by Rob Smales
He’d begun to look almost pleased, as if just thinking about the dreams was enough to make him happy. Then he hesitated, his expression caving in on itself.
“But then, a few years ago, the dreams . . . changed. See, sometimes the running dreams were hunting dreams. Stalking little things through the woods, like rabbits. Squirrels. Stuff like that. Not every time, but enough. Enough for me to notice. I wasn’t catching them, or anything. Just every once in a while I was chasing them, like it was a game, you know? Tag, or something like that. It was kind of . . . well, it was kind of beautiful.”
He raised his chin as he said that last, obviously daring anyone to poke fun at him for the sentiment. Kyle waited to hear that derisive snort from Officer Saltz, but it didn’t come. He glanced sideways, and found the little cop still leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest, but for once the sneer was gone, replaced by an intense stare. Saltz didn’t look at Kyle at all, watching Grandpa as if hanging on his every word.
“A few years back, though, it changed again. They wasn’t always hunting dreams, but they was more often than not. And I started . . . I started catching things.”
Grandpa’s chin had relaxed to its usual position, but now he wasn’t looking at anyone. He stared at the bars to one side of Officer Downs, but his eyes looked funny to Kyle, like he wasn’t really seeing anything. Or maybe seeing stuff the rest of them couldn’t. Like running rabbits and squirrels.
“I was catching things—still the little things I’d been chasing before, you know, woodchuck, maybe a raccoon—and I was killing ’em. With my teeth. Like an animal.”
His head swiveled, and he looked straight at Officer Downs, and Kyle thought the policeman met his eyes.
“I’ve hunted—near ’bout everybody ’round here does, at one time or another—and I know some guys who done that thing where you drink the blood of your first buck, supposed to bring you closer to the spirit of the deer. I never went for that shit. My daddy never told me to when I was a kid. But in these dreams, taking these little critters down like that . . . I did taste their blood.”
His gaze drifted off into the middle distance again, caught up in the memories. “It was the strangest thing. I’d never really thought about it—why would I?—but the blood tasted . . . you know, different, depending on what it came from. I guess I’d always just thought blood was blood, but it’s not. Woodchuck don’t taste like rabbit don’t taste like squirrel—and nothing tastes like deer. And in the dreams I liked it. I liked it all. I was always disgusted when I woke up, and started thinking of the moon dreams as nightmares. Told myself I wasn’t looking forward to the full moon each month any more . . . but I was lying to myself. Part of me was always looking forward to it. But then they changed again.”
Grandpa gulped, Adam’s apple bobbing visibly in his skinny neck.
“I had one . . . I had one where I et what I killed.” He shifted on his cot, sliding his bony shanks into a more comfortable position. “Up ’til then, the hunting dreams ended when I caught up. I’d tackle what I was chasing, or sink my teeth into it if it was a killing dream, they’d let loose this little screech, and I’d wake up right then, with the feel of the thing on my skin, or the taste of its blood still in my mouth. But it was all just a memory, you know? Like when you wake up and you’re not sure whether you’re still dreaming or not, but then you wake the rest of the way up and it all sort of fades away. It was like that. Then one time I didn’t wake up.”
He swallowed again.
“Not ’til I was done. It happened about a year ago, and that one was a nightmare. I—”
He broke off and looked at Kyle, his eyes showing fear for the first time since he’d started. “I’m sorry.”
What? Kyle thought, then opened his mouth to voice the question, but Grandpa turned back to Officer Downs.
“I dreamed I chased Jingles, my daughter-in-law’s cat. Caught it out behind the shed and drug it off into the woods.”
Kyle gasped, but the old man went on like he hadn’t heard.
“That’s the first time I remember eating in the dreams. I woke up that morning with the taste in my mouth, and I was upset about that one, not just pretending. She was a crotchety old bitch, but I liked Jingles just fine. I was lying there, waiting for the taste, the memory, to fade, lying there for quite a while before I realized it wasn’t going away. Then I noticed my big toe.”
