to Donna Summer records, and bob for apples, and later on the lights will be turned
down for a game of spin-the-bottle and she will perhaps kiss some boy, not because
she wants to but because it will be fun to giggle about it with her girlfriends in
study hall the next day.
Marty’s dad takes Marty in the van because the van has a built-in ramp he can use
to get Marty in and out. Marty rolls down the ramp and then buzzes up and down the
streets themselves in his chair. He carries his bag on his lap and they go to all
the houses on their road and then to a few houses downtown: the Collinses, the
MacInnes’, the Manchesters’, the Millikens’, the Eastons’. There is a fishbowl full
of candy corn inside The Pub. Snickers Bars at the Congregational Church parsonage
and Chunky bars at the Baptist Parsonage. Then on to the Randolphs, the Quinns’,
the Dixons’, and a dozen, two dozen more. Marty comes home with his bag of candy
bulging … and a piece of scary, almost unbelievable knowledge.
He knows.
He knows who the werewolf is.
At one point on Marty’s tour, the Beast himself, now safely between its moons of
insanity, has dropped candy into his bag, unaware that Marty’s face has gone deadly
pale under his Don Post Yoda mask, or that, beneath his gloves, his fingers are
clutching his Yoda staff so tightly that the fingernails are white. The werewolf
smiles at Marty, and pats his rubber head.
But it is the werewolf. Marty knows,
and not just because the man is wearing an
eyepatch. There is something elsesome vital similarity in this man’s human face to
the snarling face of the animal he saw on that silvery summer night almost four
months ago now.
Since returning to Tarker’s Mills from Vermont the day after Labor Day, Marty has
kept a watch, sure that he will see the werewolf sooner or later, and sure that he
will know him when he does because the werewolf will be a one-eyed man. Although
the police nodded and said they would check it out when he told them he was pretty
sure he had put out one of the were wolf’s eyes, Marty could tell they didn’t
really believe him. Maybe that’s because he is just a kid, or maybe it’s because
they weren’t there on that July night when the confrontation took place. Either
way, it doesn’t matter. He knew it was so.
Tarker’s Mills is a small town, but it is spread out, and until tonight Marty has
not seen a one-eyed man, and he has not dared to ask questions; his mother is
already afraid that the July episode may have permanently marked him. He is afraid
that if he tries any out-and-out sleuthing it will eventually get back to her.
Besides
– Tarker’s Mills is a small town. Sooner or later he will see the Beast
with his human face on.
Going home, Mr. Coslaw (Coach Coslaw to his thousands of students, past and
present) thinks Marty is so quiet because the evening and the excitement of the
evening has tired him out. In truth, this is not so. Marty has never-except on the
night of the wonderful bag of fireworks-felt so awake and alive. And his principal
thought is this: it had taken him almost sixty days after returning home to
discover the werewolf’s identity because he, Marty, is a Catholic, and attends St.
Mary’s on the outskirts of town.
The man with the eyepatch, the man who dropped a Chunky bar into his bag and then
smiled and patted him on top of his rubber head, is not a Catholic. Far from it.
The Beast is the Reverend Lester Lowe, of the Grace Baptist Church.
Leaning out the door, smiling, Marty sees the eyepatch dearly in the yellow
lamplight falling through the door; it gives the mousy little Reverend an almost
piratical look.
“Sorry about your eye, Reverend Lowe,” Mr. Coslaw said in his booming Big Pal
voice. “Hope it’s nothing serious?”
The Rev. Lowe’s smile grew longsuffering. Actually, he said, he had lost the eye. A
benign tumor; it had been necessary to remove the eye to get at the tumor. But it