That was a bit more than Owen could bear. He needed to figure out what he was dealing with. Now … He couldn’t rely on these contacts. He couldn’t rely on the paper’s archives. Most of this reference was obsolete. The microfiche slides were out of order—by years, sometimes. And the lighting was terrible.
Nothing would be resolved from this office.
Jarvik, by now in a lavender peacoat, granted him all the time he needed. A follow-up piece to the weekend’s “trilogy” wasn’t expected for two or three days. If necessary, Kegel would update the Sprawl Mart and Holtwood affairs, not to worry. Providing the scanners didn’t go ape again, Owen was encouraged to put all he had into making his next installment a “scorcher.”
Which gave him a chance, at last, to find out what a corn wolf was—although only at random, after he’d tried and given up. It was really a fluke that he found it at all. Having settled on browsing Bad Moon: An Unabridged History of Urban Legends, by Ronald Stoner, he stumbled onto it: Kornwolf—spelled with a K. It was German.
Centuries back, at the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), an age when wolves had still roamed the forests of Germany, farmers had grown to refer to the outlaws, deserters and fugitives hiding in fields all over Europe as kornwolves. Often, these “heretics” were able to live off the land until harvest without being spotted.
Currently, the term had survived in some older, primarily German-American communities. In parts of the rural Midwest, the Kornwolf was still reviled as a spirit of vengeance, a curse of the fields, a “blight,” a “pariah.”
The term was included in Stoner’s history owing to “The Kornwolf of Dole, Indiana”—also known by the people of Blessinger County as “The Werewolf of Possum Turn.” This creature had first been spotted roaming the Hoosier Forest in 1970. One person claimed to have witnessed it mauling a goat on the side of the road at dusk. Another reported horrible screams from the forest. Three dozen chickens were murdered … For over a month, it had wandered the region—then, just as unexpectedly, vanished. In appearance, it was said to have bridged the gap between Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, and Nixon …
Owen looked up from the book with a start.
It had taken him almost seven hours, but, finally, he’d stumbled onto something.
Dr. Diller had been on the money.
Now, for gazing into the abyss …
By the next afternoon, he had narrowed his definition of “werewolf” down accordingly. Every mythology, every belief, every culture, tradition and creed in history recognized some basic manifestation of the shape-shifter. It was a universal.
Typically, a person assumed the form of the most deadly beast in that part of the world—the wolf or bear in Europe and northern Asia, the leopard or hyena in Africa, the lion or tiger in China and India—each to its own inherent embodiment. The Romans had the Versipellis. Italy had the Lupo Manero. Portugal had the Lobo homem. Mexico, the Nahual. France, the Loup Garou. And Werewolf came from the German.
The modern (Christian) image of the werewolf, culled from the fire and brimstone of medieval Europe, had gelled to its current form in the sixteenth century’s Reformation.
Between the years of 1520 and 1630, over thirty thousand individuals were condemned as werewolves—not witches, but werewolves—most of whom were burned, beheaded, dismembered or otherwise put to death.
In 1540, Rainer Yokelman, a friar from Cologne, had devised a key to identifying werewolves in human form.
Indications included:
Pale skin.
Sensitivity to light.
An absence of tears or saliva.
Bad breath.
Excessive thirst.
Cuts and abrasions on arms and legs that do not heal.
An extended ring finger.
Glands that emit foul odors.
Hypersexuality—including a drive toward incest, bestiality and rape.
Speaking in tongues.
Purple or bluish urine.
Intense cravings for meat.
The ability to sense—or “see”—events happening miles away, or even beforehand.
Massive intake of wine or spirits, used to catalyze demonic possession.
Irritability.
Drastic mood swings—spells of lethargy erupting in outbreaks of wild violence.
A bent for long, nocturnal meanderings.
Extreme sensitivity to lunar conditions.
Steadily darkening skin throughout the day preceding a transformation.
According to Yokelman, the “blighted” or cursed individual could also exercise powers of mind control over those around them—particularly those affected by intoxicants.
