Hunter's Moon

by Tess Grant

  No time, she thought, no time. It’s coming.

  Maddie came first, flying long and low into the clearing. She was only a dark shape against the silvered moonlit grass, but after so many years together, Kitty knew it by heart. Behind her came something Kitty had never seen before and never wanted to see again.

  It was doglike but only in that it went on four legs. It was much bigger, wilder somehow—an immense matted shape of fur, carrying fear with it. It ran in great leaps, sometimes reared up on two feet, sometimes down on all four. Halfway into the clearing, it stopped and threw its head back and a long gurgling howl broke from its throat. The sound, ghastly enough in the middle of the woods at midnight, trailed upward and became something very much like a scream toward the end.

  Moonlight glinted off curved white fangs. Something dripped from its mouth, but Kitty didn’t know if it was saliva or blood. Maddie barreled in well below the line of punji sticks, burrowing her muzzle under Kitty’s arm, frantic and shaking. Kitty felt a scream of her own rising, but her father’s voice echoed softly in her ear, “Screaming is a waste of energy and a distraction, Kitty. Conserve your energy for the real fight.” She bit it back, holding it like a dry ball of food lodged in her throat. She knew then what dread tasted like, a scream she couldn’t let out choking her in the heart of the night.

  She heard the whisper beside her, “Come on, sumbitch.” Then louder, “Come on.”

  The creature—she still didn’t know what it was—paced for a few minutes. A heavy feral smell smacked her face like a rotting hand. The thing turned its back to them, and she thought for a minute it would go. But it whirled with a sickening snarl and leaped. The moon glinted on heavy hooked claws. She had never seen such a jump, at least six feet high and covering the twelve or so feet between them in a great skyward arc. A roar from her right nearly deafened that ear, and there was a flash of fire from a rifle muzzle.

  The burst of light temporarily blinded her. Her panic increased as her vision faded to black. She heard a sickening thud nearly at her feet as the thing stopped in midair, dropping short of impalement on one of the stakes.

  “Oh God,” cried Kitty. “Oh God, oh God.”

  Her ears rang and her chant of anguish filtered down a long tunnel to reach her. Her vision dropped back in place piece by piece.

  She looked to her side and saw an old man kneeling next to the rock with a rifle tight against his hip. Looking back at the heap on the ground, she saw some strange metamorphosis taking place. Hair disappeared from the body, and its heavy haunches slimmed and lengthened. The great mane of hair around its neck receded, and Kitty was horrified to see it finally take a human form. Then it withered, curling and drying; dust flying away on the night air. The blood spatter on the ground bubbled, sending up a misty vapor before disappearing altogether.

  Kitty’s heart battered her ribs so hard it made it hard to breathe. Her hands started to shake, jittering with the beat in her chest.

  The old man turned and looked at her. She could see him now, crew-cut white hair, Dickies work jeans. “You alright?” he asked, putting the rifle in the grass.

  He was so normal looking, so out of place. So familiar. “Mr. Phinney?”

  “Yup. Now give me a hand up. Been thinking about getting me some of those new knees. Now would be a good time.”

  Chapter Six

  Punji sticks hedged the entire rock, pointing straight up, behind, forward. Kitty pushed herself to her feet, leaning against the rock for support. When her mom talked about moon-challenged crazies, a screaming mutant canine hadn’t been what had come to Kitty’s mind. She looked over at Phinney. He waited patiently, apparently for her to help him up. She baby-stepped her way around the poles the few feet to where he knelt. Even here, back in the nest, it was hard to move. From the front, there was no safe entry unless you came in low like Maddie or slow like Kitty.

  She held out her hand and he grasped her wrist. Her own hand closed around his wrist, feeling the soft powdery skin slide a little beneath her fingers. She braced herself and pulled. He was surprisingly light, and she pulled harder than she needed to, making him stumble a little as he reached his feet.

  Dropping her hand, the old man turned and began pulling on the corners of an olive green tarp. Raising an index finger to her, he beckoned, gesturing at the far corner. Kitty wound around him, through the poles, and took up the position he indicated. Together, they unrolled the tarp out from the base of the rock. He yanked a pole out of the ground and let it fall onto the tarp close to the boulder.

