by Gene Lazuta
“That’s how he ended up gettin’ killed. It was on a night like that.”
“How did Datch find all this out? About the doctors, I mean,” Cooper asked, genuinely interested now.
“Bobby told him.”
Cooper’s eyes narrowed.
“Datch hypnotized him and he told the whole story. Mind you, if you’d asked him while he was just awake and normal, he’d know nothing about it. But when the doctor put him under, he told it, in detail: all about his dad’s drinking too, and some of them doctors who weren’t all that on the up-and-up…about some of the awful things they did to him while his daddy sat drunk in a dark waiting room. And about the last doctor he saw, on the night his daddy was killed…it was that last doctor who told him what he was.”
“Yeah? And what was that?”
“The Blood Prince.”
“He said that?”
The sheriff nodded.
“He said that…in those words?”
The sheriff nodded again.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Datch don’t got no reason to lie, and he says he’s got tapes of the kid sayin’ it when he was eight or nine years old. He took it to mean that he had developed some kinda guilt complex over his father’s death that ended up gettin’ twisted into a kind of buried megalomania where he confused his own actions with the impact they have on others. Somehow, he ended up deciding that he’s capable of killing people, just by thinkin’ ‘bout it, ‘cause—and this is the kicker—the dream he’d been having the night they went out was about his daddy dying when his head hit the windshield of his car. I guess that when Datch asked him to describe that dream, even while he was in his trance, it made the kid cry. That’s how bad it was.”
“So he thinks he killed his own father?” Cooper said, draining his coffee cup and, at least for the moment, forgetting that there was a dead body in the room right next door.
“Not ‘thinks,’” the sheriff corrected. “Subconsciously he’s convinced he did.”
“So to screen that, he came up with this artificial memory in which it was Woodie in the car, and not him,” Cooper mused aloud. “I never even though to question it. I mean, why would I? He never really talked about it. And Woodie never mentioned it at all. Christ…”
“Now you wanna hear about the Dr. Green who his daddy had taken him to see the night he died in that accident?”
“Dr.—”
‘Green.”
Cooper stared. “Coincidence” he said after a pause.
“Description fits,” the sheriff nearly whispered, leaning in very close. “The boy’s description of that last doctor fits exactly with the one you gave me of the Mr. Green from Cleveland, and the one I could give you of the Mr. Green who brought his Indian Diggers into my town. It fits, Mr. Cooper, right down to a hair.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“It means that, when Bobby gets here,” Conway replied, “we better have our stories straight if we’re gonna use him to get to the bottom of this thing.”
So they got their stories straight, and Cooper repeated the scenario about Woodie’s midnight run, calls from the phone booth, and eventual murder to his friend both over the phone and in a motel room later that morning. The only part that was not completely fabricated to roughly match the evidence Norris would see was the part about Woodie’s diary. That was real. They’d found it—a half-filled spiral notebook of spaced-out ramblings—in the backseat of the Pinto, written in a shaky, apparently hurried hand. Its contents were convoluted, at best. But having heard everything he had about werewolves and Vyrmin legends from the sheriff, Cooper recognized at least a portion of what Woodie had written down. And he had to admit to himself that, whether he liked it or not, the sheriff seemed to be on the right track. So he went along with the lie. He repeated the scenario as his emotions ebbed ever closer to the boiling point until his temper broke, as Cooper had known it would, and he picked up his gun and headed out to find his brother’s killer.
Just like Conway said.
“That’s the key, Mr. Cooper,” the sheriff had emphasized. “We gotta think like dogs. We’ll give the wolf some runnin’ room, and then just let him lead us right back to the pack’s lair.”
“That’s assuming he knows where it is,” Cooper cut in.
“He knows,” Conway assured him gravely. “Believe me, Mr. Cooper. He knows.”
* * *
But now that the deed was done, Cooper couldn’t stand himself. He stood at the edge of the parking lot, watching the trees sparkle with freshly settled snow beneath a brilliant, white winter’s sun, and the shadowy, closed-door conspiracies and archaic bogeyman stories of the wee morning hours all took on an aspect of absolute fantasy in his mind.
And worse.
They took on the aspect of betrayal.
“Let me explain,” he shouted into the hole in the woods where Robert Norris had disappeared. But there was no reply. “Bob! For Christ’s sake, listen!”
And then he turned.
“Goddamn it!” he spit, slamming his revolver against his thigh when he found Conway, standing about thirty feet away, near the center of the motel’s parking lot, holding a walkie-talkie near his mouth.
His attention was fixed on the older man’s face, and a sneer crept over his upper lip.
“You son of a bitch,” he hissed, lowering his head and aiming his eyes forward from beneath furrowed brows.
The sheriff, too far away to hear Cooper’s words, still seemed to catch something from his expression because, as the detective began walking his way, he lowered his walkie-talkie and stared.
Cooper took five steps, froze, and turned back around.
“We’d better get inside,” Conway called from across the lot.
“Wolves?” Cooper asked the air, astonished, straining his ears to pick up every bit of sound. “In Ohio?”
