Cycle of the Werewolf

DECEMBER

It is fifteen minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve. In Tarker's Mills, as in the rest of the world, the year is drawing to its close, and in Tarker's Mills as in the rest of the world, the year has brought changes.

Milt Sturmfuller is dead and his wife Donna Lee, at last free of her bondage, has moved out of town. Gone to Boston, some say; gone to Los Angeles, other say. Another woman has tried to make a go of the Corner Bookshop and failed, but the barber shop, The Market Basket, and The Pub are doing business at the same old places, thank you very much. Clyde Corliss is dead, but his two goodfornothing brothers, Alden and Errol, are still alive and well and cashing in their foodstamps at the A&P two towns over-they don't quite have the nerve to do it right here in the Mills. Gramma Hague, who used to make the best pies in Tarker's Mills, has died of a heart attack, Willie Harrington, who is ninety-two, slipped on the ice in front of his little house on Ball Street late in November and broke his hip, but the library has received a nice bequest in the will of a wealthy summer resident, and next year construction will begin on the children's wing that has been talked about in town meeting since time out of mind. Ollie Parker, the school principal, had a nosebleed that just wouldn't quit in October and is diagnosed as an acute hypertensive. Lucky you didn't blow your brains out, the doctor grunted, unwrapping the bloodpressure cuff, and told Ollie to lose forty pounds. For a wonder, Ollie loses twenty of those pounds by Christmas. He looks and feels like a new man. “Acts like a new man, too,” his wife tells her close friend Delia Burney, with a lecherous little grin. Brady Kincaid, killed by the Beast in kite-flying season, is still dead. And Marty Coslaw, who used to sit right behind Brady in school, is still a cripple.

Things change, things don't change, and, in Tarker's Mills, the year is ending as the year came in—a howling blizzard is roaring outside, and the Beast is around. Somewhere.

Sitting in the living room of the Coslaw home and watching Dick Clark's Rockin New Year's Eve are Marty Coslaw and his

Uncle Al. Uncle Al is on the couch. Marty is sitting in his wheelchair in front of the TV. There is a gun in Marty's lap, a. 38 Colt Woodsman. Two bullets are chambered in the — gun, and both of them are pure silver. Uncle Al has gotten a friend of his from Hampden, Mac McCutcheon, to make them in a bullet-loader. This Mac McCutcheon, after some protests, has melted Marty's silver confirmation spoon down with a propane torch, and calibrated the weight of powder needed to propel the bullets without sending them into a wild spin. “I don't guarantee they'll work,” this Mac McCutcheon has told Uncle Al, “but they probably will. What you gonna kill, Al? A werewolf or a vampire?”

“One of each,” Uncle Al says, giving him his grin right back. “That's why I got you to make two. There was a banshee hanging around as well, but his father died in North Dakota and he had to catch a plane to Fargo.” They have a laugh over that, and then Al says: “They're for a nephew of mine. He's crazy over movie monsters, and I thought they'd make an interesting Christmas present for him.”

“Well, if he fires one into a batten, bring it back to the shop,” Mac tells him. “I'd like to see what happens.”

In truth, Uncle Al doesn't know what to think. He hadn't seen Marty or been to Tarker's Mills since July 3rd; as he could have predicted, his sister, Marty's mother, is furious with him about the fireworks. He could have been killed, you stupid asshole! What in the name of God did you think you were doing? she shouts down the telephone wire at him.

Sounds like it was the fireworks that saved his—Al begins, but there is the sharp click of a broken connection in his ear. His sister is stubborn; when she doesn't want to hear something, she won't.

Then, early this month, a call came from Marty. “I have to see you, Uncle Al,” Marty said. “You're the only one I can talk to.”

“I'm in the doghouse with our mom, kid,” Al answered.

“It's important,” Marty said. “Please. Please.”

So he came, and he braved his sister's icy, disapproving silence, and on a cold, clear early December day, Al took Marty for a ride in his sports car, loading him carefully into the passenger bucket. Only this day there was no speeding and no wild laughter; only Uncle Al listening as Marty talked. Uncle Al listened with growing disquiet as the tale is told.

