The Capture
Blake Corbett no longer needed the werewolf or any confirmation of his theories relating to it. Following the debacle of the night of September 17, he had naturally retreated from the embarrassing aftermath and publicity, and he had always found that the best way to get away from any problem, intellectual or emotional, was to drown himself in his work. In this way, Anna Marcus and A Beast In the Streets actually benefitted by his mistake, since that novel was completed within two weeks and on Rodney Witty’s desk inside another. On October 11, the movie deal went through, and Corbett found himself rolling in money, comparatively speaking. The next few days were passed in rapturous excess.
His contacts with the other members of the “Wolfman Squad”, as one television reporter had labelled them, deteriorated over the same period of time. They had stopped gathering regularly to discuss events and ideas, in spite of Doug Morgan’s attempts to continue with these exchanges. Meg Talley took a job to replenish her funds before winter classes began at the college she would reenter in San Francisco, and, after an exceptionally vigorous argument with Morgan, Nick Grundel moved out of Doug’s home for parts unknown.
So, it was really with mixed emotions that Corbett took Morgan’s excited phone call, which apparently proved that they had been right all along. He didn’t need this anymore, either as a tantalizing mystery or as personal aggravation, but he also knew that there was no way on Earth that he would be able to resist it.
“You’re sure that this is one of the wolf’s attacks?” he asked again while the normally solemn Morgan literally stuttered before the flow of words that had come out of him.
“My god, haven’t you been listening? Haven’t you seen any of the news coverage?” demanded the reporter.
Blake blinked blearily at the clock on his desk, and it calmly informed him that the time was 11:06.37 on Oct. 17. He hated Mondays. “No, at least to the part about news coverage; see, I’ve only been awake for about thirty minutes, and my brain doesn’t turn right-side up until about noon.” None of his nine-to-five friends could ever understand or forgive him for sleeping each morning until ten-thirty, no matter how often he pointed out that he usually worked until past three a.m. each night. “As for the first part, to be painfully honest, Doug, you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”
“I’m keyed up,” Morgan admitted. “But for the last month all of the calls and letters I’ve gotten—except for the fruitcakes—have been telling me what a prize jackass I’d made of myself in this werewolf story; but I knew if I could last until the next full moon, which was last night, something somewhere would happen to blow it up again! Lord, did it ever!
“Anyway, last night, in some little hamlet named Velberg, up in Montana, a truck stop was attacked by a creature that looked like a cross between an ape and a human—that’s what they’re calling him, ‘The Apeman’—and five people were torn to shreds in the same fashion as the Gretlers and the Mitchells. Well, actually, only five are already dead, but a sixth is in the hospital and not expected to live out the day.”
“Damn, that’s terrible!”
“I know, it is, really,” agreed Doug, trying to rein in his enthusiasm, “and I don’t mean to come across as so cold, but there’s a good part to this story: the police have in custody an uninjured survivor!”
“Like Meg?”
“Better than Meg! He was right there when it all happened, and there’s no questioning his story. He’s an adult man named Daley, not some hysterical teenaged girl.”
Corbett considered pointing out that he’d never seen Meg in even a near-hysterical state, but Morgan’s pumped up account of the assault wouldn’t allow him the time.
“It was just after midnight, there were six people in the cafe, and—oh, yeah, I almost forgot about that kid next door in the grocery area, so that means we have the five dead and one probable.”
We must keep an accurate mortality count, Blake thought numbly.
“It was raining like Noah’s Flood, and this car rolled to a stop outside the place. The grocery kid went out to find out what the driver wanted, and he was killed on the spot; the, uh, cook, I believe, apparently went to his aid and was also killed, and a man who tried to help him was next. Then the creature broke into the cafe and took care of two women and a boy.”
“A young boy? A child?”
“Seven or eight, they think.”
“My god, a child and two more women. They’ve got to stop this crazy bastard before he gets another chance!”
“We’ve got to stop him, whether it takes crosses, silver bullets, burning at the stake or whatever! And they’ll listen to us, now, they have to!”
“What makes you so sure?” sighed Corbett.
“This time, the thing was shot, twice, with a shotgun and slashed with a meat cleaver, and it didn’t slow him.”
Blake whistled. “But there’s only one witness?”
“Unless the woman in the hospital regains consciousness. I’m flying up to Kalispell in an hour, and from there to Velberg. I can swing an extra fare on the paper if you want to come along.”
Between novels, with some money in the bank, and facing an opportunity to redeem his reputation, Corbett didn’t have to think twice as to whether he wanted to interview this survivor, though he doubted that the trail of the murderer could be picked up, even so soon after an appearance; that werewolf seemed to be just as much a ghost. “Yeah, I’ll go, but don’t charge ii to the Chronicle. I know that you’re not their favorite employee since last month, and there’s no reason to chance straining the relationship even further.”
“Don’t worry. I’m the Emperor Fort around here now that it looks as if I’m being vindicated.”
“Good, but I’d still prefer to pay for my own flight, if you’ll tell me which line you’re taking. And what about the others?”
“I haven’t called anyone but you, yet.”
“They’re in this just as much as we are, Doug. I think we owe them something.”
“All right; why don’t you handle that. I’ve got some more details to string together.”
“Sure. I suppose Meg is still at home, but where’s Nick staying now?”
“Of that I am gratefully ignorant.”
“Come on, Doug, he did just as much research as any of us. I know that the two of you had a personality conflict—”
“Hardly surprising since one of us has the personality of a shark of less than normal intelligence.”
“That’s not fair, either. The kid is a genius, you know, and he seems to have had a rough childhood.”
“My heart bleeds,” Morgan commented sarcastically. “But if you’re determined to contact him, you’ll have to call the missing persons bureau; I haven’t spoken a word with him since the first of this month. I’ve got to go now. Be at the airport in forty-five minutes.”
“Uh, right. See you then,” Corbett said into a dead line. Shaking his head at the raw drive that Morgan was able to direct into a specific undertaking (though perhaps “undertaking” was a poor choice of nouns), he thumbed through his phone file and dialed Meg’s home telephone number. Her mother answered. “Mrs. Talley,” he said in his most polite, respectable tone, trying not to sound like a thirty-five year old, divorced ham and egg writer robbing their cradle and coming across just that way, “this is Blake Corbett. I believe we met once through your daughter Margret.”
“Yes,” she answered suspiciously.
“Well, I was wondering if I might speak with her, if you don’t mind?”
“She’s not here,” was the terse reply.
“Could you tell me where I might get in touch with her?”
It was obvious that Mrs. Talley would have done many other distasteful acts rather than again expose her daughter to this strange man who had involved her in a most embarrassing public search for a thing of mythology. “Actually, she’s just begun working, and I wouldn’t want to get her in trouble with her boss by accepting personal phone calls.”
Blake sighed and glanced at the clock. “I assure you, Mrs. Talley, this is important.”
“Um … all right, I suppose, but I want you to know that her father was extremely upset with the things that you and your friends had her doing last month: interviewing escaped mental patients, staying up all night—”
“I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t something that I’m sure Meg will want to know about, Mrs. Talley. If you will … ?”
“Oh, all right. She’s working at The Male Lair as a salesgirl. I’m afraid you’ll have to look up the number for yourself.” She hung up as swiftly and thoroughly as had Morgan before her.
“Blake Corbett, Tracer of Lost Mysteries,” the writer muttered to himself as he consulted the phone book, “or How to Recruit New Friends and Impress Your Old Ones by Appearing To Be Completely Ignorant and Superstitious.”
