He gave Crow a reassuring nod. “When you were nine, you couldn’t understand that any man, any human being, was capable of committing the horrors that were happening in town. You couldn’t accept that a man had done those things to your brother. For a kid, it’s much easier to believe in monsters—after all, monsters are supposed to do bad things, they’re evil by their nature, so there is no betrayal of human morality. Crow, you
“You’re wrong,” Crow said simply. He stopped and slid the machete into its flat sheath and looked at Newton with humorless eyes. “There are monsters. I saw one. You make a really good argument, Newt, I’ll give you that. Very persuasive, eminently logical, but you
“But—”
“It was pretty bright, despite being nighttime. It was two days past the peak of the full moon, there was a lot of light. I saw his face.”
“Griswold’s face?”
“Uh huh. Almost his face. Maybe in another couple of nights it would have been even more like his face. Maybe two days earlier it had been a lot less like his face—but on that night, it was somewhere between.”
“Between…what and what? You’re not making sense.”
Crow’s dark eyes glittered. “Between the face of a man,” he said softly, “and the face of a wolf.”
Newton opened his mouth to speak. Words utterly failed him.
Crow nodded. “Yep, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. There were two sets of murders, each spread out over a handful of days, separated by just less than a month. Both sets began just two days before the full moon and ended two days after.”
Newton still couldn’t manage the words.
“I think Ubel Griswold was a werewolf,” said Crow.
Chapter 24
(1)
“Please tell me that you’re just having a mental breakdown,” Newton said, “and that you don’t really believe that Griswold was a werewolf.”
They had stopped walking and stood together in a natural clearing surrounded by wild rhododendrons and holly. A few crows were gossiping back and forth above them in the trees. Crow met the reporter’s skeptical stare with his own flat and level one. “I know what I saw.”
“You were nine!” Newton yelled.
“Yeah, I was nine!” Crow yelled back, “and at age nine I saw a fucking werewolf! I don’t care if you don’t believe it.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well I damn well do!” Crow bellowed those words and they seemed to hang in the air around them like ozone.
Newton made a dismissing hand gesture and turned away, walking ten steps down the path they had come, saying, “This is nuts. How the hell I ever got talked into coming down here…”
“You can go back if you want to.”
Newton wheeled and marched right back and, when he was close enough, jabbed Crow in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Tell me what you saw. Exactly, every detail. Put me in the scene if you want me to believe this bullshit.”
Crow’s face went suddenly scarlet and in a movement too fast for Newton to see he grabbed the reporter by the front of the shirt and spun him completely around and slammed him up against a pine tree and held him there, fists knotted in the cloth of his jacket front. Newton’s hiking stick went clattering to the ground between them and Crow kicked it angrily aside. He leaned in close and his voice was a feral whisper. “Listen, asshole, this thing
He took a breath and exhaled sharply, and then pushed himself away from Newton. “I saw it.” He turned away, flapping an angry hand at Newton. “Val was right. You’re really are an asshole and I should never have trusted you.” He kicked a stone and it went skittering through the brush, startling the crows, who leapt into the air to find higher branches.
Then he turned back to face the reporter. “If you want to go back, then go back. You know the way. But I’m going on and I’m going to find his house. I want to look inside…I
Newton nodded, unable to speak.
“Did you look up what his name means?”
A shake of the head this time.
