WOLF TALE
THAT WHICH FOLLOWS
Sandal Pennington was fuming mad as he drove home.
He was drinking his soy decaf latte, his left hand on the wheel of his lime-green 2012 Prius, his long hair tied behind his head in a man bun with his short, brown beard trimmed properly. On the back of his vehicle was a “coexist” sticker and most people who knew him, intimately or otherwise, knew him as one who identified as a “male feminist.” Women who knew him intimately saw him rather differently in a manner that he found rather unjust.
One such ungrateful bitch was precisely the reason he was so angry.
He had just ordered his drink at the Starbucks located where Worthington St met Charlotte Rd after work when he got a call from his lawyer. The conversation they had in the parking lot behind the building was a terrible one. He couldn’t believe the situation, not even a little, and he was then, as now, utterly shocked and deeply offended.
He was driving down Edmonton St eastward, parallel to that of Charlotte Rd to the north, which would have been much quicker and direct, but he refused to use it. He not only disliked, but he even feared, going anywhere close to that forest and avoided any road that went close to it if he could. He generally pretended the road didn’t exist and his wife and kids always became irritated at the extra distance they had to go to get back to their home in Edwards Grove.
On his left, he was then passing the neighborhood of Maplewood and he looked casually at it for a moment, his teeth clenched together, and thought about an earlier gold digger who came from over there. A friend of his sister who went horseback riding with her on weekends back when they were kids in the 1990s, but she didn’t get far in her lies, no. Not in those golden days.
He looked away and tried to relax, remembering how he got that little sneak back for her lies. He tried to do some breathing, thinking of yoga, trying to desperately calm himself down before dealing with his family. Explaining that their husband and father was about to be sued for sexual harassment was bound to get a lot of ungrateful yapping from his own bride and brood.
“Sexual—fucking—harassment!” he said very bitterly, saying each word after the other slowly. Then he screamed, slamming his fist against the wheel, over and over again. “Me!” he roared. “Fucking me! The one fucking asshole who isn’t a misogynist in this fucking town and a fucking Pennington to boot!” It was probably the hundredth time he had said that since that call and it made him madder each goddamned second.
The hot caffè latte from Starbucks was not helping!
Lucy Waddell, that ungrateful bitch receptionist he gave a job to, no, a career to, when she desperately needed one, was now threatening to take his veterinarian license away due to sexual harassment. His veterinarian clinic was on the north side of Worthington St, just below Interstate 95, one of only two clinics in town, and he was at risk of losing everything to that Jew who ran the other just because he had given Lucy Waddell a job there when she needed it at just seventeen. Now, four years later, she was actually going to sue him!
He couldn’t believe it! He just could not believe it!
Where was this coming from? Took advantage of her? Groped her without consent? It was insane! A lie like that could ruin his life and he knew she was lying! Everyone knew she was lying! If she didn’t like it, why didn’t she quit or report him earlier?
Because it was exactly what she wanted, that’s why!
So what if her grandfather’s Civil War bar needed money on the boardwalk? There were other jobs without a so-called rapist and Jack Waddell had been holding onto that bar well enough even after Julian Bartlett killed the foundries and most of his business.
“Fucking slut!”
It was that Ethan Bartlett, that fucking traitor to his class, who was doing this to him! When he began to reopen the canneries and the fisheries, Lucy’s granduncles, father, uncles and brothers were all fully employed for once, the lazy black bastards, with Lucy’s granduncles specifically hired as trainers for the new generation of workers with higher wages for their experience. With them and so many others employed, Jack Waddell’s bar was booming.
And suddenly, as if by wondrous magic, Lucy Waddell created a problem.
Suddenly, there was talk that Sandal Pennington was some kind of hypocrite. Suddenly, there was talk of sexual harassment. Suddenly, there was talk even of rape.
“Goddamn those fucking niggers!” he screamed. “Goddamn that damn, damn, damned nigger slut!” He screamed into the air, his face turning red.
He knew, he just knew, it all came down to that mean, bitter, old fisherman, John Waddell, the bar owner Jack’s elder brother, the Waddell patriarch they call him, who started all of this! That bastard had it out for the Penningtons ever since Sandal’s father had that mischief with that daughter of his back in the 1980s. John Waddell didn’t dare say one peep back then, not in those golden days when Julian Bartlett was running the show and protecting the right people and keeping those goddamned peasants in line, black and white, but now that the bleeding heart known as “Ethan” was taking over and suddenly, every lowlife couldn’t stop taking shameless, highly undeserved, advantage of their betters.
