by Gene Lazuta
He stopped and raised his arms in an eerie, almost pagan imitation of the posture of a priest over an altar: palms upraised, elbows slightly bent, back straight.
“What was around me didn’t come from the woods that we know,” he said, his voice booming now. “Not from our Valley, not from our trees. What was around me came from the jungle of Hell itself, called up from the pit by that ancient thing that walks on moonbeams and moves through the night in silence and safety. It was him: that demon in the trees, that silver devil who feeds on shadows and bathes in blood. It was him! The same as our ancestors saw! The same as made the monsters we can still name after three hundred years: Jean Grenier, Peter Stubb, de Sade!
“Werewolves all!
“And how many more?
“Werewolves?
“Killers; eaters of man flesh; beasts!
“The Man in the Woods showed them how to make the belt of human skin, and they blessed it in the blood of something tamed so that they might follow him into the woods of their souls. He instructed them in the ways of the Wild, and they carved his name into the flesh of history: Satan! Lozella! Vennaltiza! A thousand titles for that which roamed the Garden of Eden itself, walked the earth while Pharaoh built his tombs, and slept in the shadow of Jesus’ cross.
“He’s waited, and he’s watched, since the start of it all, since the beginning of time. And now, he’s come again!”
“Je-sus Kee-rist,” Conway heard Detective Cooper whisper as Emil stepped around the table and into the gauntlet of silent, staring listeners.
“That thing on Lefty’s back,” the deputy shouted, pointing a huge index finger Cooper’s way. “Them eyes in the bushes, them black shapes in the trees…the way the sky dulled over and the sun seemed to go cold…the horse’s blood and shit on the ground… they all add up to the same thing. There’s wolves in the woods! There’s wolves in the house! And there’ll be wolves in the mirror!
“This is my warning!” he roared, inches from where the detective stood his ground. “I’m the witness. As it’s happened before, so shall it happen again, world without end!
“World without end!
“World without end!
“Amen,” the crowd said in the gloom.
“I killed the belted one and burned his lair. But he was only the first. The Man in the Woods has come, and with him servants to his will. The passing of dry centuries has left him weak, and for now he walks in the shape of a man. But this will soon change, for a Prince has been born who will renew the Law and rekindle the Hunt. The Man in the Woods knows of this Prince and has watched over him with love and anticipation. His coming will herald a new Dark Time. His flesh will be as a belt around the world. The Wild will rise again!
“So said the belted one!
“‘Hail to the Blood Prince!’
“So spoke the flesh-eater before he died.
“‘Hail to the Blood Prince!’
“And so is my warning.
“Listen:
“Into the village of man will come a wolf, disguised as one with the Flock. Shun him, and drive him out, for he will bring ruin upon all he sees. He is the gate through which the Wild will come. He is the path down which the Wild will run. He is the key to the lock on the soul of the hateful ones…the secret ones…the Vyrmin!
“He will make others to drink of your blood.
“He will make others to eat of your flesh!
“He will make others to desecrate your graves!
“But never will he do these things himself, for he is the Prince of the Blood, and the Man in the Woods will use him to stir the Vyrmin to their rise.
“Be aware: there’s wolves in the woods!
“Be aware: there’s wolves in the house!
“Be aware: there’s wolves in the mirror!
“The Blood Prince comes…known as one of us, remembered from our past. But he is a pest, a plague, and a wound. He is evil, and because of him, we will kill!”
“Okay, Emil,” Conway said, reaching past Cooper and presenting his open hand to the sweating, trembling, nearly hysterical bear of a man shadowed in the gloom. “Each of us has heard.”
“Then I can rest,” Emil said, his voice dropping in tone and pitch so abruptly that it sounded as if he’d been deflated by a single shot. “The witness shall speak until each has heard—only that can the witness do. No more…and no less. The witness shall speak until each has heard, and then he shall rest until his flesh is ruined for his words.”
“You’ve earned your rest,” the sheriff said, producing, as if by magic, a pair of handcuffs which he snapped first around Emil’s right wrist and then his left.
