Cycle of the Werewolf   ::   Кинг Стивен

The Beast is hunched over, but it is clearly walking on its two rear legs. Walking the way a man would walk. The red light of the twizzer skates hellishly across its green eyes.

It moves slowly, its wide nostrils flaring rhythmically. Scenting prey, almost surely scenting that prey's weakness. Marty can smell it-its hair, its sweat, its savagery. It grunts again. Its thick upper lip, the color of liver, wrinkles back to show its heavy tusk-like teeth. Its pelt is painted a dull silvery-red.

It has almost reached him-its clawed hands, so like-unlike human hands, reaching for his throat-when the boy remembers the packet of firecrackers. Hardly aware he is going to do it, he strikes a match and touches it to the master fuse. The fuse spits a hot line of red sparks that singe the fine hair on the back of his hand, crisping them. The werewolf, momentarily offbalance, draws backwards, uttering a questioning grunt that, like his hands, is nearly human. Marty throws the packet of firecrackers in its face.

They go off in a banging, flashing train of light and sound The beast utters a screech-roar of pain and rage; it staggers backwards, clawing at the explosions that tattoo grains of fire and burning gunpowder into its face. Marty sees one of its lamplike green eyes whiff out as four crackers go off at once with a terrific thundering KA-POW! at the side of its muzzle. Now its screams are pure agony. It claws at its face, bellowing, and as the first lights go on in the Coslaw house it turns and bounds back down the lawn toward the woods, leaving behind it only a smell of singed fur and the first frightened and bewildered cries from the house.

“What was that?” His mother's voice, not sounding a bit brusque.

“Who's there, goddammit?” His father, not sounding very much like a Big Pal.

“Marty?” Kate, her voice quavering, not sounding mean at all. “Marty, are you all right?”

Grandfather Coslaw sleeps through the whole thing.

Marty leans back in his wheelchair as the big red twizzer gutters its way to extinction. Its light is now the mild and lovely pink of an early sunrise. He is too shocked to weep. But his shock is not entirely a dark emotion, although the next day his parents will bundle him off to visit his Uncle Jim and Aunt Ida over in Stowe, Vermont, where he will stay until the end of summer vacation (the police concur; they feel that The Full Moon Killer might try to attack Marty again, and silence him). There is a deep exultation in him. It is stronger than the shock. He has looked into the terrible face of the Beast and lived. And there is simple, childlike joy in him, as well, a quiet joy he will never be able to communicate later to anyone, not even Uncle Al, who might have understood. He feels this joy because the fireworks have happened after all.

And while his parents stewed and wondered about his psyche, and if he would have complexes from the experience, Marty Coslaw came to believe in his heart that it had been the best Fourth of all.



AUGUST

“Sure, I think it's a werewolf,” Constable Neary says. He speaks too loudly-maybe accidentally, more like accidentally on purpose-and all conversation in Stan's Barber Shop comes to a halt. It is going on just half-past August, the hottest August anyone can remember in Tarker's Mills for years, and tonight the moon will be just one day past full. So the town holds its breath, waiting.

Constable Neary surveys his audience and then goes on from his place in Stan Pelky's middle barber chair, speaking weightily, speaking judicially, speaking psychologically, all from the depths of his high school education (Neary is a big, beefy man, and in high school he mostly made touchdowns for the Tarker's Mills Tigers; his classwork earned him some C's and not a few D's).

“There are guys,” he tells them, “who are kind of like two people. Kind of like split personalities, you know. They are what I'd call fucking schizos.”

He pauses to appreciate the respectful silence which greets this and then goes on:

“Now this guy, I think he's like that. I don't think he knows what he's doing when the moon gets full and he goes out and kills somebody. He could be anybody—a teller at the bank, a gas-jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road, maybe even someone right here now. In the sense of being an animal inside and looking perfectly normal outside, yeah, you bet. But if you mean, do I think there's a guy who sprouts hair and howls at the moon… no. That shit's for kids.”

“What about the Coslaw boy, Neary?” Stan asks, continuing to work carefully around the roll of fat at the base of Neary's neck. His long, sharp scissors go snip… snip… snip.

“Just proves what I said,” Neary responds with some exasperation. “That shit's for kids.”

In truth, he feels exasperated about what's happened with Marty Coslaw. Here, in this boy, is the first eyeball witness to the freak that's killed six people in his town, including Neary's good friend Alfie Knopfler. And is he allowed to interview the boy? No. Does he even know where the boy is? No! He's had to make do with a deposition furnished to him by the State Police, and he had to bow and scrape and just-a-damn-bout beg to get that much. All because he's a small-town constable, what the State Police think of as a kiddie-cop, not able to tie his own shoes. All because he doesn't have one of their numbfuck Smokey Bear hats. And the deposition! He might as well have used it to wipe his ass with. According to the Coslaw kid, this “beast” stood about seven feet tall, was naked, was covered with dark hair all over his body. He had big teeth and green eyes and smelled like a load of panther-shit. He had claws, but the claws looked like hands. He thought it had a tail. A tail, for Chrissake.

“Maybe,” Kenny Franklin says from his place in the row of chairs along the wall, “maybe it's some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you know.”

“I don't believe it,” Neary says emphatically, and nods his head to emphasize the point. Stan has to draw his scissors back in a hurry to avoid putting one of the blades into that beefy roll of fat at the back of Neary's neck. “Nossir! I don't believe it! Kid heard a lot of these werewolf stories at school before it closed for the summer-he admitted as much-and then he didn't have nothing to do but sit there in that chair of his and think about it… work it over in his mind. It's all psycho-fuckin-logical, you see. Why, if it'd been you that'd come out of the bushes by the light of the moon, he would have thought you was a wolf, Kenny.”

Kenny laughs a little uneasily.