by Rob Smales
“I’m sorry, Kyle. Your grandfather’s pretty sick—but not in the way he thought. Your father called me about a week ago, after your grandfather talked to him, wondering what he should do. I did some research: I’m no doctor, but I think what your grandpa’s got is called ‘clinical lycanthropy,’ and it’s . . . it’s a mental thing. An illness. It’s . . . your grandfather’s confused, Kyle. Maybe getting older has something to do with it. Maybe not; I have no idea. Like I said, I’m not a doctor. But he’s delusional. All that stuff he said earlier, about the dreams, and changing into a wolf, he wasn’t lying, exactly. He thought he was telling us the God’s honest truth . . . and right now your grandfather really thinks he’s a wolf in a cage.”
The gentle hand pulled him around to face Officer Downs, but he could still hear Grandpa snarling and growling. The big police officer offered Kyle a handkerchief, and the boy wiped at his face. “What he needs right now is a special kind of doctor. We can wait ’til morning, when he stops thinking he’s a wolf, and talk to him about it. But for now . . .”
“What now?” said Kyle, whose legs were already screaming at him to run away from the crawling old man behind him, to run fast and far, and if the cop hadn’t been between him and the door they would have gotten their wish. “Can I go home? I want to go home.”
Officer Downs looked at him with sad, brown eyes, then over Kyle’s shoulder, toward Grandpa. “I understand you wanting to go home, Kyle, but there’s no one here right now but me and Officer Saltz, and I”—he lowered his voice, though there was no one there to hear. “I don’t really want to leave your grandpa alone with Saltz. You understand? But then, you don’t really want him bringing you home, do you?”
Kyle thought of the sneering officer, pictured being shut up in a car with the little cootie-carrier, for even ten minutes. The man could say a lot in ten minutes. And something about being alone with him . . .
Kyle shook his head. “No. No, thanks, I don’t want that.” He started edging around the man, sliding toward the door. “But I know the way—it ain’t far. Me and Gran—”
He stumbled over the name, hearing his grandfather moving and growling about his cell. “Uh, we walked here anyway. I can walk back. No problem, okay? I just want to go home. Okay?”
He hadn’t slipped out from under that big hand yet, and for a moment it tightened against his shoulder, and he was afraid Officer Downs was going to hold him there, maybe put him in a cell right next to Grand—right next door, and tears welled again. But then the hand slipped away, the squeeze more of reassurance than restraint, and the man sighed.
“All right. It’s not the best solution, but it’s what we have. You hurry on home, and you send your dad down here just as soon as you get there, all right? I’ll explain what’s going on, and he needs to help decide what’s going to happen, anyway. You just be careful, you hear me?”
“Yessir,” said Kyle, sidling for the door, the words coming out all in a rush. Officer Downs said something else, but Kyle wasn’t listening as he pushed through the door into the police station proper. He picked up speed crossing the big, main room with all the desks. Saltz’s voice came from somewhere off to the side, but Kyle didn’t hear him, didn’t look left or right, just kept his eyes on the doors to the street. He was moving at a run when he hit them, and they barely slowed him down as, weeping terrified tears, he sped off into the night.
Hickey Four-Legs watched as the smaller man burst back into the room outside his cage, making those man-sounds that made no sense to him.
“Jesus Christ, this is like a gift from God! Fantastic!”
“I don’t like this,” said the big man.
“What’s not to like? You have the old fool’s confession on tape, right? I mean, Jesus, he spelled the whole thing out. I noticed you never said he was in a cell or even in custody, so we can tell the chief he was in the chair out front and just got away while our backs were turned. The kid never spoke, right? Not while the tape was rolling?”
“No,” said Big. “No, I don’t think he did.”
“So?” Little said, voice almost a squeal as he unbuttoned his shirt. “It’s perfect.”
“I still don’t like this. He’s just a kid, and—”
“Says the one who killed Spellman in the first place.” Little was kicking off his shoes and pawing at his belt buckle.
