by Gene Lazuta
“As a matter of fact, Grenier’s a good example. My grandma had him in a storybook when I was a kid. And I’ve been carryin’ him with me most of my life. He was a seventeen-year-old who cannibalized five or six children in some French village in the early sixteenth century. The particulars are a little different, but the chronology of that story’s just about exactly the same as the one we have here.
“See, this kid had a magic belt and was runnin’ around pretty much like Emil says Lefty was—naked, all painted up, the whole nine yards—when, one day, he attacked a girl in a field. She became the ‘witness’ for her village, ran home, and told everybody what she’d seen. The men in town hunted the kid down, make him confess to being in league with the devil, and locked him in a monastery, where he died three years later, crawlin’ around on all fours and barkin’ at the moon.”
“So this time, Emil’s our ‘witness’,” Cooper said, smiling.
“Uh-huh,” the sheriff agreed. “And here’s the Christian part, since now we’re followin’ the middle European version. Supposedly, God sends a witness to the flock to announce the coming of the Dark Times. Since Satan—the Man in the Woods is called Satan now—is ‘Lord of This World,’ God doesn’t interfere with his temptations of mankind. He just makes sure that we have a figntin’ chance. So, for the time it takes the witness to tell his story, God fills him with knowledge that disappears when he’s through. The people who hear God’s word can believe it or not, just like everything else in the Christian faith.
“But the problem for the witness—and I’m sure that this is why Emil looked so worried when we locked him in his cell—is that God doesn’t seem to think that the messenger warrants any special favors. Once his story’s told, the witness just goes back to being an ordinary person. And from then on, his life ain’t worth a shit. The Vyrmin know what he did, and hate him for it. Traditionally, the witness is always the next to die.”
“Wow!” Cooper grinned, clapping his hands and shaking his head. “This is a good one!’
“What’s so good about it?” Conway asked, consciously keeping his voice free of emotion.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Cooper said with a self-deprecating chuckle. I don’t mean to sound insensitive. It’s just that you’re so well informed! You’re a walking werewolf encyclopedia, and that cuts the work I’ll have to do right in half.”
Conway’s eyes narrowed.
And Cooper reached out and put his hand on his arm, saying, “Now let me explain something to you, Sheriff. Normally I look like an ass-wipe to the people who call me in because the Church is almost always used as a last resort. The local cops stumble on a crime scene, monkey around with it for a few days, and then, when they can’t make heads of tails out of the thing, they call me. In the meantime, the unsub responsible is a thousand miles away. Invariably, I end up with my thumb up my ass saying, ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what happened here,’ so the local cops can use me as an example: if an ‘expert’ can’t work out this case, how can they be expected to do it? Which is stage one.”
Lifting his hand, he leaned forward and pointed his index finger at the sheriff’s nose. “But stage two is very different. After the circus part is over, I go to work. While the cops on the scene add yet another mystery to their ‘unsolved’ file, I dig in, record what I’ve found, compare it with everything else I’ve got, study it, turn it upside down and inside out, lock it in my head, and sleep with it every night until I win. It might take me weeks, months, or years, but while those bozos who used me to justify their own ineptitude forget all about it, I’m quietly working my way right up to the spot they said no one could ever find. And in the end, I win. In the end, I always win.”
“You take this personal,” Conway said.
And Cooper rose from his seat, still smiling that broad, seemingly genuine smile that was so out of place with the emotion in his voice that the sheriff was suddenly filled with the impression that he was watching not a police officer discussing a case, but an evangelist thumping his stump.
“Sure I do!” he said, stepping up to the window so that, from where Conway sat, he saw the man’s dark figure clearly defined by the amber light glowing in the jail across the street.
Between the two, snow was falling steadily in bright specks that flashed silver before spinning away in the dark.
