The porch light went on. The door opened, showing my wife, hair disheveled, eyes widening. I nearly fell toward her, screaming for her to close and bolt the door. As she did so I heard the creature in the field howl once more, its wail answered by another and then another howl from somewhere in the distance.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” I said, laying my son on the couch, seeing where the thing had gotten its teeth into the tips of his two middle fingers, shearing one of them clear off, the other attached by a mere thread of cut bone.
And it was then, as shock began to give way to other feelings, that I remembered again what that smell was, the smell that had come over my world like a poison cloud when the fiery meteor had crashed into my life. It explained all my unnamed apprehensions, my feelings of supposed cowardice in front of my son. I knew now why I had wanted to run so badly.
I had smelled that odor once before, long ago when I was Richie’s age, when one night my friends and I stumbled onto a derelict under an abandoned railroad bridge. We thought he was sleeping, propped up against the wet side of the tunnel with his head down, one arm thrown out against the stone underneath for support. But when we got closer we saw that he was not sleeping but was dead, and that there were things crawling in and out of his mouth and nose and eyes, and over his hands and feet where white bone showed. And we ran away yelling, not only from the sight, but also from the smell of decomposing flesh that had surrounded it.
But that was not all.
The thing that had made this smell come back to me with such force this night when I had smelled it again, and which had rounded up all the little fears into an insistent frightened voice that had told me to run and hide and save my family, was the fact that we had run away from the railway tunnel, my friends and I, under the light of a full Moon.
CHAPTER 2
The Beast
When I turned from Richie to my wife, there was a look on her face I had never seen before. I don’t know if it was an instinctive thing—I still am confused about the supposed difference between the sexes, and the supposed unique ability of females to sense a situation and act accordingly; I believe to this day that that ability is derived more from adapting to situations than from genetics—but that night, at that moment, my wife knew what was happening. And instead of weeping, like some hysterical, foolish movie heroine, or falling back on my mythical strength as male provider, she forced the last of latent sleep from her eyes and turned to the closet in the front hallway, producing the shotgun her brother had given me two years before, over my protestations.
He had told me calmly, in the way that country people tell city people who, to them, are basically filled with nonsense, that I would need it. “You may not need it to hunt, or drive off some burglar, or to threaten your neighbor who starts digging up the north end of your garden with his tractor and ignores your protests, but you’ll need it.” When I tried to get him to take it back with him, to tell me why, if none of those things he had said would come to pass, I would possibly need a shotgun, he just waved me off like a stupid child and said, “Put it in the closet, Jason.”
Emily pulled down the bulky box of cartridges from the closet shelf. She then went to the front door and turned off the porch light. She stood silhouetted in the hallway by dim moonlight.
She cocked the shotgun open and pushed two shells into it. “What was it, Jase? Dog?” Her voice was eerily calm.
“It wasn’t a dog,” I said, still in shock.
Richie let out a cry, and Emily lowered the gun and joined me.
I had stopped the bleeding in his fingers; the cuts had been quick and clean and my scarf had served as a compress. Emily went into the bathroom; I saw a stab of yellow light cut into the back hallway as she turned the switch on. She returned with our first-aid kit, and as she worked on the hand with ointment I tried to get Richie to look at me.
His eyes were milky; though he called my name he didn’t see me. He stared feverishly into another world. I held a cool washcloth to his forehead. He waved his unhurt hand in front of him, murmuring, “Dad? No!” again and again.
“Tell me what did this,” Emily said.
The howling started outside. There was a clipped yelp, close by, and then three or four answering cries from far off. The hair on my arms stood up, and I turned to Emily and said, “That.”
I got up, squeezing her arm, and walked to the living-room window. I had to shoulder my way around the Christmas tree. The nostalgically pungent odor of balsam that filled my nostrils as I brushed it made a strange contrast to the horror of what was happening.
A large, dark shadow darted past the edge of my vision. A cold fist tightened in my stomach. If that was the thing we had left in the ditch at the far end of the field, it had grown to at least six feet in height in less than an hour.
There was a small window in the back bedroom on that side of the house. I sprinted to it. It was covered with Venetian blinds. I turned the wand slowly to open them. I saw darkness, a thin cut of lawn bordered by bushes, the squeezed vertical fingers of a stockade fence.
And then movement.
By the bushes, moving on around to the back of the house, was something tall and stooped, with the grace of an athlete, the head of a dog, long limbs, large paws.
Then it was gone.
I moved to the other window. I slowly turned the blinds, and they revealed the beast standing on the other side of the window glass, staring in at me.
This was not the face of a dog, or even a wolf. There was too much intelligence in it for any animal. It was a face that made me think of fire. It was all eyes and teeth, the eyes wide, yellow unending flame, the teeth long white razors.
I was sure it would slam through the window glass, clutch me in its teeth, and devour me. I watched its body tense, its eyes go deep and wide with hunger—
“Jase? Can you see anything?” Emily called from out front.
The beast gave a sudden unearthly howl and leapt away from the window.
“My God,” I gasped, and then I was running for the living room. “Emily!” I screamed. “No!”
