Small Town Monsters. Craig Nybo

Their science is considered as well as many metaphysical characteristics of the species.

      To scientists: you cannot completely understand lycanthropy with the devices of science alone. You must open your mind to certain spiritual considerations to fully comprehend the species.

      To the spiritualist: as with any physical element that has mass and leaves evidence of its existence, lycanthropes cannot be simply dispelled as aberrations to deity. As with all creatures of nature, lycanthropes have makeup and form. They exude physiological characteristics that can be scientifically analyzed and understood.

      Only with an adequate discipline in both schools—science and spirituality—can one hope to understand the nature of these beasts. This volume is an attempt to explain lycanthropes, to chronicle their known dealings with man, and to ultimately destroy them.

      As both scientists and spiritualists, we issue to you a solemn warning: should a werebeast stalk your village, step with caution. For in human form, it will twist your perceptions with its clandestine deceit, even unto condemning its own loved ones to prison or death, in order to frustrate your investigation of its nature. However in bestial form these creatures revert to pure, feral instinct. They shall exert themselves even unto self-sacrifice in the determination to

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      protect their type and blood.

      “What are you reading?” Clay’s voice startled Kurt. He looked as if Clay had caught him in the act of something incriminating—or at least embarrassing. He pushed his moon-shaped reading glasses down to the tip of his nose and glanced up at his deputy.

      Clay held a brown folder in one hand.

      “Is that the Danny Slade file?” Kurt asked, ignoring Clay’s smugness.

      “What there is of it. There isn’t much information here. It took me forever to dig it up. I’m not in the habit of blowing the dust off 50-year-old murder cases.” Clay tossed the folder onto Kurt’s desk.

      Kurt pushed his reading glasses up and opened the aged envelope. He poured a pile of papers and bagged evidence out onto his desk. Among the items was a plastic bag of what looked like matted hair, a sheaf of grizzly, black and white pictures of body parts that had been exhumed from the Slade property, a smaller envelope containing photographs of Danny Slade himself.

      Kurt picked out one of the Slade photographs. The silver photo-paper, yellowed with age, felt fragile in his fingers. In rich sepia, the photo framed a 19-year old Danny Slade. Danny, shirtless, stood against a plain wall, perhaps in the old police station, long-since converted into Abigail’s Diner. Danny’s face donned a wry expression; his oversized pupils and sneer could have, by themselves, won him a conviction. Danny had many of his father’s, Artemus’s, characteristics—the same hookish nose, the same barrel-chest, the same thick, sinewy neck. There was real strength in the boy’s features. Like Artemus, Danny’s body bore an exorbitant amount of hair, not only on the face, but everywhere. His almost pelted skin indeed gave him a wolf-like appearance. A thick beard started just below Danny’s eyes and, in tendrils, wove downward into a bushy mane that hung half way down his chest. Danny had the same low hairline as his father, starting just above his brambly brows

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      and rushing back into an unkempt bush.

      “I can see why they were afraid of him,” Clay said, looking over Kurt’s shoulder at the photograph. “He’s a monster.”

      Kurt glanced over his reading specs up at Clay. “If he killed all of these people he certainly was.”

      Kurt flipped through a sheaf of victim photographs; all were of twisted bodies. One victim, a young woman, lay in a dry creek-bed, one of her arms torn from its socket. Her shirt had been torn open to reveal a mangled torso. Another photograph showed an old man lying over a cedar post fence, his rear in the air, his arms dangling, outstretched in an almost ritualistic fashion. The sinews of his back and lower scalp had been chewed away, leaving large patches of exposed bone. His stomach had been opened and his intestines had fallen free to pool in a serpentine coil on the ground beneath him.

      “Any of this looking familiar?” Clay asked after a hard swallow.

      “What are you suggesting?” Kurt asked.

      “I’m suggesting that those bite marks look a lot like the ones we saw up on Buren’s ranch.”

      “Save it for the campfire, Clay; we’re not in the business of indulging ghost stories.”

      Clay nodded, but his stomach didn’t settle.

      Kurt continued to flip through the photos, mostly forensic pictures of Artemus’s property. A crew of detectives and cops had torn the whole place up. Every detail had been photographed and cataloged. Each hole revealed its own grizzly secret. There were buried body part; heads, arms, bones—a chilling graveyard of death and torture.

      “Does evil like this really exist?” Clay asked, almost to himself.

      “Yes, it does,” Kurt said, his voice flat. “And I thought I left it behind when I moved to DePalma Beach.”

      “Maybe we should at least consider the possibility that—”

      Kurt cut Clay off. “This is a 50-year old case. There is no connection between what happened then and what’s happening now.”

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      “The bite marks look similar,” Clay said.

      “The bite marks we saw were on the bodies of sheep. Last time I checked, murder is a human condition.”

      “Then why look into all this?” Clay pointed at the evidence scattered across Kurt’s desk.

      “Because we are not dealing with murder; we are dealing with possible hysteria. I have to be prepared to defuse this absurd talk about monsters before we have a witch-hunt on our hands.”

      “You have to admit, this looks like the work of a werewolf,” Clay said, picking up one of the terrible photographs.

      “It is the work of this sick man.” Kurt tapped on the photo of Danny Slade. “He was a psychopath, not a werewolf. And let me remind you: what happened on Buren’s property wasn’t a crime; it was the circle of life.”

      Kurt picked up the executive summary of the Danny Slade case. He held it high as if proving to Clay that the case was a tangible thing—a solved thing—a closed thing. “Danny was convicted of murder, nine people, some from DePalma Beach, some tourists. He was sentenced to death and put in the electric chair in 1952 at the age of 20. Case closed.”

      “Who’s this with him?” Clay asked. A photo he hadn’t seen at first had caught Clay’s attention. He picked it out of the pile. The picture framed Danny Slade and another man. The other man, like Danny, had an excessive mane of facial hair. “They look like ZZ-top.”

      “That’s Danny’s father, Artemus.”

      “Are you sure?” Clay asked, a little critical.

      “Yes.”

      “You said Danny was executed in 1952; how old is Artemus?”

      “Strange,” Kurt said and flipped the photograph of the two men over. On the back, someone had written Danny Slade, 19; Artemus Slade, 39. June 15th 1951.

      “That can’t be.” Kurt said as he worked the calculation in his head. “If Artemus was 39 in 1951, that would put him at…”

      “One-hundred-one years old,” Clay said.

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      Kurt and Clay stared at the photograph for a long moment. It didn’t work; Kurt wouldn’t put the man who he had visited, the man who went by Artemus Slade, at any older than 85. “There has to be a mistake,”