Wolf Land Page 9

  Joyce strode over to the circulation counter, dropped her bagged lunch and her current novel—Brian Keene’s The Lost Level—next to her monitor. She’d turn on the computer later. She needed to spend the next fifty minutes or so in research.

  On the way to the speculative fiction section, Joyce mulled the facts of her situation.

  Four of the people at the bonfire had been bitten or scratched. She, Bobby Talbot—otherwise known as Weezer—Melody Bridwell, and Glenn Kershaw.

  It was now…she mentally calculated the time…thirty-two hours since the attacks.

  Her wounds were almost healed. Her wrist fracture ached, but there was no explanation for how briskly the bones had knitted. She suspected that if an X-ray had been taken of her bones immediately after the attack, the findings would have revealed a break far more severe than the images she was shown at the hospital. That quickly, from the attack at the bonfire to the hospital, her bones had reformed into a fracture that wouldn’t require surgery. While at the time of the injury she’d been sure the bones within her flesh had been ground into splinters.

  Joyce climbed the spiral staircase, her wrist protesting only a trifle as she gripped the handrail.

  What else do you know? she asked herself.

  You’re changing, she answered. You can say it any way you’d like, but it boils down to the same thing: you’re changing.

  Though only thirty, Joyce prided herself on accepting facts as they were, not as she wished them to be. It was this attitude that gave her a stronger-than-average self-knowledge.

  She was not ugly, but she wasn’t a stunner. To the right man, her looks were intriguing enough that, when combined with her intellect and her personality, she could become very attractive. But it would take the right man. And so far, she hadn’t come close to finding him.

  Despite the fact that she wanted to get married someday, she believed herself to be reasonably happy alone. She had her library. She had her books. And she had her small house on Bluff Street.

  For now, that was enough.

  At least, it had been until the attack.

  Because now she found the longings that had been latent within her blossoming into full-fledged yearnings. Since childhood she’d been a vegetarian, not out of any ideological stance, but simply because she preferred the taste of fruits and vegetables. Occasionally, she’d experienced a craving for meat, but those moments were infrequent.

  Until the attack.

  The morning after the bonfire, she’d relished the taste of bacon strips, while grimacing at the staleness of her cornflakes.

  Her other senses had grown keener as well. Her eyesight, twenty-twenty to begin with, now possessed a crystalline clarity that convinced her to eschew her reading glasses.

  Her skin was more sensitive. The little hairs on her forearms prickled whenever someone approached. This morning she’d felt, by a tightening of the skin at the base of her neck, her neighbor Mr. Turpin eyeballing her from his kitchen window. No doubt he and everyone else in town had read or seen something about the bonfire murders, and like everyone else, Mr. Turpin was no doubt curious about Joyce’s story. But to feel his hungry eyes on her through a window at a distance of more than forty feet?

  And her sense of hearing, she thought, making her way past the science fiction bookcases, had grown startlingly acute. This morning Joyce had stopped at a red light and heard a talk radio personality yammering on about the current crisis in health care. Yet Joyce’s radio had been off, and there was no one in the lane next to her.

  But across the intersection from Joyce’s little Honda CR-V there was an elderly man nodding whenever the talk radio host made an emphatic point.

  Her sense of hearing was uncanny.

  So what, she asked herself as she neared the horror section, did it all mean?

  Joyce stopped in front of a cherrywood bookcase and selected the book she’d been thinking about since the attack.

  Lycanthropology, by Clark Lombardo Coulter PhD.

  Joyce flipped the book over and scanned the back cover synopsis:

  Repudiated by the academic establishment, reviled by the medical and psychiatric communities, the furor over the 1937 release of Lycanthropology ended Professor Clark Coulter’s tenure at Columbia University and led to a tragic downward spiral of drinking, depression and suicide. Yet in 1963—over two decades after Coulter’s death—Hardscrabble Publishing’s rerelease of Coulter’s bizarre meditations spawned widespread critical acclaim and a devoted cult following. Now considered an underground classic, this notorious book is regarded as a masterful work of fiction, one that stands with Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris and Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour as one of the preeminent works of lycanthropic storytelling in the horror canon.

