The Wolfman

Why, I asked myself, was he up at the Crowley property if he knew the wolf would be out that night? Did he see it as two heads working toward the same end?

Pretty much. He thought he’d at least be safe.

And why did he leave me the envelope? To rub my face in it? To prove he wasn’t as bumbling as I might have thought? No. It was so if anything ever happened to him, I could avenge his death.

“Well, knock me the fuck down.”

I looked down at my hand and saw it explode, but it was all in my head. It was time. The wolf was going to give me the memories of that night that I’d been hoping for.

They say birds can see colors in the spectrum that people can’t, and that dogs can smell things that people can’t too. The wolf experienced the world more fully than any man could ever imagine, and on those occasions in which its memories would bleed out and seep into mine, it was as if I was given the power and the privilege to see this world through the eyes of God, or at least a notable competitor to his title and throne.

In living day-to-day, I see the world as I always have, but because I know of how it could look, it has lost its shine, its flare, and its magic. It is dull, lackluster, and rusted, and I always know that there are things that dwell just below the surface that I, in my human form, could never put my finger on. The taste of metal filled my mouth. I tasted … I tasted blood … I changed.

The beast rose on its own two legs from the murky red puddle that still steamed on the floor. It howled low, grunted, and quickly swept the house for signs of life with its ears, its nose. It smelled my detergent, it picked up the mouse living under my kitchen sink by the rustling of dust bunnies, the minuscule pitter- patter of tiny feet.

The beast made the decision to leave it be. It knew it had a target in the Rose Killer, and even if it didn’t have a target, it would not have settled for the death of an animal. It smelled the collected smoke from my years of cigarettes, permanently clogging the air in the house, and living in the walls and fabrics. The beast wrinkled its wet nose and let out an animal sneeze.

It lurched through the house slowly and left through the front door, stooping its shoulders to fit under the frame of the door. Once it was outside, its ears perked up; it breathed deep and bellowed. The night glowed and screamed with life. Like I’d trained it to, it closed the door behind it before taking off into the night.

It ran at speeds beyond my comprehension, faster, perhaps, than the great cats that prowl the prairies of faraway lands. Through backyards, dark roads, then the woods that surround the town of Evelyn, and finally, the open road, it ran. Wind kissed it, streaking trails through its thick, dark hair. The moonlight came down, washing over it like a mother’s love.

The sounds and smells of an entire world enticed it, beckoned it, pulled it in a million different directions, but the beast was focused. The beast knew what it had to do. It was hungry for it. It had the intent. Thank God for that.

The wolf reached Edenburgh and quickly found the spot where that poor girl had been found over there, the backyard to the house with the swimming pool. As it had done countless times before, it got down low on all fours and smelled the ground, leaving drips of snot and spit on the crushed blades of grass. With its tongue, it picked up the soil, rolled it around in its mouth, all with the purpose of picking up the scent, the taste, the smell of the perpetrator. Once it had that, the bells would toll and it would be only a handful of minutes or hours before the target would meet his destroyer.

After several seconds, the wolf wrinkled its brow, clenched its giant fists, and growled somewhere deep inside it. It spit out the soil and howled. It was mad. It was a feeling, a sensation, an instance that had never occurred before, and the beast didn’t know what to make of it. The beast was frustrated. It hadn’t picked anything up.

How is that possible?

The beast angrily went on to what it felt was the next possible spot to help it along, using the same kind of reasoning skills one would expect only real people to be capable of. In the blink of an eye, it stood upon Judith Myers’s grave, breathing heavily. With fingers stretched and claws bared, it went to the business of digging out the coffin, hoping in its own, animal way to get a scent off the dead girl’s body.

When it got to the shell of the coffin, six feet down, it pulled the lid off the casket. The beast looked down, and there rested the young, dead lady. Like a burnt piece of paper, she had begun to turn a darker shade around her edges—her eyelids, her fingertips, her lips. She was discolored, as if she were covered in a fine layer of soot. Her dress was stained by dirt now, and as the beast took her by the back of her neck more carefully than I ever imagined it could handle something, the stitches in the dress where they had sewn it around her stiffened form began to pop open.

The beast lifted her up. As she bent at the waist, the beast heard cracks. To its otherworldly ears, they sounded like firecrackers. It smelled the putrid fumes of chemicals and death rise from her like angry phantoms. Her dress fell away to one side, exposing a dead breast. The wolf groaned low, and hunched up, almost as if it were ashamed of itself, or sad for what had happened.

Its left hand sliced the dress away from the body, exposing rows of thick stitches along the chest and lower regions, forming a Y, as if it was a question branded into her so she could remember to ask God that, just in case she happened to run into him.

More dank smells, almost too powerful for the wolf. It wanted out of that grave, but it would not go. It smelled her down there, privately, up along the blackened stitch holes, and up further still to the eyes, or, more accurately, the sockets where eyes used to live and swim and dart. Where beautiful eyes used to see, to know, to wonder, to radiate joy and love, and watch the rain come down.

The eyes saw the killer. Could that be why he took them?

The holes had been stuffed with cotton and glued shut, heavily caked with makeup, giving the impression that nothing had been done to the face. With the grace and precision of a surgeon, the beast, with one gleaming nail, plucked through the gunk sealing the eyeholes and opened them up. It brought its nose up close, close enough to leave wet marks, and smelled there in the dried and putrid pits. Nothing.

The beast crawled out of the hole and screamed. Before taking off into the night, the beast laid the lid back down and filled in the hole by kicking the dirt in, like a cat in a litterbox. The beast was now in a rage. It had struck out twice, unable to get a lead on its target, and it was now getting close to seething. It felt … denied. The anger was rising, and it was running out of options.

With nowhere else to go, the wolf came back to Evelyn, racing through the darkness of the woods along the northern edges of the town. A million animal eyes watched it dart past them, unafraid. They knew. There was a communication there. There was only one prey for that night. No substitutes.

When the beast reached the perimeter of the Crowley property, it slowed down to a careful, silent stalk, kept low to the ground, all senses focused out on the horizons. It smelled the ground, the occupants of the great house many, many yards away. It heard the occupants, sleeping, breathing deeply and slowly. To the south, it heard the low rumble of a car engine, tasted the grainy tang of gasoline fumes on the air. It heard a cough. Picked up the scent of meat loaf.

It was crawling now, down on its hands and knees. With its nose twitching, it came up to the spot where she died. It could at least smell her there, the scent left behind of Gloria Shaw, but nothing else. No one else. The beast was … lost.

And that was it. It knew it. The scent of its prey was gone. It had vanished to such a degree that not even the wolf’s otherworldly senses could pick it up. The target was gone, and without a target, the beast was without anchor, without guidance. It cried. It roared.

The beast heard a twig crack behind it, and it turned. Pearce was there, standing right there, his gun drawn and pointed. He did not fire. His eyes were wide and filled to the brims with fright. With its uncanny hearing, the beast heard a rumble in the man’s belly as loud as a passing train. The man spoke.

“Don’t,” Pearce said, stepping back slowly. “Get back. I’m not the one you want.”

The wolf rose up, towering over Pearce by a foot, if not more. Its veins, its teeth, its very being called out for blood.

“We’re in this together,” said Pearce. “Don’t come closer.”

The lust could not be denied. That’s what it was.