The morning dawned pale lemon and rose, shafts of sunlight dropping into the stormy blue of the restless lake. The cool air said autumn would arrive early. I stood at the edge of the water on the pebbled beach in my sports bra and shorts, the rusty stain of Maudie’s blood flaking from my skin where I hadn’t been able to mop it from me. Nick was asleep in the nest of gutted pillows and torn blankets we’d dragged together, so exhausted from the night’s horrors that we had fallen into dreamless oblivion still sticky with gore.
“Preston,” I whispered into the soft breeze that ruffled the lake. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I didn’t have much hope that the ghost would still be near. When it had fled the night before, I feared it had been compelled to return to the submerged corpse that held it like a prison cell. Silence met my question, and I cast a frustrated gaze up and down the shore. The breeze stirred the birch leaves to a confetti-like flutter, but when I’d nearly resigned myself to breaking my promise to find Preston’s bones, a faint voice joined the susurration of the leaves.
“Cousin,” it breathed.
“Where’s your body, Preston? I’ll bring it to shore.”
“Only bones,” the voice moaned. “Gnawed bones …”
I waited, but it said no more. “Maudie’s dead, Preston. She can’t hurt you anymore. If you want to leave this lake, you’ll have to tell me where to look.”
“Shallow water. Fallen birch.” The voice had grown faint as an old memory but mustered a final time. “Picnic ….”
To the left of the boathouse, the lake had carved out a small inlet. It was ringed with a thick stand of swaying birches, their leaves already edged and spotted with autumnal gold. A grassy patch grew about their feet, home to three picnic tables gone grey and splintery with neglect. The birches strode to the edge of the lake, leaning out to admire their reflections in the calm mirror of the inlet. I saw where one, some time ago, had toppled in. Its pale trunk had turned black and slick, but the few broken limbs that rose above the water were white as bleached bones.
I walked to the strip of stones and fine silt, just big enough to beach a couple of kayaks, between the boathouse and the family of birches. The water was clear and no more than thigh deep until it reached the deadfall. There it spread in a murky penumbra about the fallen tree, indicating a deeper hole. I looked around at the sunlit picnic area, then back at the watery grave, thinking about gnawed bones and the black irony of the site of Preston’s slaughter. Sighing, I waded in.
The water was cold after the previous night’s storm, but it was icy by the dead tree. I took a gliding step forward, intending to lean on the old birch and fish one-handed beneath its branches. The hole opened under my foot and down into the tea dark water I went, a plume of dull scarlet unwinding from my hair as Maudie’s blood washed from it. Panicked, I flailed at the water to stop my descent and lifted my face toward the surface already several feet above me, watching columns of bubbles rise into the sun dapple.
The birch, its roots tenacious even in death, clung to the bank. The tree formed a bridge to nowhere over an underwater cavern that yawned like a hell-pit beneath me. The cold that arrowed up from those depths gripped my bones and tried to squeeze the breath from my lungs.
I could see Preston’s skeleton, still partially clothed in ragged flesh, dangling from a precarious basket of slim branches. I pushed to the surface, filled my lungs, and sank down to stare at his half-face, his jaw almost unhinged in a tortured scream. His remaining eye stared at me, cloudy and beseeching.
I thought about his role in Maudie’s hunts, and about the bloodthirsty lie he’d told me about resting in shallow water. He had been a murderous bastard in life. It didn’t seem that he’d changed his ways in death. Still, a promise is a promise, and I reached out and began to pull away the pliant whips that held him. He sagged deeper, sliding from the tree’s embrace like an awful birth.
My hands stretched out to catch him. The last clinging branches released him, and he swayed toward me as though he would put his ruined head on my shoulder. A mighty resonance rumbled through the still, icy water. My ears popped. An immense bubble wobbled upward from the black and broke around me, then another. In alarm, I pulled my hands back and looked down.
Preston tumbled past me, drifting downward into the abyss. His skeletal hand rose, reaching for mine. Our fingertips brushed, flesh on bone, as another silent roar erupted from the cavern. I stroked back and up, propelling myself to the surface, and thrashed my way to the shore in a white haze of adrenaline, leaving Preston to whatever dwelled below.
I squelched across the grass in my wet sneakers, too shaky to run, tossing glances over my shoulder as I made for the lodge. Nick emerged to lean on the porch rail, his hair sticking up in stiff, bloody spikes. He slung a beach towel over the rail.
