Grey Lore

by Jean Knight Pace

  Silver bullet shot from an antique gun.

  No teeth.

  Sam’s dad was sitting so close to the TV that every image that popped up reflected several times—on both lenses of his glasses and on his shiny, balding head. Sam’s dad reached up to wipe the sweat off his face and popped an Aleve into his mouth, no water, just a quick swallow.

  “Nice stuff, huh?” Sam said

  “I told you to go to bed,” his father replied.

  Sam didn’t listen.

  They were now showing a picture of the type of gun they thought the killer might have used. It was strangely delicate—white-handled, intricately engraved, pretty. And then a psychologist came on to discuss the potential motivations for such a crime.

  Sam was pretty sure his dad didn’t blink. Once his father opened his mouth like he was going to speak, but then closed it again—not so much as a snuff of air escaping.

  When Sam looked at his father again, he was touching his teeth, one by one, as if counting.

  It was nearly dawn, but there was too much to think about. His dad was obsessed with a serial killer, he hadn’t kissed Sarah, and Ella had been chased by some crazy drug-head.

  Sam watched the full moon as it tilted down toward the horizon. His dad was right about one thing. When the moon was full, the world went insane.

  Sam had felt so good right after he’d helped Ella—all that adrenaline, or whatever it was. Now, it was gone. His head hurt like it had never hurt before and the moon seemed like a laser, sharp and searing. He lay down, pressing a pillow over his eyes.

  Outside, he heard the low rumble of thunder—a storm headed in their direction. Inside, he heard a small, close sound—breathing, and then a tiny meow.

  He moved the pillow just a bit and opened his eyes. The orange tabby sat at the end of his bed—a fat queen, her tail curled round her body. He closed his eyes again. He didn’t care how she’d gotten there or if the door had been left open. Someone could come try to steal something if they wanted. What were they going to take? The pork and beans?

  Again, the cat meowed—this time getting up, stretching her back, and then carefully padding up the bed toward Sam’s chest. She cuddled up against him like a baby, breathing and purring. It was surprisingly soothing, and Sam felt his own breath come in calmer, slower waves. When he slowed his breathing, the pulsing and light-headedness got better too.

  And then he heard the thunder again—still distant, but moving closer.

  “You hear that?” he asked the cat.

  “No, hun. No one hears that but you.”

  Sam bolted upright—migraine and all.

  The cat stood, looking at him with sleepy eyes that seemed to say she wasn’t happy at being shaken from her resting spot.

  “No one spoke,” he mumbled to himself, lying back down. “I just drifted into a dream.”

  The thunder rumbled again. He sat up, got off the bed, pulled the old blinds up. It was dark, but clear. Sam had always loved a fat, full moon, but tonight looking at it hurt his eyes.

  He stepped back, feeling dizzy, and when he did, it felt like he was stepping into a tornado—long and fierce. But it didn’t feel bad. In fact, it gave him a strange release. He felt stronger, bigger, calmer. His hands, when he held the ledge of the window seemed to have doubled in size.

  “Weird,” he said and when he did, his voice was low, grumbly.

  He couldn’t tell where the bed was, but he wanted to sit down—at least part of him did. The other half wanted to break through the window and eat.

  He moved back to where he thought the bed was and bumped it. Around his ankles, he became aware of something—soft, vibrating. The cat wove between his legs, purring, pressing. Again, his breathing slowed. He felt as though he shrank—the blood beating against his skull. He sank onto the bed and fell back.

  “It will pass,” he heard the voice purring beside him. “Just breathe and it will pass.”

  It was so soothing, he didn’t even care now that he was imagining the cat speaking. As long as she could calm him down, as long as she could shrink the blood vessels in his head. He breathed.

  And in his breathing he remembered something, something so long forgotten he wondered if it was a memory or just his imagination.