  Kitty watched him pull two more poles before she joined in. He had saved her life; the least she could do was some clean up. Besides, she wasn’t leaving until he did, so she might as well move the departure along. She took a close look at the spears as she stacked them on the weather-beaten canvas. The end opposite the silver tip was sharpened wood so it could be jammed deep in the ground, the top that glittering silver spearhead she’d already seen. She ran her thumb cautiously along the keen edge. What had he called them? Punji sticks? She vaguely remembered some old war movie on TV one Saturday afternoon and the bad guys planting sharpened sticks at the bottom of a pit for the good guys to fall on. She let the stick drop onto the tarp in disgust. Yuck.

  Close to thirty sticks lay in a pyramid on the tarp. Phinney flipped the tarp over top of the stack, tucking the edges down between the pile and the rock. He shuffled through the leaves, kicking a drift over the tarp, hiding it in the slight undercut at the base of the rock.

  It looks like he’s hiding a body, Kitty thought. But no, the body dried up and blew away. She began to shake with silent laughter, laughter that threatened to escalate to hysteria, another scream she dared not let out.

  “Coffee?” he asked conversationally, turning from the rock.

  She stared at him. No words even came to her mind. With all that had just gone on, the first thing he was going to ask was if she wanted a beverage?

  He worked the silver flask out of his Dickies. “I figure you’d like an explanation. I’ve got some decaf crystals up at the house. Got to clean the gun anyway.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Yeah, I always like some decaf after I kill someone. Are you insane?”

  “Most folks say so,” he agreed mildly. He shrugged. “You were here. You saw exactly what I saw. Does that make you insane or does it make me right?”

  “I’m going home and calling the police.”

  “I’d expect you to.” Phinney screwed the top on the flask and ambled out of the clearing. Maddie trailed along in his wake as though she had known him all her life.

  Kitty managed to wait at least three heartbeats before fear made her bolt after them.

  * * *

  “I’ll put some water on,” he said, grabbing a teakettle off the stove.

  Kitty took a good look, cataloguing the place so that she could describe it to Joe and Jenna later. It wasn’t every day she got a peek into the local oddball’s living arrangements. They had approached the cabin from the south across a sliver of meadow. A long porch ran the length of that side of the cabin complete with an old-fashioned metal glider couch and some shellback lawn chairs. A small ribbon of dirt lane wound behind it up the hill. Cancerous rust dotted the old tin roof.

  The inside of the cabin was decorated in what her mom would call “hunting camp.” White steel cabinet sink and counter next to a skinny two-burner stove, wobbly table with two wooden folding chairs, old plaid couch and stained coffee table. Two doors led off a small hall toward the back, maybe to a bathroom and bedroom. Phinney had made a try at hominess with red-and-white checked curtains at the windows and a matching tablecloth, even a small terra cotta pot of some herb on the windowsill. But the harsh white light from the bare fluorescent bulb over the sink made it all look hard.

  “You drink coffee?” Phinney asked.

  “What? No. I mean yes.” Kitty found herself stammering stupidly. He watched her, dark blue eyes steady. She felt even more uncertain. “This
is insane.”

  “You’ve said that before.” He turned to the cupboard and pulled out two thick-walled white ceramic cups. The spoon clinked loudly against the sides as he stirred a heaping spoonful of instant coffee into the hot water. “Milk? Sugar?”

  Kitty gave up and sat down heavily, the chair protesting with a squeak. He placed the cups down on the table. Pulling a cardboard container of milk out of the tiny fridge, he cracked the top and smelled it before putting it down next to the sugar. His own chair creaked as he sat down across from her. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled a couple of turns up his forearms, which were speckled with age spots. Underneath the wrinkles lay thin cords of sinewy muscle.

  “What was that out there?”

  “Werewolf.” He picked up his mug and took a long swallow.