“Goddamn that fucking traitor!” Sandal snarled bitterly. “Fuck that fucking Ethan Bartlett!”
He saw the last turn that led into Maplewood was green, raised his drink to sip, but in his rage, accidentally squeezed the cup too hard and spilled hot latte all over his lap.
He shrieked into the darkness of his cab as hot Starbucks sizzled down onto his crotch.
“Son of a bitch, bitch, bitch!” he roared, feeling instinctively embarrassed even though there was no one around to see, and looked down at his ruined hundred-dollar dress shirt and two hundred-dollar slacks. He gasped in pain and then looked up just in time to see that the light had turned red. “Damn it!” he cried as he flew full speed through it.
He quickly looked around for a cop.
“This is just what I fucking need! A fucking ticket!” Several of the cops were all right but some on the force, mostly women and blacks, all despised him because of Lucy’s desire to retain her reputation. He could see those pants-wearing butch man-woman bitches, like that Christopherson bitch or Mary Merrick, who loathed him utterly, telling lies about him to all the white men on the—
He had looked through the rear-view mirror and his eyes bulged open, his jaw dropped, his voice came out in a wheezy little gasp, and he could not think.
The werewolf was charging up behind his car.
Its arms were pumping like a human sprint runner, its teeth pulled back in concentration, and its eyes open wide with berserk rage. It was so close that the red of his backlights was illuminating it like some monster in some horror film.
It was getting closer and suddenly its hands were reaching out toward the back of his Prius with five human-like fingers with claws at the end and it was close enough to where Sandal could hear the click, clack sound of them touching the surface of his vehicle as it searched around for a handhold.
Sandal’s foot gently lowered on the gas.
The werewolf’s mouth jerked open in a snarl and it pumped its arms faster, getting closer, but he went faster too and soon the red vanished and it disappeared into the darkness behind him. Just before it did, he saw its snot point up into the sky and howl in rage. Distantly, he heard its cry of rage.
And then it was gone. Disappeared beyond the sight of the red backlights and when he looked for a moment, he did not see it appearing through the streetlights.
But was it gone? Did he hallucinate it? He wasn’t sure.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Sandal whimpered. If he had stopped at that light, it would have just run right up to his door, slammed its fist through the window, and then ripped his head clean off or maybe yank him out of the car so as to tear him to pieces right there on the street as it had that drug dealer.
It was at that moment that he realized he had not been paying attention to the moon. After what happened to Bob Holmes, he damn well should have, but that Waddell bitch had been so distracting with the threat of ruining his livelihood, and then that call from his lawyer letting him know he couldn’t get out of it had just been all too damn distracting.
There was the sound of screaming from somewhere and he began to panic, terrified that something was in the car with him, hiding in the back seats and ready to pounce, but then he realized he was the one who was screaming. That didn’t calm him down as much as he might have thought but it brought the panic down to a manageable level.
He swung left up Colm St, only slowing down enough so as not to crash, which was the only thing he feared more than stopping at that moment, passed Hamilton Hall on his right, and then shot up mechanically back to his home in Edwards Grove. He noted Lake Chelsea on the right and the full moon reflecting on the water, feeling the moon as some great, new horror that he had never fully understood before. On his left was the dreaded forest, but, for once, he didn’t care, except for a quick thought or sense that maybe the forest was where that werewolf really came from.
In all the old stories, weren’t all the monsters from some dark, deep woods somewhere?
He made it to his home, parked in the driveway, and sat there in the car for a moment.
There was no way the werewolf could have kept pace with him, and, of course, it couldn’t follow his scent through a car.
Or could it?
That thought made him want to start shrieking again. He stepped out, eyes wide and stunned, and went quickly inside. His wife Julie and daughter Jessica were all still up, sitting in the living room and watching something on television that he didn’t notice.
Jessica looked up at him as he walked in, her eyes confused. “Are you okay, Dad?”
