Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (12 page)

Brush and scrub trees tore at us, but we kept running.

* * *

For the first time in its sixty-year history, Raven’s Den Camp closed early that summer so local sheriff’s deputies and volunteers could beat the brush for a lost camper. Missing was a thirteen-year-old boy named Harold Manry from Ash Grove. The camp staff, including Pastor Jerrod and Coach Sanders, assisted in the search. Manry’s counselor swore he had been accounted for at lights-out, as did the other boys assigned to the cabin, so it was assumed he had wandered into the woods sometime after curfew and become lost. Coach and Pastor Jerrod gathered all of us and asked if anyone knew what had happened to Harold. Danny and I kept our mouths shut, trying not to tremble when Coach’s eyes swept over us.

Poor Harold’s body was never found and he was eventually presumed dead. Thank goodness that in those days they didn’t print the blurry photos of lost children on lunchroom pint cartons of milk. I felt guilty enough.

We made a pact to never speak of what we’d seen. Mr. Wiles was AWOL. When dawn finally arrived he hadn’t returned to our cabin (Danny and I sat awake all night, shivering, in shock). We were told he had taken suddenly ill. We heard stories of food poisoning and Lyme disease from a tick bite. I wondered if he’d screwed up and been pushed permanently outside that eldritch circle.

Dad drove Nate and I home in the tired old station wagon. I spent the next six months avoiding Coach at basketball games and pep rallies until Dad announced we were selling the farm and moving. I slept poorly. Every time the tree outside my room tapped the window pane I awoke in a sweat, sure that I would see one of their transformed bestial faces staring in at me with hell-fired eyes.

These days I live far from the Ozark hills. Lately I have begun experiencing a recurring dream. The details are always the same—the horrible scene beyond the ravine and the panicked run through those haunted woods. This time Danny’s aim is off and the flashlight spins into the darkness past the man-lynx. It yowls in fury and scratches my hip with one claw as we speed by.
No
, my memory insists,
that was a scrape from a tree branch or brambles
. The dream shifts suddenly as dreams are apt to do, and I’m the grown man I see each morning in the mirror, taking his twelve-year-old boy on a father-and-son summer retreat. A spacious, modern lodge with a crackling stone fireplace and indoor plumbing looking down on a clear, blue lake; nothing like Raven’s Den. We hike through the spruce-covered hills and cook freshly caught fish on an open grill and make campfire chocolate and graham cracker s’mores.

In the morning my son calls to me to get up,
get up, Dad
, and join him in skipping flat stones across the lake’s rippling surface before breakfast, but I lay there paralyzed—held down by that freezing weight of black, stream-polished dread.

I dare not move. Perhaps if I ignore my son’s insistent calls I can forever remain in this perfect dream. If I leave our cabin and stroll past the edge of the woods I’ll find another crude circle of stones.

And I know exactly what I’ll see even before I peel back the blanket and sheets—

THREE DOG NIGHT

JOHN F.D. TAFF

It was the pull that morning that finally did it for Roland; the final pull he would lead.

However, it would not be the final pull he was ever involved in––

The pull
––what a vague, euphemistic word for that procedure. It sounded as if it were some sort of selection process, for a winning candidate or a great prize, a lottery drawing maybe.

It was a death walk, the last walk, a kind of animal green mile.

The pull was the round up of dogs and cats from the St. Francois County Animal Control Shelter, those who had gone unadopted; those whose luck had run out—the old, the infirm, the mangy, the aggressive, the merely unremarkable. All loaded into a cage in the middle of the main kennel, all taken to the gas chamber

All
pulled
––

No lethal injection for this shelter. Too expensive, said the bureaucrats. Besides, they said, gassing is safe and effective and causes a minimum of discomfort for the animals.

Roland knew that, from 18 years working here, the gas chamber might be
effective
, might even be
safe
, though he was unsure as to whom it was safe
for
. The discomfort for the animals—not to mention the workers? That was anything but minimal.

