The Beast: A Werewolf Horror
The Beast Book One
Aleister Davidson
Black Mantis Press LLC
Copyright © 2018 by Aleister Davidson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters and events are completely fictitious.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Thanks for Reading
Also by Aleister Davidson
About the Author
1
Thomas wasn’t exactly afraid the first moment he saw the thing. It was more like, in that instant, he was shocked by the sight of it. His mind was confused by the fact that it even existed, for it was something that was not supposed to be. A thick, shaggy-furred, shambling monster that walked on its hind legs. It had a face much like that of a wolf, with piercing red eyes, and it made a low pitched, guttural growling. Not precisely the kind of traits typical of wild animals, though there was nothing natural, or domestic, about it.
It was a midsummer's evening in nineteen-eighty-three, and Thomas was playing with his friends by the creek behind his grandmother’s house. It appeared on the bank, not more than ten feet from him, peering through the thick reeds and cattails that grew lush that time of year in Kentucky. Thomas had been crouched down, dodging rocks that his friend Matty had thrown at him. When he noticed that the stones stopped, he looked up to see Matty staring beyond him, slack-jawed and in awe, like a statue in the full moonlight.
Thomas turned and over his shoulder, saw it. He smelled its hot, rank breath. He peered into its soulless, red eyes. It was a hulking mass of dark, matted fur. Teeth that gleamed in the moonlight, stained red with blood, chewed on the remains of something…or someone. It held what looked like an arm in its clawed hands, slathering over the meat and dripping thick blood onto the ground.
Life had never been the same for Thomas since that day. Matty had seen it, as well as Laura and Evan, the kids from down the street. The four of them talked about it over and over for a couple of weeks. They would meet up just to spend the afternoon talking about the monster in the trees. They recalled in grim detail their perilous flight from the creek; all but Thomas screaming in terror as they ran home. The four had all imagined that the thing had chased them, snapping at their heels as they fled, but it had only disappeared back into the trees.
After a couple of weeks of such meetings, Laura and Evan came clean that they had talked with their father about the monster at the creek. Their dad was a marine corps veteran and had served in Vietnam. He was an extreme skeptic who didn’t have a speculative bone in his body. He had convinced both of his kids that they had all mistaken a dog on the bank for a monster, or they had merely imagined it. It was simpler for the two children to swallow. They both knew they were imaginative, unlike their father, but neither of them wanted to admit that they had seen such a terrible thing. Matty had opened up about his experience to his cousin and in turn, was ridiculed. He joined with Laura and Evan. Thomas then found himself alone.
He was alone, not only concerning what had happened and his belief in it, but also he became ostracized by the group and spent the rest of the summer without any friends. Sometimes the other three would see him down by the creek, and they would throw rocks at him. Stones hurt, but not as much as being outcast by his only friends. They offered to take him back in if he would just drop it about the wolf-monster. He declined.
“I ain’t no liar!” he would scream at them. “I know what I saw! What we all saw!”
The fact that a body was found a few days after they saw the thing, in the same area, didn’t seem to mean much to the other kids. It had been heavily mutilated and dismembered. It had been partially eaten. To Thomas his friends turning on him was a wound he could hardly endure. Just living through such an experience was traumatic enough on its own. But to be shunned, to be told you are crazy, that he didn’t see what they all saw…that was unthinkable. How Evan and Laura could accept their father’s view of things was beyond Thomas, especially when the stories on the news and in the paper confirmed exactly what they had seen.
Matty was a couple of years younger than Thomas and Evan and a few years younger than Laura. When school started again, he was getting beat up at the bus stop on the first day. Even after alienating Thomas, he found the older boy came to his rescue. Two second-graders, Hank and Fred, were trying to steal Matty’s lunch money after bloodying his nose. Thomas came up behind them and cracked their heads together. Hank cried as a baby and Fred whimpered.
“He’s with me, you dumbass rednecks,” Thomas said, matter-of-factly. “You got a problem with him…you got a problem with me.”
Hank and Fred understood, both nodding in agreement. Thomas felt like a big dog, flexing his third-grader status. He helped Matty dust off his shirt and produced a handkerchief from his backpack and gave it to the first-grader to dry his bloody nose. He didn’t say anything to the younger boy, just shot him a dirty look.
“Thanks, Thomas,” the kid said meekly. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe you’d take up for me after how we were to you. How we’ve been to you.”
“Maybe I’m a better man than you are?” Thomas questioned more than stated.
The two boys had a good laugh about it all. When they got on the bus, Thomas sat near the middle and let Matty sit with him. They left the back seats empty for the fifth and sixth-graders. There was a hierarchy, and he had just proven it. He didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes on the first day of school. As some of the older kids got on at another stop, one who was apparently the leader of his group gave Thomas a nod that showed approval for both leaving the back seats vacant and also for taking the younger kid under his protection.
