Moondeath

by Rick Hautala

  Otherwise there is the possibility that the were

  pire.

  It went on from there, breaking down the various customs of different countries for destroying the werewolf. Bob was satisfied at this point, though. He had decided to use the most common, the Hollywood method of shooting the beast with a silver bullet.

  The only problem he could think of, other than getting in a position to shoot, was how he was going to get a silver bullet.

  Leaving his brim-full cup of coffee and his donut with one bite out of it, Bob paid his bill at the register and went out to his car. He wheeled around the rotary, got onto Route 16, and, with the sun rising behind and to the right, sped toward Cooper Falls.

  .II.

  When he pulled into town two hours later, Bob drove slowly down Main Street. The view absolutely astounded him. It looked like he had been away for years and, in that time, the town had died. Cooper Falls had never been a thriving town, but now, at seven-thirty in the morning, it looked as though the town was in a state of siege.

  The plate glass windows of the pharmacy were starred with holes. Plywood covered the bottom of the windows. Every store window along Main Street was either boarded or soaped over, or had its blinds drawn.

  Bob pulled over to the side of the road beside the library and looked up at the cold stone and bricks. It seemed like years, lifetimes ago, that he and Lisa walked up those stairs holding hands. Now there was a thin covering of dirty snow on the steps. Bob shivered as he looked up at the thin, skeletal trees, not yet budding. He lit a cigarette and drove the length of Main Street toward Lisa’s apartment building.

  Like the rest of the town, Lisa’s building looked asleep or deserted. Bob realized with a start that he hadn’t seen anybody on Main Street. There should have been someone—a milkman or a paperboy or someone!

  Bob pulled up to the curb in front of Lisa’s apartment and looked up. He felt his spirits rise when he saw the curtain billowing in and out with the morning breeze.

  He raced up the steps two and three at a time up to the third-floor landing. His hand was shaking as he reached out and pressed the buzzer beside the door.

  No answer.

  He put his ear against the door and pushed the buzzer again, listening to it sound within the apartment. After a moment, he heard a faint scuffing sound. Then the door lock was being worked.

  “Who is it?” Lisa called out, her voice still thick with sleep.

  “Me,” Bob replied simply.

  The lock clicked and the door swung open, then Lisa’s surprised face filled the opening. She stood there in the doorway for a moment, then she collapsed into his arms and burst out sobbing.

  “Oh God! Oh God! I can’t believe it. It’s really you!” she sobbed, her voice muffled by his shoulder.

  Bob patted her on the back, then held her away at arm’s length. “Well,” he said, forcing a smile, “aren’t you going to ask me in?” Then he kissed her, long and deep.

  They went into the apartment and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” Lisa kept repeating. “Why didn’t you call or write? Oh, God. Are you here to stay or are you passing through?”

  Bob could tell that she was trying hard to restrain any emotion that might show in her voice, but she was doing poorly.

  “I’m not sure,” he said calmly, locking her with his gaze. “I’m really not sure.”

  “So,” Lisa said, smiling weakly.

  “So,” Bob said, nodding his head. “I got all your letters.” He watched Lisa, who sat looking from him to the tablecloth to him again. “I can’t believe what’s happened to the town. Why didn’t you say something in your letters, when you wrote?”

  Lisa shrugged. “I don’t know.” She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, fighting tears. “It’s been terrible. Lots of people are scared, lots have left town for good. It’s been terrible.”

  “I can’t say as I blame them for leaving,” Bob said. He noticed that Lisa’s face paled. “They’ve got plenty of good reasons.”

  Lisa was gnawing at her lower lip.

  “Yes, Lisa,” Bob said, reaching across the table and taking her hand. “I’ve come back to, to do what I have to do to stop it.”

  The tears streaked down Lisa’s cheeks, and fear registered in her eyes. “Bob! You don’t—I can’t—”

  He squeezed her hand tighter, reassuringly. “I know what it is. I know who it is. And I know what I have to do to stop it,” he said intensely.