Kyle sniffled. Tears ran down his face, though he was trying his best to fight them. His grandfather didn’t cotton to tears, ’specially not in public. You gonna blubber, he’d say, you take it t’home, you hear me? ’Tisn’t nobody’s business but your own. Grandpa glanced at Kyle, and his gaze stuck. When he went on, he was telling his story to Kyle, not the cops.
“My big toe was hurting something fierce, like I’d smacked it a good one, but I didn’t remember doing that at all. I yanked my foot up to check it out, and that was when I saw the dirt. The bottoms of my feet were black with it—not just the usual inside-the-house dusting up, mind, but real dirt, like I’d been walking around outside. My hands, too. Palms were scratched and dirty, fingernails filthy. I realized I was wide awake, but I could still taste the blood—Jingles’s blood—and I started rooting about in my mouth with my tongue.”
Another throat-working swallow.
“There was blood in there, and something else, something solid, all worked down in between my teeth. I sucked a bit out and spat it in my palm, and it was fur. Like cat fur. Then I ran into the bathroom to throw up. I puked for a while, bits of stuff coming out that didn’t look nothin’ like the dinner I’d et the night before.
“I tried to ignore all that stuff, the fur in my teeth and my dirty feet, tried to tell myself it was just a dream and nothing more, just like it always had been. But then the cat turned up missing. Abby kept a-callin’ it, and it never came. Then, two days later, the boys found the cat in the woods. Found . . . what was left of it, I mean.”
Tears rolled down Kyle’s face now, and to heck with that old man. Kyle remembered him and James finding Jingles half-buried under a fallen tree in the woods behind the house. The bugs had gotten to the cat by then, and between the maggots and the smell, both boys had puked their guts out in the trees. Then James had stayed to mark the spot while Kyle ran for home, crying and spitting, puke and snot running from his nose, to fetch their pop.
They had really only been able to identify her by the little tag hanging from the collar still about her neck, but Kyle would never forget finding the crumpled, ruined form sticking out from under that log. Grandpa said they’d found a cat, but that wasn’t quite true. They’d found the front half.
Well, most of it.
“So now I knew,” Grandpa said. “They wasn’t just dreams after all. Maybe they never had been. I don’t know. But I’ve heard stories of things that go bump in the night my whole life, and I been to the movies. Someone getting out to go a-killin’ when the moon is full, waking up with no memory of it but some kind of jumbled dream? I ain’t stupid: didn’t take me but that morning of the missing cat to put two and two together and come up with werewolf.”
Grandpa’s forehead shone with sweat, though it was cool in the cells. He mopped his face with a sleeve.
“I did what I could. Made it almost a year. Moon dream nights, I’d head to the shed out back. Got a padlock for it, and put it on the inside, so I could lock myself in. Hang the key from a little hook, and I couldn’t get out of there until I had hands to work the lock, you understand? Plus, no one could get in there at me, come upon me by accident, you know? I was locked in there all safe and sound for the night ten full moons runnin’.
“Then this past month, just as the sun was going down, I walked into my shed and found the hook empty and the lock gone. I looked everywhere in that shed, but I didn’t find nothin’, and I just ran out of time. I found out later my grandson, James, had borrowed my lock to use with his bike, but I all I knew at the time was the full moon was rising and there I was, loose
. Well, I ran off into the woods just as fast as I could, getting as far away from people as I could before the change came. I’d stayed awake a few times in that shed, just to see what happened, so I knew the signs. I ran and I ran and . . . and that was all I remembered ’til morning, when I woke up with blood in my teeth and what felt like a full belly.”
He wiped perspiration from his face again, unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt, then another, flapping the open neck of the shirt to cool himself.
“You all right, sir?” said Officer Downs.