“That was an accident,” Big said, voice rising, pointing toward Hickey Four-Legs. “It was just like he said: the kid saw me and he ran. He ran, so I chased, and things just got out of hand. We’d just spent two nights running with the pack, and you know how we get. It’s hard to think for yourself; you know that.” Big shook his head. “He shouldn’t have run. God damn it, but he shouldn’t have run.”
Little waved a hand, clad only in his boxer shorts now. “Whatever you say, Josh. But it happens a lot with you. They find the Spellman kid and start searching the woods back of your house, and—”
“You have bodies there too, remember?”
“Not any more, I don’t.” Little pointed toward Hickey Four-Legs again. “He does. Just give me ten minutes to kill the kid, then bring old snarly-and-drooly there along to discover with the body. Bang-bang, he’s dead, and we have ourselves a confessed kid-killer in the cooler downstairs when the chief gets back from Bangor.”
He stepped closer, looking up into the bigger man’s face.
“Look, Josh, this Spellman thing is too close to home. The chief, she’s a bitch, but she’s not stupid, and she’s not going to let this go until she finds someone. Either we hand her this half-breed or she might find you. And me. And I am not down with that.”
The two men stood side by side, looking into the cage at Hickey.
“You have any idea he was a ’breed?” said Little.
“Christ, no. But he’s seventy if he’s a day, and it sounded like he only started having the pack dreams once I moved so close. If I’d moved somewhere else, he might have just kept having the moon dreams until the day he died. Not enough wolf in him to make the change, but it’s no wonder his mind snapped.”
“Lucky for us.” Little looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s been long enough. He’s away from the station, at least.” He bent and stripped off the boxer shorts. “Just open that door and give me five minutes, okay?”
He bent, hunched, and a cracking like the snapping of dry sticks filled the air as his back bowed, his legs twisted, and a scent like wet dog exploded into the room.
“God,” said Little, a tone of terrible longing slipping out around a mouthful of lengthening teeth, “I hope he runs!” Fur sprouted across his skin in widening ripples as he fell to all fours. Claws scrabbled for a moment at the hard, tiled floor, and in his cage, Hickey Four-Legs pressed himself against the wall farthest from the bars and whimpered, eyes wide.
Big stepped away from the large black wolf that stood, chest heaving, in the middle of the corridor. He pulled the door open, and with an eager growl the wolf streaked out through the police station, nostrils already flaring as it seined the air for the bitter, yellow scent of the boy’s fear.
The scent of prey.
Big left the door and walked back to the bars of Hickey Four-Legs’s cage.
“I don’t know if you can understand me,” he said. “I hope part of you does, somewhere in there. I actually admire what you were trying to do, turning yourself in like you did. Trying to do the right thing, set an example for Kyle. And I’m . . . I’m touched by what you were telling the boy, there at the end. And I think you were right: a man does what’s right.”
Big bowed his head for a moment, and something within him cracked like a dry stick. His chin came up, and he looked in at Hickey Four-Legs with eyes suddenly gone red, as the wet dog smell grew stronger.
“Unfortunately for Kyle,” he said, gravel and bass suddenly filling his voice, “we’re not men.”
Hickey Four-Legs growled at the man-wolf-thing in front of him, straining back against the wall in fear as its nonsense sounds
washed over him, baring his teeth in a threat born of terror. But as he snapped and snarled and tried to raise up non-existent hackles, tears finally rolled down the old man’s cheeks to spatter the floor beneath his feet.
ONE SOCK, TWO SOCKS
“Oh, for the love of God!”
Larisa flailed about uselessly with one blue sock. The rest of the laundry was already in the basket sitting atop the dryer: clothes and underwear folded neatly, socks rolled together in pairs, all but the blue sock in her hand.
She could not find its mate.
“There were two blue socks in there,” she nearly shouted into the open dryer, bending to take yet another look into its empty drum. “I had to unroll the pair when I put them in the washer!”