The call from the Retreat was unmistakable. Even a city boy like him recognized it. From the trees, it coiled like an auditory serpent, moaning in a single, baleful voice before falling, only to reemerge as a chorus of howls that chilled his blood.
Conway was suddenly at his side, taking his arm.
The howling went on a moment longer and then stopped.
“Wolves?” Cooper mumbled again.
There weren’t any wolves in Ohio. And there hadn’t been for over a hundred and fifty years. Sure, one was spotted in New York State, or Michigan every now and then. But those were just wandering down from Canada. On the eastern half of the continental United States, the wolf had been hunted to extinction as a pest. The last one to be killed in Ohio was in 1832. He’d seen a microfilm of the newspaper article about it when he was in college, complete with an accompanying photograph of the proud hunter—baggy pants, handlebar mustache, and those dark, beady eyes that everyone in old pictures seems to have—standing with his musket next to where the animal hung by its hind legs from a tree.
The howling stopped.
Cooper felt Conway stiffen for a split second and then hiss, “Shit!” before pulling him by the sleeve.
The detective stumbled, half fighting the tugging on his jacket and sensing the motion, speed, and imminent, unstoppable approach of something in the trees. It was a feeling of undeniable momentum, of natural, animal power, and in a weird, inappropriate way, he found it beautiful. He couldn’t see, hear, or smell anything. It was just a tingle in his gut and a shudder up his spine. It was something electrical maybe…
But whatever it was, Conway apparently felt it too, because he became frantic.
“Move, damn you! Can’t you see the Hunt’s begun?” he shouted in Cooper’s face, making the young man turn and examine him as if he were an exhibit.
“What did you say?” he asked.
And the sheriff suddenly looked as if he’d forgotten the entire English language—just now, this second, forgotten it, the whole fucking thing.
“I…” he began, standing perfectly still. “I…don’t know.”
The “because” burst into the sunshine at that instant, and as members of the Flock have done for thousands of years, when confronted with the wolf in the flesh, every man in that little courtyard stopped what he was doing and started with his mouth open, paralyzed by fright, just long enough for the hunters to begin their attack.
23.
When Robert Norris heard the howling, he too stopped in his tracks. But for him, it was a very different experience than for the others, because…
He understood what the wolf song said.
Not in words. It wasn’t exactly words that he heard. Instead, it was a kind of instinctual, natural sound, like the patter of falling rain or the moaning of the wind that, without articulate definition, described an event so intrinsic, so acutely attuned to the logic of the wilderness, that the imperfection of human language stood as a feeble approximation by comparison. This sound emerged from that wellspring from which all language, or the very concept of language, had been drawn. This simple, animal howl said more in its modulated way than all the words he had ever been taught, and communicated with a part of his spirit that he had suspected was there only in those most perfect moments when he would stand amid the trees and feel the presence of God in His works.
It stalled his forward progress and took command of his senses, driving from his mind every intention he had developed, replacing them with a pure and crystalline confusion that expressed itself most eloquently in the stunned silence of his limp, gaping mouth, which hung open in a breathless O. It chilled him to the bone, and he listened, enraptured, as that first solo voice fell off and a chorus of three voices took its place—primitive, timeless, and in an equally wordless way, expressive of a simple, yet complex concept that he would have thought of as harmony if his mind had been capable of pulling that word from the dictionary in his skull.
Three-part harmony.
He closed his eyes.
Three, acting as one.
As if in a dream, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the vibrating ball of heat that was his brother’s artificial eye. When it hit the light, a weird, tranquil stillness descended on his thoughts, radiating up, through the very bones in his arm.
He heard the wolf song shimmer through the blackness in his mind, and in a vague, echoing way, the sense of it came clear.
Joy.
The song celebrated.
Joy…at a return.
Joy…at simply being.
Joy…at release.
When he opened his eyes, he found that his right arm had lifted Woodie’s glass eye up over his head.
“Let me explain,” his friend Mike Cooper had shouted after him as he first entered these woods, and there had been a moment, a brief, flashing instant, during which Norris had considered turning around and giving the man his chance. But that had been a red moment, an instant of passion when he was still a furnace of vengeful hate, seething at a fever’s pitch with images of his brother’s dead body, and a moment of purpose—a purpose unlike any he had ever felt before in his life. He had been about to turn and give the man his chance, but the wolf song had interrupted it, and now it seemed that that moment had occurred a million years ago. For now he was locked in a tenebrous place between the song of the wilderness and the pulling—no, the absolute demand—of his body. He wanted to lift his eyes to the thing he held aloft in his hand and feel, as he had felt before—in the room in which a woman had lain, dead below a cloud of sulfurous smoke and supernatural dread—that contact with…something…he didn’t know what…
But it was something…big!
He could feel the eye in his hand, screaming to his most secret placed to look at me!
And he wanted to look.
But a part of him was terrified at what he might find should he actually do it.
He wanted to look.
And despite it all, he did.
And as sunlight hit the eye, he was suddenly somewhere else.
