Cycle of the Werewolf   ::   Кинг Стивен

Leaning out the door, smiling, Marty sees the eyepatch dearly in the yellow lamplight falling through the door; it gives the mousy little Reverend an almost piratical look.

“Sorry about your eye, Reverend Lowe,” Mr. Coslaw said in his booming Big Pal voice. “Hope it's nothing serious?”

The Rev. Lowe's smile grew longsuffering. Actually, he said, he had lost the eye. A benign tumor; it had been necessary to remove the eye to get at the tumor. But it was the Lord's will, and he was adjusting well. He had patted the top of Marty's whole-head mask again and said that some he knew had heavier crosses to bear.

So now Marty lies in his bed, listening to the October wind sing outside, rattling the season's last leaves, hooting dimly through the eyeholes of the carven pumpkins which flank the Coslaw driveway, watching the half-moon ride the starstudded sky. The question is this: What is he to do now?

He doesn't know, but he feels sure that in time the answer will come.

He sleeps the deep, dreamless sleep of the very young, while outside the river of wind blows over Tarker's Mills, washing out October and bringing in cold, star-shot November, autumn's iron month.



NOVEMBER

The smoking butt end of the year, November's dark iron, has come to Tarker's Mills. A strange exodus seems to be taking place on Main Street. The Rev. Lester Lowe watches it from the door of the Baptist Parsonage; he has just come out to get his mail and he holds six circulars and one single letter in his hand, watching the conga-line of dusty pick-up trucks-Fords and Chevys and International Harvesterssnake its way out of town.

Snow is coming, the weatherman says, but these are no riders before the storm, bound for warmer climes; you don't head out for Florida or California's golden shore with your hunting jacket on and your gun behind you in the cab rack and your dogs in the flatbed. This is the fourth day that the men, led by Elmer Zinneman and his brother Pete, have headed out with dogs and guns and a great many six-packs of beer. It is a fad that has caught on as the full moon approaches. Bird season's over, deer season, too. But it's still open season on werewolves, and most of these men, behind the mask of their grim get-the-wagons-in-a-circle faces, are having a great time. As Coach Coslaw might has said, Doodly-damn right!

Some of the men, Rev. Lowe knows, are doing no more than skylarking; here is a chance to get out in the woods, pull beers, piss in ravines, tell jokes about polacks and frogs and niggers, shoot at squirrels and crows.