Animals. Part 22

And blackness.

The Chrysler slowed to a stop, some two hundred yards down the road. Vic turned the volume down and hit the power-window b.u.t.ton. He listened for the sound of fire, or maybe a nice explosion.

But aside from the tortured rumble of the sedan's engine, all was quiet. He'd lost sight of the Mustang shortly after it hit the retaining wall. The curve obscured the rest. He put the car into reverse, began backing up. He'd gone maybe three or four hundred feet when he saw a wheel, upright and wobbling as it rolled all on its lonesome down the darkened road. Another fifty feet back, and the wreck came into view.

The Mustang had wrapped around a gnarled old oak. The front end was crushed from b.u.mper to windshield, the rest of the car mashed like an old beer can.

Vic smiled. He could see steam wafting up, hear the groan of metal settling. He watched for a minute, didn't hear anything else. He'd kept his promise, all right. Just like he said he would.

Never laid a hand on 'im, he thought, and began to chuckle.

And the chuckle became a laugh, the laugh a full-scale belly-buster. He looked up, saw the waning moon, dolefully observant. She was the perfect lover, he mused. She kept her opinions to herself. This time when the urge to bay rose up inside, Vic gleefully gave in.

Then he turned the stereo way up high. Put the car into drive.

And together, they howled off into the night.

PART TWO.

Jane.

EIGHTEEN.

MONTHS LATER.

26.

Ah, how the mighty had fallen. The name on the sign hanging over the door was Big Dan's Deadbeat Bar & Grill; and whether that was simply truth in advertising or actual self-fulfilling prophecy, the end result was the same.

It didn't matter that it wasn't the actual name of the bar-which was Danny D.'s, for anybody who cared. Once upon a time, some whiz kid had scrawled the words on the flap off a case of Gennie Cream Ale, found a stray nail poking halfway out above the door. The rest was not so much history as irony, or entropy. Dan didn't much care for the sign, but he couldn't be bothered to climb up there and take it down. And neither could anyone else.

Which pretty much summed it up. The bar wasn't just a dump; it was a black hole. And moreover, a virtual loser magnet, ground zero for bottom feeders, with a rich redneck history of shootings and stabbings to go with its watered-down booze and lobotomized IQs. It had the kind of desperate dog kennel vibe you made cruel jokes about when your life was on track, but found yourself naturally gravitating toward when that same life horribly disa.s.sembled.

Syd had spent a good bit of the last eighteen months there. It somehow spoke to his condition.

Ever since the crash and burn.

The door opened without warning. Another loser, coming through. Syd winced against the light, the dark shape it framed. He couldn't see who it was, nor imagine that it mattered. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Syd was on his seventh beer. On the outside, yet another Pennsylvania spring had sprung: a bright, shiny, sun-s.p.a.ckled chlorophyll explosion, draping the world in its first blush of green.

He knew it was beautiful, and that it should be inspiring; but, frankly, at this point, it just gave him a headache. The sun was too bright, and what it revealed was too damaged. The world didn't bear up to such close scrutiny. The shadows made a lot more sense.

Just as it was easier, in the long run, to bury the truth. . . .

The door shut. Syd blinked back the little floating dots, let his gaze flicker across the room. There was Doris the troll, on her perch by the corner, with her bottle of Pabst and all those hairs in her chin. There was Big Dan himself, a blubbery mountain of caked sweat and whiskey-soaked lard. A couple of big-mouthed Blutos-Syd had nicknamed them Bo Hunk and d.i.c.k Weed-slowly p.i.s.sed each other off as they argued last night's pre-season game. Maybe a half-dozen others, mostly regulars, were scattered around the bar. He didn't know their real names, didn't want to; it was easier to make up his own.

The guy who'd just come in was small and balding. It took Syd's eyes a moment to completely readjust, make the face come clear. In fact, it wasn't until the little guy stopped and said, "Hey, man. How ya doin'?" that Syd realized who it was.

And by then, of course, it was far too late.

Oh, christ, he thought. Staring at the legendary figure before him. There was no time to do anything but react. His grimace and shrug were completely automatic.

"I know," said Marc Pankowski, "exactly what you mean."

For a moment, they exchanged what Syd knew was meant to be meaningful eye contact. It was hard not to laugh, but the dread in his stomach went a long way toward counterbalancing his reaction. Syd wasn't sure if Marc could read him, because Marc looked away and then kept going down the bar.

But the horrible thing was that, under the circ.u.mstances, maybe Marc had a point.

