A Werewolf in Riverdale

by Caleb Roehrig

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Kevin Keller’s locker is next to mine,” Ronnie stated, “and Sheriff Keller was the first one on the scene when the groundskeeper called the police.” That silenced the room—enough that Archie could hear Jughead swallow audibly before Veronica continued. “He basically described it just like that. Apparently it was … really, really bad.”

  “They found bite marks on the body, and ‘inconclusive tracks’ on the ground in the cemetery.” Gleefully Reggie resumed the account. “It looks like he was chased by something—or someone—before they got him. The sheriff’s department doesn’t know if it was a man, or an animal, or both together, but get this …” He paused for effect. “They’re calling the killer the Riverdale Ripper.”

  The girl called Maria started to sob, and Jughead looked like he might be on the verge of passing out again, but it was Betty who shoved herself up from the table, so quickly she knocked over the napkin dispenser. Her face white and her hands clenched into trembling fists, she stammered, “I-I’m sorry, I … I just … I have to go.”

  Whirling around, and slipping past a startled Pop Tate, she raced for the door and vanished into the parking lot outside.

  A half block from the Chock’Lit Shoppe, Betty Cooper’s hands were still unsteadied by the chaotic interaction of nerves and grief … and dread. She struggled to make a call on her cell phone. When she finally managed the task, it rang only twice before the other party picked up.

  “Well, well, well,” a woman’s voice drawled, low and measured—and a little sarcastic. “I was wondering when I would finally hear from you.”

  Betty stopped walking, shut her eyes, and drew in a breath of crisp air. She couldn’t afford to sound upset. “Hello to you, too.”

  “I’d ask why you’re calling,” the woman went on, “but, then, I’ve seen the news.”

  “They’re saying it was a possible animal attack.”

  “They always do, don’t they?”

  Betty could picture the woman on the other end of the call now. Most likely, she was sitting in her office beneath the massive and detailed map of the Riverdale area she had hung on her wall. Bristling with thumbtacks, it showed the locations of reported “possible animal attacks,” all color coded by date to make chronological patterns easier to detect at a glance. A month ago, Betty had been standing in that office herself, helping to press a cluster of colored pins into the green area that marked a tragic campsite outside of town.

  Staring into the distance, watching dark birds swoop across a pale sky, Betty said, “This time it was someone I knew.”

  “Well. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The woman’s tone was gentle, and it made Betty frown. “Stop pretending like you aren’t mad at me.”

  “Why would I be mad at you, sweetie?” The woman’s voice had smoothed into a soft, lilting purr.

  “Because you told me this was going to happen!” Betty finally exclaimed, a mouse tired of being toyed with by the cat that had it cornered. “When those campers died … you told me it was just the beginning, and I didn’t want to believe it. And now a friend of mine is dead, and it’s my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” the woman relented with a heavy sigh. “This is the fault of the beast that killed Dilton Doiley—the same one that killed those poor folks in the woods last month—and no one else. Now, don’t get me wrong,” she hastened to add, “I’m glad you feel guilty. Guilt is a great motivator, and it’ll take you a long way toward making sure you’re prepared for the next time. Because, Elizabeth? You know there’s going to be a next time.”

  “I do.” Betty nodded. Freshman year, she and Dilton had been lab partners. She’d always been one of the smarter kids in class, but he was an actual genius—and yet he’d been truly humble about it, and grateful for someone who got his terrible puns. “Hey, Betty, do you know why you can’t trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Get it?” It was a joke so bad it circled back around to being funny somehow, and her vision swam a little. “I want to be ready. I won’t let this monster kill anyone else.”

  “Good girl.” The woman’s smile could be heard through the phone. “You know where I am, and you know you’re welcome any time.” She paused, letting significance gather before she made her next statement. “Things are going to get worse, Betty.”

  “I know,” Betty returned brusquely. With another look at the sky, she added, “I’ll come by after sundown. Just make sure you’re ready for me.”

