When the Moon is Full and Bright by Ty Green
When the Moon is Full and Bright
by Ty Green
-1-
Blanche took the high ground, like Grandma and Grampa had taught her. On the Chaney Junior High School playground, this was the top of the jungle gym, a towering monstrosity of looping stainless steel that few of the other kids ever dared to scale. She pulled her beloved red hoodie taught against the early spring gusts that rose and fell at abrupt intervals, a cruel reminder that it could still snow any day, any night. They weren’t out of the woods yet.
She studied Jane—if that was the new girl’s real name—wander aimlessly, alone as always, pausing occasionally to scratch at the back of her shorn head, which was, as always, concealed beneath a red bandana. Blanche had a good idea why she wore that thing, and it didn’t have anything to do with T-cells and chemo, though doubtless that was what Jane wanted people to assume.
Others didn’t see what Blanche saw, though. The twitches of Jane’s nose and ears when she detected something of interest. The outsized hands and feet at the ends of Jane’s stick limbs, which caused her to dawdle around like a Great Dane puppy. That was, until she chose to put the speed on.
Sick human children could not move like that. Blanche’s best friend, Ginger Waggoner, had died two summers ago from triple-hit lymphoma. She didn’t have energy to stay awake through a 90-minute movie. She’d nod off mid-conversation. By the end, she couldn’t even sit up, let alone run and leap and climb.
In gym class, Jane was downright creepy—it was as if she knew she was supposed to keep up the act, but she couldn’t resist showing off how much stronger and faster, how much more agile she was than everyone else, even Alex Price, who was captain of the gymnastics team. When Blanche asked her about it, she just shrugged and said she “used to do sports at her old school,” and went back to pawing at the back of her head under that bandana.
Now Blanche watched Jane’s large ear wiggle—she could see it move, even from a hundred feet away and twenty feet up. Then Jane crouched and crept past the creaking, croaking swings and the tire tree, toward the fence.
Just inside the fence, in front of the mangy shrubs, was a large snowshoe hare, halfway between its stark white winter coat and its tawny brown summer coloration. Jane was locked onto it, creeping closer, closer.
Across the playground, a bunch of boys were playing pickup soccer. One of them gave an echoing shout and Blanche turned in time to see Henry Hull punt the ball at a dead run. It was meant to be a pass to Markus Ouspenskaya, the only player even remotely in the vicinity, but Henry had put too much toe into it. The ball sailed over Karen White and Evvie Ankers on the see-saw, describing a great arc across half the playground before beginning a sharp descent toward the back of Jane’s head.
Without turning around, she sidestepped it and whacked it away with her forearm. The ball burst.
Kids shrieked and ducked, probably thinking their number had come up for yet another school shooting. The dented ball, now a neon yellow crescent, plopped to Jane’s feet, hissing air. The movement was effortless, instinctive. Had Blanche blinked, she would have missed it. She couldn’t help wondering what that might have looked like if, instead of a soccer ball, that were some kid’s head.
Another gust from the nearby river shoved at Blanche and she lost her grip. For a second, she was certain she’d tumble through the countless pipes of the jungle gym before coming to rest, a bent and broken mess herself, on the half-frozen wood chips below. She jerked to a stop, hugging tight to the structure with all four limbs, the five-pointed locket with a photo of her mom on one side and her dad on the other tinkled against the next beam down, the one she now pictured caving in the back of her skull had she not caught hold when she did.
When she dared to open her eyes, the first thing she saw was Jane seeing her. Her nose twitched, her eyes flickered—for a split second, Blanche could swear they were yellow. She was staring right at her.
Blanche watched as Jane’s left ear curled toward her and her right ear twitched back, as if reaching behind her head, tracking the rabbit as it disappeared into the brush. Jane scratched at the back of her head, furiously this time.
In that moment, any remaining doubt melted away. Blanche’s heart panged off her sternum with the realization. She knew what Jane was, which meant the new “girl” could lead her straight to the rest of them.
-2-
The next day, as the bus rumbled to a stop outside Brandners’ house, the knot in Blanche’s stomach cinched tighter. She ducked in the last seat, careful not to take her eye off the big-eared head wrapped in its red bandana six seats ahead.
She slipped her hand into her backpack and felt past her books and folders, through the graveyard of gum wrappers she never got around to throwing away, until her fingertips found the cold, smooth grip of her grandfather’s old boot gun. It was only a snub-nosed .38, but it should do the trick.
Blanche had always found the etching inside the cylinder of grandpa’s revolver, in the pattern of a pentagram with a chamber at each point, exceedingly witty, but now she felt the itch of worry that five bullets might not be enough. Maybe not even eight bullets, including the three extras she’d found in Grampa’s workshop and stowed in a tight-rolled Ziplock in her lunchbox.
Except for eyelashes, accentuated with too much mascara, Jane had no hair whatsoever. No eyebrows, nothing.
Everyone assumed she was a cancer kid, which accounted not only for her “spells,” but also for her irregular attendance and the strange injuries she sometimes wore on her arms and legs and sometimes her face. If asked, she would say they were from medical procedures and leave it at that. Blanche had noticed, however, that Jane was always absent the day after a full moon, and last month, when there was a full solar eclipse, she’d been out the entire week.
The bus brakes gave their slithery metallic whistle. The doors whooshed apart. Jane’s red-wrapped head popped up and bobbled down the aisle.
Blanche gave a final glance behind her, at the deep expanse of unbroken woods between the Brandner residence and this scraggly driveway, which looked more like an unkempt hiking trail than a passage meant for vehicles, that must lead to Jane’s house. There was no mailbox, no number, not even one of those little reflective posts to distinguish the end of the driveway from the dense forest that seemed to run from the road straight up Landis Ridge to terminate just below the crawling strands of gray cloud.
