Cycle of the Werewolf   ::   Кинг Стивен

He tunes the radio to a rock and roll station, and he feels just… great!

And what happens later that night might be a judgment from God, or a jest of those older gods that men worshipped from the safety of stone circles on moonlit nights—oh, it's funny, all right, pretty funny, because Lowe has gone all the way to Portland to become the Beast, and the man he ends up ripping open on that snowy November night is Milt Sturmfuller, a lifelong resident of Tarker's Mills… and perhaps God is just after all, because if there is a first-class grade-A shit in Tarker's Mills, it is Milt Sturmfuller. He has come in this night as he has on other nights, telling his battered wife Donna Lee that he is on business, but his business is a B-girl named Rita Tennison who has given him a lively case of herpes which Milt has already passed on to Donna Lee, who has never so much as looked at another man in all the years they have been married.

The Rev. Lowe has checked into a motel called The Driftwood near the Portland-Westbrook line, and this is the same motel that Milt Sturmfuller and Rita Tennison have chosen on this November night to do their business.

Milt steps out at quarter past ten to retrieve a bottle of bourbon he's left in the car, and he is in fact congratulating himself on being far from Tarker's Mills on the night of the full moon when the one-eyed Beast leaps on him from the roof of a snowshrouded Peterbilt ten-wheeler and takes his head off with one gigantic swipe. The last sound Milt Sturmfuller hears in his life is the werewolf's rising snarl of triumph; his head rolls under the Peterbilt, the eyes wide, the neck spraying blood, and the bottle of bourbon drops from his jittering hand as the Beast buries its snout in his neck and begins to feed.

And the next day, back in the Baptist parsonage in Tarker's Mills and feeling just… great, the Rev. Lowe will read the account of the murder in the newspaper and think piously: He was not a good man. All things serve the Lord.

And following this, he will think: Who is the kid sending the notes? Who was it in July? It's time to find out. It's time to listen to some gossip.

The Rev. Lester Lowe readjusts his eyepatch, shakes out a new section of the newspaper and thinks: All things serve the Lord, if it's the Lord's will, I'll find him. And silence him. Forever.



DECEMBER

It is fifteen minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve. In Tarker's Mills, as in the rest of the world, the year is drawing to its close, and in Tarker's Mills as in the rest of the world, the year has brought changes.

Milt Sturmfuller is dead and his wife Donna Lee, at last free of her bondage, has moved out of town. Gone to Boston, some say; gone to Los Angeles, other say.