The Fear In Yesterday's rings

In the silence that followed his announcement, I glanced at Harper, then back at Button. Off to the right, somewhere in the kitchen, somebody dropped a tray of glasses. 'Would you be talking about those werewolf killings?' 'Why, yes,' the cryptozoologist replied, looking surprised and somewhat taken aback. 'Of course. However, needless to say, it's not a werewolf.'

'Needless to say. Just what makes you th-'

'I'm virtually certain it's a lobox.'

'A who?'

'A lobox,' he repeated, opening the flap of the briefcase and putting his right hand inside. 'I have some-'

'Dr. Button, just what makes you think I'm interested in those killings?'

He stopped with his hand halfway out of the briefcase, stared at me, and slowly blinked. He seemed almost startled by my question. 'But aren't you investigating them?'

'No. What on earth gave you that idea?'

He flushed again, obviously embarrassed, then turned to Harper, as if she might have the answer. When she merely cocked her head to one side and smiled sweetly at him, he turned back to me, shook his head slightly. 'I just assumed … an investigator of your stature in this little town out here in the middle of nowhere, only a few miles from where the last killing took place …'

'You assumed wrong, Button. My reason for being here has nothing to do with the killings. I'm engaged in personal business.'

'Oh, I see,' the man said in a small voice, clearly disappointed and embarrassed. Much to my relief, he slid his hand out of his briefcase, closed the flap. 'Well,' he said, addressing the candle in the middle of the table, 'now I'm afraid I feel a little foolish.'

'Think nothing of it,' I said, raising my hand to signal for the check. 'Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to-'

'What's a lobox?' Harper asked.

Button looked hopefully at Harper, uncertainly at me. 'If you have to go. .'

'We have time,' Harper said sweetly.

Button eagerly reached back into his briefcase, drew out what appeared to be an eight-by-ten photograph. Whatever it showed, I was going to have to wait my turn to see it; he handed the picture to Harper. 'That's a lobox.'

I watched Harper's face in the candlelight as she studied the photograph Button had given her. Her eyes widened, and she absently nodded her head in what seemed to be appreciation. Finally, she handed the photograph across the table to me.

It was a photo of what seemed to be one of the eerie and hauntingly beautiful cave paintings from Lascaux, in France, but I couldn't be certain; I owned a book on the paintings and had leafed through it on a number of occasions when contemplating my own mortality, but the painting I was looking at was unfamiliar to me. The light from the camera's flash had wiped out the ochers and blacks at the edges of the painting, but in the center was a stylized drawing of the head of a beast. Except for the eyes, which seemed almost human, and the great fangs, which had certainly been exaggerated, it might have been the head of a wolf. All about the fierce head, puny stick figures representing men ran in terror.

Button produced more photographs, more prehistoric depictions of the wolflike beast he had called a lobox. In one, a lobox had a stick figure by the throat. Another depicted its great claws, with one protruding from the rear of the black leather pad on its paw, making the full set of claws appear almost like a raptor's talons. Clearly, the Cro- Magnon who were responsible for the cave paintings had not hunted this creature; it had hunted them. Except for one painting, which had a quite different feel from the others, almost comical, and which looked like a lobox trying to stand on its head, what projected from the paintings was the experience of sheer terror our ancestors had felt before this creature. I handed the photographs back to Button as I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

'Canis lobox,' Button said in a low, tense voice.

I’ll take the one trying to stand on its head.'

'Obviously done by a lesser artist,' Button replied, looking slightly pained at what he might have considered my irreverence. 'Until now, Canis lobox was considered only a mythical- 'speculative' is the word I prefer-creature. These photographs are recent, because the drawings were only recently discovered at Lascaux, very deep down in the network of caves, far below the level where most of the other paintings are found. Because of their location, some scientists are speculating that the paintings of Canis lobox may have had religious significance to the Cro-Magnon who produced them sixteen thousand years ago. These are the only known depictions of this creature, unique among mammals for the claw at the rear of its footpad. There's a very sparse fossil record that hints at the prior existence of such an animal, but that record is far from conclusive. Many of us now feel that these paintings confirm that it lived. Because of the special placement of the paintings in the cave, it could mean that prehistoric man viewed the creature as some kind of terrible god.

'The lobox flourished across North America in the Quaternary period, beginning forty thousand years ago. It was the age of the great mammals. Lobox coexisted with mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and other creatures that we're much more familiar with. Lobox was a cousin to the great dire wolves, and descended from the same ancestor-Tomarctus-as present-day wolves and dogs. Its closest modern-day relative, besides the wolf, is a breed of dog called the kuvasz, which was originally bred hundreds of years ago, in Europe, to protect sheep herds from wolves. But the lobox was very special; no other creature in any of the Lascaux cave paintings is depicted in this much detail, or evokes such a feeling of sheer terror on the part of the artist. Using a little imagination to extrapolate from the small fossil record, it may be easy to see why this animal was so feared.'

Button once again reached into his briefcase, withdrew two pieces of paper, handed one to Harper and one to me. It was an artist's rendition of how a lobox might have appeared, drawn from a variety of angles. The animal certainly looked fierce enough to me. It resembled something that could have been a cross between a wolf and a Great Dane, with the wolfs spindly legs and large paws, and the Great Dane's huge rib cage and muscular withers. But no wolf or dog possessed this creature's broad snout and gaping nostrils. Obviously enhanced by the artist's imagination, the yellow eyes of the beast were very bright, shining with a distinctly humanlike quality that was very much like that in the photograph of the painting that was sixteen thousand years old.

'The reason for the lack of an extensive fossil record,' Button continued, excitement building in his voice, 'is that they didn't get caught in tar pits, like the one at La Brea, for example, even though they were probably larger than dire wolves. The speculation is that they were simply a lot smarter than the animals that did get trapped in fossil-producing places like tar pits. If a fossil fragment of a lobox skull is any indication, its brain pan was relatively large in proportion to its body weight-approximately the same ratio as the porpoise. The lobox was probably second in intelligence only to Cro-Magnon, and may have been smarter than Neanderthal; in fact, there are a few scientists who believe that the lobox may have played a very large role in wiping out Neanderthal. It certainly had the keenest sense of smell of any creature that's ever lived. Elephants are believed to detect specific odors from as far as four or five miles away; the lobox may have had an olfactory range twice that. It must have been like a kind of ultimate bloodhound, and it apparently had a taste for human flesh.'

I grunted, handed the sketch back to Button. 'You're saying you think one of these is responsible for the killings?'

'Yes,' the cryptozoologist replied tersely. He raised his sharp chin slightly, in an almost defiant gesture. 'I do.'

'Uh. . where do you suppose this critter came from?'

Now he lowered his chin as well as his gaze. 'That's something I haven't quite worked out yet,' he said quietly.

'Well, it's certainly an interesting theory,' I said evenly, trying to be polite. Nate Button seemed to me to be an obvious world-class crackpot, and I wondered how he'd lasted as long as he had in the highly critical academic community, where even lesser fools are not suffered with much good humor.

'Interesting, but highly unlikely,' Harper-who, at least in the past, had not herself displayed much fondness for fools-said with disarming sweetness. 'Now, let me get this straight, Dr. Button. You believe that a creature called a lobox, which if it actually did exist at all has been extinct for more than ten thousand years, has been running around ripping up people all across the Midwest? Even assuming that a few members of the species did survive,