That afternoon one of the older boys kicked a soccer ball high into the woods. Several of us joined the search. Fifteen minutes later as we were about to give up I heard a thin wail and shouts. When I arrived at the circle of kids I saw Calvin Bray sprawled in a dead faint on the forest floor. Nate stood over his friend, holding the lost ball, face white as a sheet.
“Nate, are you okay? Did a snake bite Cal?” Dad hated snakes and he had infected us with his fear of copperheads and black water moccasins.
Nate shook his head slowly like a somnambulist. He tucked the ball under his left arm and pointed. I followed his finger to the large white and red shape lying in the weeds: the decapitated head of a cow, tongue half torn from its gaping pale mouth, cream coat clotted with dried black blood, milky eyes bulging and crawling with bluebottle flies. My stomach did a slow air-show roll. When I finally dragged my eyes away I looked in a wide circle. No matching headless cow carcass. No blood trail.
It was like the mutilated cow head had fallen from the sky.
* * *
We all became masters of camp pranks, learning to short-sheet beds, apply Vaseline to toilet seats and set diabolical traps. The first day or so you carefully watched and recorded your cabin-mates’ behavior. Did they dive into bed at night? Hide a spade shovel under their blanket. What frightened them? Daddy long-legs, toads and grass snakes found their way into pillowcases and suitcases. How about a dead perch under your mattress? Preparation H in your Colgate? In retaliation a few fellows pulled on fresh underwear treated with Bengay (“flaming balls revenge”).
The day after the gruesome discovery in the woods Danny and I were plotting payback against the camp bully, one Harold Manry. If the county schools could have afforded football programs, Harold would have been a star defensive lineman. He played basketball as a guard, but he was too large and slow to excel. He’d spent most of his time terrorizing the younger campers and gave Ricky Wilson—Chief Half-Moon—a bloody nose playing tetherball.
Danny argued for Flaming Balls with Wood Ticks, but I wanted something grander. While we devised and discarded convoluted Rube Goldberg ideas, I decided to tell him about Wiles’ nocturnal treks. We agreed to wake each other the next time it happened and get to the bottom of the mystery. Encyclopedia Brown deduced all of his two-minute mysteries sitting down with his twelve-year-old eyes closed, but we were rugged Outdoor types.
* * *
The next night after tabernacle, while around a small campfire, we burned marshmallows at the stake, and read New Testament Bible verses (the shortest ones like “Jesus wept” —John 11:35—had long been exhausted). Then we climbed into our bunks and joined Wiles in calling goodnight to the girls.
Sometime later Danny shook me awake. He held a finger to his lips and beckoned me to follow. I slipped on my jeans and my bare feet into my sneakers and followed Danny outside. There were gauze-thin ribbons of clouds, but the campground was washed in cold moonlight. The full pock-bellied moon was rising above the trees against the Milky Way. It looked bloated and tinged; a Blood Moon, or what they call the Strawberry Moon in the Deep South. Legend—and the Scholastic paperback Strange Superstitions! —soberly proclaimed that a Strawberry Moon focuses and concentrates supernatural forces. Those who dare walk under its bloodshot eye are more apt to encounter a bobbing will-o’-the-wisp, Manitou spirit or flesh-craving Wendigo.
Wiles’ glimmering T-shirt was disappearing into the brush and forest’s edge.
We followed at a good distance for a hundred yards and then Danny stopped and handed me what felt like a small roll of tape. He pulled out the metal flashlight he’d taken from our cabin and clicked it on so I could see, hooding its beam with his left hand. The reflective tape glowed fluorescent yellow. The same type of tape that was wrapped around the tree trunks that lined the narrow twisting graveled drive from the camp’s entry gates to the main grounds.
“I filched it from the work shed,” Danny said. “Tear off small pieces every so often and mark our way on the bigger trees.”
I was impressed; I wouldn’t have thought of that. Typical city kid. I told myself that Encyclopedia Brown might not have, either.
