August anyone can remember in Tarker’s Mills for years, and tonight the moon will
be just one day past full. So the town holds its breath, waiting.
Constable Neary surveys his audience and then goes on from his place in Stan
Pelky’s middle barber chair, speaking weightily, speaking judicially, speaking
psychologically, all from the depths of his high school education (Neary is a big,
beefy man, and in high school he mostly made touchdowns for the Tarker’s Mills
Tigers; his classwork earned him some C’s and not a few D’s).
“There are guys,” he tells them, “who are kind of like two people. Kind of like
split personalities, you know. They are what I’d call fucking schizos.”
He pauses to appreciate the respectful silence which greets this and then goes on:
“Now this guy, I think he’s like that. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing when
the moon gets full and he goes out and kills somebody. He could be anybody
– a
teller at the bank, a gas-jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road,
maybe even someone right here now. In the sense of being an animal inside and
looking perfectly normal outside, yeah, you bet. But if you mean, do I think
there’s a guy who sprouts hair and howls at the moon … no. That shit’s for kids.”
“What about the Coslaw boy, Neary?” Stan asks, continuing to work carefully around
the roll of fat at the base of Neary’s neck. His long, sharp scissors go snip …
snip… snip.
“Just proves what I said,” Neary responds with some exasperation. “That shit’s for
kids.”
In truth, he feels exasperated about what’s happened with Marty Coslaw. Here, in
this boy, is the first eyeball witness to the freak that’s killed six people in his
town, including Neary’s good friend Alfie Knopfler. And is he allowed to interview
the boy? No. Does he even know where the boy is? No! He’s had to make do with a
deposition furnished to him by the State Police, and he had to bow and scrape and
just-a-damn-bout beg to get that much. All because he’s a small-town constable,
what the State Police think of as a kiddie-cop, not able to tie his own shoes. All
because he doesn’t have one of their numbfuck Smokey Bear hats. And the deposition!
He might as well have used it to wipe his ass with. According to the Coslaw kid,
this “beast” stood about seven feet tall, was naked, was covered with dark hair all
over his body. He had big teeth and green eyes and smelled like a load of panther-
shit. He had claws, but the claws looked like hands. He thought it had a tail. A
tail, for Chrissake.
“Maybe,” Kenny Franklin says from his place in the row of chairs along the wall,
“maybe it’s some kind of disguise this fella puts on. Like a mask and all, you
know.”
“I don’t believe it,” Neary says emphatically, and nods his head to emphasize the
point. Stan has to draw his scissors back in a hurry to avoid putting one of the
blades into that beefy roll of fat at the back of Neary’s neck. “Nossir! I don’t
believe it! Kid heard a lot of these werewolf stories at school before it closed
for the summer-he admitted as much-and then he didn’t have nothing to do but sit
there in that chair of his and think about it … work it over in his mind. It’s
all psycho-fuckin-logical, you see. Why, if it’d been you that’d come out of the
bushes by the light of the moon, he would have thought you was a wolf, Kenny.”
Kenny laughs a little uneasily.
‘Nope,” Neary says gloomily. “Kid’s testimony is just no damn good ‘tall.”
In his disgust and disappointment over the deposition taken from Marty Coslaw at
the home
of Marty’s aunt and uncle in Stowe, Constable Neary has also overlooked
this line: “Four of them went off at the side of his face – I guess you’d call it a
face-all at once, and I guess maybe it put his eye out. His left eye.”
If Constable Neary had chewed this over in his mind-and he hadn’t-he would have