And the Devil will rise from the bog.
“I couldn’t think where I’d seen it before. Then it dawned on me—it’s from that damned painting at the diner. Uh”—he looked around—“did you put more coffee on?”
“You say it comes in waves,” began Doris. “Does that mean there’s really a pattern? Let me see the dates again.” She scanned. “You realize there’s plenty of secondhand stuff, tracks, dead chickens, that sort of thing—even disappearances—but nothing you could really call evidence.”
“You mean like an eyewitness report? Somebody left to talk about it afterwards? No, there isn’t. Somehow I don’t find that especially reassuring.”
“Is it…God, I can’t even say it.” Athena put her cup down. “Is it a werewolf?”
Doris shuffled papers in embarrassment. “Look at the dates. It goes back…two and a half centuries. Well,” she sighed, “we’ve certainly got enough books here. Let’s see, here’s a good one—cannibal clans on the Scottish moors. Check out the pictures. I crave that bearskin.”
“I wasn’t sure what might be relevant to the case, so I just grabbed everything.”
Athena had been holding her fists close to her body. Now she relaxed slightly, comforted by the professional sound of that: relevant to the case. Listening to their voices, she sipped coffee and watched Doris’s cigarette smoke fill the room.
“This book’s about ghosts.”
“Let me see that. I didn’t mean to bring that one. Must’ve picked it up by accident.”
“Great chapter headings. Look, honey. ‘Haunted Places.’ Not houses, mind you. ‘Psychic Phenomena in America,’ ‘Poltergeist Activity and Pubescent Girls.’ Is this dirty, I hope?”
Athena paged through volume after volume, her attention only partially focusing. Now that they were actually down to it, it all seemed so foolish, so fantastic. For over an hour, they all leafed through in relative silence, skimming indexes, peering at illustrations.
“Here’s a good one,” said Doris. “Did you know you could tell a vampire by the smell?”
“Matty’s asleep finally.” Pam wandered in. “Oh, are you still talking? What are you still talking about? Them pineys, I bet.”
Athena opened another book. “Yes, we’re still talking.”
“Oh well, I’ll just get some coffee and go in the other room then.” Pam poured herself an inch of coffee, then filled her cup with milk and sugar, stirring it slowly and with some apparent difficulty.
Something thumped. Steve had opened a heavy tome. “I found this.” He turned to a marked passage. “The librarian told me the author was supposed to be a famous warlock. He claims that lycanthropy—that’s being a werewolf—that it’s…”
Pam’s eyes opened very wide.
“…kind of a ‘malevolent astral projection,’ what ever that means.” He kept his eyes on the page. “Apparently the person goes into a kind of trance, and his ‘animal soul’ is free to walk around.”
“No mental projection tore those men apart,” Doris muttered.
“He did it.” Pam dropped her cup. Quickly, milky coffee found its way into the cracks between the worn floorboards.
“Pamela!”
“Oh! Oh, I’ll get it, ’Thena.” She grabbed a cloth off the sink and began to sop up the mess. “And you just cleaned in here too.”
“No, it’s all right.” She got out of her chair. “Just leave it. Pamela, I’ll get it.”
Steve hadn’t taken any notice of the accident. “I don’t see why we’re assuming that what we’re looking for is a he.”
“You saw the bodies,” said Doris. “No woman did that.”
“I don’t know. When I was on the force in the city, I saw some pretty horrendous things.”
“You’re forgetting the semen on the body. It’s a he.”
“It’s an it,” said Athena.
Rag in hand, Pam crouched over the wet spot on the floor, listening with her mouth open.
“Yeah, I guess.” Doris nodded. “It. Makes you think of cavemen huddled around a fire, seeing eyes out there in the dark. What?”
“No, it’s nothing. Just a dream I had. Pamela, if you don’t mind…”
“You mean I have to leave? You’re kidding!”
“Please.” Athena waited for her to exit, then turned back to the others. “Reading all this stuff, I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I get. I can’t explain. Did either of you look through this one? It talks about central Europe and the plague. Think of them—isolated people with death all around, barricading themselves in their huts to keep out disease and wolves and vampires. And then, like what you talked about before, Steve—immigrant workers huddled in the pines. Pretty similar. What ever it is, couldn’t they have brought it with them?”
“You sound like an expert all of a sudden, honey.”
“I guess without knowing it, I’ve been thinking about all this.” She stopped. “Without knowing it. But do you think it’s possible?”
“You mean something congenital?” Doris considered it. “What’s that word again? Here it is—lycanthropy. Something in the genes maybe, waiting for the right combination…” They watched her mull it over. “Okay.” Taking a drag on her cigarette, she sat up straight. “Okay, I’m starting to put something together, just hypothetical. But how’s this sound? See that book there? The Indians of the north country are afraid of the bear men. In Europe in the Middle Ages, they had werewolves. What if it’s all the same thing? See what I mean, ’Thena? Steve? Where’s that article? Leopard men in Africa? Tiger people in Asia. We get identical legends in, look, China, Brazil, Hungary. Right? Always in blasted countryside, bleak mountains or swamps, barren ground. What if it’s the same creature?” They nodded hesitantly, trying to follow. “Not a bear or a tiger anyhow. But something so terrible that the locals always interpret it as the animal they most fear.”
“And here?”
“They called it the Devil.”
He sighed. “That puts a hell of a dent on the whole idea of shape-shifters. It’s what I just read. Have you seen this?”
“I glanced over it,” Doris responded.
“It’s about people who believe they can be trans…transmogrified.”
“Trans-who?”
“Changed,” Athena put in quietly.
“Could I see that?” Doris read in silence for a moment. “Of course, right down the page here, he completely contradicts himself. This bit—a man does something, something so horrid that he blames it on some monster or other he’s dreamed up. Right? Because he couldn’t have done it, obviously. Not a nice guy like him. Or else, if he did, he must’ve been changed into a beast somehow.” She laughed sourly. “In which case, they’d go out and look for a witch to burn. I tell you, they always find a way to stick it to the woman.” She tossed the book down. “Where’s that other thing I was looking at a minute ago?”
“What?”
“You know, about certain kinds of psychos who completely block out what they’ve done from themselves, so they really don’t even know they’re doing it. Steve? Steve, what’s the matter? You looked funny there for a minute.”
“You know what? You know what?” From the doorway, Pam’s words poured in a rushing babble. “At my ma’s house, when my uncle Nim died, when I was just a little girl, one night I woke up, and I was real scared, and there he was, and he was just standing there, standing by my bed, and he had these real big eyes, and he just kept looking at me and looking at me. I was so scared. And his eyes was all strange like.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“And then one time when I was fooling around with the wee-gee board and I asked if anyone was there, remember, ’Thena? You was here. And it spelled out…”
The books lay in a disorderly heap. “So, is it a monster all the time?” Athena made her voice very loud, but her words barely got past the forlorn laugh that caught in her throat. “Or is it sometimes normal?”