I know exactly what you mean. It suggested a commonality of experience, a new link forged of understanding in the brotherhood of man. I know exactly what you mean. Was it true? G.o.d help him: in some ways, yes. They had both flamed out and lived to smell the ashes. They had both been drunk when they did it, and had pretty much stayed that way ever since. They had both become monsters, then turned to s.h.i.t. So, yeah, there were a couple of similarities.

Only I never took anyone out with me, Syd thought. But that wasn't exactly true.

Suddenly, Syd was staring at his hands and the fifty-cent draft on the bar before him. The TV behind the bar was tuned to "The Love Connection." Chuck Hillary-or Willary, or whatever-was smugly leering. He tried to make himself watch, couldn't. It was just too f.u.c.king grim. There was nothing here to feed his soul, nothing here to give him solace.

When the first tear welled up, he was almost surprised. It had been so long since he'd even cared.

Syd picked up the beer and drained it, wiped his cheek as an afterthought. Then he motioned wordlessly to Dan for another. It was still very difficult to think about Jules, even after all this time. What was worse: once he'd started, it was impossible to stop. The fact that he'd never told a living soul just compounded the matter, upped the ante on his shame.

When the cops had shown up at the scene, he was f.u.c.ked up and far from home, with a concussion, six cracked ribs, and his left arm and leg broken in seven places. Syd was pinned beneath the steering column. It took two hours, an extra EMS team and the Jaws of Life to finally free him from the wreckage, and the whole time he was fading in and out of resolution: from teeth-chattering shock to utter black and back again. He was babbling, too, about chases and bodies and mysterious monsters trying to run him off the road.

The police listened to every word he said, and didn't believe a bit of it. Chief Hoser, in particular, shook his head dismissively, his stern, gaunt features conveying the essential message: I always knew you'd turn to s.h.i.t.

In any event, all of their most pressing questions were answered by his Breathalyzer test. Never mind the crash, they said: his blood-alcohol level alone was enough to have killed him.

It wasn't until Jules turned up missing, and the blood in the parking lot was found, that they seriously started asking questions. But by then, Syd had sobered up and had time to think. Think about the thing that had chased and destroyed him. Integrate and a.s.sess the astonishing facts of his condition, the essential unbelievability of his experience.

Compounding his predicament was the fact that the car that Nora left parked outside his apartment turned out to be registered to a thirty-two-year-old white male by the name of James Whalen, late of Shreveport, La. James had been missing some seven months now. The police were real curious about that little development. Well, you see, officer, my friend Jules got killed by a werewolf, the same one that ran me off the road. It all happened because I f.u.c.ked its girlfriend, who just happened to be another werewolf, probably the one who did your boy down in L'weeziana. Oh, yeah, and in the process I got turned into one, too. Swear to Christ.

So much for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In the end the only way to deal with it was to swear complete ignorance: of what had happened to Jules, of what had happened to Nora, of absolutely everything. Nora's things were confiscated, but like the car, they yielded no clues, not even a fingerprint. Chief Hoser dragged Syd in for questioning yet again, this time with detectives and State Police in the room, and asked him why he thought that might be.

Syd could only shrug.

In the end he got a lot of hard looks and intimidating questioning that went nowhere; Jules's case was left open, but past a certain point they just stopped looking.

Of course, the rumor mill took it through every conceivable mutation, mostly centering on Jules's pent-up wanderl.u.s.t and the mysterious redhead. Syd kept his mouth shut and his head down; he had other problems to worry about.

Eventually he went to court for reckless driving, driving under the influence, and reckless endangerment; he pled guilty and got socked with a two-thousand-dollar fine, eight weeks on the D.W.I. program plus four months of A.A. and personal counseling, and a year's suspension of his driver's license.

All of which mattered not in the slightest, being that he had no car to drive, having wrapped his wheels around a tree. And he had no money to buy one with, because he'd just quit his job. Bobo was predictably compa.s.sionate; after their little encounter, this was not a surprise. But it meant no disability, no workmen's comp, no nothing.

He had managed to hold on to the cheesy hospitalization plan attached to his long-beleaguered Visa card; it const.i.tuted the sole bright light on his medical horizon. It had, at least, covered a chunk of his physical therapy.

He healed incredibly fast, of course.

Surprising everyone but himself. . .

Suddenly, Dan appeared with another gla.s.s of suds, scooping four bits out of Syd's loose change. Syd pulled back to the present, looked at Marc Pankowski, who had picked out a table near the back. Marc smiled at Syd. Syd looked away quickly, wondered what Marc's excuse was for surviving all those crashes.

It had occurred to Syd that maybe he wasn't the only amped-up critter in Monville. If Marc's inner nature did reveal itself, what would he be? A were-weasel, maybe? A were-slug?

