CAITLIN CHRISTOPHERSON SHORT STORY
ORIGIN OF THE HUNTER
Caitlin Christopher just came into Colm’s Bar for a casual drink on a Saturday night she had off and felt deeply guilty after her third Corona. She didn’t feel particularly great about smoking either. Lacey was with her father, Ted Lewis, this weekend, and without her around, it was all too easy for Christopherson to screw up and feel sorry for herself.
Mother of the fucking year, Caitlin thought bitterly, happy that she was inside and the law kept her from smoking indoors. She was sitting alone in a corner of the bar under the dim yellow light, nursing her fourth beer, feeling helpless and sorry for herself. This was no way for a mother or a policewoman to behave.
She looked at the walls around the bar for a moment.
It was a lovely building, tucked away a few streets west of Worthington above Mandy’s Diner, wonderfully old-fashioned, wooden, and had probably been around forever. Back to the eighteen hundreds at least, placed back when there was only a small group of buildings in Midtown and surrounded on three sides by farms with Worthington leading southward to what was then the only part of Bartlett Bay that could be classified as a township or city.
It was probably a bar even before Colm’s Bar’s eponymous owner, John Colm, got hold of it. That was back in the 1920s, after he was seriously injured and could no longer perform as a policeman. Christopherson heard he ran it as a restaurant during Prohibition, which was said to be why it presently had such a great food menu, and the basement acted as a speakeasy that agents were nervous about raiding because it was the police’s personal bar.
The picture of John Colm as a young police officer from a couple of decades earlier was still on the wall, as well as a sort of graduation picture of him and the other police circa 1900 or so. At that time, police academies were rare and the photo of them together in uniform was just an acknowledgement of their being trained and ready. Just him and ten other police officers to patrol all of Bartlett Bay, one of whom was a member of the Simms family. There was always a Simms in the Bartlett Bay Police Department somewhere.
There were a lot of other police paraphernalia in there as well. John Colm retired in the 1950s or so, leaving it to his daughter’s family, who had relatives in the Force, so their pictures and badges were here and there as well, and they ended up selling it to Ray Alan when he, after also being injured out of the Force, used his settlement money to buy the place from the daughter and her husband, who were by then nearing retirement age themselves.
Ray followed the same tradition of mounting police graduation photos and the like but he also added newspaper articles from various times when the police took out something monstrous or inhuman. There was the takedown of half-mad hobgoblins on a Bonny and Clyde kind of adventure in the eighties ending in New Haven, the officers posing by the destroyed vehicles in photograph and there was also a dead troll in the nineties, its corpse having turned to stone in the daylight by the time the photo was taken, taken down by two dozen officers before dawn came.
Nothing about the werewolf on either of the times it had appeared before could be found anywhere on those walls.
Ray Alan was still the owner, in his sixties then and mostly relying on his son, and he had been giving her strange looks all night. He was a skinny older man with a long, hound-dog kind of face, his hair gray and mostly still there, wearing a pair of thin, black metal-framed glasses and a short-sleeved white dress shirt tucked into jeans. He was still kind of handsome too and he was successful in marriage. His wife had produced five children, the second-eldest son being the one who took after bartending and was presently running the business pretty much the same as if he was the owner. Ray still worked there part-time but mostly just to keep retirement from boring him to death.
“Hey, Teddy, watch the bar, will you,” he said suddenly and Christopherson knew he was going to come up to her. She wasn’t sure what he was going to say but when he limped over and sat down, she saw his expression and thought she knew exactly what he was going to say. Something about drinking too much and not being a good mother or something terrible like that.
Except that he didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at her across the little table with that strange expression on his face, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Your bartender has the same first name as my ex-husband and therefore he is terrible,” she told him jokingly.
He smiled at that but it was a strange, distant smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
She sighed. “Look, Ray, I know I shouldn’t be—”
“I know that look,” he told her in a cold voice. “You’re getting hooked into this more than you should.”
“Yes,” she agreed bitterly. “Is this where you tell me a whole lot of nothing and expect me to walk away while that thing rips apart some innocent child like the one in that Stephen King movie?”
He frowned at that but not at her. She could see Ray’s eyes starting to stare off into the distance as he began to think. Then he looked at her without moving his head, his eyes narrowing behind his lenses, and she could see that he was internally debating whether he should tell her something or not.