He had no reason to expect that his luck would change when he made this next call to The Male Lair, a men’s clothing store that was as totally opposite the nationally popular ladies’ boutiques as possible (sort of Early Caveman), and thus he wasn’t surprised when it didn’t and the contentious store manager answered. It was only after several more of his dwindling minutes had passed that he was able to convince the man that, in spite of the fact that no one in Meg’s family was dead or in grave health, he really did need to speak to her. And to top everything, when the young woman finally came to the phone, her voice made it clear that she was upset by the whole situation, as well.
“Hello, Meg? This is Blake, Blake Corbett.”
“I know, Mr. Yurick told me,” she answered shortly. Then, in an effort to temper her tone, she added, “How are you, Blake?”
“Fine, but what I called about concerns the murders that took place in Montana last night.”
She had heard of the atrocity, though obviously not very much. “That gang killing?”
“It was more than that; Doug says that our werewolf did it.”
She remained cautious. “The radio news said that police were calling it an execution. How does that—”
“It was done with hands and teeth, not guns! Listen, Doug has got contacts all over the country, and I think he was getting his information straight from a Montana newspaper or maybe a leak in their police department. He says that all of the signs are identical to the ones which were left behind here in July and August. He’s convinced that it’s the werewolf—last night was a full moon—and he’s flying up in half an hour to check it out, and I’m going with him. Do you want to come with us?”
The spark was rekindled within her, and it strove greatly to overcome the humiliation she had suffered and all of the mundane realities which presented themselves. “Oh, wow, Blake, you know I would, if there were even a chance that this is the real thing! Do they have any hard clues this time?”
“An eyewitness who saw the same thing that you did in August.” He edited Morgan’s remark about the “hysterical teenaged girl.”
“Gosh, I … but I can’t. Not now. I’m working in this place to raise my tuition for next semester, so you know that I don’t have the plane fare.”
“No problem. It’s on the paper,” Blake lied, intending to pay for it himself, yet realizing that she would be more likely to accept if she thought the cost would be passed on to some conglomerate expense account.
“You know, I’d never forgive myself if this turns out to be him … when did you say you were leaving?”
“Forty-one minutes and thirteen seconds. Could you get to the airport by then?”
“I’d have to get some clothes from home! I couldn’t go anywhere in this thing! The airport’s … but I can drive like a maniac when I have to. Of course, I’ll lose this job—”
Corbett hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t want you to do that, Meg.”
“To see a real werewolf, I’d live on welfare for the rest of my life. If the police don’t arrest me for driving without a jet pilot’s license, I’ll see you at the gangplank in thirty-nine minutes! Bye!”
For the third time in less than half an hour, Blake’s right ear rang with the sharp clatter of a telephone being hung up on him, but this time excitement washed away any irritation and reminded him that he had some distance to drive, as well, and didn’t have so much as a handkerchief in his travelling bag.
Corbett met Talley in the airport parking lot just three minutes before Morgan had told him their flight would leave.
As it turned out, they had an hour’s wait. Prudent Doug Morgan had taken the liberty of shifting the liftoff schedule in his call to Corbett in order to compensate for possible traffic and ticket delays. He wanted nothing to really delay their departure for Velberg.
“I’ll be … I meant to ask if you knew where Nick’s staying now,” Blake complained while they were somewhere between Los Angeles and Kalispell. “He has a right to be in on this with us. He was a force behind us in getting the investigation underway. If we get there and glut ourselves with all of the publicity once this monster is caught, it’s going to look as if we purposely cut him out.”
“I’m all for that,” said Morgan from a seat ahead of the other two.
Meg laughed at the crack, but only politely. Of them all, she had continually worked closely with Grundel during the month-long search for an impossible suspect, and she had begun to see beyond the brash, loud-mouthed exterior that the young man habitually employed in nearly all social circumstances. Not much, but a little. “Don’t commit hara-kiri. I don’t have any idea where he is, either.”
“You sound a little disappointed in that,” he observed.
She sighed. “I guess I am. Working together like we did, in the libraries, on the road, I, well, I thought that we were getting to be friends. He even told me just before that night in September, when we were expecting the attack that didn’t come, that he would have taken me out to dinner a few times if he’d had any money. Now, don’t read all of this wrong, I do not think that anything serious could ever have developed out of all of this even if we had kept on working with one another, but I did see underneath that protective crust a few times, and I know that Nick could become a fully functioning member of the world if he would only stop trying to fight everybody and everything.”
“Maybe, but my ESP tells me that functioning as a member of society would equate to a sentence in Purgatory for Nick.”
“You’re probably right,” Meg said, grinning. “But we shouldn’t worry so much about Nickie; when he finds out we’re in Montana, I’m sure that somehow he’ll contact us.”
When the flight landed in Kalispell, the trio still had some travelling to do to reach Velberg, some forty miles to the west; Morgan wasted no time in renting a car, and they reached the police station by late afternoon. There were no interviews to be had with either the single witness or the local investigating team, however, though they found themselves to be celebrities of some standing in the eyes of the gathered news media due to the notoriety they had already gained in connection with the case. Meg and Blake were a little leery of the cameras and microphones at first, since they had been particularly hard hit by the backlash of rationalism following the September difficulty (Corbett, who seldom even noticed the photos of himself on the back covers of his novels, had been quite startled a week after that long night to open his morning paper and find a caricature of himself inside a cartoon box loudly proclaiming that the Martians were in full invasion, so convinced by a walnut which had fallen on his head). But the reporters knew that this was the Full Moon Maniac at work again, and they were desperate to locate fodder for their various editors, because the Velbert police and the FBI were much less generous with pertinent information than the California authorities had been.
The rest of the afternoon and much of the evening were filled with interviews in which they found themselves on the wrong side of the questioning. The three were even taped on a short piece for the NBC nightly news program.
Finally, they extricated themselves from the travelling circus just before ten and set about finding lodging for the rest of the night, which turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated. Velberg was a small town boasting not so much as a Holiday Inn, and the single reputable hotel was already swollen with the previously arriving reporters from about the country. The Maniac was definitely moving to the forefront as a news item.
While going through the phone book, Corbett came across a listing for the Bitterroot Bungalows, which was a chain of resort cabins located just outside the town, and while he realized that the establishment would undoubtedly be closed in mid-October—much colder in Montana than in California—it was getting later by the instant and he really didn’t have much to lose other than his dime. His surprise was like a burst of sunshine to Meg and Doug, who were waiting in the idling rented car in front of the phone booth, when he signaled to them via a thumbs up through the glass; the manager that Blake had expected to rouse from a warm bed with his ridiculous inquiry was, instead, happily awake and renting his bungalows as fast as the phone rang. The tragedy was proving to be profitable for the area’s landlords.
Corbett reserved three, and the group wearily drove out to occupy them after a long day that had begun with revitalizing news and ended with the denial of any details connected with that news. Each of them had a lot riding on the strange series of attacks, and it was beginning to seem that they would forever remain two steps behind, but they were just too tired to carry out the fight, which would be better met in the morning when they were fresh; so they slept quickly and deeply, perhaps the only three people in the frightened town who did so that night.
They knew that they had no reason to worry: the full moon had shown the night before.
In spite of his exhaustion, Douglas Morgan experienced something akin to a nightmare with himself, not the monster, as the chief villain. In this dream, he chased after the shadowy creature through a moonlit field, only to have the first rays of the sun steal his catch just as his hands reached out to grasp the lunatic; then, somehow, he was standing in the middle of a crowded precinct house in Los Angeles, with flashcubes zotting nonstop all about his head, and he watched as a pair of uniformed cops carried in the punctured body of what had to be the Moonlight Killer, incomplete due to its lack of a face; “He’ll never see another moonrise,” said someone who could have been Captain Richard Marsh or Jack Lord.