Now or never—yet Blanche did not stand. How deep might that path run up the ridge? What if Jane’s “family” was around? What if she was wrong about everything and she was in fact stalking a (strange, strangely built) sick kid?
She should wait another month, maybe. Until the April full moon, when the nights were shorter, warmer. She’d have more time to gather evidence, to prepare. Maybe even to convince Grandma and Grandpa that despite all their time combing the area, on roads and trails, she, Blanche, had found the den.
Then again, counting tonight, there were three full moons before the end of the school year. What of the people who went missing or turned up in pieces between now and then, while the cops and the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife continued to bumblefuck around ignoring the obvious answer? Twenty-four dead and missing in the tri-county area within the past year, from 86-year-old Neil Marhsall to 4-year-old Jenny Naughton. How many more if she waited?
Of course, none of those was the real reason she hesitated. She shimmied off the goosebumps and wiped the tacky sweat from her cold palms on the seatback and stood.
No turning back. Seconds later, she stood in the roadside weeds, watched the bus ease from the pavement to the gravel road that continued up the ridge. The driver pulled into a truckers’ turnaround, paused, presumably checking both sides of the barren road, and started back down the mountain toward town.
A sharp gust seemed intent on pushing Blanche back downhill where she belonged. She braced herself against it, kicking herself for wearing only her red hoodie instead of a proper jacket. She turned, her Converse crunching on the weedy gravel, to face the barren forest tangled so close around the driveway it reminded Blanche of a tunnel bored into the thousand-and-one blue-gray shades and shadows of late-March twilight.
In the heart of the tunnel, something shifted. Blanche swung her pack to her front, fiddling with the zipper while watching the shape in the tunnel float through patches of dark and darker until a round red head atop a twiggy neck and a waifish body and huge, misshapen ears emerged, looking more like some grotesque cartoon character than ever, and more amused than surprised to find a girl standing at the mouth of her driveway.
Christ, Blanche thought, if I’m half as bad at selling a bullshit story as I am at being sneaky, I’m never making it off this mountain.
Blanche took heart in the knowledge that Jane was a figure of fear. No one wanted to talk to the cancer kid, to get too close, to acknowledge that she was a person. Emotional self-defense, perhaps, but inhumane all the same. Cruel, even. She knew Jane did not get many visitors, should be glad to have one, no matter the circumstances.
“Hey,” Blanche said, “sorry. I’m Blanche? From school? I know this is kind of out of nowhere, but we have that bio test coming up, and I sit behind you, so I know you always get A’s. I was hoping, maybe—”
Jane held a finger—an old man’s finger, long and wide with knuckles like fleshy whorled marbles—over her lips. Her eyes flicked, flashed, only for a second, so brief as to be nearly subliminal but long enough to set the flesh between Blanche’s shoulder-blades and up her neck and down her arms skittering.
She wanted to believe she could still be wrong. Maybe Jane was sick, and she had a psycho abusive parent or something, who gave her all those bruises and scratches, and sometimes it was so bad she had to stay home, and those occurrences happened to coincide with lunar events.
Right. Exactly.
Jane’s lips curled up at one side into a half-smile and Blanche tried to convince herself that her eyes hadn’t just burned amber and wild with delight and back again in a blink of those gloppy black lashes.
“I had a funny feeling about today,” Jane said in her low, scratchy voice, like she’d been up all night coughing or screaming or singing to the moon, “I could feel your eyes on the bus. Right here.”
At this she tapped the nape of her neck. She slinked closer, covering the final few steps too fast for Blanche’s comfort.
“Sorry,” Blanche said, stepping toward the road, “I didn’t mean to be a creep. I just…I have a D in bio right now and my grandparents are going to kill me if I don’t ace that test next week.”
“Sure,” Jane said, “I can help you. Besides. You must be curious about where a girl this glamorous lives and dresses and carries out such an unattainable beauty routine day after day after day.”
“Right,” Blanche said, “exactly,” deciding at this distance that Jane’s eyes and ears and teeth were all too big for her narrow face.
A sharp, roiling snarl. Blanche stumbled back, hand shooting into her backpack with such force, she punched it from her own hand and tripped over it.
Jane stood over her, looking genuinely concerned. She spread her dinner-plate hand over her stomach.
“It’s just my tum-tum, kid,” Jane said, holding out her other mitt to help Jane up, hoisting her up with alarming ease, “haven’t had a real meal in like a month.”
Blanche’s heart and intestines traded places. She reminded herself she had a role to play.
“Right, wow. Sorry. You must be home alone a lot, huh?”
“I wish. When you’re like me, they never really leave you alone,” Blanche said, holding out her arms to reveal pin pricks and gauze bandages, knicks and bruises that might be from a search for a vein to get a line in.
“Oh. Right. Sorry.”
“You apologize too much. People do that then they have something to hide. You got anything good in there, Little Red Riding Hood?” Jane said, tugging at Jane’s hoodie.
Blanche’s fingers crawled past her grandfather’s gun and, careful to hold her pack so Jane could not see inside, fumbled onto the strap of her lunch bag. She removed it and knelt to inventory its contents.
“Kinda funny, isn’t it? I’m basically dead and yet I’ve never been hungrier,” Jane said, her voice seeming to drop to a seismic rumble to end in a hiss as she finished, “fucking ravenous,” revving up the ‘r’ in the back of her throat like Nicki Minaj.
“Here!” Blanche said, springing to her feet and almost throwing half of a turkey and cheese sandwich at Jane.
Jane craned forward, sniffing. Before Blanche could react, Jane put her paws to her sides and shot her face forward, taking the sandwich from her hand with her mouth and shaking it a bit before gobbling it down, never touching it with anything but her tongue and teeth.