She sighed and began to say, “Ray…” That was the only word that came out and she sighed again but before she could speak that time, he actually started talking.
“Old Bill Cordeiro didn’t believe in no-win situations either,” said Ray. “Like you, he believed very strongly in what he was doing. His little sister was murdered when he was a boy and the killer got away clean because the officers dragged their feet. He simply couldn’t live with himself if some innocent person died and he hadn’t done his absolute damnedest to stop it.”
Christopherson looked at him, her hand gripping the corona tightly. “When was that? That was in—”
“The year was nineteen-sixty-seven but no one will talk about it,” he said. “That was my first year on the Force, back before that Gurney nutcase crashed his truck into my cruiser and gave me a limp for life. Jesus, I’m old. Back in those days, I had that bright-eyed, ‘I can change the world’ attitude that rookies sometimes have.
“I didn’t expect my first year to be quite so—interesting.”
Christopherson stared at him intensely, very interested now that somebody was actually talking. “The Summer of Love,” she whispered.
“I didn’t find it as such,” he replied stiffly and then added, “It was bad, Caitlin. The first victim was a ten-year-old girl from Edwards Grove. Cute little blond thing with pigtails. Found pieces of her everywhere all over her backyard, the January snow splattered crimson from wall to wall. Bill was so disturbed by it that he swore that he would get that bastard! Swore it on his soul!”
Christopherson swallowed a lump down her throat. “Did he?” she asked very softly.
“If, by get, you mean that he found the killer in Colchester after he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, then yes. But if you mean that he killed the werewolf and stopped its reign of terror, then no. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. Like you, he was baffled at every turn, but determined to find the truth all the same.
“Cordeiro was haunted by his failure until the day he died, God rest his soul. He considered it his greatest professional blunder although none of us ever did.”
“Who was the werewolf back then?” she asked.
He looked around, saw no one was nearby, and said softly, “An orderly at the Bay City Hospital named Peter Landry. Weirdo, unmarried, and in his forties. It turned out he was a homosexual with severe emotional issues involving his mother and possibly transgender. Most of the people the werewolf killed were women he was jealous of, usually children or teenage girls. His therapist would later admit off-the-record that Landry still viewed himself as a child which may or may not have had something to do with his choice of victims.
“He also went after open homosexuals whom he deeply envied. He lacked the courage to be honestly gay even among other gays. The Red Rooster was a part of it. Everyone knew it was a gay bar even then. Hell, even one of the old Wellingtons was the head of a club that used to meet there when he and the other rich gay kids weren’t able to go to their usual, high-end spots in New York City. He’s like ninety now and could, but won’t, talk about it.”
“The Red Rooster?” replied Christopher thoughtfully. “I never hear anything about it. That place is clean.” The Red Rooster was still a gay bar located down in Lower Bartlett Bay, a little north of Fisher St, not far from Rodriguez Repair on Torris St. Bars often called the cops when fights broke out. It happened quite regularly at the Green Lobster but there were never problems at the Rooster. Not even drunk driving.
“Oh, it’s incredibly clean and always has been,” Ray told her. “That’s because it was dangerous to be gay in the old days and the habit of cautiousness has stuck around. Back in my rookie days, we had a lot of bigots on the Force and a lot of them wanted to shut it down hard. Some of the boys used to regularly harass the gays and some even arrested them when they were open enough about their lifestyles to get caught. Luckily for them, they had old Devon Kerry. He was a gay police officer and he always gave them the heads up if he could.
“Did you know you could get thirty years for being gay in Connecticut in nineteen-sixty-seven?”
“Jesus,” she replied.
“The thing about the Red Rooster here was that Landry always wanted to be part of that world. He just didn’t have the courage to do it. Later, several patrons said they saw him staring at the bar from a distance, in his car or walking, almost longingly, as though he deeply wanted to enter. There was a guy he must have seen walking in and out, that I think he was either in love with or jealous of or both, by the name of Darren Porter. Good-looking guy, sexy gay man, got all the guys, the kind you girls all cry about when you find out they’re gay. That kind of gay guy.