“Close . . . close,” Grandpa muttered, as if talking to himself. “Almost here. Gotta finish. The dream that night was so . . . my memory of it was all jumbled, but still, I kept seeing this . . . this kid, running from me. He ran, and I chased. God help me, I chased. I didn’t remember the killing, or the eating, but I remembered that child, running. Screaming. I—”
He broke off, shaking his head, lips pressed tight. Kyle stared at his grandfather, cold sick coiling in his belly like a snake, feeling like he had to pee. Mom and Dad had said there was no such thing as vampires and werewolves. No such thing. But Grandpa was sitting right there, with the cops and their confession-recorder thingie, saying he changed. Saying he ate up Jingles. Chased a kid. And they had found a half-eaten Jingles, hadn’t they? So that part was true, and if that part was true, then the rest could be—
“When they started, the moon dreams weren’t nothing but that: dreams. I walked around hoping like hell it had gone back to that, at least for one night, and it hadn’t been anything but a dream. I was praying it. Then, two days later, Kyle came home from school talking about a missing kid, a kid from his class what nobody’d seen since that night. The night my lock went missing. They ran the kid’s picture in the paper, and that’s when I knew, knew for certain. I’d seen that kid in the picture running away from me in my dream. He ran, and I chased. And that was that.”
He coughed, a wet, growling bark, flinching as if in sharp, momentary pain, and his old, yellowed eyes rolled a bit in their sockets, wide with sudden fear.
“I’m out of time. I tried to tell my boy about all this—tried twice, since that last moon, so he knows about the shed now, and so it ain’t safe no more. But he didn’t want to hear it, this crazy talk from his old pa. He wouldn’t listen.”
He was standing, unbuttoning the rest of his shirt as he spoke, but he paused long enough to look at Kyle once more, and the corners of his lips twitched in an almost half-smile.
“We Hickeys can be some real stubborn assholes sometimes.” His eyes shifted to Officer Downs, still seated before the cell. “So I came here, looking for you boys to take my confession and lock me up nice and safe. You’ll keep me in, and people out, and figure what to do with me in the morning. But for now”—he tore the shirt off, exposing a narrow, old man’s torso, long, ropy muscles still working beneath slightly sagging skin as he gestured toward Officer Downs—“you best be getting back, son.”
Officer Downs turned to glance at Officer Saltz, but Kyle only had eyes for his grandfather as Bonnie’s father pocketed the recorder and stood, taking the folding chair back to its spot against the wall. Grandpa stripped right down to his skivvies, folding his clothes neatly on the cot, his movements marred by occasional jerks and twitches, each accompanied by a grunt of pain. Kyle had to pee something fierce, and he wanted to run, run all the way home to use his own bathroom, so afterward he could go into his own room, and curl into his own bed, where his mom could sit next to him on the mattress and stroke his hair the way he liked, and tell him again and again that werewolves aren’t real. That monsters aren’t real.
But he couldn’t run, couldn’t move from the spot on which he stood, was pretty sure he’d still be standing there long after the pee had run down his legs like some big friggin’ baby. Then Grandpa looked up at him, thrust his hands forward to grab the bars, and Kyle was pretty sure he did pee, just a little, a hot spot in the front of his Wolverine underwear.
Hickey was coming to the end of his story just in time. The sun had been down for a while, and now the moon was coming. The cells had grown uncomfortably warm, though the others didn’t seem to notice, and with the heat had come the thickening, the air in the little cell congealing until it felt like water against his skin. His breaths didn’t come easily any more, but required a growing effort, flowing in and out of him like the tides pulled by the moon. Sound wasn’t muffled by the thick air, but instead grew sharper, more defined. He heard his own heart beating, strong, but rapid, sped up with the effort of breathing. Of talking. The itching began, every hair on his body standing to attention like there had been a lightning strike nearby, and he swore he could feel them thickening as well. Coarsening.
He knew from experience he’d have been itchy naked, but clothes seemed to make it a thousand times worse, as if the hair had nowhere to go and was forcing itself back in. He’d already opened a few buttons, but now he stood and took the shirt off, fumbling in his haste. He warned Downs away as he tore the shirt from his back, then started right on the pants, kicking off his boots and skinning the jeans down his legs. He stopped at his briefs, for now, and folded his clothes into a neat pile on the cot.