Feeling more confident, we walked deeper into the woods, trying not to lose sight of Wiles. Danny kept one hand over the flashlight’s lens to provide just enough light to navigate, and I marked off trees every thirty yards or so. We heard owls and saw a great grey and brown hawk with glowing eyes perched on a dead storm-damaged tree limb, waiting for its next mouse-meal.
Wiles dipped through a ravine and disappeared over its rim. A flickering light glowed beyond. Before we crested the top we heard voices and dropped to the forest floor. Danny dowsed the flashlight and signaled to me silently. We belly-crawled to the top like G.I. Joe and peered over to the other side.
We saw Wiles join several men who were standing around a crude Druidic circle of stones. A small brazier sat in the center filled with burning deadwood. One of the men took off his orange jumpsuit and I realized with a nasty shock that it was Pastor Jerrod. He wasn’t wearing anything else. Except for his face, neck, wrists and ankles he was fish-belly white. The other three men already stood buck-ass naked in the flickering orange light; two potbellied middle-aged counselors from Pine Bluff, and Coach Sanders. As we watched, paralyzed, Mr. Wiles cast off his cut-off shorts, T-shirt and boxers and joined the others inside the stone ring as they began circling the fire. They chanted in unison in a glottal, throaty language I couldn’t understand. The sight of them twirling and half-skipping around that pagan fire filled me with a pure superstitious dread. Their faces contorted like devils, they gnashed their teeth and I noticed with an ashamed horror that all five were sporting erections, though Wiles’ was mainly obscured by his ponderous gut.
And that was when two large hands clamped down our shirts and a nasty voice spoke in our ears.
“So what exactly are you two maggots up to?”
Danny and I both jumped and I couldn’t completely stifle a small cry. We twisted around to see our nemesis, Harold, recent recipient of the Burning Balls award. The bastard had followed us into the woods.
“Boy, wait until I drag your sorry asses back to Coach,” he said with satisfaction. “Maybe I should give you both black eyes and tell Coach you tripped on some rocks.”
“Shhhhh!” Danny said with a scowl. He grabbed Harold’s thick forearm and tried to pull him down.
“Shut up!” I hissed at the big moron. “Get down!”
“What are you two queers doing out here? Wait until I tell the other guys.”
The chanting in the clearing below us stopped. Danny and I pulled free from Harold and peered back over the ravine rim.
The five sweat-bathed men stared up at us, only they weren’t men anymore. Pastor Jerrod was a large silver-maned wolf. Coach was a huge tawny mountain lion. The two Pine Bluff counselors were stocky, long-eared lynxes. Wiles was a dopey, shaggy-assed black bear. He looked at us with comical eyes, flattened his broad ears, and grunted.
For a brief moment I entertained a fantasy: I was asleep in my cabin bunk, dreaming. This was a nightmare spun together from exhaustion, fiery tabernacle sermons, undercooked hot dogs and too many issues of Famous Monsters and Eerie.
The Jerrod-Wolf creature howled; the same terrible cry I’d heard the night I watched Wiles slip into the woods, and I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Coach, now a huge cougar sporting four-inch fangs, glared at us with eyes glowing green in the firelight.
The lynxes both began padding toward us, splitting up to either side of the clearing.
“Peter, run!” Danny shouted.
Harold stood transfixed as the creatures began ascending the side of the ravine.
The werewolf’s silver muzzle contracted to reveal rows of sharp white teeth and four dagger canines; the shape-shifted cougar snarled.
I struggled to my feet and we ran. It took Harold a little longer to make up his mind, but he turned and lumbered after us.
“Faster, Peter!”
I heard Harold fall and grunt as the air left his lungs.
“Hey guys!” he called, gasping. “I hurt my ankle.”
God help us, Danny cranked his pistoning legs into sixth gear.
I knew he was right; if we turned back to help big, clumsy Harold they would fall on all three of us. We heard growls and the cougar’s scream, and Harold shrieked in terror. Over the intervening years, I’ve relived that race through the darkened woods many times in dreams, my lungs searing and heart galloping, the flashlight’s beam stuttering and jumping from the ground into the witchy tree boughs.
