It Hunts Me

The Pine Wheel Roadhouse was almost empty and the air was almost still. The fan overhead, turning beside the mounted deer head and old Moxie sign, wasn’t doing a thing to move the air about the bar. The shitty decorations they put up every year weren’t swaying in the least. Halloween, and this warm. A true Indian summer was growling slowly over Vermont. It was two in the afternoon and the soft dull heat of the outdoors was floating in through the cracks. Peggy silently cursed old Reggie Tuttle every time he went outside for a smoke, because his bad hip caused him to move slowly and the heavy front door was left open for five seconds at a time. Once that heat got in, it was in for the night.

Peggy wiped the bar with strong tree trunk arms in quick circles. The bar didn’t need it, but she did. Nothing was happening. Her hair stuck to the back of her neck in lank straws. She needed a distraction, but the livelier patrons wouldn’t start showing up for hours yet. Genny with his funny voices and stories wouldn’t stop selling coke around the campus until after four. Bernard came in most nights and always had a kind word and a ribald joke for Peggy, but it wouldn’t be until evening fell if at all. Reggie was here, but he was a sour old man that nursed his imports at the back table, and Dan was face-down on the bar again, snoring softly. Peggy had left him a rag to wipe up his own damned drool when he woke up. This was the uneasy truce they’d settled upon about three years ago.

The third patron was a stranger. Peggy sized him up. Dark hair brushed back from a pallid face. He held his beer mug with both hands. He hadn’t sipped it yet, she noted. Those eyes stared through the glass, through the bar and through the floor beyond. This one likely had a story to tell. He would at least help pass the time, so long as he wasn’t entirely unfriendly like Reggie back there.

Peggy sauntered to within five feet and leaned on the bar with her elbows. “Long day?”

The man looked up, startled. “Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Yeah.” His eyes were darkly ringed.

“Honey, not for nothing, but you look like you been through some shit. When was the last time you slept?”

He shrugged. “It’s been two days, at least. I’ve had some stuff going on.”

Peggy Tovey, who never failed to lend an attentive ear to a soul that needed someone to listen, asked “Wanna talk about it?” She swiveled her forearms out from her planted elbows, palms up. “Nobody listens like a bartender, and I’ve got hours to kill here. I’m a dirt cheap therapist.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.” Before she could make an argument, he tilted an eye at her and said, “Actually… yes. I could use an ear. I may as well tell someone.”

“Let it out,” Peggy said, rolling her considerable head down, around, and up in a gesture of go ahead, tiger.

“I, uh… I’m a murderer.” He set his jaw and stared at Peggy. Peggy stared back, waiting for him to go on. “That doesn’t alarm you? I see you’re not running for the phone.”

Peggy grinned around her chewing gum. “Darlin’, I hear worse than that weekly. I had one fella tell me, in detail, how he murdered a whole group of rival bikers in Acapulco. That’s Badger, though, so there’s no knowing if he was telling the truth. So I dunno. All I know is that I ain’t impressed yet.” She said it like a friendly dare. “I’m Peggy, by the way.”

“Ben.” He took a swig of his beer. “I’m also a werewolf.”

“Now that is a new one to me, but ‘tis the season.”

Ben glanced around at the Halloween decorations hanging limply from their fixtures. “I guess.”

“So wait, are you a murderer or a werewolf? My understanding is that werewolf… guys… ain’t really in control when they’re howlin’ on down the boulevard.”

“I don’t howl,” the man said. “And I never lose control.”

“Oh, that’s interesting. So you just change and go around killin’ folks because you like to. I see.”

“I don’t change, either.”

“…But you’re a werewolf.”

“It’s not like that. I hear it first.”

“You hear it?”

“The howling.”

“You just said there isn’t any howling.”

“I said I don’t howl.” He stared at his hands, gripped about his beer mug. “I’m the werewolf, but I don’t become the wolf. It comes out during the full moon and hunts me. And it howls. It howls all the time.” He drained the glass.

“Well that’s a twist. Need another, hon?” Peggy smiled the smile she saved for little kids and drunks, when either needs humoring.

“Please. So anyway, I hear it first. Howling. Real distant, miles and miles away. That’s always the way of it. It starts from far off and closes in. I hear it howling as the night wears on, closer and closer. Then nothing. Then scratches at the door. It circles the house, trying the entrances, but I’ve got the door locked and bolted and my cabin windows shuttered and padlocked from the outside. To be safe, I bolt myself into the basement, but it’s never gotten into the house. Sometimes I see it when it’s not around. In the daytime, I mean. In mirrors and windows. Really quickly, just a hulking furred shape with yellow eyes and it’s gone when I look again.”

Peggy saw that whatever fun she was having listening to his tale, this man believed it. He was haunted. She clunked a fresh beer down onto the bar and the foam slopped over her fingers and down the side. “Here. For courage. What do you do for a living? I notice you’re not working today, but you can afford a house. Meaning no offense.”