“Jesus Christ,” Blanche said, so startled she hadn’t even realized she was holding her backpack before her like some ridiculous purple-and-blue tie-died shield.
“Come on, kid,” Jane said, turning and hurrying into the darkening tunnel of twisted branches and wilted ferns and thorny red tufts of bramble, “The others won’t be back for awhile. Should be quiet till then. Perfect opportunity to teach you a thing or two.”
Jane was in such a hurry to catch up, she didn’t notice she’d left her lunch box at the edge of the driveway. In it was a string cheese wrapper, a bruised and thus untouched pear, and her three extra silver bullets.
-3-
The path ended at a long, flat building that appeared to be crumbling back into the earth. All visible windows were shattered, one with a sheet of plastic wrap bulging in the breeze like a pitiful sail. Chunks of roof were gone, the siding cracked and pocked.
Vines had poured into every opening and ran along the siding, across the roof, some disappearing into the chimney. To Blanche it looked as if the forest’s tentacles were preparing to haul the decrepit bungalow into its thorny, leafy gullet, an eerie landbound recreation of Victorian images of the kraken dragging some wayward ship to an abyssal grave.
Beside this was a garden that had run riot, effectively becoming another extension of the woods that encroached on the building. Hunks of wilted brown plants wavered in the breeze as if to greet her or perhaps flagging her down for help.
Only one plant seemed to be in bloom—a toxic one, with flowers resembling melted purple stars. Grandma had taught Blanche all about it.
“Where it blooms out of season, hiker beware,” Grandma always said.
It had many dramatic names—monk’s hood. Devil’s helmet. Wolfsbane.
On cinderblocks to the right of the house was an old van, gold with blue side-panels. Beyond this was a pile of bikes, most with bent handlebars or wheels or frames. One caught Blanche’s eye—a teal GT mountain bike with a pink basket on the front.
The one Kaley Shipman had ridden to school every day right up until the Monday before Thanksgiving, just before the first snowfall, when she never made it home from cheer practice. Five months later, her missing posters were still all over the telephone poles downtown, the bulletin boards at Star Market and Creekside Café and, of course, Chaney Junior High School.
The basket, Blanche noted, was shredded. Like something had latched onto it and torn it apart. And the seat was cut, browning tufts of stuffing peering through three symmetrical slashes in the black rubber.
The birds had gone silent. Squirrels, too. The only sound was a fresh rumble from Jane’s belly, so loud and long Blanche could swear it shook the ground of patchy, pine-needle-flecked snow and soggy, trodden weeds beneath their feet. Jane was standing a little too close, trying not to be obvious about trying to get behind Blanche.
“Wow, Jane. This really is…out here,” Blanche said, turning, then checking her phone to find it had No Service—little surprise. This place didn’t even look like it had electricity, maybe not even running water.
“Daddy always says nature is the best medicine,” Jane said, “I don’t know. He doesn’t even like me going to school in town. Says there’s no point.”
“Jesus, Jane. That’s dark.”
“He’s always barking about this and that. Come on, it’s getting dark. I wanna show you something cool,” Jane said.
“Your family’s gone, huh? We’re the only ones here?” Blanche said, scanning this way and that.
“Yeah, why? You afraid my family is gonna gobble you up or something?”
When Jane stopped and put one of her high, wide ears to the door, listening for something inside, Blanche slipped her hand into her backpack. When Blanche said the coast was clear and pushed the door wide and melted into the mildewy gloom within, Blanche grabbed her grandfather’s .38 and tucked it into her belt, a reassuring weight against the small of her back.
She had to get this over with. The shadows were deep, only a tattered strip of pink sun peering over the knobs and thickets of the ridge. If there were others—and with a den this size and a pile of bikes that high, there would be—she could not afford to be alone when the others returned.
With adrenaline and poor light and moving targets…she shoved away the part of her that screamed this was a mistake. Her worst. Her last.
When it was done, she decided, she’d hop on Kaley Shipman’s bike and ride it back down to town, straight to her grandparents, and they could all come up together and finish this how it started—as a family. If only she could steady her hands, stop her pulse from galloping in her ears like a dribbled basketball. Grandma and Grandpa were right about one thing—no matter her hunger for revenge, she was too young, too inexperienced. At least by now, they must be wondering where she was.
The gloom inside the house moved. She checked behind her as she approached the crooked stoop.
Silent forest. Deep blue dusk.
Then the clouds parted to reveal a brilliant golden glob of full moon above the ridge. In the distance, something shrieked.
“You coming or what?” Jane said.
A thin mist coiled soundlessly among the blackening woods. Blanche forced a smile and stepped inside.
The odor of wet dog and moldy wood rushed up her nostrils, made her sneeze, her eyes leak. Jane hadn’t turned on any lights.
“Come on, Red,” said the waifish shadow in the hallway to Blanche’s right, “make yourself at home.”
-4-
In the dark, all Blanche could make out was the sunset on the reflective strip on Jane’s backpack. She moved too fast. Blanche lost her.
Mist crept through the busted windows. A nearby cricket risked a single chirrup.
“Hey? Jane?”
Blanche pulled out her otherwise useless phone and switched on its flashlight. The beam was powerful up close but didn’t cast far in this country dark. Again, she called to Jane, scanning the unfurling wallpaper for a light switch.
Then she saw the stain. Brick red, cast in an erratic archipelago of splats and specks from where the wall met the ceiling clear down to the carpet at her feet. Gouged through the drywall at eye level, deep enough to have severed a stud and pulled a venous scramble of multicolored wires through the holes.
Four long courses. If it were the ‘80s and this was a movie, they might’ve been the work of Freddy Krueger.
But this was real. This was right now.