For the first month of the school year, Matty sat with Thomas, and they never spoke of the monster in the reeds. Laura and Evan became absorbed in their own lives, separate from each other. Thomas and Matty never saw them sit together once on the bus. Evan would occasionally join them and talk about what was on television the night before, but they kept their conversations mundane for the most part. Somehow Matty letting Thomas back in was good enough for Evan, but Laura, who was sitting in the back with the sixth graders on a regular basis, didn’t want anything to do with any of them anymore. She was one of the ‘cool kids’ now. She even treated her brother as if he didn’t exist.
2
On the fifth week of school, near the end of September, Matty didn’t show up for class. Several days went by, and most people assumed that he was out sick with a cold. But there was a meeting in the cafeteria a few days later, and the principal made a big announcement to the entire school, from Kindergarten to sixth grade.
“I have a tough announcement to make this morning, school,” Principal Maxwell stated, seemingly shocked and having a much harder time than necessary. “Matty Epperson was found dead last weekend. It appears to have been an animal attack. We are saddened by his loss and our prayers are with his family and his friends.” The principal burst into tears; his sobs exaggerated over the P.A. system.
There were a lot of kids talking already, over the school counselor announcing Matty’s friends needing to see her. Everything was a blur for Thomas. He stood up and walked out of the cafeteria, out the school doors, and walked straight home. It took him forty minutes to walk it, but he never slowed his steady pace.
During the entire walk he was having a conversation with himself about what he thought it was that got Matty. As he neared his house, he walked by the Epperson's home. He saw Matty’s mother through their front window, but he didn’t have the heart to stop and ring the bell, as he had intended after he saw her sobbing heavily. He knew it wouldn’t be polite to stop in and ask what happened.
Over the next week, he heard a lot of things, every possible rumor, about what had happened. Every kid in school had their ideas about what it was that had killed little Matty Epperson. None was even close to what Thomas knew it was. None except Evan. The day came when Evan approached Thomas with the most curious of information.
“I think I saw it again, Thomas,” Evan said on the bus home from school. “Come over to my house, I can’t come out today, but I can have company. We need’a figure out what to do about this thing.”
Thomas finally felt like he had some support from his friends. Well, a friend, at least. After going home and dropping off his backpack and his books Thomas went straight over to Evan’s house. He rode on his bike and got there in under three minutes.
By the time he arrived, Evan was already dead. He was strung across his lawn, spewing guts out of his ripped in half torso. He had dragged his intestines across the yard after apparently trying to claw his way to the front door. As Thomas shrieked in horror, Evan jumped out from behind a bush and yelled “Boo! Ha, ha, I got you!”
Thomas knew the Lucas family went all out for Halloween, but he never knew they would get that good. It looked precisely like Evan. The guts were so realistic they were stomach turning. Considering everything that had happened, Thomas thought that it was slightly in poor taste; although the quality of the work was terrific.
“So, you didn’t actually see it, did you?” Thomas asked bluntly.
“No, Thomas. That part was true.” Evan replied, a little faster than he usually spoke.
Thomas could tell Evan was uncomfortable and was even quicker to forgive him for the prank. After all, it was the Halloween season. They entered Evan’s house, and Mr. Lucas was laughing so hard he could barely explain that he had filmed Thomas’ reaction to his Halloween props with his VHS shoulder-mount camcorder. The boys ignored him for the most part and made their way upstairs to Evan’s room. It was clear to Thomas that Evan had in fact seen the beast as there were several sketches of it tacked up on one of the walls. One was of the thing’s face, a close-up. It struck a chord with Thomas who had dreamed of that face the night before. In his dream, he had gotten a much closer and more precise look at the thing than he did that first day they saw it in the summer.
It hadn’t felt like a dream, but he knew it must have been. He recalled sitting in his bed, in his grandmother’s house, hearing the door to his room creak slowly open. Before he could get up to close it, a smell so foul and putrid hit his nostrils that he immediately felt nausea wash over him. Then the fur covered, hulking, muscular form of the wolf-man strode into his room. He sat in his bed frozen with fear as it stood over him, drooling thick saliva from sharp fangs and staring at him with those evil red eyes. Then Thomas had woken up, sweating and trembling, finding his room empty. Still, he could smell the putrid stench of the monster. Evan had drawn its face flawlessly; as if he had looked right into the other boy’s dream. The thought sent a shiver down Thomas’ spine.
“Evan, where did you see it?” he asked after clearing a lump from his throat.
“Down by the creek again. This time it chased me. Then I saw it in my backyard, by the pool, during the last full moon. I saw its eyes out my bedroom window. At first, I only saw its reflection in the pool. But then when it knew I saw it, the thing ran away, through the backyard and into the woods towards the creek. I got a much better look at it then, but I had a dream about it. That’s where I finally saw its face. Or what I think its face must look like,” Evan talked so fast he felt dizzy after getting it all out.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it looks like,” Thomas replied. “I had a dream about it too.”