“I do substitute teaching and they didn’t need me today. They don’t need me very often. I want to go full-time, but sometimes I don’t get much sleep and can’t teach well.” He made  a wavy hand motion: so it goes. “Anyway. ”

“So that all doesn’t sound that bad. How are you a murderer?”

He grunted a smileless laugh and stared without speaking. After a moment, he took a solemn glug from his beer. “Yesterday was my birthday. It was also the first night of the full moon. My girlfriend wanted to have a party. I said no, but didn’t tell her why. I never told her about the wolf. I told her I needed to be alone. It’d worked in the past.”

“Who’s your girlfriend?”

“Ava. Teaches sixth grade.”

“Pretty?”

Ben stared at his beer for a time longer. “So I’m at the gym and it’s getting dark. I hop off the elliptical to go home. I get there and begin walking up to my door, and stop dead in my tracks. I’d seen a shadow move inside my house.”

“I thought you said the wolf couldn’t get inside.”

“It wasn’t the wolf, the wolf was still off in the woods somewhere, running toward me. The shadow I’d seen was a person. I looked and saw a balloon, dim, but visible in the moonlight through my window. Ava’d decided to throw me a surprise party. The wolf howls. It’s maybe a mile away.”

Peggy’s eyebrows raised, and she suppressed her smirk as best she could. “Oh no!”

“So I run back to the car and tear out of my driveway. I’m trying to lead it away from the house, see? I call her from the road, and she asks where I went. I start yelling to get out of the house, she’s confused, she starts yelling back. Then I scream at her to stay in the house and to lock the doors. She’s crying and asking what she did wrong. I heard the howling, then, through the phone. The thing was outside. The screaming started right after.” He drained the beer. “‘Just tell me what I did wrong,’ that’s the last thing she said to me.” He held his empty mug and gazed at it with what looked like wonder.

Peggy glanced to the side, to a newspaper behind the bar. Its headline shone in fifty point all-caps.

SURPRISE PARTY MASSACRE

Eight Dead In Backwoods House Of Horror

There, to the side, was a little picture of Ben. It looked like a school ID photo. The considerable hair on her arms stood up in thick stalks. That’s why he looked familiar, she realized coldly. He was the prime suspect in the Massachusetts murder spree the TV wouldn’t shut up about from last night. “Go on,” she said as she took her phone and began texting Earl at the precinct.

Ben continued. “I just drove. I drove all night. I filled the tank only once, and that was when I was sure the wolf was going to catch up to me. I must have looked insane, staring off into the darkness like that.”

“That’s real rough.” Peggy put her phone down, poured a double and placed it on the bar. “Here. On the house.”

“Thanks,” he muttered before drinking it down.

He didn’t seem to notice that it was 190 proof, so Peggy poured him another one. She just had to make it until Earl and the cavalry arrived. The police station was just across the street, but who knows how long it’d take him to check his phone. Sometimes Earl and the boys liked to jaw. She braced her arms against the bar and tried to remain calm and friendly. She could do this.

Ben picked up the second shot. “So that’s how I’m a murderer. I as much as killed Ava by not just telling her straight out, like I did you. This morning my car died just a bit out of town. The sun was up so it didn’t matter, the wolf was gone by then, and I realized I was a killer as I was walking.” He paused, and his blinks grew languid to Peggy’s practiced eye. “I just can’t bear to go home. There’s a bus stop up the road. I’m going to hop on when it arrives and just take it anywhere it goes. Clear my head. Figure out what’s next.”

“Good plan,” Peggy said. “As good as anything. That bus don’t arrive for hours, though, so you don’t need your head clear just yet. You got a while.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He looked at Peggy, taking note of the sheen of sweat across her forehead.

“Hot in here,” she laughed.

“You’re right about that too.” He lifted the shot to his lips and slugged it down.

By the time Earl and the deputies entered the bar with their guns drawn, the murderous werewolf was passed out on the bar.

Ben woke up on a cot. He blinked a few times and his eyes adjusted. He was in a jail cell and it was dark. What time was it? He stood up. “Officer,” Ben called. “Officer!” A cop turned the corner of a long hallway and walked toward the cell.

“Keep it down back there,”

“You have to listen to me. You have to lock the doors.”

“What?” The cop tapped the bars. “You’re already locked in.”

“No, that’s not good enough. You-”

“Pipe down. You’re being transferred in the morning. Till then, sleep it off.”

The cop left the hallway and Ben climbed onto the cot, then looked out the window. The moon was full overhead, fat and yellow. “Oh god,” he whispered. Something blotted out the moon for a second, then was gone. It had been furred and enormous. Ben fell back off the cot, shrieking.

“Hey!” the cop yelled back. “I thought I said-” A howl sounded from outside. It was long, low, and very loud.

There was tumult in the room beyond the hallway as cops began standing and jostling about.