She fanned her fingers and angled them to match with the slashes in the wall, her phone light creating the illusion of a great black hand falling from above. She peered closer. Her breath caught in the back of her spitless mouth.
Bits of hair. Hombre hair—bleached blue for most of its length, but light brown toward the root, and curly.
Like Mikey Wadleigh’s hair. The eighth grader who played bass in that shitty band with the cute singer. Mikey was supposed to come to band practice at their drummer’s house two weeks ago and never showed. Blanche suspected she just found all that was left of him.
A thud to her left, down the hall. She shone her light just in time to catch something white dart across and disappear into a doorway at the far end.
“Jane? The hell did you go?”
Branches scraped the roof. A lone cricket gave tentative chirrups, pausing for long intervals as if afraid to give away its exact location. Blanche’s stomach somersaulted, her pulse seemed to clunk up the sides of her neck.
Here, now, she hated herself for being right. There was none of the excitement she’d expected, no sense of vindication or impending triumph, no thrill in the hunt. There was only cold, plain fear, turning her mouth sour and her scalp itchy with sweat despite the chill and the dark, because she was hunting, yes, but she was also being hunted.
She heard Grandpa’s voice scolding with his favorite refrain: “The only difference between courage and stupidity is whether you come home in the end.”
“Jane? Come on, quit screwing around,” Blanche said, trying to sound loud to drum up a reservoir of courage she knew wasn’t there.
No response. At first, she thought it was scraping or scratching from one of the distant rooms. Then she realized it was harsh, quick breaths.
Sniffs. Grunts.
“Are you okay? Jane, what the fuck?” Blanche said, moving deeper into the house, swimming in so much cortisol and adrenaline she felt as if she were drifting along some deep-sea tunnel, or some weightless cavity through a faraway planet.
A creak. A loud thump. Like someone falling.
The cricket stopped. Blanche’s fingers wrapped around the cool walnut grip of Grandpa’s .38, all five of its cylinders packed with Grandma’s special blend of lead and silver.
She needed to move faster, to get this over with, but her legs would not cooperate. She tried to ignore the steady tremor of her gun-hand as she rested it on the wrist of her flashlight hand.
A ticking rumble. Wet, round, loud enough to feel like it was coming from inside her head. Like a thunderclap unrolling in slow motion to fill every fold and lobe of her brain.
Raw instinct dropped her to the floor, low on her belly, hiding her light. The dark rippled, shapes cutting through it, at the far end of the hall.
She raised the light, the tremoring gun. The growl grew louder, closer. It went on a little too long. Too steady.
Not a growl. A motor.
It revved and sputtered. Holy fuck, she thought, someone taught the goddamn things to use power tools.
-5-
Blanche was about to start letting the silver fly when the lights flickered on. Jane rolled from one of the many doorways in a rickety wheelchair, her red bandana loose and disheveled.
“Sorry, had to go fire up the genny,” she said, “I get so tired by this time of day, you know?”
Then she saw. Stopped.
“Jesus, is that a gun?”
“Why didn’t you answer me?” Blanche said, kneeling now, trying to will her hands to stop shaking and hating herself for the tears welling in her unblinking eyes.
“I had to take care of some shit. Maybe I didn’t hear you. Why do you have that thing?”
“I assume for the same reason you have these claw marks on the wall running through the biggest bloodstain I’ve ever fucking seen. With Mikey Wadleigh’s hair stuck in it,” Blanche said, thumb on the hammer as Jane rolled closer.
“Ah, shit. You know when your parents tell you to clean your room and you’re like, ‘whatever, I’ll get to it eventually’ and think they’re total jackasses for getting on you so much? Same idea. My bad. Totally slipped my mind,” June said, scanning the stain from the middle of the ceiling to the pool on the floor as her great mannish paws continued to roll her closer, closer.
“So you admit it? You’re not sick, you’re—”
They were eye to eye, only the gun between them, the beam from Blanche’s phone still jittering and glinting on the spokes of her wheelchair. Jane popped her neck, her shoulders, rocked her jaw back and forth, like a boxer warming up in the ring.
“Before this ends the only way it was ever going to end—with me tonguing your meat from between my molars—how did you know? What made you sure enough to follow me out to an abandoned vet clinic?”
“I knew it the moment I saw you. The red bandanas—Little Red Riding Hood reference. Very cute—”
“You should talk, I bet you sleep and shower in that hoodie, too.”
“…the fact that you don’t have a single hair follicle on that skin-suit. You don’t even bother to draw in eyebrows, for Christ sakes. The way you move in the halls, like at any second you could run up the wall and pounce on someone from the ceiling. You never show up to class the day after a full moon. Because you and your whole family is snout-deep in a blood orgy. You people killed my brother. Turned my mom and dad. You made my grandma kill her own daughter. I came to exterminate you, you filthy fucking mutt!” Blanche said, full-on crying now.
“Oh, so it’s a revenge plot. Did you ever stop to think that maybe we went after your family for…gasp…revenge? Do you have any idea how many grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, how many mated pairs your family has exterminated over the years? The infamous Dudley Dooright Dantes. Goody two-shoeing your way through one pack after another from B.C. to Baja. Trying to make us extinct. What is any living thing going to do in that situation, Blanche? Here’s your biology lesson, though you won’t get a chance to use it: there’s no instinct stronger than self-preservation. Even a virus can do it.”
“You are a virus.”
“You. Are dinner.”
At this a baleful howl punctured the silence of the woods. Jane’s large brown eyes locked on Blanche’s, shimmered mustard-yellow—no mistaking it this time—as the rest of the chorus joined in from every direction, from the crest of Landis Ridge to the banks of the river in the valley below. They formed a resplendent, stacked chord, quavering in and out of harmony, and cut out in an instant, the echo still ringing in Blanche’s ears as hot, furious tears met on her chin.