That was when the dream became so incriminating. He watched, both as himself and disembodied, while he rushed forward to drag the cold body from them, shouting, “No, that’s not right! I have to catch him! You won’t believe what he is! Bring him back, bring him back!”
For one of the few times in his adult life, Morgan woke himself from a dream, and as he sat upright, sweating in spite of the poorly operating electric heater in the room, every sensation and nuisance of the play was alive in his mind. He was afraid that the werewolf would be caught by someone other than himself, that was clear. Considering the amount of time he had put into the case, it was also human and understandable. The less palatable thrust of the dream had to do with his fear that the cursed man would be killed, in his human form, and declared a mentally insane but physically normal homo sapiens and therefore remove all chance of ever proving that an actual werewolf had existed. Morgan wanted him alive, functioning, metamorphosing, in other words, killing.
He, Douglas Morgan, modern and liberal human being, was subconsciously hoping that the murderer would remain at large slaughtering innocent people just so he could prove to the scientific world that he was not a deluded fool paying superstitious homage to a myth that should have died centuries ago.
“Jesus, I don’t really want that,” he said aloud. “I couldn’t live with that!”
He had an impulse to call Joyce, but since it was deep into the morning, he resisted it. There had never been anything like this before in his long career, and he was losing his handle on it. He wanted to flaunt this living proof before all of the contemptuous sneers that had ever been turned against him, but he couldn’t rid himself of those haunting eyes of the too many people who had already died to provide his proof. Finally, he turned over and shifted his trained reporter’s mind into that nascent, idling space that precedes sleep.
Morgan had only one clear thought before dropping off.
I wonder what he is feeling about all of this.
The Man felt numb, primarily.
He knew he had killed again, and he could remember enough of the night to realize that his victims had included two more women and a child. A young boy, he thought.
Women and children, ladies and kids, their cries ringing in his ears forever. The beautiful girl the second time in Lynnview … an untouched, virginal sacrifice in her lacy nightdress, begging him to let her live. Why hadn’t that satisfied his lust and rage? Didn’t it satiate the passions of the demons of old, from the volcano to the things which swept down on bats’ wings from the deeply black skies of antiquity? And what was he but another of those monsters, an embodiment of fury?
Women and children.
He was being sexist, of course, as his more radical students would have instantly informed him had they been privileged to see this ludicrous melodrama as it resolved itself. As a twentieth century male, his most painful regrets were reserved for the helpless among his victims, the women and children, as if the superior size and strength of the men he savaged made any difference at all in the outcome of their meetings. But wasn’t that the way it had been for all time, the men turning their mere flesh and muscle against all manner of dangers, denying their own humanity and right to fear in order to protect their women and children? Go down with the ship, boys; you’re replaceable!
But for all of the chiding and joking that he did with his numbed ego, the faces that were embedded in his retinas were those of the poor, poor women and children.
Sexist, ageist, chauvinist, everything made one an “ist” these days when free thought was encouraged only when it jibed with the progressive ideas of the chic crowd. So what did that make him? A human exterminatorist?
He shivered in the cold Montana wind, because all that he wore were the clothes he had managed to steal from a church benevolence building the morning after his last attack, and he looked like any other hobo waiting in the night for the sound of that lonely whistle. He had often read of this mode of transportation, used at one time or other by such worthies as Jack Dempsey and Paul Gallico, but he had never imagined that one day he would be dependent upon it as an escape from another group of heinous murders. Naturally, there had been no chance of returning for his car, even after daybreak had given him back his original self, because of all of the attention which had already been drawn to it …
So why hadn’t he turned himself in?
He was a reasoning being, an ethical man who detested the very acts that would be laid to his charge—he was now, at least—but he had not turned himself over to the authorities and thus ended the periodic nightmare in one fashion or another. He could have done so before the Mitchells died and they would be alive now; he knew what would happen the next time the moon began its cycle, and yet here he stood, waiting for a free ride out of Montana and probably into the lives of some other hapless individuals. Why didn’t he walk back to Velberg and say, “Here I am, fellows, break out the silver bullets,” or some such?
Because he was afraid that those ridiculous measures might well work. And even if they didn’t and he truly was immortal, all that he could look forward to would be an eternity of institutionalization which was probably worse.
He heard the faint whistle and silently praised the broken-down men back there in the “jungle” for their accuracy in predicting when the next train would be along. Now he only hoped their advice concerning the best method to hop an empty car while the steep curve slowed its speed would turn out to be as helpful.
They’ll know who you are within hours, he told himself as the distant headlight registered on his cold eyes, and this will only prolong the agony.
Not now, answered the benumbed portion of his mind. This is survival, when there is no time for thoughts which have graduated beyond instinct.
Bending low to escape the notice of any interested eyes, he began to run alongside the rumbling freight train.
Morgan had no media friends or contacts among those out of towners staying at the Bitterroot Bungalows, so he might well have slept right through the biggest revelation of the entire Moonlight Maniac case had it not been for the strong voice of a reporter staying in the cabin next to his and the anemic battery that his company car had been plagued with. It was only six-thirty in the morning when the pathetic grinding whine of the car died a slow death and was replaced by the lusty anger of its driver, both of which were strong enough to rouse Doug from a sleep that had become quite sound after the incident of the self-incriminating dream. He swung his feet to the cold floor and then leaned over to the window with the definite purpose of adding some new ungentle epithets to the man’s already extensive vocabulary.
As he raised the glass, however, he was met with a sight that cooled his rage and fanned his curiosity as swiftly as the morning air replaced whatever warmth had been left from the bed: it looked as if the entire population of the Bungalows was forming a caravan back into Velberg.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he shouted.
The reporter with the dead auto answered in the context that most immediately interested him, “Aw, hell, the battery’s gone! I might as well try to hitch it in with one of the others—say, have you got any jumpers? I’d really appreciate it if you can boost me off so I can get to the town hall before I read about it in the evening edition.”
“What’s happening at the hall?”
“The news conference. The damned politicos in this hick town called it for seven a.m. and didn’t inform anybody but the locals so that they could avoid any embarrassing questions!”
“Holy crap!” Morgan slammed shut the window and began grabbing at his clothes.
Outside, the stranded reporter heartily kicked the fender of his car and resumed cursing.
Doug was dressed in two minutes and came out of the bungalow looking somewhat like a walking bundle of laundry. For only a moment, he considered allowing Blake and Meg to sleep on, figuring that he could absorb all of the important information to be had at the conference and relay it to them later, but nagging guilt and the realization that he had time enough to drive around the perimeter of a mudhole like Velberg six or seven times before seven o’clock changed his mind. He pounded on their doors and loudly passed on the news and the fact that he would be leaving in under ten minutes. He would have stuck to that threat, too, had not the girl surprised him by rushing into the weak early sunshine only a minute or so later than Corbett’s appearance.
None of them knew whether the “town hall” was another name for the police station (which they had located the day before) or an entirely autonomous setup in another building, but this presented no problem due to the fact that they simply followed the line of departing vehicles. “Nick would compare this to being part of a funeral procession,” Corbett observed with a sleepy laugh.
“I wonder where he is now?” said Meg, still uncomfortable with the way they had left without trying to locate him.
“Probably in jail on charges of terminal contempt of court,” Morgan answered.
The hall turned out to be a separate department of the local government, and it was already crowded with newsmen and townspeople when they reached it, but Morgan had to admit that he was surprised when civilians from the Outside (Meg and Blake) were allowed inside despite their lack of press credentials. He had not expected to receive anything resembling cooperation in this place.
There were no preliminaries. The chief of police appeared at the head of the large room into which they had all been herded and invited them to be seated in the folding metal chairs which had been provided. Those in the front complied, but most of the others remained standing.