He looked at her, looked around his beautiful Victorian home with its windows of normal, breakable glass and walls of normal, breakable plaster and wood. He had an idea that he should feel safe but he didn’t. Bob Holmes might have had an idea he was safe too but Sandal rather doubted being inside his house would have made a hell of a difference.
“Get in the car,” he said. “We’re staying at a hotel tonight.”
Julie looked at him with a confused look on her face. “What?” she asked.
“Trust me and, uh—bring the pets.”
It sounded stupid and Sandal instinctively expected resistance but something about his expression made his normally resistant and rebellious family follow him wordlessly. It seemed to have frightened them more than words could. They packed the younger twins into the back, both rubbing their eyes, the dog, cat and bird as well, and then went off to a hotel in New Haven, which at least felt like it was a good distance away.
If the werewolf got him there, it would have to make its way unseen through a dense city and up three stories. Even if it could, and there was no way it would make that distance on foot, it would still be difficult to find him before morning.
Unless it could drive? Could it, he wondered.
Sandal found he did not like that question at all.
Once the family settled in, they gave him all kinds of looks that said he was crazy but it took a while for one of them to say anything. Their faces contained identical looks of worry and discomfort merged.
“Well,” said Julie with a forced shrug. “Any particular reason you dragged us out here to stay in an expensive hotel a mere few miles from our home?” He looked at her and something on his face made her own shift to one of more intense worry. “What’s with that look you have there?”
Sandal shrugged awkwardly.
Suddenly, there was a call on Julie’s phone. She picked it up. “Hello, Meredith.” Meredith Alexander was their nosy next-door neighbor. “Why are you whispering like that? Why do I need—”
Sandal snatched the phone from her hand and gasped out the word, “Meredith.”
“Sandal!” She sounded very scared and spoke very softly. “You need to get out of your house right now!”
“What do you mean?” he asked, his eyes growing wide as he stared into the distant nothing. He knew what she meant, even before she said it, he knew but he seemed to be on some kind of autopilot.
“The werewolf is outside your house,” she whispered and his eyes grew even wider and he began to shake. “I can see it standing on your driveway, just looking at it. I called the police but you need to get your kids out of the back and—”
There was a roar so loud it Sandal could hear it through the phone. He heard Meredith drop the phone as the scream continued for several moments. He listened, and, though distant, he thought he could hear the sounds of something being destroyed. Something big.
Something like a house.
Meredith did not pick up the phone again but he could hear her whimpering in fear.
* * *
Caitlin Christopherson and Mary Merrick secured the scene quickly enough.
They had moved through the wreckage of the house with a pair of pump shotguns with silver-fronted slug shells. They found nothing but the shock of knowing that in a very short time, like five to ten minutes short, something came by that was powerful enough to tear down a two-story Victorian home with its bare hands.
Christopherson went back to the uniformed officer named Robertson standing outside. “I saw nothing,” he told her again. “It was gone by the time I got here.”
She wasn’t sure she should be angry or just relieved. A troll could do what the werewolf did. Maybe. She wasn’t sure but a troll was different. It was more of a wild animal with intelligence, like a Sasquatch, than it was a true monster. It could be sadistic but it wasn’t a true killer reveling in bloodshed like the werewolf.
What had occurred was not exactly a “lead” but it was better than before. The werewolf hadn’t killed anyone, or at least, no one they knew of, and they had an actual witness that time for all the good it did. Meredith Baxter was so terrified that it took them an hour to get into her house but what she told them did not exactly fill Christopherson with confidence.
“‘A seven-foot-tall man-like thing covered in black hair with the head of a wolf,’” Christopherson quoted to Mary when the two were alone together again, both smoking. There were lights flashing red and white in front of the house and the boys were talking to each other about the witness and the surviving victim, but everyone knew it was already a dead end.
The last few times, they had bloodhounds and Emmett, Mary’s father’s talking dog, sniffing around, and it really frustrated him. He said it was that the werewolf’s scent was “utterly perfect” until “he just hit a wall” and “the werewolf just disappeared.” He was coming up again but Christopherson knew he would suffer the same problem.
“It’s pretty much what we knew already,” Mary replied. “We got lucky this time. The intended target survived.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’s a hypocritical cunt,” she replied with a shrug. “One of those so-called male feminists. You know the kind.”
“The ones who pretend to care just so they can molest women?”
“Big time,” Mary told him. “He is being sued by Lucy Waddell for sexual harassment.”
