Cycle of the Werewolf

AUGUST

“Sure, I think it's a werewolf,” Constable Neary says. He speaks too loudly-maybe accidentally, more like accidentally on purpose-and all conversation in Stan's Barber Shop comes to a halt. It is going on just half-past August, the hottest August anyone can remember in Tarker's Mills for years, and tonight the moon will be just one day past full. So the town holds its breath, waiting.

Constable Neary surveys his audience and then goes on from his place in Stan Pelky's middle barber chair, speaking weightily, speaking judicially, speaking psychologically, all from the depths of his high school education (Neary is a big, beefy man, and in high school he mostly made touchdowns for the Tarker's Mills Tigers; his classwork earned him some C's and not a few D's).

“There are guys,” he tells them, “who are kind of like two people. Kind of like split personalities, you know. They are what I'd call fucking schizos.”

He pauses to appreciate the respectful silence which greets this and then goes on:

“Now this guy, I think he's like that. I don't think he knows what he's doing when the moon gets full and he goes out and kills somebody. He could be anybody—a teller at the bank, a gas-jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road, maybe even someone right here now. In the sense of being an animal inside and looking perfectly normal outside, yeah, you bet. But if you mean, do I think there's a guy who sprouts hair and howls at the moon… no. That shit's for kids.”

“What about the Coslaw boy, Neary?” Stan asks, continuing to work carefully around the roll of fat at the base of Neary's neck. His long, sharp scissors go snip… snip… snip.

“Just proves what I said,” Neary responds with some exasperation. “That shit's for kids.”

In truth, he feels exasperated about what's happened with Marty Coslaw. Here, in this boy, is the first eyeball witness to the freak that's killed six people in his town, including Neary's good friend Alfie Knopfler. And is he allowed to interview the boy? No. Does he even know where the boy is? No! He's had to make do with a deposition furnished to him by the State Police, and he had to bow and scrape and just-a-damn-bout beg to get that much. All because he's a small-town constable, what the State Police think of as a kiddie-cop, not able to tie his own shoes. All because he doesn't have one of their numbfuck Smokey Bear hats. And the deposition! He might as well have used it to wipe his ass with. According to the Coslaw kid, this “beast” stood about seven feet tall, was naked, was covered with dark hair all over his body. He had big teeth and green eyes and smelled like a load of panther-shit. He had claws, but the claws looked like hands. He thought it had a tail. A tail, for Chrissake.

“Maybe,” Kenny Franklin says from his place in the row of chairs along the wall, “maybe it's some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you know.”

“I don't believe it,” Neary says emphatically, and nods his head to emphasize the point. Stan has to draw his scissors back in a hurry to avoid putting one of the blades into that beefy roll of fat at the back of Neary's neck. “Nossir! I don't believe it! Kid heard a lot of these werewolf stories at school before it closed for the summer-he admitted as much-and then he didn't have nothing to do but sit there in that chair of his and think about it… work it over in his mind. It's all psycho-fuckin-logical, you see. Why, if it'd been you that'd come out of the bushes by the light of the moon, he would have thought you was a wolf, Kenny.”

Kenny laughs a little uneasily.

'Nope,” Neary says gloomily. “Kid's testimony is just no damn good 'tall.”

In his disgust and disappointment over the deposition taken from Marty Coslaw at the home of Marty's aunt and uncle in Stowe, Constable Neary has also overlooked this line: “Four of them went off at the side of his face—I guess you'd call it a face-all at once, and I guess maybe it put his eye out. His left eye.”

If Constable Neary had chewed this over in his mind-and he hadn't-he would have laughed even more contemptuously, because in that hot, still August of 1984, there was only one townsperson sporting an eyepatch, and it was simply impossible to think of that person, of all persons, being the killer. Neary would have believed his mother the killer before he would have believed that.

“There's only one thing that'll solve this case,” Constable Neary says, jabbing his finger at the four or five men sitting against the wall and waiting for their Saturday morning haircuts, “and that's good police work. And I intend to be the guy who does it. Those state Smokies are going to be laughing on the other side of their faces when I bring the guy in.” Neary's face turns dreamy. “Anyone,” he says. “A bank teller… gas jockey… just some guy you drink with down there at the bar. But good police-work will solve it. You mark my words.”

But Constable Lander Neary's good police work comes to an end that night when a hairy, moon-silvered arm reaches through the open window of his Dodge pickup as he sits parked at the crossing-point of two dirt roads out in West Tarker's Mills. There is a low, snorting grunt, and a wild, terrifying smelllike something you would smell in the lion-house of a zoo.

His head is snapped around and he stares into one green eye. He sees the fur, the black, damp-looking snout. And when the snout wrinkles back, he sees the teeth. The beast claws at him almost playfully, and one of his cheeks is ripped away in a flap, exposing his teeth on the right side. Blood spouts everywhere. He can feel it running down over the shoulder of his shirt, sinking in warmly. He screams; he screams out of his mouth and out of his cheek. Over the beast's working shoulders, he can see the moon, flooding down white light.

He forgets all about his. 30-. 30 and the. 45 strapped on his belt. He forgets all about how this thing is psycho-fuckin-logical. He forgets all about good police work. Instead his mind fixes on something Kenny Franklin said in the barber-shop that morning. Maybe it's some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you know.

And so, as the werewolf reaches for Neary's throat, Neary reaches for its face, grabs double-handfuls of coarse, wiry fur and pulls, hoping madly that the mask will shift and then pull off-there will be the snap of an elastic, the liquid ripping sound of latex, and he will see the killer.

But nothing happens-nothing except a roar of pain and rage from the beast. It swipes at him with one clawed handyes, he can see it is a hand, however hideously misshapen, a hand, the boy was right-and lays his throat wide open. Blood jets over the truck's windshield and dashboard; it drips into the bottle of Busch that has been sitting tilted against Constable Neary's crotch.

The werewolf's other hand snags in Neary's freshly cut hair and yanks him half out of the Ford pick-up's cab. It howls once, in triumph, and then it buries its face and snout in Neary's neck. It feeds while the beer gurgles out of the spilled bottle and foams on the floor by the truck's brake and clutch pedals.

So much for psychology.

So much for good police work.