Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2)

by Walker, Robert W.

  Werewolf’s Grief

  Bloodscreams #2

  By Robert W. Walker

  Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com

  Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.

  PROLOGUE

  He had to be as cunning as an animal. He had to be an animal.

  There was a time when the howling in his ears had been still, but Kerac couldn't recall how that felt. He'd been hearing the cry of the creature for too long now. What? An hour a day, two ... maybe a week, two weeks ... double that? A month? Many months? Couldn't tell.

  The cries told him he had to escape. If he didn't escape, he'd die.

  The howls told him what to do. He fell dead away in the cafeteria at Merimac, the state-operated prison for the criminally insane. He had no idea how long he'd been here, or what he had done to deserve being put away, but the cries told him clearly how to faint by restricting his own air supply.

  It'd worked and he'd been taken to the infirmary. There the cries told him even before he'd fully recovered his senses that his disorder must be made more complicated if he was to be taken to a real hospital, outside the great walls that held him here.

  Kerac dug for the piece of glass he'd held beneath his tongue, grateful he had neither swallowed nor choked on it. He waited for the prison doctor to look away before he reached down into his pants and slit his penis near in two with the glass. He made not a sound, just listened to what the noises inside his head instructed him to do. He lay back and let the blood fill his pants with a dark, purple splotch, a kind of "stigmata," the buzzing in his mind told him in an indecipherable tongue that somehow was translated into self-mutilation.

  He wondered again what he'd done to deserve imprisonment alongside madmen. The pain in his privates was the price he must pay for escape. To keep from thinking about the pain, he concentrated on his laugh. He'd thought a great deal about laughter since coming here, and how important laughter really was. He let out with a laugh now which seemed to percolate in his diaphragm and erupt with the force of a volcano. It was a raw, naked laugh. The laughing slowed the cries, the howls and the mournful wails of an animal inside his brain.

  When the doctor looked back at him, quaking from Kerac's laugh, he had a look of horror on his face. Kerac's eyes dimmed over with a thick, gummy substance, and suddenly he was seeing everything in a kind of 3-D, everything in clear perspective, angles and depths jutting out and in, nothing hidden in the dark shadow-covered corners. It was like seeing for the first time. It was wild and exciting. It was mind-blowing, like being on a heroin high, but without the color, because everything was in grays, blacks and shimmery whites.

  His hearing had also become incredibly acute. He could actually hear the orderly's sneakers on the floor as he inched toward the door. He could almost hear the other man's heartbeat. He could hear someone in the TV room snoring. He could hear a fly breathe. It was a power he'd not ever expected to possess.

  All this as well as his intensified sense of smell. In fact, he could smell the other men as never before, and in his brain he distinguished each man by his smell. The orderly sweat heavily and exuded a goatlike stench; he used no deodorant, while the doctor's perspiration was a cold, sweet scent; there was the faint scent of anise escaping his pores along with the disinfectant on his hands.

  The look on the doctor's face, the look of shock and puzzlement, must be due to the cut and the blood, reasoned Kerac. But Kerac then caught sight of his own hands in the now colorless world around him, and he saw the extended claws and the hair and the nestling parasites in the fur covering his limbs. The realization that he was mad only now dawned on him, seeing himself this way.

  He lifted off the table and the doctor and his orderly backed away in fright. Kerac saw his gray reflection in the doctor's glass cabinet. Like his mind, his body was all a tangle of knotted confusion. His eyes had dropped below the brow into a deep recess of dark circles created by folds of leathery skin from which prickly, whiskerlike hairs sprouted. His nose had enlarged, the nostrils flared. His jaw was snoutlike and the pain that racked his body made him shout, but the shout came out as an inhuman howl, the cry of a beast that had been raging in his head for as long as he could remember, which seemed to be the last few hours.

  The orderly tore open the door in an attempt to race from the room, but Kerac's reaction was quick and instinctive, pouncing on the man in catlike fashion, ripping away at his face to stop the screaming.

  "Kerac! Kerac!" shouted the doctor, pleading.

  But Kerac's claws came down in rapid-fire fashion, turning the young orderly's features to mincemeat before he slid dead to the floor.

  Screaming, the doctor tried to escape, but Kerac's hairy arm caught him about the neck, a deadly claw sinking deep into the man's throat, severing the jugular. Kerac tore a limb from the man as he was bleeding to death. He did so with playful ease, amazed at the strength he possessed. He wanted to try his strength again, but something cunning deep within his mind opted for escape. But not before he ripped apart his prey. He left nothing recognizable as human in a matter of minutes. Kerac lapped at the blood, crawling about the carrion on all fours. But hearing the shouts and footsteps of others, he tore away another limb, and taking his two prizes, he leapt through the window to the sound of sirens and the flash of lights.