  “Not now, Bob,” Lisa said, eyes overflowing. “Let’s not talk about it now. Later.”

  “Sure,” Bob said, getting up and walking over beside her. He grasped her by the elbow and, guiding her gently, led her into the bedroom.

  .III.

  “I don’t think we should be doing this,” Lisa said as Bob stopped his car at the foot of the Simmons’ snow-filled driveway. The late afternoon sun threw out a slanting ray of light that illuminated the house, making it stand out in sharp relief against the dark forest behind it. The weather-worn shingles, the crumbling masonry of the chimney, and the boarded-over windows stood out with such sharp detail that Bob felt as though he was looking at a painting.

  “What?” Bob said. “We’re just stopping by to—”

  “To break the law, that’s what,” Lisa snapped as she pointed to a sign tacked to the gatepost. No Trespassing. Police Take Notice.

  “The house has been boarded up for over a month now,” Lisa said. “I don’t think we have any right to be prying around.”

  Bob snuffed loudly and, feeling his resolve build, reached into the back seat for the two flashlights he had brought. He held one out to Lisa and said, “Look, you don’t have to come up. If you want to wait in the car you can. I want to take a look around.”

  “Inside?”

  “Yeah, inside. If what I read was right, there must be some evidence in the house. If Ned was doing any kind of magic, there would have to be some signs of it, some implements or something. Do you want to stay in the car?”

  “Are you kidding? Stay here alone?” She bit at her lower lip. She hefted the flashlight in her hand and switched it on and off a few times. The beam made a pale circle on the glove compartment.

  “Don’t worry,” Bob said, “they’re brand new Ever-Readys.” He glanced once more up at the still house and said, “Come on.”

  They stood at the bottom of the driveway for a moment, silently surveying the gently sloping land, the house, and the towering ridge behind the house. Then they started trudging through the snow. The going was harder than Bob had expected, and before they were halfway to the house, they were both puffing for breath.

  “Looks spooky, doesn’t it?” Lisa said. “It almost looks like a ghost ship riding waves of snow.”

  “You wax poetical,” Bob replied, breathing rapidly.

  The sun was lower in the sky, and the slanting gold lighting brought out darkening purple shadows. The ridge loomed taller, darker, more threatening.

  “Bob,” Lisa said suddenly, surprising him. “Don’t you think we should go back? We shouldn’t be out here. I mean, if there’s any investigation to be done, let Thurston do it.”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll just give him a call tomorrow and say his troubles are over, all he has to do is arrest Ned Simmons. He’s a werewolf. He’s the one who’s been killing all these people. They’d throw the net for sure, Lisa.”

  “Maybe you could approach it a little more rationally,” Lisa said defensively.

  “How can you be rational about something that’s so irrational?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said, looking down at her feet. “Maybe you could say that there are hippies or someone living out here and he ought to check it out. Anything. I just think we shouldn’t be out here.”

  “I’m going to have a look around,” Bob said firmly. He turned away from Lisa and continued walking toward the dark, silent house.

  One end of the porch had caved in from the weight of the snow. T
he floorboards creaked underfoot. Bob and Lisa stood at the door, looking nervously at each other. Wind whistled in the eaves, loosening snow that had accumulated there.

  “After you,” Bob said, in a deep, Boris Karloff voice. He swept his hand in a grand gesture toward the door.

  Lisa was not amused. “Let’s take the boards off the door first, OK?”

  “Sure,” Bob replied. He grabbed the No Trespassing sign that was nailed to the door and ripped it off.

  “Bob!”

  He shrugged and slid his gloved fingers under one of the rough planks. Grunting loudly, he gave it a quick tug. The board squeaked loudly as it began to give. Bob braced his foot on the side of the house and pulled again. The dried-out board suddenly snapped in half. Arms windmilling wildly, Bob fell backwards over the porch railing and landed flat on his back in the snowbank.

  “Bob!” Lisa screamed. “Are you all—” She stopped and smiled when she saw that he was laughing.