I may be a hairy, toothy killer, but damn it, my momma raised me right.
The moon was on the rise now. He could feel it. His muscles had twitched while he’d undressed, the spasms growing longer and stronger as they came. He turned and saw Kyle standing in frozen horror, like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. He didn’t blame the boy: Hickey himself was terrified, and he was a grown-ass man.
His stomach lurched, his innards rolling, muscles writhing in ways they were just not meant to move, shoving aside things within him as they heaved. As sick as Hickey felt, Kyle looked sicker, his face a shade of white that said he was about to puke or pass out. It suddenly dawned on Hickey, his abdomen twisting to the point of pain, that the boy might be too frightened to make heads or tails of what was happening, that he might not understand why Hickey had brought him along. His nose sharpened, the syrupy air carrying the scents of Ivory soap and minty toothpaste from Downs, while making it quite clear that prick, Saltz, had relied on strong coffee to wash the sleep-stink out of his mouth that morning.
Kyle gave only a bitter scent, sour and sweet and slightly acrid all at the same time, so strong it nearly stung his nose. Part of Hickey, once buried deep inside but rising with the moon, recognized that scent, and was goaded by it, surging up faster now, urging him to lash out at the scent, to bite and rend and tear and devour—to destroy the thing before him giving off the prey smell.
The boy’s fear.
Hickey had to make sure Kyle understood. The cops hadn’t had to come get Hickey, even when his own jackoff of a son wouldn’t listen to him. He’d walked through those doors on his own. His gut cramped, worse than anything he’d experienced outside of the full moon, and he lunged forward to get a grip on the bars. The reek of piss hit him like a slap, and he knew he’d just about undone the boy, but Carl Hickey wasn’t going to deliver his message from his knees.
“Remember this, boy.” Something within him twisted, and when he opened his mouth he had to force aside a scream so the words could come out. “I may be a monster, but I’m also a man . . . and a man does what’s right, even if it ain’t easy. That’s why I’m here, boy. A man does what’s right.”
Pain hit him hard, boring through his middle, and his hands slipped from the bars. The impact as he fell to all fours shattered his knuckles like glass within their little bags of skin, and he howled with agony. The splintered bones shifted, pulling in tight as he watched his fingers shrink through bulging eyes. His left leg broke, and started to reform, followed by his right.
Something tore loose inside him, then something else; things moved as his ribcage creaked, then cracked. Shifting. Shortening.
He moaned, unable to draw enough breath for a shriek, his lungs squeezing and reshaping, and the tone grew resonant as, with a horrible crac
k, his face split, lips stretching almost to bursting as his muzzle thrust forward, and his face deformed, and his teeth grew.
In seconds, two-legged Hickey was gone and only four-legged Hickey remained, pacing the wall of bars, seeking a way out of the cage. He stared out at the men, skinning back his lips in a snarl, a challenging rumble deep in his chest. The little cave stank of fear and piss and misery, and Hickey wanted to get out, to get away, into the clean night air where he could hunt under the watchful eye of the full moon.
Kyle watched what was left of his grandfather working its way back and forth in the cell. The old man crawled about on his hands and knees, nicotine-stained teeth bared as he snarled and snapped at the bars, the skid mark in the back of his drooping jockeys winking like a brown eye on every other turn. Behind him the mean cop was laughing fit to bust, giggling like a hyena until Officer Downs’s stern voice ordered him to stop. Even then, high-pitched snorts and chuckles could be heard as Kyle said, “What’s going on?” He took a step toward the bars, stretching out an uncertain hand. “Grandpa?”
Quick as a thought Grandpa turned, naked teeth snapping at the extended fingers. He came up short, his forehead striking one of the bars with a clang that set Saltz to laughing again, and Officer Downs sent him out of the room. The door closed behind the cackling officer, and then Kyle felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.