“I know there will undoubtedly be a number of questions that you will want to ask concerning the multiple murders of night before last,” began the chief.
A deep murmur of agreement rolled through the assembly.
“… and you will have the opportunity to do so in a few minutes. But first, I have a statement which will be read. For those of you who weren’t here yesterday, I am Roger Lydecker, Chief of Police, this is Mayor James Bryce,” he indicated a short, heavy man seated on the stage next to him, “and this is FBI operative Lawrence Kepperling.” The agent, a youthful-looking black man, smiled confidently. “The Bureau became involved when the circumstances of the murders led them to believe that the perpetrator of the Germanetti’s Truck Stop crimes is the same individual who has committed a number of other killings in the state of California.”
“The statement, Roger,” prompted the Mayor.
Lydecker looked at the sheet of paper he held and coughed professionally before beginning. “Firstly, we regret to announce that Miss Eileen Maria Villachaise, who was severely injured in the attack on Germanetti’s Truck Stop on the night of October 16, this year, died of her injuries at four-thirty a.m., local time.”
A wave of muttering slipped through the crowd and Doug whispered rather loudly, “Damn it all! There goes our second corroborating witness.”
“Your concern is very heartbreaking,” said Meg with the beginnings of anger in her voice.
“Did the woman regain consciousness?” called Blake.
Lydecker frowned upon being presented with a question before the appointed time. “Uh, no she didn’t, at least not since early Monday morning, following surgery, when she momentarily awoke long enough to mumble some incomprehensible words to one of our nurses.”
“Incomprehensible,” nodded Morgan. “Not acceptable to the preconceived theory is more like it.”
The policeman didn’t hear this and plunged ahead with his statement. “The investigations which have been carried out at the scene of the attacks have produced promising results. Following the information given to us by witness Robert Daley, we have located and investigated the car driven by the murderer—”
“Who’s it listed to?” shouted someone near the back of the room.
“I was coming to that. Now, checking the registration has given us the name of one Charles Gerald Cummings, thirty-four years of age, of 1807 Norris Avenue, San Diego, California.”
“Spell it, Chief!” ordered half a dozen of the reporters.
Lydecker complied, but Blake Corbett hardly heard him over the echo in his mind of the name, “Cummings, Cummings, Cummings.” It was startlingly familiar, like the first few times he had seen his own name in print above short stories, though without the enjoyable overtones, certainly. Then it hit him squarely between the eyes with the force of a straight right hand: Gerald Cummings, the professor who had written the article and then vanished!
“He’s a teacher!” Corbett accidentally yelled.
“That’s … uh, correct,” Lydecker said. “He is a professor at Blythe Springs Junior College, which is located just outside of San Diego. He’s also unmarried, has no criminal record that we have been able to discover, and was reported missing last March.” He noticed several people slipping out of the room to open telephone lines to their various papers. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he added forcefully, “I must stress that Professor Cummings is simply the registered owner of the vehicle, and while it is true that a nation-wide alert has been put out on him, it’s highly possible that the instructor was earlier attacked by the killer, who has since been using the stolen car to move about the country! He could be a victim rather than the murderer.”
“That’s him, isn’t it?” asked Meg excitedly. “The man who wrote about the disease relationship?”
“Bingo,” replied Corbett. “He disappeared in March, too.”
“But how could he have … where?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet that our werewolf is Cummings himself.”
Questions were fired at the police chief without regard to the remaining portion of the prepared statement, and Morgan was right in the forefront, an old hand at this facet of the game, but Blake took Meg’s arm and began wrestling his way toward the exit. She couldn’t understand why they were defecting so soon, but Corbett’s wide command of apparently trivial details in this whole matter had allowed him to come up with important tangents time after time, so she slipped along in the trough that he was creating with effectively uncordial pushings. Still, it took several minutes before they were able to emerge from the building into the feeble sunlight that radiated through a thin shell of clouds.
“Hey, why are we in such a hurry?” she asked.
“Doug can handle the stuff going on in there, and I thought that we would be more help by tying up a couple of public phone lines before that army starts to flood out and overloads this little system that they have set up here,” he explained.
“Oh, I see. We get on long distance to some friend or other and stretch out the conversation until Doug joins us, and then he’s sure to have a line to use in filing his story. Smart thinking!”
Blake grinned. “I thought I’d check the time and weather in Old New York.”
They started to jog down the street to the small telephone office and its six outdoor booths, which were located just two blocks away, when a familiar voice called out, “Well, if it isn’t Arnold Benedict and Madame Borgia, out for their morning constitutionals. It looks like treachery does wonders for the health.”
Corbett stopped his slow run, turned his face to the sky, closed his eyes, and said, “Nick, you can think what you want to of us, as I’m sure you will, but we would have gotten in touch with you if we’d had any idea of where to reach you!”
Grundel merely laughed, and they turned to see him sitting inside one of the dirtiest and most disreputable little green Fiats that either of them had ever beheld.
“What in the world are you doing here?” laughed Meg.
“Same as you two Judases, listening to the press conference.”
“Isn’t it rather hard to pick up all of the inflections and hidden meanings from out here?” Blake asked, walking to the car.
Grundel shrugged. “One of the palace guards thought I looked too … ‘squalid,’ I think he said, to be included with all of the great citizens and patriots in the hall, and since he wouldn’t listen to any of my coolly logical retorts and had a gun on his hip to back up his own, I decided to listen to the party on the ether.” In demonstration, he reached over and dialed up the volume of the car radio; the conference emerged sounding much like a jumbled high school debate.
“I didn’t realize that it was being broadcast,” said Blake.
“But how did you get here?” continued Meg. “You didn’t even own a car last month.”
“Still don’t,” was the reply. “I ‘borrowed’ this rattletrap from a friend for fifty bucks and the promise that I’d have it home by the end of the week. I’ve been driving straight through since Monday morning, which means that I haven’t slept or eaten in nearly two days, so why don’t you generous folk volunteer to treat me to a monstrous breakfast, pardon the pun? It took all of my hock money to make the ‘loan’ and pay for gas and oil.”
“Oh, we can’t right now, Nickie, we’ve got to get to the phones,” Meg responded.
Corbett produced his billfold and withdrew several bills, which he then pressed into her hands. Since he had spent about half of his adult life broke, it always felt good to spread around the green when he had it. “We really need only one line, don’t we? I never eat breakfast before lunch, so I’ll handle that matter while you treat the wandering fool to a meal.”
The young woman stared uneasily at the money. “Blake, I don’t want to take advantage of—”
“Then let me!” Grundel interrupted. “I starve, wench, the vital juices of my virile body dry by the instant, as one of Corbett’s more articulate characters might say.”
Blake sighed in mock resignation. “You’ll be doing me a favor by getting that ham actor away from me, Meg, please!”
“Your chariot, my lady,” said Grundel, pushing open the passenger door on the dirty vehicle.
“The Male Lair!” repeated Nick between attacks on his large stack of pancakes. “Why in the hell would a young, intelligent, and supposedly liberated woman choose to work in a crudhut like that?”
This bearded contradiction would never allow himself to be figured out if their association lasted for a century, Meg decided. “Money, pal. I thought that I would be going back to college in the winter quarter, and I had killed my bank account while helping you three look for Cummings, so I took what I could get for the best pay.”
“You couldn’t find a handy Playboy Club to hop into?”
“Not in Lynnview. What’s the matter, don’t you like girls running around in tiger outfits?” she said with a bit of spice. “I was getting fond of my tail.”