As the boys talked through the late afternoon into the evening, they realized that they had both shared precisely the same dream. Each in their respective bed, seeing the wolf-man enter their room and stand over them, slathering, snarling, and emitting a low growl with red eyes glowing.
“Thomas, my dad talked to Matty’s mom the other night,” Evan delivered with a bit of suspense in his tone. “She told him Matty had been torn to pieces. Dozens. Some parts were chewed on, but not fully eaten. She said whatever did that to him had done it for fun, not for food. The cops are saying that it could have only been a bear or a mountain lion, but neither has been seen around here…not in town at least, for like a hundred years.”
Thomas hung on every word. He wanted to know everything he could about their adversary. The boys talked for a while longer and eventually agreed that the thing had indeed been in their rooms, and had intended to scare them. They also decided that they needed to recruit someone else to their cause. Someone who would also be interested in kicking the monster’s ass. As far as the boys were concerned, it was now their prey. Their enemy. After all, it had killed one of their close friends; brutally ended the life of a first grader with his entire future ahead of him. They were going to destroy it. They didn’t know how just yet, but they were dead set on seeing the monster killed and gone for good.
Thomas rode home as fast as he could. The moon was almost full, and it was nearly Halloween. Everyone’s decorations in their yards spooked him a bit. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt tight around his face and pedaled, scared to look at his neighbor’s front yards. Evan’s dad’s Halloween display had gotten to him. It was too realistic.
When Thomas got home, his uncle was pulling into the carport in his beat-up old Volkswagen bug as the boy was putting his bicycle up. They greeted each other cordially and went into the house through the kitchen door off the carport. Thomas’ grandmother put a hot plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes in front of each of them before either had a chance to speak.
The two of them tore into their food and had nearly finished their plates before either of them spoke. It was Thomas who broke the silence, after astutely observing blood stains on his uncle’s shirt sleeve.
“John, you have blood on your shirt,” the boy pointed at his uncle as he spoke. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, dread. I thought I had cleaned up before leaving work. I must have brushed up against the wash sink after cleaning up,” John replied as if he were utterly unconcerned.
Thomas knew that his uncle worked at a grocery store and spent a lot of time behind the meat counter. Especially if a new side of beef arrived that day and needed to be trimmed down into the various cuts of meat that people consumed. Still, it seemed like a fresh stain, thick and red. Usually, by the time a side of beef arrived at the store, it had very little blood, if any at all, left in it. Thomas had never doubted his uncle on anything, certainly nothing as mundane as a stain. It felt strange that he did so at that moment. He felt a pang of guilt strike him in the gut, but he wasn’t sure if it was warranted. Something about the stain seemed all the more suspicious since his uncle had so casually ignored it.
Thomas got up without finishing his final few bites, leaving John alone at the table. The boy washed up and went to bed early, not wanting to be in his uncle’s company after dinner. Part of him regretted it; his favorite show was on. Still, he stayed up most of the night, alone in his room. He was overthinking, making too many plans to destroy the beast to sleep.
3
Thomas met Evan on the bus to school the next morning. He immediately told Evan of his suspicions that his uncle John was the wolf-man. They got into a lengthy debate, though they kept their voices low, over whether or not the wolf-man was like a werewolf and changed by the full moonlight, or if it were some kind of hybrid between man and beast and it only had one form. Evan was prone to believe that it was a hybrid. Thomas was inclined to think that it was a werewolf. They agree
d that whatever it was it needed to be stopped. They spent their lunch and recess breaks at the school library, looking for anything they could find about werewolves, wolf-men, monsters…anything that was even closely related to the subjects.
Among the books they found was a leather bound, old tome, whose yellowed pages smelled lightly of rot. Entitled, On the Subject of Lycanthropes: a Scientific Study of Werewolves and the Occult. The book proved indispensable in their education on how to hunt werewolves. After school that day Thomas stayed the night over at Evan’s house. They spent the whole evening reading the book together. After only a few hours they were able to surmise that it was indeed a lycanthrope that they were dealing with, but just as they had, the book also differentiated between werewolves and wolf-men. They still didn’t have enough evidence, either way, to conclude what it was exactly.
What they thought they still lacked in knowledge was eventually balanced out by what they did learn. That either way, wolf-man or werewolf, it could be stopped. According to the book, it could be fought. It could be killed. The revelation brought them much joy, and they were finally able to begin conceiving a plan of attack since they knew what its possible vulnerabilities were.
Since the two didn’t agree about what it was that they were facing, they didn’t quite see eye to eye on how to fight it. The monster needed to be seen again, to be studied, in Evan’s opinion, before they confronted it. As far as Thomas newly enlightened view was concerned the beast was a wolf-man. It walked on two feet. That alone told him what he was dealing with. He saw no reason to hesitate. In Thomas’ view, they needed to hunt it down quick and deal with it as the book suggested, with a silver dagger, holy water, and fire. Wolfsbane and garlic were not effective against wolf-men, nor the sign of the cross. At least according to their book.
The Beast Page 1