“He would do it because he’s crazy, Wes,” Nick said. “That’s why. I don’t think conventional sense is part of this guy’s repertoire.”
“It definitely is that,” Wes said. “Like rabid-crazy. It’s smart though. It is. The way it stood there on the porch… I could feel it listening to me and I knew… I knew it was amused by what was happening. How sick is that? But you know what else?”
“What’s that?” Nick asked as he went down the hall to the bathroom in search of some ibuprofen.
“Werewolves don’t behave that way,” Wes said.
Nick rolled his eyes but made an mhmm sound. Again: there was no point arguing with Wes about it, but the more he thought on it, the more he thought a mask or suit of some kind might be a part of the M.O. It would also make it easier to wield whatever it was he used to claw and bite with if the attachments were rigged to the suit somehow. It was all a little too complex for Nick to work out right then, but he’d never been stupid and he hoped if he thought about it more then he’d figure it out. In high school Nick’s teachers had always talked about what a bright boy he was, but he was so unmotivated. If Nicholas would only apply himself he could be a straight A student.
Nick hoped more than anything that he still had enough brain cells, enough of that bright boy left to figure this shit out.
“Nick, are you still there?”
“Hmm? What?” Nick said. He was staring into his open medicine cabinet though he didn’t remember opening it.
“I’ve been talking to you for the last couple of minutes and you haven’t said anything,” Wes said.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “I was thinking. What did I miss?”
“I said that werewolves don’t behave that way,” Wes said.
“I heard that part,” Nick said as he took down the bottle of ibuprofen and shook it. “What else?”
“Oh,” Wes said. “I also said that the movies and folklore—well, most folklore—got it wrong I think. Which makes sense because lycanthropy doesn’t translate to ‘slavering beast baying at the moon’. Nuh-uh. You know what it means?”
“Can’t say that I do,” Nick said. He shook out two pills then reconsidered and shook out two more.
“It’s derived from modern Latin lycanthropia, which is in turn derived from the Greek word lukanthrōpia. That word is from lukos, meaning ‘wolf’ and anthrōpos, meaning ‘man’. So, in summation, wolf-man. Man, Nick. Man. Do you get it?”
“It means that wolves don’t act that way, but men do?” Nick guessed.
“Yes!” Wes crowed into the phone. “It’s just awful, isn’t it? But fascinating. It makes more sense than mindless, bloodthirsty monsters roaming the countryside though, huh? I must say, however, that this monster is bloodthirsty. It sure seems to think like a man though. A really bad man. And see, wolves don’t kill for sport. Humans kill for sport. Dear lord.”
The excitement faded from Wes’s voice the more he talked. Nick could practically feel him reliving the night he had been nearly murdered. Such thoughts could certainly put a damper on things—like formulating a new theory on werewolf behavior based on the etymology of a compound word. Wes made a soft whimpering sound in his ear and Nick frowned.
“Hey, you’re okay,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean to get you stirred up.”
“I still have bad dreams,” Wes said. “All the time. I don’t feel like I’ve slept since it happened. I try to be upbeat and optimistic, but sometimes even when I’m awake I close my eyes and see its face. Its gosh-darned face. It was, God, Nick, it was so big; all of it. It filled up everything and blocked out the sky and I just knew it was going to be the last thing I ever saw. It was going to do something awful to me; it was going to hurt me really bad before it finally killed me. I saw its eyes and it is insane. Do you get that? That thing is insane and it’s a huge freaking monster and it could… You said… and you’re right. You are. It’s going to come back for me.”
“No, listen to me,” Nick said. He licked his lips. “No it won’t, not if you’re careful, all right?”
“But what if it does?” Wes said. His voice was shaking.
Nick hadn’t meant to scare him worse or upset him; he’d only meant to warn him and make Wes realize he needed to be careful. He should have thought of a better way, but it was too late now.
“How about I come over for a little while?” Nick asked. “I can keep you company.”
“I think I’d like that,” Wes said after a minute. “Maybe we can watch a movie.”
