Small Town Monsters. Craig Nybo

is a good question. Fact is, the murders stopped after Danny’s execution. As for Artemus, he slipped out of sight and out of mind. He’s still alive. Lives just south of the scout camp. He was always a bit strange, but the death of his son caused him to back away even further. He’s a distant relative of mine, I believe. But, hell, everyone in this town seems to be a distant relative of everyone else.”

      The moon shone like a gigantic coin, bluing Hugh’s yard and the spruces that guarded his home. A south-western breeze chilled Kurt as he raised his bottle and drank the last swallow. “Well, that’s a hell of a story. I’d best be turning in,” Kurt said. He stood and dropped his empty in a wastepaper basket Hugh kept on the porch.

      “Good of you to come over and keep an old man company,” Hugh said.

      “You are a master,” Kurt said.

      Hugh raised his bottle of beer in solute.

      Kurt stepped off the porch onto Hugh’s lawn. A cold fear,

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      like that of a preadolescent walking home after watching a horror movie, tickled Kurt’s spine as he moved across the street. At one point he glanced over his shoulder into the dark to make sure he was alone. Hugh still sat there, perched on that rickety bench of his. The old man raised his bottle. Kurt waved over his shoulder.

      Kurt shook off the jitters; Hugh’s stories were better than any movie. He went to his bedroom, put on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and collapsed into bed. As he lay there, staring up at the ceiling, his fingers interwoven behind his head, he found himself almost expecting to hear the shrill night cry of a wolf from the nearby woods outside his window, but the howl didn’t come that night.

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      Chapter 6

      Marvin Payne died on a cool September night. The full moon bathed the lonely shack in hoary light. The shack sat in a clearing three quarters of a mile south of the Depalma Beach Scout Camp. Scout programs had dried up for the year and the camp stood deserted except for Marvin Payne, whom Austin Dievers, the camp owner, had learned to trust as caretaker during the winter months. The shack’s door lay broken open, the victim of a rogue gust two nights earlier. Marvin had hung a tarp over the opening to ward off most of the night freeze, but cold air still seeped inside to chill his bones. He would ask Austin to help him fix the door on the weekend.

      Marvin slept, bundled in a makeshift bed crafted from old crates and used timber. Austin had provided a mattress and some old blankets. It was better than the old days when Marvin had slept in the alley behind the old theater in a tick-ridden bedroll on an army surplus army cot he had found in a dumpster.

      Something in the thick woods outside Marvin’s shack shifted. For the briefest moment a pair of silver eyes winked from just outside the shack’s little yard as the predator closed in. The predator stood on four legs, its body a solid mass of

      Concerning:

      Marvin Payne

      Craig Nybo

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      sinew. Mostly it was hungry. It longed to bite into warm, vulnerable flesh and feel the pulse of tepid blood run down its gullet. Sometimes the hunt brought its own difficulty, like in the instance of a stag; but tonight, everything had come easily. The smell of a man had wafted to the predator on the wind like a gift from nature.

      The predator felt almost certain that it would find the man sleeping, lying prostrate in its wooden cave. But the predator still had to be cautious—always cautious. There could be other men nearby. Though man-things were slow—walking on two legs rather than four—they could be clever. The predator remembered a cold night when men had hurt it. One man had pointed something long and hard at it. There was a noise, ghastly and deafening. There was pain in the predator’s right haunch. Two more men had come out of the woods after the sound and the pain. But the predator was cleverer than men. It had crawled into a clod of deep foliage and waited until the men had gone away. The spot on the predator’s right thigh where the men had hurt it ached at the memory.

      The predator sat in a copse of trees just outside the shack’s yard. It sniffed at the air and perked its ears. It heard no other men about, only the sounds of night crickets and a fox in the distance.

      Finally satisfied, the predator rose to all fours and padded out of the woods into the clearing toward the wooden cave. It approached carefully. The smell of the man was strong. The predator circled the wooden cave and found an opening where it could enter.

      The predator stood outside the opening for a moment to gather its wits. Then it acted, moving stealthily into the darkness of the man dwelling. It padded across the hard floor and found the man laying curled up. So easy this time, the predator thought as it leapt out of the darkness and closed its maw on the man’s pale, exposed throat.

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      Chapter 7

      Chapel-bowl Lanes smelled like a carnival house ashtray. The regulars staggered in nightly with matching league uniforms and leather bowling bags. The owner of the place was a spindly hawk-nosed codger named Dallas. To the recollection of his friends, Dallas had no middle or last name; he was simply Dallas and that was that. He stood behind a thick glass countertop. He kept himself busy amid the crackle of toppling pins and the chatter of half-drunk fools with tattoos scribed in bleeding blue on their alligator-skinned forearms and shoulders. Dallas’s job, aside from being the proprietor of Chapel Bowl, was to polish and repair worn bowling balls. For a nominal fee, Dallas could buff this scratch out or fill that ding; he could make any ball as good as new. It wasn’t that he took pride in his work; acting as ball doctor paid enough to keep the buzzing lights on in the place and to call in an occasional maintenance man from Butte to take care of the bigger problems that regularly came up in the machinery of a bowling alley.

      It was Wednesday. Kurt showed up dutifully at eight o’clock P.M. He wore his blue, button up league jersey with a wide stripe over the right shoulder. He greeted Buck, Larry, and Arthur, the other members of his team, who came with

      Concerning:

      Dallas

      Kurt McCammus

      Larry Uriarte

      Buck Trudeau

      Arthur Andrus

      Bill Chatwin

      Ray Preston

      Phil Wadsworth

      Gerald Plumm

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      bowling balls custom fitted for weight and grip.

      It was a habit of Kurt’s teammates to make fun of Kurt for using a house ball. “Maybe you’d improve your game if you left off rolling cannon shot instead of a sensible bowling ball,” Larry would often say. The same old saw, but it always got laughs from Buck and Arthur. Kurt would shoot Larry a bitter smile and pick a 16-pounder with holes spanned adequately enough to not cut into his fingers.

      Kurt wasn’t a bowler; he wasn’t a sportsman of any kind. But Chapel Bowl Lanes had a blue-collar quaintness that tended to soothe him. Everything about the place rescued Kurt’s mind from the junk he had left behind in Los Angeles.

      Kurt chose a house ball from the rack and made his way over to the rest of his team. He placed his ball in play and took a seat next to Larry, who wore a suspicious smile, curled between his salt and pepper mutton-chops.

      “What?” Kurt asked.

      “House ball again?” Larry asked as if he didn’t know.

      “I happen to like a good house ball.”

      “Sure, they make good paper-weights.”

      “Don’t bust my chops.”

      “You’re up,”