She snatched up a clean, rolled pair of tube socks from the top of her basket and waved it at the open machine as if it could see and hear.
“They were rolled! A pair! What the hell do you do, eat them?”
The dryer sat motionless, not deigning to make the slightest response.
“I know it’s you.” She indicated the nearby washing machine. “That one gives back everything. You, on the other hand, apparently charge me something each and every time I use you!”
A part of Larisa felt pretty silly standing there yelling at an inanimate thing. The rest of her, though, was eaten up with annoyance over the missing sock.
She flung the lonesome blue sock on top of the folded clothes and snatched up the laundry basket. “I’ll prove it’s you! You can’t seem to help yourself. Wait here—I’ll be right back.”
Larisa stomped up the stairs in a way she hadn’t done since she was about six years old. A few minutes later she marched back down those stairs clutching a half-full laundry basket. She put the basket back on top of the dryer and spun the washing machine dial to Light Wash.
“Right! Here’s the deal.” She pulled a rolled pair of socks from the basket and separated them. “I have here ten pair of socks. Ten pair. That’s twenty socks. I’m counting them, and washing them. Nothing but them. Let’s see how many socks I get back!”
She counted each of them aloud as she dropped them into the rapidly filling washing machine. “. . . Nineteen, twenty. There: ten pair.”
She backed across the laundry room toward the chair against the wall as if afraid or unwilling to take her eyes from either machine.
“There. Let’s just see what happens.”
Thirty minutes later, the washing machine’s buzzer sounded and the machine itself shuddered to a silent halt. Larisa opened it up and started counting wet socks back into the basket.
“. . . Nineteen, twenty. There, you see?” She pointed an accusing finger at the dryer as she nearly shouted. “I got back what I put in. Now let’s see how you do!”
She counted all twenty socks into the machine, speaking aloud again, though whom she was actually talking to was a mystery, even to herself. She slapped the front of the dryer closed and gave the knob a somewhat savage twist, choosing a twenty-minute timed dry. She backed toward her chair once more, eyes glued to the quietly roaring machine. She stayed that way, nearly unblinking, for the entire cycle.
When the dryer’s buzzer went off, Larisa was yanking the front of the machine open before the internal drum had even come to a halt. She put the basket on the floor next to the open door and began counting warm, dry socks into it.
“. . . Eighteen, nineteen—son of a bitch!”
She stared into the empty dryer, looking for sock number twenty, but saw nothing but the white enameled surface. She dumped the socks out onto the top of the dryer and recounted them into the basket, just in case she had miscounted.
Nineteen.
“Son of a bitch!” she repeated, standing helplessly for a few seconds, then her jaw muscles bunched as she clenched her teeth in frustration.
“No way. It has to be in there somewhere. It’s just not possible!”
Bending low, she thrust her head and shoulders into the open machine. She swept her hands about the rear of the dryer, checking that nothing was stuck to the back of the three agitator vanes built into the drum. Her voice sounded hollow inside the round metal box.
“This is impossible. It has to be in here. They all do! I’m going to find out where they go, even if I have to take you apart!”
At her words the drum suddenly went into motion, spinning a half revolution clockwise; since Larisa was bracing her hands on the inside of the drum for balance, she spun, too. As her upper half twisted around, her legs followed suit until she fell, landing on her side on the inside of the open dryer door. The drum gave a kind of lurch, and seemed to Larisa to lengthen and gain depth. At the same time the door beneath her hips gave a sudden heave upward, causing her feet to actually leave the floor. She felt herself slide further into the machine, further than she thought possible, the edge of the opening actually catching her at the back of the knees.
She inhaled to scream and almost choked on the air as the back of the drum opened right before her eyes. What was revealed was not the wall behind the dryer, but instead what looked like a tube or tunnel, sloping downward and out of sight. The drum gave another lurch, the door gave another heave, and Larisa found herself bodily sliding down that tunnel. It was a pinkish-red, and to her hands it felt warm, wet, and slippery . . . and resembled nothing so much as a huge throat. There was another shuddering lurch and her headfirst slide picked up speed. Her breath finally came out in its intended scream, but it was far too late.
