Weird Like This

By Mike Ramon

A collection of short fiction. 43 stories, from horror, to crime, to post-apocalyptic.

The Three Dead Girls: A detective investigates the brutal murder of young girls in his small suburban town. Soon, he will learn a terrifying truth about who -- and what -- their killer is.

The Visitor: A young boy is home alone on a rainy day when there's a knock at the door. The visitor would like to come in...and he is very hungry.

Night Owls: An insomniac walks the streets at night. He starts to notice that the people he passes in the night look very similar. In fact, they all have the same face.

Red Christmas: Santa is out making Christmas deliveries. This year, Santa is delivering something that no child would ever want.

Last Cigarette: A hit man forces his mark to dig his own grave. The luckless fellow has only one request: a last cigarette.

Tourist Season: It's perfect day for the family to hike through the woods. They must be careful, however; there are hunters about, and they like big game.

Strange Country: In a post-apocalyptic world, society has fallen apart. A man and wife find refuge in the woods, but will their safe place stay safe for long?

The Grubbs: A new family moves into the neighborhood. They seem nice, but they have a horrifying secret.

In the Looking Glass: A man finds a nice mirror that's free to anyone who wants it. He take sit home. Soon, he will discover that he doesn't like what he sees in it's reflective surface.

Retribution: After a man's daughter is kidnapped, he spends years thinking of what he would do if he ever found the person who took her. Years later, he finally gets his chance.

These stories and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Ramon
• Release date: Apr 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005774769

Mike Ramon

Born and bred in the Midwest.

Book preview

WEIRD LIKE THIS

Mike Ramon

© 2021 M. Ramon

Smashwords Edition

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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Table of Contents

The Three Dead Girls

The Hunters

The Worst Thing

Up the Wolves

The Visitor

The German Lieutenant

The Runner

Night Owls

The Hearse

Come Softly to Me

The Jangle Man

The Sand

Eternity in His Eyes

Red Christmas

Amanda

Beau

Ashes

Last Cigarette

Kitty

Echo

Tourist Season

The Dorothy Lynn

Noah’s Children

A Violent Incident

The Void

The Safe House

Marty’s Place

Dolly

The Mimic

Strange Country

Killer on the Road

The Grubbs

Hallways

Words

Dream

The Interview Room

The Knocking on the Wall

Before the Rain

The Man on the Bicycle

In the Looking Glass

The Mystery at Chayse Park

Retribution

Miller’s Woods

The Three Dead Girls

The First Dead Girl

Laurie Pettigrew turned nine years old on the day she went missing from Cedar Falls. Her folks, Tom and Cindy, were planning on taking her to the mall to pick out a gift for her birthday. This was a tradition for the family. When they arrived back home, Laurie would have been surprised by a party awaiting her return. Her uncle, Jesse James Harrow, was supposed to get all the decorations up and let all the guests in while the family made the long drive to the Sugar Grove Mall in Fryeville.

There’d been a delay in leaving for the mall as Cindy Pettigrew tried reaching her brother on the telephone to make sure that he was awake and ready to fulfill his duty. Jesse James Harrow, who’d legally changed his name to such from Gary Alan Harrow, and who we at the CFPD knew very well (even if we hadn’t had much luck getting any of the dozen or so charges we’d thrown at him over the years to stick) wasn’t answering the phone because he was sleeping off a bender. In truth, Cindy should have known better than to entrust anything at all to her brother; the man was and is a world-class fuck-up. That’s just my opinion, of course, but I’ll defend it to my dying day. So, as her mother tried to get through to Uncle Jesse James, and while her father sat watching the start of a ballgame on TV, little Laurie went out back to check on the little garden that she and her mother were growing. The garden had been Laurie’s idea, but her mom had helped her with it. Laurie was proud of that little garden.

Cindy got tired of trying to get in touch with her no-good brother, and so she called a friend named Betty Richardson. She asked Betty to come over and put up the decorations instead and Betty readily agreed. The matter settled, Cindy went out back to get her daughter, having earlier seen the girl in the garden through the kitchen window. Failing to find Laurie out back, Cindy looked for her daughter in the house.

There I am, calling her name and looking through the whole house, and Tom won’t move his stupid ass from in front of the TV, she would say later.