  Smiling, she clutched Lycanthropology to her chest and moved down the aisle. From the folklore section, Joyce selected three relevant volumes from Man, Myth & Magic, two more books that dealt with shape-shifting, and tomes about Native American, Irish and Scottish folklore.

  Stacking the books before her on a shelf, she frowned at their bulk. Better to make two trips down the stairs rather than attempt to lug them all at once. Especially with a bum wrist. Joyce was about to balance a cluster of five books in her hands when an inexplicable whim seized her, and she gathered all nine books to her stomach.

  Though the stack reached all the way from the zipper of her shorts to her breasts, the weight felt like nothing at all.

  With a mixture of elation and misgiving, she made her way down the loft aisle, then tromped down the spiral staircase, her feet moving with an excess of vitality that she hadn’t experienced in years. She felt, God help her, like dancing.

  But first she needed to learn what was happening to her.

  Rather than sitting at the circulation desk, Joyce selected a spot near the back window, which overlooked the small hollow that abutted the library. As she read about the history of werewolves in ancient Europe, her thoughts drifted to Glenn. Was he healing as well?

  She suspected he was.

  Was he changing in other ways too?

  Joyce tapped the pages of her book, found her eyes sliding out of focus.

  She might as well admit it.

  She wanted to go to him, ask him how he was doing. She even had an excuse to do so. An in. They’d endured a tragedy and for the first time shared common ground.

  Would he be annoyed if she stopped by his house? If he was, she could simply return to her hermetic existence, no worse off than she’d been before.

  But if he welcomed her inside…

  Joyce’s flesh tingled at the prospect of his touch.

  Beware the rebel, her mother’s voice reminded her.

  Joyce pushed the thought away with little trouble.

  Perhaps, she decided, Glenn was the one who needed to be wary of her.

  A playful smile curling her lips, Joyce returned to her book.

  Late that afternoon, six hours after being allowed to return home, Melody Bridwell worked up the courage to unwrap the tape with which the doctors at Lakeview Memorial had mummified her and peek under the discolored gauze. The stain was a rusty brown, and it had begun to stink, but so great was Melody’s dread of what she’d find under the gauze that she’d refrained from changing it like she was supposed to.

  Through the bathroom door, she heard her father call, “Where’d you put my remote?”

  It’s where it always is, Melody thought. If you weren’t so lazy, you’d reach down and find it in the crevices of your recliner.

  “Be out in a minute,” she called.

  Melody bared her teeth as she pinched an edge of the gauze and peeled it back. The rank odors of unwashed skin and coagulated blood overwhelmed her.

  She peeled the gauze back a bit farther and gasped at the way the large scab tore away from the new flesh. A wave of nausea la
pped over her as she studied the lumpy brown scab. Like a hunk of beef jerky, the kind her brothers chewed when they were out of tobacco.

  An armada of terrible images assaulted her. The cloying apple cider smell of Red Man tobacco. Brown teeth with a string of jerky fat dangling between them. Rank breath huffing over her averted face. Feverish grunting. A tearing pain. Then the unwanted lubricant of semen.

  Melody caught sight of herself in the mirror, clapped a hand over her mouth. Yes, she was crying, but that was no big deal. She’d wept plenty of times over the past sixteen years of her life, ever since she’d developed the first alarming bumps on her chest and caught one of her brothers watching her while she played shirtless in the sprinkler.

  What scared her was the way her teeth seemed to be elongating. It had only been a fleeting moment, and when she’d opened her mouth again a few seconds later, her teeth looked like they always did. White. Straight. The only member of her family who didn’t look like she’d just pigged out on mud and barbecued pork.