“The werewolf followed him from the Red Rooster back to his apartment one night and then tortured him to death. His neighbors heard Porter shrieking through the walls and called us, practically screaming themselves. The werewolf only ended what it was doing when we got there, tearing off Porter’s head and tossing it across the room, his guts and limbs spread everywhere. What was left of his face on the couch opposite his body had the perpetual look of agony printed across it.”
“You actually faced it?” asked Christopherson, shocked and enthralled. “You actually fought the werewolf!”
“Oh yes!” he said with sudden, wide eyes. It was an expression that seemed to indicate an almost childlike fear of something unnatural. Something like the Boogeyman. “Most of the Force was there. I saw Alvin Simms put a full barrel of silver buckshot point-blank right into its face with my own two eyes. I thought that would instantly kill a rhino or shatter a man’s head like a melon but all it did was piss the creature off.”
“Was that the captain’s brother?”
“Uncle.”
“Is he still around?” Christopherson felt it would be very useful to question him.
“He retired to Florida back in the eighties, I think, and passed away in the nineties. The point I’m making is that this thing is not the run-of-the-mill monster. You do not want this thing following you home to where your daughter is, just like it did to poor Darren Porter. If it finds out you’re onto it, it will.”
“How is it that it doesn’t know already?” she asked.
“I don’t think the werewolf and the victim are perfectly synced and the victim is usually convinced the werewolf is someone else. It’s a defense mechanism that keeps them from panicking and then running to us to protect their friends and loved ones. You question them as a police officer and they will, quite convincingly, state they are not the werewolf. Cordeiro did find Landry before the end and, to his lifelong misery, was convinced by Landry that he wasn’t the werewolf. The victim won’t be looking into us because the victim will be absolutely certain he or she is not the werewolf. At the end, they will figure it out, which was why Landry ate a shotgun and left a note, lamenting the death of all of his victims and the reasons behind it.
“But if the werewolf sees you, as a werewolf, and fingers you as the most dangerous police officer, well, Caitlin—” he looked apologetic almost “—I’d recommend a long stay with Lacey’s father every full moon. Does he live far away?”
“Boston.”
“Good but, still, there’s no guarantee it won’t follow your daughter there.”
“You’re joking,” she said, horror slipping down into her very bones. “You cannot be serious,” she added when he didn’t immediately respond but she knew he was and now she understood why Mary and the others were really trying to get her to back off. No one told her, they seemed afraid to tell her or even think about it, and now she knew why.
The werewolf would go after her family and the family of anyone who it thought helped her.
Best to stay out of it, Christopherson thought with sarcastic bitterness. Best to play stupid.
“It’s not as stupid as it appears,” Ray told her after a moment. “The man or woman with the werewolf spirit in their body might, out of the blue, just suddenly find themselves with a curious interest in the lives of the Bartlett Bay Police Force. Might just look into all of our personal lives. Maybe they’ve developed an interest in writing a book about the policemen or have a college essay or something, but then the next full moon comes along and, for some crazy reason, they suddenly have an unshakable urge to visit Boston.
“It’s no big deal, right? After all, they’re not the werewolf.”
Christopherson swallowed a lump down her throat. She could see he wasn’t lying or, at least, believed everything he was saying. “What do I do then?” she asked. “Just let it go?”
“Let it go until the French arrive. Once they’re here, it’ll forget about you fast enough.”
Christopherson blinked at him. “The French?” she asked. That was new. “What the hell do the French have to do with this?”
“The French have everything to do with this and the reason everyone is just waiting this out. Did you ever research the origin of the werewolf?”
“Of course, I did,” she replied, annoyed that he would even ask her that question.
She learned of several French versions but who knew what was true or not. There were countless stories about werewolf-like creatures from all over the world, skinwalkers from Navajo lore being a very popular theory of origin. The werewolf could be from France, sure, but it could also be from China or the city of Timbuktu for all Christopherson knew.
“What do these French hunters believe?” asked Christopherson.
“The full French legend begins in ancient Greece,” he told her. “King Lycaon of Arcadia tricks Zeus, King of the Gods, into eating human flesh and, as a punishment, Lycaon was transformed into a wolf along with his sons, who participated. Sounds crazy, right?
“Well, the story that many French people believe is that this has some kind of real-world origin, indicating that perhaps the legend is based on some truth, and that in reality Lycaon and his sons really were cursed to transform into wolves, perhaps not by the gods but by somebody, and his wife or one of his elder sons’ wives was pregnant with a son, who didn’t transform because he was in the womb, but held the seed of that curse in his blood that transferred to every subsequent generation that followed.