The big deputy nodded, allowing himself to be led from the bar. The crowd shuffled behind, wide-eyed and stern. Behind them followed Mike Cooper, frowning and grim.
“I’ve earned my rest,” Emil said vacantly, hanging his head. “We must all rest before the Prince arrives. For once he comes, there’ll be no rest for any in the Flock again.”
5.
“Any in the Flock!” Cheryl Lockner, Emil’s wife, mimicked sardonically under her breath as she watched Sheriff Conway lead her husband through Ruggle’s front door. She was hanging back in the crowd, sticking to the shadows along the back wall, dressed in a sack-like, flower-print dress and a frumpy, knee-length grey overcoat that had started its life as her Sunday best, only to end up looking like something out of a bag lady’s shopping cart. Her right index finger was nervously twirling a tendril of jet black hair. Her left arm was folded over her small breasts. And her darkly circled blue eyes were flickering from Emil to the sheriff and back…
Suddenly the outside door opened, silhouetting the two men and making her squint as she headed for the bar’s rear exit. She hit the alley at a trot, paused, and took a deep breath of the cool afternoon air.
It was dark here.
And cold.
The alley was narrow, tall, and lined on both sides by garbage cans. From overhead, tiny specks of snow swirled between the bar and the building next door. The rain that had fallen for most of the day now glistened on dirty brick as ice. And even the slightest gust of wind produced a soft, moaning howl that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her head.
“Told them…” she mumbled, aloud. “Told them all!”
The alley didn’t answer as the door banged shut behind her. There was no way out of this little courtyard. It was a dead end.
“The Flock…” she said, her eyes scanning the shadowy jumble of swirling papers and heaped mounds of black plastic trash bags. “He saw it, and he told!”
She paused.
From inside her came a sudden rush of that same sensation that had been coming to her in one form or another most of her life. She thought of it as the “sexy feeling.” It was like the charge she felt when she thought about a man—any man—since high school; only this time, it was better.
“He told…” she hissed, stepping deeper into the gloom. “And now they know!”
Sex was her favorite thing. She dreamt of it at night and fantasized about it during the day. She visualized it in her mind, from all different angles, and in all kinds of positions, with men of all ages, colors and types. She’d married Emil not because he had gotten her pregnant, but because he was a great fuck. Not just good…but great!
She married Emil.
And now he’d…
“Told!”
The sexy feeling was like vertigo, tingling her stomach and lightening her head. It came and went every day, all the time, and the goofiest things could bring it on. It was fun, and it was as much a part of her personality as was her temper, which was explosive…especially when she had her period and Emil wouldn’t come near her, like now. The sexy feeling could make her crazy sometimes, and for the past couple of weeks, its stirrings had been nearly intolerable.
The swirling papers on the ground made dry, rustling sounds as they puffed up in brief flashes of white in the dark. They seemed to be reacting to some whirlwind…some wh
istling current of air that spiraled invisibly down in chilling, foul-smelling breaths. They seemed to be blurring as the wind moaned and a shape made of darkness formed in the center of rushing bits of light.
When that figure spoke, it made her hold her breath…the feeling was that good.
When the figure spoke, it asked, “Why have you come?”
And she didn’t know…
Or care.
The words were like silk on her skin, and when she heard them she froze in her place, ran her tongue over her upper lip and hugged herself with both arms with an “Mmmmmmmm” that was sultry and wanton.
The darkness seemed pleased by this.
“Are there words for it?” it inquired.
And Cheryl Lockner closed her eyes.
She could feel herself drifting inside herself…as if she had fallen instantly asleep and her spirit were riding the warm waves of her most secret passions.
Fuck the words! She thought.
Fuck the world!
Fuck it all!
The darkness seemed pleased by this as well.
So pleased, in fact, that it reached out and took her arm: warm flesh on hers.
She opened her eyes.