She was just nudging her way past the Christmas tree when the front picture window exploded toward her. She never had a chance to raise the shotgun. There was an implosion of glass and wood frame as the window shattered.
It was over almost before it began. There was a blur of movement—huge yellow eyes, piranha-like teeth, upraised claws, a dark-haired body. Its mouth was open impossibly wide. It made an unearthly sound, something between a scream and a howl of triumph, and Emily was engulfed by the beast.
There was no chance to save her. I had barely taken a step toward her when the thing’s paws had lowered in frightfully swift arcs, talons extended like sabers, and blood exploded around her. Then its teeth were upon her. She didn’t even have time to cry out. The shotgun dropped uselessly to the floor at her feet, followed by her severed arms. Then the rest of her seemed to disappear in a haze of blood and ripped flesh. I saw her dying eyes turn to find Richie, and then she was gone. The monster fell to her corpse like a mongrel crazed with hunger and death lust.
Despite the horror of what I had seen, my only thought was to save my son. I lifted Richie from the couch and ran to the kitchen, throwing open the door to the cellar. I snapped on the light and struggled to secure the door behind me. I felt how flimsy it was; a cheap security lock set into a glued sandwich of wood chip and veneered oak. It would barely hold back a grammar-school child, never mind the raving horror that at this moment stood howling in my living room.
I turned the lock on the outside of the door and closed it nevertheless. Cradling my son, I brought him down and lay him on an old couch that butted one wall of the rumpus room I had put together. I ran to the workshop at the other end of the cellar, grabbed two strong two-by-fours and an armful of wood pieces scattered about along with nails and a hammer.
I bounded up the stairs and pounded the two-by-fours across the door, then nailed the smaller pieces around the circumferenc
e. It was the best I could do, but I doubted it would be enough. Sounds still issued from the front room of the house. I returned to the rumpus room to find Richie asleep, his breathing regular.
I put my hand gently on his head. “Oh, Richie,” I said, and suddenly I began to tremble.
Shock is an inefficient biological method of protection. There is a threshold of terror beyond which shock will dissolve and throw the patient into a more heightened reality.
I sat helpless on the edge of the couch, the one my wife and I had bought the week before our marriage, the one we had had our first argument over (a silly fight over fabric, corduroy versus a silky rose pattern she favored; she had won, and for the next year I harbored a barely hidden resentment that sometimes flared into outright ammunition during subsequent fights), and now, though my own death be near, all I could think of was that fight, and how I had acted like a schoolboy after losing. I had once written of that other Emily, Emily Dickinson, transmuting my love for my wife into a feigned bond with the dead poet of Amherst:
~ * ~
Emily—
Do I know you?
Do I really feel
What I believe?
Your life was mine—
Your hundred-year bones
Lie with me now.
Were you tortured, shy?
Or was your anguish deeper still—
A boldness of mind
Encased in dreadful face?
Can I say these things without a lie?
Were your dashes all mistakes—
Archaic device—
Or rather helpless insecurities Caught in vain ice?
~ * ~
And now my own Emily was gone.
It was an inconceivable blow, smitten on an inconceivable night.
In that place beyond shock, I did lose control of myself, then. Life, I decided, was not to be lived without my Emily. The hammer was on the floor next to me; I remember rising, and concluding that it would be best to walk calmly up the steps, remove the impediments to the door’s opening, and throw it wide, inviting my own extinction. And, I remember thinking ironically, in that strange state I was in, if religion be right after all, I would enjoy an immediate reunion with my beloved.
I believe I reached the first step of the cellar stairs before the final image of my wife’s face, as she had turned to Richie, striving for his salvation, rose before me. To do what I contemplated, even in madness, would be a betrayal beyond forgiveness.
And then my son called me, and I dropped the hammer, all thoughts of destruction and betrayal banished.
“Dad,” he murmured. It was a weak summons, but it might as well have been a cry from a mountaintop for the joy and hope it gave me.
I dropped the hammer and rushed back to his side. He was lost behind the swirling, feverish mists of his eyes, but then he found his way back to clarity.
He panted my name and then he added, “They…”
“What is it, Richie?” I held him as he receded to delirium. I could almost feel him fighting unconsciousness.
His eyes cleared, and suddenly he was Richie again. For a moment I thought that he was going to laugh. But his mouth was twisted in terror, and my cry of thanks for the return of my son froze on my lips as he stared wildly into my eyes and pleaded, “Kill me. Oh, God. Dad, kill me!”
His eyes clouded, then closed, and he went limp in my arms.
I thought I had lost him. But his even breath told me that he was asleep. I laid him down and sat stroking his head, thinking of what he had said. Delirium must still hold him. I thought of the beast that had done this to him.
I picked up the hammer, but this time it was to face and kill whatever chose to break through my feeble defenses and try to take my son from me.
CHAPTER 3
Lull
But nothing came. And that was, in many ways, worse than facing the thing that had leapt through the front window of my house.