“Okay, sweetie,” Jane said, leaning forward, “you have about thirty seconds. I’m right here. You have a perfect shot. So do what you came here to do. Take one of us down with you.”
“Thirty seconds to what?” she said, pointing the gun at Jane’s chest, cocking the hammer, but her index finger wouldn’t or couldn’t squeeze the trigger.
“You’re still not sure, are you? That’s why you can’t do it. You’re still not sure if you’re a superhero monster slayer or if you’re just some psycho who’s about to murder a pitiful cancer kid. In a wheelchair, even! I can hear that seed of doubt growing, blooming. You can’t pull the trigger because if you’re wrong, you’ll be a murderer. You’ll be even worse than those you claim to hate. So. Much. Then you’d have no choice, would you, Blanche? You’d have to flip that thing around and set things right the only way a monster really can. See, I clocked you, too. The second I saw that nasty scar all along your right arm. The one you tell everyone came from a car accident when you were little. It looks like it’s blinking at me in the light, because your hand is shaking so bad. You were there that night, gun in hand, just like now. Is it—ohmygod, is that the same gun? Going for a little narrative symmetry there, huh, girlie?”
At this Jane laughed, her eyes at once human and beast as her frail frame shook with amusement. Blanche could hardly see through her burning tears of fury and impotence and humiliation.
Her finger was on the trigger. But she just…couldn’t…
“I guess you didn’t think about the fact that it could end up just like last time. When you choked. Just like you’re choking now. You’re not a real Dante. Too soft to be one of them. And I don’t think you want to be. I think you’d rather be one of us. But you can’t decide for yourself. You always freeze, Blanche, you always will. Call it your fatal flaw.”
Jane whooped, startling Blanche back a step, causing her to waste a round over Jane’s shoulder. A puff of drywall drifted from the wall behind her to the carpet. Jane spun her chair to reveal the finger-length strip of thick black bristles running up the back of her scalp.
“Time’s up,” she said, and sank her fingers into the hissing bristles of what Blanche’s grandfather called the Snoopy Stripe.
Jane’s fingers peeled it wide, exposing a mat of course hair and pushing upward through the hole, as if standing out of her skin, like a diver removing a wetsuit, great triangular ears popping erect, one, two, followed by the profile of her short, thick, whiskered snout. It reminded Blanche of a malformed pit-bull.
Then the generator sputtered out. The darkness returned.
Then Blanche understood. The lights weren’t to help her see. They were a signal to the ones waiting in the woods—a dinner bell. An announcement that there was no need to go out and hunt tonight.
-6-
Jane titled her head back and bellowed, shaking every musty inch of the crumbling hallway. Blanche clapped her hands over her ears. She’d forgotten earplugs, a staple piece of kit. Putting them in was always the first thing Grandma and Grandpa did when they went to liquidate a den.
No sooner had Jane’s bellow faded than the response arrived, that mournful chorus rising from every direction and closing in like a giant furry fist. The howls turned to yips, growls, grunts of effort, of anticipation as the undergrowth crashed and the moon filled the corridor with its mottled auburn glow.
Blanche had dropped her phone screen-down. She waved the gun, not wanting to waste another bullet but needing to know if Jane was still there.
Thuds against the outer walls. Claws raking the doors.
She fired a round in Jane’s general direction. In the muzzle flash, she saw that the wheelchair was empty. She ducked into the nearest doorway.
A rumble beside her. Blanche could make out shapes, outlines in the poor light, suggestions of things that all seemed hostile and hungry.
The second time, she recognized the rumble. Jane’s stomach.
Blanche rolled away just in time to see the silhouette of a long shaggy arm slicing another chunk of wall to powdery smithereens. The Jane-creature connected to it was taller than Grandpa, and he was 6’4” and proud of it. Her shaggy frame seemed to fill the room, her raking movements mixing stenches of rotten meat-breath and wet fur, of the brimstone coals of deepest hell. The moon caught her eyes, and they gleamed like twin gobbets of fire. Her breath sounded like pounding surf, like tumbling boulders, like the earth itself splitting in two. The beast seemed to swim through the moonlight, to bask in its transformative embrace.
Shadows outside. Enormous, even bigger than the one standing over her. Blanche could hear them sniffing her out, communicating in yawps and clacking teeth.
Jane was a shadow, claws clicking on warped hardwood, hauling harsh slaking tugs of air into her cold wet snout. A throaty rumble joined that of her stomach. Blanche crab-crawled back out the door.
Blanche saw the wan rectangle of blue light describing the outline of her cell phone. She snatched it, held the flashlight up.
It had been long enough that must have forgotten just how horrid, how repulsive they were, that uncanny mingling of features at once human and savage. Now she saw. Screamed.
Jane’s talons swung down, leaving three slashes up Blanche’s arm, red Adidas stripes carved in flesh. Now it matched the other arm, and Jane seemed to enjoy this, lapping at it with her long, gravelly tongue.
Blanche’s phone clattered to the floor in two asymmetrical shards. Jane crouched, drool patting onto the floor, passed that hand-sized tongue over her muzzle.
Jane pounced. Blanche fired.
-7-
“Goddammit, Dee, I lost the signal,” Grandpa said, tossing his phone in disgust as the giant tires of the Wolfwaster screeched up the mountain to Landis Ridge.
“For the tenth time, you shouldn’t have been tracking her phone in the first place. She’s a good kid, Larry. Better than I was at thirteen, shit.” Grandma said, lighting a fresh cigarette.