“As the story goes, one of that boy’s descendants was a knight in medieval France known for his violence and cruelty. The strongest name connected to him is Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes, the Count of Saint-Pol, which may be who the werewolf really is or maybe the werewolf was a different man entirely that history confused with Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes. This was in the eleven hundreds or so and who the hell really knows.
“The werewolf, whoever he was, was a murderer and a butcher of men, women and children and he had a habit of ignoring sanctuary, pulling people out of churches, and murdering them outside or, possibly, even inside, often murdering the priests and nuns as well in retaliation for protecting his enemies. Now, the ancient Greeks believed very strongly in sanctuary as did the Christians and that might have something to do with it. They called it ‘asylia.’”
“Asylum,” Christopherson replied thoughtfully.
“Exactly,” Ray told her. “Later, when this knight’s chickens came back to roost and he was hunted down for his crimes, he was eventually cornered into a monastery or church himself. There, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, he had the gall to demand sanctuary for himself against his enemies.
“His enemies, which included a devout priest, abhorred his nerve and were deeply offended. So deeply offended that the priest cursed him from the depths of his soul to be the monster outside that he was inside, to never again mock the laws of God and man alike as he had done so often before, and let all who see him know him for the monster that he was.
“It was then they say the old Lycaon curse returned, bubbling up from that past ancestor and intermixed with a different magic or religion to transform him into something not quite a man and not quite a wolf, never to know what it is to be man again, and the sight of him running off into the darkness on that full moon night shrieking, reverberates through the ages. The same full moon on that long-ago feast Lycaon held.”
Ray adjusted his glasses.
“They say that cursed knight still roams the world, unable to be full man or full wolf, so he thus sends his spirit to take over people, to live and feel again as a man does vicariously, but every full moon, the beast comes out again, and the violence and rage within them take over.”
“You believe that story?” asked Christopherson.
“The part about the werewolf spirit taking people over and going on a rampage sure feels right,” Ray told her.
“Where does wolfsbane fit into this?” she asked.
“According to the French and Greeks, it was a sacred plant during the ancient era of Greece Lycaon lived in and was a symbol of asylia and xenia, which was the guest right that Lycaon dishonored. People had planted it around temples and homes during those days and it supposedly caused Lycaon and his sons agonizing pain to be anywhere near it. I don’t know if that’s true but I do know the breed of it that works best against werewolves was descended from one found natively in Greece.”
Christopherson could see that he believed at least some of that story and he never struck her as a fool or delusional. “The French are involved because of that ancient French knight?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” Ray told her. “The werewolf has appeared all over the world. Even Japan and China and other parts of Asia. At some point, it has appeared a few times in South America and Canada, a few times in Britain, and it’s on its third time here, in Bartlett Bay, but in France—” his eyes widened behind his lenses “—it always comes back to France.” His eyes then narrowed. “It always comes home.”
Christopherson listened and felt almost enthralled by his story.
“Every generation, it appears somewhere in France. Sometimes even more often than that and it appeared almost as often in its distant empire, such as Louisiana, Quebec, or Haiti back when it was Saint-Domingue, before those places became independent or free of France. Wherever French people exist, there you will find it, wreaking violence and agony upon those that cursed it.
“France is the werewolf’s personal hunting preserve.”
“And that is why the hunters are primarily French and why the word will soon reach them and they will soon appear. The French always appear. Cordeiro needed them and so do you.”
“They’ve never killed it then,” Christopherson said bitterly.
“They have a bunch of times but it keeps coming back. There will always be more victims to possess. What the hunters really actually want is to capture it and torture information out of it so they can find the source.”
“The source?”
“Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes’s real body. The one that was transformed in medieval France into a permanent werewolf state, wandering somewhere out there in the world. They need to find and kill that to kill the werewolf permanently and the normal werewolf, the possessed man or woman in werewolf form, is the key to finding it. I’m not entirely sure how but I think it involves magic or psychic powers.”
Christopherson wasn’t sure what to think about French hunters but despite the illegality of it all, the idea of a small, dangerous private army trained in this and determined to stop that werewolf did comfort her.
“When will they come?” she asked.