When Laurie wasn’t found in the house, Cindy checked the front yard, and then the garage to see if the girl had grown tired of waiting and had already gone to the car. At this point, Cindy’s calls of her daughter’s name had grown panicked, and Tom – whether a stupid ass or not, I have no opinion – finally turned off the television and joined in the search for his daughter. All that he found of Laurie was a shoe at the edge of the woods that abutted their backyard. Cindy called 911 while Tom went into the woods to look for their girl. The first officers on the scene, Jensen and Klein, searched the house to make sure the girl wasn’t hiding somewhere. As they went through the home, Cindy did as they asked of her, calling around to Laurie’s friends to see if the girl had walked over to one of their places. She would later admit to having felt dumb for not thinking of doing that on her own, but when I spoke with her, I assured her that most people weren’t thinking clearly when they were panicked like she was.

The search of the house was fruitless, as were the calls. When Jensen and Klein went out to the woods, they met Tom Pettigrew as he was coming out of there. In his hands, he had a torn piece of a dress. The dress was red with blood.

That was about the time I entered this story. Officer Klein was the one to call in for help, having realized that he had a kidnapping on his hands, and based on the bloody scrap of dress, the kidnapped child was in grave danger. When I arrived at the Pettigrew home, I introduced myself. As the Pettigrews were a bit shell-shocked from the turn their day had taken, I had to introduce myself a second time to get their attention.

Detective who? Mr. Pettigrew asked.

Detective Bairstow, I repeated.

I asked all the standard questions. Had Laurie spoken of a new friend lately, maybe an older boy? Had they had a problem with peeping toms? Could either of them think of someone who might hold a grudge against the family? The answers to all of my questions were negative. There was some anger when I informed them that they would both have to submit a DNA sample and be fingerprinted, but I managed to calm them down. This was standard procedure, I assured them, and didn’t mean that we actually thought they had harmed their daughter.

The woods were searched. We’re talking about Miller’s Woods, which in those days, before a good portion was cleared out to make way for those condos they built in the mid-00’s, were large enough that every year we got at least a half-dozen calls to go in there and find some kid who’d gotten lost after leaving the trails. At one point, it seemed like half the CFPD were in those woods searching for the missing girl. No sign of the girl or what became of her was found other than a smear of blood at the spot where Tom Pettigrew had found the piece of her dress.

The big stations in Chicago never ran the story, but WNBO, a local radio station, gave the story a good deal of coverage. They gave a detailed description of Laurie and the dress she was last seen wearing. We got a good deal of tips, none of which led us to the girl. One tip we spent a lot of time on was had come in anonymously, a woman saying that we should take a close look at a man named Harry Pendergast. Good old Harry had quite the record. He’d been charged in 1983 with public indecency after exposing himself to a six-year-old girl in Pemberton. He served no jail time for that, or for the time he was caught peeping into a teenage girl’s window in Cedar Falls in ‘86. It wasn’t until 1990 that he finally got locked up for touching a young girl at a park. He served three years for that one, getting out in late ‘93. We questioned him for three days. He couldn’t recall where he was or what he’d done on the day Laurie went missing because he’d been drinking a lot that week and had suffered several blackouts. I interviewed him myself, and I can attest to the fact that he smelled strongly of booze. He finally remembered that he hadn’t even been in Cedar Falls on the day Laurie disappeared. He said he was up in Bunton County that day, visiting a brother-in-law. We looked into it, and the Harry Pendergast path came to a dead-end when a deputy from the Bunton County Sheriff’s Department watched a video from a surveillance camera at a liquor store down the street from the brother-in-law. Bother Harry and his brother-in-law were seen on video at the store within twenty minutes of the time when Laurie was taken. Even with a lead foot, it would take at least forty-five minutes to get to Cedar Falls. We had to cut Harry loose after that.