Continuing, Yokelman ardently maintained that, while most werewolves, or lycanthropes (from the Greek: lykoi, wolf, and anthropos, man), were commonly given to work their mischief by light of the full moon, lunar conditions, in fact, continued to influence not just their behavior, but their overall psychological and physical dispositions, throughout the cycle. The dual natures of human and beast were not at all mutually exclusive. They waxed and waned in flux with one another as much as they did with the moon. The “blighted” was subject to transformation at any time, with varying severity.
Other means of inducing the blight included wearing a “wolf pelt” or “girdle”—one granted by the devil in exchange for the individual’s soul—wearing an article of clothing obtained from a werewolf, eating the heart of a wolf, chanting a series of incantations while dancing around a ritual fire, “carnal indulgence” and last, sustaining excessive mental and physical trauma.
During interrogations, suspected werewolves were beaten, often to death, instead of being questioned properly. The verdict was simply a flogging away, went the logic—as long as the suspect was chained to the floor, that is. The old: “If-she-floats-she’s-a-witch, if-she-doesn’t-she’s-dead” routine.
Today, a handful of explanations had begun to account for this age of hysteria. Foremost among them, and not to be underestimated, being the fact that Europe had been enmeshed, at the time, in a comprehensive religious cataclysm: many accepted, seemingly harmless sects like the Anabaptists—and even the Quakers—had been lumped in with all manner of heretics, killers and social outlaws, each to be hounded with equal tenacity. Modern physicians would now place anyone afflicted with schizophrenia, rabies, porphyria (the “hairy gene”), psychomotor epilepsy, manic depressive psychosis and hysterical neurosis of the dissociative type—to say nothing of everyday quirks and foibles, or an alternative sexual lifestyle—at risk of being accused and condemned as a werewolf by sixteenth-century standards. Most of the people Owen considered worth a damn would not have survived it. In likelihood, he himself would have burned at the stake on a dozen occasions already—and he wasn’t even a creep, ho ho.
He never would have made it through adolescence.
He checked out Bad Moon at 8:45, just before the library closed, and adjourned to The Plea to catch up on his basket, the scanner and Jarvik’s latest wardrobe.
Through his window, the old man appeared to be lost in thought. He was seated with his feet on the desktop, staring absently into space. A rose had been tucked into one of his pockets.
Owen decided to leave him alone.
Nothing new had come over the scanner. A couple of vaguely similar calls had filtered in on Monday evening—one from an angry Soddersburg resident claiming to have been pulled over, searched and questioned by “heavily armed Dutchies,” the other from Bird-in-Hand, someone complaining of having been tailgated clear from Ronks to New Holland by a Sprawl Mart wagon with high beams.
Little had happened as yet this evening. A call had come in from the Intercourse Getaway’s desk clerk, reporting a “posse of vampire types” who were scaring his regular customers.
Otherwise, nothing was cooking out there. No livestock attacks. No kornwolf sightings.
Feeling no less unwelcome in the newsroom than ever, he stopped by the kitchen, filled up on coffee and made
for the microfiche vault.
For the next few hours, he read through Stoner’s Bad Moon. It was organized alphabetically. Owen would make it to H by midnight. Along the way he would read about the Adlet; the blood-thirsty Inuit weredogs that still hunt the icelands in search of human flesh; the Navajo Coyote People, who were able to travel for miles in the blink of an eye; Gilles Garnier, the Hermit of Dole, burned as a werewolf in the 1570s; and more from Germany, the Greifswald werewolves, who plundered that city in 1640.
The last entry he was able to read that evening concerned the “Harvest Sabbath.” Dating back, again, to the sixteenth century, this ritual event was defined as the culmination of a seasonal curse. When a group or community lost its faith, or was errant in performing the will of the Lord, “a blight would overcome their fields, as a madness would overtake their young, as a devil would grow to appear among them, enticing their gentlest hearts to murder.” This devil, this spirit of vengeance, would “bury its seed among them by light of the moon,” from which would grow their undoing, in time. The Sabbath itself was a rite of destruction.