We passed a huge oak tree marked with a strip of reflective tape and saw two glowing eyes in the flashlight’s beam; one of the giant lynxes stood directly in our path. Danny slid to a stop and flung the metal flashlight, striking the animal squarely on its hairy skull. It yelped and backed away.
We ran. We ran, now without the light, sure that at any moment that huge white wolf would bring one of us down like a yearling buck. Or the mountain lion would spring from a tree and sink its powerful jaws into my throat. It occurred to me that this was the dream-shape I had seen floating down from a nearby cabin roof through our cottage window.
Brush and scrub trees tore at us, but we kept running.
* * *
For the first time in its sixty-year history, Raven’s Den Camp closed early that summer so local sheriff’s deputies and volunteers could beat the brush for a lost camper. Missing was a thirteen-year-old boy named Harold Manry from Ash Grove. The camp staff, including Pastor Jerrod and Coach Sanders, assisted in the search. Manry’s counselor swore he had been accounted for at lights-out, as did the other boys assigned to the cabin, so it was assumed he had wandered into the woods sometime after curfew and become lost. Coach and Pastor Jerrod gathered all of us and asked if anyone knew what had happened to Harold. Danny and I kept our mouths shut, trying not to tremble when Coach’s eyes swept over us.
Poor Harold’s body was never found and he was eventually presumed dead. Thank goodness that in those days they didn’t print the blurry photos of lost children on lunchroom pint cartons of milk. I felt guilty enough.
We made a pact to never speak of what we’d seen. Mr. Wiles was AWOL. When dawn finally arrived he hadn’t returned to our cabin (Danny and I sat awake all night, shivering, in shock). We were told he had taken suddenly ill. We heard stories of food poisoning and Lyme disease from a tick bite. I wondered if he’d screwed up and been pushed permanently outside that eldritch circle.
Dad drove Nate and I home in the tired old station wagon. I spent the next six months avoiding Coach at basketball games and pep rallies until Dad announced we were selling the farm and moving. I slept poorly. Every time the tree outside my room tapped the window pane I awoke in a sweat, sure that I would see one of their transformed bestial faces staring in at me with hell-fired eyes.
These days I live far from the Ozark hills. Lately I have begun experiencing a recurring dream. The details are always the same—the horrible scene beyond the ravine and the panicked run through those haunted woods. This time Danny’s aim is off and the flashlight spins into the darkness past the man-lynx. It yowls in fury and scratches my hip with one claw as we speed by. No, my memory insists, that was a scrape from a tree branch or brambles. The dream shifts suddenly as dreams are apt to do, and I’m the grown man I see each morning in the mirror, taking his twelve-year-old boy on a father-and-son summer retreat. A spacious, modern lodge with a crackling stone fireplace and indoor plumbing looking down on a clear, blue lake; nothing like Raven’s Den. We hike through the spruce-covered hills and cook freshly caught fish on an open grill and make campfire chocolate and graham cracker s’mores.
In the morning my son calls to me to get up, get up, Dad, and join him in skipping flat stones across the lake’s rippling surface before breakfast, but I lay there paralyzed—held down by that freezing weight of black, stream-polished dread.
I dare not move. Perhaps if I ignore my son’s insistent calls I can forever remain in this perfect dream. If I leave our cabin and stroll past the edge of the woods I’ll find another crude circle of stones.
And I know exactly what I’ll see even before I peel back the blanket and sheets—
THREE DOG NIGHT
JOHN F.D. TAFF
It was the pull that morning that finally did it for Roland; the final pull he would lead.
However, it would not be the final pull he was ever involved in––
The pull––what a vague, euphemistic word for that procedure. It sounded as if it were some sort of selection process, for a winning candidate or a great prize, a lottery drawing maybe.
It was a death walk, the last walk, a kind of animal green mile.
