It wasn’t moving . . . yet.
I spun, staring across the room.
The thing that stood in the corner wasn’t a mummy.
But it was Charlie Steiner.
All trace of the Hollywood monster was long gone. No costume, no bandages, no Lon Chaney, Jr. frightface. Charlie wasn’t a rampaging mountain of cobwebs anymore. No. He was just a thing that had lain in a leaking plywood box for ten long years. Shrunken and black. Desiccated and degraded. His corpse had rotted in the wet earth, then dried and baked in the heat of summer, then rotted some more when the next rains came. It had been like that month after month and year after year as the seasons ran their circles and ran them again, until all that was left of him was bone and gristle and the black jerky that held it all together . . . along with a little bit of a very old dream.
What remained couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. Charlie stood in that corner, looking more like a giant marionette than anything human, a pile of tottering bone. Empty-eyed, he stared across the room at me, death’s eternal grin on his skinless face.
I expected him to collapse if he moved so much as an inch.
But he didn’t.
He still knew what he wanted.
He still knew what he needed.
He came after it, faster than I ever could have expected. He skittered across the room like a giant insect, and his bones clicked against the hardwood floor, percussion for a nightmare dance. His arm came up just as I raised the .38, and as I turned to face him I thought that arm had become thicker and whiter as it descended toward me.
But the thing I saw wasn’t Charlie’s arm at all.
It was Roger’s Louisville Slugger, and it came at me in a white-ash blur.
The bat slammed my wrist, and I lost the pistol. Charlie’s jaw clacked open and closed, and the sound was castanet laughter as he whirled and slammed the Slugger against my skull. Next thing I knew I was on the floor, and as I rolled away the bat came down on the meat above my collarbone.
That burst of pain hard-wired me.
The pistol was right there, by my other hand.
I snatched it up. Charlie stood above me, Roger’s bat raised over his head with both skeletal hands. He opened his mouth, and I swear I actually heard him take a breath. Blood bubbled over his black teeth, and he started to say something, the way he always did in my dreams.
“No,” I said. “This time you don’t say a word.”
Six times I pulled the trigger. And I thought of Roger, and a missing little girl, and a woman who was down the hall.
And Charlie Steiner fell. His bones clattered to the floor. The lights started to flicker, and then the room started to spin. A black hole opened up in the middle of it, and I remembered the mummy’s cobwebbed mouth opening all those years ago at Butcher’s Lake, and I remembered his buzz-saw scream.
But there was no scream this night. There was only chanting. There on the ground, with gunfire echoing in my skull, I know I heard it. Distant. Indistinct . . . as if it came from a place far below or far above. And then I started to fade and the lights went out, and the black hole went away, and the moon seemed to hang above me in the darkness. It shone on me and the dead thing at my feet like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And there was no way to fight it, not when the moon shone down and that black hole returned at my feet. Charlie’s wrecking-ball fist had already crumbled, and I was slipping into unconsciousness, and everything was suddenly slipping away except for me and the whisper of my own breath.
Wherever I went next, I didn’t hear anything.
It was a quiet place, and empty, and I was alone there.
I awoke the next morning, and I was alone still.
The Louisville Slugger lay there on the floor. My pistol was next to it. But Charlie was gone. The only trace of him was a set of scratches that started in the far corner of the living room and ended at the front door. Looking down at them, I remembered the clicking percussion of his bony feet as he came after me the night before.
I searched the house for Ana, but she was gone, too. All that was left was a beat-up Corolla parked in my driveway, and a princess costume on the bedroom floor—a gown that smelled of Ana’s vanilla perfume. I went down to Butcher’s Lake, hoping I’d find her there. I drove to her apartment, and then I went to The Double Shot, but by then I knew she wouldn’t be there . . . or anywhere.
