6

Deadline

They were considered to be hysterical fools, of course, by a large portion of the people in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, though reaction to their charges in the town of Lynnview itself was restrained. The residents of that community had lost six of their number to the Maniac, and while most of the waiting citizens sincerely hoped that the killer was no more than an “ordinary” lunatic (in the original sense of the word) who could be found and captured by the police very soon, the hushed stories that continued to circulate about the fates of the Gretler and Mitchell families wouldn’t allow them to fully dismiss these wild charges made by a newspaper columnist, a horror novelist, and the only witness to either of the events. Werewolves didn’t exist, naturally, but it never hurt to be careful in matters such as these.

Besides, the insane man might well believe himself to be a wolfman, and that could be almost as dangerous, couldn’t it?

Douglas Morgan carried the bulk of the public campaign in his regular column, not ignoring other interesting bits of the unusual, but concentrating at least one paragraph of each appearance on the phenomenon which was destined to repeat itself—he claimed—on the fast-approaching seventeenth of September, when the moon would next be full. He had been on the laughing end of the argument so many times before that he was willing to gamble everything, even the ultimate embarrassment, on this seemingly solid case of existing supernaturalism.

The police became targets as they steadfastly refused to take him or his evidence seriously, even when Blake Corbett used his acquaintance with Captain Richard Marsh to present their discoveries and conclusions; so his attitude toward the job they were doing, or failing to do, swiftly evolved into scathing observations concerning their ineptness. Morgan had become efficient in the use of sarcasm out of self-defense, and he employed all of his talents in that direction with keen effectiveness. In return, the police department accused the reporter of releasing important information that they could have utilized in tracking the killer (which he had, of course, by recounting the intimate details of Meg’s experiences on the night of the last murders) and called him “irrational” and “rabble-rousing”, among other things. Doug responded to the charges by wondering in print over the competence of a force which had on file the footprints, blood type, hair samples, and saliva traces of a mass murderer but had yet to come up with the first clue to his identity.

This conflict between official and private investigation had disturbed Blake Corbett, who had begun the project with the certainty that both groups could unite and pool their resources to put a swift end to the monster’s ugly career. He had met with Rich Marsh with just such a union in mind, expecting to have some difficulty in convincing the hardheaded realist of the fantastic truth, but he had almost forgotten that Marsh the individual and Marsh the public servant were inseparably combined in this case. The policeman had to look at the situation from the perspective of his profession, and he advised Corbett, in quite clear language, to “keep (his) butt out of it.”

But Corbett was convinced that he was doing something which would benefit his fellow people and, because he was a “name” due to his success as a writer of fiction, he found the channels for expression of this frightening theory easily opened to him. With Meg Talley, he appeared on several local radio and television shows before finally being invited to appear on a nationally-televised late evening interview and variety show. The telecast, which was hosted by a substitute entertainer who refused to take any part of the subject (including the documented murders) seriously, was filled with half-veiled snide remarks and open hawhaws at his and Meg’s expense, but Blake was not inexperienced as the focus of an interview, and he managed to reply with enough intelligent statements to hold his own. It was after their segment was over and they had left the stage that the heavy damage was done by the ridiculing host and the cooperative guests who followed them. His exposure to big time publicity left a sour taste in Corbett’s mouth, but his agent, Rodney Witty, was ecstatic over the shot that his sudden notoriety gave to the writer’s sales.

Nick Grundel kept a low profile throughout the flush of interest shown by the media, though not from choice. He was simply not a Name (‘name’), as were Morgan (columnist), Corbett (author), and Talley (near-victim), and the few interviews that he was asked for and consented to were almost unusable due to the innate derision with which he responded to questions and his, as he put it, puckish sense of humor. Grundel assuaged his feelings with the realization that his interesting personality would help boost his popularity as a lecturer after all of this was over and help secure him a position as a sportscaster, as outspokenness had done for others in the field.

Through the Chronicle, the four investigators received far more feedback via letters, telephone calls, and even personal visits than they had ever expected, and better than ninety percent of them were what could have been listed as “favorable”. It seemed that those who were stirred enough by the conjectures that they sponsored were devout believers in the “invisible barrier” that “orthodox science” had thrown about the vast collection of unexplainable “facts” that continually resisted their standard methods. Many of the contacts even included reports of other werewolves—one who killed chickens in Arkansas, another who stole newborn children in Puerto Rico, a third who, the informant swore, was in reality a nun presently in charge of the convent at which the letter writer was residing—and a strange one claiming to have secret information that explained how the Lynnview Moonlight Mangler was in fact an intergalactic criminal who had been sentenced to Earth for hideous deeds back on a planet in the Ursa Major system.

Some told of other monsters, spirts, and devils that they were presently investigating in a like fashion, but Blake’s favorite out of all of the thousands that were sent to them was a cable that arrived at the paper from an American Air Force pilot who was stationed in Japan. In what seemed to be guileless honesty, he reported having seen the unbelievably huge form of a dinosaur-like creature swimming beneath the surface of the water just outside Tokyo Bay.

Rather than siding with the anti-establishment segment, as he might have been expected to do, Nick classified all of the reports as “a malodorous compilation of tales composed of one-hundred-proof cattle excrement.” Blake wasn’t sure what he thought about the imaginative calls and letters; he had received similar tales from readers of his work who were convinced that he was turning out fiction that was based on far more than imagination, and then he had dismissed the response as originating in the whacko fringe, but with what he was accepting as rational now, he felt strange about dismissing anything.

Meg was amused by the weird speculations that were pouring in to them, and she often repeated the wilder ones and added her laughter as comment; it wasn’t long, however, before her ridicule became quite familiar to her, taking her back to the night when she had eagerly watched Blake and herself on the talk show and had grown increasingly enraged at the attitude of the host, who didn’t believe her story any more than she believed those of these equally sincere people. She didn’t read much of the incoming mail following that experience.

Even Morgan had mixed emotions concerning the mountainous correspondence that they were receiving. On the one hand, he welcomed these witnesses who seemed to be confirming his unpopular beliefs, but the naggingly sensible side of his personality (which Grundel might have volunteered to stand in for, though he was hardly equal to the job) told him that he just could not accept the testimonies of these obviously self-convinced people and remain in any way an analytical mind. He saw so much of himself in their sincerity, the ultimate underdog battling against prejudice and the natural inertia of humanity to thrust forth an unpopular concept, and he supposed that his acceptance of a real, living lycanthrope should place him in the same category as the most wild-eyed of the bunch. But he had facts this time, hard evidence that had overcome his skepticism and separated this situation from those of the letter-writers who swore that they had aliens masquerading as members of their families, frozen Sasquatches in their cellars, and psychic communication with every dead important person since the last Ice Age.

Doug could only pray that this time, after so many other times, he would be proven incontrovertibly correct for a change.

August passed, and there was a dip in public interest, though the four continued to follow up whatever seemed like a lead in the story. Time, the great healer, is also inclined toward amnesia.

Once, while only Meg and Nick were in the newspaper office (which had become the center of the operations for the search, which in turn had raised daily sales significantly), a call came in from one of Grundel’s informants, and at the moment it seemed to be the answer that they had been seeking. Meg had been scheduled to register for the fall semester at college earlier in the month, but, in spite of her family’s insistence that she do so and try to bring her life back into the realm of the normal, she had committed herself to the problem of the Lynnview murders and knew instinctively that it would be several months before she could even think of anything as mundane as education.

It was Tuesday afternoon, September sixth, and just as hot and still as the summer days that had passed before it. When Nick took the call, responding only in low grunts of acknowledgement, Meg listened intently because she could tell this was important; his set frown and the lack of characteristic sarcasm with the caller assured her of that. He hung up and started for the door without a word of explanation.

“So where are you off to?” she asked.

“To the ballet,” he replied, the old Nick Grundel again.

“Wrong time of the day and wrong type of person, Nickie,” she disagreed. “Was that about the killer?”

“Must have been,” he said. “See you later.”

Meg grabbed her purse and darted out before he could shut the door against her. “I just love the ballet,” she told him.

“I work alone, girl, so why don’t you prance yourself back in there and monitor the phone or something?”

“Listen, Grundel, I don’t care what you think about me personally—” she began.

A grim smile cracked his face. “And I’m a sexist dinosaur, right? Just think back, have I treated Blake or Doug with any more respect, patience, or common decency than I’ve shown you?”

“All right, so you show contempt for everybody, no matter what race, sex, or creed they happen to be. What I’m trying to point out is that I’m a charter member of this club with just as much right as you to follow up on leads.”

Grundel looked at her for a moment, with a strange kind of searching in his eyes. “I think I’ve found him. The werewolf. And that’s where I’m going right now. Still want to come?”

The familiar chill ran through Meg’s body as the raw memories were given new life. She saw the entire night again and felt the fear that had wrapped her like a cold blanket, but that was night. This was the day, and werewolves never came out in the daytime. “Let’s go.”

“You got it,” he responded.

While they took the elevator to the ground floor, the young woman said jokingly, “In the movies, John Agar would have told me that this was too dangerous for a mere girl.”