“And for the tenth time, I agree with you, but this is not back then. You can’t be too safe these days. And look how it turned out! This is your proof that it was a good idea. How the hell else would we have found her? You want to trust Chief Sayles and his bumblefucking Barney Fifes to find our missing kid? Got half a dozen they can’t account for already. And now we lost the signal.” he said.
“Just because it worked out this once, doesn’t mean it was right to do it in the first place. She’s a teenager, not a sea turtle in a research program. I’m telling you, she’s just off at some little friend’s house smoking pot or drinking beer, watching You-sta-tok videos or whatever they do. Probably forgot to charge her phone and the battery died. Apart from you and me, Blanche knows better than anyone in this town how to look after herself. You, old man, are overreacting, like you always do,” she said, brushing Camel Wide ashes from her pink bandoliers and purple daishiki.
“There is no overreacting with a moon like that,” Grandpa said, nodding at the deep orange moon that appeared to rest atop the lumpy summit of Landis Ridge, like a perfect circle of unblinking ember.
“Stop! Back up,” Grandma shouted, head out her window, “look!”
He squeaked to a stop on the last bend, coming to rest before a rough, overgrown path. Grandma hopped out and snatched something from the roadside. She tossed it into his lap.
A purple lunch-bag. When he opened it, a baggie fell out. For a second, he expected drugs, but when it picked it up, four silver .38 Special bullets tinkled into his lap.
“Fuck,” Grandma said, pitching her smoke, “all right, Larry. You called it.”
“Why—”
“Because she found them. And she thought…after everything I told her, she thought she could handle it alone?!” Grandma said, her voice quavering, with equal parts fury and despair.
“That’s why I couldn’t find Old Shorty last night. She took it,” he said, fingering one of the silver-tipped cartridges between the three remaining fingers of his left hand.
A howl. Two. A chorus. Grandpa killed the headlights and eased onto the side of the road.
They were halfway through loading up when they heard thrashing in the trees, advancing from all sides. Then came the shot, its muzzle flash describing the smashed, vine-draped windows of a long, low building uphill.
“She’s alive,” Grandma said, racking the pump of her favorite shotgun and hurrying into the dark.
-8-
Jane was only a pup. Instead of pinning her quarry to the ground, only one razor-tipped paw found its mark, opening an oozing double-gash from Blanche’s navel to her hip. She felt little pain, only a funny cold sort of itch inside the cuts, then hot wet flow down her leg confirming that damage was done.
Blanche’s second shot had smashed one of the few remaining shards from the window to their right, and they both turned as a second set of paws tore through the frame and another howler, lighter in color but larger and with a pointier snout, dragged its bulky frame into the room. A great thump on the other side of the house.
Another tore at the front door. All around the building, wood rent and whined and crumbled. In they poured.
Hearing still muted from the howling, the shooting, Blanche crawled into the hallway. Using the wall, she righted herself and hobbled, hand pressed to her flayed hip, telling herself it was only the claws, not the teeth—she might bleed out, but at least she’d die a human.
A large, burbling form blocked the end of the hallway. The main room was filled with more of them than she cared to count.
How many rounds did she have left? Three? Two?
For a heart-stopping moment, their faces were illuminated by flashlights or headlamps bouncing over the driveway. The nearest one had one eye, and one flap of its snout was snagged at the pink-black speckled gumline, giving her a view of the full length of a massive yellow fang jutting at such an angle as to register in Blanche’s mind as a tusk. They heated the cool humidity, rendering the air a choking funk of dog-that-rolled-in-carrion.
Shouts outside—human shouts. A gunshot. A volley of shots. Shrill squabbling.
The pack scattered into the gloom to set up an ambush. She tried to call out that there were too many, but a growl dead ahead cut her off as the pointy-snouted one filled the hallway. Blanche held out the revolver and fired her third round into its shaggy chest.
Her hand was slippery with her own blood, the recoil caused her to fumble the revolver. Outside, blasting, howling, splashes of gravel. Cries that might be human or beast.
Ahead of her, something yelped and panted. Blanche dove to the floor, fumbling in the poor light for the gun with its final round.
“What? No, no, no,” she said, patting and patting and finding nothing.
A snarl behind her. Then a half-second of quaking floorboards and her face was on fire.
The force of the blow lifted her into the nearest doorway. Only this one didn’t open into a barren room. In the hazy moonlight, she could make out a staircase. The creature in pursuit sliced one of her shoes open, punctured her ankle, her calf.
She pulled herself headfirst down the stairs, banging and bouncing before spilling across icy smooth cement. The top step creaked as the beast started down after her, panting and snorting. She tried to stand, dragged something heavy onto herself, and the moonlit basement went black.
-9-
“—only a scratch!”
“Lawrence Dante, that thing’s muzzle was right there—”
“Jesus Bungee-Jumping Christ, Dee, I know the difference between a claw and fang. Check out the tooth dents on my knife, if you don’t believe me,” Grandpa said, tossing the ruined dagger, its blade an alloy of stainless steel and sterling silver, which the large she-wolf had destroyed when she went for his leg.
The bent weapon plunked into the gravel beside the huge lupine form that had ruined it. Grandma had pumped her full of Furbuster Express—3 1/2 -inch 12-gauge shells handloaded with silver pellets. The creature gave a final whimpering spasm, pawing at the night sky as if trying to swim away into it, then fell limp and still.
Grandpa was still cursing under his breath as he aligned another stripper clip with the receiver of General Patton, the M1 Garand his father had brought home from France and taught Grandpa to maintain well enough for it to continue vanquishing monsters 80 years later.
The silver mixed into the 8 rounds in the clip caught the moonglow and gave a luminous blue cast as he fed the battered rifle. Grandma scanned the trees with the barrel of her shotgun. They moved toward the claw-ravaged door.
“You know that place is probably jammed with them,” she said.
“I know, doll. But Blanche is in there.”