The pull was the round up of dogs and cats from the St. Francois County Animal Control Shelter, those who had gone unadopted; those whose luck had run out—the old, the infirm, the mangy, the aggressive, the merely unremarkable. All loaded into a cage in the middle of the main kennel, all taken to the gas chamber
All pulled––
No lethal injection for this shelter. Too expensive, said the bureaucrats. Besides, they said, gassing is safe and effective and causes a minimum of discomfort for the animals.
Roland knew that, from 18 years working here, the gas chamber might be effective, might even be safe, though he was unsure as to whom it was safe for. The discomfort for the animals—not to mention the workers? That was anything but minimal.
Those bureaucrats had never participated in a pull; they’d never had to look into the trusting eyes of dog after dog as they were taken into that room; never had to see their eyes as the door was closed, their tails still wagging, as if the door would open and the food would come, the love would come––
Never had to see the eyes of those dogs in their dreams, their nightmares––
Lethal injection––gassing––it was all the same, Roland figured on his good days.
They’re dead any way you look at it.
Today was not a good day––
The air was hot inside the kennel, even this early in the morning. The pull was always done in the morning, so the howls of the cats and dogs wouldn’t disturb people on their way to work or disturb the few people who came to the shelter to adopt animals.
He was about to go to the next cage when his eye caught a small figure huddled far in the back of the cage closest to the door.
“Awww, shit,” he yelled, hanging his head. “Why didn’t anyone tell me that she was back?”
The roar of his voice, for Roland was an enormous man, echoed off the steel rafters of the room. The door to the administrator’s office opened, and Mel Shubert stuck his head out part way. “Yeah?” he asked around a mouthful of jelly doughnut, purple clots at the corners of his mouth.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me that Bethany was back?” he demanded over the din of the dogs.
Mel shrugged, though with some sympathy. “What would you have done?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just pulled back inside and let the door close.
Roland removed his gloves, walked to the cage. Bethany cowered at its rear, a white American bulldog mix of some kind, smaller than most, with black splotches covering her flanks and circling one eye, like Petey in The Little Rascals. Roland thought she had made it, that she’d been adopted.
But no––
He didn’t let it happen often, but Bethany, in the short time she was there, had penetrated his carefully constructed defenses and made it to his heart. He knew he couldn’t save them all—couldn’t save most of them––even some of them. After 18 years, he had to be content with saving almost none.
Almost none had to be enough. Otherwise, you went crazy and had 50 dogs in your house. Or, and he wasn’t sure which was worse, your heart shrank, became as dense as lead, hard as diamond. Once that happened, you we
ren’t good for either animals or people.
And so he felt his heart wavering as he stood there, expanding and contracting in his chest as if not sure which way to go.
“Aww, shit, girl,” he growled. And though she didn’t move, her tail began wagging. “No, no, too late for that, little lady.”
He pulled her with the rest, took her himself to the chamber.
She went in with four others, all calmly, trustingly, and that fed his anger––anger at them, anger at those who had abandoned them, anger at all of that, all of that and this stupid job, this stupid system that put him in this position, made him kill these creatures who wanted nothing more than to eat, to sleep, to be loved.
Not too much to ask––but apparently too much to ask.
He closed the steel hatch on the chamber, punched the red button on the switch near the door. Carbon monoxide gas hissed into the room, colorless, odorless. Roland watched through an acrylic window set high in the hatch. After 20 or 30 seconds, Bethany and the four other dogs swung their heads from side to side, wobbled, fell over.
Another four minutes and they were dead.
When the light on the switch signaled that the cycle was complete, Roland tapped the shoulder of the attendant standing by him, told him with a nod of his head to take over for the rest of this pull.
* * *
Jonesy’s owner was an older lady who lived in a small house with a small yard, and Jonesy was her small dog for 13 years. Then, Jonesy got sick, and she brought him to the shelter, seeking a cheap answer to her prayers. The only answer it had was putting Jonesy to sleep. That was its cheap answer to everything.
Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) Page 9