“Sure, we can do that,” Nick said. “And maybe after the movie, I can help you forget for a little while. How about that?”
“You don’t—”
“But I want to,” Nick said. It was true—he did want to and that was weird, too. One day though he and Wes were going to have a talk about Wes’s abominably low self-esteem because it was awful. Wes was cute, smart, well-off and an all around decent guy; there was no reason for him to feel like that about himself.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “We can play rodeo since your back still bothers you.”
“What’s rodeo?” Wes sounded curious and amused.
“You’re the cowboy and I’m the bull,” Nick said.
Wes mused on that for a moment then laughed. “Oh,” he said. “Okay, I think I can do that. Do I need a red flag?”
Nick thought about Wes’s shiny new red truck again and said, “Nah, just make sure you wear your spurs. I’d hate to buck you off.”
Wes laughed. “Wow, well. That sounds like a lot of fun.”
“It will be,” Nick said.
“I’ll cook something… you know… after,” Wes said. “Cowboying is hard work.”
“See you in a little while, sugar,” Nick said.
“Bye-bye,” Wes said.
Nick hung up and finally took his ibuprofen with another swallow of beer. He was a little tipsy, but nowhere close to shit-faced. He could drive fine.
On his way out of the house, he stopped to grab two more beers to drink on his way. It was the bad habits of Old Nick resurfacing, but one slip did not mean the end to everything either. He pushed away the twinge of guilt he felt and the worry about being caught as he fished his truck keys out of his jeans pocket and headed for the door.
He clumped down the doorsteps and walked to the truck, keys jangling in his hand as he tried to balance the two cans of beer. Nick set them on the roof of the truck while he unlocked and opened the door. He’d just closed his fingers around one cold, wet can when a twig snapped somewhere close by in the woods behind him with a sound like the crack of a .22 rifle. Nick jumped and turned around, staring into the thickly shadowed forest. He saw and heard nothing; once he was really paying attention, he realized he didn’t even hear the chirp of early evening crickets.
Nick swallowed, grabbed his beers and got in the truck, slamming and locking the door. For another moment, he sat there, staring out the window. The hairs on the back of his neck crawled and after a second his skin joined in until he felt like there were cold insects creeping all over his flesh. He cranked the truck and threw it in reverse, backing away far too quickly. He had the overpowering urge to get out of there right goddamn now and he obeyed. Nick saw nothing, but there was something watching him and he knew it. Something—someone—that meant him no good will.
Tick-tick.
26
Sundays are good days for drinking. E.O. Fussell had known that from the time he was seventeen years old and got drunk while playing hooky from church. There used to be a prohibition on the sale of alcohol in the parish on Sundays, but about ten years ago that had changed. It thrilled the drunks and scandalized the holy rollers, most of whom were also drunks, they just preferred to keep it a secret. Nobody liked a drunk youth minister, after all. E.O. was not a holy roller, he had little use for religion outside of the fact he believed in Jesus and loved the man well enough, he supposed. Sometimes he wasn’t real sure about that, but he’d never dare say so aloud unless he
was three sheets to the wind. Drunks and theology did not mix well, but it had never stopped people from trying to force that bitch to spread anyway.
While everyone else was sitting in stuffy clothes on uncomfortable benches, aching for a drink but determined to get right before they got lit, E.O. was floating in his boat with a line dangling forgotten in the water. He’d been coming down to the old gravel pit on his property for the last twenty years or so. Before that, he’d gone down to the west field and bobbed around in his boat on the old cow pond. The gravel pit was much prettier and though his wife, Doreen, had complained all those years ago when he’d leased the land, E.O. didn’t regret it. The money he made off that lease helped to build their house and in the meantime, it got him a nice, big fishing hole. After the gravel diggers were gone, he had stocked the resultant smallish lake with white perch and blue catfish. Sometimes he even caught a few, but mostly he didn’t bother with fishing much. What he really went down to the gravel pit to do was drink.