  “Lovely Luna Lunatic,” his mother’s voice said in his head. “Longed a lolly to take a lick. Instead she found a licorice stick. Lonely Luna Lunatic.”

  She’d told him silly poems at night. He’d been so young when she died—maybe three. But the migraine had tapped into his mind, squeezing out the memory. He could see her blond hair, dark eyes. She was beautiful.

  And then another memory jolted forward—his Granny Calhoun—alone in bed. She was in a room with monitors and drips. But she did not have Alzheimer’s. His father’s mother had gone insane.

  “Lovely Luna Lunatic,” a voice in his head murmured again—this time whispering, fading. It felt almost like an accusation, a prophecy. He burst out of bed and toward the window. He broke through the glass, tearing out the shards with hands that seemed too thick to bleed.

  The cat yowled behind him and he leapt through the window, toward the moon. As he did, the storm clouds rolled in—pressing out the stars, inking over the moon. The thunder clapped and Sam fell onto the cold dirt by his trailer as the freezing rain pelted his face and back.

  It felt good. His head and hands cooled, the migraine faded into the puddles at his feet, and he took a long, sure breath before standing.

  The window, he could see, was completely banged out. He walked around to the front door, which was locked. So he climbed back through the window and dropped to his floor, cutting his foot on a piece of glass. Exhaustion washed over him. He staggered into bed, and slept.

  In the morning, his room was freezing, his throat hurt, and his body ached. Also, his window was still broken. Awesome. Because of all the parts he wished he’d dreamed, that was number one. Sam paused. Had he dreamed? Or had he hallucinated? Had the migraine messed with his mind somehow? He shook his head, trying to toss the worry away.

  Strangely, he’d managed to break the window without a scratch to anything but his toe. Sam broke down an empty cardboard box and taped it over the bedroom window. Then he swept up the glass and went into the living room. His dad was already gone.

  Sam sat on the couch and closed his eyes. It seemed his dreams and his imagination were trying to stitch something together—something that wouldn’t make any sense unless he could see it as a whole. Which he couldn’t.

  Sam opened his eyes. He needed to find the picture with the inscription. He needed to put some parts together, recover some pieces of himself it seemed he’d lost.

  Chapter 27

  Ella scrolled through her phone, reading news stories about the silver shooting the week before. She was glad that this shooting had been farther away. Much farther. A fancy hotel in New York City where some rich CEO from Paris was staying. Definitely no connections to Indianapolis or Napper. But at the same time, that made it extra troubling. The shootings stretched from Los Angeles to New York. No connections between the victims except wealth, and even their wealth seemed oddly discordant—earned in entirely different ways. Ella swiped the screen closed and plugged her phone into the charger.

  She still hadn’t told Vivi about the corn maze. She hadn’t told anyone. Her aunt had been out of town the weekend it had happened, and by the time she got back, Ella felt like the story was stuck in her skin.

  The attack had been scary and bizarre, but probably just some druggy prank. Yet, she definitely would have told her mother. Ella sighed. Jack would be here in about five minutes, and she wondered if she should tell him. It seemed like someone should know.

  As soon as Jack came and Vivi left, Ella blurted out the whole story—the chase, the cut on her arm, Sam barging through the corn. It felt surprisingly good to talk about it.

  “Ella. Oh, wow,” Jack said, reaching out and touching her arm. “Are you okay? Let me see.”

  H
e lifted her arm, gently rolling up her sleeve so he could see the cut. For several seconds he examined the thick, raised line that tracked an inch and a half up her forearm.

  “Oh wow,” he kept whispering, touching the pink line in a soft way that made Ella feel like the entire night had been worth it. “Did you call the cops?”

  Ella hadn’t. The farmer had offered to, but looking out at the intricately mowed corn maze and the dogs he’d taken in, Ella hadn’t had the heart to call the police. What if they shut the maze down? What if it hurt his business? It wasn’t his fault there were strung-out sickos in this world.