“Sure I take it personally. And that’s why this is such a good one. Usually the motivations of someone who could do a thing like this are so cryptic, convoluted, and tangled around some event, fixation or delusional construct that they have to be inferred from the logic of his behavior. Sometimes the root of that disturbance—or what he thinks he’s achieving by doing the things he does—will stem back to a series of traumatic episodes that he’s spent a lifetime weaving into a fabric of violent compulsions. Sometimes it’s a sexual obsession or paranoid fantasy. And sometimes it’s just plain old shit for kicks. But no matter what it turns out to be in the end, I’m lost going into it. That’s my life. They throw me into a fucking ocean of blood and expect me to swim straight home, over and over again. But this time, I’ve got you! This time we apparently know quite a lot about the delusional structure. Or at least we’ve got a pretty fair idea of where it came from: old European werewolf legend! Bang!
“Step by step you laid it out. Now we can start running with it! In the end it won’t turn out to be that simple. It never does. But just saying the word, ‘werewolf,’ is the kind of thing that could normally take me months to figure out. We already have a nucleus of fresh evidence, a working hypothesis, and a time frame that doesn’t preclude the possibility that our suspects might still be in the area. We could actually solve this one on the scene, Sheriff Conway! We could actually make a bust, hands on, you and me
“You just don’t know how exciting that is; you can’t imagine how satisfying it would be for me to nail these fuckers, dead to rights. No bullshit, just snap on the cuffs and ‘read ‘em their rights.’ You just don’t know.”
And that was true. Conway didn’t know, because he wasn’t listening anymore. He was staring through the window past the young detective into the street. His mouth was open, his skin was clammy, and a chill had just run the entire length of his spine and settled like a bowling ball in his gut.
What he was seeing happen in front of the jail flew in the face of every other experience he had ever had in his life. And, as he sat there, paralyzed for a heartbeat, his brain was busily denying what his eyes were so convinced was true.
In the glow of a single streetlight, beneath a swirl of blowing snow, a figure dropped into view from the inky darkness above. It just descended, floating down quickly, with smooth, effortless movements that kicked up little puffs of snow as it came to rest on the pavement as gently as if it were settling itself on the sandy bottom of some dim and lifeless ocean.
And then, as he stared, the creature’s image burst into hideous, mind-numbing focus, overpowering his mental defenses with the simplicity of its presence, and reaching into that hidden corner of his mind populated by his most private nightmare specters.
He gasped, thinking, It’s impossible! as the thing, or things—for it was actually two figures that he was seeing, and not, as he had first imagined, a single beast, with…wings—ran straight up the jailhouse steps.
Wings!
The fucker had wings!
And the woman was naked!
It must have been a week that he sat frozen in that chair. At least he felt as if it took him a week to sort things out well enough to get himself moving. In reality it was probably only a second or two before his legs jerked his body out of its seat, sending his chair clattering across the linoleum and turning every head in the place his way as he shouted, “Holy shit!” and pointed to the now empty street through the glass.
Only a second or two, in reality…
Reality?
Ha!
What reality?
What kind of reality is it that contains a thing like what he had just s
een flutter down from the sky like some vile, black snowflake? Where in reality does an awful, hairy thing with long arms and short, crooked legs come from? Where do gibbering monkey faces and wide, leathery wings naturally fit together into one wicked little beast that couldn’t have been more than three feet tall but that could dangle a full-grown woman beneath it and fly—with its fucking wings…oh, God, its fucking grey wings with the ribs and veins and bulging pockets of sinewy muscle…
What reality?
Sweet Jesus!
What fucking reality was there left?
“Sheriff?” Cooper asked, stepping forward and bumping their little table so hard that it too went crashing over, spilling dishes and breaking glass that crunched underfoot as he stumbled in clumsy pursuit.
But Conway didn’t hear. He was plunging through a weirdly distorted bubble of stupid, gape-mouthed faces and insane, bouncing door frames as a voice, a wondrous, all-knowing voice—that he would later privately identify as his grandmother’s voice—said, over and over again in his mind, “The witness is the next to die…to die! The witness is the next to die!”