“Soon,” said Ray. “By now, they’re either here or on their way.”
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Caitlin Christopher just came into Colm’s Bar for a casual drink on a Saturday night she had off and felt deeply guilty after her third Corona. She didn’t feel particularly great about smoking either. Lacey was with her father, Ted Lewis, this weekend, and without her around, it was all too easy for Christopherson to screw up and feel sorry for herself.
Mother of the fucking year, Caitlin thought bitterly, happy that she was inside and the law kept her from smoking indoors. She was sitting alone in a corner of the bar under the dim yellow light, nursing her fourth beer, feeling helpless and sorry for herself. This was no way for a mother or a policewoman to behave.
She looked at the walls around the bar for a moment.
It was a lovely building, tucked away a few streets west of Worthington above Mandy’s Diner, wonderfully old-fashioned, wooden, and had probably been around forever. Back to the eighteen hundreds at least, placed back when there was only a small group of buildings in Midtown and surrounded on three sides by farms with Worthington leading southward to what was then the only part of Bartlett Bay that could be classified as a township or city.
It was probably a bar even before Colm’s Bar’s eponymous owner, John Colm, got hold of it. That was back in the 1920s, after he was seriously injured and could no longer perform as a policeman. Christopherson heard he ran it as a restaurant during Prohibition, which was said to be why it presently had such a great food menu, and the basement acted as a speakeasy that agents were nervous about raiding because it was the police’s personal bar.
The picture of John Colm as a young police officer from a couple of decades earlier was still on the wall, as well as a sort of graduation picture of him and the other police circa 1900 or so. At that time, police academies were rare and the photo of them together in uniform was just an acknowledgement of their being trained and ready. Just him and ten other police officers to patrol all of Bartlett Bay, one of whom was a member of the Simms family. There was always a Simms in the Bartlett Bay Police Department somewhere.
There were a lot of other police paraphernalia in there as well. John Colm retired in the 1950s or so, leaving it to his daughter’s family, who had relatives in the Force, so their pictures and badges were here and there as well, and they ended up selling it to Ray Alan when he, after also being injured out of the Force, used his settlement money to buy the place from the daughter and her husband, who were by then nearing retirement age themselves.
Ray followed the same tradition of mounting police graduation photos and the like but he also added newspaper articles from various times when the police took out something monstrous or inhuman. There was the takedown of half-mad hobgoblins on a Bonny and Clyde kind of adventure in the eighties ending in New Haven, the officers posing by the destroyed vehicles in photograph and there was also a dead troll in the nineties, its corpse having turned to stone in the daylight by the time the photo was taken, taken down by two dozen officers before dawn came.
Nothing about the werewolf on either of the times it had appeared before could be found anywhere on those walls.
Ray Alan was still the owner, in his sixties then and mostly relying on his son, and he had been giving her strange looks all night. He was a skinny older man with a long, hound-dog kind of face, his hair gray and mostly still there, wearing a pair of thin, black metal-framed glasses and a short-sleeved white dress shirt tucked into jeans. He was still kind of handsome too and he was successful in marriage. His wife had produced five children, the second-eldest son being the one who took after bartending and was presently running the business pretty much the same as if he was the owner. Ray still worked there part-time but mostly just to keep retirement from boring him to death.
“Hey, Teddy, watch the bar, will you,” he said suddenly and Christopherson knew he was going to come up to her. She wasn’t sure what he was going to say but when he limped over and sat down, she saw his expression and thought she knew exactly what he was going to say. Something about drinking too much and not being a good mother or something terrible like that.
Except that he didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at her across the little table with that strange expression on his face, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Your bartender has the same first name as my ex-husband and therefore he is terrible,” she told him jokingly.
He smiled at that but it was a strange, distant smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
She sighed. “Look, Ray, I know I shouldn’t be—”
“I know that look,” he told her in a cold voice. “You’re getting hooked into this more than you should.”
“Yes,” she agreed bitterly. “Is this where you tell me a whole lot of nothing and expect me to walk away while that thing rips apart some innocent child like the one in that Stephen King movie?”
He frowned at that but not at her. She could see Ray’s eyes starting to stare off into the distance as he began to think. Then he looked at her without moving his head, his eyes narrowing behind his lenses, and she could see that he was internally debating whether he should tell her something or not.
