“Do your twenty newspapers a day tell you that?”
“Please,” interrupted the kid. “Look at the camera. I’m gonna start snapping with or without your permission, guys.”
Pearce and I looked at each other, smiled, and then we both flipped the bird at the camera. The flash went off three times in rapid succession.
“Speaks volumes,” said the kid. “I swear, this place is amazing. I’m here for an hour and I’m already caught up in a horror story.”
I looked at Pearce.
Bill Parker’s ghost haunted the corners of his brain, crying out for answers. Pearce chewed his nicotine gum, thought of his baby, his town, and what—or who—had devoured our upstanding townsman, Bill Parker.
“You have no idea,” I said.
THREE
It happened overseas. The fact is that Marlowe Higgins died in ‘Nam. He never made it. On that night when the beast entered me, when I became, the Marlowe Higgins that had dreams of making it back Stateside, the Marlowe Higgins that loved baseball and motorcycles and had a girl named Doris waiting back home for him, ceased to exist. In his place was a shell, a husk, a host for the ungodly thing that had invaded him. Indeed, one can’t truly have a life when what lurks on the inside feasts on death.
I found that out the hard way.
Once I realized what I had become, I started drifting, going from place to place, town to town. I was a stranger on every street and in every city, and that’s the way I wanted it. The name I was born with was a worthless thing to me, and wherever I went I left a trail of blood and grated bones in my wake.
I was never able to go fast enough to escape the horror in my head, the truth of what I carried soul-deep. I alone was hell on earth, and knowing that I was responsible for the gruesome murders of so many innocent people was often too much for me to bear. Even in combat I’d never had the nerve or the desire to kill another human being. It disgusted me that the monster forced me to do what I’d thought I would never be capable of. What made it worse were the dreams I told you about. I started drinking out of necessity, and in my weakest moments, when the liquor wore off long enough for me to find the keys, I’d get on my motorcycle and see just how fast I could go.
I woke up in hospitals a lot those first few cursed years on the road. They chalked up my suicidal tendencies to combat shock, or whatever the hell the term was they were using at the time, but they never took it too seriously because I never got hurt that bad. I was lucky, they said. What it really was, and this bothered me immensely, was that it had just become harder for me to die.
My “accidents” on the black-veined roads of America began to get a little more elaborate. One time I hot-wired a semi and drove it through a gas station in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I woke up burned like a motherfucker, handcuffed to a hospital bed. I was so burned up there was no way they could identify me. When the next full moon came, the handcuffs didn’t mean much to the beast, and it got us out of there, but not before butchering a handful of nurses and an eye specialist.
I woke up the next day in the cellar of a local antique shop, naked, as usual, and the burns that had covered a healthy portion of my body were gone. I woke up in immaculate physical condition, just like I always do the day after. I haven’t gotten so much as a cold in the last twenty years.
The blood on my hands made me a monster by proxy, an accomplice to the supernatural genocide machine that had affixed itself to my being. I couldn’t take it, so once I found my way out of Wyoming, I got myself a rifle. A Remington. With a little bit of liquid courage I strolled up to a pawn shop and threw a garbage can through the window. I made off with the first weapon I saw. I figured a nice, concentrated attack on my skull would be the ample dose to keep me down for good, and in doing that, I’d be putting the beast down too.
I drove this pretty ‘63 Monterey I’d wired out into the wilderness and found a spot on a hill that overlooked a stream. I was surrounded by trees, the pink-orange rays of the day’s dying sun. Brown leaves hugged the ground like a blanket, holding in its moisture so it could turn to ice in the coming frozen months, and the clear, chill water in the stream sent cool air up over the hill that passed through me like a prayer.
As night came on I loaded my rifle. I pressed the butt of it into the grass and rested my chin at the business end. I took a few deep breaths, then a few more, and just as the cold of night set in, I cursed myself for not having the stones to do what needed to be done.
I drove off to the next town.
That was the first time I ever put a gun to my head, but it wasn’t the last.
And so it went like that—going from town to town, stealing, working odd jobs, sleeping in dives or hot cars, drinking and fighting, trying to forget, being responsible for the slaughter of yet another poor soul because I was too yellow to take myself out, waking up, then doing it all over again.
It took the unfortunate death of my mother at the hands of a junkie in 1981 to change my life, and with it, the very nature of the beast itself.
I called her every so often from wherever I was. I guess she was the only person who really understood the fate that had befallen me, and she knew why I could never go back home. Sometimes I’d call and hang up. Other times I’d be crying by the time she picked up. Sometimes when I was crying, she’d hang up because she just couldn’t take it. Sometimes I’d call her with a fierce drunk on, and I’d scream.
One morning I called and a cop answered the phone. He asked who I was, and when I stated that I was the son of the woman whose house he was in, he told me she’d been attacked. He didn’t tell me she was dead, not over the phone. I thought there was still a chance for me to see her. I drove at a hundred miles an hour and got there by nightfall. That’s when they broke the news to me.
She had been coming home from work. She put the key in the front door, and the scumbag, or “the perpetrator,” as they called him, pushed himself in behind her, knocked her down. What it was supposed to have been was a simple robbery. A street thug intimidating an old lady bad enough that she’d give up where the cash was in the house and that would be the end of it. But things didn’t go down that way. He either thought she was lying when she said that was all there was, or maybe he just felt like doing what he did. Maybe he saw it as a perfect opportunity to say “fuck you” to the world. I didn’t know, and I still don’t. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What he did to her claimed her life before her heart stopped beating anyway.
They had his fingerprints, some stains left behind, as if he were a dog marking his territory. But that was all. He was just another faceless criminal. Another tragic tale of America’s youth gone awry.
I wanted to take the world itself and throttle it like a baby. I was sick with anger. Not even in combat had I ever felt a feeling akin to the pure, unadulterated fury that coursed through me in the weeks following her death. I harbored the hope that the next time the beast came out, he’d wipe out the whole fucking city in one fell swoop, mark it on the maps as a red zone the way they would with Chernobyl a few years later.
On the night of the full moon, I was in the car I had at the time, parked on a dark road. I was naked. Clothes would get destroyed in the change—the beast maintained a human shape, but was so much bigger than I was—and I didn’t like to waste them. Outfits cost money, and I was consistently in the position of barely being able to feed myself, much less buy anything.
For the first time in my life I welcomed the beast. I looked forward to the lashing out that was about to happen. As night fell, the pain in my body grew stronger and stronger, just like it always did, but it didn’t bother me, not that night. It was just more fuel for the fire.