Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  Its impact was even more profound than the convolutions wrought on his body, and, face pressed firmly into the soaking mud, he screamed through a gurgling, nauseous wretch that scissored his torso nearly in half and bent him into a tightly held fetal position.

  When his scream died, the second part of his transformation was complete, and lifting his head he saw the world through new eyes…

  And was dazzled.

  Every movement, down to the most minutely insignificant detail, attracted his attention with a reflexive speed that was as fast as the firing of a nerve. No integration of information occurred, no filtering of impressions through a complex, distracting system of human preconceptions muddied the simple purity of his sight. He saw his surroundings as an animal would see them: precisely as they related to himself. He was one with his environment, as if external reality had ceased to be the incomprehensible puzzle that he, in his human egotism, had striven to manipulate, becoming instead an extension of his own, physical being. Moving through these trees would be as natural as breathing, and just as easy.

  Though he was still lying on the ground, his head suddenly jerked up as a movement snatched his attention. A man in a ragged tan uniform appeared, stumbling from tree to tree as if in a daze. The human portion of Ernie’s mind recognized him as the deputy who had driven his pickup truck away from the motel earlier, only to return when his own transformation had begun—but the animal part of him instantly identified the man as not yet altered…he was still essentially human, and as such, he was prey.

  Ernie lifted himself into a half-crouch and snarled threateningly at the man, focusing his attention on his soft, white throat, but holding himself back from the attack until he saw in which direction the man’s nature would turn.

  The man froze when Ernie growled, his face slackening into a rubbery, twitching mask of comic confusion as the air seemed to swell with the renewed push of the energy pouring out from the trees.

  As Ernie watched, the man doubled over and yowled through the metamorphosis that he, himself had so recently endured.

  If there had been more humanity left in him, he would have been repulsed at the gush of black fluid running from the man’s mouth. He would have been awestruck at the viscosity of his skin as it quivered over him in startling ripples that contorted his face and locked his muscles in a crucified posture of sheer rigidity. He would have been horrified at the thick, crushing sound of flesh being literally vomited up in a bloody, bulging bubble that swelled the man’s throat and pulled his stomach into a concave cavity that made his ribs stand out beneath his wet shirt like the skeleton of some twisted, broken ship.

  But the part of Ernie’s human nature that might express such feelings was dead, and he watched impassively, unimpressed with what he saw, save for its being the proof he needed that this man was not to be feared, but welcomed as a Brother in the Blood.

  The deputy gurgled as the transformation progressed. He swayed and clutched at himself, ripping his shirt to ribbons in blind agony and twisting his head forward as a huge black membrane burst from his mouth and rolled his face back over his skull, exposing a bloody red pulp of raw meat, overrun with an intricate map of gorged, blue and red veins and arteries. He fell, as Ernie had fallen, pulling himself into a thrashing ball as the exterior of his body turned itself around, revealing a moist skin of prickling hair while finger- and toenails thickened and cracked. He writhed in the muddy snow until finally the change was finished, and tentatively he raised his head, as Ernie had done, to sniff the air.

  The human in him had been pushed back, but had not fled his form altogether…not yet. Even more power was needed for that final change. And that power was yet to come. So, for now, his limbs and body still resembled those of a man, though overall he was heavier and more thickly muscled than he had been before. At his groin, a carpet of black fur surrounded his dangling penis, and that hair seemed to spread out, over the rest of his form, thinning as it went until, along his back, it degenerated into a sparse sprinkle that dotted his still moist flesh. Hanging off him at his elbows were ribbons of tissue, like a ruined placenta, and when he moved, there was an animal surety to his limbs that was dangerously free.