Another lead we spent some time on came from a woman named Candy Lewis. She was certain that she’d seen Laurie with a middle-aged couple at the restaurant where she was a hostess. She said the couple had been coming into the restaurant at least once a week for the past three years, and this was the first time they’d brought a kid with them. She insisted that the girl looked a bit nervous, but she’d been busy that day and hadn’t thought anything about it until seeing a picture of Laurie in the Cedar Falls Review the following day. The couple always paid in cash, so we couldn’t track them through a credit card. The restaurant had no security cams, so we only had the description given to us by Candy and other staff at the restaurant. We had to station an officer in plainclothes at the restaurant for the next week until the couple came back. When the man and woman walked in, Candy tipped off the plainclothes cop. The officer identified himself to the couple before questioning them. It turned out that the girl they’d brought with them the previous week was a niece who’d been visiting from Wisconsin. She bore a passing resemblance to Laurie, but it was another dead-end.

Five days after the identity of the girl who’d been seen at the restaurant was confirmed as Jennifer Randolph of Mukwonago, Wisconsin, who was perfectly safe and healthy, the body of little Laurie Pettigrew was found on the banks of Sag Creek by a group of teens who’d gone there to smoke.

I thought it was a dummy, one of the boys said. I touched it, man. It wasn’t no dummy.

The body was examined. There were no signs of sexual assault. The cause of death was readily apparent: the girl’s throat had been ripped out.

The Second Dead Girl

Debra JoAnne Wentworth – known as Debbie Jo to her family – was a five-year-old girl with sandy blond hair and gray eyes. She’d recently started kindergarten at Cedar Falls Elementary, and was excited about finally going to school like a big girl. Her family lived on Low Street, just two blocks over from the school. It was a Saturday, so there’d been no school that day, but there was a funfair in the school’s gymnasium that evening. The fair was set to run from six o’clock to eight o’clock. Debbie Jo’s mother, Roberta JoAnne Wentworth – Bobbie Jo, to her familiars – was suffering from a stomach bug that kept her near the toilet all day. Debbie Jo’s father, Dennis Wentworth, was supposed to drive little Debbie Jo to the funfair when he got home from work, but his car broke down on Highway 53. Not having a cellular phone, which was a luxury in those days, he walked to a gas station. From there, he’d called a friend who worked for a towing company to ask for a tow home. The friend agreed, but told Dennis that it would be at least two hours before he’d be able to get around to it. Accordingly, Dennis Wentworth was waiting for his friend on the shoulder of Highway 53 when the time came around to leave for the funfair.

Having been informed by her husband over the phone about his car troubles, Bobbie Jo had told her daughter that she would not be able to go to the fair. The girl cried over the news, pleading with her mother to be allowed to go. Tired and in no mood to deal with an upset child, Debbie Jo called around and learned that two neighbor girls – sisters Kaytee and Kaylee Konstantino, ages ten and seven – were going to be walking to the school together. She asked their mother if the girls would take Debbie Jo along with them. Debbie Jo was ecstatic when she learned of the plan, and she’d rushed to put on her newest dress, an aquamarine princess dress that her grandmother had bought her the previous month. At ten minutes to six, the Konstantino children knocked at the door and Debbie Jo gave her mother – who was curled up on the couch and holding her aching stomach – a hug before leaving the house.

I was going to stop her before she ran out, Bobbie Jo told me when I interviewed her later. I wanted to remind her not to talk to strangers. I felt awful…my stomach…so I didn’t say anything. Maybe if I had…

But she’d surely taught her daughter that lesson countless times by then. Would one more repetition of that most sacred law of children have made a difference? I doubt it.

By all accounts, Debbie Jo had a wonderful time at the fair. She ate popcorn and an elephant ear, and she drank punch. She played at bowling – two lanes were set up with blue gym mats acting as bumpers. She participated in the cakewalk, which she didn’t win. She took part in a game in which kids stuffed marshmallows into their mouths to see who could fit the most, but that game was called to a halt when an eight-year-old boy started to choke. The boy was okay, but they decided to stop the game in the name of caution.

Eventually, Debbie Jo used up all of the money her mother had sent her to the fair with, and she got bored. The Konstantino girls still had money to spend, so when Debbie Jo told them she wanted to go home, they demurred, wishing to stay until they’d spent all of their fair cash. The last sighting of the girl was when a woman saw Debbie Jo heading out the exit near the back of the school at approximately 7:35 pm. The woman assumed the girl’s parents were waiting for her in the small lot back there, and so she didn’t think to stop Bobbie Jo. It was already dark out when Bobbie Jo Wentworth left the school. She never made it home.