Reeling, bewildered, exhausted and drifting in oversuspended disbelief, Owen emerged from the microfiche vault a few hours later to check the scanner.
Someone from Paradise had phoned in complaining of too many locals seated with guns on their porches all over The Basin of late, and how it was ruining the tourist season.
Otherwise, nothing. Still no sightings.
The lull was increasingly disconcerting.
Owen left the building and walked up the street to the empty central plaza. The fountains were still. He leaned on the edge of one basin, sitting beneath a walk light. His temples were throbbing. He rubbed them. The evening was quiet. The air was crisp and clear.
He looked up, into the sky, as framed by an outline of darkened department buildings—and spotted the moon in a solid crescent, as centerpiece, hanging directly above him. A waxing crescent, if memory served—working its way to the first quarter. Or was that a gibbous, he wondered. He couldn’t remember the order. How did it go?
Whatever the case, it was hanging over him. Which only confused him all the more—as it wasn’t full …
Lord almighty.
Again, he cradled his head, exhaling.
For all of that afternoon’s research, the one thing he couldn’t shake—the one thing that hadn’t stopped eating a hole in his rambling thought dreams—was Rainer Yokelman’s listing of purple or bluish urine as a symptom of lycanthropy, and with it, the one image hanging persistently, now, in his mind, from the past two weeks—more than all of the “sightings” combined, more than the motion detector photo—the observation he couldn’t in some way or other attribute to human delusion (which wasn’t to be underestimated) and/or deception (by outside parties) was the purplish “spray paint” marking the walls of the Holtwood structures the week before—the bluish goo that, upon inspection, appeared to have rusted around the edges, eaten away by a potent corrosive.
He hadn’t been able to figure it then, and he couldn’t pretend to shake it now. He was all out of sorts. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. He never had.
In the morning, he woke up with less than an hour remaining before he was due at the gym. He dressed, made coffee and checked his original list of goals for the early hours. He hadn’t left time to sift through the hate mail. That would just have to wait until later. He wouldn’t be able to swing by the bookstore either, not before three o’clock.
One way or another, he definitely needed to turn something in by the end of the day.
He thought about it all the way to the gym …
Whatever the case, Roddy looked good in training.
As that went, watching The Unbelievable spar with Calvin that afternoon would not only interrupt Owen’s regularly scheduled torture session with Rhya, Coach Stumpf would actually give him cause, by surprise, for pleasant distraction. Owen could never have seen it coming, as, all morning, Jack had seemed even more dour than usual.
He still hadn’t mentioned the article.
Earlier, Roddy had outlined a bad situation pending with one of the juniors, Franklin, the one with the lip on him. Jack was in serious straits with Franklin, apparently.
It seemed to be all he could do to focus on Roddy and Calvin’s work in the ring. Which Owen took for a good sign, at least insofar as it indicated that Roddy, by sparring like an able-bodied veteran, was rendering the luxury of distraction affordable. There wasn’t much Jack really needed to tell him. Roddy had been fighting for twenty years. He knew every gun on his deck, by now. And their plan was solid: attack the body.
A week before, Owen had sensed a current of tension between them, coach and fighter. Jack had seemed skeptical, nervous, reserved as to Roddy’s performance & mind-set in training—and Roddy, in turn, had been tuning Jack out, getting caught with his back to the ropes too often—at times, it seemed, to spite his coach. That tension appeared to have settled by now. Beyond his impressive work in sparring, Roddy was regulating his weight—inching down from 148. He was pulling his roadwork every morning. He was sleeping at least eight hours a night. He was drinking his water. And his diet was on track—carbs in the morning, roughage and lean white meat at night.
And no booze, no grass.
Bobbing and weaving, he walked Calvin down with his hands up, chin tucked, unblinking. He looked like a real contender.
Jack appeared more or less satisfied with him. The only time he really spoke up was to jump on Calvin, not Roddy, to keep his hands up—and cut with the shucking and jiving already. Calvin tended to showboat a bit. But only, in this case, by running from Roddy. They wound up hashing it out in the corner. Roddy proceeded to land his hooks, and, although he might have been holding back, they still looked plenty painful to Owen.