  One of the guards sighted Kerac, drew a bead on him and hesitated, realizing that the escaping form was some sort of animal. A second guard arrived just in time to see what looked to him like a large dog--maybe a bear--leap over the ten-foot fence, dropping something in its wake. The two men went to inspect what the creature had dropped at the foot of the stone fence. The flashlight told them it was a large man's bloody leg.

  "Get the dogs!" shouted one of the guards to the other.

  In an hour guards and dogs were scouring the woods surrounding Merimac, but they found nothing when the dogs refused to cooperate.

  -1-

  The scene in which two men were literally ripped apart by some kind of bloodthirsty animal kept coming back at Abraham Hale Stroud, wanting--demanding--clarification from his subconscious.

  Twice now it had run on the "silver screen," his playful term for the steel plate in his head which had some years before become a kind of psychic antenna, somehow combining with what had apparently been in his makeup all along: extrasensory perception. The combination made for something the experts called second sight, but for Stroud there were no words that fit the peculiar "gift" that seemed to be initially inherited, in the genes. In a sense his own body chemistry had been wed to a kind of electromagnetic pole at the cranium that sometimes sent and sometimes received messages from far away. He'd been visited by his grandfather's ghost and others on more than one occasion. Typically, the visits were, while shocking and heart-stopping, benign in nature. Often, they were meant to "guide" him to answers not readily perceived by any other means. They'd certainly been beneficial in the case of the Andover Devil...

  Just the same, he was often confused as to the meanings of his visions. He'd once been a soldier hunting the enemy in a tangled jungle in Southeast Asia, and this was before the metal plate in his head. With his abilities he'd located the enemy where nothing mechanical could. In fact, he was so good at locating the en
emy that over half his company was killed in an ensuing engagement. He was himself left for dead on the field for two soul-searching days before he was found and brought out. He was then shipped home after a Hanoi hospital stay where the doctors stabilized the rest of his body, but could do very little for the missing shards of his skull. They then packed him off like a mailbag into a cargo plane and got him stateside where a "real" hospital outside Chicago replaced part of his skull with a metal brace. Curiously, the doctor's name had been Bracewell.

  Later, as a cop on the Chicago Police Department for some thirteen years, he became known as the "psychic detective." During those years he'd also completed his work on a doctorate in archeology at the University of Chicago, working nights, weekends and holidays to do so. He had retired from the arena of the policeman when his grandfather died, leaving him an estate in Andover, Illinois, on the Spoon River, along with full ownership of Stroud Bank of Andover and the family fortune. It had all seemed like any man's dream--winning the lottery--at first, but now Stroud knew there were stipulations, even a real live "curse" associated with the wealth of Stroud Manse.

  He'd had to rid Andover of what the locals had for years whispered about in the pubs and coffeehouses as the Andover Devil. As a result there'd been a great loss of life, including a good friend, Dr. Jacob Magaffey. And although the immediate threat of the vampire colony that'd held Andover in its collective grasp for generations had been broken, Stroud knew that he'd be called on again to use his wealth and his "gift" to fight evil in whatever other form or guise it took. And right now, it seemed to be taking on the form of a ghastly monster of the night that left men lying in flesh heaps the way a lion on the Serengeti left its prey to the vultures, scavengers and maggots.

  Just exactly what the creature resembled in appearance, Abraham was unprepared to say. The images and visions that'd come to him of this overwhelming evil gave him the feelings of the monster far more than it gave him the appearance. The creature hungered. It hungered not just for blood and flesh to fill its stomach, but for the exhilaration and adrenaline high of the kill itself. It was a hunter, a predator of the first order, but the purpose of its hunt was love of the kill first, feeding second. Its instincts were those of the jaguar. It was large, ferocious and powerful and it delighted in its own attributes.

  But Stroud had his hands full with his work. The dig at the newly discovered burial mounds at a well-established and well-known Cahokia Indian village here in southern Illinois was disproving some long-held notions about the Cahokias. He was having a wonderful time with it, feeling like a boy in the toy department at Macy's. It was taking up most of his waking hours. The evening hours, however, were being given over to fantastic visions of a creature roaming the countryside. The "disturbance" had not gone unnoticed by colleagues and friends here, including Dr. Cage, the expedition leader.

  "You feeling all right?" was a constant question put to him lately down at the dig site.