When the girl was reported missing, I was off-duty. The first I heard about the case was the following day when I was assigned to the case. I guess they decided that I was the dead-little-girl guy. I spoke with her parents. They looked like they hadn’t slept since reporting the girl missing, and their eyes were red and raw. Dennis explained that he’d finally arrived home at twenty minutes past eight to find Bobbie Jo asleep on the couch. When he realized that their daughter wasn’t home, he’d woken his wife up. Bobbie Jo wasn’t too worried when she realized the time. She assumed that Debbie Jo had gone home with the Konstantino girls. She called over there, but Mrs. Konstantino told her that while Kaytee and Kaylee had arrived home just after eight o’clock, Debbie Jo was not with them. Mrs. Konstantino questioned the girls, who admitted they hadn’t seen the Debbie Jo since they’d rebuffed her request to leave the funfair. Dennis got into his car and drove around the neighborhood searching for his daughter. Failing to do so, the Wentworth’s called the police.

The police searched the neighborhood, knocking on doors and showing a picture of the missing girl. Calls were made to those who were at the funfair that night. This was when the details of Debbie Jo’s night at the fair were learned, as well as that last sighting. From the time Debbie Jo left the school, there was nothing. It was as if the girl had walked out of the school and into a void.

When I drove to the school, I stood near the back exit, trying to picture the lot as it would have been the previous evening. There would have been a few parked cars and not much else. I couldn’t understand why the girl had gone out that way; the exit at the front of the school made more sense. From the back exit, she would have had to walk around the school to head home. The only thing I could figure was that the back exit was closer to the gymnasium and so the girl had just headed for it because it was the quickest exit.

Beyond the paved lot was a field where the schoolchildren played during recess. At the edge of the school property was a fence, beyond which was a large, overgrown field leading to the edge of Miller’s Woods, the same woods that ran behind the Pettigrew home. I got angry when I found out that nobody had bothered to comb the woods the night before. A few officers did so upon my request. Not nearly as many as when Laurie Pettigrew went missing, but it was still something. It was a rookie – Samuelson, I think his name was – who found the girl’s head.

This time, the story made it onto the Chicago newscasts. Two dead girls, and one of them was beheaded? Now that’s the kind of gore that leads. Two different stations even sent crews out to cover the funeral. The rest of the Wentworth girl’s body was never found; her family had to have a closed casket funeral. At times I found myself thinking of that child-sized coffin, so small but still too big for what it actually held within. That’s a bad line of thought; it made me nauseous.

Public interest grew to a point where we held a news conference. There I was, standing next to Capt. Willis as he stood at a podium with a bevy of microphones sticking up into his face, each mic with the call sign of the station it belonged to. Flashes of light that felt blinding, the reporters shouting over one another to have their questions heard. Then Capt. Willis calling on me, and there’s me standing at the podium as Capt. Willis stepped off to the side, me in a spotlight I neither needed nor wanted.

Were the two killings committed by one individual? We weren’t sure, but it was a possibility.

Was there any connection to satanic cults or heavy metal music? We had no evidence of such connections at the time.

Did the two girls know each other? Not that we could tell; Laurie Pettigrew went to school at St. Mary’s while Debbie Joe attended Cedar Falls Elementary, and as far as we could ascertain, the two families weren’t familiar with one another.

Did we have any suspects on our radar? Not at this time.

There were reports that Laurie’s parents had been asked to submit their fingerprints and DNA – was it possible that they had something to do with the murders? The prints and DNA were normal procedure because Laurie had disappeared from home and her parents were the last known people to see her. They were not suspects, and there were no plans to ask for samples from the Wentworth family.

The press conference ended and I got back to work. As with the Pettigrew girl, tips started flooding in, but they were all dead-ends. The tips stopped coming and the trail went cold. After a few months had passed, it seemed the only ones who remembered those two girls had ever existed were their parents, who would call once or twice a week to ask if I was any closer to finding the person who killed their children. I always had the same answer: no.