  “Ella,” Jack said firmly. “You need to write up a police report. It’s dangerous to think of people like that roaming around and taking advantage of certain situations.”

  He must have seen the set in Ella’s face because he said more softly, “Look, I know you don’t want to hurt the farm, but the maze really is the perfect draw for drunks and perverts.”

  Ella had to admit that this seemed true. “Okay,” Ella said slowly. “I’ll think about it. But listen.” She paused. “You can’t tell Vivi. Or anyone. I told you this in confidence and there’s no present danger,” she said using a phrase she remembered from TV. “So you can’t tell her. Please.”

  Jack nodded. “I can’t make you call the cops. But you really should let the police know. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to anyone. Least of all you.”

  Ella lay in her bed that night thinking about what she might include in a police report if she did fill one out. And then she remembered something she’d forgotten. The voice. That strange voice telling her to look down to where she’d found the bullet. Who had it been? And why hadn’t he come and helped her?

  Granted, a guy in a werewolf suit had been brandishing a scalpel, but still—who sits back and lets a teenage girl get threatened like that, and then just vanishes. He hadn’t even called 911. And how had he known about the bullet and where it was?

  Maybe he’d been in on the prank somehow, and then regretted how far it was going. Maybe. She remembered being relieved to hear that voice, that there had been something almost familiar in it.

  As she drifted to sleep, Ella pictured Loco speaking those words, and in that place between sleep and waking, it seemed possible—even probable—that a dog under the full moon would call out to her.

  When Ella woke in the morning, she’d decided not to write up a police report. Her dreams of the dogs had been too sweet. She didn’t dare cut off some of the income to the farm that was their home.

  She’d decided something else too. Next week she would find out if there was a bus that ran all the way out to the farm. She had to know if Loco was there.

  Napper walked the neat trails of his property. Normally, the foliage along the trails was in perfect condition, but with the wolf population increasing, he could see the wear of having so many animals in such close proximity. Certain areas looked trampled, as though the wolves had been pacing them at night. And the wildlife that consisted of their prey was decreasing at an alarming rate. He’d had to order more hare and goats to be brought onto his land.

  In addition to more food, the wolves needed more space. He hoped that soon he would be able to give it to them. Napper hiked deeper into the dense woods of his land, and as he did, he spotted the group of Gevudan in the distance, chasing a young deer. Wolves were beautiful creatures—smart, organized, efficient. They were connected in packs that worked together to kill, that reproduced with order, creating offspring from only the strongest of their kind.

  In a wolf pack, each animal had jobs that they performed without complaint. Though occasionally, one would break away, fight for dominance. Or leave the pack, finding his own way and fending for himself until—if he proved strong enough—others would follow him, forming a new pack with the new wolf as their alpha.

  Napper respected that. Yet he also understood that these lone wolves could be a threat to the existing pack, sometimes encroaching on their territory, sometimes drawing wolves away from the pack, threatening their solidarity.

  The Rogue had long been a lone wolf—one of their kind, defiant, anonymous. Yet, thus far, unable to draw his own following.

  Each time Napper thought he knew who the Rogue was, that person wound up dead—hearts shot through, teeth torn out. As though the true Rogue knew his thoughts and was saying, “Nice guess, but try again,” before dancing out of view. It was a game well played, but Napper was tiring of it.

  He didn’t know if the one the humans called the Silver Shooter was the same as the Rogue or hired by the Rogue. Whatever the case, he knew that the Rogue was trying to lure him into the game, hoping he would attempt to stop the shootings.

  But Napper disliked the rules of others. He played his own game. And it had only one winner.

  Chapter 28

  For Halloween, Witten had let them watch the movie “The Wolf Man.” The ‘40s were weird, that’s all Sam had to say about it.

  Near the end of class, Mr. Witten asked, “So, what’d you think?”