“If women are equal in all things with men, that includes the right to be stupid, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Now, either shut up or tell me who provided the voice of HAL in 2001.”

They took Corbett’s car and left the city, heading northeast. As they drove, Grundel briefly outlined the nature of his information and how it affected them. He had several acquaintances whose relationships with the law were, to put it diplomatically, casual ones, and it was one of these men who had called to say that there was a nameless fellow holed up in a “safe house” north of Lynnview; street word had it that this man was a murderer of high count, who liked to get very physical in his avocation and had a proven mental record that ran into the areas of necrophilia and cannibalism.

“That sounds incriminating, but not like our werewolf,” Meg commented. “If he has a history of mental disturbance, couldn’t he be a regular maniac, if that’s not a contradiction in terms?”

“Could be,” admitted Nick, “except for the fact that he’s cyclic, once a month.”

She nipped at her lower lip. “How did your stoolie find that out?”

“The guy brags about it. And how about this: he won’t tell anybody his real name, but he’s free with a self-bestowed nickname of Wolfman. Haskel, the man who called me, says that this cat arrived from ‘back east’ two months ago and is setting up a deal to get himself out of the U.S. because he’s ‘satiated with this country.’” Grundel smiled again.

“I’m nearly convinced. But we always thought that the werewolf would be sort of normal when completely human, maybe even sorry for what he did during his periodic rages.”

“Our bias,” he said. “We’ve been looking for Lon Chaney in the guise of Larry Talbot. We never figured that he might enjoy being what he has become.”

“Ugh.”

A small, dusty-brown house set in the middle of an overgrown field came into view.

“Having second thoughts about coming with me?”

“Where’s John Agar when I need him?” was her only reply.

Grundel surfed the small car up a long, twisting, and rutted drive as if he knew the occupant of the hovel and would be welcomed with a hearty handshake and a cold beer. Meg wished she felt some of his fearlessness—the young man had never once admitted to being affected by the issues they were dealing with, unlike Doug and Blake, and he hadn’t congratulated her in any way concerning the wild night she had spent dodging their quarry—but when his description of the man inside the house really began to wind its way into her subconscious, she had to wonder whether his courage were rational or the manifestation of a totally warped personality.

Nick tromped across the wooden porch with no attempt at stealth, and Meg followed, telling herself that she was only doing so to try and save the fool from his own enthusiasm. He pounded on the side of the grungy screen door, though the sound could just as well have been knocks on a coffin lid.

After a moment of silence, they heard a swift series of shuffling noises from within the dark building, followed by a deep bellow of “Who’s it?” It was more of a threat than a question.

“Wolfman, is that you?” shouted Grundel.

“Maybe.” A huge, white apparition appeared at the screen door, filling it. “Who you supposed to be?”

“Well, we’re not the cops, or you’d have a .38 Special growing out of your navel. I’m Lum and this is Abner, and that’s all you need to know, except that we’re here to make travel arrangements.”

“The Farmer sent you?” He was a pair of football-sized shoulders from which hung an ape-like body clothed in a sweaty tee-shirt and cut-off jeans. This was definitely not the sensitive, tormented victim of the unnatural that Meg had expected.

Grundel flipped open the door and squeezed by the hulking figure without so much as a suggestion of an invitation. Meg decided to remain on the porch, but Wolfman engaged in his first civilized action by holding open the door for her, and she mentally shrugged, figuring that where Lum wandered, there followed Abner.

“Now, if the Farmer didn’t clue us in to you how else could we have tracked you, boy?” demanded Nick. He quickly scanned the visible perimeters of the room and found no one else inside. “Why don’t you tell us what country you’d like to visit?”

Wolfman disappeared into an equally gloomy room. Meg was half-expecting him to return carrying a pistol or a meat cleaver or whatever form of weapon that was in season for mad killers, but when he rolled back into view, he brought-with him no more dangerous an armament than a fresh can of beer. “Austria,” he grunted. “Or Australia, I forget which. The place that’s got all of the kangaroos and boomerangs.”

Grundel nodded. “Good choice; we can handle it for you. The heat will be off you there, and you can resume your quaint hobby.”

“My what?” The congenital confusion that covered Wolfman’s face only slowly receded to melt into understanding. “Oh, yeah, you mean my hobby, sure, sure, there’ll be a whole lot of new blood down there, all right.” He laughed and spewed bits of foam down the front of his shirt.

Nick laughed, too, though Meg could find very little that she would describe as humorous in the planning of the most savage types of murders.

“You’re good, man, you know it?” asked Grundel. “You got this whole state dumping in its pants over those little jobs you pulled off down in Lynnview.”

The big man continued to be overjoyed with himself. “Ain’t it something? You know, I attacked a few folk back in Jersey, bit some throats and left a few cats and dogs with their heads gone, but it wasn’t until they let me out of the clinic and I come out here that I decided to do it all the way. Zippp! Rip out them necks and gnaw on what’s inside.”

Meg felt her stomach contract and pressed her bag tightly across it, but when she looked to Nick, his amused expression hadn’t changed.

“Right, man, once a month, right?”

“Yeah,” agreed the other man, almost choking on his mirth and beer. “Once a month!”

“Full moon, isn’t it?”

“Of course, you cabbagehead, I’m the Wolfman, ain’t I?”

“That’s who you are.” As neatly as a surgeon inserting a scalpel, Grundel introduced a question that was, to Meg, totally irrelevant, but which would establish the Wolfman’s true identity for Nick, “When’s the next full moon, tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, tomorrow, and am I looking for it, man!”

Grundel continued to laugh and nod, but he casually took Meg’s shoulder and steered her toward the front door. “Okay, Wolfman, Abner and me’ll take care of all travel arrangements for you and have you cruising towards Australia inside of a week.”

“We have to go now … to make preparations,” Meg added, feeling that she should give something to the conversation. Her reward was a meaningful—and painful—squeeze from Nick’s hand.

Wolfman’s face dropped half an inch in disappointment. “Aw, why don’t you hang around a while? I need the company; I mean, this dump ain’t even got a television.”

“Sorry, Wolf,” said Nick, raising one hand. “We’ve got business, lots of folks to take care of, you know. We’ll get back to you.”

“Sure, okay, I understand, but hang on a minute while I get you a going away beer.” He directed one of those long legs toward an adjoining room.

“Nothing for me, please!” Meg called after him.

“Will you shut up?” hissed Grundel in her right ear.

“What?”

“I could surely use one in this heat, Wolf!” he shouted. To her, he whispered, “Let the creep get out of the room, will you? He’s not our werewolf, but—”

“How can you tell?” she demanded in a low tone.

“If he was a werewolf, no matter how stupid he was, don’t you think he would know the date of the next full moon? This guy is a fruitcake, but he hasn’t ever sprouted fur. Now hop yourself out to the car and stay clear.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Take down a bad guy, sweetheart.” It was an exceptionally poor imitation of Bogart, but it conveyed his plans to her, and they weren’t very encouraging.

“Let the police handle—”

“Here’s the brewsky!” stated Wolfman, entering the room. “Cold and sharp as my teeth tomorrow night!”

With a slight shove to set Meg on her way to the door, Nick reached into his belt and came up with a small but deadly-looking gun which he gleefully pointed into the big man’s face. “Game’s over, dotto. You may not be Talbot, but you are definitely sick, so get your hands up.”

“What’s this?” Wolfman demanded.

“Great response, Leonardo, just the Wildian riposte that I expected.” Grundel half-turned his head toward Meg, who was standing in the doorway, and said, “Talley, go down to the car and look in the glovebox for—”

Wolfman threw the two beers he held with the synchronized power of a major league pitcher. While one missed the target completely, the second connected with Grundel’s forehead as noisily as a pair of clapping hands. From Meg’s viewpoint behind him, Nick abruptly resembled a surfacing whale as the beer spouted high over his head while he staggered back.

Words were no longer important to Wolfman; he charged at Grundel with a primitive roar, swept the small gun aside into the darkness of the room, and grasped the much shorter man by the front of his shirt to lift him two feet off of the floor. Nick began kicking wildly in the area of the ape’s groin, but his thrashing feet connected only with knees and thighs, which angered the attacker but failed to injure him. Exploding with an even louder howl, the Wolfman hurled Grundel away from him as if he were no more than an offending bundle of clothing and sent the man sailing across the floor and into the screen door, which he smashed like old twigs in passing.

Meg had been frozen by the eruption of violence, but when Nick soared by her face in imitation of the human cannonball and Wolfman followed to complete his job, she reflexively extended her right leg to trip the big man and cause him to dive for the unfinished wooden floor. He skidded face down for a couple of feet. Meg knew that she was not the female incarnation of Bruce Lee, just as she knew that the bellowing psychotic would transfer his outpouring of rage at her as soon as he regained his feet, so she utilized the weapon with which she was proficient—her handbag—and swung it in the manner of an Olympian’s hammer with enough speed and precision to neatly clip the back of his rising head. The roar of anger switched to a grunt of pain, and he dropped his head back into the floor.

Nickie’s going to be furious, she thought with a happy pride. Even with his gun, he couldn’t handle this goon, and I have triumphed using one of the oldest weapons known to women. Here, have another for what you did to my car!