The Quiet Between

There were no more murders that year. The closest Cedar Falls came to a homicide after that was when a woman shot her boyfriend after he’d taken after her with a baseball bat. The man spent nine hours in surgery and lived. To an outsider – hell, to most insiders, as well – that must have seemed like a welcome peace after the murders of those two girls. Not for me, though, and not for the small number of cops who knew about the print. You see, there was one detail that the press was never told about and which never appeared in any official report. I haven’t spoken or written about it until now.

Near the spot in the woods where Debbie Jo’s head was found, we also found an animal print in the soft earth. The print itself wouldn’t have been of much interest – hell, Miller’s Woods was known for being home to a skulk of foxes – except for two things.

First, it resembled a wolf print, and no wolf had any business in that part of the country. It was Sgt. Jiminez who clued me in to the likeness to a wolf print. He’d grown up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where wolves could be seen in the winter months. His father was an avid hunter, and as a kid would take him out to track wolves. Not to kill them, as wolves were a protected species at the time. Instead of shooting them with a rifle, the elder Jimenez would shoot them with a camera, his other hobby being wildlife photography. Later, I did some of my own research at the public library, comparing photos of wolf prints to the print we found in the woods. Sgt. Jiminez was right, it looked just like a wolf print.

But there was still the second thing: the print was massive compared to a normal wolf print. That day in the woods, I compared the print to my own foot, and the print was larger. There was no wolf anywhere that was that big. It was a puzzle that made all of us who saw the print uncomfortable, and so we chose not to talk about it. We didn’t write about it in our reports, we didn’t tell Capt. Willis about it, and we sure as hell didn’t tell the press about it.

I suspect the others tried forgetting about it, and I did too. I couldn’t forget, though. That wolf print was a thorn in my side. The sheer size of the print and it’s location in our little piece of suburban Northern Illinois were both oddities. I read up on wolves, on their habitat range and physical characteristics. I paid special attention to the normal size of a wolf paw print: 3 to 4 inches wide and 3½ to 5 inches long. The print in the woods was nearly a foot long. And it wasn’t just the size of the print that was odd, but the depth as well. Whatever had left that print was heavy, the print it left behind deep. The heaviest wolf that I could find in my reading – the Alaskan timber wolf – weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds. I’d wager that whatever left that print in Miller’s Woods weighed twice that.

My kids spent the summer with me. At the time, they both lived with their mom in Minnesota, but they always came for the summer. I tried putting the strange reality of the wolf print out of my mind. I did tell the kids that I wanted them to stay clear of Miller’s Woods. While they thought it strange that I was so insistent on this point, they agreed. Other than that, I tried to keep the murders from touching our lives. It helped that the two victims were girls, and my kids were boys.

The summer passed uneventfully and the kids went back to their mom’s. As if their departure was a signal for the weirdness to return to my life, less than a week after the boys left, I came home one day to find Morton Fink waiting on my porch. I was dog-tired from a long day on the job, and I didn’t feel much like dealing with the town drunk. Mort could often be found stumbling along First Street or near Dead End Row, trying to find his way home in the dark while blind drunk. My boys told me that some of the kids had a nickname for Mort: Fink the Stink. I told the boys that I didn’t want to hear them using the cruel nickname, but if I’m being honest, the name fit.

I’d bought a sandwich or two for the man over the years, and Mort seemed to take this as a contract between us that meant that he could come to me with any problem he might have – the manager of Lucky Lou’s wouldn’t serve him because he’d skipped out on paying one time, somebody threw a Big Freeze at him as he was walking down Rt. 60, the adult book shop on Main Street should be closed down to keep kids from being perverted – and I always tried to humor him until he let the matter drop and let me be. That night, however, I just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. I took a deep before getting out of my car. Mort came down off the porch to greet me.

G’evening, Detective.

Good evening, Mort, I said. Look, I’m really tired, so—

But I stopped talking then. There was a look in his eyes that I’d never seen there. Instead of drunken bleariness or wild indignation at the way society treated him (especially the manager of Lucky Lou’s), I saw confusion and fear. Also, while the breath that was blown into my face didn’t smell great, there was no odor of alcohol, which was a first.

Detective, I need to tell you something, he said. It’s about that Wentworth girl.