  Most of the class groaned and Witten laughed. “Hokey or not,” he said, “this stuff is also part of the enormous body of wolf lore that our country enjoys. And there are certain elements that are almost always the same. Silver, for example. Werewolves don’t like it. They can be killed with silver bullets. Or, as you saw in this film, even silver staffs and silver stakes can be used against werewolves. Wolf-shifters and silver just don’t go together. Usually.”

  “What do you mean ‘usually,’” one of the girls asked.

  “I mean,” Witten said, “that in some very, very old lore, there are tales of certain werewolves who couldn’t be harmed by silver. Werewolves who were strengthened or even healed by it. But that part of the mythology has been eradicated in pop culture.”

  Sam had stopped listening and was staring at Sarah, watching her scribble drawings into her notebook. He hadn’t talked to her much since last week at the corn maze—a nod hello or maybe a question about homework. After that Sam never quite knew what to say.

  As the weekend neared, Sam found himself even more frozen. How did you go about inviting a girl to spend time with you? Sam had no idea.

  At the end of the day, Sam hurried to his locker, grabbed his books, and then circled back through the hall.

  Sarah stood by her locker, slowly stacking up books.

  “Hey,” Sam said, walking past.

  “Hey,” she said, turning to him.

  He cleared his throat. She just looked at him, bright-eyed, waiting. But his mind was blank. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you Monday I guess.”

  She looked back into her locker. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Sam walked home slower than he’d ever walked home before. It was Halloween night and a few little kids were already out in costumes, walking with their parents, holding pillow cases and plastic pumpkins, winding their way through the trailer park.

  Sam unlocked his front door, dropped his backpack on his bed, and walked back outside. He just wanted to be alone in a world that was bigger than he was dumb. But he wasn’t sure that was possible.

  A tiny princess wandered past him, the train of her dress dragging the ground. “Trick or treat,” she sang at the woman who opened the door.

  Sam remembered how Sarah had looked the weekend before when he’d left her car—her eyes leaning in though her body had stayed still. He wanted to forget that he hadn’t kissed her. He’d wanted to kiss her more than anything. But he was sixteen and he didn’t know how. Where did your arms go? How did your lips go? He suspected that Sarah knew all these things and that made it worse.

  Truth be told, Sam hadn’t been kissed by anyone for years—no grandmother or mother or portly aunts. Nobody. His dad gave him his best; for physical affection that meant an awkward pat sometimes.

  And that is what Sam had ended up opting for with Sarah. He’d patted her hand and watched her eyes pull away from him. He wanted to forget that too. And now, after this afternoon, he was
pretty sure she never wanted to talk to him again.

  He walked to the end of his street, right up to the gate by The Property and kicked it. He heard a click and it swung open. Just like that.

  Sam pinched his arm. It hurt.

  He stepped through the gate and walked up the path. It felt good to be swallowed into the preserve, the leaves of the trees changing and falling; it opened his mind.

  Next time, if he got a next time, he would ask her if she wanted to hang out. And next time, if he got a next time, he would kiss her, no matter how badly. At least if she ignored him after that, he’d know he’d given it a shot.

  When he looked up, he found that he’d walked straight up to Zinnie’s house. The door was open, the fire lit.

  “Hello, Sammy,” the old voice said.

  Sam had trouble finding his own voice. He pinched his arm again. Harder. It still hurt.

  “You were gone,” was all he could say.

  “It happens sometimes,” she said. “More and more lately. With these awful wolves about.”

  Sam had forgotten all about the wolves. He’d just walked through a wolf-infested wood and not given them the tiniest thought.

  “Have a gingerbread,” Zinnie said. “They’re fresh.”

  They were the most elaborate gingerbread men Sam had ever seen—candy buttons, peppermint clothes, licorice eyes. And they were delicious. At least Zinnie’s Alzheimer’s hadn’t spread to her baked goods yet.

  The empty house kind of made sense now. Zinnie’s family or someone must come and find her here and take her away—things and all. And then she’d come back.