Jack hit his stop watch. “TIME!”
The voice of Aretha Franklin welled up in the cease-fire, warbling out of the speakers. Roddy and Calvin tapped gloves and walked back to their corners. Jack was mumbling—hardly a bitter expression about him—but notably humorless, distant, dazed—in spite of his own better efforts, preoccupied.
Thereby, it came in a flash when, on turning to Owen, he mumbled: “You’re in on this, right?”
Owen stepped back, looking over his shoulder to make way for whomever Jack was addressing. But no one was there. He swallowed. He looked back, wide-eyed. “Me?”
Jack waited for an answer.
Roddy leaned over the ropes, peering out through his headgear, jawing his mouthpiece to clarify. “You want to work the corner, buddy?”
Owen swallowed again. “Doing what?”
Jack produced a yellow bucket.
Hallelujah.
Spit bucket boy.
At last, O Lord, he was coming home. And for those who had doubted him: eat your hearts out …
Owen could not have been more elated. The whole thing was nearly too good to be true. Finally: some time on the inside, working the corner, wading through all of the sleaze and the grit and the nervous anticipation—all of the dead time and agony backstage. And he would be there as a part of Team Lowe: spit bucket boy for The Unbelievable …
Once again, Jack had acknowledged his presence, albeit with less than an excess of jubilance.
Man, The Coach was a weird dude.
Whatever the case, Owen accepted.
It was almost enough to throw him off his game for the rest of the afternoon. But no matter how thrilled he may’ve been, he still had a deadline back at The Plea and, as yet, very little to go on but incomplete research and dwindling scanner reports.
He arrived at the office to find that a total of one complaint had come out of The Basin the night before—and not even a cooker: that lady from Bareville again, with a random gunfire report …
This didn’t look good.
A sinking feeling returned to Owen. For three nights now, the disorder in Lamepeter Township had shown a marked decline. What had begun as a drifting lull in the
action was starting to make him nervous. The Blue Ball Devil needed a catalyst, something to bring it all together. Synchronization of disparate elements. Mobilization. Order to chaos.
He ended up back at the library, this time in search of astronomical data. Something about the previous evening down in the plaza wouldn’t sit with him. The fact that he couldn’t remember the lunar phases may have been part of the problem. But maybe the moon’s having come up in reference on more than a dozen occasions that afternoon—each in the line of his unbiased fire—bothered him more. He had questions, as always.
According to an article published in Mythos Quarterly, the moon’s effect on human behavior was demonstrated clearly through statistical analysis. During the first and last quarters of each lunar cycle, the time on either side of the full moon, the level of registered crime in society rose—unequivocally, month after month. From schools, jails and emergency rooms to public zoos across the planet, everything living was somehow or other affected by the moon’s gravitational pull—and the fact was, again statistically, behavior was far less rational while it was full. The reasons were purely scientific: over 70 percent of the earth was covered with water. The human body was made up of roughly that same percentage of water. The moon was known to affect the tides most strongly during the time when its gravitational pull on the earth was greatest, i.e., during the phase when the sun, the earth and the moon were assembled in a line, in that order. It followed, then, that the human body was equally affected during that phase.
However, as Owen continued reading, other sources would maintain ardently, in spite of conventional wisdom, astrology, folklore and chronically “skewed” statistics, that levels of registered mayhem increased during new moons as clearly as during full ones. Which did make sense, astronomically at least, as new moons occurred when the same celestial bodies in question were lined up directly (only with the moon in the middle this time) and exerting the same gravitational pull. The new moon was known as the “full moon’s ghost.” Related arguments cited statistical peaks in assault and battery at the new moon. Also, emergency admissions to psychiatric facilities reached a pinnacle. A national poll of radio DJs revealed a surge in “loony” calls, as, by report, did the FBI—from people of all walks of life, irrespective of economic and social distinctions, people complaining of being watched by communists, neighbors and little green men—in the days directly surrounding a new moon.
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