I took him inside the house and made gave him some food, reheating pasta from the night before. He told me his story around mouthfuls of buttery noodles. It was a crazy story, and he knew this. That’s why he’d come to me sober, hoping that I wouldn’t think the things he was saying were the rantings of a booze-brained lunatic. I didn’t say much as he talked; I just listened. I wondered briefly if someone on the force had put Mort up to this as some sort of grim prank. I dismissed the idea. Nobody would pull that sick of a joke.

Mort said that he’d been cutting across the field past the fence behind Cedar Falls Elementary on the night Debbie Jo Wentworth disappeared. He couldn’t remember where he was coming from that night or where he’d been headed to, but he remembered what he saw that night and everything after with perfect clarity. He saw the girl standing at the edge of the woods. He stopped in his tracks and stood watching her.

I couldn’t figure why a kid would be standing out near the woods all alone at a time like that, he told me. It looked like she was trying to see into the woods. I heard her say something, but she was too far away to make it out. Then…

What happened?

She gave out a little scream of surprise, or maybe fear. She tried backing away, but something came out from the trees. Something came out and snatched her up, and then they were gone.

I got out the little notepad I use when on the job, flipping to a blank page.

What did the abductor look like?

Look like?

Yes. I need a description.

It looked like something straight out of hell.

I asked him to elaborate, and he did so, his hands shaking all the while. I’m not sure if his hands were shaking because of the story or the lack of alcohol. I stopped jotting in the notebook as he described it to me. It had been dark that night, but the lights from the lot behind the school gave some illumination to see by. It was big, at least six and a half feet tall. Muscular and hairy. Broad chest, like a bodybuilder.

Its face…it wasn’t no normal face. It was canine, Detective.

He looked at me apologetically, like he was sorry for telling me such a crazy tale.

The damn thing had a snout instead of a mouth. It grabbed her up and went back into the woods. I was so scared I nearly pissed m’self.

Why didn’t you get help? Why didn’t you call the cops and tell them what you saw?

He shook his head.

Right then, I was too scared to think straight. I don’t remember where I was goin’ that night, but I know where I went. I went straight to the walkway under the bridge running over Sag Creek. I sleep there sometimes in the warmer months when I’m, uh…between residences. I stayed there all night drinking off the rest of whatever I had on me. I know it’s not right, but I kept thinkin’, ‘At least it didn’t see me’. I didn’t sleep at all that night. Then the next day, I did think of telling the cops, but I was scared that you’d all just put me in a straitjacket.

I thought about everything he’d said.

Who else have you told about this? I asked.

Nobody, Detective. Just you.

Maybe…maybe we should keep this between us for now.

He looked as confused as I felt. He’d just come forward as a witness to the abduction of a murdered child, and I was telling him to keep quiet about it. If people ever found out about our little talk and my advice to him, the best-case scenario was that I’d lose my job. If I wasn’t so lucky, I could face charges. When leaving my house that night, Mort – known to some as Fink the Stink – stopped halfway across the front lawn to look back at me. Then he turned away and walked off into the night.

That weekend I went back to the library. Instead of reading up on wolves – which existed in a sane, rational world – I jumped into books about something else, something that existed in myths and horror movies. I tried to stay away from outright fiction and stick to the stuff that at least claimed to approach the subject academically. Most of it was obvious bunk, authors cashing in on the cryptozoology crowd, people who believed Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster were real. I was a little embarrassed by this bit of research, worried that someone might look over my shoulder in the library and see that I was reading A True History of Werewolves in America.

The part that confused me was the disappearance of the Pettigrew girl. She was taken during the daytime. And Debbie Jo, too. While she was taken at night, there was no full moon. Everything I’ve learned from the movies tells me that werewolves came out on the night of a full moon. That’s one of the basic laws of lycanthropy. A True History… called the full moon trope a myth, along with the one about silver bullets. According to this book, lycanthropes (the term most often used in the book, despite the term werewolves being used in the title) could transition from human form to lycan form at any time, regardless of the hour of the day or phase of the moon. There is nothing to compel one of these creatures to change from its human form to its lycan form against its will, but a person gifted (or afflicted) with this ability will feel a growing itch the longer they refrain from transitioning. While it might take a tremendous act of willpower to avoid scratching that itch, it can be done if the individual truly doesn’t wish to change.