Meg’s sense of control evaporated quite swiftly at midpoint in her second swing at the prone man, who, for all of his mental slowness, was remarkably fast in his physical reactions. His body flipped over even as her bag descended at him, and his snakelike left hand darted out to catch the purse and wrench it from her grasp at the same time that his right was shoving itself upward. Meg attempted the universal assault tactic, as had Grundel, with a hard kick to the testicles, but she was thrown off by his speed and abruptly found herself staring up into those wild eyes.

“Nick!” she shouted.

The Wolfman pitched a straight right at her, and though it missed her face, the knotty fist still slammed into her chest just below her throat and knocked her completely off her feet and over the back of a dust-laden sofa. For a week after the confrontation, Meg was unable to move either of her arms without inciting hot pain throughout the front of her body, thanks to that single, powerful punch.

Nick Grundel would never have admitted to being possessed of anything approximating bravery and habitually claimed to be interested solely in the welfare of Nick Grundel. But as soon as his scattered senses returned to his head from the far corners of the porch on which he found himself and Meg’s shriek punctured the woozy balloon that enveloped him, he charged back into the darkness intent upon subduing the bughead who had treated him so roughly. Since he had already tested the strength in those long, massive arms, he decided to go low this time, around ankle level, and try to do some damage by bowling over the big sucker. It was an intelligent, if ultimately futile, plan.

Wolfman was ready for the attack and hopped lightly over the shooting body, bringing down his huge, unshod feet on Grundel’s back, arms, and butt.

“Ow! Watch it, you big fathead!” screamed Grundel. In response, Wolfman leaned down and gathered him up in those arms once again, though this time, the smaller man found himself pinned upside down by a breath-denying bear hug about his waist, with his own legs dangling like the antennae of a grotesquely enlarged insect. “Yow, let me go, you idiot! Put me down!”

Wolfman replied by jerking his arms in a reversed Heimlich Maneuver, jumping up and down, and bawling, “I gonna kill you this time, bud!” Grundel was vaguely aware of Meg’s dancing around the two of them and beating ineffectually at the brute’s back and shoulders.

The ridiculous ballet ended moments later when a near-platoon of gun-wielding policemen rushed through the ruined screen door and surrounded them with their weapons’ barrels directed in a most eloquent statement.

“Will you drop the kid, Harmon?” the lead policeman demanded in something close to exasperation. “Come on, put him down, now!”

Wolfman released his hold on Grundel and raised his arms in meek contradiction to his immediately previous reaction to a gun pointed at his stomach; Nick plunged down like a disabled missile and just managed to get his arms beneath him in time to prevent his head from driving into the floor. Wolfman/Harmon had been handcuffed and was being led out into a waiting patrol car by the time Grundel was able to sit up, with Meg’s concerned attention.

The police captain stalked over to the pair and glared down at them with all of the fury of an ancient pagan god. “Just what in the name of sanity are you two doing here, blowing all of our work to hell this way?” he yelled. “I ought to run you in and charge you with interfering with police surveillance!”

“Officer, I’m Margret Talley—” the young woman began.

“I know who you are, Miss, and I’ve got a pretty damned good idea of why you’re here, which is why you’re not out there with the nutcase right now!”

The old Nick Grundel surfaced from his daze. “If you know why we’re here, why did you ask why we’re here?”

The cop stabbed Nick with his eyes. “You shut the hell up!” He returned his attention to Meg. “I know you from that run-in you had last month with the Maniac and from your TV career, so who’s he? That writer who’s promoting you?”

“Right,” muttered Grundel. “The name’s Corbett, A.B. Corbett.”

“His name is Nicholas Grundel,” Meg said pointedly, “and he’s an associate of mine. We’ve been tracking this killer.”

“Jessie Harmon’s no killer. He’s a screwed up mental case with an institutional record dating back fifteen years, but he was a possible lead to the real psycho before you amateurs decided to save the population of the state of California single-handedly.”

“What kind of lead could he be?” asked Meg.

“By sitting out here in the open, mouthing off about how he was the Wolfman, we hoped that he would attract the real killer into exposing himself. We kept a stake-out on surveillance at all times, though he’s got no record of serious assaults, until now. The team panicked, called us down from Newhall, and blew the whole set-up for nothing.”

“Thanks for the value judgment of our lives,” Nick grumbled.

“Your lives … because of you, that crazy monster will probably be loose for another month and slaughter some other innocent families!”

“Oh lord,” gasped Meg.

“Come off it, mister,” snapped Grundel. “If this is the only chance you have of pulling in the werewolf, Lynnview would be better off with Larry, Moe, and Shemp as protection. Harmon is as likely an attraction as I am!”

The captain started to answer but thought better of it and simply stormed out of the house to join his men. Meg and Nick slowly followed, leaning painfully on one another and resembling nothing so much as two-thirds of the painting The Spirit of ’76.

Blake Corbett also pursued an end that he thought would be revealed as the transmuting murderer, but his confrontation came six days later, September 12th, with the tension growing throughout Los Angeles, Lynnview, and the surrounding countryside; the media had thoroughly saturated the public consciousness with the fact that the first night of the next full moon would be at the end of that week. It was also for that reason that Corbett decided to follow through with a theory that had been formed out of related hunches and stray thoughts, but for which he had absolutely no solid evidence.

First, he went back to the grind of research, employing primarily the Hollywood records which were so easily obtained in the LA area. His subject was Lorenzo Cameron, and the pertinent facts that he discovered were:

Cameron, Lorenzo Anthony (born, Anthony Eugene Kazanjian, April 5, 1915, in Hobart, Indiana). Acted in high school and junior college productions, 1929-35; appeared in title role of Hamlet in Gary (Ind.) Little Theatre, 1937; came to Hollywood in 1938, appearing as film extra and in nonspeaking parts through 1940 (including Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, Edison the Man, Rulers of the Sea, Brother Rat and a Baby, and The Letter), as Anthony Kazanjian, and in bit and secondary parts from 1941 through 1942 (Pot o’ Gold, Moon Over Miami, True to the Army, others) as Tony Kazan. Achieved some prominence after changing name to Lorenzo Cameron in 1943 and first and second male leads in films such as Sagebrush, The Story of Pearl Harbor (both 1943), Hotpoint, Mulligan’s Canyon, Dead Man’s Hands (1944), and Beast From the Bayou in 1945. Congenital foot deformation kept the actor out of service in World War II. His initial financial success came in early 1946 with the release of Cry of the Lobo, in which he portrayed Jeffery Burke, the alternately savage and repentant “Lobo” or werewolf of the title; the unexpected response rivalled the reaction to Chaney’s The Wolfman, released five years earlier. Over the next half-dozen years, a series of Lobo films followed (Return of the Lobo in 1946, The Lobo’s Ghost in 1947, Mark of the Lobo in 1949, The Terrible Curse in 1951, and an all-star vehicle which featured five Castille Studios monsters entitled Lucifer’s Castle in 1952), before traditional gothic-styled horror was replaced by scientifically-inspired dinosaurs, mutants, and interstellar invaders. Cameron’s career as a name-value star was ended in the wave of science fiction films which followed, but he had made good salaries in his heyday, had invested well, and was financially quite comfortable by the time he turned forty. Cameron’s career was selective from 1955 onward, and he appeared largely in character roles in movies and on television, with his final professional appearance coming as a walk-on in The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. According to the latest information (the bulletin of the “Lorenzo Cameron Fan Club”, headquartered in Joplin, Missouri), the retired actor was in good health and living quietly with his wife on his estate in Riverside, California.

Corbett couldn’t say exactly what had first sparked suspicion concerning Cameron, but he felt that this strange conviction had been given a big push on that rainy Monday morning in Morgan’s office as he read Professor Cummings’ description of a theoretically “genuine” werewolf. There were many similarities between the instructor’s extrapolations and the characteristics of Cameron’s Lobo: the practical invulnerability due to cellular regeneration, the view of the lycanthropy as a disease rather than a supernatural curse, the fact that some individuals might see the condition as desirable and a small price to pay for immortality, and other odds and ends.

These similarities were strengthened when his research turned up the fact that the second “Lobo” picture (Return of the Lobo) had been filmed partially in the largely devastated countries of Eastern Europe on a governmental deal implemented to provide private American capital to the areas in need of reconstruction. While these authentic locations were great benefits to the background of the movie—Europe being the home of the American concept of lycanthropy—Blake couldn’t help but make the connection: supremely ironic or not, it was entirely possible that an Indiana-born actor playing the part of a tortured mutating killer had encountered his real life counterpart in the black, ancient forests of Romania or Bulgaria and been infected with the very sickness that had been merely a pretense. Corbett’s well-developed sense of supernatural retribution reveled in the idea.

