Cycle of the Werewolf
NOVEMBER
The year is almost over in Tarker’s Mills. It is cold and dark. There is something strange happening on Main Street this evening. The Reverend Lester Lowe watches from the front door of the Baptist Church. He has come outside to get the mail from the Church mailbox. He received some pamphlets and one single letter.
In front of him on Main Street there is a long line of trucks, like a metal snake, moving out of town. These are not people who are leaving the cold winter of Tarker’s Mills and going to Florida for the warm weather. You do not wear hunting clothing and carry guns if you are moving to Florida.
This is the fourth day in a row that this procession of cars has happened. The leaders of this group are Elmer Zinneman and his brother Pete. They leave each night with a large group of men and their dogs, and also many six-packs of beer.
The full moon is coming soon. The men are dressed in hunting clothing, but bird and deer hunting season is over. Now it is werewolf hunting season. As he watches the trucks leave town, Reverend Lowe knows that most of these men are not serious.
They are joining the group just to be able to go out into the forest, drink beers, pee on the ground, tell dirty jokes and shoot at squirrels and other small animals. Somebody will accidentally shoot somebody. These men are the real animals, he thinks, as he touches the eyepatch he has worn since July.
It’s true that some of the men are not serious. But others, like Elmer and Pete Zinnerman, are dead serious. Reverend Lowe heard Elmer say at the barber shop recently that if the Beast goes hunting this month, their dogs will find it. And if it doesn’t go hunting, then maybe they will have saved someone’s life.
But the Reverend Lowe does not feel uncomfortable because of the men who are looking for the Beast. He feels worried and uncomfortable because of the letters he has received.
Yes, the letters. The longest one he received was only two sentences long. It looked like it was written by a child - the handwriting was large and sometimes misspelled. He looks down at the letter he received in today’s mail.
It has the same childish handwriting, with the same address as the other letters: “The Reverend Lowe, Baptist Parsonage, Tarker’s Mills, Maine 04491.”
Now the Reverend is feeling a new and strange sensation, a sensation of feeling trapped - the way a fox feels trapped when the hunting dogs find it. The sensation he feels is like when the fox turns, shows its teeth and prepares to fight the dogs that will certainly kill it. The sensation is kill, or be killed.
He goes back inside and sits down. He carefully opens the letter. Like the other letters, there is no salutation. Like the others, it is not signed. There is only one sentence written in the middle of the page: “Why don’t you kill yourself?”
The Reverend Lowe’s hand begins to shake. With the other hand, he crumples the piece of paper into a ball and puts it in the ashtray on the center table. He takes some matches and he sets the letter on fire, like he has set the other letters on fire. He watches it burn.
Lowe now understands what he is. This knowledge has come in two distinct stages: the first stage was after his nightmare in May. It was the dream he had where everyone in his church became a werewolf. And then the next day the terrible discovery of Clyde Corliss’s mutilated body in the church.
Since then, he has begun to sense that something is…well, wrong with him. He does not know any other way to explain it. Something wrong. But he also knows that on some mornings, usually when the moon is full, he wakes up feeling amazingly good, amazingly well, amazingly strong!
This sensation slowly goes away as the moon changes, and then becomes stronger as the new full moon returns. Since the dream and the death of Corliss in his church, he has also been forced to consider other things. He used to be able to ignore them. But not anymore…
Dirty clothes that are ripped and torn. Cuts, and scratches and bruises on his body that he cannot explain (and since they do not hurt him, like normal scratches and bruises hurt, he could easily not think about them). He has even been able to ignore blood he has sometimes found on his hands…and lips.
Then, on July 5th, the second stage: that morning he woke up with only one eye. Just like with the cuts and scratches, he did not feel any pain in his missing eye. There was only an empty hole where his left eye had been. At that point, the Reverend Lowe could not deny it: he is the werewolf. He is the Beast.
For the last three days he has been feeling familiar sensations: he has felt great anxiety. He has felt an impatience that is almost too much to control. There is a sense of tension in his whole body. It is coming again - the change is almost here again. Tonight the moon will rise, and it will be full.
The hunters will be out in the forest with their dogs and their beer. That does not matter to Reverend Lowe. He - the Beast - is smarter than they think he is. They think only about the wolf - not the man. They can drive their trucks to look for him, but he can drive his small passenger car anywhere he wants.
And this afternoon he will drive to another city, he thinks. He will drive far away and stay at a motel outside of town. And if the change comes, there will be no hunters and there will be no dogs. No, they are not the ones who frighten him. He is not scared of those animals.
Reverend Lowe looks at the new letter again. “Why don't you kill yourself?” The first letter came early this month. It said: “I know who you are.” The second letter said: “If you are a man of God, get out of town. Go someplace where there are animals for you to kill but no people.” The third letter had only two words: “End it.”