And the man was tall and lean. His flesh was smooth, white and so, so warm. He had long hair and a beard. He was naked in the gloom…just standing there, naked: muscular, naked, and touching. He exuded an aroma that thrilled her. It seemed to climb right through her nostrils and into her brain.
She didn’t speak.
Fuck the words! she thought, making the man smile.
Fuck it all!
Within the man’s eyes was an emptiness so deep that it seemed to go on forever. When Cheryl Lockner gazed into that blackness, it was like falling into the sky.
6.
After locking Emil in his cell, Conway and Cooper went to look at what he had done. They started at the Zimmer farm and ended at Samuel’s Funeral Home, which served as the county’s morgue since it had a cooler. The fire had destroyed a great deal of evidence, but because of the rain, and the speed with which the volunteers had arrived, it had not obliterated Lefty’s “lair,” as the deputy had obviously hoped that it would. As a result, they were able to sift through the ashes—so to speak—and reconstruct a scene that in many respects served to verify much of Emil’s account.
Two of his hounds had indeed been torn apart. And the third had a hole in its chest, and a bullet in the ground beneath it.
“Put her head in my lap and shot her in the heart so’s she wouldn’t see the gun,” Emil had explained from his cell, his face slack and his voice flat—a total change from the hellfire and damnation posture he had assumed at the bar not an hour before. “I didn’t want her to see the gun. She knew what a gun was, and I didn’t want her to have to look at it.”
Much of the barn was demolished, the fire having spread quickly through the hay, old kindling wood, and rows of paint cans lying everywhere. But behind the scorched building, a curious arrangement of gardening tools had remained intact. Set like the skeleton of a tiny tepee over the smoldering mound of a campfire, two shoves and a rake served to suspend a stainless-steel kitchen pot on the end of a bicycle chain. Fused to the bottom of that pot, in a crust of blackened goo, was the cracked and fleshless skull of what look to be a German shepherd dog.
Lefty’s burned body actually did have nails lining its upper lip—he’d been lying face-down on the ground when Emil poured gasoline on him, so his front was not too terrible damaged.
His wife’s body had been skinned—and in a frying pan on the stove in the house was one of her severed hands, next to a bottle of Wesson oil.
“Eaters of man flesh,” were the words Emil had used.
During the course of their tour, Conway and Cooper didn’t really talk much. They walked, side by side, each studying the other as much as the crime scene, or anything else. The sheriff wasn’t sure about this young man from the city yet, and the detective didn’t seem all that certain about this redneck sheriff.
By seven that evening, they had seen enough, and together they stopped at the Thunderbird Café right across the street from the jail, where Conway drank yet more coffee, Cooper ate greasy meat loaf, and a heaviness hung between them that was almost visible.
Finally, as Conway sat studying the glowing yellow window of his office, Cooper pushed his empty plate away and said, “Okay, Sheriff. Let’s have it.”
Conway frowned.
And Cooper said, “Who’s the Man in the Woods?”
The sheriff sighed, long and hard. “The devil,” he said simply, his voice very serious. “Or at least he is as near as I’ve ever been able to figure.”
Cooper waited.
And Conway looked at him. “Do you see this kind of thing often, Mr. Cooper?” he asked, his brown eyes betraying only a hint of the tension he was feeling in his chest. “I mean killings…for no real reason. Crazy shit. Stuff that makes your skin crawl.”
Cooper nodded in response. “Yes, I do, Sheriff. I see it a hell of a lot more often than you’d probably think.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” Conway said, softly. And then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, he added, “If we work this thing through, who makes the arrest?”
“Why, you do, of course.”
“You sure? No red tape rules at the end gonna take it away from me? No bureaucratic baloney from the state gonna let the governor waltz in and take the credit?”
“I promise,” Cooper said, earnestly. “I’m here to consult. That’s my job. I go from one situation to the next, cataloguing the crimes of some very sick people in a database. I don’t tell the local authorities how to run their business. And I don’t tell them what to think. I’m not interested in credit—I solve problems.”
“And now you wanna hear a fairy tale about the Man in the Woods?”