  Without waiting for a snappy comeback, she ended the call. It was true what they said: better late than never. But from here on out, no matter what she did, it would always be too late for Dilton Doiley, and that was something she was going to have to make peace with, somehow. If she could.

  Shoving her phone back into her bag, Betty Cooper started up the street again at a determined pace, already thinking ahead about her plans for the evening.

  If she’d just looked back over her shoulder, she’d have seen that Archie had followed her out of the Chock’Lit Shoppe—that he’d been worried about her and had wanted to make sure she was okay. She’d have seen that he’d been standing just close enough on the sidewalk to have overheard her entire conversation, and that he was staring after her as she disappeared up the street, his brow creased in a shocked and suspicious frown.

  “You told me this was going to happen.” Who had Betty been speaking to? And what did she mean this was her fault? As the girl vanished from sight, a cold wind eddied around Archie’s feet, and he hunched his shoulders. Whatever was going on in Riverdale, if it involved his friends, he was determined to find out the truth.

  THE SECOND ARCHIE LEFT THE table, chasing after Betty, Jughead threw his backpack over his shoulders and made a hasty exit of his own. Pop Tate called out, but the door closed on his words, a cold breeze sweeping the sound away. Slipping around the corner of the building, Jughead dashed up the street in the opposite direction of his two friends, determined to leave all conversation related to Dilton’s death far behind him.

  His hands trembled and his stomach cramped as he broke into a sprint, as if he could outrun the images that plagued his memory—as if he could escape the ugliness that was presently carving out permanent grooves in his mind. “The guy’s head was ripped clean off his body …” “One of his feet was missing …” “They’re calling the killer the Riverdale Ripper.” That awful dream he’d had kept up with him, its horrors matching his pace step for step, refusing to let him get away.

  The sound of tearing flesh and cracking bones echoed in his ears with hideous clarity; the sight of Dilton’s bloodied face flashed before him—the boy’s mouth yawning open in an endless, silent scream. It was enough to bring Jughead to his knees in the middle of the sidewalk, his stomach heaving as a string of dark green bile poured out between his lips.

  It was just a dream. Of course it was just a dream. A completely terrifying, gut-wrenchingly vivid, and disturbingly coincidental one, maybe—but still, a dream. That’s all it could be, and it was the only explanation he could allow himself to consider.

  Unless it turned out he was having a psychotic break?

  The thought made Jughead shiver. A cold sweat filmed his forehead, and he frantically scrubbed his face with the sleeve of his jacket. No, that wasn’t possible—there was no history of that kind of mental illness in his family. He was being ridiculous. It was just a dream.

  Jughead needed to get it together. His head spun as he spat foul, acrid slime onto the pavement, sucking in mouthfuls of fresh, damp air to cover the revolting taste.

  Or maybe he was psychic. He’d never really believed in that kind of thing before, but it would explain everything, wouldn’t it? Last night, as Dilton’s final moments played out in a graveyard less than a quarter mile from his bedroom, Jughead had somehow channeled them through his subconscious mind. Right? It made sense. Sort of.

  His legs were rubbery as he stood back up, his head pounding, and the world tilted and sp
arkled while he regained his equilibrium. The fact was, Jughead knew he definitely needed to eat something, but his stomach had been replaced by a lead weight that was almost too heavy to carry. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, gulping down another breath of fresh air, he started for home again—the long way, this time.

  But the long way wasn’t much better. To get home without passing the cemetery, Jughead was going to have to walk through the second creepiest part of town: the old lumber district. About a hundred years earlier, Riverdale had been one of a dozen cities in the region with a thriving lumber industry. Trees were harvested from the dense forests that climbed the endless hills, the local mills processing cedar, oak, pine, and maple, and storing the resulting timber in vast yards that anchored the west end of town. Hundreds made their livelihoods from the business of wood—thousands, if you counted the haulers and speculators, the builders who put up homes for the workers and warehouses for the entrepreneurs.

  The economy had changed drastically over the past century, however, and almost all the mills had long since been closed, the structures demolished or left to rot on their foundations. Riverdale’s west end was practically a ghost town these days, the lumberyards and warehouses abandoned, given over to the dominion of rats and raccoons.