But more…
As the sunlight hit the eye, he was suddenly someone else…
And a woman was crying.
24.
The first beast emerged from the Retreat in a flurry of perfect motion and energy. The sight of it staggered Cooper where he stood, and he had to reach out and take Conway’s arm so as not to fall. His knees felt weak, but worse, his brain was protesting in his head, squirming, as if it wanted to get out, as if it wanted to just push itself through his ears and go scurrying across the parking lot in a mad rush to return to the place it had been before it had ever heard of Harpersville, Ohio, and the terrors that seemed to give the place its own horrendous identity.
Conway’s brain apparently was performing similar convolutions because, in that same instant, the sheriff reached out and grabbed Cooper’s arm and, together, they stood, tentatively supporting one another as reality itself seemed to slip into memory.
“It comes in bloody rage and deadly grace,” the sheriff said. And Cooper, despite his already overloaded mental switchboard, recognized the archaic diction of the man’s pronouncement, and was intrigued by it.
“Why are you talking like that?” he asked, and he meant more than the words inferred.
He meant, “Why is your voice so calm? Why do your words sound so right, so appropriate, so fucking natural? Why, and this is the big one, Mr. Sheriff of this shit-box town, oh yes, this is the big, sixty-four-thousand dollar question, why, with all of it, do I believe they’re true?”
“I don’t know,” the sheriff said, and somehow that was no more than what Cooper had expected.
Then he turned his head and saw the first of the Vyrmin emerge into the sun glare of a December morning, bursting forth from that shadowy wilderness that was the Killibrook Valley, into the hard truth of a new, serious reality in which the things that howled in the dark suddenly were make flesh in the light and…
Conway and Cooper hugged one another and stared.
They were standing at the edge of the Retreat with the trees at their backs. The first figure darted up from a patch of brush about twenty yards to their right. From their vantage point they saw the parking lot stretch for about forty yards before it ended in the steaming wreck of the ambulance and pickup truck. There were five or six men clustered aimlessly around a body lying on the ground there, and one man was leaning against the ambulance, his arm crooked in a bloody, improvised sling. Before anyone could make a sound, the group scattered like birds, dark against the white snow, and another creature appeared, moving in next to the first from the left. A third soon followed, and the three formed a line between the deputies and that place where Conway and Cooper stood like a pair of embracing lovers, startled by an unexpected porch light.
They’re impossible! Cooper’s mind screamed.
No!
No-no-no-no-noooo!
They looked kind of like apes: their legs were short and muscular, covered with hair and tipped by what looked like paws, but with fingers. Their arms were heavy and started at hunched shoulders. When they moved, their heads, shoulders, chests, and arms all swung as one in whatever direction they wanted to look, pivoting on those tiny legs as if brain and body were one single spring, looking for something at which to snap. Their hands, as big as shovel blades, hung dangerously at their sides, the fingers opening and closing, opening and closing, and…
“Nooooooo!” Cooper screamed, shattering the moment and making Conway jump. “Oh, Christ in heaven…that face!”
The creatures glanced at one another ever so briefly, and then, as if perfectly choreographed, the one in the center leaned forward and growled out a hideous warning toward where the sheriff and detective stood, while the other two turned and chased after the fleeting deputies. Finishing his howl, the center creature hesitated just
long enough to see Conway lean back and drag Cooper behind him into the woods, before turning to join his companions.
The creatures had to be a good thirty yards behind the deputies, but an instant after the first two turned, Cooper saw a bright red flash and knew, as the ground beneath his feet disappeared and he felt himself tumbling backward, that one man had already died.
How?
How could they move so fast?
How?
“That face!” he shouted, struggling against the strong arms that gripped his coat as he stumbled, fell, tumbled, and then scrambled for his feet. “The one in the middle! My God, it looked like that old man…”
“Ernie Cray,” the sheriff offered.
“Yeah!” Cooper said, pulling himself free and rolling suddenly in a ball.
The Retreat was very steep at this particular place, and without Conway’s steadying hands, Cooper went sliding on the ice and frozen ground, crashing into brittle, sapling trees and bouncing off larger trunks until he was able to get a hand around a substantial elm and arrest his untethered motion. Breathing hard, he hugged the tree, closed his eyes, opened them, and tried to get to his feet again as a scream—a very human scream this time—shrieked from overhead.
But, before he could lean into his climb back up the way he had just slid down, Conway came duck-shuffling from tree to tree and grabbed him by the collar, pulling him down again.
And someone else screamed.
And Cooper took a swing at the sheriff’s head.
And the next thing he knew there were stars flying and he was falling again and when he landed and looked up, the sheriff’s face was about two miles wide in his vision and a voice that sounded as if it were coming down from heaven itself boomed in his ears. “Don’t fight me, Vyrmin. Your destiny lies in these trees!”
And Cooper found this sentence uproariously funny, and, there on the ground, staring up past Conway’s face into the sun, he laughed, loud, hard, even while the sheriff slapped him, two times, and three, and…