The dryer door closed behind her.
From the top of the stairs, her husband’s voice floated down.
“Hey, honey? Have you seen my other blue sock? I can only find one here. Honey?"
MUTES
Tape begins:
Test, test, is this thing on? Okay. Right. Okay . . . where to start? I found this old tape deck, and I have one tape. I need to get this told, just in case, but I have to hurry. I don’t know how much time I have. Granny McCalloum was right. She always said—wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
My name is Scott St. Armond. I’m making this recording in my apartment, and I swear I’m of sound mind. I swear to God.
I’m from Slaughter, Louisiana, population about 1,000. My Granny McCalloum is the local hoodoo woman there. She used to claim I have the sight, too. But I wasn’t like her. Not then.
Anyway, I came to the big city when I turned eighteen, trained up and got work as an EMT. That’s when shit got weird. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but the first time I noticed anything was at this car wreck my partner and I responded to out on Route 18.
Oh, hang on—
I just checked the window, and there’s too many to count. Jesus, this is bad.
Okay, Route 18. Some kid out speeding around lost control of his car and went off the road, into a tree. The driver was banged up, but walked away. His girlfriend, though, wasn’t wearing a seat belt and was thrown from the vehicle into another tree. We found her at the base of an old pine, in rough shape. She’d been impaled by more than a dozen branches, some of them as thick as my two thumbs together. She’d rolled to the ground with snapped-off pine stakes sticking out of her torso, legs, and one eye.
She was still conscious. We found her by following the screams.
Another crew showed up for the driver while we went for the girl. We strapped her to the stretcher, branches sticking out of her this way and that, and started carrying her up to the road. I’m a pretty big guy, lots bigger than Jerry, and I had a hard time carrying her over the uneven ground in the dark. I don’t know how he managed.
We jostled her a little, and that got her screaming again. Now I was still green, and this was easily the worst thing I’d ever seen. You can watch videos and movies, even real stuff like the surgery network, but it’s nothing compared to up close and personal. Especially the screaming. I was freaked out.
So when I looked up from watching for rocks and holes and saw five dark silhouettes backlit by our ambulance strobes standing not
ten feet away, I reacted badly. I caught a whiff of a sweet licorice smell. I thought Sambuca and figured they were drunk.
I yelled, “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t your fucking entertainment! Back away; get back to your cars! Go on now!” But they just stood there.
Behind me, Jerry yelled, “Scott! What the hell are you doing, man?”
I glanced back at Jerry and shouted over the girl’s crying.
“What the hell’s it look like?” I said, “I’m telling these looky-loos to—”
I stopped dead and the stretcher gouged my lower back. The night was clear with a good moon, but when I turned back to them, they were gone. The field between us and the road was empty, not a soul in sight.
Jerry struggled not to drop the stretcher, and yelled at me to move my ass.
We got the girl into our bus and Jerry started us rolling while I tried to stabilize her. Jerry waited until we’d left the ER to ask what the hell I was doing out there.
“Didn’t you see the people?” I said. “The people in the field?”
He just squinted at me and said, “I didn’t see anybody but you. Yelling at a field.”
Jerry had worked there a couple of years already, so it was practically part of his job to rib me as the newbie. He walked around for a while saying I’d already cracked from the strain, but that wasn’t it.
That was the first time I saw the Mutes.
The next time was the night of my accident.
I guess it was about a month after we pulled Tree Girl out of that field when we got called to the warehouse. One of the eighteen-wheelers had been pulling into the warehouse when the big rolling security door let go. That heavy steel door came down in its track like an axe, chopping right into the windshield. The driver was unconscious, steering wheel bent right down into his chest. The truck was still rumbling out diesel fumes as it idled with that massive door propped on the hood.