  Out of the ghost-filled frying pan and into the rat-infested fire.

  In this neighborhood, the streets were wide and the sidewalks narrow, a purpose-built feature designed for the convenience of the truckers and flatbed drivers, whose vehicles were forced to perform a terrifying square dance every time they pulled in or out of the yards’ entrances. So the chilly wind had plenty of room to build up strength as it hurtled over the pavement, shaking damaged fences of chain link, tossing garbage at Jughead’s feet, and nearly blowing the hat off his head.

  It was bracing, though, and felt good against his overheated face. He hated this part of town almost as much as he hated the graveyard—the raccoons could become viciously territorial when they had babies to protect, and the rats were … well, they were rats, and they were filled with actual, very gross diseases—but at least the area was quiet. For the first time since he’d arrived at school that morning, Jughead was alone with his thoughts, and he could finally stop pretending that he wasn’t freaking out.

  Dragging his hand along a length of fencing, the metal mesh clattering rhythmically, he told himself to be rational. If his dream had really been second sight, what did that mean? Did he have a responsibility to tell someone? In the movies, if a guy had psychic visions of a murder, it almost always got him into trouble. He’d tell people, and no one would believe him—except for the killer, naturally, who would hear about it somehow and then drop by the guy’s house with an ax or a chain saw to make sure he couldn’t convince anyone he wasn’t nuts after all.

  Or if the guy with the visions tried to ignore what he was seeing, the dreams wouldn’t leave him alone. He’d just keep having them, more and more frequently, until finally one of them revealed a vital clue that would point to the killer’s identity. The problem was, Jughead realized as he reached the end of the chain link—a cold, greasy lump sticking in his throat—everything he could remember from his dream he had seen from the killer’s point of view.

  And despite the scrubbing he’d given his hands over the sink after he’d woken up that morning, there were still dark half-moons of inexplicable dirt trapped under his fingernails. At least, he hoped it was dirt. When he held his hands up to the light, the stuff almost looked like dried blood …

  A sudden rattling noise from behind him brought him up short, and Jughead spun around on his heel—but the street was still completely empty. Almost disquietingly so. He waited for the sound to come again, for something to happen that would reassure him it was just the wind or one of the creepy animals that made their homes in the empty warehouses … but aside from the faint whistle of air cutting through the diamond lattice of chain link, he heard nothing.

  It occurred to him then, finally, that the neighborhood wasn’t just deserted of people; he hadn’t seen a single living thing at all since he’d left the Chock’Lit Shoppe. Aside from the usual vermin, this part of town was typically crawling with stray cats that feasted on the rodents and birds that fed off the ants and other insects. But as he stood there waiting pointlessly for the noise to repeat itself, his throat bobbing up and down as that lump refused to budge, Jughead realized that the only living thing around was him.

  The emptiness was unsettling—just one more part of this terrible day that felt all out of place—and somehow it brought a cold, clammy sweat to his neck. Suddenly, what he wanted most in the world was to be at home again, to have all of this behind him so he could maybe start the day over. Forcing that lump down his throat at last, Jughead turned back around … and ran right into a tall figure that stood directly in his path.

  Letting out a shriek, Jughead lurched away, nearly losing his balance; when the figure started to laugh, the boy blinked hard, his heart beating so fiercely that his vision pulsed with bright veins of light. The person laughing at him was someone he knew. “B-Bingo?”

  “Oh, man, you oughta see your face!” Standing before him, where a moment ago there had been no one at all, was Jughead’s cousin Bingo Wilkin. “In fact, hold on—let me get my phone and I’ll take a picture.”

  As Jughead caught his breath, he considered—and not for the first time—how hard it was to believe that he and his cousin shared actual DNA. From his clothes to his hair to his personal life, everything seemed to come easy for Bingo. He was popular and athletic, he sang and played guitar in a band (called The Bingoes, the narcissist), and even when he screwed up, people couldn’t wait to give him another chance. By contrast, Jughead had always been the Weird Kid, the gawky outcast whose language no one spoke and few had ever cared to learn. The universe was maddeningly unfair.