I kept it to myself for a few days, hoping the phone would ring, hoping it would be Ana. But the phone didn’t ring. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call Ben Cross. He came over to the house, and I told him the whole story. God knows what he thought of it. But after I finished, Ben asked me to get in the car and we went for a little drive.
To Potter’s Field.
To Charlie Steiner’s unmarked grave.
“We thought it was kids who did it,” Ben said staring down at the open hole and the broken box at the bottom. “You know—Halloween night, taking a dare to buck the town legend. We expected we’d find Charlie’s bones hanging in a tree somewhere. But after what you’ve told me, I’m not so sure.”
Ben kept the story out of the paper. That was fine with almost everyone. The town fathers didn’t want any more tabloid reporters sniffing around. The next day, a county work crew used a backhoe and filled in Charlie’s grave. They tamped down the earth and rolled a couple strips of fresh grass over the top of it. Next thing you knew, Charlie’s unmarked plot looked like it had never been disturbed at all.
Ben didn’t really want me in the Steiner place anymore, but we worked it out. I had nowhere else to go. Now it’s my home. More than anything, it was the place I’d been with Ana. That’s what I wanted to remember about the house by Butcher’s Lake, and that’s why I stay there.
As for Butcher’s, I still go down there. Not often, but often enough. Usually at sunset. Sometimes I’ll take a bottle of wine and walk along the shore. One night the wind was up, blowing through the eucalyptus, making the cattails dance. It was almost dark. And I thought I saw someone down near the water, staring at me from a gap in the cattails.
I hurried to the spot.
Someone was there. In the cattails, watching me.
I moved closer.
My hand reached out.
It was a Halloween mask. A little princess with black hair and red lips. The mask was hung up in the cattails. I didn’t want to think about how it might have gotten there. I really didn’t need any false hope. But I took the mask home with me, and I put it on the mantelpiece right next to the plastic tiara Ana had worn that Halloween night.
Of course, I didn’t tell anyone about it.
No one, except Ben.
“Maybe she’ll come back,” he said. “She was a dream, that one. I guess she really was.”
I don’t know anymore. I really don’t.
Like I said, I don’t like dreams. I don’t trust them.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.
I have them, still.
Norman Partridge’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story,” according to Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novel Dark Harvest was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best one hundred books of 2006, and two short-story collections were published in 2010—Lesser Demons from Subterranean Press and Johnny Halloween from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. His work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.
UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF
Carrie Vaughn
October 31, 1944
The boy, Fritz, had only a few hours to assassinate the collaborator.
He had completed the first part of the mission the night before, crossing over enemy lines into occupied territory. This was the easy part; he’d done it a dozen times before. But this time, he carried a gun in his pack, not t
he messages and supplies he’d couriered previously.
As usual on these journeys, he awoke in the morning, safe in a copse of autumn shrubs he’d found to hide in, hidden by fallen leaves and tangled branches. He was naked, but he was used to that. After giving himself a moment to recall where he was, to reacquaint himself with his human limbs, his grasping fingers instead of ripping claws, he untangled himself from his pack, looped around his shoulders so it wouldn’t slip off when he was wolf. Inside, he found a canteen of water, a day’s rations, and common workmen’s clothes and boots so he could travel unnoticed. And the gun.
Dressed and armed, he set off. He’d memorized the maps and the description of his target. The village had been occupied by Allied forces for several weeks, and the woman, Maria Lang, a nurse, had not only surrendered to enemy forces, she had been assisting in administration of the village, supplying the American soldiers with aid and information. The village might or might not be recaptured in coming battles, that wasn’t his concern. Right now, the woman must be punished. Executed.
Not murdered, they told him. Executed.
He balked, when they told her his target was a woman. That did not matter, his superiors in his SS unit told him. She was a collaborator. A traitor, not worthy of mercy. And Fritz was seventeen now, ready for such an important mission. He ought to be more than a letter carrier. And so here he was, trekking across abandoned farmland toward the edge of a wooded stretch where the collaborator’s cabin was said to stand, using his preternatural sense of smell to detect the scent of treachery.