  But though his body might have still retained is essential humanity, his face revealed the extent to which he’d been transformed. When he stood, his head hung heavily at the end of a deeply matted neck, his face’s features were swollen with bloody hair, and his mouth was wide and strong. Beneath his black lips ran a row of long canine teeth, stretching, it seemed, from one ear to the other. His eyes blazed yellow beneath a heavy ridge that sloped straight back to a crown of segmented bone from which ropes of muscle ran to the jaws. Everything about this new arrangement seemed wholly designed for the act of efficient and powerful biting. And as if test their purpose, the man snapped has jaws three times before focusing his eyes warily on Ernie, as if he were waiting for whatever might happen next.

  Ernie didn’t keep him waiting long.

  In a rush he was on his feet, moving with such incredible speed that the forest around him blended into a single blur. Just as quickly, his newfound brother leapt aside, and in an instant they were circling one another, growling, snapping their huge jaws, and breathing deep of the musky aroma of wet fur and blood. There was an exuberance to their investigations that was pure and innocent. Like two dogs they barked at one another, attacked and jumped back, muzzled and bit—all playfully, but with a deadly earnestness that Ernie sensed could explode into true combat in an instant.

  After a time, the other man broke and ran, and Ernie followed. Silently they skimmed through the woods with a nimble precision that took them a mile and then back before they stopped, their tongues lolling and their noses running behind great puffs of frozen mist. The end of their run had deposited them about a hundred yards behind the Lexington Motel, and through the trees they watched as a third creature, freshly changed like themselves, worked his way down the ridge.

  When the three were together, a closeness was created, and they knew, without speaking—for words were now alien to their thought processes—that they were the first…after hundreds of years…the first to return to the Wild.

  Ernie was the largest and oldest of the males, and as such he instantly assumed a role of dominance. Throwing back his great, hairy head, he emptied his lungs in a roar that shuddered his chest and exploded through the trees like thunder. The others watched him quizzically for a moment and then offered their own voices in a chorus of howls that blended into a music so chilling that animals for miles froze in their tracks and urinated where they stood.

  The Singing had come again!

  After generations of silence, the ancient Song of the Wild was again floating through the forest while the singers rejoiced in the knowledge that they had finally become together what they had always secretly been apart…

  When the Singing stopped, Ernie Cray glanced at his companions and, in that telepathic way of animals communicating with their own kind, made his wishes known: there were men at the top of the hill…men in the motel. There were unwitting, fleshy members of the Flock within striking range…probably huddled together, as was their nature when startled by the Song…

  Imagining them so—for that human quality was still his to enjoy—Ernie, the leader of this small, dangerous pack, suddenly found himself bursting with a gnawing, overpowering hunger that marked this morning, and this moment, as that time when, after countless peaceful nights, the Hunt would begin again.

  And then the pack moved in.

  III

  DIE•RY

  FOUR

  22.

  As Cooper turned from watching the sheriff’s men enter the woods in pursuit of Robert Norris, the events of the previous evening were vivid in his mind.

  It’s really amazing that so much could be so clear, and so little really revealed by it all, he thought, realizing that if things hadn’t gone so seriously wrong, the idea of six big, armed men following a single, unwitting park
ranger into the woods so they could stop him from becoming the werewolf king would have struck him as being very funny.

  But not now.

  Now he was scared.

  After the cemetery episode had come the discovery of Woodie’s mangled body in the Lexington Motel, and Cooper had been swept from one scene of bloody murder to another, stubbornly protesting, both verbally and in his mind, that what they were witnessing was the acting-out of a violently deranged group of insane people, and not, as the sheriff insisted, the resurrection of an ancient and frightening evil.

  Everything he saw, from the weird, ritualistic motif of Lefty Zimmer’s dog’s-head soup, to the outlandish explosion of violence aimed at Woodie Norris’ dead body, all served to verify his theory about drugs being at the heart of some delusional construct that was impelling the members of the Institute of Metaphysical Research along their dizzying spiral to madness.

  But those same ghoulish signals, so clear to the detective, simply fueled Sheriff Conway’s belief that there were real Vyrmin running around the town, and that they only way to fight them was some ridiculous plan of his that had something to do with behaving like a dog.

