even one chance in a thousand that he might be right
Four days later, on December 10th, Uncle Al called. “Great news!” Marty announced
to his family, wheeling his chair back into the family room. “Uncle Al’s coming
over for New Year’s Eve!’
“He certainly is not,” his mother says in her coldest, brusquest tone.
Marty was not daunted. “Gee, sorry – I already invited him,” he said. “He said he’d
bring party-powder for the fireplace.”
His mother had spent the rest of the day glaring at Marty every time she looked in
his direction or he in hers … but she didn’t call her brother back and tell him
to stay away, and that was the most important thing.
At supper that night Katie whispered hissingly in his ear: “You always get what you
want! Just because you’re a cripple!”
Grinning, Marty whispered back: “I love you too, sis.”
“You little booger!”
She flounced away.
And here it is, New Year’s Eve. Marty’s mother was sure Al wouldn’t show up as the
storm intensified, the wind howling and moaning and driving snow before it. Truth
to tell, Marty has had a few bad moments himself… but Uncle Al arrived up around
eight, driving not his Mercedes sports car but a borrowed four-wheel drive.
By eleven-thirty, everyone in the family has gone to bed except for the two of
them, which is pretty much as Marty had foreseen things. And although Uncle Al is
still pooh-poohing the whole thing, he has brought not one but two handguns
concealed under his heavy CPO coat. The one with the two silver bullets he hands
wordlessly to Marty after the family has gone to bed (as if to complete making the
point, Marty’s mother slammed the door of the bedroom she shares with Marty’s dad
when she went to bed-slammed it hard). The other is filled with more conventional
lead-loads … but Al reckons that if a crazyman is going to break in here tonight
(and as time passes and nothing happens, he comes to doubt that more and more), the
.45 Magnum will stop him.
Now, on the TV, they are switching the cameras more and more often to the big
lighted ball on top of the Allied Chemical Building in Times Square. The last few
minutes of the year are running out. The crowd cheers. In the comer opposite the
TV, the Coslaw Christmas tree still stands, drying out now, getting a little brown,
looking sadly denuded of its presents.
“Marty, nothing-” Uncle Al begins, and then the big picture window in the family
room blows inward in a twinkle of glass, letting in the howling black wind from
outside, twisting skirls of white snow … and the Beast.
Al is frozen for a moment, utterly frozen with horror and disbelief. It is huge,
this Beast, perhaps seven feet tall, although it is hunched over so that its front
hand-paws almost drag on the rug. Its one green eye (just like Marty said, he
thinks numbly, all of it, just like Marty said) glares around with a terrible,
rolling sentience … and fixes upon Marty, sitting in his wheelchair. it leaps at
the boy, a rolling howl of triumph exploding out of its chest and past its huge
yellow-white teeth.
Calmly, his face hardly changing, Marty raises the .38 pistol. He looks very small
in his wheelchair, his legs like sticks inside his soft and faded jeans, his fur-
lined slippers on feet that have been numb and senseless all of his life. And,
incredibly, over the werewolf’s mad howling, over the wind’s screaming, over the
clap and clash of his own tottering thoughts about how this can possibly be in a
world of real people and real things, over all of this Al hears his
nephew say:
“Poor old Reverend Lowe. I’m gonna try to set you free.”
And as the werewolf leaps, its shadow a blob on the carpet, its claw-tipped hands
outstretched, Marty fires. Because of the lower powder-load, the gun makes an
almost absurdly insignificant pop. It sounds like a Daisy air-rifle.
But the werewolf’s roar of rage spirals up into an even higher register, a lunatic
screech of pain now. It crashes into the wall and its shoulder punches a hole right