A wolf could cross enemy lines when a man in a uniform could not. When even a man in disguise could not. A wolf traveling in a forest did not draw suspicions. And a wolf could be trained to follow a certain route, certain procedures. To return to a certain spot on schedule. A wolf was wild, but the man inside the werewolf could learn.
Fritz had been a shepherd boy, like in one of the old fairy tales, tending sheep in pastures at the edge of a Bavarian forest. Still living the old ways, with the old fears. Then, he cried wolf, and no one heard him.
He survived the attack, and the bite marks and gashes on his legs healed by morning, and everyone knew what that meant. He knew what to do, and on the next full moon he spent several nights in the woods alone. Howled to the sky for the first time. When he returned, friends and family said nothing about it, did not ask him what he felt or what he’d experienced. He learned to live with the monster, but he no longer looked after his family’s sheep.
The war came, and he was too young to be recruited as a proper soldier, but a man from the SS found him. Said he was forming a special unit, and that he’d heard rumors about these forests. About the shepherd boy who no longer looked after sheep. Colonel Skorzeny had a job for him, and you did not tell men like that no, so Fritz went with him.
His new home, a compound fenced in with razor wire—steel edged with silver, he was told—had normal barracks and storage buildings and such. There were also cages, for those who had not volunteered, or who had changed their minds. The soldiers carried knives and bayonets laced with silver. Silver bullets loaded their guns. A mere knick from one of those blades, a graze from one of those bullets, would kill him. Fritz did as he was told.
Fritz had never met another werewolf before joining Skorzeny’s special unit. The SS colonel had found a dozen of them across Germany, and he made more, finding soldiers who volunteered to be bitten, and a few who didn’t. Fritz was the youngest, and his instinct was to cower, to imagine a tail folding tight between his legs, to lower his gaze and slouch before the older, fiercer werewolf soldiers. Skorzeny would shout at him for weakness because he didn’t understand, but the others recognized the gestures of a frightened puppy. Some looked after him as an older wolf in a pack would. Some took advantage and bullied.
Fritz was a monster from a fairy tale. He shouldn’t be afraid of anything. What, then, did that say about the SS soldiers he cowered before? Who were the greater monsters? He told himself he deferred to them because he was loyal to the Fatherland, because he fought for the Führer, because he believed. But when he returned from a mission in the pre-dawn gray, lying naked at a rendezvous point as soldiers waited to escort him back to the barracks and the silver razorwire, he knew the truth: he was afraid. Even him, near invulnerable, a monstrous creature haunting dark stories, was afraid. This was the world he lived in.
Tonight was the full moon. He had two choices: to stay human and shoot the woman before night fell. Or to wait until the light of the moon transformed him, and let his wolf do the work with teeth and claws.
In the forest some miles outside Aachen, he did not trust his wolf to do what needed to be done. The wolf worked on instinct, on gut feeling, and in the end Fritz could not tell his wolf what to do, especially on a full moon night. He had tried to argue with the colonel, who wasn’t a wolf and didn’t understand. But the colonel said this mission must happen now, and must be completed tonight. The Allies were gaining ground and a message needed to be sent to other would-be collaborators, that death awaited them.
So Fritz went. He would have to complete the mission, not his wolf, because he suspected his wolf would follow his instinct and run to safety. Away from Germany. He and his wolf had been having this argument for months, now.
He found the house; it wasn’t hard. As the description said, it stood alone, isolated, and the woman lived by herself. She walked to the village several times a week, but she rarely had visitors. The place seemed oddly comforting: an old-fashioned white-washed cottage with a thatched roof, a garden plot that still had a few odd remnants left over from the fall harvest, a well lined with stones and a wooden bucket beside it. He circled the place, smelling carefully, and only smelled a woman, Maria Lang. And she was at home.
