Cycle of the Werewolf

He sleeps the deep, dreamless sleep of the very young, while outside the river of wind blows over Tarker's Mills, washing out October and bringing in cold, star-shot November, autumn's iron month.

NOVEMBER

The smoking butt end of the year, November's dark iron, has come to Tarker's Mills. A strange exodus seems to be taking place on Main Street. The Rev. Lester Lowe watches it from the door of the Baptist Parsonage; he has just come out to get his mail and he holds six circulars and one single letter in his hand, watching the conga-line of dusty pick-up trucks-Fords and Chevys and International Harvesterssnake its way out of town.

Snow is coming, the weatherman says, but these are no riders before the storm, bound for warmer climes; you don't head out for Florida or California's golden shore with your hunting jacket on and your gun behind you in the cab rack and your dogs in the flatbed. This is the fourth day that the men, led by Elmer Zi

Some of the men, Rev. Lowe knows, are doing no more than skylarking; here is a chance to get out in the woods, pull beers, piss in ravines, tell jokes about polacks and frogs and niggers, shoot at squirrels and crows. They're the real animals, Lowe thinks, his hand unconsciously going to the eyepatch he has worn since July. Somebody will shoot somebody, most likely. They're lucky it hasn't happened already.

The last of the trucks drives out of sight over Tarker's Hill, horn honking, dogs yarking and barking in the back. Yes, some of the men are just skylarking, but some-Elmer and Pete Zi

If that creature, man or beast or whatever it is, goes hunting this month, the dogs will pick up its scent, the Rev. Lowe has heard Elmer say in the barber shop not two weeks ago. And if it-or he-don't go out, then maybe we'll have saved a life. Someone's livestock at the very least.

Yes, there are some of them-maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen-who mean business. But it is not them that has brought this strange new feeling into the back of Lowe's brain-that sense of being brought to bay.

It's the notes that have done that. The notes, the longest of them only two sentences long, written in a childish, laborious hand, sometimes misspelled. He looks down at the letter that has come in today's mail, addressed in that same childish script, addressed as the others have been addressed: The Reverend Lowe, Baptist Parsonage, Tarker's Mills, Maine 04491.

Now, this strange, trapped feeling… the way he imagines a fox must feel when it realizes that the dogs have somehow chased it into a cul-de-sac. That panicked moment that the fox turns, its teeth bared, to do battle with the dogs that will surely pull it to pieces.

He closes the door firmly, goes inside to the parlor where the grandfather clock ticks solemn ticks and tocks solemn tocks; he sits down, puts the religious circulars carefully aside on the table Mrs. Miller polishes twice a week, and opens his new letter. Like the others, there is no salutation. Like the others, it is unsigned. Written in the center of a sheet torn from a grade-schooler's lined notepad, is this sentence:

Why don't you kill yourself?

The Rev. Lowe puts a hand to his forehead-it trembles slightly. With the other hand he crumples the sheet of paper up and puts it in the large glass ashtray in the center of the table (Rev. Lowe does all of his counselling in the parlor, and some of his troubled parishoners smoke). He takes a book of matches from his Saturday afternoon “at home” sweater and lights the note, as he has lit the others. He watches it burn.

Lowe's knowledge of what he is has come in two distinct stages: Following his nightmare in May, the dream in which everyone in the Old Home Sunday congregation turned into a werewolf, and following his terrible discovery of Clyde Corliss's gutted body, he has begun to realize that something is… well, wrong with him. He knows no other way to put it. Something wrong. But he also knows that on some mornings, usually during the period when the moon is full, he awakes feeling amazingly good, amazingly well, amazingly strong. This feeling ebbs with the moon, and then grows again with the next moon.

Following the dream and Corliss's death, he has been forced to acknowledge other things, which he had, up until then, been able to ignore. Clothes that are muddy and torn. Scratches and bruises he ca

Then, on July 5th, the second stage. Simply described: he had awakened blind in one eye. As with the cuts and scratches, there had been no pain; simply a gored, blasted socket where his left eye had been. At that point the knowledge had become too great for denial: he is the werewolf; he is the Beast.

For the last three days he has felt familiar sensations: a great restlessness, an impatience that is almost joyful, a sense of tension in his body. It is coming again-the change is almost here again. Tonight the moon will rise full, and the hunters will be out with their dogs. Well, no matter. He is smarter than they give him credit for. They speak of a man-wolf, but think only in terms of the wolf, not the man. They can drive in their pickups, and he can drive in his small Volare sedan. And this afternoon he will drive down Portland way, he thinks, and stay at some motel on the outskirts of town. And if the change comes, there will be no hunters, no dogs. They are not the ones who frighten him.

Why don't you kill yourself?

The first note came early this month. It said simply:

I know who you are.

The second said:

If you are a man of God, get out of town. Go someplace where there are animals for you to kill but no people.

The third said:

End it.

That was all; just End it. And now

Why don't you kill yourself?

Because I don't want to, the Rev. Lowe thinks petulantly. This whatever it is—is nothing I asked for. I wasn't bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It just… happened. I picked some flowers for the vases in the church vestry one day last November. Up by that pretty little cemetery on Sunshine Hill. I never saw such flowers before… and they were dead before I could get back to town. They turned black, every one. Perhaps that was when it started to happen. No reason to think so, exactly… but I do. And I won't kill myself. They are the animals, not me.

Who is writing the notes?

He doesn't know. The attack on Marty Coslaw has not been reported in the weekly Tarker's Mills newspapers, and he prides himself on not listening to gossip. Also, as Marty did not know about Lowe until Halloween because their religious circles do not touch, the Rev. Lowe does not know about Marty. And he has no memory of what he does in his beast-state; only that alcoholic sense of well-being when the cycle has finished for another month, and the restlessness before.

I am a man of God, he thinks, getting up and begi