According to the text, there is also nothing compelling a lycanthrope to attack humans. A lycanthrope can feed on a cow or dog, or any animal that it can catch, just as easily as on a human. There was also no reason for a lycanthrope to kill for sport as opposed to sustenance. However, as with some people, some lycanthropes could be cruel.

Something that caught my attention was a passage describing how a lycanthrope would likely have a favored hunting ground. It might not restrict its activities strictly to this favored ground, but it would stay close. I thought of the dead girls, both of whom had been taken into Miller’s Woods. The spot along Sag Creek where Laurie was found wasn’t far from the eastern boundary of those woods.

Miller’s Woods. That was the key.

As crazy as it was (and even then, I didn’t completely believe it), I’d come to think that there was a werewolf preying on young girls in Cedar Falls, and that Miller’s Woods was its hunting ground. The question then was this: what the hell was I supposed to do with this information?

The Third Dead Girl

I couldn’t tell anyone that a werewolf had killed those girls. Much like Morton Fink, I feared they would put me in a straitjacket. As for Mort, he kept his word. As far as I know, he never told anyone else about what he’d seen that night behind the school. Mort was struck by a pick-up after stumbling into the road while walking down the highway leading away from Lucky Lou’s, whose manager had decided to lift the ban and allow Mort to come back. He died there on the side of the road.

I did what I could do. I warned Capt. Willis that I’d heard rumors of some junkies using Miller’s Woods as a hang-out spot, and he promised to increase patrols around the woods. At my suggestion, a warning was placed in the Cedar Falls Review telling parents that they should instruct their kids to steer clear of Miller’s Woods for the time being. For my part, I did my own rounds around the woods on my time off, keeping an eye out for anything that might be anything. Nothing happened, no children were taken, and I began to think that the whole thing really was crazy. Those two girls were killed, but it surely didn’t have anything to do with a werewolf. The print in the woods belonged to an abnormally large wolf that had found its way farther south than was normal. Mort Fink may have seen someone snatch Debbie Jo Wentworth, but his memories were too gin-soaked to be considered accurate. He hadn’t seen a werewolf. The killer was probably some drifter who’d left town after the second murder; if he was still killing girls in other places, then hopefully some cop there would catch up with him and blow the back of his skull out.

Then, eight days after the first anniversary of Laurie’s disappearance, a call came over the radio: A ten-year-old girl named Paulina Oberhauser had been reported missing from her home. The family were all tucked into their beds when the parents heard a loud crash of glass, followed by a scream. They rushed to their daughter’s room to find the window busted in and Paulina gone. The house was located on Stewart Street, which was two blocks over from Miller’s Woods.

I was on my way home from the station; when I heard the call, I pulled a u-turn and headed in the direction of Stewart Street. I had two near-misses as I careened like a madman through the streets of Cedar Falls. When I arrived at Stewart, I considered pulling onto that street to gather back-up, but I decided that doing so would lead to too many questions that I couldn’t answer. Instead, I continued until I got to the woods, parking on the shoulder of the road. I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment before getting out of the car and running into Miller’s Woods. I had no idea where I was going – the woods were so big that Paulina and whoever (or whatever) had taken her could be anywhere. I kept going anyway, calling the girl’s name, my sidearm in hand. I pictured someone coming upon me running through those woods with my gun drawn, yelling at the top of my lungs. They would think me insane. I pressed on, branches that overhung the path scratching my face. I called for the girl over and over. And then I heard her voice up ahead.

Help!

That spurred me on. I yelled her name again but there was no response except a sharp scream that was suddenly cut off. I searched with the light, straining to see something in the shadows where the light didn’t reach.

Paulina! I called.

I came around a twist in the path and I saw it there. It was just as Morton Fink had described it, and I understood why someone’s first instinct would be to run and hide, and to think only that they were glad they hadn’t been seen by those yellow eyes. The monster held the girl in its arms, its muzzle buried in the girl’s flayed belly. When my light flashed in the creature’s face, it dropped the girl and bared its bloodstained teeth at me. I felt frozen where I stood, unable to advance or to retreat. The beast let out a low growl and then charged at me, stepping over the dead girl. I raised my weapon and emptied it, hoping that the silver bullet thing really was a myth. The creature yelped in pain, swatting its massive claws in the air as if it could bat away the bullets. It fell to the ground and was still.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring down at it; eventually, two uniformed officers found me. They’d heard the gunshots all the way over on Stewart Street and had come to investigate. They found me standing over the body of Delmer Denkins, aged forty-eight, originally from Nampa, Idaho. The man had a history of petty arrests, but nothing to suggest the child murderer he would become. But I’d seen what Delmer really was. I’d watched him change after death, turning from one kind of monster into another one.