  “‘Cause see, a dog’s really the way you gotta look at this,” he had said in a room next to where Woodie’s body lay. “‘Cause only a dog’s smart enough to protect the flock in a pinch.”

  That was after midnight.

  And by then, Cooper was pretty well shot…

  * * *

  He’d nearly frozen to death at the cemetery, poking around for “clues” with the other deputies, and finding a shitload. But nobody, least of all Sheriff Conway, seemed to have the slightest idea of what to do with any of them. It was like a silent comedy, all shot in jittering black-and-white, with jerking movements and an outlandish plot that not even its participants could possibly take seriously.

  Somebody would find something and shout, “Hey! Look’it this!” And the sheriff and Cooper would jog over and Cooper would say, “Great! A boot print; make a plaster cast of it and we’ll see if it matches up with any of the ones we found around the horse’s carcass at the Zimmer farm.”

  And Conway would shrug it off and say, “Fuck it. We already know it’ll match. And besides, a boot’s a boot. What we really need is the print of a bare foot so we can see if they’re still human at all.”

  And Cooper would roll his eyes and hiss under his breath and just go on, weaving between the tombstones, in the mist and snow, with a silver moon poking through the clouds overhead and a sinking, deep-gut feeling settling in his bowels that no matter what, things couldn’t possible get any goofier than this.

  Only to discover that he was wrong…

  Because, shortly after midnight, a red-faced yo-yo that Conway had sent back to his office to “man the phones” came squealing the tires on his van up the path to the caretaker’s shack and shouting out the window, “We got us another one! Holy shit!”

  Which of course turned out to be Woodie.

  The sheriff’s reaction to Woodie’s death was surprisingly reserved. Especially after the way he’d huffed and puffed at the cemetery. Cooper expected him to turn purple and have a stroke when they walked in and found Woodie splashed all over the walls. But instead, the murder of Woodie Norris seemed to have an almost calming effect on him. It was as if by dying, the younger Norris had somehow put something into focus for the sheriff, making him less confused and therefore, more rational.

  But Cooper reacted quite differently. While Conway was calmly examining the room, the detective, until now the sole advocate of sanity and deductive reason in the bunch, broke down and cried. He just stood in the doorway of that motel room, clutching his wounded chest and bawling his eyes out for what must have been a good ten minutes. It wasn’t until the sheriff literally led him out by the arm that he was able to stop.

  Twenty minutes after that, sitting on a cheap motel bed and sipping coffee that tasted like lacquer thinner, he listened to Conway drop his bomb.

  “I want you to call Bobby Norris down here. And when you do, I want you to tell him this,” he said.

  And then he proceeded to tell Cooper, word for word, a story in which Woodie made a terrified call from a phone booth, raving about beasts chasing him, and everything being his brother’s fault.

  Cooper, after ten respectful seconds of stunned silence, laughed in his face.

  And the sheriff, with all the reserve of a priest, reached out and slapped him so hard that it made his right ear buzz.

  “Now we’ll go over it again,” he said, as Cooper raised a hand to his burning cheek.

  And they did.

  Again.

  And again.

  Until Cooper finally made the call, at three in the morning, that brought Robert Norris rushing down to his old hometown, because something bad had happened to his baby brother, and his good old pal Mike Cooper was on his side, and doing him a favor.

  As Cooper hung up, the sheriff put a hand on his shoulder and smiled, saying, “That was good. That was real good. I ‘specially liked the part about it being ‘bad.’ That made it sound authentic.”

  And Cooper shrugged the older man’s hand away, suddenly feeling a little sick at his touch.

  After that, Conway seemed to think that he owed the detective an explanation. It would take Robert Norris at least two hours to arrive, and the sheriff apparently wanted Cooper on his side when he finally did show up. So he sat the young man down, folded his hands, and said, “While you were fuming back at the jailhouse, I made a coupla calls. One was to the man who married Bobby Norris’ mama. His name’s Datch, and he’s a head doctor.”