And by the time he hit the street, the witness was screaming inside the cage that Conway himself had locked up tight.
7.
When the first bullet hit, it knocked Lefty Zimmer right on his ass. And that wasn’t surprising considering that Deputy Emil Lockner carried a .357, long-barreled Magnum Python that he’d picked up at a sportsman’s show in Dallas a couple of years back. Sheriff Conway had been kidding him about that gun ever since he got it, calling him “Dirty Harry”(even if Dirty Harry had carried a .44, not a .357), and his “big shot deputy.” But when that cannon shuddered in his hand and Lefty took his dive, every bit of kidding he’d endured went up in smoke.
Emil’s heart was pounding, and his bowels were juicy. That’s how scared he was. And he had every right to be. Lefty would have scared anybody the way he exploded out from that barn, jumping around and screaming like a maniac, waving his arms and charging straight ahead with a row of goddamn carpenter’s nails waggling under his nose so that the plum-colored puff of his upper lip bulged and bled and his own blood ran down his chin. His eyes were vacant and terrible. His hands were curled into black, fire-charred claws. And his dick was hard.
Maybe that’s what scared Emil the most.
Maybe that’s why he just pulled his gun and fired.
There wasn’t any hesitation in this movement. Something in his head just said, “This is bad. The whole scene. It’s bad. I mean really. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he gets here, so just do it…grease him. Do it now!”
And Emil did.
Ka-pow!
And down Lefty went, his legs lifted comically as smoke swirled everywhere and dogs snarled in the rain. He lay there for a moment, and then, to Emil’s amazement, he got back up…grinning, bleeding, with a pencil-sized hole in his chest and pieces of himself lying in the grass behind him. The hole in his back where the bullet had exited must have been really something to leave that much bloody shit on the ground.
And that’s when Emil pissed himself, because, by rights, Lefty should have been dead.
Without even thinking he fired again, and this time Lefty didn’t get up. The bullet hit him high on the forehead, taking off his skull cap and blasting his brains out in a quick pink spray that hung like a halo as he spun to his left, his knees buckling and his eyes crossed as he turned his face up as if trying to see where his brains had gone.
When he landed, a thunderclap rolled up out of the Valley, and the Man in the Woods disappeared. Through the ominous grey clouds that boiled overhead, a brief break formed and a single shaft of sunshine shown down to where Emil stood with his wet trousers and smoking gun.
And…
Pretty much the next thing he remembered after that was Sheriff Conway slamming his cell shut and turning the key. There were vague, blurry images in his head of people gathered around him, listening to something he said. And there was a weird, droning echo of a voice he knew to be his own weaving crazy sentences in the depths of his skull. But his only vivid, substantial thoughts were the sound of that key turning in the lock on his cell door…
And his wife’s voice calling his name.
It was right then that Emil Lockner knew he was going to die.
He was standing with both hands on the bars when the jail’s outside door opened and Cheryl came in, saying, “Hellloooo, Eeeeemmiiiiiiiil?” in a weird, catlike whine. Crouching beneath a swirl of darkness and snow as wings flapped, teeth jittered, and the ground jerked underfoot, she was worse than Lefty had been—partly because she was his wife, but also because she was farther along the path to the final change than Lefty had ever had time to achieve.
Her eyes were big black slits that shone like silver dollars when the light caught them just right. Her teeth were crooked, veined, and sharp…bulging her lips and distorting the line of her mouth into a twisted, perverse grin. Her skin was milky—almost translucent under the harsh, fluorescent tubes—and there seemed to be something dark curled beneath it, like hairs that had not yet broken the surface. As if all the juice had been sucked from them with a hypodermic needle, her breasts hung flaccidly on her chest. And on her back was riding that… that…thing, that hellish creature with the human eyes and tiny fingers that he’d seen pointing from Lefty’s shoulder as it leaned over and whispered in his ear.