  She laughed then, her voice as brittle as the light. He didn’t join in. She shoved her chair back. “Thanks for the coffee, but I have to go home.”

  “Didn’t your mom ever tell you to stay out of the woods at night?”

  His question stopped her for a minute, butt stuck on the edge of the chair. Of course she had, and her dad too. But they hadn’t been talking about a werewolf; they’d been talking about…about…what exactly had they been talking about?

  “You know,” he said, setting his mug down and putting his elbows on the table. “Oakmont County has the highest rate in the state for unsolved disappearances and deaths. You ever wonder about that?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Her voice sounded defensive. Disappearances and deaths? She was in high school. Up until now, her biggest problem had been who had lied about her non-tryout for the dance team and trying to pass advanced algebra. She stood up and walked to the door. With her hand on the knob, she stopped. All she could see in the panes of glass was her reflection, because outside there was nothing but darkness. She turned to face him, so still that even his chair was quiet. Finally, he set his coffee cup down.

  “Would you like me to walk you home? There won’t be any more tonight, not until the next full moon. But the first one always makes folks kind of jittery.”

  * * *

  The sun sent pencil-thin lines tracing across the scuffed hardwood, and the silvery curtains Kitty had sewn herself puffed and billowed in the morning breeze. Dimly through her sleepy haze, Kitty heard Sam yelling at Maddie. She floated, blinking to the surface. Insane dreams, the kind of screaming night terrors her mother said she’d experienced as a little kid. But that’s all it had been, because here she was in the hollow of her old lumpy mattress with the same Z-shaped crack scarring the drywall ceiling.

  Arms over her head, toes pointing, she stretched and felt a pain in her back snap her through the last of her sleepy haze. Rolling over slowly, she sat on the edge of the bed for a minute. The curtains puffed again, and as they swirled in the wind, she saw her mom and Sam down in the yard with Maddie. The clock said ten-thirty. Apparently, Mom was in the mood to let her sleep late, and Kitty was grateful. She rolled her neck from side to side, hunching her shoulders, and still there was a pulling pain in her back whenever she moved.

  The mirror over the dresser was old. It had belonged to her grandmother and there was a silvery-black haze around the edges. But there was no tarnish in the middle, and Kitty could clearly see the ugly red-brown scrape down the middle of her back.

  Where?

  Her mind was blank for only an instant before the thought of the granite outcropping in the bowl in the woods tumbled in, followed by the flood of everything else.

  No night terrors. Real.

  Her legs started to buckle. Reaching for the edge of the bed, she sat down before she fell down. Now that she remembered, she realized ten-thirty wasn’t so late at all. She hadn’t slept until nearly five. Every time she closed her eyes and started to drift, she would rocket awake, some image stealing her breath and her sleep. The creature arcing through the night sky toward her, the dreadful metamorphosis into something human, the dust whirling from the clearing on the night’s breath. Fear and tears and anger, cycling over and over again. She hadn’t wanted to close her eyes, but finally they had closed anyway, and sheer exhaustion had taken over.

  Call the police? She ran it through her mind once again. She rejected the idea last night, picking up the phone, putting it down, what seemed like a hundred times. What would she tell them? That she was out in the woods with Phinney of all people, complete with his flask, and he shot an animal that had become human and it had dried up and blown away? Oh, and he topped it all off by calling it a werewolf. That was the best part. She had seen enough crime shows to know it wasn’t going to fly. The story looked even worse in the daylight. No body, no evidence, nothing but a near-hysterical teenage girl.

  Tell her mother? Fat chance. At least her dad would have listened to the whole thing before he told her it was nonsense. Anne would tell her that after the first sentence or two…right after she grounded her for being out in the woods in the middle of the night.

  She heard the door downstairs opening and slamming shut in the whirlwind that was Sam. The pounding of his feet up the stairs meant her mom had finally tired of her still being in bed. She jumped back under the covers.

  Act normal. Act normal.

  Sam flew around the corner and launched himself onto her bed. Kitty mock-screamed and put her arms up defensively.

  “Get up, lazy girl. It’s already after ten.”

