does in his beast-state; only that alcoholic sense of well-being when the cycle has
finished for another month, and the restlessness before.
I am a man of God, he thinks, getting up and beginning to pace, walking faster and
faster in the quiet parlor where the grandfather clock ticks solemn ticks and tocks
solemn tocks. I am a man of God and I will not kill myself. I do good here, and if
I sometimes do evil, why, men have done evil before me; evil also serves the will
of God, or so the Book of Job teaches us; if I have been cursed from Outside, then
God will bring me down in His time. All things serve the will of God … and who is
he? Shall I make inquiries? Who was attacked on July 4th? How did I (it) lose his
(its) eye? Perhaps he should be silenced … but not this month. Let them put their
dogs back in their kennels first. Yes …
He begins to walk faster and faster, bent low, unaware that his beard, usually
scant (he can get away with only shaving once every three days … at the right
time of the month, that is), has now sprung out thick and scruffy and wiry, and
that his one brown eye has gone a hazel shade that is deepening moment by moment
toward the emerald green it will become later this night. He is hunching forward as
he walks, and he has begun to talk to himself… but the words are growing lower
and lower, more and more like growls.
At last, as the gray November afternoon tightens down toward an early anvil-colored
dusk, he bounds into the kitchen, snatches the Volare’s keys from the peg by the
door, and almost runs toward the car. He drives toward Portland fast, smiling, and
he does not slow when the season’s first snow starts to skirl into the beams of his
headlights, dancers from the iron sky. He senses the moon somewhere above the
clouds; he senses its power; his chest expands, straining the seams of his white
shirt.
He tunes the radio to a rock and roll station, and he feels just … great!
And what happens later that night might be a judgment from God, or a jest of those
older gods that men worshipped from the safety of stone circles on moonlit nights –
oh, it’s funny, all right, pretty funny, because Lowe has gone all the way to
Portland to become the Beast, and the man he ends up ripping open on that snowy
November night is Milt Sturmfuller, a lifelong resident of Tarker’s Mills … and
perhaps God is just after all, because if there is a first-class grade-A shit in
Tarker’s Mills, it is Milt Sturmfuller. He has come in this night as he has on
other nights, telling his battered wife Donna Lee that he is on business, but his
business is a B-girl named Rita Tennison who has given him a lively case of herpes
which Milt has already passed on to Donna Lee, who has never so much as looked at
another man in all the years they have been married.
The Rev. Lowe has checked into a motel called The Driftwood near the Portland-
Westbrook line, and this is the same motel that Milt Sturmfuller and Rita Tennison
have chosen on this November night to do their business.
Milt steps out at quarter past ten to retrieve a bottle of bourbon he’s left in the
car, and he is in fact congratulating himself on being far from Tarker’s Mills on
the night of the full moon when the one-eyed Beast leaps on him from the roof of a
snowshrouded Peterbilt ten-wheeler and takes his head off with one gigantic swipe.
The last sound Milt Sturmfuller hears in his life is the werewolf’s rising snarl of
triumph; his head rolls under the Peterbilt, the eyes wide, the neck spraying
blood, and the bottle of bourbon drops from his jittering hand as the Beast buries
its snout in his neck and begins to feed.
And the next day, back in the Baptist parsonage in Tarker’s Mills and feeling just