“Waddell? Like related to William Waddell?”
“Lucy is his cousin.” William Waddell was an officer who worked Lower Bartlett Bay. A rookie of maybe twenty-two years old. “Her granduncle owns that old Civil War bar down on the boardwalk. The 29th Regimental.”
“I heard about that bar,” she said. Typically, she went to Colm’s Bar, as did Mary, since that was the “cop bar” of the town and was owned and operated by an ex-cop. Waddell’s bar had been known to the Force as a hotspot identical to The Green Lobster, acting as a black version of a place where unhappy out-of-work drunk fishermen sometimes drove sloshed back to their homes. Both bars were now thriving since so many of those citizens were employed in the fisheries and, queerly, the excess drinking problems had gone down incredibly.
“Sandal’s been molesting Lucy for years,” Mary told her. “Her granduncles have been trying to get her to come forward forever but she needed the money to help support the bar, which was the Waddell family legacy. Now that it’s doing fine and everyone’s employed, they’re pooling their money together to get a lawyer and go after him.”
“There are a lot of scumbags in this cute little town,” Christopherson said. “Lucy Waddell is black, I’m assuming.”
“Yeah,” Mary replied with an unreadable look. “Unsurprisingly, the same ethnicity as her cousin.”
“This feels as though it has some connection to the black community,” she replied.
“It would seem so,” Mary replied. “But that doesn’t explain Janet Dupree.”
“Goddamn it, it doesn’t!” Christopherson groaned. Maybe Janet Dupree did have a connection somehow but it didn’t seem much like it. When questioned about that to her mother and other close friends, the closest thing to a connection to the black community was a black man that she had dated in high school but he hadn’t seen her in years, although he was quite upset to find out she had died.
The Gurneys’ connection to the black community was easier to learn. Christopherson didn’t need a murderous werewolf to learn of their unpleasant history with racism and the black community.
Still, it all felt like coincidences. For Christopherson, it was a word that was quickly becoming the most hated word in the English language.
When she talked to Sandal, by phone since he wasn’t going anywhere near Bartlett Bay until daylight, he explained that the werewolf ran at him while he was driving. She sensed he was hiding something but she imagined the crux of it was true. He was driving and the werewolf made a rush at him but missed for some reason and he got away. He got home but he feared the werewolf was following him, so he took his family, his pets, and then left.
He was right.
The werewolf did follow him but when it found an empty house, it went berserk, and destroyed it, and evidently as easily as a child could destroy a gingerbread house.
She was going to question Sandal Pennington more thoroughly when he came back but she sensed there wasn’t much more to learn.
Looking back at that damage, she recalled the earlier hope she had that night. She had hoped that the werewolf was still nearby when she arrived so that they could have put a dozen shells into the monster and end it once and for all. Kill the bastard like in the movies, watch him turn back into a man or woman, and be rid of the problem forever.
But it was gone before even Robertson got there and looking at the damage afterward, armed or not, Christopherson wasn’t so sure slug rounds could slow the werewolf down, let alone kill it.
The werewolf was furious, according to Meredith Baxter and it was out there somewhere. That meant they would likely find another victim before dawn. If they were lucky, it would be cattle or a horse or something, but it could just as easily be a human being. Someone like Janet Dupree, with the same prevailing thought of being just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Maybe it tried to follow Pennington to New Haven. Maybe there was a naked man or woman who would awaken amongst the trees off the Interstate 95 come dawn.
That would help solve the problem, wouldn’t it? The naked man or woman seen walking back into Bartlett Bay after a full moon might just be the werewolf.
A fun fantasy but there would be no such easy answer. It might be Christopherson’s first rodeo but it definitely wasn’t the werewolf’s. Of that, she was becoming more and more certain, even though she had no reason to think that. No reason to believe it wasn’t just some dumb monster risen from some human being’s subconscious, except, of course, for the reason it was constantly thwarting them in ways no stupid animal could.
Looking at the remains of that house shifted her understanding and increased her worry. This wasn’t just a “very strong” thing and she understood why all the hard men and women on the Force, people who had lived with Bartlett Bay and its terrors all their whole lives, would rather wait for the creature to finish its job and vanish rather than dare confront it head-on.
The latter felt very much like suicide and the sort where it changed nothing in the long run.