  “I know,” Cooper said, disinterestedly. He was quickly coming to the conclusion that he didn’t like Sheriff Conway…not one, single bit.

  “Dr. Datch wasn’t none too thrilled to hear from me,” Conway continued, despite, or maybe because of, the detective’s tone. “I asked him about Woodie, and he was a little evasive until I kinda spelled things out for him. Gave him some bits and pieces. Maybe hinted that there might be trouble.”

  “You threatened him.”

  “Okay.” The sheriff shrugged. “If you wanna get technical…but it verified something I already knew, and put some things in perspective.”

  “Like what?” Cooper asked, despite himself.

  “It wasn’t Woodie in that car the night his father was killed,” the sheriff answered, with all the appropriate dramatic candor. “It was Bobby.”

  “You’re nuts,” Cooper replied, sloughing off even the suggestion as absurd.

  “You’re wrong,” Conway insisted. “I was there, remember. I pulled that kid out myself.”

  “But Bob told me that Woodie lost his eye in that accident.”

  “Woodie’s eye came out two years later. He fell off a bike.”

  “But Bob told me…”

  “According to his stepfather,” the sheriff interrupted, “Bobby Norris is about the most remarkable case of defensive memory loss he’s ever seen. He even kept a notebook on the boy. Used to hypnotize him and everything. Called it ‘screen memories,’ which, as far as I can tell, means that the boy subconsciously rearranged his life to hide a painful event instead of dealing with it.”

  “I know how a screen memory works. I had a professor who called them scream memories. And they are notoriously unreliable.”

  “Maybe so…but they’re logical, when you think on ‘em a minute. Supposedly Bobby was the reason they were out so late in the first place. Datch says that Bobby sees his daddy’s death as being his fault…’cause of his dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “He’s always had bad dreams, since he was born, it seems. Used to wake up screaming, night after night. Went on for years. Finally, according to what Bobby’s mama told her second husband, his daddy couldn’t take it no more. He started trying to find out what was wrong with him…started taking him to doctors.”

  The way the sheriff inflected the word “doctors” caught Cooper’s attentio
n and made him frown.

  “But they weren’t regular doctors,” the sheriff went on, apparently aware that he had hit the detective a little closer to home.

  “According to Mrs. Norris, her husband was afraid that there was something seriously wrong with the boy, something maybe, inherited. See, Robert Norris, Sr., he didn’t know too much about the Vyrmin or such like. Like I told the boys before, his daddy disappeared up in the woods when he was just a little guy, and by the time he was grown, there hadn’t been anything funny going on for so long that he didn’t hear too much about his family’s curse. Oh, he got it a little from the kids at school, but that went away over the years, and the next thing you know he’s a normal, everyday kind of guy with a wife and two sons, one of which has an occasional bad dream like a lot of kids do, while the other never sleeps a single night through without screaming himself awake.

  “Not a single night. Not a one.

  “So he starts to study on it, and he finds out that, yeah, his family did have a history of being a little odd. Matter of fact, his mama, who wasn’t all that old then, told him that she had met his dad in Columbus, but that he had brought her back to Harpersville just after they got married. Told him how folks treated the family like lepers. Told him all the stuff about his daddy that she probably swore to herself she’d never tell, but that she knew she would someday, because someday he would ask. He’d have to.

  “So he found out and got worried. There had been plenty of signs by then. Started about the time of his sixth birthday. But he never paid it no mind. Other folks did, a little, ‘specially the older ones. But he never paid it no mind…until his boy started to slip. And then he did everything he could think of to help him. But he couldn’t just go to a regular doctor and say that he thought that maybe his son had inherited the family curse. So he started sneaking out at night, sometimes driving from sundown to sunup to get to doctors way out of town, barging in at all hours and paying crazy amounts of money for them to look at Bobby and say what they thought.