Cycle of the Werewolf :: Кинг Стивен
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The rain comes later, pelting against the windows asElmer and Alice sit up in bed together, all the lights in the bedroom on. It is a cold rain, the first real rain of the autumn, and tomorrow the first tinge of color will have come into the leaves.
Elmer finds what he expects in his pig-pen; carnage. All nine of his sows and both of his boars are deaddisembowelled and partly eaten. They lie in the mud, the cold rain pelting down on their carcasses, their bulging eyes staring up at the cold autumn sky.
Elmer's brother Pete, called over from Minot, stands beside Elmer. They don't speak for a long time, and then Elmer says what has been in Pete's mind as well. “Insurance will cover some of it. Not all, but some. I guess I can foot the rest. Better my pigs than another person.”
Pete nods. “There's been enough,” he says, his voice a murmur that can barely be heard over the rain.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Next full moon there's got to be forty men out… or sixty… or a hundred and sixty. Time folks stopped dicking around and pretending it ain't happening, when any fool can see it is. Look here, for Christ's sweet sake!”
Pete points down. Around the slaughtered pigs, the soft earth of the pen is full of very large tracks. They look like the tracks of a wolf… but they also look weirdly human.
“You see those fucking tracks?”
“I see them,” Elmer allows.
“You think Sweet Betsy from Pike made those tracks?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Werewolf made those tracks,” Pete says, “You know it, Alice knows it, most of the people in this town know it. Hell, even I know it, and I come from the next county over.” He looks at his brother, his face dour and stern, the face of a New England Puritan from 1650. And he repeats: “There's been enough. Time this thing was ended.”
Elmer considers this long as the rain continues to tap on the two men's slickers, and then he nods. “I guess. But not next full moon.”
“You want to wait until November?”
Elmer nods. “Bare woods. Better tracking, if we get a little snow.”
“What about next month?”
Elmer Zinneman looks at his slaughtered pigs in the pen beside his barn. Then he looks at his brother Pete.
“People better look out,” he says.
OCTOBER
When Marty Coslaw comes home from trick or treating on Halloween Night with the batteries in his wheelchair all but dead flat, he goes directly to bed, where he lies awake until the half-moon rises in a cold sky strewn with stars like diamond chips.
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