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Sandal Pennington was fuming mad as he drove home.
He was drinking his soy decaf latte, his left hand on the wheel of his lime-green 2012 Prius, his long hair tied behind his head in a man bun with his short, brown beard trimmed properly. On the back of his vehicle was a “coexist” sticker and most people who knew him, intimately or otherwise, knew him as one who identified as a “male feminist.” Women who knew him intimately saw him rather differently in a manner that he found rather unjust.
One such ungrateful bitch was precisely the reason he was so angry.
He had just ordered his drink at the Starbucks located where Worthington St met Charlotte Rd after work when he got a call from his lawyer. The conversation they had in the parking lot behind the building was a terrible one. He couldn’t believe the situation, not even a little, and he was then, as now, utterly shocked and deeply offended.
He was driving down Edmonton St eastward, parallel to that of Charlotte Rd to the north, which would have been much quicker and direct, but he refused to use it. He not only disliked, but he even feared, going anywhere close to that forest and avoided any road that went close to it if he could. He generally pretended the road didn’t exist and his wife and kids always became irritated at the extra distance they had to go to get back to their home in Edwards Grove.
On his left, he was then passing the neighborhood of Maplewood and he looked casually at it for a moment, his teeth clenched together, and thought about an earlier gold digger who came from over there. A friend of his sister who went horseback riding with her on weekends back when they were kids in the 1990s, but she didn’t get far in her lies, no. Not in those golden days.
He looked away and tried to relax, remembering how he got that little sneak back for her lies. He tried to do some breathing, thinking of yoga, trying to desperately calm himself down before dealing with his family. Explaining that their husband and father was about to be sued for sexual harassment was bound to get a lot of ungrateful yapping from his own bride and brood.
“Sexual—fucking—harassment!” he said very bitterly, saying each word after the other slowly. Then he screamed, slamming his fist against the wheel, over and over again. “Me!” he roared. “Fucking me! The one fucking asshole who isn’t a misogynist in this fucking town and a fucking Pennington to boot!” It was probably the hundredth time he had said that since that call and it made him madder each goddamned second.
The hot caffè latte from Starbucks was not helping!
Lucy Waddell, that ungrateful bitch receptionist he gave a job to, no, a career to, when she desperately needed one, was now threatening to take his veterinarian license away due to sexual harassment. His veterinarian clinic was on the north side of Worthington St, just below Interstate 95, one of only two clinics in town, and he was at risk of losing everything to that Jew who ran the other just because he had given Lucy Waddell a job there when she needed it at just seventeen. Now, four years later, she was actually going to sue him!
He couldn’t believe it! He just could not believe it!
Where was this coming from? Took advantage of her? Groped her without consent? It was insane! A lie like that could ruin his life and he knew she was lying! Everyone knew she was lying! If she didn’t like it, why didn’t she quit or report him earlier?
Because it was exactly what she wanted, that’s why!
So what if her grandfather’s Civil War bar needed money on the boardwalk? There were other jobs without a so-called rapist and Jack Waddell had been holding onto that bar well enough even after Julian Bartlett killed the foundries and most of his business.
“Fucking slut!”
It was that Ethan Bartlett, that fucking traitor to his class, who was doing this to him! When he began to reopen the canneries and the fisheries, Lucy’s granduncles, father, uncles and brothers were all fully employed for once, the lazy black bastards, with Lucy’s granduncles specifically hired as trainers for the new generation of workers with higher wages for their experience. With them and so many others employed, Jack Waddell’s bar was booming.
And suddenly, as if by wondrous magic, Lucy Waddell created a problem.
Suddenly, there was talk that Sandal Pennington was some kind of hypocrite. Suddenly, there was talk of sexual harassment. Suddenly, there was talk even of rape.
“Goddamn those fucking niggers!” he screamed. “Goddamn that damn, damn, damned nigger slut!” He screamed into the air, his face turning red.
He knew, he just knew, it all came down to that mean, bitter, old fisherman, John Waddell, the bar owner Jack’s elder brother, the Waddell patriarch they call him, who started all of this! That bastard had it out for the Penningtons ever since Sandal’s father had that mischief with that daughter of his back in the 1980s. John Waddell didn’t dare say one peep back then, not in those golden days when Julian Bartlett was running the show and protecting the right people and keeping those goddamned peasants in line, black and white, but now that the bleeding heart known as “Ethan” was taking over and suddenly, every lowlife couldn’t stop taking shameless, highly undeserved, advantage of their betters.