  He had plenty of time to think there on his hands and knees beside students--children--a third his age. He meant to get dirty, to grind the dirt into his jeans, sift it through his fingers and get it under his nails. He meant to learn firsthand what Cahokia must have meant to the Cahokian people. He meant to unearth another set of bones for Cage and the others to marvel over. Meantime, he was truly soaking up the field experience and learning the newest techniques. The game of the bone hunter had advanced rapidly in the past few years; so many new toys at the scientists' disposal, like the Earthscan, a device that told the archeologist where his best chance of finding buried earth formations lie. With the help of the Earthscan, time, energy and backaches were saved, not to mention the integrity of the dig itself. Who needed a useless slag heap?

  It was all good experience for Dr. Abe Stroud, newly appointed assistant to Dr. Cage. Stroud knew best that he needed the invaluable experience before becoming involved in an overseas dig.

  With work and focusing his attention on the artifacts and bones the earth reluctantly gave into his hands, Stroud had felt he could fend off the nagging nightmare that had now returned for a third time like a bad penny. So long as it remained a nightmare, however vivid, Stroud remained uncertain of the meaning of the vicious killing played out in his mind. It might be nothing more than a simple and meaningless nightmare, and yet he knew that he wasn't like other men who had bad dreams and could wake up and forget about them or blot them out entirely. His dreams sometimes predicted the future, and sometimes were replays of incidents already in the past. That was how he had first met the missing boy, Timmy Meyers, who had eventually led to the discovery of an entire vampire colony that had learned to cohabit with humans by day and night so closely it was impossible to tell them from ordinary humans. Maybe the dream was trying to tell him something. Maybe the dream was brought to him by his dead grandfather...

  How did the old Celtic prayer go? From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties ... And things that go bump in the night ... deliver us!

  Maybe he was just being foolish, letting his imagination run wild ... maybe the stress and excitement of the work weaving itself into his night and turning into a garden worm when it hit the plate in his head. Maybe...

  Dusk was coming on, and Abe feared going to sleep again. He had tired of the shaking, heart-gripping scene that'd played out in his tent and in his mind thrice now. He prayed it wouldn't return. He clamored to his feet, his legs numb at first and then shooting with pain, especially the knees. A young fellow named Jack offered him a hand up out of the pit, and he took it gratefully.

  "You've been at it since noon nonstop, Dr. Stroud," he said.

  "Guess I didn't notice the time. Happens in a flash when you enjoy what you do."

  "Everybody in camp's talking about you."

  "What?"

  "About how you pitch in, how you work, get your hands in ... not like some I've worked with, believe me. Last guy I worked with, real old, ugly, skinny fart--"

  "Dr. Sturdevant?"

  "Yeah, sorry ... didn't know you knew him."

  "Only by reputation."

  "Reputation, hah. All he was interested in was getting the freshman girls into bed with him."

  Stroud laughed and said, "Archeology and Sex."

  "That's right ... bartered grades for it, the old weasel."

  "I meant his book, Archeology and Sex."

  "Oh, oh yeah ... Well, I'm off to mess. See you, Dr. Stroud."

  "Thanks, Jack, for the hand up and the lesson."

  He looked back over his shoulder and said, "Don't mention it to her, but Tammy Wymes thinks you're a hunk, Dr. Stroud. Might help you sleep, you know what I mean?"

  Stroud dropped his gaze and shook his head. "Yeah, maybe that'd set things right, all right."

  Stroud then wandered off from camp as was his habit, to spend a little time along the brook the Indians had no name for. For the Indians, where the water flowed from and where it went as it moved past their village was of no consequence. It was enough that it was here and that it gave of itself to them. Stroud wondered how the world had become so complex and difficult.

  The night was coming on fast, a chill in the breaking wind. Young saplings twitched and the bugs were chattering. It was the sort of night a man could see forever, the stars flirting with the imagination, a high, near-full moon blinking around a stray cloud; when the moon moved over, it flushed the land around Cahokia with a sandy, silvery hue. Then it dawned on Dr. Stroud that he'd stood here in a near-catatonic state so long that he'd missed dinner. He was left with the prospect of going to his tent where he'd log a few notes, catch up on his reading and try like hell to get some deserved sleep. Maybe tonight it wouldn't elude him.

  "Dr. Stroud? Is that you?" A female voice made Stroud turn. It was Tammy Wymes as if on cue. Everybody in camp must know she'd come out here looking for him. She'd been flirtatious since the day Stroud arrived, but he'd chalked it up to a schoolgirl's interest in one of her teachers. She was wearing a sheer blouse that showed her midr
iff, her stomach heaving a bit with the cool night air, puckering her belly button first open and then closed as if it were a third eye, winking.

  Stroud calculated her age at nineteen, possibly twenty. He was in his early forties. He began to wonder about her motivation in coming to him like this.

  "You must be cold, Miss Wymes," he said.