He lets the brake off his chair and flips the power switch. The little amber eye, the one that means his battery is wellcharged, comes on in the dark. Marty pushes RIGHT TURN. The chair rotates right. Hey, hey. When it is facing the verandah doors, he pushes FORWARD. The chair rolls forward, humming quietly.
Marty slips the latch on the double doors, pushes FORWARD again, and rolls outside. He tears open the wonderful bag of fireworks and then pauses for a moment, captivated by the summer night-the somnolent chirr of the crickets, the low, fragrant breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees at the edge of the woods, the almost unearthly radiance of the moon.
He can wait no longer. He brings out a snake, strikes a match, lights its fuse, and watches in entranced silence as it splutters green-blue fire and grows magically, writhing and spitting flame from its tail.
The Fourth, he thinks, his eyes alight. The Fourth, the Fourth, happy Fourth of July to me!
The snake's bright flame gutters low, flickers, goes out. Marty lights one of the triangular twizzers and watches as it spouts fire as yellow as his dad's lucky golf shirt. Before it can go out, he lights a second that shoots off light as dusky-red as the roses which grow beside the picket fence around the new pool. Now a wonderful smell of spent powder fills the night for the wind to rafter and pull slowly away.
His groping hands pull out the flat packet of firecrackers next, and he has opened them before he realizes that to light these would be calamity-their jumping, snapping, machinegun roar would wake the whole neighborhood: fire, flood, alarm, excursion. All of those, and one ten-year-old boy named Martin Coslaw in the doghouse until Christmas, most likely.
He pushes the Black Cats further up on his lap, gropes happily in the bag again, and comes out with the biggest twizzer of all—a World Class Twizzer if ever there was one. It is almost as big as his closed fist. He lights it with mixed fright and delight, and tosses it.
Red light as bright as hellfire fills the night… and it is by this shifting, feverish glow that Marty sees the bushes at the fringe of the woods below the verandah shake and part. There is a low noise, half-cough, half-snarl. The Beast appears.
It stands for a moment at the base of the lawn and seems to scent the air… and then it begins to shamble up the slope toward where Marty sits on the slate flagstones in his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his upper body shrinking against the canvas back of his chair. The Beast is hunched over, but it is clearly walking on its two rear legs. Walking the way a man would walk. The red light of the twizzer skates hellishly across its green eyes.
It moves slowly, its wide nostrils flaring rhythmically. Scenting prey, almost surely scenting that prey's weakness. Marty can smell it-its hair, its sweat, its savagery. It grunts again. Its thick upper lip, the color of liver, wrinkles back to show its heavy tusk-like teeth. Its pelt is painted a dull silvery-red.
It has almost reached him-its clawed hands, so like-unlike human hands, reaching for his throat-when the boy remembers the packet of firecrackers. Hardly aware he is going to do it, he strikes a match and touches it to the master fuse. The fuse spits a hot line of red sparks that singe the fine hair on the back of his hand, crisping them. The werewolf, momentarily offbalance, draws backwards, uttering a questioning grunt that, like his hands, is nearly human. Marty throws the packet of firecrackers in its face.
They go off in a banging, flashing train of light and sound The beast utters a screech-roar of pain and rage; it staggers backwards, clawing at the explosions that tattoo grains of fire and burning gunpowder into its face. Marty sees one of its lamplike green eyes whiff out as four crackers go off at once with a terrific thundering KA-POW! at the side of its muzzle. Now its screams are pure agony. It claws at its face, bellowing, and as the first lights go on in the Coslaw house it turns and bounds back down the lawn toward the woods, leaving behind it only a smell of singed fur and the first frightened and bewildered cries from the house.
“What was that?” His mother's voice, not sounding a bit brusque.
“Who's there, goddammit?” His father, not sounding very much like a Big Pal.
“Marty?” Kate, her voice quavering, not sounding mean at all. “Marty, are you all right?”
Grandfather Coslaw sleeps through the whole thing.
Marty leans back in his wheelchair as the big red twizzer gutters its way to extinction. Its light is now the mild and lovely pink of an early sunrise. He is too shocked to weep. But his shock is not entirely a dark emotion, although the next day his parents will bundle him off to visit his Uncle Jim and Aunt Ida over in Stowe, Vermont, where he will stay until the end of summer vacation (the police concur; they feel that The Full Moon Killer might try to attack Marty again, and silence him). There is a deep exultation in him. It is stronger than the shock. He has looked into the terrible face of the Beast and lived. And there is simple, childlike joy in him, as well, a quiet joy he will never be able to communicate later to anyone, not even Uncle Al, who might have understood. He feels this joy because the fireworks have happened after all.
And while his parents stewed and wondered about his psyche, and if he would have complexes from the experience, Marty Coslaw came to believe in his heart that it had been the best Fourth of all.
AUGUST
“Sure, I think it's a werewolf,” Constable Neary says. He speaks too loudly-maybe accidentally, more like accidentally on purpose-and all conversation in Stan's Barber Shop comes to a halt. It is going on just half-past August, the hottest August anyone can remember in Tarker's Mills for years, and tonight the moon will be just one day past full. So the town holds its breath, waiting.
Constable Neary surveys his audience and then goes on from his place in Stan Pelky's middle barber chair, speaking weightily, speaking judicially, speaking psychologically, all from the depths of his high school education (Neary is a big, beefy man, and in high school he mostly made touchdowns for the Tarker's Mills Tigers; his classwork earned him some C's and not a few D's).
“There are guys,” he tells them, “who are kind of like two people. Kind of like split personalities, you know. They are what I'd call fucking schizos.”
He pauses to appreciate the respectful silence which greets this and then goes on:
“Now this guy, I think he's like that. I don't think he knows what he's doing when the moon gets full and he goes out and kills somebody. He could be anybody—a teller at the bank, a gas-jockey at one of those stations out on the Town Road, maybe even someone right here now. In the sense of being an animal inside and looking perfectly normal outside, yeah, you bet. But if you mean, do I think there's a guy who sprouts hair and howls at the moon… no. That shit's for kids.”