She sighed and began to say, “Ray…” That was the only word that came out and she sighed again but before she could speak that time, he actually started talking.
“Old Bill Cordeiro didn’t believe in no-win situations either,” said Ray. “Like you, he believed very strongly in what he was doing. His little sister was murdered when he was a boy and the killer got away clean because the officers dragged their feet. He simply couldn’t live with himself if some innocent person died and he hadn’t done his absolute damnedest to stop it.”
Christopherson looked at him, her hand gripping the corona tightly. “When was that? That was in—”
“The year was nineteen-sixty-seven but no one will talk about it,” he said. “That was my first year on the Force, back before that Gurney nutcase crashed his truck into my cruiser and gave me a limp for life. Jesus, I’m old. Back in those days, I had that bright-eyed, ‘I can change the world’ attitude that rookies sometimes have.
“I didn’t expect my first year to be quite so—interesting.”
Christopherson stared at him intensely, very interested now that somebody was actually talking. “The Summer of Love,” she whispered.
“I didn’t find it as such,” he replied stiffly and then added, “It was bad, Caitlin. The first victim was a ten-year-old girl from Edwards Grove. Cute little blond thing with pigtails. Found pieces of her everywhere all over her backyard, the January snow splattered crimson from wall to wall. Bill was so disturbed by it that he swore that he would get that bastard! Swore it on his soul!”
Christopherson swallowed a lump down her throat. “Did he?” she asked very softly.
“If, by get, you mean that he found the killer in Colchester after he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, then yes. But if you mean that he killed the werewolf and stopped its reign of terror, then no. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. Like you, he was baffled at every turn, but determined to find the truth all the same.
“Cordeiro was haunted by his failure until the day he died, God rest his soul. He considered it his greatest professional blunder although none of us ever did.”
“Who was the werewolf back then?” she asked.
He looked around, saw no one was nearby, and said softly, “An orderly at the Bay City Hospital named Peter Landry. Weirdo, unmarried, and in his forties. It turned out he was a homosexual with severe emotional issues involving his mother and possibly transgender. Most of the people the werewolf killed were women he was jealous of, usually children or teenage girls. His therapist would later admit off-the-record that Landry still viewed himself as a child which may or may not have had something to do with his choice of victims.
“He also went after open homosexuals whom he deeply envied. He lacked the courage to be honestly gay even among other gays. The Red Rooster was a part of it. Everyone knew it was a gay bar even then. Hell, even one of the old Wellingtons was the head of a club that used to meet there when he and the other rich gay kids weren’t able to go to their usual, high-end spots in New York City. He’s like ninety now and could, but won’t, talk about it.”
“The Red Rooster?” replied Christopher thoughtfully. “I never hear anything about it. That place is clean.” The Red Rooster was still a gay bar located down in Lower Bartlett Bay, a little north of Fisher St, not far from Rodriguez Repair on Torris St. Bars often called the cops when fights broke out. It happened quite regularly at the Green Lobster but there were never problems at the Rooster. Not even drunk driving.
“Oh, it’s incredibly clean and always has been,” Ray told her. “That’s because it was dangerous to be gay in the old days and the habit of cautiousness has stuck around. Back in my rookie days, we had a lot of bigots on the Force and a lot of them wanted to shut it down hard. Some of the boys used to regularly harass the gays and some even arrested them when they were open enough about their lifestyles to get caught. Luckily for them, they had old Devon Kerry. He was a gay police officer and he always gave them the heads up if he could.
“Did you know you could get thirty years for being gay in Connecticut in nineteen-sixty-seven?”
“Jesus,” she replied.
“The thing about the Red Rooster here was that Landry always wanted to be part of that world. He just didn’t have the courage to do it. Later, several patrons said they saw him staring at the bar from a distance, in his car or walking, almost longingly, as though he deeply wanted to enter. There was a guy he must have seen walking in and out, that I think he was either in love with or jealous of or both, by the name of Darren Porter. Good-looking guy, sexy gay man, got all the guys, the kind you girls all cry about when you find out they’re gay. That kind of gay guy.
“The werewolf followed him from the Red Rooster back to his apartment one night and then tortured him to death. His neighbors heard Porter shrieking through the walls and called us, practically screaming themselves. The werewolf only ended what it was doing when we got there, tearing off Porter’s head and tossing it across the room, his guts and limbs spread everywhere. What was left of his face on the couch opposite his body had the perpetual look of agony printed across it.”