“I see you got cleaned up,” he said, then narrowed his eyes. “What happened? Are you ok?”
“Don’t go in the water … over there … the inlet,” I said, my teeth chattering. “There’s something in there, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know … there’s a deep cavern … I had to let Preston drop into it.”
“Serves him right,” Nick muttered. He tossed me the towel. “You think there’s another monster here? Hot damn! We hit the jackpot this trip. Claudia will be over the moon.”
I wrapped the towel around myself and climbed the stairs to the porch. My gaze went past Nick to the long, stiff mound hidden under the tarp we’d taken from the woodpile. In a brilliant stroke of foresight, we’d covered Maudie with it so we would not have to look at her lupine impossibility first thing in the morning. Nick’s gaze followed mine.
“Sorry. Too soon, huh?” He moved to stare down at the tarp, nudging it with his toe.
“We’re going to have to document this. Photos. Write it up. Video interviews with locals if we can get them. We should get samples from the body. Claudia could do it, but she won’t be able to get here for a couple of days. I mean, what are we supposed to do with it?”
He looked at me, eyes wide. “I never believed we would ever find anything. This thing we’ve been doing … the investigations … it was just a fun way to make a living, a gimmick. But this,” he nudged the tarp again, “changes everything. If this is possible, there are no impossibilities.”
Nick’s voice had risen as he spoke, and he ended with a strained laugh. He raked a hand through his hair, grimaced, and stared at the tacky residue that came away on his fingers. I put my hand on his arm.
“Steady, Nick. Are you ok?”
It was an inane question. He transferred his stare to me.
“Hell, no. We killed a werewolf last night! I saw a ghost.” He pointed at me. “And you! You called it to us. My writing partner is some kind of witch. I am definitely not ok. Now you tell me there’s a creature living in a cavern under the lake. I feel like I’ve fallen into one of our books.”
I nodded. I had expected this.
“I understand. Look, I’ll get us packed while you get cleaned up. You can drive back, and I’ll wait for Claudia. I’ll get the documentation, and then we can decide what, if anything, we want to do with it.” My lower lip trembled, and I bit it. “It’s been fun, Nick. We’ve written some great stuff.”
The electric blue stare sharpened on me.
“What are you saying, Tess? I don’t want to dissolve the partnership.”
“You don’t?”
A slow, mischievous grin crept across his face.
“No way, baby. We’re onto something big. Can’t unsee it or unknow it. All I want now is more of it. Are you in?”
I answered him with a grin of my own and tossed the damp towel back to him.
“Stay away from the inlet,” I said, and headed inside to begin packing our gear.
***
Trudy Bigg had a walk-in freezer. We had a dead werewolf in need of preservation. We rolled into the empty parking lot at MeeMaw’s with Maudie’s lolling carcass in the Jeep, wrapped in its borrowed tarp. The bar wasn’t open, but we could see Trudy lounging on the porch swing of the little cottage she kept on the hillside behind it, sipping coffee. I strolled to the foot of her concrete stairs, leaving Nick to guard our precious cargo.
“Hells bells, girl, you’re up early,” Trudy called down to me. “Get on up here and have some coffee.”
“I’d love to,” I replied, “but I have a favor to ask you. I’ve got something I’d like to keep in your big freezer for a couple of days.”
“No problem. Let me go grab the keys and I’ll be right down.”
Trudy joined us in front of MeeMaw’s, the keys on a lanyard trailing from her fist and jingling like Christmas. She cast a curious glance in the cargo area, saw the long tarp-wrapped bundle, and grinned at us.
“Don’t tell me you got yourselves an out of season deer. What happened, you hit it with this beast?” She thumped the muddy flank of the Jeep. “Happens all the time around here. Looks like a small one. I can give Dom a call and he’ll have it dressed and on ice for you in no time.”
Nick opened the tailgate and flipped the tarp open.
“It’s no deer, Trudy. And if you don’t want to help us with this, we understand.”
Trudy stared at the wolf for a long, silent moment. Her only outward reaction was to drum the fingers of her right hand against her thigh. She looked up from the body and met my eyes.
“Never heard of wolves around here.”