  “Jeeze, we’re off to a flying start,” he said, standing up and brushing himself off.

  He mounted the steps and started working on the boards again, this time more carefully. The rest of the boards pulled away easily. When he was finished, Bob looked at Lisa quickly and then reached for the doorknob. He was surprised to find it unlocked. Hinges complaining, the door swung slowly inward.

  “God! What a stench!” Lisa said, covering her face with her mittens.

  “You just can’t get good help these days,” Bob said, wrinkling his nose. He was smiling, but careful not to take a deep breath of the noxious air in the house. “It’ll air out soon enough and, besides, we’ll get used to it in a minute.”

  “You can get used to it,” Lisa said.

  Bob clicked on his flashlight and let the beam dance around in the hallway. After a moment, they both stepped inside.

  “The power’s off, no doubt,” Bob said, flicking a useless wall switch.

  “What could make this place smell so bad?” Lisa asked.

  “Just being closed up so long,” Bob said, walking further down the hallway. His light beam illuminated wafting cobwebs and flickering dust motes.

  When nothing unusual appeared in the hallway, Lisa seemed to relax. She snapped on her flashlight and began scanning the floor and walls.

  “You know, you haven’t really told me what we’re looking for,” she said. She was breathing shallowly through her mouth, and her voice sounded weak.

  Bob walked over to the living room door and leaned inside. The wall creaked from the pressure of his weight. His throat felt tight from the stale air, and he had trouble speaking. “Well, I told you that I’ve done a bit of reading about werewolves, lycanthropy. That book we got, the one burned at Julie’s house, wasn’t much good because half of it was burned.”

  “Oh,” Lisa broke in, “I forgot to tell you. I ordered a copy from the publisher for the library. It came a few days ago.”

  “Oh, good,” Bob replied. “Anyway, I read some other books and, well, if someone wants to turn into a werewolf, he—”

  “Or she, right? A woman can do it too?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. But the person has to have some magic implements. You know, potions and all that. As it turns out, most of the witches’ potions were organic hallucinogens. A lot of scholars think those old witches were just tripping their brains out. When they were flying, they were really just stoned.”

  “So what does this all have to do with your werewolf?” Lisa asked sharply.

  “Well, for becoming a werewolf, the primary drug potion used contained belladonna. Also, the person had to have a piece of wolf fur. Usually it was a belt that they wore while doing the ceremony.”

  “You think we’ll find one here? That Ned really is doing magic?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bob said. “You see, people could become werewolves either voluntarily or involuntarily. Now, if Ned was doing it on purpose, he would have to have something like that wolf pelt. The other thing I’m thinking is that Julie Sikes might have been doing it to Ned, that, for Ned, it was involuntary. In that case, what we’re looking for probably burned with Julie’s house. We probably won’t find anything here.”

  “Except maybe a warrant for breaking and entering,” Lisa said. She walked back to the front door and looked down at the car parked at the bottom of the driveway. The sun had set, but she could still see the wavering lines of tracks they had made through the snow.

  Bob snuffed and entered the living room. All of the furniture was covered with sheets. The chairs sat like hunchback ghosts in the gloom of evening. The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped at ten past ten. As Bob looked around, Lisa followed closely behind him.

  “You said that Ned hasn’t been seen around town for a month or so, huh?” Bob asked as he got down on his hands and knees and peered under the sofa.

  “At least,” Lisa said. “No one’s sure when they saw him last, but it was quite a while ago.”

  “Does Thurston think he was killed by the wild dog and just hasn’t been found yet?”

  “I guess so. After Ned had been missing for a week or so, they came out here and boarded the house up.”

  Bob stood up and wiped his hands on his pants legs. “You could start looking around too, you know.”

  “Sure.” Lisa walked over to the TV and pulled it away from the wall. She shined her light behind it but found nothing. She wasn’t even sure she’d know if she found anything important, but she kept looking.