After checking to make sure there was no wolf-blood on her face, she went on her tiptoes and kissed him. He kissed her back, as he hadn’t in a long time. He didn’t like the look in her eyes when he opened his. The knot of electric snakes in his gut wound tighter.
“It’s awful quiet in there, isn’t it. Taking up ambush positions, no doubt. Wily bunch. Might even be clever enough to keep her alive, use her as bait. She wasn’t in there, I’d say just light this place up and pick em off as they come out, one by one, like that farmhouse in Sonoma,” she said.
“Sonoma? That was down by Eugene. Either way, as much as I want to play this like Butch and Sundance, I think we’d better keep it tight. Can’t risk hitting her.”
“Half a century of spraying for canids, Larry. And this might be the single dumbest thing we’ve ever done.”
It was. It felt like…it. The end. His bones squirmed and his balls hid inside his body.
“Hallway goes to the right, I’ll take that. You take left.” he said, switching on his headlamp.
In the initial melee, she hadn’t taken the time to switch on the flashlight mounted beneath the barrel of her beloved short-barreled pump, Old Thumper. She did this now and held it to illuminate her face.
“Larry,” she said, “before we go in there, I want you to know, we left in such a hurry, I didn’t have time for underwear. If we don’t end up as red stains on the ceiling, this night could get even more interesting when we get home.”
“Jesus, woman, you’re even crazier than I am,” he said.
“That’s why I run this circus. Now. Let’s shave some fur.”
-10-
Blanche’s eyes popped open. Lights flashed, wolfen shadows rushed through them at the top of the stairs, high above. The cacophony of gunfire and howling and roaring and reminded her of the tornado that hit the summer Grandma and Grandpa dragged her out to Oklahoma in pursuit a mated pair of redneck outlaw-types, whose real names, incredibly, were Talulah and Grover.
For an instant, she couldn’t move. She tried to prop herself on an elbow but the bolt of pain when it took her weight drove her into a ball.
She knew the searing pain from her neck to her ribs all too well. Same as when she’d fallen racing Alex Price and Karen White across the monkey bars in third grade, back East. Dislocated shoulder. Ribs bruised for sure, maybe even broken.
Her left knee didn’t feel right, either. Nor her left ankle.
She spat blood to the side as a horrible cry came from upstairs. She couldn’t tell if it was Grandpa or one of them. She sat up and tried to scoot herself toward the steps. Every part of her seemed to bark protest at the effort. She took frequent breaks, but she kept inching, inching.
A low growl from the shadows behind the stairs more felt in the sternum than heard with the ears. Blanche froze, one scoot from the bottom step.
A single high, rectangular window admitted a shaft of moonlight, casting a kind of trapezoidal spotlight on the ground just beside the stairs. Into it emerged lithe, hunched, shaggy form. Its claws slicked across the cold cement as it lowered and crept toward her on all fours. Ropes of white saliva swung and plopped from lips as black and slick as leeches. These parted into a grotesque sort of grin, and its gray snout jittered side to side and up and down as it huffed her in.
This close, her teeth were enormous. Her eyes great golden rings in the moonlight. Her two front teeth were bucked, and the proportions of her paws were as gawky in this form as her hands and feet were in human form.
“Jane, please,” Blanche said, knowing it was useless.
Rustling behind her, in a debris-strewn corner. She didn’t have time to turn before Jane was on her.
-11-
Grandpa took down as many as he could, but it was a house of shadows with claws and fangs. The barnyard musk of the creatures exerting themselves mingled with the eggy fart stench of gunpowder and the metallic brine best known to surgeons and soldiers and hunters, until the crumbling bungalow at the last bend of Landis Ridge Road reeked like a portal to some seething underworld where an endless, pointless war rages in pitch dark. He ran through his ammunition in under a minute.
He and Grandma lost sight of each other in the churning fray. She could no longer tell what blood came from her and what came from the howlers.
A squat one with a big half-pink, half-black nose had sent three of her fingers flying into the dark with a single swipe of its paw. She thrust her silver bowie into its shoulder twisted the blade, leaning her meager weight into it, another paw came from behind. It still had a firm grip on her bandolier and she could not move in time.
Another had flanked her—a wiry, silver-tinged male with a chipped fang on the lower right and a long scar across his muzzle, so tall he couldn’t stand inside without stooping—popped Grandma’s severed fingers into his maw and crunched them like pretzel sticks as their two pairs of savage hazel eyes met.
“Found you, fucker,” Grandma whispered.
The same pack leader who had hit them at the camp that night. The one who had mauled Blanche’s parents. He hoisted her off the ground, claws punching into her gut until she felt his paw pressing against her belly as he held her aloft with one ropy, auburn, orangutan-like arm.
At this height—Grandma’s head scraped the flaky paint of the ceiling—she saw over the melee and surveyed the pack members who lay dead, shriveling and convulsing back to human form. There were many, they had done their job and done it well, perhaps as well as it could be done in these circumstances. A handful of pack members they hadn’t felled now surrounded the blood-soaked Grandpa, nipping at him as he pulled his final weapon, what he called his Emergency Fund—a sawed-off side-by-side shotgun loaded with her Fur Trimmer shells.
The pack leader latched onto her leg, shaking his head and moaning with pleasure as her blood cascaded down his tongue. Grandpa saw her get bitten, cried out.
He saw her see him. The howlers circled, weaving around his line of fire. He stood, back-to-the wall, raised the weapon, eyes mad, and mouthed “love you” before putting both barrels into the pack leader.
Then the rest were on him. The snapping and ripping and chewing soon drowned out his final scream.
The pack leader gave a brief expression of shock, like a dog spooked awake by a noise outside. He stumbled once, twice, and dropped her.