“No. I want to hear what you know. If you recognized something, you’ve got to let me in on it, because we’re not going to move this thing along until we’re both on the same footing. Crazy or not, anything familiar might be important.”
Conway cleared his throat and thought, There’s something strange about this guy. He’s just a little too calm. A little too willing to sit down and talk. He came her knowing something already, but he’s playing it close to this chest.
Finally, he said, “Okay. Yeah. I recognized a few things. As a matter of fact, I recognized a lot. Everything that Emil says he saw out at Lefty’s farm, and everything that happened at the bar afterwards, lines up, step by step, with the stories my old German grandma got from her even older German grandma, who probably saw ‘em carved on the wall of a cave somewhere. The whole thing supposedly started with the moon…it’s that old. It’s a legend. And all us children of immigrants down here know how it works.”
Conway heard himself talking, but could barely believe what he was saying.
“Everybody,” he began, seriously, as his grandmother might have done. “Or almost everybody, anyway, has got the evil in ‘em. That’s what my grandma used to say: ‘Everybody’s got some o’ the evil; and everybody’s got some o’ the good. Only the saints are all one way; and only the Vyrmin are all the other.’ The rest of us are stuck somewhere in between. But every once in a while, the edges come loose, the Vyrmin get out, and the Dark Times return.
“That’s when the Hunt goes on—when mankind, which is the Flock that the Shepherd Jesus is supposed to protect, is threatened by the wolves, called Vyrmin. The Vyrmin look like normal, everyday people on the outside. But inside, their souls are black. Any good they do is for the sake of their disguise. They’re the wolves in sheep’s clothing, the hidden germ in the system. They live out their lives, day to day, sometimes unaware of what they are themselves. But when the time comes, and the Hunt begins, they come out.”
“And that’s what you think those people were doing when they slaughtered that horse?” Cooper asked, his eyes on Conway’s face. “Their surface motive was to perform some rit
ual that would magically transform a human being into an animal?”
“Believe it or not,” the sheriff said. “And, lookin’ at the same stuff we looked at today, anybody who was raised in this area would tell you the same thing.”
“Okay,” Cooper said, scooting forward in his seat, his eyes sparkling. “Explain the components. Why the horse, the nails, and the belt?”
Before answering, Conway thought, This son of a bitch is enjoying this! Then he sighed. “Well…lemme see. I don’t know everything, but what I do know, I wanna get right. A Vyrmin—in this case, Lefty, I guess—can turn himself into an animal, or at least he thinks he can, by wearing a magic belt made of human skin and anointed with the blood of an animal that’s had its wildness beaten out of it; an animal that’s been tamed, in other words. To get a belt like that, he or she has to entice the Man in the Woods into appearing in physical form, which means that they have to make a sacrifice.”
“And that explains the dog’s head in the pot?” Cooper cut in.
“Probably,” Conway said. “Or the horse. I don’t know which.”
“Go on.”
“Now, the Man in the Woods is a spirit, a forest nymph or, more accurately, a being sent down from the moon. He’s been a part of European folklore since, Christ, I don’t know. Supposedly the moon was once this free-roaming entity that saw the earth just after it was created, and liked it. But somehow, it felt that something was missing…which were trees. So it sent the Man in the Woods down to spread himself over the planet and make the forests outta his body, and the animal outta his soul. The moon is the eye of evil, the dark twin of the sun, which symbolizes goodness. And at night, when the moon dominates the sky, evil, in the form of the roamer in the trees, dominates the earth.
“And there he is: the Man in the Woods. His body, or skin, encircles our planet, and his master, our moon, watches us from the sky at night. He’s been known as Pan, Lozella, Satan, and God knows how many more names in God knows how many languages. And he’s always represented that sense of savage freedom that’s both attracted and repelled mankind since the beginning of what we’d call civilization. Over the centuries, there’ve been those people who’ve sensed his presence strongly enough to want to actually summon him up from the trees so they can make that final jump from human to animal, like Jean Grenier, who Emil mentioned.