With this pleasing, if admittedly farfetched, possibility as a starting point, Corbett began to look for related facts that would reinforce his case, such as an unexplainable series of brutal murders which occurred in places where Lorenzo Cameron happened to be filming. The only helpful incident that came of his long hours of gazing through old newspapers and crime magazines, however, had to do with the death in the state of Georgia of a young hunter one full moon-lit night in 1958. The corpse was mutilated horribly, and the official explanation had attributed the deed to a pack of wild dogs, former pets which had been abandoned and reverted to feral existence in the rough back country of the area. It interested Blake because that time in 1958 just happened to correspond to a month when Cameron was in Georgia shooting a cameo appearance in the Burl Ives/Christopher Plummer movie Wind Across the Everglades. Might not the wounds left by an attack of a werewolf be mistaken for the similar ones of a wild dog killing?

(A fact that kept nagging at Corbett throughout his research into Cameron’s career was that the man, a former top name actor and high earner, continually accepted tiny, almost negligible roles in a wide variety of films for what must have been mediocre pay at best. Generally speaking, the ego of a show-business personality who has once reached the heights will not allow him to accept such minor work, unless he is in desperate need of money, which all sorts of documentation proved that Cameron was not. Perhaps the location filming gave the man a reason for travelling extensively and thus spreading out the unfortunate results of his monthly rages over a stretch of geography which would prevent authorities from establishing a pattern to them.)

Armed with the knowledge that awaiting the September 17th atrocity would quickly prove that all of his speculation had been correct, Corbett nevertheless was unable to sit back in safe comfort and allow the possible deaths of more unsuspecting people to confirm his theory. Though Cameron hadn’t worked since 1972, the Screen Actors’ Guild still listed him and the agent with whom he was associated, and the latter individual provided a telephone number that Blake used to set up a meeting with the object of his search (under the cover story of interviewing the old star for a magazine article).

Corbett knew well of Meg and Nick’s abortive attempt to bring in the Wolfman by that time, naturally; and he knew that the law, who had sternly advised all four of them to keep their noses out of an official investigation, would not appreciate what he was doing in driving to Riverside to meet with Cameron. But it was getting late, late for everyone. What if his suspicions were correct, and the monster, during one of his fits, was faced with more victims than he could slay, though not too many to savage and infect with his peculiar disease? And what if those affected by the assaults were not diagnosed as fellow sufferers and were given the opportunity to further spread the plague? Geometrically expanding populations of snarling, raging wolf creatures filled the writer’s head as he drove and caused his hands to grip the wheel in white-knuckled alarm.

The Cameron estate was large, green, and over-all the epitome of style and dignity, which testified to the intelligence that the actor—or his business manager—had shown at the peak of his earning power. Like their athletic counterparts, boxers, many successful acting personalities were unable to cope with the sudden influx of big money and spent their latter years living in ghettos or lending their names to miniscule-budget productions, the way that fighters were reduced to janitorial or shoe shining jobs.

A butler answered at Blake’s knock, but Lorenzo Cameron was right behind the man, tall, smiling, and apparently in brimming good health in spite of his advancing age (a symptom of the disease?) He was about six feet (Morgan’s height, and the height Meg had assigned to the thing which had attacked her), perhaps a rather spare one hundred and fifty pounds, and had a full head of finely waved gray hair (it would be ridiculously easy to dye his hair to give the impression of an age that had been withheld from his body).

“Ah, Mr. Corbett, isn’t it?” the actor asked in a hearty voice. “Here, Cushing, let the man in.”

Blake shook the hand which had been extended to him, though not without a touch of trepidation, and returned the greeting. “Mr. Cameron, I’d recognize you anywhere. I must have seen your pictures a dozen times each.”

Cameron laughed and took his shoulder to guide him into the large and tastefully furnished home. “They certainly play them enough on the late shows, don’t they? I’ll bet I’m something of a disappointment to you without my fangs and claws!”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Corbett disagreed, stepping inside. “I admire your acting in the films as much as the special effects.”

“Are you going to get a long, cooperative interview!” Cameron led him through hallway and into an airy den, apologizing that his wife would not be present for the session, and Blake noticed, as they walked, the decided limp favoring the right leg with which his host moved. Of course, it was on record that a malformed right foot had kept him from serving during the Second World War, despite his attempts to join the Army, but Blake had never detected a limp in any of his definitely athletic roles early in his career and had relegated any such difficulties to character acting in his later appearances. Cameron seated himself in a well-stuffed arm chair and indicated that Corbett should do likewise.

“First,” Cameron began, “let me say that I know of you, also. Yes, when a Mr. A.B. Corbett telephoned for an interview, I scanned through my personal library and came across five volumes of your work, all of which I have read and thoroughly enjoyed.”

If he was a mass murderer, he certainly was the most congenial one Blake had ever heard of. “Thank you. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do: satisfy the reader, not the critics.”

“You, too, huh? How about a touch of the grape? Wine? A liqueur? Whiskey?”

Out of politeness, Corbett consulted his watch (two in the afternoon, it told him) and answered, “Oh, nothing for me, thanks. It’s a little early.”

Cameron rang a small bell on the table next to his chair. “I believe I’ll have a draught to loosen my vocal chords. Now, where shall we begin? With a standard statistical biography?”

“That would be fine.”

While Cameron rolled off the facts which Blake had already dug out of various sources, the writer pretended to be taking down the information on a notepad, but in truth his imagination was working double-time. The healthy, forceful personality before him belonged to a man much younger than Lorenzo (Anthony Kazanjian) Cameron, a self-assured, powerful man of, say, thirty or thirty-one (which was how old he had been when he made the second “Lobo” film in Europe). His entire demeanor was that of a person in complete control of himself and his situation because he was … invulnerable? Immortal? Naturally, such a personality could also have been attributed to the fact that Cameron was a wealthy man who had become so in a business that was nine-tenths filled with talented failures, but Corbett’s racing mind had its explanation devised and would not allow a more rational solution to intrude.

Cameron progressed through his early years in Indiana and his initial efforts in Hollywood before Blake ventured to interrupt with a question. “Mr. Cameron—” he began.

“Please, call me Anthony. As I said earlier, my actual name was Anthony Eugene Kazanjian before I changed it. Isn’t that a jaw breaker?” Before Corbett could insert the question, which had to do with the overseas filming of the second movie in his most famous series, the actor went on, “Young man, I’m going to give you a ‘scoop’ that I’ve admitted to no other interviewer, though a few of my correspondents have guessed the ‘secret.’ In the first years of my career, I was known as Anthony Kazanjian, and when I made Moon Over Miami in 1941 with Betty Grable and Don Ameche I went by the name of Tony Kazan, real slick, real Hollywood. It was chosen by my first agent. But in 1942, I saw a combination horror movie-anti-Nazi film called The Mad Monster, featuring Glenn Strange and George Zucco. Have you ever seen it?”

Preoccupied with his growing conviction, Blake still took the time to briefly run through his memory of monster films seen, but he drew a blank. “Can’t say that I have.”

Cameron shrugged. “It wasn’t a big hit. It dealt with a sort of artificially created werewolf.”

In 1942? Corbett thought. Four years before Romania?

“Well, George Zucco, whom I knew rather well at the time, had another role as a slightly insane scientist named Lorenzo Cameron.” The actor smiled as realization dawned in Blake’s face. “My career was progressing somewhat slowly at the time and I had just gotten rid of my agent, so I figured, Why not give a new name a try? A number of young actors go through the same stages in their early years. Anyway, ‘Lorenzo’ sounded a bit mysterious and Latin, while ‘Cameron’ was acceptably Anglo-Saxon, so I took it. No one was more surprised than I when my career took off the next year. I did Hotpoint, The Story of Pearl Harbor—”

“Cry of the Lobo,” supplied Blake.

“Yes, yes, after the war, and that one really did it.”

“And the first sequel was filmed overseas, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right, in Europe. The government tried to promote American investment during the Occupation, and while the locations were excellent for the picture’s atmosphere, I can’t say very much for the facilities on a continent which had just gone through the most devastating war in history. Still, I met some fascinating people and heard tales which were supposedly quite true but which would chill your blood, believe me.”

“Did you believe any of them?” Blake asked abruptly.

“Hmmm? Oh, you mean the stories?”

“Yes.”

Cameron chuckled. “The surroundings lent them an air of authenticity, of course, and at night in the areas where there was little to do in the way of entertainment it was easy to feel that the spirits of the dead glided about in those dark forests, but I must be honest with you, Mr. Corbett. Actually, I do not now have any belief in the so-called supernatural, and I never have in the past, either. It may crush a number of your readers to discover that I’m too hardheaded to fully accept any of the scripts that I acted, but that’s the way things are.”

“It does exist, you know,” Blake said almost involuntarily, “the supernatural is real.”

Cameron gazed at him quizzically.

“Right now there’s an event occurring in this area that rivals anything in any of your films! There are werewolves, here, now!”

“Lynnview!” Cameron responded with a smile and a slap on the right arm of his chair. “That’s what you’re talking about and where I’ve seen you! You and that girl, that … um …”

“Margret Talley.”

“Yes, exactly!” He was becoming more excited by the instant, though it was a happy excitement. “You and she have been on television espousing the theory that a real werewolf is responsible for those murders!”

“That’s right. I’m as convinced of it as anything in my life.”

“Oh, god, how exciting! What’s your theory? Is he an emigrant who brought this curse with him or an American who has been delving into the occult?”

