But no one knew who the Rose Killer was. So maybe Pearce was a copycat killer.
Maybe he freaked out. Maybe he couldn’t find a cigarette, and he snapped. Maybe he snapped, and to cover up his ghastly crime, he made it look like all those murders out West?
No fucking way, I thought. But why was he dead when he wasn’t the one I’d sent the wolf after?
Could he have left his seed on one, or both, of those girls? Could he have been a deviated pervert like that? He was awfully dirty when he came over to my place that evening not so long
Ago….
No fucking way, I thought. There was only one logical explanation for the tragedy that had occurred. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.
I went over to my lumpy bed, which was still in the corner because I had forgotten to move it back that morning, and got on my knees to reach under it. I slid out my Remington. It was always oiled and loaded, ready to go.
I sat on the bed and leaned forward. The butt rested against the floor, and the long barrel came up to me like the stem of a flower. I put the business end in my mouth and hooked my thumb around the trigger.
The bottom line was that after so long, so very long, the beast had gone mad. In killing Pearce, it went against my orders and did the one thing it was never supposed to do, and that was to kill an innocent person.
The beast had gone rabid. The beast had fucked our little arrangement right in its pearly little ass. It could not be trusted anymore with the responsibilities I’d bestowed upon it, and because it couldn’t be trusted, I couldn’t be trusted.
There was no way in hell I was going to let myself go on anymore after that. I wasn’t about to go back to living the kind of life I lived before I learned how to control the fucking thing, when every single day was an exercise in torment and every moon was a study in damnation. There was no way I could live with myself, not after having it so good for so many years. I wasn’t going to go backward. I couldn’t be responsible for the death of another child, I just couldn’t, and the knowledge of having killed Pearce burned an acid hole in my stomach.
I glimpsed one of his memories again behind my eyes.
He proposed to her in an Italian restaurant, all cheesy-like, by putting the ring in a glass of champagne. She cried, and it bowled her over. Everyone in the place clapped.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told her.
“Get out of my head!” I screamed to no one in particular.
Knowing that this kind of tragedy (there’s that magic word again) could happen again to some other poor soul so easily made me absolutely sick, hence the gun to my head.
No more blood. No more tears. No more running. Sick of running. I would never again look in a mirror to see my face with that blank, shell-shocked look plastered onto it like a death mask. No more face, I thought. No more killing. No more head. It’s over now.
“You motherfucker,” I gurgled. “We had a deal.”
I could feel the snot and the tears and the spit running out of me, spilling down the barrel of the rifle. I didn’t want to die. I truly didn’t. Jesus, I didn’t have much. I had a truck, an ashtray, a recliner. Doris’s night-light. An old leather jacket with half its flairs missing and a twenty-year-old Led Zeppelin patch on the back. A stinky old eagle feather my mother gave me years ago, which, apparently, was my legacy.
That gun.
My thumb tightened. The trigger went back a hair’s width at a time. I clenched my eyes, wondering if I’d hear the bang.
That fucking beast. How could it betray me?
When all the madness started, the beast would go after anybody—women, children, old folks, you name it. The thing had none of what a common thug would call “decency.” Once I tightened the leash on it, though, it only went after bad guys—people I singled out for it to hunt, even if I didn’t know who they were. I’d give it enough hints to do its job, and it never failed. You’d think that after so many years of routine, the thing would be reliable. I had more than enough information on this Rose Killer to give the beast a good lead, not only from the papers but from a goddamn detective too. And it took my friend down. No one in the world would ever be safe again. The beast was loose. I had to stop it the only way possible.
I would be leaving behind a ratty house with half of its contents hidden, like I was a paranoid old man. No one would ever know who I was, what I was, but because of the articles on the wall, people would be talking about me for years.
In the silence of my bedroom I heard the spring in the gun coil. It was the sound of death made real, and would have been the last thing I ever heard in this world, if not for the roar that erupted in my brain.
I opened my eyes, and I was in the woods.
No I wasn’t. I was in a graveyard. The graveyard in Edenburgh.
The wolf was giving me one of its memories—a brief clip from its night on the town. A single piece of the puzzle.
The wolf was down in Judith Myers’s grave, a great big wall of dirt piled up on one side of the desecrated hole. The full moon rained down silver light.
With one of its giant hands, the wolf angrily swept the dirt from the lid of her coffin, and then broke the locks on it as if they were made of plastic instead of steel. The stench of death wafted up into the monster’s face, forcing a long bellow to echo out from between its frothy lips. The stench of chemicals was thick, of formaldehyde, and alcohol, of makeup for the little girl’s corpse.
It reached behind her neck and lifted her head up. Her lips were red, her dress was a light violet, a draped and high-necked thing of silk. It covered the stitches in her chest. Her eyelids were sealed shut with glue. Behind them, balls of cotton rested where a pair of blue eyes used to be.
Her stiffened abdomen cracked like a knuckle when the wolf raised her up, bringing her up to its pulsing snout. This was something I had seen the beast do before—busting into graves to pick up the scent of its prey from the victim’s body.
The wolf breathed in deep, hungrily searching to pick up the scent of he who it was sent after. Then the wolf cried, loosening its grip on the dead girl. Her head came back down on the fake pillow heavily, like a brick. The wolf screamed.
And then the spell was broken, and I was back in my bedroom with a rifle in my mouth.
The wolf couldn’t speak the King’s English, but it was clearly trying to communicate with me, perhaps in a simple effort to keep me from blowing a hole in my noggin. It was telling me that it had tried. It hadn’t flipped its lid, and it hadn’t gone after Pearce out of the crystal blue. Something had gone wrong. Something beyond the wolf’s control. But my connection to the monster wasn’t strong enough at that moment to get more than just a snapshot of what had happened the night before. The rest would come to me at some later date. I pulled the barrel out of my mouth. I never did have the balls for that dirty business.
Pearce was a victim. Maybe because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was a victim all the same. I had to find out why. On the one hand, the Rose Killer was still out there. All those dead women needed justice. Pearce needed avenging too. But just as important, I had to find out what had gone wrong. That way I could stop it from ever happening again.