It was a habit he had fallen into not long after he and Doreen got married; this sneaking off to nip out of a bottle. He had several hiding places he went to, including the bathroom (he kept a pint in the water tank, sealed up in a sandwich bag) but the pond and the gravel pit later on were his favorite spots. E.O. loved being outside and the gravel pit was a beautiful thing to see. The water was a deep, dark blue so still that it reflected the brighter blue of the sky and the white of the clouds. The trees had grown back around it, shockingly green against the white of the sandy beach ringing the pit. It was the best place in the world to spend a Sunday; just E.O., the breeze and a bottle of whiskey. Monday he’d have to deal with a bus load of screaming brats, kids that got more ill-behaved with every year that passed. He ought to retire, he was well past old enough, but even though he wanted to club the shrieking snot-noses he still liked having something to do.
It was a warm day and E.O. was seriously thinking about going for a swim. An experimental dip of his hand into the rich blue water quickly changed his mind. The air was warm, but the water was still colder than a well digger’s ass in Montana. He shook his hand off and leaned back in his seat, swiveling it from side to side to take in the view while he drank deeply. He’d been hard at this drinking thing since about eight in the morning and damned if he wasn’t sleepy. A quick glance at his watch showed him that it was almost noon. That explained it then. He was good and drunk and overdue for a nap, but he also thought maybe he should drag a lawn chair up to the end of his driveway to watch the churchgoers streaming by because that was always good for a laugh.
Despite the lift on the ban of alcohol sales on Sunday, most of the holy drunkards still went all the way to Sun the next parish over to buy their booze. E.O. had always wondered if they really believed no one would recognize them at the Circle K in Sun instead of at the Chevron in Sparrow Falls. Given how many went to Sun, they were bound to bump into one another. E.O. had bumped into plenty over the years, guys still wearing their good suits and shiny church shoes. It gave him great pleasure to say, Well, hey, Earl, to the local Methodist minister.
The memory made E.O. laugh the deep raspy laugh of a longtime smoker and drinker. It echoed over the gravel pit like the cawing of a lonely crow. He wiped under his eyes with a gnarled, sun-browned finger then took another drink. He thought about Doreen, dead now six long years and how he didn’t need to go off to drink any longer. Not that Doreen hadn’t known what he was really up to anyway. She’d never said anything to him about it, only feigned disappointment when he informed her (often slurring) that there hadn’t been nary a bite that day. It was a little game they had played, both of them comfortable in their pre-ordained roles. Lord, how he missed that woman.
He closed his eyes and pulled up the memory of their first date. He’d had his eye on her for nearly a year and finally worked up the courage to ask her to the Christmas Carnival. That night she’d met him at the door wearing a dark green dress that swirled around her ankles, brushing over the toes of her matching pumps. She’d had a white poinsettia tucked behind her ear that had drooped and dipped when she ducked her head with a shy smile.
Do you like it? Doreen had asked him.
I ain’t never seen anything so pretty, E.O. had said.
She’d looked at him then, his sloe-eyed beauty with chestnut hair and eyes darker than chicory coffee. He’d never told a single soul, but he had known he would marry Doreen Wallace that night as sure as he knew he really hadn’t ever seen anything or anyone as beautiful as she was.
E.O. smiled to himself, slow and sad, thinking about how her deep, dark eyes had never dimmed or gotten milky with age. They had stayed young even as wrinkles had gently creased her face like a well-worn, well-loved page in a picture book and her hair had turned to steely silver-grey, a different kind of beautiful. She’d been a lively, spry soul; a firecracker of a woman who loved gardening right up to the day she was weeding her bean patch and found a copperhead moccasin hiding in the tangled pea vines.
A soft splash pulled E.O. out of his thoughts and for that, he was grateful. He didn’t want to get caught up in thinking of Doreen the way she had looked when he’d found her halfway home; staggering, hand black and grotesquely deformed as the snake venom ate its way through her.
