuff, but it isn’t real. I don’t know what that thing was, but it was real.”
“There’s real,” Dunc said, “and then there’s real.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” Dunc said, opening a book, “that we don’t know all there is to know about the phenomenon of lycanthropy. Look—”
“I hate that, when you use big words,” Amos said. But he looked.
“People have been scared of wolves for a long time,” Dunc said. “Without reason. They’ve almost always kept to themselves. But the fear was so great that they transferred it to anybody who even started to act a little weird. They said they maybe had been bitten by a wolf and then had turned into a wolf.”
Amos was reading ahead of Dunc. “It says it’s all a bunch of old superstitions.”
Dunc nodded. “I read that. But there are several cases that aren’t so easy to explain. Some guy in Hungary back about three hundred years ago was caught running nude through the woods with a pack of wolves, and they said he could change into one whenever he wanted.”
“And you think that monster after us last night was a werewolf?”
Dunc shook his head. “Not necessarily. It just might have been somebody who thinks he’s a werewolf.”
Amos looked at Dunc for a long time. “It bit a plastic flamingo completely in half, Dunc—like it was snapping off a Twinkie. It had teeth you could use for floor lamps, Dunc. That wasn’t imaginary.”
“Yes, it might have been. People do strange things—they can rip a car door off, if they panic. It happens all the time. If they’re hysterical or in a trance, they can do lots of weird things. A good mask, some hair glued on a body—I tell you, I recognized those eyes. That was somebody we know.”
“It was?”
“I’m sure of it. All we have to do is figure out who it was and cure him, and that will be the end of it.”
“Cure him? They have pills for this?”
Dunc picked up a book, thumbed to a place he had marked with a piece of notebook paper, and opened it. “It’s the same as the problem—if they think they can be cured of the imaginary problem, then it cures them. One psychiatrist used a silver butter knife and cured somebody of imaginary werewolfism. Just scratched him on the forehead three times.”
“So all we do is find this thing,” Amos said, “go up to it—that is get really close to it, right in its face—and scratch it three times with a butter knife.”
“Right.”
“Wrong.” Amos shook his head. “Not for anything. Not for a date with Melissa. Not for a single thing in the whole world am I going to try and scratch that thing with a butter knife. Not me, not ever. You might, but not me.”
Dunc ignored him. “It has to be tonight. Halloween. It’s the last full moon for another month. We’ll have to get you off being grounded and find it tonight.”
“You’re forgetting trick or treats, and after that there’s the Halloween costume party. Melissa’s going to be there. I’ll skip my grounding if I have to, but I’m not missing it.”
But Dunc still didn’t hear him. “Yeah. He’ll be out tonight, sure as anything. We’ll set a trap for him, catch him, and cure him.”
“I was going as a groom,” Amos said. His voice was sad because he knew now that he would have to help Dunc. He would never get out of it. “I thought if she saw me as a groom, maybe—”
“Some kind of trap. That’s the problem: How do you trap a werewolf?”
.5
“You know, everybody has it wrong. They all think I’m the crazy one, but it’s not me—it’s you.”
Amos was standing in his room with a costume on.
He looked like a sheep.
Dunc was pulling here and there, trying to make it fit better. It was a bit small. “It was the closest the costume store had to a sheep—and we were lucky to get it, considering it’s Halloween. It’s made for a small child. Maybe if you stayed on all fours it would hold its shape. Try it.”
He pushed Amos down.
“Dunc …”
“Be quiet now. Let me look.”
Dunc stood back. Amos looked like somebody’s idea of a cartoon lamb. The suit stuck out here and there. Odd bits of wool were glued to the lining, and it had flopping ears and a long tail.
“Perfect.”
“You’re lying,” Amos said. “I can tell by your voice. That tone means you’re lying. I don’t look at all like a sheep. I look like a ruptured llama.”
“But in the dark or in the full moon, it’ll work. I know it. One of the articles said that werewolves like sheep more than anything.”
“When you say like, you actually mean they like to attack sheep, don’t you?”
Dunc nodded. “Small point. Yes. But we’ll have him long before then. I’m going to use our old volleyball net and stretch it across that opening back of the Riglettis’. You pretend to be grazing there, in the Riglettis’ back yard, and when he comes for you, I’ll spring the net on him. Then I’ll scratch him with the butter knife, and it’ll all be over. Piece of cake.”
Amos stood. “Don’t say that—about it being a piece of cake. That’s the jinx saying. When you say that, it always goes wrong. I’ll do this, but don’t say that.”
“You’re being negative,” Dunc said. “Remember to stay positive. Be grateful. Look how we got y
ou out of being grounded.”
Amos nodded. “You told the truth. Heck, if I’d known that would work on my folks, I would have done it long ago.”
“But you should still be grateful.”
Amos nodded. “I am.” He started taking the suit off.
“What are you doing?”
“Dunc, it’s two in the afternoon. We can’t do this until tonight, and I’m not going to keep the suit on all day. I’ll rot.”
“Oh.” Dunc nodded. “I just thought we could sit around and watch the sunset and wait for the moon to change.”
“No.”
“How about if we go back to the library and see if there are any more books on werewolves?”
Amos dropped the sheep suit in a lump. “Only if we can go past Melissa’s house. It’s only three hundred and forty-seven feet out of the way from the straight route between here and the library.”
Dunc sighed. “All right.”
“I thought I might get a chance to see her through a window and see what costume she’s wearing to the costume party tonight.”
“I understand,” Dunc said, although in truth he didn’t.
Amos headed for the door, and Dunc held back to take a moment to straighten out the sheep suit and lay it on the bed. The rearranged suit made the rest of the bed look messy, so he took an extra moment to remake the bed. The neatened bed made the rest of the room look like a disaster area, so he added a minute to straighten out some of the pictures and clear away the rubble on top of the desk, where there were some pencils that needed sharpening in the sharpener bolted to the side of the window, and the sharpened pencils made all the papers look completely goobered up, and he took another minute …