“Goddamn that fucking traitor!” Sandal snarled bitterly. “Fuck that fucking Ethan Bartlett!”
He saw the last turn that led into Maplewood was green, raised his drink to sip, but in his rage, accidentally squeezed the cup too hard and spilled hot latte all over his lap.
He shrieked into the darkness of his cab as hot Starbucks sizzled down onto his crotch.
“Son of a bitch, bitch, bitch!” he roared, feeling instinctively embarrassed even though there was no one around to see, and looked down at his ruined hundred-dollar dress shirt and two hundred-dollar slacks. He gasped in pain and then looked up just in time to see that the light had turned red. “Damn it!” he cried as he flew full speed through it.
He quickly looked around for a cop.
“This is just what I fucking need! A fucking ticket!” Several of the cops were all right but some on the force, mostly women and blacks, all despised him because of Lucy’s desire to retain her reputation. He could see those pants-wearing butch man-woman bitches, like that Christopherson bitch or Mary Merrick, who loathed him utterly, telling lies about him to all the white men on the—
He had looked through the rear-view mirror and his eyes bulged open, his jaw dropped, his voice came out in a wheezy little gasp, and he could not think.
The werewolf was charging up behind his car.
Its arms were pumping like a human sprint runner, its teeth pulled back in concentration, and its eyes open wide with berserk rage. It was so close that the red of his backlights was illuminating it like some monster in some horror film.
It was getting closer and suddenly its hands were reaching out toward the back of his Prius with five human-like fingers with claws at the end and it was close enough to where Sandal could hear the click, clack sound of them touching the surface of his vehicle as it searched around for a handhold.
Sandal’s foot gently lowered on the gas.
The werewolf’s mouth jerked open in a snarl and it pumped its arms faster, getting closer, but he went faster too and soon the red vanished and it disappeared into the darkness behind him. Just before it did, he saw its snot point up into the sky and howl in rage. Distantly, he heard its cry of rage.
And then it was gone. Disappeared beyond the sight of the red backlights and when he looked for a moment, he did not see it appearing through the streetlights.
But was it gone? Did he hallucinate it? He wasn’t sure.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Sandal whimpered. If he had stopped at that light, it would have just run right up to his door, slammed its fist through the window, and then ripped his head clean off or maybe yank him out of the car so as to tear him to pieces right there on the street as it had that drug dealer.
It was at that moment that he realized he had not been paying attention to the moon. After what happened to Bob Holmes, he damn well should have, but that Waddell bitch had been so distracting with the threat of ruining his livelihood, and then that call from his lawyer letting him know he couldn’t get out of it had just been all too damn distracting.
There was the sound of screaming from somewhere and he began to panic, terrified that something was in the car with him, hiding in the back seats and ready to pounce, but then he realized he was the one who was screaming. That didn’t calm him down as much as he might have thought but it brought the panic down to a manageable level.
He swung left up Colm St, only slowing down enough so as not to crash, which was the only thing he feared more than stopping at that moment, passed Hamilton Hall on his right, and then shot up mechanically back to his home in Edwards Grove. He noted Lake Chelsea on the right and the full moon reflecting on the water, feeling the moon as some great, new horror that he had never fully understood before. On his left was the dreaded forest, but, for once, he didn’t care, except for a quick thought or sense that maybe the forest was where that werewolf really came from.
In all the old stories, weren’t all the monsters from some dark, deep woods somewhere?
He made it to his home, parked in the driveway, and sat there in the car for a moment.
There was no way the werewolf could have kept pace with him, and, of course, it couldn’t follow his scent through a car.
Or could it?
That thought made him want to start shrieking again. He stepped out, eyes wide and stunned, and went quickly inside. His wife Julie and daughter Jessica were all still up, sitting in the living room and watching something on television that he didn’t notice.
Jessica looked up at him as he walked in, her eyes confused. “Are you okay, Dad?”
He looked at her, looked around his beautiful Victorian home with its windows of normal, breakable glass and walls of normal, breakable plaster and wood. He had an idea that he should feel safe but he didn’t. Bob Holmes might have had an idea he was safe too but Sandal rather doubted being inside his house would have made a hell of a difference.
