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 cannot account for (but since they never hurt or
ache, as ordinary scratches and bruises do, they have been easy to dismiss, to
simply … not think about). He has even been able to ignore the traces of blood he
has sometimes found on his hands … and lips.
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