  For a few minutes longer they poked around in the living room. Then, as if by unspoken agreement, they both went into the kitchen and continued their search. Suddenly, Lisa screamed. She heard a wild scrambling sound behind her. She spun around and trained her flashlight beam on the walls and floor but saw nothing. “Did you hear that?” she asked nervously.

  “Your scream? Yeah.”

  “No, I—” Again, the scratching sound came. This time she was ready for it, and she pinpointed it with her beam.

  “In the walls,” Bob said. “Probably just mice in the walls.”

  “Whew!” Lisa wiped her forehead and loosened her coat collar.

  In the kitchen, they looked behind everything: pulling the refrigerator away from the wall, looking inside the cupboards, shifting everything around. They even knocked on the walls in hopes of locating a hidden hollow place. They finally concluded that the kitchen would yield nothing.

  They were heading into the hallway when Bob suddenly slipped and fell. He landed on one knee and bumped his head against the counter. His flashlight clattered to the floor and went out as it rolled away.

  “Aww, shit!” he yelled, rubbing his head with one hand and his knee with the other.

  “You OK?” Lisa asked. The beam from her light hit his eyes, making them hurt.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I saw that before but stepped in it anyway.” He groped in the darkness for his flashlight and found it. He sighed with relief when he snapped it on and it worked.

  “What? What did you see?” Lisa asked.

  “That.” Bob pointed his light at a dark brown stain on the wooden floor. He touched it tentatively and found that it was sticky and had begun to molder.

  “Something spilled here,” he said, studying the brown ooze. “Probably from the stove.”

  “Look here,” Lisa said, training her beam a little to Bob’s right. There was another, deep, rust-colored stain on the floor.

  “Looks like dried blood to me,” Bob said.

  Lisa gasped softly, then said, “I think they reported that Ellie was found dead in the kitchen.”

  Bob snickered. “Well, you don’t find blood like this if someone dies of heart failure.”

  Bob got up slowly, keeping his light on the brick-red stain. “I just thought,” he said, stopping Lisa from heading down the hallway. “I didn’t check in the fireplace. A classic hiding place, as long as they didn’t use it.”

  “After you,” Lisa said.

  Bob went into the living room and, getting down on his hands and kne
es, peered up into the fireplace. The narrow flue was crusted with thick soot. It looked empty. Shifting into a better position, he held his flashlight with one hand and gingerly reached up behind the damper. He ran his hand along the edge, reaching as far down back as he could.

  “Hmmmm. Nothing. Wait a minute.” He grunted as he stretched up into the chimney. “I felt something.” He reached, then dropped back with a sigh. “Christ,” he muttered, rubbing his face with his soot-smeared hand. “That can work up a sweat. I don’t know how the hell Santa Claus does it!”

  He smiled and angled his body around to reach again.

  He was breathing rapidly as he shoved his arm up over the damper and grabbed for what he had felt. “It’s furry, all right,” he grunted. “Just a little bit—Got it!” His fingers closed on the bundle of fur.

  He withdrew his hand slowly so he wouldn’t scrape it on the corroding damper. A shower of soot rained onto his face as he pulled his hand out triumphantly and shined his flashlight on his find.

  Lisa screamed, and, in a quick reflex action, Bob tossed the object away. “Key-rist!” he shouted, looking down at the partially decomposed body of a large rat. He wanted to laugh at his surprise, but the way the dead rat’s eye absorbed the light like a chip of black marble made his stomach do a quick flip-flop.

  “Must have gotten caught up there,” he managed to say, once his pulse had slowed.

  “Sure as hell isn’t a pelt of wolf fur,” Lisa said grimly.

  “Let’s check the rest of the house.”

  .IV.

  Seavey and Thurston sat in the idling cruiser not speaking. The spotlight on the side of the car was fixed on the rear license plate of the car they had found parked at the bottom of the Simmons driveway. Thurston took a clipboard from the console and jotted down the plate number. “For later,” he said, not particularly to Seavey.

  “You’re sure it’s Wentworth’s car?” Seavey asked, furrowing his eyebrows.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Thurston snapped. He tapped his pen on the edge of the clipboard.