“Get in the car,” he said. “We’re staying at a hotel tonight.”
Julie looked at him with a confused look on her face. “What?” she asked.
“Trust me and, uh—bring the pets.”
It sounded stupid and Sandal instinctively expected resistance but something about his expression made his normally resistant and rebellious family follow him wordlessly. It seemed to have frightened them more than words could. They packed the younger twins into the back, both rubbing their eyes, the dog, cat and bird as well, and then went off to a hotel in New Haven, which at least felt like it was a good distance away.
If the werewolf got him there, it would have to make its way unseen through a dense city and up three stories. Even if it could, and there was no way it would make that distance on foot, it would still be difficult to find him before morning.
Unless it could drive? Could it, he wondered.
Sandal found he did not like that question at all.
Once the family settled in, they gave him all kinds of looks that said he was crazy but it took a while for one of them to say anything. Their faces contained identical looks of worry and discomfort merged.
“Well,” said Julie with a forced shrug. “Any particular reason you dragged us out here to stay in an expensive hotel a mere few miles from our home?” He looked at her and something on his face made her own shift to one of more intense worry. “What’s with that look you have there?”
Sandal shrugged awkwardly.
Suddenly, there was a call on Julie’s phone. She picked it up. “Hello, Meredith.” Meredith Alexander was their nosy next-door neighbor. “Why are you whispering like that? Why do I need—”
Sandal snatched the phone from her hand and gasped out the word, “Meredith.”
“Sandal!” She sounded very scared and spoke very softly. “You need to get out of your house right now!”
“What do you mean?” he asked, his eyes growing wide as he stared into the distant nothing. He knew what she meant, even before she said it, he knew but he seemed to be on some kind of autopilot.
“The werewolf is outside your house,” she whispered and his eyes grew even wider and he began to shake. “I can see it standing on your driveway, just looking at it. I called the police but you need to get your kids out of the back and—”
There was a roar so loud it Sandal could hear it through the phone. He heard Meredith drop the phone as the scream continued for several moments. He listened, and, though distant, he thought he could hear the sounds of something being destroyed. Something big.
Something like a house.
Meredith did not pick up the phone again but he could hear her whimpering in fear.
* * *
Caitlin Christopherson and Mary Merrick secured the scene quickly enough.
They had moved through the wreckage of the house with a pair of pump shotguns with silver-fronted slug shells. They found nothing but the shock of knowing that in a very short time, like five to ten minutes short, something came by that was powerful enough to tear down a two-story Victorian home with its bare hands.
Christopherson went back to the uniformed officer named Robertson standing outside. “I saw nothing,” he told her again. “It was gone by the time I got here.”
She wasn’t sure she should be angry or just relieved. A troll could do what the werewolf did. Maybe. She wasn’t sure but a troll was different. It was more of a wild animal with intelligence, like a Sasquatch, than it was a true monster. It could be sadistic but it wasn’t a true killer reveling in bloodshed like the werewolf.
What had occurred was not exactly a “lead” but it was better than before. The werewolf hadn’t killed anyone, or at least, no one they knew of, and they had an actual witness that time for all the good it did. Meredith Baxter was so terrified that it took them an hour to get into her house but what she told them did not exactly fill Christopherson with confidence.
“‘A seven-foot-tall man-like thing covered in black hair with the head of a wolf,’” Christopherson quoted to Mary when the two were alone together again, both smoking. There were lights flashing red and white in front of the house and the boys were talking to each other about the witness and the surviving victim, but everyone knew it was already a dead end.
The last few times, they had bloodhounds and Emmett, Mary’s father’s talking dog, sniffing around, and it really frustrated him. He said it was that the werewolf’s scent was “utterly perfect” until “he just hit a wall” and “the werewolf just disappeared.” He was coming up again but Christopherson knew he would suffer the same problem.
“It’s pretty much what we knew already,” Mary replied. “We got lucky this time. The intended target survived.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’s a hypocritical cunt,” she replied with a shrug. “One of those so-called male feminists. You know the kind.”
“The ones who pretend to care just so they can molest women?”
“Big time,” Mary told him. “He is being sued by Lucy Waddell for sexual harassment.”
