Later, I tried to go through my nightly routine of reading a book until I drifted off to sleep. I tried one of my favorites, the Modern Library edition of Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, but it couldn’t hold my interest. I was restless. I went next to my paperback collection of Charles Beaumont’s The Howling Man, which was another one of my favorites, but even still I had to force my way through three stories before I felt sleep pulling me down.
It was a restless night, but I managed to sleep.
In summer, I was pretty much on my own during the early morning. Dad was on night watch, which meant that he usually didn’t make it home until 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning. Mom, on the other hand, was always up well before dawn. She was normally at her practice by 6:30. That left me to sleep late. I was going downstairs just as my dad and Max were dragging in from a night of crime fighting. Both, most of the time, went promptly to bed. That left me with a day empty of parental supervision.
That was how it usually happened, anyway.
But that morning I woke to my mom screaming.
I sat up in bed, trying to figure out what the sound was and where it was coming from. When I realized it was my mom screaming from outside, I ran downstairs. I ran out the front door and skidded to a stop. My mom’s car was stopped at the end of the drive, her door open.
In the grass, in a sea of blood, were the dismembered bodies of Billy Steyn, Matt Drake and Lee Johnson.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t come out here,” my mom said.
She looked from me to the yard, and I’d never seen her look more terrified, or helpless. She was very close to tears.
As I looked over the yard I saw Billy’s body. He was missing a leg and both arms. Near him, hanging off the curb, was a paper grocery bag filled with eggs, a few of them broken and soaking through the bag. I realized then they were going to egg my house when the hairy man got them.
The next moment I realized something else.
The hairy man had been in front of my house.
* * *
My day turned into a circus after that. First the neighbors came out. And I mean all of them. I saw Jeff in the crowd, but his mom had a death grip on his shoulders and he couldn’t break loose to talk to me. Then the cops got there. Our yard was blocked off with crime scene tape and a parade of photographers took so many pictures that the flashbulbs nearly burned my eyes out.
And the questions. They never stopped.
My mom and I were separated.
We were put in police cars and driven downtown to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. I saw my mom a few times, but it was always from across a crowded office where the detectives were too busy answering phones or running back and forth to let me talk to her.
Then I was stuck in a dirty little room with a chair and a desk and a trashcan and told to wait, somebody would be with me in a moment or two.
Finally, Detective Travis came in.
I felt relieved to see somebody I knew, though we had never really said more than a few words to each other.
He said, “Hey there, Mark. Had a bit of scare today, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes sir.”
Detective Travis smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “Your dad’s out there in the office with your mom. I called him.”
“Oh,” I said. “Can I see him?”
“In a minute. I want to ask you some questions first, if that’s okay?”
I nodded, but my gut tightened. My dad was a cop. And I’d made him mad before. Many times actually. I’d even stood up to him, especially lately. But I’d never been the subject of official police questioning. This was something else entirely. I felt the heat rising to my cheeks. I felt my pulse quicken. My hands felt numb.
“Did you know these boys, the ones who got killed?”
“Yes sir.”
“You do?” He’d been writing notes to himself on a yellow legal pad, but when I told him that I knew Billy and his gang he put his pen down and seemed to take notice of me all over again. I didn’t like the attention. “Do you know their names?”
“Yes,” I said, and told him.
“How do you know them? They’re all older than you, aren’t they?”
“Yes. They’re kind of like bullies. They’ve been picking on me and my friends for a long time now.”
“How long?”
I shrugged. “A year or so. Maybe two.”
“They pick on you just because, or…”
I shrugged again.
“Mark, talk to me, okay? I know you’ve been through a bad shock today. Hell, it’s been a rough week for you, hasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Mark, I need you to answer me, okay? You can’t just shrug or nod. I need you to say something.”
Suddenly, I thought of all the times during his interview with Rebecca Hannett that he’d had to ask her to speak her answers out loud and I realized he must have been videotaping our interview. I looked around, but didn’t see a camera. It must have been hidden somewhere, though.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a bad week.”
“So why did those boys pick on you?”
I sagged into my chair. Then I told him about the nunchucks incident, and about Billy cornering me in the hall outside my class and about all the times they messed with us at the arcade.
“And this has been going on for about two years you said?”
I nodded. “About that, yeah. I guess that’s why they had the eggs.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, to throw them at my house.”