Suddenly, the story came pouring out of Corbett: “We think that it’s someone who once played the part for the movies, Mr. Cameron, an actor who left the United States to film a picture in old Europe, where the legends began and where the truth behind those legends still lives.”

Cameron’s eyes seemed to be glowing with fervor. “Yes, what a story that would be! The player who is doomed to live out his play in actuality.”

“No, not doomed, privileged, because he found that this encounter with a carrier of the disease, no matter how painful or terrifying at the moment that it occurred, left him invulnerable, ageless, capable of existing in vitality while the world slipped by without him.”

“This is gripping, boy, you have a real tale here! You could sell it to any major studio. Victim becomes willing participant in his affliction.”

“At first, maybe, he would feel great remorse at what his inner monster required of him each time the full moon rose, but when he realized the full extent of his gifts, his attitude would change. Being a civilized man, he would undoubtedly try to take the right precautions—because at least at the beginning, he wouldn’t enjoy killing innocent men and women—and he would lock himself away on those nights, but after years, decades, his discipline would slip, and he would begin to either escape his self-constructed cage or find himself away from this protective cage and there would be more accidents: a fourteen year old hunter in Georgia, a night-travelling insurance salesman who stopped to give him a ride elsewhere.”

“Building to the crescendo, good, good!”

Corbett nodded. “And then there comes a point when the ‘accidents’ give way to intentional foraging, during which he vents his ever-building fury against the unsuspecting humanity in which he existed as a member for the greatest portion of his life. Now he has lost all inhibitions and begins to long for the release that is given to him during those hours that the moon rules, and he drives into areas that are isolated from the clustered caves of man but which still support occasional dwellings. On a lonely road outside of a small town, he changes and, like the animal he has become, tracks his prey to their home, into which he slips and catches them—a man and his wife—asleep in their bed.”

“Asleep and as unprotected as modern people can be!” added Cameron enthusiastically.

“Right, and he mercilessly slaughters the couple; and then the next full moon arrives. He can hardly control his wild desires. He wants to kill again and taste human flesh to satiate the millions of bacteria which live forever inside of him! He finds another house, but this one contains four people, one a pretty eighteen year old girl in her nightgown, begging his rage-deafened ears for her young heart and throat!”

“Lord, it’ll work better than The Exorcist or Halloween or any of those, and putting the beautiful girl in adds the sex that the audiences demand these days!”

“But that’s not the end. With this family dead, he has to wait another month until the cycle within his body completes itself once again, and the days flash by, reducing the period of safety that has been allotted the people of Lynnview to mere hours, while the monster eagerly contemplates his next night of liberation!”

Cameron slapped his hand down on the arm of the chair again, with enough of an explosion to startle Blake, and then he jumped to his feet, still with that mad smile. “Suspense, action, beautiful women, if I were thirty years younger, I’d beg you for the part myself!”

Corbett also stood. “Mr. Cameron, you are that man.”

For a moment, the actor stared at him, and then he drew back his head and roared with laughter, but this was different, more acidic, than the mirth that he had shown throughout the conversation. “You know,” he said when he could a few seconds later, “I thought that you would say it, but I hoped not. Now that it has come to the confessional basics, I suppose I’ll have to tell you the truth.”

A strangely detached fear blew through Corbett. He was about to hear an admission of guilt that he had worked for but never really, deeply believed in as fact, and he suddenly realized that Lorenzo Cameron was quite a bit larger than he. Sure, he looked old and hardly capable of offering effective resistance to a much younger man like Blake; but, as the unaging werewolf, his physical form was just as youthful as the day—or night, rather—that he had encountered the demon in some European forest. Blake had to face the arising possibility that he would have to fight his way out of this room.

“Sit down, son,” Cameron said in a kindly tone.

“I’d like to stand.”

The actor placed one large hand on his shoulder. “Please.” Corbett felt the strength of that hand forcing him downward into the chair and allowed it. Cameron also sat. “Now, how many people have you told about this … theory of yours that I am the Lynnview Mangler?”

Blake’s mind was working frenziedly. “A lot,” he said. “Uh, Doug Morgan, Nick Grundel, Margret, and Captain Richard Marsh of the L.A.P.D. He’s a policeman.” It was all a lie, of course; he had decided early that his ideas concerning a noted impersonator of werewolves being a legitimate lycanthrope sounded very idiotic, even to him, and had kept quiet about it all.

Cameron was slowly shaking his head. Blake wondered when he would ring that little bell again and Boris Karloff would lumber into the room playing the butler and carrying an ax.

“That’s really too bad, young man,” he said. “It will be rather embarrassing, I guess.”

“What?”

“That I’m not your killer.”

“But it fits, just like a puzzle. You said that it fit.”

“Life is not an easily assembled jigsaw, Corbett, and it seldom resembles one.” He took a long drink before continuing. “The holes have to be pointed out, naturally, because I don’t want to spend the remaining weeks until the next full moon night in police custody. Number one: there are no werewolves, never were, and won’t be until modern scientific medicine gets around to actively manipulating the genetic codings of human beings, the way old George did to poor Glenn Strange. Two: I did not kill a boy hunter in Georgia, a travelling salesman anywhere, and during the nights of the murders in Lynnview, I was calmly sleeping in my room right here in the manor, as my wife and staff will attest.”

“Sure they would, but—”

Cameron held up his hand. “Number three: as you may have guessed from seeing how I limp, I was born with a twisted right foot, not a catastrophic deformity, but enough of one to keep me out of the action in World War II. From what I’ve read in the papers, especially in the columns of this Doug Morgan, whom you mentioned, I know that the police have clear tracks of the killer’s bare feet, and neither shows any malformation—”

“That doesn’t mean a thing, and you know it!” snapped Blake. “The disease is symbiotic and … molds the body in which it lives! During the first attack of shape-shifting, your foot could have become as healthy and normal as anyone’s, and this limp you pretend to have is just camouflage!”

Cameron sighed. “Would that it were,” he said softly. “The foot never bothered me extensively as I grew, other than to keep me out of competitive sports and direct me toward acting, and when I finally made it into films, I was able to bind it before shootings and walk so that my stride was almost the same as other men. But when I had the hit with ‘Lobo,’ which was a most physical part, as Lon might have told you before he passed away, the preparations became much more extensive and included regular drug injections to combat the pain involved; still, by the time I made the last two, doubles were used in every scene possible. I realized that I was taking huge chances with my health, but those pictures represented my greatest opportunity to make decent money from my career—they were such massive successes, relatively cheap to make, and I had a percentage of the gross of each—so I went through with it.

“By 1954, I couldn’t have made another even if the demand for them hadn’t been destroyed by the giant-monster-on-the-rampage craze, and in October of that year, I had to have extensive surgery performed.” He suddenly leaned forward, drew up his right pants-leg, and pulled down the long sock to reveal the network of straps that covered his upper calf. With swift motions of his deft hands, Cameron unfastened the straps and removed his right foot. “You see, the theory that I am the savage murderer of those people in Lynnview is quite ingenious and would certainly work as a screenplay, but there is just no way that I could commit these crimes and leave behind two natural footprints. Even if the monthly transformation gave me back my real foot, that means I would have had to have anticipated your visit and somehow or other amputated it before today.”

Corbett wanted to throw his pad and pen into the air and slap his forehead vigorously with both hands. Instead, he flushed with embarrassment and began an attempt at apology. “Mr. Cameron, I … don’t know what to say … I feel so incredibly stupid and vicious, coming here, to your home, without any proof whatsoever and accusing you this way.”

Cameron chuckled once more and slapped his shoulder jovially. “Not at all, don’t even think of it, my boy. This has been one of the most enjoyable afternoons of the entire year for me, and I can tell that you did it all for the sake of others, those whom the Maniac hasn’t had the opportunity to attack, yet. Relax! Have a drink!”

“Yeah, thanks, maybe I will.”

Cameron rang the bell. “Now, I certainly hope that you aren’t planning to leave just yet. As soon as we’re finished talking about me, I’d like to ask you more about your work and why you weren’t around turning out such photogenic properties when I was acting!”

The personal esteem of the three investigators who had been involved in the unsuccessful attempts to stop the murderer before he had another chance to strike plumbed the depths in the days that followed; the police were vocally upset with them, another paper had somehow gotten the story of Nick and Meg’s confrontation with Jessie Harmon, and new doubts concerning the possibility of the existence of the creature they were pursuing were given new opportunities to surface and nip painfully at them. Douglas Morgan, who was the only member of the group not to be drawn into the active efforts to capture the werewolf, didn’t add to their troubles with a single word of admonition, but they could tell by his eyes that he was less than happy over the jobs they had done to wreck the already shaky credibility of the investigation. His editorial bosses longed to order him off of the story and back to more “conventional” topics, but the positive response to his columns remained high and even increased as the seventeenth approached, so the order was postponed in favor of beneficial sales, at least until after the next full moon.

The approach of that night also acted to dissipate their gloom. Public interest returned, predictably, including a brief rash of tasteless “Wolfman Parties” held at various teenaged hangouts and resembling misplaced Halloween celebrations, and the investigative spirits of the four flared in response. True, they had failed to find the sick killer while he was still in his relatively harmless stage, but the police departments of both Lynnview and Los Angeles had as much as openly admitted that they would be on the streets in cavalry force on that Saturday night, so their hounding of the cities’ authorities had at least greatly reduced the possibility that the monster would have an easy time in finding his prey this time.