Paulina Oberhauser was dead, but she was the last of the dead girls. Her family invited me to the funeral, I guess out of gratitude at my attempt to save her. People treated me like a hero for a while after that, as the man who’d killed the child ripper. Nobody asked why I’d gone straight to the woods after hearing the call over the radio. Jimenez started to ask me about what I’d seen in the woods one time, but he stopped and turned away.

It’s been a long time since that night. My boys are grown now, with kids of their own. The Pettigrew and Wentworth families moved out of town long ago, but I still see Paulina’s parents from time to time. I’ll run into one of them at the grocery store or the gas station, and they’ll say hello. I’ll smile and greet them, and ask how they’re doing. They always say they’re doing well.

I’ve never talked about this to anyone, and I never will. This thing here is for me and me alone. I just needed to put it down on paper. I know what I saw in those woods, I know what killed those girls. I know it, and I will never forget it.

The Hunters

His luck had to run out sometime, he supposed. He had never really had much of it anyway. They had him surrounded. In spite of the desperate situation he was in, he couldn’t suppress a smile at the thought of it; they were out there right now, smug, complacent; sure of their own power. They were hunters who had grown accustomed to easy prey. They thought he was just sitting here in his room, none the wiser, a helpless fool awaiting the slaughter. But he saw them, and saw through them. He had been running from the jackals so long that he could even smell them. There were two of them now, a man and a woman, leaning against a car and locked in an embrace. It was an act, of course. They were just waiting for the word, for some signal to move, to kick in the door of his motel room and snuff him out. Where there were two of them, there were sure to be more. That’s how they operated.

He moved away from the window, carefully setting the curtain back in place so that it wouldn’t move too much. The room was dark; he wanted them to think he was asleep. He grabbed the duffel bag that held all of his worldly possessions and lifted the strap over his head, settling it onto his shoulder. The heavy weight of the bag bit into his shoulder, but it wasn’t too bad. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. The bathroom was small, with a toilet, a stand-up shower and a sink crammed into it in such a way that he was sure the architect had been a fan of the game Tetris. The only light was the faint glow of a streetlamp coming in through the opaque window set high above the toilet tank.

He unslung the bag and set it down, cramming it under the sink to give himself room to move around. After lowering both the seat and lid of the toilet, he stepped up onto it and reached up to turn the knob that locked the window in place. When he pressed on the window it didn’t want to budge. He pushed harder and his right foot slid out from under him on the smooth surface of the toilet lid. He braced himself against the wall and managed to catch his balance. With his feet planted a little more firmly (he hoped), he tried again. This time the window moved, the bottom edge moving out and up. It moved slowly, but it was moving.

When he had pushed the window up as far as it was would go he hopped down off of the toilet and grabbed his bag out from under the sink. He stepped back up onto the toilet and used both arms to lift up the duffel bag, sliding it out the window. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed it, giving the duffel one final big push so that it wouldn’t be in his way when he came down. The bag fell to the ground with a loud thump. The window was too high for him to pull himself up, so he stepped up onto the toilet tank while holding onto the lip of the window for balance. From this new position he was able climb up and through the window, twisting himself around has he did so, so that he was sitting on the windowsill.

He tried to back himself out of the window as slowly as he could, trying to get a foot up on the sill, get he lost his balance and fell back, tumbling out of the open window. He hit the ground hard; the wind was knocked out of him, and for a moment tiny bright pinpricks exploded before his eyes, dancing around and disappearing as new points of light bloomed. He lay there for a minute, catching his breath, until the pinpricks all went away. He was fully aware that a clock was ticking somewhere, and that he needed to get away from this place. Still, he waited until he felt he was ready to move on. When he finally gained his feet his head swam a little, but he steadied himself against the brick wall of the building, and in a moment he felt better. He dusted himself off and picked up his bag, slinging