  Shivering, Melody thrust away the image of her distorted freak teeth and returned to the gauze pad, which was now halfway off.

  “Melody Ann Bridwell, what the hell you doin’?”

  Her muscles tensed, but she concentrated on removing the rest of the gauze. Biting her lower lip, she tore the last of the pad from her skin, discarded it in the overflowing trash can—she’d have to empty it soon even if it was her brother Robbie’s only chore around the house. Well, that and porking his girlfriend Adriana Carlino.

  Melody shivered. She could detect a dozen odors emanating from the dingy plastic receptacle, none them pleasant. There were Adriana’s wet wipes, which she prided herself on never flushing. That was probably better for the plumbing, but when the damn things smelled like old period blood, diarrhea and unwashed cooter, Melody considered the trade-off a poor one. Add to those odors the smells of crusty tissues—her brother Donny still jerked off several times a day, despite being thirty-six this past April—banana peels, half-full spit cups, and several other withering stenches, and the bathroom was a horror show for her newly sharpened sense of smell.

  Melody didn’t linger long on this phenomenon because it made her uneasy. She’d decided the morning after the attack that her senses were more acute not because of anything unnatural, but rather because she’d adopted a new appreciation for life due to her near-death experience.

  Sure, she told herself. That has to be it.

  Biting her lower lip, Melody began to work her fingernails under the remaining scab, the one that began at her hipbone and crept all the way down to the back of her knee. There was some blood, some yellowish pus, and a whole lot of discomfort, but in the end she was able to scratch away the chunky layer of scab.

  Leaving her with a large span of bright pink skin. She was certain there’d be no scar.

  So why did this scare her so badly?

  Melody turned, drew up the short sleeve of her shirt and suppressed a moan. The scab was flaking away on her shoulder as well, and like her leg, the flesh here was shiny and unblemished, like that of a newborn.

  Yet on Sunday night the wound in her shoulder had been ragged and deep. Like a divot chunked from soft sod.

  Melody remembered the beast thundering toward her, the eyes like hellfire, the heaving chest muscles as broad as a bodybuilder’s, the hair so thick she could scarcely make out the rippling striations. She remembered the beast’s gloating snarl, the steam-shovel talons. She remembered shrieking for help, screaming in pain, the droplets of blood flying like water from a summertime sprinkler, like—

  “Goddammit, girl, get your ass out here!”

  Melody jumped and leaned on the sink for support. Her father’s voice battered the outside of the bathroom door again. Then his fists made the wood dance in the jamb.

  Automatically, Melody went over, twisted open the lock. The door flew inward, sprawling her against the commode.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, girl?” her father demanded. “My shows come on at six!”

  Melody nodded, made to move past him, then remembered the gauze pad, the tape. Fragments of her scabs lay all over the floor and speckled the sink like flecks of red pepper.

  She turned, hoping she could blot out her father’s view of the mess. “I’m sorry I took so long, Dad. I’ll be out in a second.”

  She thought her father would go, but peripherally, she saw him freeze.

  His voice tight with suspicion, he asked, “What’s that crap on the floor?”

  Melody looked down and saw that the crap was her leg dressing, the unspooled strands of tape, the stained gauze pad.

  “It’s nothing, Dad. I just need to pick up—”

  “Lemme see,” he growled, and before she knew it, he’d yanked up on the leg of her shorts.

  She could feel his eyes crawling over her flesh. And what was more, his beer breath was fouler than usual, because mingling with the Old Style scent were the onions she’d chopped for his hamburger earlier that day. As his knobby, loathsome frame drew closer, she smelled his body odor, like maggoty beef soaked in sour sweat, and the stench of his shit-streaked underwear. And underneath that, she could smell his need. His spoor, percolating in his vas deferens.

  He began fondling her leg.

  His voice husky, he said, “Looks like you’re healin’ up good, girl.”

  Closing her eyes, she nodded. “I think so.”