Grundel smiled in a moment of mental imagery. “Sure. You’ve got a perfect body for the leotards and whiskers.” He seemed to sober abruptly. “But jobs like that are for elementary school dropouts training to become hookers or male domination freaks, and I don’t believe you’re in either of those categories.”
Meg was both surprised and pleased by what she saw in his response to the situation. “Why, Nickie, your concern over my reputation and well-being is quite touching.”
He flushed again, with embarrassment outperforming his anger. “It doesn’t make any difference to me what another dumb broad does with her life, whether it’s marching against totally imaginary oppression or playing animal-tease footsie games for the benefit of a bunch of impotent middle-aged studs.”
Nick’s reestablishment of his protection lowered the atmosphere about the table by twenty degrees. Meg thought that he had lashed out specifically against her and had done a good job of accomplishing his purpose. “There are times when you are absolutely disgusting, did you know that?” she demanded.
His confusion was deepened when he realized that instead of telling her to blow it, as he normally would have, he wanted to soften the sting in some way. “Well, if it upsets you to be called a dumb broad, let me assure you that I’ve found the IQ of the female of the species corresponds to that of the ‘superior’ male almost to the decimal point, which doesn’t say much at all for either sex.”
“I see,” Meg replied, still hurt, “you’re as unbiased as Don Rickles and hate everybody separately but equally. The perfect cynic.”
“Sometimes I think that cynicism and realism are the same thing.” When that philosophical observation made no inroad, Nick decided on a strategic retreat and redirection of his forces. “So, our werewolf turns out to be Corbett’s favorite college professor, eh?”
Meg grudgingly answered, “It well could be him. But, like the Chief pointed out, the car was registered to him, and that’s a long way from a positive identification.”
Grundel mulled the point for a few seconds. “Makes sense. If Cummings was as interested in this lycanthropy matter as the article indicated—in spite of his disclaimers—then it follows that he would keep an ear tuned for the odd report of a possible wolfman-type creature and use his own time to follow up any leads. Let’s say that he found one and tried to observe it during a full moon, then it’s entirely possible that the creature killed him and, upon returning to its senses, took his clothes, money, and car to move his base of operations into California and then north.”
“Ugh,” she commented, almost involuntarily. “I’m never going to be able to explain to myself why I ever got mixed up in this sick business … or why in the world I’m still involved in it. I’m not that addicted to violence, I don’t rush to every fire or accident that I hear about—”
“Sounds a little like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Grundel observed with a wicked grin.
“Thanks for the moral support. One thing that I’m fairly certain of is that if I were infected with that kind of a disease and I couldn’t be securely locked up during the seizures, instead of driving around the country like a travelling executioner, I’d end it on my own.”
“Ah, altruism rears its ugly head once again. Maybe suicide has deprived us of the company of thousands of man/beasts before our present friend snarled along, though I can’t say that I can understand why such drastic measures would be necessary. In fact, if I were in the shoes of this guy who killed the Professor—”
“Blake believes that it’s the Professor himself.”
“Blake is a writer, and they use their emotions far more than their brains. Anyway, if it were me, I might sort of enjoy these ‘regular releases,’ as Cummings termed them. Just think about being able to turn all of your hostilities onto the world and having no one to stop you, running through the woods again and searching for your next victim! As for the immortality angle—”
“My lord, Nick, I honestly cannot tell if you’re sincere or if you’re only trying to keep up appearances and needle me some more!” Meg exploded in sudden vehemence. “You’re even worse than Doug when he found out about that poor Villachaise woman’s death! Do you really think you’d enjoy murdering eight year old boys or teenaged girls?”
“Maybe some of the ones that I’ve met,” he said with feeble humor.
She turned sharply away from the table.
“Whoa, don’t leave on me now!” he admonished her. “You’ve got to pay the check, remember?”
“I should leave you here to wash dishes for the rest of your sick little life so you wouldn’t have any opportunities at all to be infected by Cummings or whoever it is! You were born without anything resembling a conscience, Nick Grundel, and if I weren’t so thoroughly nauseated by that, I’d probably feel sorry for you!”
Too far, Silver Throat, Grundel told himself. “Don’t put out a hit on me just yet. You know me, Meg, always overstating everything. I swear to you that I’d never agree to become a mass murderer just to gain a kind of invulnerability.” Nick was really startled; he even thought that he saw the glint of a tear in her right eye.
“You’re certainly glib when you need to be, aren’t you? Am I supposed to forgive you and call myself an emotional fool now? It hurts to say it, but I’m nearly convinced that, aside perhaps from deaths in your immediate family, you’ve never felt genuine remorse for anything that’s ever happened to anyone but yourself.”
The expression of joking antagonism vanished from the man’s face before the blankness that he sometimes used to hide his true feelings. He mumbled something that she couldn’t make out.
“What did you say?”
“I said you’re not being fair.”
It was such a completely incongruous statement coming from the usually callous personality across the table from her that she almost laughed. “Fair?” she repeated. “Whatever are you talking about?”
“I am a human being, damn it, and just because I don’t burst into tears whenever I hear a sad song on the radio doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of psychopathic specimen to be examined, you know.” He drank a long swallow of coffee as if to punctuate his remarks.
Meg was unable to decide if he were acting just to turn the tables on her, so she was wary. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but you’ve got to admit that you haven’t exactly overreacted to any of these horrible killings. I just can’t envision you being upset over anything that doesn’t directly involve you.”
For a long time, he didn’t reply, instead staring out the front window of the restaurant, and Meg realized that he could be busily concocting some sad story with which to refute her charges, though she really didn’t think so. The woman had practiced reading faces many times in her life, and in this practice, she felt that she had cultivated a reliable facility. The most expressive portion of Nick’s face behind the heavy beard were his eyes, and in those eyes she saw painful memories that seemed to be beyond any form of counterfeiting.
“I don’t know why I should tell you anything; you’re no psychiatrist and I don’t have to prove myself to you,” he said in a low voice.
“Don’t try to then. It’s your life, not mine.”
“I think I want to.” He sighed and returned to the past for an instant. “There was a time, two years ago … no, not that, it’s too personal for you to accept, I suppose. I read something once that has nothing to do with anyone I’d ever met or heard of. Is that removed enough?”
Meg nodded, uncomfortable now.
“Okay. It happened in 1944, July 6, if memory serves me. A circus was performing in Hartford, Connecticut, and more than seven thousand people had paid to watch the performances. There was a fire …”
“I think I read about that, too. It was a tragedy.”
Grundel shook his head. “We’ve all heard of the big tragedies like that: fifty killed, a hundred, or, in this case, more than a hundred and sixty. But that’s not what reaches us, because it’s too hard for us to conceive, if we’ve never been a part of one. What got me despite all that you think was one little girl. She died in the fire or the crush to get out, but no one could identify her.”
“Burns?”
“No. Her face was untouched. She looked to be about six years old, and a photograph was made and circulated locally and then nation-wide through the newspapers, but no one ever claimed her body, and eventually they had to bury her unidentified.”
Meg felt a tightness in her throat, but then she had always known that she was a sucker for a sad story.
“The Mitchells and the Gretlers had people to mourn for them, just as these others will have, but that kid was really Nobody and she always will be. You look startled; so was I. I was only fourteen, but I had pretty well developed into what you see before you, minus the beard, and when I couldn’t shake the thoughts of that little girl even after a week had passed, I thought maybe I was cracking up or something. Pretty schamltzy, huh?”
“Nick, I-I’m sorry. I had no right to jump you that way.”
“None of that now,” he said, grinning. “We don’t want to turn this place into Brokenhearts Theatre, do we? I know what kind of person I am, Meg, and those moments of near-humanity are infrequent, to put it mildly. The rest of the time may be some twisted sort of self-defense, real cynicism, or just boredom, but it’s what I am and I don’t fight it.”