Syd felt the pain resurging, downed another insulating gulp of beer. Nowadays, at least, his senses were so dulled by ritual sedation that he could no longer be trusted to pick one out of the crowd.

But one thing seemed certain: there were very few wolves running loose in the wild. He felt pretty sure he was the only one in town, broken or otherwise. Most people were herbivores at heart: unrealized were-cows, sheep, and pigs. If they reached in far enough to tap their true natures, you could probably sneak up and tip them in their sleep.

Syd couldn't worry about them at this point. For the last year and a half, he'd been mostly concerned with how to keep his own animal down. . . .

When the first full moon came, he hadn't known what to expect. Either he was a monster, or he was insane, or both. Not exactly a prime set of options.

Syd had spent the day alone and afraid, pacing crippled through the apartment that now functioned as his cage. It was just prior to his eviction, early on in his physical therapy, and absolutely everything hurt: from the bodily damage he'd sustained in the crash to the permanent loss of the woman he loved.

Of the two, the pain with Nora's name on it was by far the worst. The physical damage would heal, at least; the emotional destruction was beyond salvation. At first he thought the shock of her absence alone would kill him; it was impossible to sleep or eat or even think clearly.

In the end Syd had resorted to a sort of traumatic amputation of the soul, cauterizing the wound at every point where they'd connected, focusing every ounce of will he could muster on eradicating all memory of her. It left him dead inside, but at least he could sleep at night.

He was no longer afraid of his dreams: in the aftermath of the accident his sleep was black, devoid of images. As if a concrete lid had slammed down on his subconscious: shutting off the dialogue, refusing all contact.

But that didn't mean that it didn't want out. . . .

As the full moon neared he grew more restless. He'd been feeling antsy for days, fending off the now-familiar rushes of power that came with increasing frequency. They were tied to his anger, most clearly; but day by day, they were coming on stronger. He felt like the guy in American Werewolf in London, just before the big transformation scene. Only there was nothing funny about this. Not a single G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. As he paced he fingered his gun, wondering whether or not he should just stick the barrel in his mouth and get it over with.

More than once, he came close: hefting the blue-black steel in his hands, imagining the click and the bang, the deafening sensation of his skull exploding and spraying the back wall with brains and bone and red red rain, the subsequent headlong hurtle into . . . what? The void? Some mercifully blank oblivion? How could he know that would even end it? What if this thing went deeper, was somehow embedded not just in his flesh, but in his soul? There was no guarantee that this would all be over, or that wherever he ended up would be one bit better than this.

In the end, his questions remained unanswered, rendered academic by the simple fact that he just couldn't do it. No matter how much he hurt. No matter how bad it got. The part of him that still loved life wouldn't let him, and it was ultimately stronger than he was.

Which effectively left him right back where he'd started.

All day, he had dreaded the sun's descent.

When it finally came, so did the Change . . .

. . . and he saw enough in those first moments to know that it had not been a hallucination. For hours he stood naked before the mirror in his bedroom: his leg shackled to the steam radiator sweat rolling off of him in waves. He tried to stay focused on the reflection of his eyes. His eyes were his sole anchor point, the only things that seemed stable in a universe gone mad: even dilated and bugging with fear, they were the key. He fixed and focused on them as the Change moved underneath his skin like a school of minnows. Swarming. Crazed. His muscles and tendons shifting and straining, fighting at their accepted boundaries.

His face tensed and contorted, a manic parade of primal impulse pushing up from his subconscious. His hands clenched and clawed, came up to feel the rupturing flesh of his torso, his neck, his arms and legs and back The whole time he told himself: he knew who he was, knew what he was. He was not a monster. He would not become a monster. He would not give in.

He would not let it out.

The rushes intensified, became pain. The pain blossomed into agony. And Syd began to scream, his will locked in mortal combat with the ravening power inside. And his will said NO! to the rushes that pummeled his body, said NO! to the howling that wailed in his brain. He watched them surge, fall back, resurge and counterattack For twelve hours, he wrestled the monster within.

But when dawn came, and he realized that he didn't have to Change-that it was still, ultimately, something he could control-he no longer felt like the Lawrence Talbot character in a third-rate Universal Pictures sendup, bemoaning that horrible wolf man curse what had been visited upon him. This wasn't the movies, and there were some fundamental differences. What, exactly, those differences were was something he determined to figure out.

And thus Syd entered his In-Search-of-the-Magical-Werewolf-Within phase: a phase that carried him through the spring and summer, clear into the following fall. Most of that time was spent based out of Tommy's bas.e.m.e.nt rec room, which was where he gratefully crashed when his eviction came through. He didn't have a job, couldn't bring himself to try and find one. He still had his stereo and alb.u.m/CD collection, though he couldn't bring himself to listen to the music anymore. When Syd insisted, Tommy reluctantly took it in trade.