  “I know. I was getting up.” She dropped back onto her pillow tiredly.

  He looked at Kitty closely. “That’s it? You aren’t going to yell or slug me? Do you feel okay?”

  I guess nice isn’t normal. Who knew? “Scoot, dude. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Sam headed for the door. He turned around suddenly and said, “You’re in big trouble. Mom is really mad. You left Maddie in again last night.”

  Kitty had sat up but at that bit of news she dropped back onto the pillow. She had bowed to the inescapable fact that Maddie would be sleeping in the barn. How had she forgotten?

  Oh yeah, all that werewolf killing kind of drove it out of my mind.

  She got up and pulled clean clothes out of the dresser. One thing at a time…best to face the music with her mom first, then worry about the whole mess of last night.

  As she buttoned her shorts, it seemed the best course if Phinney would turn himself in. Let the police figure out what for. But the question was how to convince him of that?

  Chapter Seven

  Jenna turned a cartwheel in the yard, landing and giving an extra little bounce like an Olympic gymnast. “So there we are—the whole dance team. Out there on the lookout over the river. And who shows up?”

  Joe leaned backward onto his elbows in the grass. “I know the answer to this one. My dad.”

  “Exactly.” Jenna shot a forefinger his way. “Your dad. And you know what he does?”

  “Kicks you out.” Joe caught Kitty’s eye and winked.

  “He kicks us out.” Jenna sounded outraged. “I mean it’s not like we were doing anything. Just sitting up there, waiting for the moon to rise.”

  Kitty, who had been zoning out in the warm sun—sleep had been hard to come by the last few nights—sat up. “Moon? What night was this?”

  Jenna crossed her legs and sank into a cross-legged position on the lawn between them. “We weren’t even doing anything. I mean—I like your dad and everything, Joe—but come on. Kicking us out?”

  “What night was this?” Kitty asked again.

  “How many guys were out there with you?” Joe’s eyes moved past Jenna to fix on Kitty. “My dad’s guiding mission in life—other than delivering the mail—is to foil as much fun as he can. He’s like Captain Wet Blanket or somebody.”

  “Just a few.” Jenna dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “We were just waiting for the moon to come up.”

  Kitty opened her mouth to ask one more time what night it had been but Jenna filled in the blank for her.

  “You know how cool it is
out there when the moon is full.”

  That put it at two nights ago—the same night Kitty was staggering around out in the woods. She wished Joe’s dad had been around to kick her out of the woods. She could have continued on in ignorant bliss of what was out there until she left Oakmont behind and went to college.

  She opened her mouth to say something, to tell them. Then she noticed Joe still focused on her. If she told, that look would change. She knew it would. It would become like the look she had given Phinney—full of suspicion, certain that he was certifiable. She glanced away and saw Sam at the edge of the trees.

  Scrambling to her feet, she jogged over to him. “Sam, get away from the woods.”

  He ignored her and continued to kick the leaves at the edge of the tree line. Lots of good rocks had been tossed there over the years by farmers clearing the fields and he knew it.

  “I mean it, Sam. Get away from the woods.” She reached out to grab his shoulder when a twig snapped and she froze. Was it in there? Today?

  Sam looked at her. “What’s wrong with you? You look all weird. You still got the flu?”

  “No. Just go inside.” Sam grimaced and shook her hand off his shoulder. Kitty watched him head for the house. Yesterday, she had told him she had the stomach flu—just before she paid him a quarter to go with her to take Maddie to the barn. It had been pretty crappy of her, all in all—to take her brother along so that if a werewolf attacked, he got eaten first. Last night, it had sounded like a good idea, but today it just made her ashamed.

  She couldn’t talk to her friends, she treated her little brother like a rawhide chewie for the paranormal, she was afraid to go to sleep because of what she might see.

  She needed to go see Phinney.

  * * *

  Kitty finally found the courage—and the time—to face Phinney the next day. She spent the morning in a meeting with her mom, sorting out the summer schedule. Now that Anne was back at the hospital five days a week, Kitty was supposed to be in charge of the house and Sam.