He camouflaged himself behind a tree on a small rise some hundred yards away and watched for the next hour until she opened the front door. He had good vision, a wolf’s vision, and even from the hilltop he could see his target. Standing on the threshold of her doorway, she wrapped a woven shawl more tightly over her shoulders and looked out. Not searching for anything in particular, not bent toward any chore. Just looking.
When her gaze crossed the hill, her eyes seemed to meet his, and he started.
Smiling before she ducked her face, she went back inside and closed the door. She had seen him—or she had not. If she had, perhaps she believed he wasn’t a danger. Some hunter lost in the woods. A boy from the village.
If she did not believe he was a danger, he could simply knock and shoot her when she opened the door. In loyal service to the Fatherland. Keeping low, moving quickly, he made his way toward the cottage.
He could not explain the feeling of dread that overcame him as he left the shelter of the trees and approached the clearing where the garden plot and semi-tamed brambles spread out. The setting still appeared idyllic. A curl of smoke rose from the leaning stone chimney, indicating warmth and comfort inside. These were like the cottages at home. This should be easy. But he took a step, and he could not raise his foot again. As if the ground had frozen, and his boots had stuck to the ice. As if his bones had turned to iron, too heavy to shift. The cottage before him suddenly seemed miles away. The sky grew overcast, shrouded with clouds, and a wind began to murmur through the trees.
His wolf scented magic and told him to run.
The memory of Colonel Skorzeny and his silver bayonet urged him on, and Fritz forced another step. Forward, not away. Only a few steps, a knock on the door, and he could finish this. The gun was already in his hand.
Next came the voices, a scratch-throated chattering descending over him like a fog and rattling his ribs. He put his hands over his ears to cut out the noise, and looked up to see ravens. Glint-eyed, black, wings outstretched and blurred as they flapped over him, and their nearly-human croaking seemed to call, away, away, away. They banked and swooped and tittered, brushing his hair with wingtips before dodging away. He snapped at them, teeth clicking together, and swat
ted with fingers curled like claws. Wolf would make short work of them. But he had vowed to stay human. The gun sat coldly in his hand.
He ignored the ravens, which settled in surrounding trees and cawed their commentary at him. They smelled like dust and spiders.
He shifted a leg to take another impossible step, but again he could not move. Vines had come, thorny brambles reaching from the solid hedge to take hold of him, to dig into the fabric of his trousers, and under his skin. The pain pricks of a thousand little needles. A growl caught in the back of his throat. A threat, a show of anger. Wolf, wanting to rise up. Wolf could escape this, if the human was too stupid to.
Teeth bared, Fritz jerked his leg forward, then the next. His trousers ripped, as did his skin. Blood trickled down his legs. Still the brambles climbed, reaching for his middle, grasping for his arms, pulling him away from the cottage. He twisted, lunging one way and another, hoping to break away, and it worked. Vines ripped, he progressed another foot or two, and his momentum carried him full around—and when he faced away from the cottage, the brambles vanished.
For a long time he stood and looked across the clearing to the straight pines of the forest, all quiet, all peaceful. He could move freely—as long as he moved away from the cottage. It was all illusion. His breath caught.
He really had no choice about what path to choose. He could not fail in his mission. He could not take the coward’s route. But when he turned back to the cottage, the brambles returned, the battle resumed. His wolf’s strength let him fight on when a normal person would have been overwhelmed, succumbing to the blood and pain of the thorny wall. He wrenched, pushed, twisted, and growled, until the last strand of vine broke away, and he was through, close enough to the cottage to touch.
His wolf’s agility meant he sensed the ground give way a moment before it did. A hole opened—no, a trench, or a moat even. A cleft in the earth, circling the cottage, splitting open and falling to darkness. Fritz sprang back, balanced as if on a wolf’s sure paws, to keep from falling backward into the vines, or forward into the pit. His toes pushed a stone and few bits of brown earth forward, and the pieces rattled down the sides to some unseen bottom.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 8