And now this new letter: “Why don’t you kill yourself?” Because I don’t want to kill myself, the Reverend Lowe thinks to himself, in a childish way. This thing that I have - whatever it is, I did not ask for it. I wasn’t bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It just…happened.
I was at the little cemetery on Sunshine Hill, and I picked some flowers for the church reception room. I had never seen flowers like that before. And by the time I even got to the church, the flowers had already died. They turned black, every one of them.
Maybe that’s when this whole thing started to happen. There is no reason to think that was the cause. But I think the flowers and the cemetery had something to do with it. And I won’t kill myself. They are the animals, not me. Who is writing the letters?
He doesn’t know. The Reverend Lowe had never heard about the attack on Marty Coslaw. The attack had never been reported in the local newspaper. And the Reverend takes great pride in not listening to local gossip.
And Marty did not know about Lowe and his missing eye until Halloween because their religious circles are different. The Reverend Lowe does not know about Marty, and he has no memory of what he does in his Beast-state. So Lowe has no idea who has been sending him the letters.
I am a man of God, he thinks. He stands up from the sofa and begins to walk around the room, faster and faster. I am a man of God and I will not kill myself. If I sometimes do evil things, there are men who have done evil before me. And evil can also serve the will of God.
If God has cursed me, then God will take me in his own time. All things serve the will and desire of God…and who is he? Who is writing the letters?
Maybe I could ask some people around town? Who was attacked on July 4th? How did I (it) lose (its) eye? Maybe that person should be made silent…not this month. Let them put their dogs back in their kennels first. Yes…
He begins to walk faster and faster. He begins to bend over, closer to the ground as he moves. His hands almost touch the ground. He does not notice that his beard, which is usually shaved, is now growing. It is growing very quickly.
And his one brown eye has begun to change color. It is beginning to become darker and darker. And later this night it will become a deep emerald green color. The color of the Beast.
As he moves faster, he begins to talk to himself. But his words begin to sound more and more like animal sounds, like grunting, like growls. Finally, as the November afternoon goes from light gray to the color of coal, the Reverend Lowe runs quickly into his kitchen and grabs the keys to his little passenger car.
He drives fast, as fast as he can leave the town. He is smiling as he drives. He does not slow down even when it starts to snow very heavily. The lights of his car reflect off the little snowflakes as he speeds quickly down the highway. He senses the moon somewhere above the dark clouds. He senses its power.
His body begins to change. His chest and arms begin to expand. His shirt is now stretched very tight, about to rip. He feels just…great!
And what happens later that night might be a judgment from God, or a terrible cosmic joke - yes, it is funny, very funny. Because the Reverend Lowe drove far away from Tarker’s Mills to become the Beast.
It is funny because the man he ends up devouring on that snowy night in November is Milt Sturmfuller - a lifelong resident of Tarker’s Mills. And maybe God is just and right after all. Because if there is anyone who can be described as a total piece of shit in Tarker’s Mills, it is Milt Sturmfuller.
Milt has told his wife that he has to leave town on business (he has told his wife that story many times). And this night he has come to do a different kind of business - business with a prostitute named Rita Tennison.
Rita has already given him a serious case of venereal disease, which Milt has passed on to his wife Donna Lee. Poor Donna Lee has never, ever even looked at another man in all the years they have been married.
The Reverend Lowe has checked into a motel called the Driftwood. It is many miles outside of Tarker’s Mills. It is the same hotel that Milt Sturmfuller and Rita Tennison have chosen on this November night to do their business.
Milt leaves his room at 10:15 pm to get a bottle of whiskey he has left in his car. As he walks through the snow towards his car, he begins to congratulate himself for being so far away from Tarker’s Mills on the night of the full moon.
It is at that moment that the one-eyed Beast jumps on him from the top of a large delivery truck, and takes his head off with one powerful swing of his clawed hand.
The last sound Milt Sturmfuller hears in his life is the werewolf’s snarl of victory. Milt’s head rolls under the delivery truck. His eyes are open wide. His neck sprays dark blood, and the bottle of whiskey falls from his dead fingers. The Beast pushes its face into what is left of Milt’s bloody neck and begins to feed.
The next day, back in the Baptist church in Tarker’s Mills, the Reverend Lowe is feeling just…great! Lowe will read the story of the murder in the newspaper and think piously: Milt was not a good man. All things serve the Lord.
And the next thing he will think is: Who is the kid sending me the letters? Who was attacked in July? It’s time to find out. It’s time to listen to some gossip. The Reverend Lester Lowe readjusts his eyepatch and begins to think: All things serve the Lord. If it is the Lord’s will, I’ll find him. And silence him. Forever.
NOVEMBER
