The Wolfman

What bothered me more than anything was watching Pearce run himself into the ground, just like he did every time something went down in this town. It didn’t matter that the federales were in town, or that they went so far as to manipulate the newspapers and the words that were coming out of the mouths of the talking heads on the local news shows. It didn’t matter that they had all the technology and headshrinkers in the world, not to Pearce. Day in and day out, he pored over his evidence, his thoughts, the section of land he was charged to protect. When the time came, he wanted it to be none other than him slapping the meat hooks on this guy. So he went to the Crowley property every damn day and just walked around. Walked around and thought. Maybe, he thought, he would get lucky and find a business card.

I spoke to him on the phone that evening.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Going back up to the property,” he said. “Just stopped at home to get some grub. Martha made some meat loaf. Enough for a battalion, actually. I’m loading up my Tupperware with it. If this fucking town was willing to pay more overtime, I wouldn’t have to do this surveillance crap myself….”

“You’d do it anyway.”

“But I’d be getting paid.”

“You’re hiding out in the bushes on your own time?”

“Of course,” he said, as if I had just asked the stupidest question of all time. “The feds are going to be trying some proactive stuff soon. They’re going to be pulling together some kind of press conference on the TV, but it’s going to be more like some kind of subversive attack on this guy, to try to draw him out of hiding. But these bastards come back to the scene of the crime, Marley. The feds have honest-to-God proof of that, so, hey. You never know. I could get lucky.”

“You got lucky with the Polaroid stuff,” I said. “Before that, those goons didn’t even know he took pictures.”

“It’s not enough,” he said. “It won’t be till I have him in my holding cell. The feds ain’t Danny Pearce.”

“Good one.”

“Thanks,” he said, “but not as good as leaving a note in my jacket, right?”

“Oh, you found the note, eh?”

“No, asshole, the wife did.”

On the inside, I laughed. On the outside, I said, “Well, isn’t that a shame. I hope she took it well, you cheatin’ on her with such a chesty girl and all.”

He said, “Marley, I’ve never met anyone in my life who pushes their luck like you do. Balls like a gorilla.”

“You’d know,” I said.

“I know more than you think. Like how you went through my files the other night.”

“Shit, man, how the hell did you know that?”

“I’m a detective. It goes with the job. And I know you more than you think.”

I had nothing to say.

“Nothing to say for once? It’s about fucking time,” he said, and he laughed. “Now I can die happy.” I laughed too, nervously, because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, or if he was just fucking with me.

“Keep smoking, and it’ll happen sooner than you think.”

“I only fell off the wagon the one day, Marley. Martha saw to

that.”

“Good. That’s why she’s your better half.”

“Don’t I know it.” He paused. Then: “I got a good feeling about this case. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Take it easy, Danny. Get some sleep.”

“A few days, I’ll sleep. Now, not so much.”

He hung up.

That ended up being the last time I ever spoke to the man.

It was just before midnight. Night had settled upon the sky like a calm black sea. Up high, forcing itself through the darkness, was the full moon. I could feel that moonlight tug at my skin like a baby’s fingers, but I held it at bay on the other side of the curtains that hung from every window and were each drawn tight.

For me to change from my usual, happy-go-lucky self to a plain old creature of the night, I actually have to come in physical contact with the moonlight. The transformation never happens automatically, so until I was good, ready, and confident that most of the population was at home and sleeping, I sat around the house with a book.

I was reading The Captive and the Fugitive. Proust. In French.

I had once killed a Frenchman. It wasn’t something I was proud of (just kidding), but the hell of it is that from that day on, if I heard two guys talking in French (not likely in the deep South) I knew what they were saying. And I could read Proust without its being translated. What a world.

I also knew Greek, Mandarin, and Spanish, apparently.

I haunted the used bookshop over on Markson Street from time to time, but all the books I had in the house were thoroughly hidden behind heavy boxes in the bedroom closet. In case anyone ever came in, like Pearce did, I didn’t want anyone to ever think I was someone who could read. The less people knew about me, the better. It was bad enough that half the town knew my real name.

The pain of the transformation from the world’s greatest chef to a being that eats only raw meat is almost indescribable. When people actually come apart from the inside, they usually don’t live long enough to have a sit- down with somebody and verbalize what the experience was like. If I had to put it into words, I’d have to say that it’s like feeling each and every one of my bones shift and rotate inside me, and then shatter into dozens of pieces, all throughout my body. After that, it’s like feeling those sharp little pieces try to pass through all my pores like kidney stones. That would pretty much do it.

It isn’t a pleasant feeling, but I used to experience a pain far worse, back before the beast and I came to work together, and that was the pain that would come with the evening of the full moon and grow stronger and more unbearable as the hours passed. It was like the most hellish of chemical withdrawal symptoms—the running shits, the pukes, and the twitchies—and the only way to relieve that pain was to let the light of the moon touch me. However, seeing as how I didn’t used to want to change, this was a real catch-22. Coming in contact with the moonlight meant I had to break down and give up. It meant I had to allow myself to change into a life-snatching monster. Psychologically, this didn’t do me any favors. With the withdrawal pains gone, the pain of changing wouldn’t feel that bad, because I at least knew it was temporary.

If not for this pain—this torture—that attacked me like a mob and compelled me, sooner or later, to touch the moonlight, I would’ve locked myself up somewhere, and I never would’ve let the beast do what it did to all those innocent people all those years ago. Because of the pain, though, I had no choice.

I was never man enough to conquer that pain, to shrug it off and wait for a new morning to come, and it was so amazingly internal, so undying, so beyond any other pain I had ever felt, that I am quite sure there has never been a man alive who had the nerves and the stamina to endure it. I never could, and a lot of people aren’t here anymore because of that.

One night, I tried. This was back in ‘75. I was twenty-two years

old.

I was already on the road at that point, and I was as close to insanity then as I’ve ever been. For the better part of the seventies, I was on a righteous quest to find a cure for what I had become. My mission led me from one end of the country to the other, but all my leads—the rumors of witch doctors, of magicians, of allpowerful Indian shamans—either turned into dead ends or turned out to be frauds. There were a couple of people I encountered— one a medicine man in New Hampshire, and the other an unbelievably ancient German man, a hundred and thirty years old, who was kept in the basement of a nondescript apartment building in San Diego. He wielded powers and abilities not of this earth, but even they were unable to help me, and I realized then that I was beyond all hope. My chances of saving my soul fell away like sand through my fingers, and I was lost.

Then there was Maine. I encountered a group of people up in Maine that I thought might be the answer to