For a moment time seemed to stop, and a tiny, almost imperceptible flicker sparkled in Cheryl’s eyes. Maybe it was one final, tepid nod of human affection for her husband. Maybe not. But whatever had caused it passed, and a new and hideously wicked gleam spread up like a flame to take its place.
As the thing on her back beat its wings and lifted itself into the air, Cheryl Lockner cocked her head in an oddly animal way, reached over, and killed the lights.
Suddenly the room changed. All reason left Emil’s mind and he staggered back…
Going where?
Straight for the concrete-block wall behind him.
Why?
To escape…of course!
It didn’t make sense. But crying didn’t make any sense either, and he was doing that. Big, fat tears were rolling down his cheeks as the air-blasted black around him and the window over the sheriff’s desk exploded into a white, hovering rectangle. Wings were fluttering as something small and fast shot past the window once, and then again, dangling its tail—with the heart-shaped, spatula end—and rushing aimlessly in quick, unclear silhouettes.
“I didn’t mean it!” he bellowed, crashing into the wall behind him and bumping his head so hard that stars cascaded around the arched periphery of his vision. “It was the light! It came down from the sky and made me do it!”
“You’re too tame, Eeeeemmmilllll!” his wife purred from the darkness in a voice obscenely thick with sexual expectation. “You’re a gooooood man—goooood enough to eat”
And then, as if something had suddenly pumped twice as much air into the room as the place could hold, a new and overpowering sense of presence filled the darkness and Emil knew that all the evil in the world had just come in—however a thing like that could happen—up from the Valley, down from the sky, and in from that terrible, shadowland place in the corners of reality that God forgot to check when he sent the earth spinning on its way like a child releasing a ball into water. The evil just came.
It was here!
As leathery wings crackled, Emil’s fingers spidered their way over invisible concrete and his sphincter let go, filling his cell with the smell of terror. As the sound of tiny human voices shouted on the street—ten million miles away, at least, and apparently in another language for as much as they mattered now—an intelligence took hold of the night and animated the very air, laying claim to the dark and exerting a new and irresistible pressure on the boundaries of sanity, the limitations of hope. For one hideous moment there was total silence. And then, with an Oooooooowwwwwwweeeeeeee screech of tearing steel that testified to the
power of this hellish presence, the bars on the cell’s door were ripped apart and…
It was totally dark—both inside the room and within Emil’s mind.
The light from the window, the lamps, and the sky—even the shining blade of gleaming warmth that had seemed so pure and elemental when the clouds had parted over his uplifted face—all of it, all light and every memory of light, paled before this total, ancient blackness.
It was heavy, thick and as familiar as breathing. It was the same darkness that had pressed around the campfires of huddled, terrified men when men were new, and the fire they could make even newer. It ran like swamp water into Emil’s mouth and down his throat, smothering the light in his mind and erasing even his vaguest memories of reason, leaving him hysterical, desperate, and as alone with the night as his most distant ancestors had ever been when the sounds of animals…out there…in the dark…growled their hunger and approach…
Those same animals were growling in that same darkness now. And Emil did the same thing men have been doing in the dark since darkness was all there was….
He screamed.
8.
Sheriff Conway was almost halfway across the street when he heard that scream, and the sound of it nearly killed him. He was running, his external posture perfect, eyes set, legs pumping, gun drawn…but his brain felt like a frog doing flip-flops in his skull, and at any moment he knew that he was fully capable of leaving a trail of fresh coffee and stomach acid on the cold concrete.
He’d seen a demon—an honest-to-Christ demon, like out of one of his grandmother’s books—drop straight out of the sky, bat wings and all. That wasn’t the kind of thing he normally dealt with around town. What was he going to do when he got to the jail and the thing was squatting on his desk, jabbering old Latin invocations to Satan, or whatever the fuck demons did? Say, “Put up your wings. Anything you conjure can and will be used against you in a court of law?”