As the minutes wore on, I realized just how vulnerable we were. There were foundation windows around the cellar, five in all, and any one of them would provide easy entry. One blow would knock any of them inward off their simple hooks and eyes. I thought of the commercials I had so recently sneered at for house shutters—a complete and repulsively antiseptic form of blocking the home out from the rest of the world. Or so I had thought at the time. The commercials showed cheery, mostly older folks pushing a button and then standing back as steel slats rolled down from housings mounted above doors and windows. The home then became a fortress. The commercials had produced disgust in me, a disgust in the cynicism of a people who would happily shut themselves off from the rest of the world. That sort of society would eventually crumble in on itself, as communication between its members degenerated into a paranoid network of purely business contact. The unit-fortress represented to me the ultimate triumph of alienation.
I thought of all my pompous reasoning in that cellar with my son and laughed—at that moment I would have gladly given my right arm for house shutters, followed by my right leg for an electrified fence. Limbs for weapons; by the time I was finished there would have been little left of me.
I thought of boarding the baseboard windows. But I had little left in the way of scrap wood in my workshop. Even if I had, by that time I wondered if it would be wise to make any noise. I had heard nothing from upstairs in nearly an hour. Any noise might merely draw the thing to my son and me. It seemed incredible that it did not know that we were down here, especially after the glare of hateful intelligence I had seen in the thing’s face through the bedroom window. But I was not about to test its aptitude without good reason.
Maybe it had gone away. Maybe—
There was a sound, and my thoughts froze in place. I stood rigid over my workbench, hammer in hand, light from the family room spilling into the rectangle of doorway that separated my dark shop from the rest of the cellar. The sound came again.
Floorboards creaking.
It was directly over my head. I had a horrible vision of the thing peering down through the floor at me, its teeth arched painfully back into a mockery of a smile, its Atlas-like forearm gearing back to smash right through the oak parquet, slicing me in half, the monster howling in pleasure as the life pumped out of my severed body, my mind dimming, the last of my sight beholding the still-bright gleam in its chrome-yellow eyes as it yanked me up before it, holding me like a child holds a doll that has caused displeasure, and its mouth gimballing wide open, its knife-paw dropping me into that gleaming razor-filled cave of darkness…
The floorboards above me creaked as the monster moved away.
I am not good at direction. I spent the next twenty seconds frantically calculating what room was directly over the workshop. It was the back bedroom, the one through whose Venetian blinds the thing had faced me. The thing was leaving the bedroom, snarling and throwing things as it went. I followed it with my ears, out into the hallway. I crept out of the workshop. The footpads ceased again. Then there was rapid movement down the hallway into the kitchen, followed by a pause at the top of the cellar steps.
My heart declined to beat.
I stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting. If it was going to break the door and come, let it. Nothing happened. It did not move away. My ears were so attuned now to its movement that I would have heard it. It simply stood there.
Waiting was madness. If I had counted seconds I’m sure not more than thirty would have gone by, but it seemed as if the sun and Moon had traded places in the sky over and over. The muscles in my right hand where I gripped my futile hammer stood out like hard rivers and tributaries, and my hand began to go numb.
Still the thing stood unmoving at the cellar door.
Finally, I could take it no longer. I had actually opened my mouth to shout, “Come on, bastard,” when the thing walked away.
I was overcome with both relief and rage. A part of me had wanted—was ready—to face the beast that had destroyed my family.
With my ears, I
followed its movements to the front of the house. I heard broken glass being stepped on, the sound of something thrown, and then nothing.
The night had suddenly grown quiet.
I thought of the cellar windows again. For a terrified moment I thought I caught the glint of a yellow eye in one of the panes, but it was the reflection of the light bulb over my workbench, which went out, then glowed back up to life as the generator out in the barn kicked in automatically.
I went back to where Richie slept peacefully. I slipped down to the floor with my back against the couch. My right arm ached; I looked down and saw the hammer still clutched spasmodically in my hand. With an effort of will I opened my fingers and placed it on the floor next to me.
One of the cellar windows faced me, and I stared at it, but no wolf face stared back.
I kept staring, and the night wore on. Eventually, my hand went to the hammer at my side and stayed there.
CHAPTER 4
The Lost Son
My son called to me as the sun began to rise.
I must have dozed, because it had been dark and had stayed dark and in my dream I was fighting a legion of wolves. I had a flashlight in my hand, and when I turned it on they howled, and when I hit them with the lighted flashlight their howls turned to screams and they disappeared in a puff of smoke. And then all their screams merged into one unbearable sound, and my eyes opened to the orange of creeping daylight coming into the room and my son screaming behind me.
Still throwing my sleep aside, I reached back for him but he wasn’t on the couch. He continued to scream. I know the sound that had awakened me was him crying my name in a horrible paroxysm of agony, but now the sounds he was making bore little resemblance to human articulation. He sounded as though he was choking on his tongue.
“Richie?” I called out, forcing myself to my feet. His screaming continued.
He was crouched in the far corner of the room, half hidden by an old easy chair with a threadbare red slipcover on it. There was a reading lamp next to the chair. Richie’s arms flailed out, knocking it over. The bulb smashed on the tiled floor.
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