“You actually faced it?” asked Christopherson, shocked and enthralled. “You actually fought the werewolf!”
“Oh yes!” he said with sudden, wide eyes. It was an expression that seemed to indicate an almost childlike fear of something unnatural. Something like the Boogeyman. “Most of the Force was there. I saw Alvin Simms put a full barrel of silver buckshot point-blank right into its face with my own two eyes. I thought that would instantly kill a rhino or shatter a man’s head like a melon but all it did was piss the creature off.”
“Was that the captain’s brother?”
“Uncle.”
“Is he still around?” Christopherson felt it would be very useful to question him.
“He retired to Florida back in the eighties, I think, and passed away in the nineties. The point I’m making is that this thing is not the run-of-the-mill monster. You do not want this thing following you home to where your daughter is, just like it did to poor Darren Porter. If it finds out you’re onto it, it will.”
“How is it that it doesn’t know already?” she asked.
“I don’t think the werewolf and the victim are perfectly synced and the victim is usually convinced the werewolf is someone else. It’s a defense mechanism that keeps them from panicking and then running to us to protect their friends and loved ones. You question them as a police officer and they will, quite convincingly, state they are not the werewolf. Cordeiro did find Landry before the end and, to his lifelong misery, was convinced by Landry that he wasn’t the werewolf. The victim won’t be looking into us because the victim will be absolutely certain he or she is not the werewolf. At the end, they will figure it out, which was why Landry ate a shotgun and left a note, lamenting the death of all of his victims and the reasons behind it.
“But if the werewolf sees you, as a werewolf, and fingers you as the most dangerous police officer, well, Caitlin—” he looked apologetic almost “—I’d recommend a long stay with Lacey’s father every full moon. Does he live far away?”
“Boston.”
“Good but, still, there’s no guarantee it won’t follow your daughter there.”
“You’re joking,” she said, horror slipping down into her very bones. “You cannot be serious,” she added when he didn’t immediately respond but she knew he was and now she understood why Mary and the others were really trying to get her to back off. No one told her, they seemed afraid to tell her or even think about it, and now she knew why.
The werewolf would go after her family and the family of anyone who it thought helped her.
Best to stay out of it, Christopherson thought with sarcastic bitterness. Best to play stupid.
“It’s not as stupid as it appears,” Ray told her after a moment. “The man or woman with the werewolf spirit in their body might, out of the blue, just suddenly find themselves with a curious interest in the lives of the Bartlett Bay Police Force. Might just look into all of our personal lives. Maybe they’ve developed an interest in writing a book about the policemen or have a college essay or something, but then the next full moon comes along and, for some crazy reason, they suddenly have an unshakable urge to visit Boston.
“It’s no big deal, right? After all, they’re not the werewolf.”
Christopherson swallowed a lump down her throat. She could see he wasn’t lying or, at least, believed everything he was saying. “What do I do then?” she asked. “Just let it go?”
“Let it go until the French arrive. Once they’re here, it’ll forget about you fast enough.”
Christopherson blinked at him. “The French?” she asked. That was new. “What the hell do the French have to do with this?”
“The French have everything to do with this and the reason everyone is just waiting this out. Did you ever research the origin of the werewolf?”
“Of course, I did,” she replied, annoyed that he would even ask her that question.
She learned of several French versions but who knew what was true or not. There were countless stories about werewolf-like creatures from all over the world, skinwalkers from Navajo lore being a very popular theory of origin. The werewolf could be from France, sure, but it could also be from China or the city of Timbuktu for all Christopherson knew.
“What do these French hunters believe?” asked Christopherson.
“The full French legend begins in ancient Greece,” he told her. “King Lycaon of Arcadia tricks Zeus, King of the Gods, into eating human flesh and, as a punishment, Lycaon was transformed into a wolf along with his sons, who participated. Sounds crazy, right?
“Well, the story that many French people believe is that this has some kind of real-world origin, indicating that perhaps the legend is based on some truth, and that in reality Lycaon and his sons really were cursed to transform into wolves, perhaps not by the gods but by somebody, and his wife or one of his elder sons’ wives was pregnant with a son, who didn’t transform because he was in the womb, but held the seed of that curse in his blood that transferred to every subsequent generation that followed.