One moment it was Wednesday, a long distance from the target night, and the next the sun was setting on Friday. Doug, Meg, Blake, and Nick forced themselves to get sleep that night, even though they had to resort to over the counter drugs to do so, because they knew that the hours between dusk on Saturday and dawn on Sunday would offer no rest for their wildly spinning minds and they wouldn’t try to sleep if they had been able.

Saturday arrived on schedule, and the entire area which had been subject to a pair of inhumanly vicious assaults already was as tight with building tension as an over-filled balloon on the point of bursting.

It was getting very late, and he knew that he should not stop so close to those houses that he had seen back there, but twice already he had actually fallen asleep at the wheel for short instants and nearly run off the road into the tall trees that lined either side like the walls of a vast trench. He wasn’t suicidal. Not yet.

While the man slowed the Chevrolet and pulled it into a small hollow between the highway and the trees, a new thought struck him: suppose he did fall asleep behind the wheel and become involved in a fiery wreck, would he die? Once, that would have been a question answered by the laws of probability, but he was beyond most of the mortal laws now, and he knew that there were certain times when he could not die. But what about when he was a “normal” human being?

He had some evidence with which to decide the matter. In the past six months he hadn’t been sick (from physical causes) even once, but, then, he had always been a very healthy specimen. There were the small injuries that are a part of life, of course, and since March, he was sure that his healing time had improved dramatically; oh, he didn’t knit up cuts or drain bruises with visible speed, the way that the distorted portion of his memory told him he did when in the midst of those other times, but a minor slash which would have taken a week to heal before now was a pink scar in a day to a day and a half. So, could he die?

Would he grow old?

Or would that unbelievably alien life form which had made itself a part of him allow its host to grow old or die?

The brisk evening air helped to rid him of these as yet unanswerable questions and the lethargy that his fatigue had caused, and he walked around the dark blue car once before reaching in through an open window for the thermos jug and giving the caffeine in the coffee a chance to fight the sleepiness. It was still warm for mid-September, even up here, in this part of the country, but on that fast wind, even a human nose could smell the beginnings of a welcome fall. Fall. He was six months old.

Happy half-birthday to me, he mentally sang, but it was a bitter tune.

He hadn’t eaten in two days, in some futile hope that a low level of bodily energy would stave off the attack this time, and though his stomach had lessened in its physical demands for food, the mental side of him could hardly think of anything other than how much he would enjoy a hot, cooked meal—and the terrors that lay just a few hours ahead of him. Naturally, the stark visions of the latter chased away any traces of the former anticipatory pleasure when they reinvaded his brain.

Yes, yes, yes, he told himself grimly, I’m ravenous now, but in the morning, if I’m lucky in the “hunt”, I’ll be so glutted with meat that I’ll puke my guts out with the thought of what it is. And if I’m unsuccessful—oh, God, please let me be unsuccessful—maybe I’ll exhaust enough energy to destroy the other life within me.

Sitting in the open door on the driver’s side, the man began to sip at the remaining coffee (now stone cold) in his thermos and surveyed the unending walls of trees which stretched out before him. It might not be a bad place to stop for the night, he decided. The houses he had passed were some miles back, and with the car safely off the road, he could take off his clothing, lock it up, hide the keys, and jog back into the depths of these woods. He might have some trouble finding the spot in the morning, but at least there wouldn’t be any repetition of the Gretler or Mitchell fiascos. He took another swallow of the coffee.

“Hey,” said a small voice.

The man jerked his eyes about, searching for the speaker with the sharp suspicion of a wild animal. He didn’t have to look far.

“What you doing?” asked the little girl.

She was about five years old, a slight little blond girl with a dirt-smeared face and a younger brother clasped in her left hand. The boy was just a toddler, still in diapers, practically bald, and with a yellow pacifier clenched in his mouth. Both wore a minimum of clothing, as if they were on their way to a day at the beach rather than wandering around in the woods at nightfall in the middle of September. Some parents …

“Drinking coffee,” he said in answer to her question. “What are you doing?”

She shrugged.

“Where’s your mommie?”

“Back there,” the girl said, pointing a short way back along the highway. “At home.”

The man squinted in the direction of her pointing finger and barely made out the glow of lights through a cluster of trees. “Does she know that you and your brother are out here near the highway?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s getting dark. You should go home.”

The two of them stared at him with wise eyes that understood all and nothing. The man had always had a special love for children and had once decided to marry and have about a dozen, but that had been before he had broken up with Ingrid. Now, he doubted that he would ever again allow himself to become so interested in a woman that he would propose to her, because he couldn’t ask anyone to share this burden with him.

Naturally, his attitudes might change in forty or fifty years. He laughed. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.

“What you laughin’ about?” asked the girl.

“Myself,” he answered. “Now run along home.”

Again they waited silently, staring at him as if they knew. His mind, which had been under a strain over the past months, to put it mildly, shifted gears again and took the vision fed to it by his eyes and twisted it into what could be. Their beautiful, if dirty, young faces wavered and were replaced by bloody caricatures of corpses after his disease had visited them through his hands and teeth. Their innocence and trust betrayed by his affliction. It was terrible enough to know that he had killed adults, but to even fantasize in revulsion that he might attack a little child bright him back from the plane of detached intellectualism to the slimy wretchedness of his reality, a reality which might well last forever.

“Go home!” the man said with abrupt urgency.

They didn’t move. “What’s your name?” replied the child.

He leapt from the car and towered over them like some angry spirit. “I said go home!” he shouted, the visions of them ripping at his guts. “Go away! Get to your home and lock all of your doors!”

The little girl’s composure finally cracked, and she screamed in high-pitched terror, as the baby burst into tears. The effect of his outburst was just what he had planned for it to be, and the two tiny figures fled from the sight of him, wailing, with the older sister half-dragging her baby brother.

That’s right, child, he thought. Never let go, no matter what.

They vanished into the darkness, as he wished he could, and their flight was directed toward the faint diffusion that represented home and safety. But, really, how safe was that house or any man-made structure when he was in his full, awful vitality? They could yet become food for his grotesque appetite and ghosts to join the other apparitions which accused him every second of every day of his life. No. That would not happen.

The thermos was empty but for a few weak drops of brown fluid, and when he sat heavily in the seat next to it, these drops leaked onto his pants, though he hardly noticed. Once, he had been a fastidious individual, but now all of that mattered as little as the other minutiae that had been left behind with his “normal” life. He cranked the vehicle, checked the registered full tank of gas, which had cost a good chunk of his depleting funds, and swung out onto the highway again. He could at least go as far as that would take him, well away from the brother and sister, who he had saved with a dose of fright.

The road ran in terror before his headlights the way the human race ran before his savage hunger.

Captain Richard Marsh was only one of the vast collection of law officials from Los Angeles and Lynnview who loudly denied permission to the four member band when they asked to accompany the combined forces into the small town on the night of September 17. In fact, Marsh had pointedly informed them that if the face of any one of them was found inside the city limits and recognized by a policeman (or woman) such would be far and away grounds enough for immediate incarceration followed by official charging in court.

None of the four even considered staying away from the scene of the next strike, however, because they had worked for this moment for most of a month and were convinced that quick and proper action by Marsh and his cohorts would stop all of the deaths and vindicate their efforts. Meg saved them in this instance, because she lived in Lynnview and could hardly be banned from her own place of residence (unless Marsh wanted to go into technicalities concerning the college upstate at which she had been scheduled to be in attendance before becoming involved with the investigation; he didn’t bother because he didn’t have the time). Her parents weren’t thrilled to have three strange men as overnight guests, especially when they were informed that the trio intended to stay up all night monitoring police calls on equipment that Morgan was bringing in from Los Angeles. They had been worried and upset when Meg first displayed her unnatural interest in the entire affair by hunting the killer on her own, and their fears hadn’t been allayed when she took up an open investigation with these same three men, but their daughter had always been strong-willed and independent; besides, having a group of men awake and on guard while the publicized night passed was something of a comfort.

Just to be doubly sure, Meg’s father Mitch Talley would keep them company with a gun which was considerably more powerful than the .22 that his daughter had carried along on her first meeting with the Animal Man.

They moved into Lynnview in mid-afternoon, before the cops began covering the streets in preparation for a third performance. A curfew could have been imposed just on the occurrences of the past two months, and on first look it appeared to be the safest plan of action, but the authorities were especially intent on bringing this murderer to quick justice. Since they had no leads which could be used to move them out of square one, they decided to allow the night to approach and pass like any other and flood the entire town and outer roads with ummarked patrol cars in hopes that the obviously unbalanced killer would not be able to resist all of the “game” floating about on a Saturday. It was true that this would increase the chances of more deaths, but expediency equaled risk in their opinions.

