floor with a bang and sprays hot coffee everywhere, burning his ankles. He cries
out in pain and fear. Yes, he is afraid now, his two hundred and twenty pounds of
good Navy muscle are forgotten now, his nephew Ray is forgotten now, his back seat
coupling with Arlene McCune is forgotten now, and there is only the Beast, here now
like some horror-monster in a drive-in movie, a horror-monster that has come right
out of the screen.
It leaps on top of the counter with a terrible muscular ease, its slacks in
tatters, its shirt in rags. Alfie can hear keys and change jingling in its pockets.
It leaps at Alfie, and Alfie tries to dodge, but he trips over the coffee urn and
goes sprawling on the red linoleum. There is another shattering roar, a flood of
warm yellow breath, and then a great red pain as the creature’s jaws sink into the
deltoid muscles of his back and rip upward with terrifying force. Blood sprays the
floor, the counter, the grille.
Alfie staggers to his feet with a huge, ragged, spraying hole in his back; he is
trying to scream, and white moonlight, summer moonlight, floods in through the
windows and dazzles his eyes.
The Beast leaps on him again.
Moonlight is the last thing Alfie sees.
JULY
They cancelled the Fourth of July.
Marty Coslaw gets remarkably little sympathy from the people closest to him when he
tells them that. Perhaps it is because they simply don’t understand the depth of
his pain.
“Don’t be foolish,” his mother tells him brusquely-she is often brusque with him,
and when she has to rationalize this brusqueness to herself, she tells herself she
will not spoil the boy just because he is handicapped, because he is going to spend
his life sitting in a wheelchair.
“Wait until next year!” his dad tells him, clapping him on the back. “Twice as
good! Twice as doodly-damn good! You’ll see, little bitty buddy! Hey, hey!”
Herman Coslaw is the phys ed teacher at the Tarker’s Mills grammar school, and he
almost always talks to his son in what Marty thinks of as dad’s Big Pal voice. He
also says “Hey, hey!” a great deal. The truth is, Marty makes Herman Coslaw a
little nervous. Herman lives in a world of violently active children, kids who run
races, bash baseballs, swim rally sprints. And in the midst of directing all this
he would sometimes look up and see Marty, somewhere close by, sitting in his
wheelchair, watching. It made Herman nervous, and when he was nervous, he spoke in
his bellowing Big Pal voice, and said “Hey, hey!” or “doodly-damn” and called Marty
his “little bitty buddy.”
“Ha-ha, so you finally didn’t get something you wanted!” his big sister says when
he tries to tell her how he had looked for-ward to this night, how he looks forward
to it every year, the flowers of light in the sky over the Commons, the flashgun
pops of brightness followed by the thudding KER-WHAMP! sounds that roll back and
forth between the low hills that surrounded the town. Kate is thirteen to Marty’s
ten, and convinced that everyone loves Marty just because he can’t walk. She is
delighted that the fireworks have been cancelled.
Even Grandfather Coslaw, who could usually be counted on for sympathy, hadn’t been
impressed. “Nobody is cancellin der fort of Choo-lie, boy,” he said in his heavy
Slavic accent. He was sitting on the verandah, and Marty buzzed out through the
french doors in his battery-powered wheelchair to talk to him. Grandfather Coslaw
sat looking down the slope of the lawn toward the woods, a glass of schnapps in one
hand. This had happened on July 2, two days ago. “It’s just the fireworks they
cancel. And you know why.”
Marty did. The killer, that was why. In the papers now they were calling him The
Full Moon Killer, but Marty had heard plenty of whispers around school before
classes had ended for the summer. Lots of kids were saying that The Full Moon
Killer wasn’t a real man at all, but some sort of supernatural creature. A
werewolf, maybe. Marty didn’t believe that-werewolves were strictly for the horror