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#1 2009-03-29 12:04:40
- Amarok
- Member
- Registered: 2007-08-01
- Posts: 377
Closure
Amarok here! I'm going to try to get back in the game with a short little sort-of werewolf story:
CLOSURE
The two men from the Midwest Center for Cryptozoology stopped their pickup on a small dirt road. They stepped out and leaned against the side of the vehicle. The moon stared down powerfully, if coldly, but the trees lining the road nearly met over their heads, cutting off most of the light.
Trent crossed his arms.
“There’s never any closure for these stories,” he said. “Chupacabras, the Lizard Man, the Thetis Lake Monster, Boggy Creek. People see – that is, people report seeing – some phantasmagorical creature. The ‘papers and the networks lap it up, someone sells T-shirts with its picture, then comes the usual run of hunters and survivalists and gun-nuts scouring the woods, and the sightings fade away. There’s never an ending.”
Trent stared into the forest. Towns, people, cars, and streetlights lay only a few miles east and west, but here darkness reigned.
“Can’t even be an old-fashioned Sasquatch, these days,” he continued. “‘Wolf-Head’! Christ! The Horrible Result of a Lab Experiment Gone Wrong!”
Searles lowered his eyelids slightly, giving his features a distinct Peter Lorre cast.
“There have been a lot of werewolf-like creature reports in the last twenty years, starting with the Bray Road Beast in 1990.”
Trent shook his head.
“I’ve heard the same urban legend a hundred times. This Wolf-Head story is almost word for word the same as the Goat-Man of Maryland, the Grunch of Louisiana, and the Billiwack Monster of California.”
“Then why are you out here?” asked Searles.
Trent frowned. A firefly clicked on and off. A single pale moonbeam discovered a slit in the leaf canopy. The forest looked as empty as it sounded. He rubbed his mustache with one finger.
“Those dogs they found,” he said softly. “The way they were killed. And that missing girl. There seems to be something here.”
“Something. Yes.”
“Why are you here?” asked Trent.
Searles grinned.
“It’s dark as hell. It’s lonely as the moon. The dogs don’t satisfy any more, and the girls are too cautious.”
Searles brought up something in his hand, and with a snick a steel blade appeared. Trent thought, stupidly, that he had not seen a switchblade that big since high school.
Then he did not think at all, he only accepted what his senses gathered. A dark shape burst up from the thistles and saplings lining the road. It cleared the ditch and even the pickup bed, landing with a thud behind Searles.
Searles turned, knife flashing, but the dark shape slapped a great hairy paw against his head. The impact, loud as a gunshot, knocked Searles against the fender of the Silverado. He slid from there to the ground.
Trent gaped at his rescuer. He saw or imagined a long snout, pointed ears, a shaggy mane and a thick muscular neck, all supported by wide, human-like shoulders. The thing sprang into the undergrowth, and damn if a long streamer of a tail didn’t whip along behind it.
There was no thrashing in the brush afterwards, however, no pounding of paws on hard earth. It waited there, listening, as it must have done before. It must have understood what it heard, also, and it probably understood that Trent could tell the world it was no urban legend.
Then comes the usual run of hunters and survivalists and gun-nuts . . .
“Well,” Trent said loudly. “Guess I can tell the sheriff it was Jack Searles who killed those dogs and abducted that girl.”
He stared into the darkness and gave a Boy Scout-ish salute.
“That will give it a nice sense of closure. All I asked for.”
"No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted. for its poisonous wine." -- Keats, "Ode to Melancholy"
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