“Ah, I get it.” He sat back in his chair and studied me for a bit. I tried to look invisible. “Mark,” he said.
I looked up.
“What aren’t you telling me? I can see by the way you’re slouching and the way you won’t look me in the eyes that there’s something you haven’t talked about yet. What’s up? You can tell me.”
Moment of truth, I thought.
“That day the hairy man attacked me in the Swamp, Billy and his gang were chasing me. He shot me with his pellet gun and when I ran they chased me. That’s how I got so far out and found that old house.”
He grunted. I couldn’t tell from his face whether he was angry or just thinking what to say next. Finally, after like a whole minute of silence, he said, “How come you didn’t tell me this when I talked to you last time?”
“Because Billy was already trying to kick my ass every chance he got. The last thing I needed was for him to beat me up again for being a snitch.”
“You’re not being a snitch for telling the truth.”
I sagged further into my chair. “That’s what my dad always says.”
“Your dad’s a good guy.”
I nodded.
“But the real issue is this, Mark. First, you don’t tell me about Billy and his friends chasing you through the marsh, and the next thing anybody knows, he’s dead in your front lawn.”
I gawked at him. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the hairy man.”
“I know you didn’t, Mark. No fourteen-year-old kid could rip the arms off of three eighteen-year-old guys. That took a grown man, and a desperate one at that. Did you see the hairy man last night, Mark. Surely you heard something.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all? Really? Three people were attacked and dismembered in your front yard and you didn’t hear anything?”
“I swear, I didn’t,” I said.
He did that silent treatment again, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. I just sat there staring at the floor.
“Well,” he finally said, “you should probably know that we’ve been searching your neighborhood all day. We haven’t found anything.”
“That’s because he’s probably out at that house. He kills by the full moon and goes out there during the daytime.”
“By the full moon?”
“Yes,” I said, and realized I’d said too much.
“What do you mean about the full moon?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“It’s not nothing. Mark, if you bring it up it’s not nothing. Tell me.”
I shook my head, but he had me and we both knew it. I’d let it slip when I wasn’t prepared for a lie, and that’s always when the truth comes out. I said: “Last month he killed those people during the three days of the full moon. Then nothing until last night, which was also a full moon. He thinks he’s a werewolf.”
“A what?” he said. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“A werewolf,” I said. I’d gotten kind of excited there for a second, but the look on his face brought me down to earth again. I put my hands in my lap and sulked.
“What makes you think he thinks of himself as a werewolf?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Mark?”
“No reason,” I said.
“Mark, come on. If you know something, say it.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “It’s just what my friends and I think.”
“Ah,” he said. “Okay. Alright, well, you’ll tell me or your dad if you think of anything else, won’t you?”
I nodded without looking at him.
“Okay,” he said. “Come on. Your parents are waiting to take you home.”
“But…wait!” I said.
He had started to rise and was already opening the door, but he paused then and looked at me. “Yes?”
“What about the house? Did you guys search the house? That’s where he’s gonna go.”
“We searched it, Mark. We’ve had officers combing that marsh all day. Dogs too. So far, nothing. Now come on.”
He led me out to my parents. Dad was drinking a cup of coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He had an arm around my mom’s shoulders. Her face was all red and puffy, like she’d been crying.
“We’re all done here,” Detective Travis said to my dad. “We’re gonna have patrol units working your subdivision all night.”
“Thanks, Gene,” my dad said.
Travis nodded again. He looked at me. “You’ll talk to me or your dad if you remember anything else?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, yes sir.”
Travis smiled. “You’re doing fine, Mark.”
To my dad he said, “I’ll be in touch, okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
We left then. My dad had come straight from work when Detective Travis called him, and so he was in his truck. Max was in the back. I asked if I could ride back there with him, but my dad said no. That meant I had to ride with my mom for the thirty minute drive back to Clear Lake.
We didn’t say anything until we got back home. But it wasn’t to me that my mom finally broke the silence. She went immediately for my dad. “I want you home tonight,” she said. “Please.”
“Alright,” he said, taking a beer out of the fridge. “I’ll call in. Gomez should be able to cover my shift tonight.” He reached across the kitchen counter and patted my mom’s thigh. “Don’t worry,” he said. He looked at me and smiled. “We’re gonna be fine.”