Meg was busy all afternoon and into the evening trying to build a bridge between her suspicious family and the men with whom she was working. Only Blake seemed to make any effort to be friendly; Doug was too intent to respond to her father’s questions and statements with anything more than the most terse, if civil, replies, and Nick was … well, he was himself, which explained his attitude. She was the perfect hostess and did what she thought was a decent job of proving to her parents that these were not sex fiends, eccentric eggheads, or even collectively the Animal Man weaving a complicated alibi for themselves, but throughout the day she still caught her Dad eying all three with more than a touch of cautious distrust.

Night fell at 6:04.

“What time’s the moon set to come up?” asked Grundel as he peered out the front window of the modest but well-furnished home into the quiet suburban street.

“Look at the sky, stupid,” advised Morgan, with no trace of affection in the sentence. “It sets at 11:29 tonight.”

“Oh,” said Nick.

“You see, Nick, I think this fact as much as anything proves that the actual appearance of the moon has no effect on the werewolf, other than a psychological one which incites the physical one,” Blake explained. “Meg, what time of the morning was it when you saw him?”

She thought for a moment. “After two, I’m sure of that.”

“And records show that the moon set before midnight last month. Of course, I have no real evidence, but I’d guess that the man reacts to the time of the month, since his mind tells him that’s when the transformation occurs, as Cummings’ article maintained, and he changes at nightfall and reverts at daybreak, no matter if he sees the moonlight or not.”

“That makes as much sense as anything else in this mess,” admitted Grundel. “I leave those minor details to you underlings, naturally, and concern myself with the more immediately important questions.”

Meg had been at the door to the dimly-lighted room, checking on her parents as they watched television in the den, but she had heard the conversation and responded with, “Such as?”

“Such as, if we and not the police come across the Maniac while he’s in his bestial form, how the hell are we going to protect ourselves?”

The four stared at one another for a moment. “Certainly not by brute force,” added Grundel.

“Dad’s got a pretty heavy caliber gun in there,” Meg said without hope. “And the house is all buttoned up tightly.”

“The Gretlers and the Mitchells—” began Morgan.

Meg waved a hand in defeat. “Don’t bother finishing that. I know that a prison would be needed to keep that thing out, and I do remember that I’ve tried a gun on him once already.”

“Silver,” Nick said with quiet certainty.

“What?”

“Silver kills werewolves; or don’t you remember the thousands of cinematic monsters who’ve gone to their dooms with glistening silver slugs in their guts?” The young man reached into a pocket and withdrew the same small gun that he had used in his effort to capture Jessie Harmon. Somehow, he had retrieved it from the hut before the police came across it in their cleanup investigation. “This little deal is loaded with regular bullets except for one; I’ve got a friend—”

“An acquaintance,” corrected Doug.

“… who learned about weapons and slug-loading in jail, and, since this team is about as rich as skimmed milk, I could only afford enough real magic metal to make one bullet. It’s in the chamber.”

“Do you really think it’ll have any effect on him?” asked Meg.

“It should. Whether it’s from the peculiar molecular structure of the metal itself, or just from the mental image that this guy will have after seeing a few dozen films, I fully expect to see him die when this hits him. And I don’t care much if it’s physical or psychological, as long as it does the job.”

Corbett nodded thoughtfully. “Have you mentioned this to the cops? Their men would probably be a lot better off using silver than the standard .38 hollowpoints.”

“Not me, brudda. I’m in bad enough with those idiots due to that Harmon bit, and if I said anything about this in an apparently rational tone, I’m sure that I’d soon find myself wearing a jacket that fastens in the back.”

“I’m not,” observed Blake with a smile. He also had a small weapon in one pocket, though this time it turned out to be a miniature silver crucifix. “I’m not religious, so I borrowed this from someone who is. It’s been blessed by a priest.”

“Hey, Mr. Writerman, aren’t you getting your monsters confused?” asked Grundel. “That would work better on Christopher Lee than our modern day Henry Hull.”

“Silver’s silver, youngster, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the werewolf turn tail, if he has one, and run at the sight of this.”

“But how will you kill him with that, make him swallow it?”

Morgan answered that, “Who wants to kill him, kid? We’re a seek out and capture squad, or don’t you remember? With a living, breathing legendary creature in our hands we could overturn one hell of a lot of supposedly ‘proven’ scientific tenets that a simple dead human body wouldn’t make a dent in.”

“Well, I’m just as anti-establishment as all three of you put together, and I swear to you, if that bastard tries to rip out my throat, I’ll kill him just as quick as my finger can pull the trigger.”

“And be charged with murder,” Meg said under her breath.

“Anyhow,” continued Blake, “I tried to interest Marsh in the idea of having his troops carry one of these, but that only lowered his estimation of my mental range to that of imbecility, or so he said. Privately, I think he has ordered each patrol car—”

“Quiet!” barked Morgan. He quickly dialed up the volume on the police band radio.

“… to 107 Velencia Avenue; resident reports sighting of suspect with hair-covered face staring into bedroom window,” stated a Lynnview police dispatcher.

“Hot dog!” shouted Grundel.

“Six-thirty-nine,” said Doug. “Meg, where’s Velencia Avenue?”

“The far side of town,” she answered. “Are we going out to check it?”

“Wait for the response report from the patrol cars. If we go out too early and it’s a false alarm, Marsh will probably have us locked up for the night.”

So they waited about the radio in tense anticipation, each certain that this was the real thing. But their illusions were shattered after only five minutes, when one of the policemen reported back to headquarters with the news that the “werewolf” was a teenaged boy in a furry Halloween mask.

“It’s a good thing that you got us to wait, Doug,” said Meg.

“I expected as much,” he said with a sigh. “You know how some people are, anything for ‘fun’ and excitement. I would imagine that the night will be filled with fake calls to the stationhouse and costumed red herrings.”

“Stupid jackasses,” mumbled Nick.

“You’re being redundant,” said Blake.

Morgan’s prophecy proved true until about two in the morning, when reports of all types began to slack off. Meg’s mother had gone upstairs to bed at eleven, and her father had fallen asleep before the television soon after, but even though no action of interest to the waiting four was taking place, they really had no trouble in staying awake. As Doug pointed out, the initial attacks had taken place in the countryside surrounding the town, so another could easily be underway beyond the protective scouting of the authorities, and someone could call in the terrible news at any time.

Nick Grundel was given to extrapolation of the wildest kind, and his conclusions to possible realities usually dealt with the worst of circumstances developing. He nearly inspired heart failure in his hostess while she was pouring him another cup of coffee at three in the morning.

“You know, you could be one,” he said casually.

“One what? A model subservient housewife?” she asked.

He sipped the hot beverage. “A werewolf.”

“Bow wow,” Meg joked in reply. “I know about the hair samples, Mr. Grundel, and I may be many things, but I’m not a male werewolf.”

“Nope, but you were attacked by one.”

Concern replaced the mirth in her face. “Attacked, yes, but not bitten, and we decided that a victim had to be bitten and live to provide a home for the bacteria, if you’ll recall.”

Still cloaked in that maddeningly calm demeanor that he sometimes adopted, Grundel looked out into the darkness and answered, “You were on the floor of your car, if you’ll recall, so how can you be sure that he didn’t bite you on the back?”

“Because,” the girl said, trying to pick reasons out of her spinning mind. “The doctors … the doctors checked the wound carefully for the police and concluded that it was made by nails of some sort. I’ll have those five scars until I die, but you can tell that they were made by nails, not teeth.”

“Touché,” said Morgan.

“New game,” said Nick. “How do we know that the disease is carried and transmitted only through the saliva? She could start to turn at any instant now and rip us all to bloody fragments simply because the monster had bacteria-loaded claws or maybe he dribbled into the open slashes. I’m going to play it safe.” He sat down and placed the loaded gun on one knee.

A number of new—and distasteful—possibilities took Meg’s breath, and she gasped to recapture it.

Normally, Blake was the most easy-going of the three men, quiet, committed to the cause, but always with the calming word when his more volatile companions pushed one another too far. At this moment, however, his own patience had been pushed past the limit by Grundel’s cruel, self-serving game. “Nick, you can stop this crap right here; it isn’t funny at all.” Grundel attempted to look innocent. “You know that countless numbers of blood samples and tissue cultures were made of Meg’s wounds before she was released from the hospital, just as you know that even if the microbes were undetectable by medical technology—on top of all of their other unbelievable properties—and Meg were infected, she would have experienced the transformation hours ago, while the full moon was still up. I’m not sure what kind of satisfaction you get out of playing scenes like this one, but when it involves the rest of us, we sure as hell have a right to speak up about it!”

“Hey, hey, calm down, comrade,” said Grundel with a feeble grin.

“Not until you do, kid.”

“That’s the most sense anyone’s been able to pound into that lump since the doctor gave him his welcoming out slap,” grunted Morgan.

And even Grundel realized that he had gone too much beyond the border of joking. “Okay, mea culpa, I surrender. I was just trying to loosen up the group and take our minds off of all of these fake reports coming in, like telling ghost stories, you know?”

“With what we have walking around out there,” Meg said, gesturing toward the street, “the last thing we need is a ghost story.” Though relieved by Corbett’s clearly logical arguments in an illogical situation, she was still uncomfortable with the thought that thousands of microscopic lice were dancing around in her bloodstream and aching to mutate her form into that of a savage beast.