“Waddell? Like related to William Waddell?”
“Lucy is his cousin.” William Waddell was an officer who worked Lower Bartlett Bay. A rookie of maybe twenty-two years old. “Her granduncle owns that old Civil War bar down on the boardwalk. The 29th Regimental.”
“I heard about that bar,” she said. Typically, she went to Colm’s Bar, as did Mary, since that was the “cop bar” of the town and was owned and operated by an ex-cop. Waddell’s bar had been known to the Force as a hotspot identical to The Green Lobster, acting as a black version of a place where unhappy out-of-work drunk fishermen sometimes drove sloshed back to their homes. Both bars were now thriving since so many of those citizens were employed in the fisheries and, queerly, the excess drinking problems had gone down incredibly.
“Sandal’s been molesting Lucy for years,” Mary told her. “Her granduncles have been trying to get her to come forward forever but she needed the money to help support the bar, which was the Waddell family legacy. Now that it’s doing fine and everyone’s employed, they’re pooling their money together to get a lawyer and go after him.”
“There are a lot of scumbags in this cute little town,” Christopherson said. “Lucy Waddell is black, I’m assuming.”
“Yeah,” Mary replied with an unreadable look. “Unsurprisingly, the same ethnicity as her cousin.”
“This feels as though it has some connection to the black community,” she replied.
“It would seem so,” Mary replied. “But that doesn’t explain Janet Dupree.”
“Goddamn it, it doesn’t!” Christopherson groaned. Maybe Janet Dupree did have a connection somehow but it didn’t seem much like it. When questioned about that to her mother and other close friends, the closest thing to a connection to the black community was a black man that she had dated in high school but he hadn’t seen her in years, although he was quite upset to find out she had died.
The Gurneys’ connection to the black community was easier to learn. Christopherson didn’t need a murderous werewolf to learn of their unpleasant history with racism and the black community.
Still, it all felt like coincidences. For Christopherson, it was a word that was quickly becoming the most hated word in the English language.
When she talked to Sandal, by phone since he wasn’t going anywhere near Bartlett Bay until daylight, he explained that the werewolf ran at him while he was driving. She sensed he was hiding something but she imagined the crux of it was true. He was driving and the werewolf made a rush at him but missed for some reason and he got away. He got home but he feared the werewolf was following him, so he took his family, his pets, and then left.
He was right.
The werewolf did follow him but when it found an empty house, it went berserk, and destroyed it, and evidently as easily as a child could destroy a gingerbread house.
She was going to question Sandal Pennington more thoroughly when he came back but she sensed there wasn’t much more to learn.
Looking back at that damage, she recalled the earlier hope she had that night. She had hoped that the werewolf was still nearby when she arrived so that they could have put a dozen shells into the monster and end it once and for all. Kill the bastard like in the movies, watch him turn back into a man or woman, and be rid of the problem forever.
But it was gone before even Robertson got there and looking at the damage afterward, armed or not, Christopherson wasn’t so sure slug rounds could slow the werewolf down, let alone kill it.
The werewolf was furious, according to Meredith Baxter and it was out there somewhere. That meant they would likely find another victim before dawn. If they were lucky, it would be cattle or a horse or something, but it could just as easily be a human being. Someone like Janet Dupree, with the same prevailing thought of being just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Maybe it tried to follow Pennington to New Haven. Maybe there was a naked man or woman who would awaken amongst the trees off the Interstate 95 come dawn.
That would help solve the problem, wouldn’t it? The naked man or woman seen walking back into Bartlett Bay after a full moon might just be the werewolf.
A fun fantasy but there would be no such easy answer. It might be Christopherson’s first rodeo but it definitely wasn’t the werewolf’s. Of that, she was becoming more and more certain, even though she had no reason to think that. No reason to believe it wasn’t just some dumb monster risen from some human being’s subconscious, except, of course, for the reason it was constantly thwarting them in ways no stupid animal could.
Looking at the remains of that house shifted her understanding and increased her worry. This wasn’t just a “very strong” thing and she understood why all the hard men and women on the Force, people who had lived with Bartlett Bay and its terrors all their whole lives, would rather wait for the creature to finish its job and vanish rather than dare confront it head-on.
The latter felt very much like suicide and the sort where it changed nothing in the long run.