and comes out with the biggest twizzer of all – a World Class Twizzer if ever there
was one. It is almost as big as his closed fist. He lights it with mixed fright and
delight, and tosses it.
Red light as bright as hellfire fills the night … and it is by this shifting,
feverish glow that Marty sees the bushes at the fringe of the woods below the
verandah shake and part. There is a low noise, half-cough, half-snarl. The Beast
appears.
It stands for a moment at the base of the lawn and seems to scent the air … and
then it begins to shamble up the slope toward where Marty sits on the slate
flagstones in his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his upper body shrinking against
the canvas back of his chair. The Beast is hunched over, but it is clearly walking
on its two rear legs. Walking the way a man would walk. The red
light of the
twizzer skates hellishly across its green eyes.
It moves slowly, its wide nostrils flaring rhythmically. Scenting prey, almost
surely scenting that prey’s weakness. Marty can smell it-its hair, its sweat, its
savagery. It grunts again. Its thick upper lip, the color of liver, wrinkles back
to show its heavy tusk-like teeth. Its pelt is painted a dull silvery-red.
It has almost reached him-its clawed hands, so like-unlike human hands, reaching
for his throat-when the boy remembers the packet of firecrackers. Hardly aware he
is going to do it, he strikes a match and touches it to the master fuse. The fuse
spits a hot line of red sparks that singe the fine hair on the back of his hand,
crisping them. The werewolf, momentarily offbalance, draws backwards, uttering a
questioning grunt that, like his hands, is nearly human. Marty throws the packet of
firecrackers in its face.
They go off in a banging, flashing train of light and sound The beast utters a
screech-roar of pain and rage; it staggers backwards, clawing at the explosions
that tattoo grains of fire and burning gunpowder into its face. Marty sees one of
its lamplike green eyes whiff out as four crackers go off at once with a terrific
thundering KA-POW! at the side of its muzzle. Now its screams are pure agony. It
claws at its face, bellowing, and as the first lights go on in the Coslaw house it
turns and bounds back down the lawn toward the woods, leaving behind it only a
smell of singed fur and the first frightened and bewildered cries from the house.
“What was that?” His mother’s voice, not sounding a bit brusque.
“Who’s there, goddammit?” His father, not sounding very much like a Big Pal.
“Marty?” Kate, her voice quavering, not sounding mean at all. “Marty, are you all
right?”
Grandfather Coslaw sleeps through the whole thing.
Marty leans back in his wheelchair as the big red twizzer gutters its way to
extinction. Its light is now the mild and lovely pink of an early sunrise. He is
too shocked to weep. But his shock is not entirely a dark emotion, although the
next day his parents will bundle him off to visit his Uncle Jim and Aunt Ida over
in Stowe, Vermont, where he will stay until the end of summer vacation (the police
concur; they feel that The Full Moon Killer might try to attack Marty again, and
silence him). There is a deep exultation in him. It is stronger than the shock. He
has looked into the terrible face of the Beast and lived. And there is simple,
childlike joy in him, as well, a quiet joy he will never be able to communicate
later to anyone, not even Uncle Al, who might have understood. He feels this joy
because the fireworks have happened after all.
And while his parents stewed and wondered about his psyche, and if he would have
complexes from the experience, Marty Coslaw came to believe in his heart that it
had been the best Fourth of all.
AUGUST
“Sure, I think it’s a werewolf,” Constable Neary says. He speaks too loudly-maybe
accidentally, more like accidentally on purpose-and all conversation in Stan’s
Barber Shop comes to a halt. It is going on just half-past August, the hottest