  Still laughing, Bingo started digging into his pockets, and a scowl creased Jughead’s face. Slamming a bony fist against his cousin’s shoulder, he exclaimed, “What the hell is wrong with you, man? You almost gave me a heart attack!”

  “Whoa, chill out, okay?” Bingo stepped back, holding out his hands like a hostage negotiator dealing with an unstable bank robber. “I’m sorry I scared you! I thought you could take a joke.”

  It wasn’t a joke, Jughead wanted to spit back. A joke is when you say something funny in order to make people laugh; messing with somebody else in order to amuse yourself at their expense is a prank. A lifetime of being Riverdale’s signature oddball made Jughead intimately familiar with the distinction, and he was sick of people pretending that the second one was as harmless as the first. “A friend of mine got killed last night, Bingo. I’m not exactly in a laughing mood, and jumping out of nowhere to scare me when there might be a homicidal maniac on the loose”—“They’re calling the killer the Riverdale Ripper”—“is not freaking cool!”

  “Okay, okay!” Bingo held his hands up higher, sighing theatrically and rolling his eyes. “I give up, all right? Like I said, I’m sorry I scared you—I mean it.” Rolling his shoulders a little, he rubbed the back of his neck. “And, you know … I’m sorry about your friend, too. I heard them talking about it on the news today. Tough break, huh?”

  “Yeah, it sucks,” Jughead replied, jamming his own hands into his pockets and looking at the ground. Fear and confusion about Dilton’s death and that awful dream still paraded around his brain, crashing their cymbals together, and he was terrified that if he looked Bingo in the eye, the guy would know exactly what was going through his head. “What are you doing in Riverdale, anyway? Don’t you have school?”

  Bingo lived in Midville, one town over, where crime was arguably even lower than in Riverdale—especially just now—and where there were fewer rat-infested lumberyards and haunted, murdery cemeteries to drag down property values.

  “Teacher strike.” Bingo gave a foxlike grin, all his teeth showing as dimples formed in his cheeks. It was the kind of expression that belonged on the f
ace of a salesman or a con artist—and Jughead had a feeling that right now he was the mark.

  “Wow, lucky you,” Jughead grumbled.

  “Anyway,” Bingo slung an arm around Jughead’s shoulders and started walking with him down the sidewalk, “most of my friends decided to go to the lake today, but it’s, like, fifty degrees out, so I was all, ‘Screw that.’ Then I heard that school was canceled in Riverdale, too, and I figured I’d come see what my favorite cuz was up to!”

  Jughead was Bingo’s only cousin who lived within about a hundred miles, and the rest of the possible qualifiers for “favorite” were all five or under, but he decided not to bother pointing any of that out, either. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Are you kidding? I could smell you from home.” He thumped Jughead on the shoulder this time, but even though he smiled at his own joke, something strange flickered in his eyes. Then he laughed. “Just kidding—although you probably should wash your clothes more than once every six months, dude.”

  “Ha ha,” Jughead returned in monotone, wishing they could walk a little faster.

  “Actually, I figured you’d be at the Chock’Lit Shoppe with those kooky friends of yours, but I guess I just missed you.” A gust of wind ruffled Bingo’s hair, and he combed his fingers through it, taming it without any thought or effort. “The old guy who works there told me which way you went, and when I saw you walking all by yourself like a sad, pathetic loser, I decided to have some fun!”

  “Well, mission accomplished, I guess.”

  “So, the million-dollar question is: What awesome, fun stuff are we gonna do on our day off?” Bingo asked, his eyes lighting up with the promise of mischief.

  Jughead’s heart sank. As annoying as his cousin could be, he didn’t really hate the guy, but their respective ideas of “fun” rarely looked anything alike, and past experience proved that Bingo had the stronger will. If Jughead went along with him, they’d probably end up doing something dangerous and stupid—like the time they raced skateboards down an abandoned parking ramp and Jughead ended up having to get twelve stitches when he lost control and smashed into a cement post.