During that time, Syd studied everything he could get his hands on. By day he limped down to the Monville Public Library or hitched up to Pittsburgh to haunt bookstores and pore over werewolf stories, from Native American wolf rituals to northern European legends to cla.s.sical Greek and Roman myths and on, as far back as ancient Syria.

Some were benevolent; most, malign. For every Romulus and Remus-style recounting of feral children raised by loving mother wolves or beneficent lupine-spirits aiding a p.a.w.nee hunting party, there were dozens of darker tales. In Aristotle's Historia Animalium and Pliny's Historia Naturalis, in the Physiologus or Olaus Magnus's History of the Goths, Swedes and Vandals nightmares abounded: of werewolves that fed on human flesh, werewolves that raided villages and feasted on the succulent meat of babes, werewolves that gathered together for drinking bouts and raided the wine cellars of the devout on Christmas Eve. Navaho werewolves raided graveyards to mutilate the corpses of the dead; in White Russia, they struck men dumb with their gaze and caused deformed children to be born of women who crossed their tracks.

In medieval lore, it was even worse. Haunted by the Plague, molded by the Church, and enforced by the Inquisition, the hysteria burgeoned to new heights of insanity: wolves were nothing short of the Devil's hounds, agents of debauchery and sacrilege, symbols of everything vile and depraved in the soul of man. Stoked by the dictates of the Malleus Malefaric.u.m, thousands were accused of werewolvery at the slightest provocation, convicted on the flimsiest of evidence, tortured to grisly confession and burned at the stake. The legends even migrated to America with the settlers, became the foundational basis for the great wolf purges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the systematic slaughter of tens, even hundreds of millions of animals, drove them to the brink of extinction. What Nora had said came back to haunt him.

Theriophobia. Fear of the wild thing inside.

Having read himself to death each day, Syd would hobble over to Blockbuster Video, then head home, tapes in hand, to watch every movie that even alluded to his condition. From Wolfen to Werewolf of London to The Howling parts one through one million, from Altered States to Teen Wolf to Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, Syd religiously sifted through the garish and distorted Hollywood hok.u.m for some grain of usable truth.

But did it give him the answers he needed? Not really. Every once in a while, he'd stumble on an interesting sc.r.a.p, but it was obvious that most of the available information was a mishmash of old wives' tales, folklore, or out-and-out lies.

After a while, even thinking about it made the pain in his head throb mercilessly, like a never-ending migraine from h.e.l.l. And as his frustration mounted, one thing became clear: he had a lot more to fear from his worsening temper than he did from any stage of the moon or nocturnal nightmare.

It could well up at any moment. Whatever peace he found in the knowledge that he need no longer live in fear of a particular time of the month or getting a good night's sleep was instantly mitigated by the understanding that, at any moment, he might hit some emotional trip wire and go off.

It was like walking a tightrope twenty-four hours a day. And he found, to his dismay, that the longer he spent in that state, the less it took to set him off. A harsh word. A busy signal. A b.u.m hitting him up for change.

One morning when Tommy's new girlfriend Annette had chastised him for some inconsequential domestic crisis-leaving the toilet seat up or squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle, or some such triviality-Syd had very nearly lost it.

He flipped out, ranted and raved, and totally terrorized her for over an hour, ended up breaking a kitchen chair into kindling with his bare hands before storming out screaming. It was all he could do to not rip her throat out.

He came back later, apologizing profusely, and confessed that he couldn't remember exactly what she'd said that had set him off. He chalked it up to stress, made nice in the worst way, and tiptoed around her for weeks. Annette eventually forgave him, but the damage was done. From that moment on, she was genuinely scared of him. And Tommy never looked at Syd the same way again.

It was at that point that suicide started to seem like a viable alternative.

But what could kill him? He had no idea. Evidently not the same things that, for example, went into totaling cars. Or maybe he'd just been lucky; he really didn't have a clue. He wasn't particularly into the idea of hanging himself or sticking a gun in his mouth just to find out.

At one point he'd wandered into a jewelry shop, asked the perplexed shop owner if he had any silver bullets on hand. The guy looked at Syd like he was crazy, which wasn't far off the mark. Syd found himself helplessly, morbidly staring at the glittering bits of metal that lined the cases. Can that kill me? he wondered, his hand reaching out like a tentative child's first encounter with flame.

Nothing happened, of course. It was kind of like learning that your mom's spine wouldn't actually fracture if you stepped on a crack, or that golf b.a.l.l.s weren't actually filled with a powerful explosive.