transparent, melted away from the stretching body of the thing, and it was left panting feebly in the ditch its falling carrier had formed.
That smell again—that smell…
“It’s a puppy!” Richie exclaimed, and at that exact moment I realized what that smell was. “Richie!” I shouted, but he had impulsively stepped into the crater and reached down his gloved hand to the stirring dog shape that lay there, waving its paws with growing vigor, its tiny snout sniffing at the unfamiliar air, its eyes like gold coins, the light in them growing. It had a thin, emaciated body and a long slim tail, nearly hairless.
“Richie!” I screamed, reaching for him, but it was too late, and the next image was one that has come to me in my many nightmares every night since.
The tiny dog struggled on its side, moving its hind legs beneath; then abruptly, forcefully, it sprang and took hold of Richie by the hand with its teeth. I saw the bright flash of them as its small mouth opened: two sharp half circles, upper and lower, like blue-white razors. Even as Richie tried to pull back, the thing’s mouth closed on his glove, holding tight like a sprung trap.
Richie’s scream was an unearthly thing. Even more terrifying was the sound the creature made as it dropped the glove, a strong, piercing howl that echoed around the field like a triumphant bray.
The beast, with Richie’s glove still in its writhing mouth, fell back into the hole. Richie fell into my arms, and I began to pull him backward. For a moment I could still see clearly down into the crater, and my blood froze at the sight of the little monster in there, biting through the leather glove like a sharply honed machine, then spitting it aside. Already, it had grown. Its front paws were still unsteady, or I’m sure it would have leaped from the ditch at me. It did look up at me, though, with its huge, almond-shaped yellow eyes, and I swear it grinned, with a smile that Lucifer himself would have envied.
Then it turned its head, looked at the Moon rising majestically above the Earth, and let out a blood-curdling howl.
I backpedaled away from the hole, lifting my moaning son up into my arms. He lay limply.
“Richie,” I said, but his eyes were glazed, showing only pain. I turned and ran for the house.
As I reached the porch, fumbling with the front door, screaming for Emily to help, I looked back toward the far edge of the field. The thing had not yet followed me. But I saw its now-grown head rearing up out of the hole, turning to look at me—
The porch light went on. The door opened, showing my wife, hair disheveled, eyes widening. I nearly fell toward her, screaming for her to close and bolt the door. As she did so I heard the creature in the field howl once more, its wail answered by another and then another howl from somewhere in the distance.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” I said, laying my son on the couch, seeing where the thing had gotten its teeth into the tips of his two middle fingers, shearing one of them clear off, the other attached by a mere thread of cut bone.
And it was then, as shock began to give way to other feelings, that I remembered again what that smell was, the smell that had come over my world like a poison cloud when the fiery meteor had crashed into my life. It explained all my unnamed apprehensions, my feelings of supposed cowardice in front of my son. I knew now why I had wanted to run so badly.
I had smelled that odor once before, long ago when I was Richie’s age, when one night my friends and I stumbled onto a derelict under an abandoned railroad bridge. We thought he was sleeping, propped up against the wet side of the tunnel with his head down, one arm thrown out against the stone underneath for support. But when we got closer we saw that he was not sleeping but was dead, and that there were things crawling in and out of his mouth and nose and eyes, and over his hands and feet where white bone showed. And we ran away yelling, not only from the sight, but also from the smell of decomposing flesh that had surrounded it.
But that was not all.
The thing that had made this smell come back to me with such force this night when I had smelled it again, and which had rounded up all the little fears into an insistent frightened voice that had told me to run and hide and save my family, was the fact that we had run away from the railway tunnel, my friends and I, under the light of a full Moon.
CHAPTER 2
The Beast
When I turned from Richie to my wife, there was a look on her face I had never seen before. I don’t know if it was an instinctive thing—I still am confused about the supposed difference between the sexes, and the supposed unique ability of females to sense a situation and act accordingly; I believe to this day that that ability is derived more from adapting to situations than from genetics—but that night, at that moment, my wife
He had told me calmly, in the way that country people tell city people who, to them, are basically filled with nonsense, that I would need it. “You may not need it to hunt, or drive off some burglar, or to threaten your neighbor who starts digging up the north end of your garden with his tractor and ignores your protests, but you’ll need it.” When I tried to get him to take it back with him, to tell me why, if none of those things he had said would come to pass, I would possibly need a shotgun, he just waved me off like a stupid child and said, “Put it in the closet, Jason.”
Emily pulled down the bulky box of cartridges from the closet shelf. She then went to the front door and turned off the porch light. She stood silhouetted in the hallway by dim moonlight.
She cocked the shotgun open and pushed two shells into it. “What was it, Jase? Dog?” Her voice was eerily calm.
“It wasn’t a dog,” I said, still in shock.
Richie let out a cry, and Emily lowered the gun and joined me.
I had stopped the bleeding in his fingers; the cuts had been quick and clean and my scarf had served as a compress. Emily went into the bathroom; I saw a stab of yellow light cut into the back hallway as she turned the switch on. She returned with our first-aid kit, and as she worked on the hand with ointment I tried to get Richie to look at me.
His eyes were milky; though he called my name he didn’t see me. He stared feverishly into another world. I held a cool washcloth to his forehead. He waved his unhurt hand in front of him, murmuring, “Dad? No!” again and again.
“Tell me what did this,” Emily said.
The howling started outside. There was a clipped yelp, close by, and then three or four answering cries from far off. The hair on my arms stood up, and I turned to Emily and said, “That.”
I got up, squeezing her arm, and walked to the living-room window. I had to shoulder my way around the Christmas tree. The nostalgically pungent odor of balsam that filled my nostrils as I brushed it made a strange contrast to the horror of what was happening.
A large, dark shadow darted past the edge of my vision. A cold fist tightened in my stomach. If that was the thing we had left in the ditch at the far end of the field, it had grown to at least six feet in height in less than an hour.
There was a small window in the back bedroom on that side of the house. I sprinted to it. It was covered with Venetian blinds. I turned the wand slowly to open them. I saw darkness, a thin cut of lawn bordered by bushes, the squeezed vertical fingers of a stockade fence.
And then movement.
By the bushes, moving on around to the back of the house, was something tall and stooped, with the grace of an athlete, the head of a dog, long limbs, large paws.
Then it was gone.
I moved to the other window. I slowly turned the blinds, and they revealed the beast standing on the other side of the window glass, staring in at me.
This was not the face of a dog, or even a wolf. There was too much intelligence in it for any animal. It was a face that made me think of fire. It was all eyes and teeth, the eyes wide, yellow unending flame, the teeth long