  “I think so, Father Bridwell,” he corrected and slapped her on the butt.

  She compressed her lips, nodded. “Father Bridwell.”

  “Say it, bitch,” he ordered, crowding her now, his sex granite-hard against the flesh of her hip.

  Melody said it and began to weep.

  Like always, her tears were silent.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was Tuesday, early evening. Since leaving the hospital, Glenn had slept a total of forty minutes.

  Actually, he reflected as he slathered some butter on a burned slice of toast, forty minutes was a pretty generous estimate. The true number was somewhere closer to twenty, but hell, it was difficult to keep track of time when you were mired in a surreal fever dream.

  Glenn bit down on the crunchy toast and frowned, his gorge rising. He was going to puke again unless he rid his mouth of the repulsive charred taste, the slimy patina of artificial butter slicking his tongue. He even tasted the knife he’d used to spread the butter, metallic and not entirely clean from its last use. His face crumpling in revulsion, he realized he could taste peanut butter on the knife, and when was the last time he’d eaten peanut butter? Two weeks ago? Three?

  Glenn lunged to the kitchen sink, his chair overturning with a skull-piercing clatter, and geysered a jet of partially digested food into the basin. When his body unclenched, he made the mistake of looking down at what he’d regurgitated.

  Hot dog chunks.

  Barely-chewed bits of porterhouse steak.

  Salami.

  Glenn yarked again, this time only producing a reddish broth.

  It didn’t make a damned bit of sense. He could gobble any kind of meat he craved—and he was craving it all the time now—but if he so much as touched certain foods his gorge revolted violently.

  This wasn’t alarming by itself. Didn’t most people’s palates change as they grew older? That Glenn’s change had come so rapidly on the heels of the bonfire incident was disquieting, yes, but perhaps that contained its own logic as well. Didn’t traumatic events leave an imprint on their victims? Glenn had not only been attacked, he’d seen people torn to shreds. Or at least had heard about it afterward. Was it so far-fetched that an event like that could alter a person, including his diet?

  Glenn moved to the back door, opened it. The outside air smelled exhilarating, though the sunlight was harsh on his eyes. Shielding them from the glare, he stared into the forest behind his house and remem
bered yesterday taking a twilight walk in the woods. Then a run. He’d been invigorated, alive. He had no idea how far he’d ended up running, but it had to have been more than five or six miles. And when he’d returned to his backyard, dusk having given way to darkness, he’d masturbated in the moonlight. He’d never done such a thing before, but it had felt liberating and perfectly natural.

  Glenn frowned.

  He moved through his backyard, noticed that the grass was in dire need of a trim. But a part of him enjoyed the primitiveness of the overgrown lawn, savored the perfumes of the wildflowers and the weeds.

  Glenn had motored to town last night, expecting the drive to do him some good. He figured the fragrant night air might even lull him into a state weary enough to sleep when he returned home.

  But the air was anything but fragrant.

  Glenn prided himself on taking great care of the ’Vette. He changed the oil himself, a function he performed twice as often as necessary. He only fed the girl premium gasoline, and he made adjustments to her several times each month. He doubted there was a better-loved car anywhere; Glenn was intimate with every inch of her.

  But last night she’d made him sick.

  In fact, by the time he’d reached Weezer’s apartment building, he had felt so lousy that he’d needed to walk for a few minutes before rapping on Weezer’s door. But if Weezer had been there, he’d decided not to answer Glenn’s knock.

  Yet the crazy thing was, Glenn was certain Weezer had been there. For one, there was Weezer’s gamy body odor. He’d never been much bothered by it before, but he’d always been aware of it. It was an incisive, acrid odor that reminded him of old sweat and battery acid. Many times Short Pump had confided about how smelly Weezer was and should they maybe stage an intervention to persuade him to bathe more frequently? But while Glenn had always found the stench mildly unpleasant, he’d never been sickened by it.

  But he was last night.