Red Rider's Hood

with me.

It was already late afternoon by the time I left Grandma's house. I had to take two buses to get to the antique shop? something I hated, because it reminded me that I didn't have a car anymore. The buses were late, the traffic was slow, and I didn't get there until a quarter of eight: almost sunset at this time of year. The CLOSED sign was already hanging in the win­dow. I kicked the sidewalk in frustration. She was probably gone by now. I went to the door, but it was locked, so I went around to the back alley.

The alley was a narrow lane, unevenly paved, filled with bits of broken glass and Dumpsters that smelled like bad fish on a hot day. I knocked on the back door of the shop. To my sur­prise, the door opened when my knuckles hit it.

I slipped inside. 'Hello?'

The lights were off, and the sun, low in the sky, shone through the front window at a crooked angle, glinting off the crystal and making the dust in the air glow like snow under a streetlight.

'Anybody here? Marissa?' Maybe she was in the bathroom. She wouldn't have left the back door unlocked if she had gone home.

No answer. In the dark corners, antique Mardi Gras masks peered out at me. A ventriloquist's dummy leered at me from a shelf, its lips twisted in a porcelain sneer. I kept thinking its eyes followed me, along with the eyes of all the other masks and little statuettes in the room.

'Marissa?' I said, getting more spooked by the minute. The sun shifted behind a building across the street, leaving the antique shop in an eerie twilight gloom. Everything was in shadows, and every shadow seemed to be moving. A jingling sound behind me rattled my nerves, and I spun. No one was there. Just a wind chime shifting slightly. Something was wrong about that, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was. Wind chimes move in a breeze, and there was no breeze.

Suddenly something came down on my head. A pattern of lights flashed in my eyes, kind of like seeing stars in a cartoon. There was a sharp pain in my skull, and I felt my cheek hit the floor before I even realized I had fallen down. I never really fell unconscious?I was just dazed and dizzy. I felt myself get hoisted up, and felt ropes on my hands, but my eyes were still rolling into my head from the blow, and I didn't catch sight of my attacker until the spinning world began to slow down. When it did, I found myself hog-tied to a red leather armchair that smelled of old cigar smoke, somewhere in the back of the antique shop.

Sitting in an identical chair across from me was Marissa.

'What did you do that for?'

'I think you know,' she said.

I didn't know much of anything right then. That blow left me barely remembering my own name. 'What did you hit me with?'

She reached over and pulled a nasty-looking rifle onto her lap. 'I hit you with this rifle butt. As for the business end, you'll be meeting that in just a few minutes, I suspect.'

I wanted to think she was joking, but she was serious. Deadly serious.

'This is about your brother, isn't it?'

'No. It's about you. It's about the things you do. It's about what you are.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Well, if that's true, we'll know soon enough.' She looked up at a skylight above us. The sky was painted with purple-and-orange clouds. Dusk was kicking up colors and would soon be settling into night.

Marissa stood up, went off, and came back with something in her hands. There was a little table between us?cherrywood with fancy frills and clawed feet. She slammed the thing down on the table.

It was a skull. A human skull. Its empty eye sockets stared out at me. Its yellowed teeth were fixed in a snarling grin.

'What the. . .'

She sat down across from me, took the rifle, and laid it across her lap. 'Now we wait.'

'Do you have to leave that skull on the table staring at me? It's bad enough I have to sit here at all, why did you have to put that there?'

She didn't answer.

'This isn't exactly the date I had in mind,' I told her.

She sighed. 'Do I have to gag you?'

After that I kept quiet.

Slowly the clouds beyond the skylight bruised deeper, until the sky was dark. Still Marissa stared at me. Then, through a back window, a thin shaft of moonlight shone in, hitting the table. The dome of the skull glowed a faint blue in the darkness.

And what I saw then I will never forget for as long as I live.

The skull began to change.

4 The skull of Xavier Soames

I'd seen strange things in my life, and heard of things stranger still, but nothing could prepare me for what happened to that skull once the moonlight touched it.

The dome began to elongate, the jaw pulled back, the nose stretched forward, and those grinning teeth changed, too. The canines lengthened and sharpened, and the eye sockets shrank until I was no longer looking at a human skull. I was looking at the skull of some hideous beast.

I stared at the skull, astonished, and when I looked up Marissa was staring at me, just as shocked?but her expression wasn't about the skull. She was shocked by me.

'Oh my gosh, Red, I'm so sorry!' She put down the rifle and came over to untie me.

'Do you mind telling me what this is all about? Am I having a hallucination? Is this a concussion from getting knocked in the head?'

'No,' Marissa said as she finished untying me. 'It's real. You saw what you saw.'

'And what exactly did I see?'

She sighed. 'It's best if you don't know. Just go home, and forget what happened here.'

Sure?like I could possibly forget any of it. 'I'm not going anywhere until you tell me.'

She looked at me long and hard. 'Once you know, it will haunt you forever. You'll go to bed thinking about it. You'll wake up thinking about it. It will fill your dreams. Are you sure you want to know?'

I nodded.

She reached down and picked up the terrible animal skull from the table. 'This is the skull of Xavier Soames. Cedric Soames's grandfather.'

I was never one to believe in werewolves. That was just silly stuff they showed on TV late at night to keep you awake so you'd watch the commercials. Sure, some people seemed to have more animal in them than human at times, but changing from man into beast?it just didn't happen in the world I was raised in. At least that's what I had always thought. Now I wasn't so sure. I wasn't sure about anything anymore.

'Xavier Soames was the first,' Marissa told me. 'The first one in our neighborhood anyway. He started a gang.'

'The Wolves!'

'That was thirty years ago. But a couple of werewolf hunters came along to end the curse, and sent them all to their graves. The Wolves were gone, and for the longest time the only gang in town that people took seriously was that all-girl gang?the Crypts, I think they're called. They're not werewolves, and as far as I know, they haven't bothered anyone. The neighborhood recovered from the dark years. . . . Then, just a couple of years ago, Cedric started it up again and gathered a bunch of new members every bit as bad as the first.'

'But. . . but he's not a werewolf, right? He's just pretend­ing, right? Right?'

'Haven't you heard the stories,' Marissa said, 'about coy­otes getting neighborhood cats and dogs? Since when have there ever been coyotes in the middle of the city?'