“I’ll admit that it makes you unique,” she said lightly.
“Well, that’s something.” He pushed his plate away and wiped his mouth. “Meg, I want to ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Quick, who played Dr. Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein?”
“Ernest Thesiger,” she answered automatically, wondering what the first, personal incident Nick mentioned had been.
Maybe she would ask him someday.
In spite of the fact that the national search for the Maniac now had a specific individual to focus upon, either as the culprit or another victim, the attempt to seal up the area surrounding Velberg and capture the murderer fell on its face with a decided thud. Questioning of all of the men within the boundaries of the immediate search was intensive for a week after the killings, with even Morgan Corbett and Grundel the targets of grillings by both state and federal inspectors (though each swiftly proved that he was in California on the night of the 16th), but no information of any usefulness was uncovered because the prey had slipped through their fingers in an otherwise empty freight car just after the surveillance was set up.
The quartet who had for so long been preaching warnings about the true nature of the creature found themselves again the objects of non-hostile if not sympathetic media attention, and public opinion swung away from nearly total dismissal of any possibility of a werewolf to divided acceptance and resistance. It was certainly a newsworthy subject, as proven by the fact that all three of the major networks ran specials devoted to the crimes with at least one of the four interviewed on each of them, and it was hard to believe that anyone in the continental United States—or Canada and Mexico, for that matter—was ignorant of the fact that the next full moon was due on the night of November 14. The four wanted to carry on their investigation, of course, but their new status as celebrities (‘new’ in the sense that they had been written off as full-blown upside-down quacks only a month before the incident at Velberg) practically eliminated that possibility in a flood of blinding lights and pointing microphones; within a couple of weeks, Meg and Nick were fondly recalling the virtues of anonymity and the two writers were ready to return to the form of half-notoriety that they had previously experienced where their names drew much more recognition than did their faces.
October moved by for the next month, and this time there was little or no slacking of interest in the murderer, because a definite pattern had been theorized and proven in the once a month attacks, with the bloodless September viewed as more or less an “accident.” The majority of Americans were titillated by the approach of the deadly night because, even though the location of the Maniac’s next strike could in no way be projected, no one expected to be the subject of that fury; so it almost evolved into something along the lines of a television program or the morning of July 5 when early risers read with interest which local youngsters had lost fingers and eyes to the traditional celebrations of the night before. Except that toll could be perused once a month instead of once a year.
He might have yet been considered an important witness rather than the man that they were pointing out as the killer, but to most of the country’s people Charles Gerald Cummings, professor, was the mysterious figure behind all of the mad assaults. This conviction went far to assure the deep investigation into the man and his background that followed on the parts of both the officials and the news services. As the Velberg police had stated, Cummings was thirty-four, single, and an instructor in, among other subjects, literature and cinema arts at Blythe Springs Junior College, and it was further revealed that his closest relatives were an uncle, an aunt, and several cousins on his father’s side, none of whom had seen or heard from him within the last eighteen months. His disappearance had come during a week-long field trip which he had kept strangely secret but which turned out to be into the mountains of the southern part of Baja California near Santa Rosalia. He rented a land rover in San Diego on March 19, checked into a hotel in Santa Rosalia on the 21st, and apparently vanished from all detection on the 25th, at which time he paid his hotel bill and left in a northerly direction. The rover was recovered, abandoned, in a San Diego lot on April 30, and a warrant for the arrest of Cummings on theft charges was outstanding. In spite of the standard missing persons investigation carried out by the San Diego police, nothing more had been seen of the man before the discovery of his car (which had apparently disappeared from his apartment building lot some time in late March) outside of the truck stop in Montana. The car was found to contain several changes of clothing for a man of Cummings’ size, as well as a number of U.S. roadmaps and an address book that had been proven to have belonged to the man.
There was nothing evident in Cummings’ background to suggest reasons for the incredible violence that seemed to have taken over his life. He had been involved in various protest movements having to do with equal rights and the Vietnamese conflict, but always in passive actions. Though he was unmarried, his sexual preferences appeared to be heterosexual and within the arbitrary limits of what society termed “normal”, so this didn’t lend itself toward explanation of the attacks (the Maniac’s victims were recorded as six men, five women, and one child, and so far as examination could determine none had been sexually assaulted or intentionally sexually mutilated, though this latter point was difficult to judge due to the savage beatings to which they had been subjected). He had been involved in the drug culture in his youth and had been arrested once for intoxication, but had never been implicated by the authorities in any serious dealings. All of his students described him as friendly, highly intelligent, a fine instructor, and above all a non-violent, civilized human being. Almost to an individual, those of his friends and acquaintances who were interviewed expressed the opinion that Cummings had been killed by some terribly insane man, who had in turn assumed his identity, at least in a marginal sense, but the public remained unconvinced, and the professor held position as the primary suspect.
The news coverage took on an almost festive atmosphere as the next full moon approached. The Maniac was terrific ratings’ material, as far as the television networks were concerned, and the fact that they seemed to be able to predict when he would strike only heightened the perverse appeal. So the specials became more and more frequent as the remaining hours dwindled away. Grundel, who was interested in establishing a publicity base from which to launch his lecturing campaign and eventually sell his book once the incident was concluded, and Talley, who was still somewhat overwhelmed by it all, agreed to sit in as panel members on an ABC all-night news program which would monitor the events taking place throughout the nation to bring the fastest coverage of the creature’s newest atrocities, if any.
Meg was intelligent, attractive, and sincere, which made her a perfect subject for the cameras, especially when these attributes were combined with the fact that she claimed to actually have seen the killer. Nick, on the other hand, could be scathingly conceited and evil-tempered, but he was also smart enough to use this personality efficiently in presenting a love/hate relationship with the vast audiences which so recently had become his. Due to the fact that the selected panel also contained some quite prominent and vocal critics of the “werewolf” theory, including a well known science fiction author, Grundel’s presence on the program was practically required to counterbalance the logical arguments and high-flying sarcasm which were certain to be filling the air. Nick made the best of the situation, in a financial sense.
Naturally, Morgan and Corbett had also been invited to join in the lengthy watch on the broadcast, but both had refused. Douglas wanted to be free to fly into any part of the country just as soon as a positive report came over the wires, so he stayed in Los Angeles near the information hub provided by a special late edition of the Chronicle.
Blake had a distinct feeling that this was going to be the night that the monster was taken. He didn’t actually think that any sort of ESP was suddenly acting within his formerly psychically mute mind, but he figured that since the entire country was informed, if not convinced, of the reality of the thing which it faced, the prospect of capture had to be nearly absolute. For this reason, he felt that he had to be somewhere close to the action, experiencing it and acting as a part of the final machinations, and the best place that he could think of to wait for the attack was in Velberg, Montana. After all, the beast had struck twice consecutively in the countryside about Lynnview before moving on, so wasn’t it possible that he would be forced by some esoteric condition of his infection to seek more victims near the spot of his last seizure? Besides, given the complete randomness of selection of any other location, Velberg was clearly the most likely scene of another crime, a fact which did not go unrecognized by the local inhabitants, the Velberg police force, and the FBI, among others.
Corbett did not manage to escape the media, however, and as night fell found himself to be a key interview figure for each of the major networks, all of whom had live action crews in the small town. A kind of command post was set up in Germanetti’s Famous Truck Stop, which had been officially closed since October 17, and much of the media attention was focused on this establishment in spite of the wishes of the authorities, both state and federal. Somehow, Corbett wrangled permission to wait there for the news of this month’s tragedy.