She thumped not to the swampy red carpet, which now resembled a bog of blood with lily pads of fur and stark white petals of bone shard, but into a chair—a wheelchair. She watched as the pack leader, the one who had killed her daughter, forced her to lie to Blanche that her father was dead too, instead of the worse fate he had truly suffered.
She rolled forward and hocked up a bright red loogy that sounded like a hopping bullfrog as it plopped onto the pack leader’s chest. In a moment, it ceased to rise and fall, and it shrunk back to the nude, gunshot form of their former howler-hunting buddy, the “Bayou Buccaneer,” Paulo Dumas, he of the fan boat and crossbow and musical Cajun cusswords.
She rolled the chair toward the feasting pack. In the middle of the hallway, she rolled over something. She stooped and retrieved Old Shorty—Larry’s .38 snubby.
The four rounds from Blanche’s lunchbox were still in Larry’s pocket—hopefully one of them would eat them and croak. But when she flipped open the cylinder, her heart leapt. One round left.
They were so preoccupied with their feeding frenzy that they didn’t notice her approach until she was right on them. She raised the gun, cocked the hammer.
A limb shot out—a prehensile paw—instinctively, lifting her out of the chair and against a doorframe with enough force to send her bouncing across the floor. She didn’t even have time to scream, tumbling ass over teakettle down the basement steps.
-12-
Grandma landed with an awful crunch and her momentum carried her clear to the wall opposite the stairs. At once she smelled the unmistakable musk and knew she was not alone.
She could not move without her right side feeling as if she was being torn into two. She’d broken bones before, but this time it felt like they were all broken. She slumped to the right, hating the sucking sensation in her side when she tried to draw breath from that vile air.
A hoarse cry escaped her as she grabbed the edge of a broken workbench with her left and adjusted herself so she could see the staircase straight ahead. In her right was the .38 with its final silver bullet. Raising that arm was out of the question—you don’t need a medical degree to know elbows are not meant to bend that way. She took the gun in her left and scanned the darkness.
Between wet coughs, she told whoever was down there with her to show their mangy pelt and get what was coming to them. She did not notice Blanche’s shredded clothing, red hoodie and all, trailing away from where she sat.
The full moon had passed free of the clouds, its amber—and reddening—beam now a lurid spotlight, just in front of Grandma’s feet. Into it emerged an enormous frame, clicking claws, gleaming teeth. At first, she thought it was some new evolution she’d never seen before—a three-headed howler, or perhaps even Cerberus, guardian of Hades’ gates, come to drag her down to the scorching abyss of eternity himself. They watched her, and as they did, her eyes made out three separate forms.
The two on the flanks had finer features, larger eyes, more slender shapes than the huge, bulky male between them. A pair of juvenile females and a huge male—a male she assumed would be next in line to lead the pack.
The females had not yet fed—their stomachs snarled as loud as their throats. One of the youngsters cocked her head as if in recognition.
Had she stared a moment longer, Grandma might have noticed the clever emerald eyes, the gentle upward slope of the snout, the wide gap between the two front teeth—the pentagonal pewter locket now fitted more like a thin collar than a necklace.
“Eenie meanie,” she coughed, “mynie-mo. Catch a howler by its toe…” she said, panning the barrel of the .38 back and forth across the advancing trio.
Before she finished the rhyme, she stopped on the one in the middle, and pulled the trigger. The big male dove in front of the others, taking the round just below the ear.
It landed on her legs, all 400-plus pounds of it pinning her legs to the floor. The other two howled their outrage.
As the weight began to lift and the massive beast seemed to melt, shrivel, and husk up, its hair disappearing into thin air to reveal a tattoo she hadn’t seen in many moons—a portrait of Blanche as a baby, grinning and crawling through a field of vibrant wildflowers.
She had always admired the tattoo, and the young man who wore it. She could not help but weep as she turned the ruined head to behold the unseeing, unblinking, eyes of her son-in-law, David—Blanche’s father.
Grandma watched with dawning horror as the smaller of the two females crouched and nuzzled the fresh corpse, lapping at his face as if trying to revive him. Then her muzzle was in Grandma’s face and she saw those emerald eyes widen with bewilderment, with recognition, then narrow into burning slits of human hate.
Blanche waited long enough to be sure that Grandma gasped and croaked “no” and recognized the girl inside the wolf, understood that in the morning, the wolf would be inside the girl, and so it would be until the end of time, or until someone else like the soon-to-be-extinct Dantes found her and snuffed her out in a hail of silver bullets and gnashing fangs by the light of yet another brilliant, watchful moon.
Then Blanche tore Grandma’s throat out. She paused, as if deciding whether to leave it at that and give the old woman a chance to die and come back as one of the pack. Then she glanced down at the baby tottering blissfully through the flowers, now spattered in her father’s blood. Turning Grandma would be the ultimate punishment, true, for lying about her father, for cutting short their family reunion.
She knew she should. She was just too hungry.
When only Grandma’s tooth-dented bones remained, the girls climbed the stairs to find the only other survivors—a pair of young males—and together the four slipped into the night. Blanche could still remember her mother’s touch, and it seemed the early spring dark felt the same, running affectionate invisible fingers through her freshly-sprouted coat.
Forming a crescent atop Landis Ridge, they lifted their snouts to the night sky and bayed in mourning for their fellows, in celebration of their inheritance as masters of the full moon night. And so, baptized in blood and moonlight and the slick, fetid aroma of the awakening forest, a new pack is born.
###
Ty Green’s fiction has has appeared on the No Sleep Podcast and in Coffin Bell Journal. His horror-comedy short story “Hugs N Kisses, Kelli-Ann” was longlisted for the NC Literary Review’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize and received an honorable mention in the 2023 Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition.