Those bureaucrats had never participated in a pull; they’d never had to look into the trusting eyes of dog after dog as they were taken into that room; never had to see their eyes as the door was closed, their tails still wagging, as if the door would open and the food would come, the love would come––

Never had to see the eyes of those dogs in their dreams, their nightmares
––

Lethal injection––gassing––it was all the same, Roland figured on his good days.

They’re dead any way you look at it.

Today was not a good day––

The air was hot inside the kennel, even this early in the morning. The pull was always done in the morning, so the howls of the cats and dogs wouldn’t disturb people on their way to work or disturb the few people who came to the shelter to adopt animals.

He was about to go to the next cage when his eye caught a small figure huddled far in the back of the cage closest to the door.

“Awww, shit,” he yelled, hanging his head. “Why didn’t anyone tell me that
she
was back?”

The roar of his voice, for Roland was an enormous man, echoed off the steel rafters of the room. The door to the administrator’s office opened, and Mel Shubert stuck his head out part way. “Yeah?” he asked around a mouthful of jelly doughnut, purple clots at the corners of his mouth.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me that Bethany was back?” he demanded over the din of the dogs.

Mel shrugged, though with some sympathy. “What would you have done?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just pulled back inside and let the door close.

Roland removed his gloves, walked to the cage. Bethany cowered at its rear, a white American bulldog mix of some kind, smaller than most, with black splotches covering her flanks and circling one eye, like Petey in
The Little Rascals.
Roland thought she had made it, that she’d been adopted.

But no
––

He didn’t let it happen often, but Bethany, in the short time she was there, had penetrated his carefully constructed defenses and made it to his heart. He knew he couldn’t save them all—couldn’t save
most
of them––even
some
of them. After 18 years, he had to be content with saving almost none.

Almost none had to be enough. Otherwise, you went crazy and had 50 dogs in your house. Or, and he wasn’t sure which was worse, your heart shrank, became as dense as lead, hard as diamond. Once that happened, you weren’t good for either animals or people.

And so he felt his heart wavering as he stood there, expanding and contracting in his chest as if not sure which way to go.

“Aww, shit, girl,” he growled. And though she didn’t move, her tail began wagging. “No, no, too late for that, little lady.”

He pulled her with the rest, took her himself to the chamber.

She went in with four others, all calmly, trustingly, and that fed his anger––anger at them, anger at those who had abandoned them, anger at all of that, all of that and this stupid job, this stupid system that put him in this position, made him kill these creatures who wanted nothing more than to eat, to sleep, to be loved.

Not too much to ask––but apparently too much to ask.

He closed the steel hatch on the chamber, punched the red button on the switch near the door. Carbon monoxide gas hissed into the room, colorless, odorless. Roland watched through an acrylic window set high in the hatch. After 20 or 30 seconds, Bethany and the four other dogs swung their heads from side to side, wobbled, fell over.

Another four minutes and they were dead.

When the light on the switch signaled that the cycle was complete, Roland tapped the shoulder of the attendant standing by him, told him with a nod of his head to take over for the rest of this pull.

* * *

Jonesy’s owner was an older lady who lived in a small house with a small yard, and Jonesy was her small dog for 13 years. Then, Jonesy got sick, and she brought him to the shelter, seeking a cheap answer to her prayers. The only answer it had was putting Jonesy to sleep. That was its cheap answer to everything.

Healthy?
Death.
Sick?
Death.
Unwanted?
Death.
Dying?
Death.

She took the money she might have spent on restoring Jonesy to health and paid for the return of his ashes in a little wooden box, suitable for display, as the brochure said. Roland had promised to bring it to her when it was ready.

It was a promise he would keep––the last of them, as far as he was concerned.

His brother-in-law owned a trash recycling business that was proving wildly lucrative, and had offered Roland a job several times. As much as he detested his brother-in-law, now might be the time to deal with the throwaways that people actually wanted for a change.