“November 14,” said the newsman in deeply stentorian tones to the camera which was focused upon him outside of the truck stop, “Velberg, Montana, eight p.m. The sun has been down for several hours now, and the weather is cold, the night air sharp and stinging as it is drawn in to the lungs, but the skies are clear with a clarity that is seldom known in the polluted atmosphere which hangs over our larger cities. There is a moon, and it is full.”
The broadcast switched to a handheld camera which was already turned to the pale moon, yet low in the sky.
“That moon is scheduled to set at one minute before eleven this evening,” the newsman continued, “but it may have already incited a dramatic change within an apparently normal human being and changed him into a demonic beast once believed to be nothing other than the product of the ignorant, superstition-riddled mind of the Dark Age peasant. Is he a real monster with fang-like teeth and a total immunity to injury? We have with us in this forbidding spot Mr. Earl Pinder, a resident of Velberg and one of a number of men who have taken arms this night to protect their loved ones against the savage killer who seems to have already claimed a dozen lives, including six here, at this very truck stop, just last month. Mr. Pinder.”
Blake was standing out of the camera’s range, ready for the interview which he was to give next, and he saw a medium-height, wide-shouldered man wearing a heavy red-checked hunting jacket detach himself from a group of thirty or more similarly dressed townsmen and step up next to the newsman. He didn’t seem at all intimidated by the cameras or the massive lights which were being employed to light the area to near-daylight brightness.
“Mr. Pinder, you are one of the leaders of this vigilante group who have assembled here with your private weapons to defend your community against this alleged killer known as the Moonlight Maniac, is that correct?” asked the interviewer for the benefit of his audience.
“Yeah. We seen what that bastard done last month, and all the papers and television people say that he’ll be prowling again tonight,” replied the beefy-faced man. “Well, I can tell you, this time, he’ll have a little reception committee waiting.” He raised his large rifle and shook it meaningfully at the camera.
The cluster of men standing and smoking cigarettes in front of the grocery portion of the truck stop cheered and raised their own guns skyward at his comment. These men made Blake nervous. He understood the reasons behind their presence, because he felt the same rage and fear as they, and he knew that such armed squads were seldom as dangerous to themselves or the populace in general as the police liked to portray them, but these men seemed to be especially eager to shoot at something to kill their own terror. And since this enemy was possibly of the supernatural variety and unidentified, to boot, the chances of charged up emotions leading to fatal accidents looked to be extremely high.
“Isn’t it true that the police have asked you and your companions to return home and allow them to handle the matter?” was the next question.
“Yep, they even arrested three or four of us, but they didn’t do such a hot-damned job of stopping this creep in California, did they? And what about right here last month?” he demanded. “Six innocent people, two of ’em women and one kid! We ain’t letting anything like that happen here, mister, no sir! We already got men in every one of the houses outside of the town limits, and me and the other boys are ready to hit the road for wherever the thing shows up this time, I’ll tell ya!”
“Tell ’em, Earl!” shouted one of the men in the group to the side.
“But if this madman is, as witnesses have testified, an invulnerable creature, a werewolf capable of withstanding the twin blasts that Miss Villachaise fired into it, what can you hope to do to stop it?”
Pinder snorted derisively. “Bullshit! He’s crazy, but he’s a man just like you and me, and if I get the chance to sight on him he’ll be one dead man.”
More cheers from the gallery.
“We also have with us—” the newscaster began.
“And even if he did take those shotgun blasts like that Daley says—which I doubt because that little woman probably had never even shot a gun before in her life and must have missed him—even if he does turn out to be some kind of freak like they’re saying, you put enough lead into anything, and I’ll guarantee you, it’s gonna die!”
“Yes, well, thank you, Mr. Earl Pinder of the Velberg Vigilante Committee,” the newsman hurriedly finished, politely but firmly pushing him off-camera. “Also with us this evening is Mr. A.B. Corbett, author of a number of novels on supernatural subjects and an individual who has been investigating this tragic case in the capacity of a private citizen for the past several months. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Corbett. First, you disagree with Mr. Pinder on perhaps the most fundamental point of the entire matter, the nature of the person who is carrying out these attacks, is that right?”
Blake had been before the cameras enough to feel somewhat at ease before the staring lens, and he answered, “That’s essentially our basic difference in viewing the matter. I understand Mr. Pinder’s concern and what he hopes to accomplish by banding with his neighbors, but I can only hope that he will be very careful. The creature that will be moving out there, somewhere, tonight, is much more than just a mentally deranged man, and I’m not sure that all of their guns will be of any use to them if they come across him.”
“You’re saying, then, that this thing is a werewolf?”
It was the same every time that he had to make the admission before other people: half of him wanting to scream, Yes, you blind fools, it’s undeniable! and the other half pointing out how patently ridiculous even the thought had to be. “I believe that killer is a human being, a man, quite possibly Professor Cummings himself, who has become infected with an extremely rare and specialized form of bacterial life, which exists symbiotically with him. This bacteria induces certain physical changes in the man, including a form of practical invulnerability.”
“And once a month the full moon causes him to change into a ravening monster,” said the interviewer.
“Well, not actually the moon itself or any gravitational effects from it. Opinion has it that the psychological influence of its appearance triggers the physical change and the bursts of violence but does not directly cause it. This is based on the fact that in at least two cases, the attacks on the Mitchell family last August in Lynnview, California and the murders which took place here in October, the creature did not attack until after twelve o’clock when the moon had already set. In fact, witness Robert Daley described the arrival of the killer at midnight inside a moving car, and he certainly couldn’t have driven a vehicle of any type in his highly irrational state, so the change must have come upon him unexpectedly, perhaps because his watch was broken earlier or for some other reason.”
“You think that this change, if it does occur, happens at midnight by mental stimulation?”
“The evidence indicates that, yes.”
“Then we have … almost three hours to wait.”
“I believe so.”
“The countdown continues,” the man said directly into the camera, leaving Corbett to feel like a grinning village idiot. “This strange story, which is already one of the most incredible in the history of known crime and may turn out to be the scientific event of the century, nears another of its mysterious twists, but for now all is quiet. Should anything develop, we will immediately pick up coverage, but until then, this is George A. Russo returning you to your regularly scheduled NBC television program.”
The red light on the camera winked off, and Russo turned away to an aide, discussing some facet of the next report, but Corbett remained where he had been standing and squinted through the darkness at the group of men who were determined to defend Velberg against a werewolf. They were talking louder now, punctuating sentences with laughter, and he thought that he could see the glint of metal cans as they raised something to their lips. That was what he had been the most worried about: this was becoming a party.
One man raised his rifle and slowly scanned the dark countryside that surrounded the truck stop, pausing every few degrees in the sweep to close one eye and silently mouth the word, “Bang!”
11:57, CST. Rural Iowa.
Andrew Forrester sat close to the fire with his bad left leg stretched out to receive the fullest benefit of the heat. A can of beans and water bubbled on a makeshift stand above the flames, and his bottle leaned comfortingly against his right hip. He would have to go slow with that; it would be a long night.
Petey and Lester had gone down the slope above five minutes ago to check out the ’bo who had hopped off of the eastbounder that had just passed through, to see if he was carrying anything or was pretty enough to bother with, and he could now hear them struggling back up. Petey’s wheezing was louder than usual, which probably meant that they were dragging the newcomer along.
“How much?” Forrester asked as they dumped the limp body next to the fire. Lester Dunkenhorst was wearing that ugly smile of his.
“Not a damned thing,” answered Petey Eichmarr in a disgusted tone. “Not a dime or a bottle, hell, even his clothes are crap. I’m taking his shoes.”
“He dead?”
“Hit his head coming off,” explained Dunkenhorst. “I hit it again to make sure.”