I calculated the risk of laying out the whole story, briefly imagined Trudy guffawing and then returning to her cottage to call the game warden on us, and I had nearly made up my mind to tell her anyway when Nick spoke up.
“Maybe not. But I bet you’ve heard of werewolves, haven’t you?”
Trudy did not laugh. Instead, she stepped close to the carcass and grasped it by its left hind leg. She pressed her thumb into the big paw pad, spreading the long toes. Three, where there should have been four. Next, she moved to the creature’s head. She hesitated, then grabbed an ear and tilted the head toward her. With the fingers of her other hand, she opened the eye. The orb rolled to look at us, unclouded and clear. It was the green of a forest glade ringed with topaz. Trudy let go of the wolf and stepped back, wiping her hands on her jeans.
“Sweet Jesus. You got her.” She stared at us. “That’s Maudie Egolf, isn’t it?”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She reached forward again and pulled the tarp over the body, then turned and strode to the door of the bar. As she turned the key in the lock, she looked back over her shoulder at us.
“Better get that bitch in here before anyone drives past and gets nosy.”
***
Half an hour later, the three of us pottered companionably about in Trudy’s cottage kitchen, assembling breakfast. Maudie was stretched on the floor of MeeMaw’s walk-in freezer under her blue tarp and Trudy had closed the bar for the day. I called Claudia.
“How’s the monster hunt going?” she asked, a ripple of laughter in her voice.
“Fabulous. We bagged a werewolf and want you to come up here to take a look at it just as fast as you can move your fanny.”
Claudia laughed. The sunny sound of it, free of any need to believe in our dark, inexplicable horror, would haunt me in days to come.
“Tess, you’re too much. Do you like the lodge? Is Mr. Egolf keeping it up nicely?”
I glanced at the others who had frozen in the act of setting the table, their ears tuned to my side of the conversation. I mouthed at them, ‘She doesn’t believe me’, and shrugged.
“Claudia, listen to me,” I said. “Preston Egolf is dead. Maudie Egolf is dead. When you get up here and see her body, you’ll understand everything. We have her in Trudy’s freezer at MeeMaw’s, but she can’t stay there for long. We need you to come now and bring whatever equipment you need to get bio samples. All those spook stories about Pepikissimo … they’re true.”
There was deep silence at Claudia’s end. When she replied, my bubbly college roommate had been replaced by no-nonsense, un-shockable Dr. Moon.
“You’re not shitting me, are you?” she asked, then began firing a rapid list of requests at me.
“Ok, don’t do a thing to the body. Let it lie in the freezer and don’t let anyone at it. Get me photos of the site where she died, and jot down anything you remember about the weather, temperature, and surroundings at the time of death. Do you have Preston’s body, as well?
“No, it’s … gone.”
Silence again as she absorbed this.
“I’ll be there tonight. I’m getting my kit together as we speak. What does the body look like?”
I understood the implied question within the question.
“It’s a wolf, Claudia. Just a big old dead wolf.”
She let out a tense breath.
“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” she said, her calm voice hiding the intense excitement I knew she must feel. “I thought it would just be a ghost-chase all my life.”
“Welcome to the elite among cryptozoologists, sweetie,” I said, and rang off.
Breakfast waited on the table, and we all pulled up our chairs and dived in, well, like starving wolves.
“What I want to know,” Nick said around a mouthful of buttermilk pancake, “is how you knew, Trudy, that the dead wolf was Maudie. You sure didn’t seem surprised, either. What’s the story?”
I recalled how Trudy had examined the wolf, noting its missing hind toe and the unusual eye color. Having grown up in a place similar to tiny, rural Davitt’s Grove, I was not as surprised by Trudy’s easy acceptance of local myth as fact.
Trudy lifted one scrawny shoulder. “Been hearing the stories all my life. Now, people talk but don’t full-on believe, you understand. And years would go by, quiet years, and the old stories would get to be just something to scare the campers with. Then, someone would go missing. Everything would flare up again, and folks that laughed at the tales before would be sure to have their rifles with them driving after dark. Maudie was always scary, from the time I was a kid, so naturally folks said she must be a werewolf. Living out there in the woods by herself, and just plain batshit crazy.
‘My mother remembers when Maudie came home with Preston in tow. He was only a toddler, and Maudie had to have been near forty years old then. It was right after the disappearance of some people from over the line in New York. That was almost sixty years ago, and the boy grew to a man but the woman barely aged.”