Marty began by telling Al again about the night of the wonderful bag of fireworks, and how he had blown out the creature's left eye with the Black Cat firecrackers. Then he told him about Halloween, and the Rev. Lowe. Then he told Uncle Al that he had begun sending the Rev. Lowe anonymous notes.. anonymous, that is, until the last two, following the murder of Milt Sturmfuller in Portland. Those he signed just as he had been taught in English class: Yours truly, Martin Coslaw.

“You shouldn't have sent the man notes, anonymous or otherwise!” Uncle Al said sharply. “Christ, Marty! Did it ever occur to you that you could be wrong?”

“Sure it did,” Marty said. “That's why I signed my name to the last two. Aren't you going to ask me what happened? Aren't you going to ask me if he called up my father and told him I'd sent him a note saying why don't you kill yourself and another one saying we're closing in on you?”

“He didn't do that, did he?” Al asked, knowing the answer already.

“No,” Marty said quietly. “He hasn't talked to my dad, and he hasn't talked to my mom, and he hasn't talked to me.”

“Marty, there could be a hundred reasons for th-”

“No. There's only one. He's the werewolf, he's the Beast, it's him, and he's waiting for the full moon. As the Reverend Lowe, he can't do anything. But as the werewolf, he can do plenty. He can shut me up.”

And Marty spoke with such chilling simplicity that Al was almost convinced. “So what do you want from me?” Al asked.

Marty told him. He wanted two silver bullets, and a gun to shoot them with, and he wanted Uncle Al to come over on New Year's Eve, the night of the full moon.

“I'll do no such thing,” Uncle Al said. “Marty, you're a good kid, but you're going loopy. I think you've come down with a good case of Wheelchair Fever. If you think it over, you'll know it.”

“Maybe,” Marty said. “But think how you'll feel if you get a call on New Year's Day saying I'm dead in my bed, chewed to pieces? Do you want that on your conscience, Uncle Al?”

Al started to speak, then closed his mouth with a snap. He turned into a driveway, hearing the Mercedes' front wheels crunch in the new snow. He reversed and started back. He fought in Viet Nam and won a couple of medals there; he had successfully avoided lengthy entanglements with several lusty young ladies; and now he felt caught and trapped by his ten-year-old nephew. His crippled ten-year-old nephew. Of course he didn't want such a thing on his conscience-not even the possibility of such a thing. And Marty knew it. As Marty knew that if Uncle Al thought there was even one chance in a thousand that he might be right

Four days later, on December 10th, Uncle Al called. “Great news!” Marty announced to his family, wheeling his chair back into the family room. “Uncle Al's coming over for New Year's Eve!

“He certainly is not,” his mother says in her coldest, brusquest tone.

Marty was not daunted. “Gee, sorry—I already invited him,” he said. “He said he'd bring party-powder for the fireplace.”

His mother had spent the rest of the day glaring at Marty every time she looked in his direction or he in hers… but she didn't call her brother back and tell him to stay away, and that was the most important thing.

At supper that night Katie whispered hissingly in his ear: “You always get what you want! Just because you're a cripple!”

Grinning, Marty whispered back: “I love you too, sis.”

“You little booger!”

She flounced away.

And here it is, New Year's Eve. Marty's mother was sure Al wouldn't show up as the storm intensified, the wind howling and moaning and driving snow before it. Truth to tell, Marty has had a few bad moments himself… but Uncle Al arrived up around eight, driving not his Mercedes sports car but a borrowed four-wheel drive.

By eleven-thirty, everyone in the family has gone to bed except for the two of them, which is pretty much as Marty had foreseen things. And although Uncle Al is still pooh-poohing the whole thing, he has brought not one but two handguns concealed under his heavy CPO coat. The one with the two silver bullets he hands wordlessly to Marty after the family has gone to bed (as if to complete making the point, Marty's mother slammed the door of the bedroom she shares with Marty's dad when she went to bed-slammed it hard). The other is filled with more conventional lead-loads… but Al reckons that if a crazyman is going to break in here tonight (and as time passes and nothing happens, he comes to doubt that more and more), the. 45 Magnum will stop him.