“He don’t look experienced,” Eichmarr commented.
“Why’d you drag him up here?” asked Forrester, knowing the answer.
In confirmation, Eichmarr nodded toward Dunkenhorst, who, at forty-five, had more interest in sex than either of the older men. Andrew glanced at the unconscious man and figured him for around six feet, slim, maybe one-sixty, curly brown hair, no more than thirty-five, and smart-looking in spite of the couple of days’ growth of beard; Lester’s type all the way. Forrester stirred the beans with a stripped stick and shrugged. It didn’t have nothing to do with him.
“Gimme me a hand,” Lester said to Petey while he began to unbutton the man’s shirt.
“I’ll take his shoes,” said Eichmarr, doing so, “but you can take care of the rest your own self.”
Andrew Forrester shifted his leg and gingerly removed the can from the fire and left the two other men to their tasks, but his attention was abruptly drawn back to them when he heard Dunkenhorst’s sharp yelp. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s having a fit!” replied Lester, dancing back from the twitching body. Dunkenhorst figured himself to be okay, but he was deathly afraid of anybody else who acted sick or strange. “I think he’s epileptic or something!”
Petey scrambled back from the moving feet. “Jesus, Lester! You must’ve cracked his head when you hit him with that rock! He’s dyin’ on us!”
“I didn’t kill nobody!” Dunkenhorst exclaimed. “Help me roll him back down the hill!”
The two men started dragging the now wildly jerking figure toward the brush surrounding the clearing and Forrester began to curse to himself over the prospect of moving on about six hours before he had planned to when the first growling noise erupted from the injured ’bo. Dunkenhorst and Eichmarr dropped the body as if it had been a writhing snake instead of a man, and the group stared wordlessly at one another with the certainty that the deep-throated grunts they were hearing did not come from any human. The sounds might have belonged to one of the really big cats, or a bear or something, but not whatever it was rolling about at their feet.
“Hell, I’m getting out of here!” snapped Eichmarr as he turned toward the fire.
“Me too—Petey!” Dunkenhorst’s high-pitched scream burst from him at the instant that one of the struggling creature’s hands shot out and grasped his left ankle with such raw power that he could feel the bones being crushed as if in an industrial vise. Lester dropped to the earth shrieking and beating at the terrible fist. “Help me, Petey, help me!”
For some reason, Eichmarr stopped running, grabbed one of the loose sticks of firewood, and returned to start clubbing frantically at the madly wrestling mass, hitting Lester as often as the other. Then the other hand of the monster caught him by the neck, and the intermingling screams soared into the night sky like missiles searching for the stars.
Andrew Forrester was sixty-two years old and crippled, and he knew that there was absolutely nothing that he could do to help rescue either of the men from the roaring creature, which was now standing with them in its fists. So he struggled to his feet and began to run as swiftly as he had moved in the last twenty years in an effort to escape while it was occupied with the disintegrating bodies it already held. He fled with the speed of youth returned to him by the purest of terrors, and if he fell, he didn’t notice, but he had only made it to the tracks—now long and empty—when it finished with Eichmarr and Dunkenhorst and turned its hellish eyes away from the fire to look for more prey.
Forrester was running next to the tracks in the mad hope that something would come along to save him, but even if the hysteria had been able to return his very body of forty years ago, he would never have escaped. The claws touched him first, with their keen edges sliding smoothly through the flesh of his neck.
The news reached the networks at 3:44, only twenty minutes after Andrew Paul Forrester’s body was found strewn along the tracks by an engineer who was certain that no train had been responsible for that kind of widely spread out mutilation (one of his hands was eventually located more than seventy yards to the side of the rails) and just six minutes after the authorities were informed. Excitement filled the newscasters’ voices and determination flamed within the investigators, but nothing was uncovered other than two more ruined bodies just east of the first. Apparently proven correct once again, Meg, Nick, Blake, and Doug were subjected to alternating peaks and valleys having to do with the double-edged discovery of this new evidence, and the confidently rational skeptics were driven to new lengths to formulate sensible theories of explanation for the entire bizarre affair. The borders of the sensible in life seemed to be rapidly shifting, however.
The newspaper headlines screamed the murders throughout the nation, and the subheading common to most of them was a date: December 14. The next Target Night.
In a purely financial sense, the killings were the greatest things ever to happen to A.B. Corbett, because, with his face and words greeting the public from television screens and newspapers almost daily, the sales of his in-print books, including Anna Marcus and her Gothic, shot through the roof and a dozen publishers were after Rodney Witty, his agent, to contract with them for his first attempt at non-fiction, that being the personalized account of the entire Cummings/werewolf affair. But he wasn’t nearly as revitalized by the surge as he might have thought that he would be, primarily due to the facts that this story dealt intimately with real deaths, which were a long way from the generally ungraphic ones in his novels, and his sense of depression following the night of the 14th, when he had been so certain that the monster would be captured or killed. Now, with the authorities in possession of no more clues than they had wielded after the Velberg murders, he began to wonder if this sly, obviously intelligent, and even ghost-like creature would ever be stopped or if he would continue to ravage the human race here and abroad until the time that he encountered too many victims at once to effectively terminate them all and thus spread his sickness to others, who would pass it on to others, who would pass it on …
After all, Meg and Robert Daley had already survived attacks by Cummings, even if nothing but luck had saved them from being wounded by those germ-teeming fangs.
Perhaps Gerald Cummings, even with all of his tongue-in-cheek eruditeness, had predicted the end of mankind.
When the break came, it had little to do with all of the heated hours of solid detective work that so much of the nation’s federal and local law agencies had put in on the case. Combing all of the rough territory around Charleston, the northern Iowa town nearest the point where the three hobo murders had occurred, had turned up nothing other than some shredded clothing which may have belonged to the murderer but which contained no further clues; and the intensive check of all illegal riders on railroad trains, once it had been determined that this was the way that he was travelling without his car, yielded leads that evaporated after only hours of investigation. The break came because an elderly retired couple in Kansas City, Missouri hired a shabbily-dressed but honest-looking young man to nail storm hardware over their doors and windows on a blustery November 26th morning and then noticed that, despite the brown beard, the handyman resembled that picture of that mass murderer that was printed in the evening paper.
The husband, Leon Wheatley, 69, telephoned the police with his suspicions, and after an in-depth interview with Leon and his wife, Barbara, 67, reinforced the possibility, the Kansas City police chief informed the local FBI office of the development and began a discreet survey of the places where a man who was quite nearly destitute could find shelter for the night. They found their quarry asleep on one of a series of cots set up on the ground floor of a “fleabag” hotel and, in an operation that was later hailed by the Mayor as a textbook-perfect case, pounced on the man and had him chained hand and foot almost before he was fully awakened. The man struggled fiercely but only until he saw that it was not the indigents who were attacking him; upon recognizing the police, he relaxed and even cooperated with them.
An enterprising reporter at a local television station had been fortunate enough to receive a tip that the arrest was in progress, and he was there with a camera crew when the agents attempted to hustle the man from the hotel into a waiting patrol car. Though the captive was heavily surrounded by uniformed men, Ken Unsworth, the 27-year-old reporter, managed through speed and college football experience to plunge through the protective guard and fire off two questions to the tall, slender object of all of the fervent attention.
“Are you Charles Gerald Cummings?” he demanded.
“I am Professor Cummings,” the man answered freely.
“Are you the Animal Man Killer?” Unsworth shouted as he was dragged away from the moving cluster.
Cummings showed a trace of physical resistance as he tried to stop the fast trot and leaned toward the outstretched microphone to reply, “I am.”
The man appeared to be entirely sane.