“As the story goes, one of that boy’s descendants was a knight in medieval France known for his violence and cruelty. The strongest name connected to him is Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes, the Count of Saint-Pol, which may be who the werewolf really is or maybe the werewolf was a different man entirely that history confused with Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes. This was in the eleven hundreds or so and who the hell really knows.
“The werewolf, whoever he was, was a murderer and a butcher of men, women and children and he had a habit of ignoring sanctuary, pulling people out of churches, and murdering them outside or, possibly, even inside, often murdering the priests and nuns as well in retaliation for protecting his enemies. Now, the ancient Greeks believed very strongly in sanctuary as did the Christians and that might have something to do with it. They called it ‘asylia.’”
“Asylum,” Christopherson replied thoughtfully.
“Exactly,” Ray told her. “Later, when this knight’s chickens came back to roost and he was hunted down for his crimes, he was eventually cornered into a monastery or church himself. There, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, he had the gall to demand sanctuary for himself against his enemies.
“His enemies, which included a devout priest, abhorred his nerve and were deeply offended. So deeply offended that the priest cursed him from the depths of his soul to be the monster outside that he was inside, to never again mock the laws of God and man alike as he had done so often before, and let all who see him know him for the monster that he was.
“It was then they say the old Lycaon curse returned, bubbling up from that past ancestor and intermixed with a different magic or religion to transform him into something not quite a man and not quite a wolf, never to know what it is to be man again, and the sight of him running off into the darkness on that full moon night shrieking, reverberates through the ages. The same full moon on that long-ago feast Lycaon held.”
Ray adjusted his glasses.
“They say that cursed knight still roams the world, unable to be full man or full wolf, so he thus sends his spirit to take over people, to live and feel again as a man does vicariously, but every full moon, the beast comes out again, and the violence and rage within them take over.”
“You believe that story?” asked Christopherson.
“The part about the werewolf spirit taking people over and going on a rampage sure feels right,” Ray told her.
“Where does wolfsbane fit into this?” she asked.
“According to the French and Greeks, it was a sacred plant during the ancient era of Greece Lycaon lived in and was a symbol of asylia and xenia, which was the guest right that Lycaon dishonored. People had planted it around temples and homes during those days and it supposedly caused Lycaon and his sons agonizing pain to be anywhere near it. I don’t know if that’s true but I do know the breed of it that works best against werewolves was descended from one found natively in Greece.”
Christopherson could see that he believed at least some of that story and he never struck her as a fool or delusional. “The French are involved because of that ancient French knight?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” Ray told her. “The werewolf has appeared all over the world. Even Japan and China and other parts of Asia. At some point, it has appeared a few times in South America and Canada, a few times in Britain, and it’s on its third time here, in Bartlett Bay, but in France—” his eyes widened behind his lenses “—it always comes back to France.” His eyes then narrowed. “It always comes home.”
Christopherson listened and felt almost enthralled by his story.
“Every generation, it appears somewhere in France. Sometimes even more often than that and it appeared almost as often in its distant empire, such as Louisiana, Quebec, or Haiti back when it was Saint-Domingue, before those places became independent or free of France. Wherever French people exist, there you will find it, wreaking violence and agony upon those that cursed it.
“France is the werewolf’s personal hunting preserve.”
“And that is why the hunters are primarily French and why the word will soon reach them and they will soon appear. The French always appear. Cordeiro needed them and so do you.”
“They’ve never killed it then,” Christopherson said bitterly.
“They have a bunch of times but it keeps coming back. There will always be more victims to possess. What the hunters really actually want is to capture it and torture information out of it so they can find the source.”
“The source?”
“Hugues de Camp-d'Avesnes’s real body. The one that was transformed in medieval France into a permanent werewolf state, wandering somewhere out there in the world. They need to find and kill that to kill the werewolf permanently and the normal werewolf, the possessed man or woman in werewolf form, is the key to finding it. I’m not entirely sure how but I think it involves magic or psychic powers.”
Christopherson wasn’t sure what to think about French hunters but despite the illegality of it all, the idea of a small, dangerous private army trained in this and determined to stop that werewolf did comfort her.
“When will they come?” she asked.
“Soon,” said Ray. “By now, they’re either here or on their way.”