Now, on the TV, they are switching the cameras more and more often to the big lighted ball on top of the Allied Chemical Building in Times Square. The last few minutes of the year are running out. The crowd cheers. In the comer opposite the TV, the Coslaw Christmas tree still stands, drying out now, getting a little brown, looking sadly denuded of its presents.

“Marty, nothing-” Uncle Al begins, and then the big picture window in the family room blows inward in a twinkle of glass, letting in the howling black wind from outside, twisting skirls of white snow… and the Beast.

Al is frozen for a moment, utterly frozen with horror and disbelief. It is huge, this Beast, perhaps seven feet tall, although it is hunched over so that its front hand-paws almost drag on the rug. Its one green eye (just like Marty said, he thinks numbly, all of it, just like Marty said) glares around with a terrible, rolling sentience… and fixes upon Marty, sitting in his wheelchair. it leaps at the boy, a rolling howl of triumph exploding out of its chest and past its huge yellow-white teeth.

Calmly, his face hardly changing, Marty raises the. 38 pistol. He looks very small in his wheelchair, his legs like sticks inside his soft and faded jeans, his fur-lined slippers on feet that have been numb and senseless all of his life. And, incredibly, over the werewolf's mad howling, over the wind's screaming, over the clap and clash of his own tottering thoughts about how this can possibly be in a world of real people and real things, over all of this Al hears his nephew say: “Poor old Reverend Lowe. I'm gonna try to set you free.”

And as the werewolf leaps, its shadow a blob on the carpet, its claw-tipped hands outstretched, Marty fires. Because of the lower powder-load, the gun makes an almost absurdly insignificant pop. It sounds like a Daisy air-rifle.

But the werewolf's roar of rage spirals up into an even higher register, a lunatic screech of pain now. It crashes into the wall and its shoulder punches a hole right through to the other side. A Currier and Ives painting falls onto its head, skates down the thick pelt of its back and shatters as the werewolf turns. Blood is pouring down the savage, hairy mask of its face, and its green eye seems rolling and confused. It staggers toward Marty, growling, its claw-hands opening and closing, its snapping jaws cutting off wads of blood-streaked foam. Marty holds the gun in both hands, as a small child holds his drinking cup.

He waits, waits… and as the werewolf lunges again, he fires. Magically, the beast's other eye blows out like a candle in a stormwind! It screams again and staggers, now blind, toward the window. The blizzard riffles the curtains and twists them around its head—Al can see flowers of blood begin to bloom on the white cloth-as, on the TV, the big lighted ball begins to descend its pole.

The werewolf collapses to its knees as Marty's dad, wildeyed and dressed in bright yellow pajamas, dashes into the room. The. 45 Magnum is still in Al's lap. He has never so much as raised it.

Now the beast collapses… shudders once… and dies.

Mr. Coslaw stares at it, open-mouthed.

Marty turnes to Uncle Al, the smoking gun in his hands. His face looks tired… but at peace.

“Happy New Year, Uncle Al,” he says, “it's dead. The Beast is dead.” And then he begins to weep.

On the floor, under the mesh of Mrs. Coslaw's best white curtains, the werewolf has begun to change. The hair which has shagged its face and body seems to be pulling in somehow. The lips, drawn back in a snarl of pain and fury, relax and cover the shrinking teeth. The claws melt magically away to fingernails… fingernails that have been almost pathetically gnawed and bitten.

The Reverend Lester Lowe lies there, wrapped in a bloody shroud of curtain, snow blowing around him in random patterns.

Uncle Al goes to Marty and comforts him as Marty's dad gawks down at the naked body on the floor and as Marty's mother, clutching the neck of her robe, creeps into the room. Al hugs Marty tight, tight, tight.

“You done good, kid,” he whispers. “I love you.”

Outside, the wind howls and screams against the snow-filled sky, and in Tarker's Mills, the first minute of the new year becomes history.

Afterward

Any dedicated moon-watcher will know that, regardless of the year, I have taken a good many liberties with the lunar cycle-usually to take advantage of days (Valentine's, July 4th, etc.) which “mark” certain months in our minds. To those readers who feel that I didn't know any better, I assert that I did… but the temptation was simply too great to resist.

Stephen King

August 4, 1983