He found her house from memory, parked the truck on the street. He grabbed the box and a clipboard with the paperwork she’d have to sign. It was late morning now, just a little after ten o’clock, so he hoped that he wouldn’t be disturbing her at breakfast.

As in response, she met him at the door, her eyes already on the box in his huge hands, already tearing. “Why, you dear man,” she said, her voice warbling with emotion. “Have you brought my little Jonesy back?”

“Why, yes’m, I did. He’s right here.”

Slowly, he held the wooden box out. She took it with one shaking hand, the other covering her mouth, as if an entire body’s worth of grief might spill from it.

“Oh, my dear, dear little Jonesy,” she whispered, taking it from his hands, where it looked so small, and pressing it to her thin chest. “My baby, my sweet little baby.”

Roland waited, respectfully, silently.

“Would you like to come in, young man, have a cup of coffee?”

“No, ma’am, thank you. I just need you to sign these papers, and I’ll be on my…”

“You might want to look under the back before you go,” she interrupted, as he handed the clipboard to her. “Something’s been howling all night.”

“A dog?” he asked, taking the clipboard back.

“Sounded like a gee-dee wolf, if you ask me.”

Roland pursed his lips, absently signed his name to the paper.

“Okay, let me get my pole, and I’ll take a look-see.”

“Fine,” she murmured, cradling the box to her chest as if it were her actual dog. “If you want that coffee, you just knock.”

The door closed, and he thought he heard her crying quietly as she disappeared into the house.

He went to the truck to get a control pole—basically a long stick with a collapsible loop of wire on one end—and a pair of thick leather gloves. As a precaution, he also took a loaded tranquilizer gun.

A cracked, narrow concrete path ran to her backyard. A rusted gate, groaning on its hinges, admitted him.

That’s where he smelled it first.

It was like
dog
, but multiplied by 100. And it wasn’t the smell of a group of dogs or even the kennel. It was the essential smell of
dog
, pure and concentrated on the air. It was dense and unpleasant, with a whiff of wet fur and a back odor like urine.

And blood
––
there was also a bloody component, mineral and meaty.

A few wooden steps led to the back door. Under this, a wooden trellis blocked the crawl space. A section was broken, chewed through––recently from the looks of it.

Using the end of the pole, he tapped the trellis, eliciting a low, menacing growl from the dark beneath the house, angry, fearful––

“Shit,” Roland cursed under his breath. He bent, surveyed the space. There was no way he was going to be able to squeeze in there. The pole extended 12 feet, but the longer it got, the more unwieldy it was and trying to loop the wire around the neck of an agitated animal was difficult under the best conditions.

On his hands and knees, he peered into the hole. The smell rolled from this opening in powerful waves, floating on the equally strong odors of damp earth and mildew.

The growl became more pronounced, more threatening.

The space went back about eight feet and was L-shaped, with the foot of the letter farther back on the right side. There, he could just make out a dense, compact curl of darkness.

“Hey, baby,” he said in his calmest tone. “Let’s get you out of there, take you someplace safe.”

He hated himself for saying that; hated himself even though he knew that the lie meant nothing to the frightened animal.

Slowly, carefully, he slid the pole into the opening.

“S’ok, baby, s’ok. I’m not gonna hurt you––not gonna––”

There was an explosion of movement that caught him off guard, snapping, growling. The pole ripped from his hands, skittered into the darkness.

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

Recovering quickly, he snatched at the end of the pole, hauled it back. The end was chewed savagely, but the wire was intact. Raising his eyebrows at the damage, Roland slid the pole back in, prepared this time for the dog to attack it.

This time, only a plaintive whine, the low growl. He felt it bite at the pole several times, but with far less vehemence. He maneuvered the loop where he thought its head was, felt it slip around something. Quickly, he pulled back, closing the loop, yanked the pole out.

This was met by violent thrashing and maddened yelping. The pole jerked in his hands.

Careful to keep hold of it, Roland planted his feet to get better leverage. Laughing a little, he hauled back strongly, like an angler wrestling a sport fish, amazed at the fight this dog had––and its weight.