Nick turned to her. “I apologize, Meg, and if that’s not enough of a shock, I’ll also admit that my first idea wasn’t to implicate you as the bride of the beast; I almost pointed out that you were the safest bet among the four of us. See, we know that the werewolf is male, and in spite of our avid interest in the subject, not one of us three guys has even tried to come up with an alibi for the previous two full moons.”

“An even more farfetched contingency,” Doug observed.

Corbett shook his head.

“Oh, god,” said Meg with a tired sigh.

The morning came in spite of all of their wishes to slow its arrival. A little vandalism, some drunken brawling, and one case of car theft were the most serious calls that came over the police band (Morgan, who was knowledgeable in the numerical slang often used in the calls, translated for them). Plus the somewhat sick werewolf costumes and joke calls, of course. The four found themselves torn emotionally as they hungered for the abrupt, insistent, and possibly hysterical words from the police dispatcher which would tell them that the creature was in the process of attacking another victim, just as they all secretly prayed that no one else would have to be subjected to the horror that at least six people had already suffered.

Then the sun broke from the east and lifted the blanket of mixed fear and dark attraction from the community of Lynnview. They waited until nearly seven, collecting residual reports, before deciding that the night had failed them when Nick commented that he was going to find a bed to fall in even if he had to thumb his way back to LA. Corbett helped Morgan with the radio, and they all slipped out of the front door before either of Meg’s parents were awakened by the noise or moving about. A familiar figure awaited them on the front porch, however.

“Good morning, gentlemen and miss,” said Captain Richard Marsh. “My, you appear to have spent a restless night.”

“Rich,” said Blake, realizing what was coming.

“When did you discover we were in town, Marsh?” asked Morgan.

“As soon as you crossed the city limits yesterday,” answered the policeman. “I never thought that simple intimidation would slow up a pack of fanatics like you, so we were waiting, figuring that you’d come here.”

“Listen, cop, you can call us fanatics if you want, but we’ve got solid facts to back up—” began Nick.

“Down, boy,” cautioned Blake. “You might find your bed in the county hoosegow.”

“At least one of you has retained his reason. You look disappointed, though; sorry that your spookman failed to show up?”

Doug’s mood was being molded into something even uglier by the barbs. “So you say, Marsh. For all we regular citizens know, the bastard ripped apart a convent and your men mopped the blood and arrested the janitor!”

Marsh frowned. “Don’t give me that ‘cover-up’ bullshit, Morgan. When we catch the maniac, you’ll know it.”

The reporter managed to gain control of himself. “Right. There were no attacks at all during the night, then?”

“None that could be tied in to the man you’re looking for.”

“I’m not just talking about here; what about LA and up and down the coast? Nothing says that the creature can’t move around the country. He’s not tied to this one spot.”

“Oh? I thought maybe that was one of the ‘supernatural’ laws that applied to his case, that he was doomed to strike month after month in this same little community,” said Marsh, his sense of triumph over the group fully returned. “We’ve been monitoring calls all night, just like you have.” He glanced down at the radio. “Except ours have come through a cooperative enforcement network, and I can assure you that no grisly murders with any similarities to these cases have been reported in the western half of the nation in the last twenty-four hours. So, now will you take the hint and butt out of this case? We know what we’re doing here, and having a bunch of half-assed ghost chasers dogging us will only help the creep to escape our detection. I might have expected Morgan—or that one—” he pointed to Grundel, “to act this way, but, Corbett, you’ve always been level-headed.”

“Gee, I’m sorry, Coach,” replied Blake with weary sarcasm.

Marsh cleared his throat and spat into the Talleys’ front yard. Meg flinched at the action but contained herself.

“Well, I hope you can see that it’s all over now, and your pet theory has died a well-deserved death, so go home. Get back to your lives. There’s plenty of exciting, real things going on in the world that don’t have a damned thing to do with murderers or werewolves or any of that other garbage that you’ve been feeding your readers since this started.”

“You thick-headed son of a b—” Nick tried to squeeze in.

“Shut up, Nick!” snapped Corbett. “Okay, Rich, you’ve made your point, and we’ll all be headed for home now.”

The policeman grinned at the young man. “I wish you’d gotten it out, sonny, I sincerely do.” He stepped from the porch. “Move along, folks, and remember what I said. If I find any of you, and that includes you, Miss, interfering in an active police investigation, your butt is mine, and I won’t hesitate to slap that butt into jail for a considerable length of time.”

The four watched him go in tense silence, and each felt again like a schoolchild who has just been unfairly reprimanded by a teacher, brimming with retorts and arguments which were held in check by rational self-preservation. Blake was dejected and tired, Nick was livid, and Meg was exhausted both mentally and emotionally, but Doug seemed to be the most affected by the empty night. It had been his chance to show “them” that not everything was yet known by science—or religion—he had staked almost all of his finances and reputation on the chase and its outcome, and now his inner self simply could not give up the fight so easily.

“This isn’t the end of it,” he muttered while the other two men were repeating their goodbyes to Meg and walking to the car. “He was just somewhere else last night, that’s all, and next month he’ll pop up again. Wait and see. What date does the full moon fall on in October?”

“The sixteenth,” answered Grundel. “But why don’t you let it rest for a while, huh, Doug? I’ve been immersed in this stuff for a lot longer than is good for me, and now I intend to go somewhere and lose all touch with this suddenly mundane reality through the medium of fermented drink.”

“Just like that, huh? You’re going to throw in the towel on all of the work we’ve done?”

“For at least forty-eight hours,” Nick admitted, sliding into the backseat.

“We aren’t giving up, Doug,” said Corbett. “He needs a rest; we all do.”

“Don’t rationalize it,” Morgan sighed. He positioned himself behind the wheel and angrily brought the car to life, backing out of the Talley driveway without a first look. “He was out there, somewhere, and, luckily, he didn’t find anyone to satiate his lust, but next month will come. It always does.”

Blake heard this promise, but he could only think of all of the laughter and smugness that he—and they—would have to endure in the coming days, even if vindication had only been postponed for a month.

The man opened his eyes and stared into the depths of the brightening sky. The sun was slowly creeping up from behind his head, which meant that he was lying on an east/west line, and it was washing him as clean as a magic rain from Heaven. God, for maybe the first time since before Santa Rosalia, he felt good, because he hadn’t killed anyone.

Sitting up, the nude man brushed away the thousands of strands of long, fine, brown hair that literally covered his body, with an offhandedness that was born of repetition; this was the sixth time he had awakened in this fashion. Blood had caked about his lips, chin, neck, and chest, gumming loose hairs to the latter two areas, and when he first felt the sharp stickiness a flash of panic shot throughout him. His hand rubbed at the brown crust while his mind worked frantically to dig details of the previous night from the swirling murkiness that was his memory, but he was sure—he was totally certain that no human being had been savaged by his insane rage during this last seizure. There was that special touch of self-hatred that invariably accompanied a man-killing missing this time.

His terror receded and became mirth as soon as he looked around, found himself within ten feet of the car he had hidden and fled from just before midnight, and saw the corpse sprawled in mutilation atop its hood. A cow. A damned slashed, broken, and partially eaten cow!

His laughter echoed throughout the empty forest. Why in the name of God had he done that to a dumb animal? Hunger? Fury? What had driven him to it?

But, then, what had taken control of his life six months ago?

With that off of his conscience, he was able to complete his cleanup, including pulling his long, already loosened eyeteeth, and find his clothing where he had stashed it in the car’s backseat. Dressing never failed to make him feel one hundred per cent closer to human. The rearview mirror told him that he resembled a hollow-eyed, tousled drunk, but it really didn’t matter so long as he looked like a plain, unmonstrous drunk.

The cow represented a problem now that he was ready to leave. Earlier, when he had killed it and tossed it on the hood, his arms had been many times equal to the effort, with a raw power that could bend hardened metal, but now those same arms, minus the insane rage that had fed them their strength, had difficulty in pushing the heavy body from the hood onto the ground, even though it was sliding on a greasing of its own blood.

Jeeze, he would have to get that muck washed off as soon as possible.

Finally, it half-rolled over the right fender and thudded to the ground, and the man wiped his hands on some long grass before locating the keys and ducking into the car. Physically, he felt perfect, just as always following a seizure, and he didn’t even feel the need to puke, because the flesh in his stomach (which had not already been metabolized by his incredible body) was plain beef. So what if it was raw? Mentally, he actually felt lifted by the experience for the very first time, because he realized that he could beat this thing! It was not a question of where to lock himself away from the world periodically—his wild anger would always find an escape—but the answer was to isolate himself from humanity, out here in nowhere. He could roam free and challenge the world as much as his second self demanded, with the occasional cow or horse as a sacrificial victim, and no one would need to fear the light of the full moon again.

Washington has a lot of forests, he thought as he carefully maneuvered the auto in the direction of the highway, and there’s that writer there, Carl Resnavoir. Maybe he’ll have some ideas.

One man drove away from September with his spirits struggling to escape deep depression, but a second turned his eyes further north with the first shred of hope he had in half a year.