Trudy shook her head and spread marmalade on her toast. “I guess deep down we all knew what she was but knowing that kind of thing is pretty useless. Wasn’t no proof, and who do you tell? There’ve been a few over the years tried to get rid of her. Never turned out well for them. After looking at her down there, looking at what she became, I’d bet those men plain wet themselves to see it.” She took a healthy bite of toast, ruminating on the bad end of would-be monster hunters.
“That toe of hers … she hacked it clean off with a hatchet about fifteen years ago. Splitting kindling for her stove. Preston saw her do it, or nobody would have known. She held no trade with doctors. He was drinking in the bar, telling the story. Said she screeched and cursed a blue streak, then just bound it up with some of her herbs and went around barefoot for a couple of weeks. It healed like magic, he said. I saw the stump one day over at Red John’s when she brought the eggs in. She was wearing sandals, and she saw me looking at her foot and stuck it out. ‘Pretty, ain’t it?’ she said. Then just cackled like it was the biggest joke in the world.”
“Some joke,” Nick said. “I guess people around here will be relieved to be rid of her.”
Trudy nodded slowly. “Yeah, if there aren’t any more like her.” She went on to echo something Maudie herself had said to me. “Things like that will run in a family sometimes.”
***
The final report on our Davitt’s Grove adventure is an unsatisfactory one as so often happens in incidents of this nature. When we returned to MeeMaw’s to check on our treasure, we found the door to the bar pulled from its frame and flung into the dirt of the parking lot. The door to the freezer had been peeled downward like the top of a tin of sardines. Long grooves marred its smooth steel face. Maudie’s body was gone. Only a few tatters of the tarp remained.
Upon her arrival, Claudia assuaged her severe disappointment by collecting a sparse tuft of fur from among the shreds of tarp and a solitary bead of blood flattened to a tarry wafer near the ruined door. Nick and I had taken photos of the wolf carcass while it still lay on the porch of the lodge, and of the axe that killed it. These scant relics were all the physical proof we had to show for our harrowing encounter.
It seems reasonable to believe that whatever had pried its way into the freezer and absconded with the body was kin to Maudie, with a clansman’s stake in holding family secrets close. It appeared that Davitt’s Grove was not done with werewolves after all. We all agreed the culprit must be Red John Kovak, who had closed the Bait & Tackle shop and vanished, leaving the cliché of a Gone Fishing sign hanging askew on his door.
“That’ll piss everyone off,” was Trudy’s response. “It’s a thirty-mile drive to the nearest grocery store. People count on this place for staples like bread and milk.” She had glowered at the sign for a moment, then added in a soft voice, “And eggs.”
Trudy was sure that Red John had never harmed a soul, an assessment I was inclined to believe.
“He’s in public view almost 24/7,” she said. “I know he’s a goofy bastard, but he’s not like Maudie was.”
Nick disagreed, and only time will tell which of us is right. One thing of which we were certain is that having opened the door to the impossible, we could not close it again and go on as if we’d never seen behind it. Our investigations changed in both purpose and scope.
Claudia moved forward with her plans for the lodge, hoping that Red John would return soon and agree to let her observe him. She likes Davitt’s Grove, and she loves Pepekissimo and Cold Ripple Lake, especially since we’d told her of the possible monster living in its depths. She expounded on her feelings about the place as we sat around the firepit on the lodge’s weedy terrace.
“This is an isolated rural community. It’s a funny thing, but everyone has their place and function. People don’t have much here, and a lot is overlooked or forgiven in the struggle to get by. While the rules of community are observed, people aren’t penalized for strange ways. Obviously, that can’t extend to eating random visitors, but I think Trudy’s right. Maudie was a throwback. An aberration.”
I leaned back and looked up at the red sparks from the fire dancing skyward on a column of smoke, and at the shimmering veil of the Milky Way as it arced over us. Lycanthropy is certainly aberrant, I mused, but I understood the sentiment behind Claudia’s statement. A community like Davitt’s Grove is held together by more than mere adherence to social norms or to a consensus on ontological argument. Red John holds an integral place within it. Maybe even such an aberration as lycanthropy could, within limits, be overlooked. After all, a thing like that, I’m told, will run in a family sometimes.
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