cold rain pelting down on their carcasses, their bulging eyes staring up at the
cold autumn sky.
Elmer’s brother Pete, called over from Minot, stands beside Elmer. They don’t speak
for a long time, and then Elmer says what has been in Pete’s mind as well.
“Insurance will cover some of it. Not all, but some. I guess I can foot the rest.
Better my pigs than another person.”
Pete nods. “There’s been enough,” he says, his voice a murmur that can barely be
heard over the rain.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Next full moon there’s got to be forty men out… or sixty
… or a hundred and sixty. Time folks stopped dicking around and pretending it
ain’t happening, when any fool can see it is. Look here, for Christ’s sweet sake!”
Pete points down. Around the slaughtered pigs, the soft earth of the pen is full of
very large tracks. They look like the tracks of a wolf… but they also look
weirdly human.
“You see those fucking tracks?”
“I see them,” Elmer allows.
“You think Sweet Betsy from Pike made those tracks?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Werewolf made those tracks,” Pete says, “You know it, Alice knows it, most of the
people in this town know it. Hell, even I know it, and I come from the next county
over.” He looks at his brother, his face dour and stern, the face of a New England
Puritan from 1650. And he repeats: “There’s been enough. Time this thing was
ended.”
Elmer considers this long as the rain continues to tap on the two men’s slickers,
and then he nods. “I guess. But not next full moon.”
“You want to wait until November?”
Elmer nods. “Bare woods. Better tracking, if we get a little snow.”
“What about next month?”
Elmer Zinneman looks at his slaughtered pigs in the pen beside his barn. Then he
looks at his brother Pete.
“People better look out,” he says.
OCTOBER
When Marty Coslaw comes home from trick or treating on Halloween Night with the
batteries in his wheelchair all but dead flat, he goes directly to bed, where he
lies awake until the half-moon rises in a cold sky strewn with stars like diamond
chips. Outside, on the verandah where his life was saved by a string of Fourth of
July firecrackers, a chill wind blows brown leaves in swirling, aimless corkscrews
on the flagstones. They rattle like old bones. The October full moon has come and
gone in Tarker’s Mills with no new murder, the second month in a row this has
happened. Some of the townspeople -Stan Pelky, the barber, is one, and Cal Blodwin,
who owns Blodwin Chevrolet, the town’s only car dealership, is another-believe that
the terror is over; the killer was a drifter, or a tramp living out in the woods,
and now he has moved on, just as they said he would. Others, however, are not so
sure. These are the ones who do long reckoning on the four deer found slaughtered
out by the turnpike the day after the October full moon, and upon Elmer Zinneman’s
eleven pigs, killed at full moon time in September. The argument rages at The Pub
over beers during the long autumn nights.
But Marty Coslaw knows.
This night he has gone out trick or treating with his father (his father likes
Halloween, likes the brisk cold, likes to laugh his hearty Big Pal laugh and bellow
such idiotic things as “Hey, hey!” and “Ring-dang-doo!” when the doors open and
familiar Tarker’s Mills faces look out). Marty went as Yoda, a big rubber Don Post
mask pulled down over his head and a voluminous robe on which covered his wasted
legs. “You always get everything you want,” Katie says with a toss of her head when
she sees the mask … but he knows she isn’t really mad at him (and as if to prove
it, she makes him an artfully crooked Yoda staff to complete his getup), but
perhaps sad because she is now considered too old to go out trick or treating.
Instead she will go to a party with her junior high school friends. She will dance