He squinted out across the bright water, diamond flares of light obstructing his view. He was near the middle of the gravel pit and the splash had come from the east side where there was a little bluff overlooking a deep hole. It was a good, safe place to dive off of; their only daughter had loved doing just that when she was a kid. He tried not to think about Kelly any more than he tried to think about the goddamn awful way his beautiful Doreen had died. Kelly had been missing for the last sixteen years, like the world had opened up one day and swallowed her without so much as a peep.
“Dad-damnit,” E.O. muttered, still squinting into the sun-sparked water. He wanted the thoughts out of his head. He lifted the bottle for a swallow as he watched the ripples fading, barely discernible amid all the dazzling springtime light.
He leaned forward for a closer look though and realized the ripples weren’t fading after all. They were moving. Something was swimming out there and getting a little closer, a little easier to see every second. Whatever it was wasn’t just swimming, it was really cutting its way through the water. It moved out of the glaring light at last and E.O. was barely able to make out a dark head bobbing above the water. A dark head topped with pointed ears.
“Well, son of a bitch,” he said.
It must be a lost hound dog or maybe a lonely old stray. It had probably seen E.O. sitting out in his boat—a dog could see a mite bit better than an old man who hadn’t gotten his glasses prescription updated despite the nagging of his doctor. E.O. had always loved dogs, had kept them his entire life. His last one, a blue heeler named Spiffy, had died two months after Doreen. The dog had been old, going on fourteen years, but he’d seemed healthy as ever. Then one morning E.O. had gotten up for work and found Spiffy dead in his doggy bed in the living room.
He started rowing out to meet the dog, thinking that he’d get it into the boat before the poor thing wore itself out and drowned. Come Monday, after he’d done his morning bus route, he’d take the dog around to the vet’s office to have it checked for a microchip if it wasn’t wearing a collar. If no microchip was found then E.O. supposed he’d have himself a new dog unless someone came looking for it or missing dog posters showed up around town.
“Here, dog,” E.O. called as he rowed toward the still-distant black shape. “Come on, that’s a good boy.”
Rowing was not the easy task it had once been and it was slow going, but he persevered. E.O. would go out on the water until he was too old to even make the walk. He had been thinking of getting himself a motor to put on the back of the aluminum boat though, something to make his way a little easier. He was loathe to do so; he never had liked the noise of a boat motor and didn’t care for the idea of it breaking up his otherwise peaceful, boozy floats
around the gravel pit.
“Atta boy, you keep coming,” he called to the dog as he fought against the slight current in the deep water.
E.O. had a longstanding suspicion that they had hit an underground spring when they were digging the pit; he could feel the water moving when he got out to about calf-deep in it. He never saw bubbles or anything though and sure as shit wasn’t about to dive to check. He’d done a stint as a search and rescue diver when he was a younger man, combing the rivers for people lost in boating accidents or that had gotten caught in the undertow. E.O. knew all too well about the dark secrets lurking beneath the placid surface of a body of water and hadn’t gone diving since he quite the S-and-R team.
As he drew closer to the dog, it began to take shape and E.O. whistled low. What had looked like a regular medium-sized mutt was nothing of the sort. The thing was huge; it was going to eat him out of house and home if he ended up keeping it. It wasn’t like he had any other mouths to worry about feeding though, he reasoned and figured he would make do. He hadn’t even gotten a good look at the animal yet and he’d already pretty much made up his mind to keep the damned thing.
He inched ever closer, growing a little more shocked at the size of the dog with each bit of distance he closed between himself and it. “You are one big son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. He couldn’t see much more of it than its head and neck and could only imagine the bulk of the dog that lurked beneath the water like a waterlogged behemoth.
Something caught his attention as he stroked the paddles through the water. He didn’t hear the sound of the dog’s paws splashing, couldn’t see the little frothy wake of its paddling around its gigantic head. It was still moving, so it hadn’t tired out and given up, but he couldn’t tell how it was propelling itself. E.O. leaned forward and squinted, sensing movement, but still not able to make out much. Something rose up out of the water though and then cut back through it; a moment later something on the other side of the dog did the same.
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 31