“What the fuck-”

“Jesus-”

“Holy shit, what-”

“LOCK THE DOOR!!” Ben screamed. “LOCK THE DOOR!!”

Crashing and panicked shouts began in the unseen room. Growling and gunfire. Ripping and splashing. Snarling. It was in the building with them. A body flew into the hallway and against the wall, smashing the fluorescents as it went. The hallway fell into darkness as the screams continued and the broken glass tinkled to the ground. The mass of the police force backed into the hallway, firing their weapons. An immense shape darted among them. In the darkness, Ben could only make out silhouettes against the light filtering from the precinct’s lobby. The wolf-shape was very large and almost formless. Its shoulders nearly touched the ceiling. It swiped and lunged with forelegs and claws, and its eyes caught what little yellow moonlight filtered in from the window behind Ben.

In no time at all, the policemen were gurgling or dead. The smells of gunpowder, blood and shit were rich in the air, along with something muskier. Something primeval.

The huge furred shape stalked down the hallway toward the cell, its claws clicking on the linoleum.

Ben had never looked directly at it. He had never been prepared, and wasn’t now. His breath gibbered and hucked from his lungs in thin ribbons. The wolf stopped, and they looked at each other. The yellow eyes shone from the furred blackness. Ben fancied he could see maniac teeth, but he wasn’t sure. They both stood still for a time.

When the wolf began hurling itself at the bars and baying, Ben began screaming anew.

Peggy’s Suburban pulled into the gravel lot at work. She got out and stretched. She hadn’t slept well. All her dreams had featured doors, and something was always scratching on the other side.

She yawned and got the correct key out to unlock the door, and noticed something. One of the deputies at the station was lying face down in the driveway, beside a cruiser. Peggy Tovey, who never failed to move or intercede when help was needed, not even when Dirk Paine was stabbed with that broken bottle and shat himself, broke into a trot and crossed the road.

“Juan! Juan? That you?” She saw the puddle of blood before she arrived. Peggy knelt by him and saw that he was very clearly dead. His face was turned to the side. He’d seen something horrible.

Another body lay blocking the door from closing. It was Earl himself. Peggy stepped over him with trembling legs. “Hello? Anyone here? It’s Peggy, from The Wheel… everything okay in here?”

The police station was littered with the bodies of the town’s police. Gouts of blood had splashed across the walls hours earlier, and were now darkening in their final patterns. Bright knots of gut curled here and there. A skull lay bare, stripped of Dale Whitham’s face.

Only now it occurred to Peggy that whatever had done this might still be here, and she bent to pick up a shotgun. She brushed off the severed hand that still gripped the stock and couched it against her shoulder. “Anyone here? I’ve called 911! The police… the state police will be here any minute now!”

There was a noise from the hallway beyond. Peggy stepped around the corner, careful not to slip in the puddles. The sun was shining in through the window of the cell at the end of the hall. More officers lay here, strewn about, all dead. In the cell was Ben. He was kneeling close to the bars, rifling through a policeman’s belt. He looked up to see Peggy, then went back to fiddling with the officer’s body and found what he was looking for. He pulled a set of keys free with a jingle. “I guess you’ll believe me now, huh?” he said.

Peggy screamed, “What the fuck happened? What did you do??”

He stood and began trying keys in the lock. “I didn’t do anything. I told you.”

“Drop those fucking keys!!”

“I’m not staying,” he said. “If I stay, I’ll be held for questioning again, and the same thing will happen tonight. I have to go. I only have until nightfall to get somewhere distant and safe, away from people.” One of the keys clicked in the lock and he slid the door open.

“You stay right there,” Peggy said with wide, wet eyes. “You’re not goin’ anywhere.”

“I am. I told you. More people will die.”

She leveled the shotgun at Ben’s midsection. “DON’T YOU FUCKIN’ MOVE!!”

“I’m leaving. You kill me if you have to. God knows I should probably die anyw-”

He stepped out of the cell and Peggy pulled the trigger. THWAMMM!! The blast reverberated thunderously in the tight hallway. Ben’s chest opened in a circle of smoking hamburger. He flinched but didn’t fall. He looked down at the wound and touched it with a shaking hand.

“Huh,” he said. “I always wondered that. I guess that part of the myths are true.”

Peggy lowered the shotgun. Nothing made sense anymore and she just wanted to go back to bed.

“The werewolf myths, I mean,” he continued. “Maybe the real curse is that only the wolf can kill me. Jesus.” They stood there, looking at each other for a moment. Ben nodded. “Yeah. And maybe it’s for the best. …Hell. Why not. I’ll face it. Tonight, then.”

He stepped around Peggy and walked to the end of the hallway.

“Only…” He turned to face her. Tears slipped down his cheeks. “I’m so scared of that goddamned thing. So scared.”

Peggy Tovey, who never failed to try to help someone that was suffering, drove him up the old hunting trails and deep into the woods. She left him there with a blanket and several bottles of the good stuff. For courage.