For me to change from my usual, happy-go-lucky self to a plain old creature of the night, I actually have to come in physical contact with the moonlight. The transformation never happens automatically, so until I was good, ready, and confident that most of the population was at home and sleeping, I sat around the house with a book.
I was reading The Captive and the Fugitive. Proust. In French.
I had once killed a Frenchman. It wasn’t something I was proud of (just kidding), but the hell of it is that from that day on, if I heard two guys talking in French (not likely in the deep South) I knew what they were saying. And I could read Proust without its being translated. What a world.
I also knew Greek, Mandarin, and Spanish, apparently.
I haunted the used bookshop over on Markson Street from time to time, but all the books I had in the house were thoroughly hidden behind heavy boxes in the bedroom closet. In case anyone ever came in, like Pearce did, I didn’t want anyone to ever think I was someone who could read. The less people knew about me, the better. It was bad enough that half the town knew my real name.
The pain of the transformation from the world’s greatest chef to a being that eats only raw meat is almost indescribable. When people actually come apart from the inside, they usually don’t live long enough to have a sit-down with somebody and verbalize what the experience was like. If I had to put it into words, I’d have to say that it’s like feeling each and every one of my bones shift and rotate inside me, and then shatter into dozens of pieces, all throughout my body. After that, it’s like feeling those sharp little pieces try to pass through all my pores like kidney stones. That would pretty much do it.
It isn’t a pleasant feeling, but I used to experience a pain far worse, back before the beast and I came to work together, and that was the pain that would come with the evening of the full moon and grow stronger and more unbearable as the hours passed. It was like the most hellish of chemical withdrawal symptoms—the running shits, the pukes, and the twitchies—and the only way to relieve that pain was to let the light of the moon touch me. However, seeing as how I didn’t used to want to change, this was a real catch-22. Coming in contact with the moonlight meant I had to break down and give up. It meant I had to allow myself to change into a life-snatching monster. Psychologically, this didn’t do me any favors. With the withdrawal pains gone, the pain of changing wouldn’t feel that bad, because I at least knew it was temporary.
If not for this pain—this torture—that attacked me like a mob and compelled me, sooner or later, to touch the moonlight, I would’ve locked myself up somewhere, and I never would’ve let the beast do what it did to all those innocent people all those years ago. Because of the pain, though, I had no choice.
I was never man enough to conquer that pain, to shrug it off and wait for a new morning to come, and it was so amazingly internal, so undying, so beyond any other pain I had ever felt, that I am quite sure there has never been a man alive who had the nerves and the stamina to endure it. I never could, and a lot of people aren’t here anymore because of that.
One night, I tried. This was back in ‘75. I was twenty-two years
old.
I was already on the road at that point, and I was as close to insanity then as I’ve ever been. For the better part of the seventies, I was on a righteous quest to find a cure for what I had become. My mission led me from one end of the country to the other, but all my leads—the rumors of witch doctors, of magicians, of allpowerful Indian shamans—either turned into dead ends or turned out to be frauds. There were a couple of people I encountered—one a medicine man in New Hampshire, and the other an unbelievably ancient German man, a hundred and thirty years old, who was kept in the basement of a nondescript apartment building in San Diego. He wielded powers and abilities not of this earth, but even they were unable to help me, and I realized then that I was beyond all hope. My chances of saving my soul fell away like sand through my fingers, and I was lost.
Then there was Maine. I encountered a group of people up in Maine that I thought might be the answer to my prayers, back when I thought my prayers would be answered. But it turned out to not be so, and I don’t ever talk about what happened in Maine.
Anyway, back in ‘75, I was up in Saratoga Springs for a while. It had been raining all day, so it was hard for me to tell when true night was coming. I was drinking whiskey in the park they have up there, with all those nasty, sulfurous springs all over the place, when all of a sudden, the pain hit my guts. I heaved the half of the bottle I had inside me back into the bushes and ran. I had to get away from the sky.
I broke into a two-story home a few blocks away. I figured I could hide in the darkness for a while, but before long the family came home, and I ducked out the back way. It was better to find another cover than to be around children.
I soon found myself back on Broadway, and at this point, I could barely walk straight. My depth perception was starting to get funny, and I knew I really had to get inside somewhere. I figured I ought as well try to get myself arrested. They could lock me in a cell, then I’d have no choice but to deal with the pain, and in the morning, if I made it, there would be one less dead body on my hands. I went into a clothing store and started knocking racks over and cursing at the women.
This kid that worked there came up to me and said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store.”
I feel bad for that poor kid nowadays. He had terrible acne, and probably weighed a buck fifty soaking wet. I hit him with such a mean shot, his tooth was stuck in between my knuckles.
The cops came, and there I was in aisle five, surrounded by all the black, liquid crap that had slithered from my bowels. Instead of taking me to the jail, they put me in an ambulance. It took eight men to tie me down, and then they loaded me into the ambulance.
On the ride to wherever they were taking me to—either the hospital or the madhouse—I caught the light of the full moon through the window.
I changed.
The last thing I remember was the men screaming and the ambulance flipping onto its side and bursting into flames.
The next day, I woke up naked in a ditch far away.
I had to go back to Saratoga to gather up my stuff. Everything I had was in a shitty little motel room, but all my clothes and my keys were gone. I broke into a house and stole a pair of pants and a shirt.
Up in the motel room, I collected my few possessions into a bag and dressed myself in my only other set of clothes—blue jeans, a Beatles shirt, cowboy boots, and my leather jacket.
Downstairs in the lot was my motorcycle, the one I’d had for years, but it was worthless now without the keys. I did not yet know how to hotwire a vehicle. I walked it out of town, and when I came to a little pond hidden behind some trees on the side of the road, I rolled it in. The air was cold and sweet. The sky was gray. I felt like I’d lost the only friend I’d had anymore, the only thing that kept me free and human.
When I got back on the road, I stuck out a thumb. After a few minutes, a red truck stopped.
The driver asked, “Where are you going?”
I said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Canada,” he said.
“Sounds good to me.”
Since the beast and I joined forces back in the early eighties, the pain that blossomed throughout the evening didn’t hurt so much anymore. I’ve often wondered how much of it was psychosomatic, and how much was supernatural. It became a kind of buzzing feeling, like having to go to the bathroom, and as the years went on, I got to savor the feeling for the buildup that it was—the foreplay to a night of brutality and mayhem. And I always waited long enough to change for there to be a minimal amount of people out on the streets. The pain of changing has remained just as horrible over the years, but it can hardly be argued that I don’t deserve it, and maybe a little bit more.