He collapsed with a grunting cry.
There was a roll of good, stiff lamp cord in my workshop, and I trussed him up, using tight knots, binding all four paws together from behind. I rolled him onto his side and stood regarding him. I knew my son, knew the shape of his body, and this was no longer him.
His bright eyes opened and his jaws snapped out at me. He missed, and I stepped back as he flailed upon the floor, trying to break the bonds.
I walked to the cellar stairs and sat heavily on the first step. The wolf’s eyes followed me with sullen malice; then he resumed his attempts to free himself. He sounded like a rabid animal, and I stared at the shredded rags of my son’s clothing that remained on the wolf’s body.
“Oh, Richie,” I sobbed, “what in God’s name is happening?”
The wolf stopped its exertion and gave me its chilling stare.
I stared back, unbelieving, and the early day wore on.
CHAPTER 5
The Reckoning
In the late afternoon I decided to go upstairs. I dreaded what I would find, including the remains of my wife. But the rest of the world was up there also, including the food that would ease the hunger that had begun to gnaw at me. There was a radio upstairs; there was a television. My access to the government that must surely be aware of this horror by now, if not in control of it, was upstairs. I had heard no further sounds since the beast had left the night before, and I assumed the house was empty. Even if it wasn’t, I was determined to face whatever dangers lay above, in the hope of rescue and possible salvation for my son (wasn’t it possible that the government already had the problem in hand, and that a way would be found shortly to return my son to humanity?).
The wolf had fallen into a fitful sleep. I went as close as I dared. The lamp cord looked secure.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered, telling myself I was talking to Richie, and then I turned to go.
I gripped the hammer in one hand. My two back pockets held a flathead screwdriver and a carpet knife.
At the top of the stairs, keeping as quiet as I could, I pried the boards from the door using the hammer and screwdriver.
As I pulled the second two-by-four away from the frame, I thought I heard a sound from above. I waited a twenty count. There was nothing further so I resumed yanking the board away with the peculiar ripping sound that only nails released from wood make.
I lay the two-by-four aside and slowly turned the doorknob. It went a quarter turn, then resisted. It was then that I remembered that I had locked it from the other side. There was no way of unlocking it from the cellar side.
I spent the next half hour gouging the lock set from the door, first gently using the screwdriver, digging into the soft, cheap veneer of the door, and then, giving up all pretense of quiet, hammering on the screwdriver, and then, in frustration, taking the hammer to the side of the knob until the entire mechanism gave in and broke. The knob on the other side of the door fell to the floor, leaving me with the other knob in my hand, and a four-inch ragged hole in the door.
I stepped back and pulled the door open by the hole.
Quiet assaulted me. I knew I had awakened the thing in the cellar, but it had become very still, as though it waited to see what would happen.
I looked out onto the same view of the kitchen the cellar opening had always showed. But there was a violent difference. The kitchen was in a shambles. One end of the long table was covered with debris. A chair was knocked onto its back. A scattering of objects, mostly broken, including a little Dutch girl ceramic that my wife had treasured after our honeymoon trip to the Netherlands.
My transmogrified son, almost as if he could see through my eyes, let out a bray of triumphant glee from the cellar and resumed his thrashing about.
I stepped into the hallway, gingerly avoiding the broken frame of a photograph that had been knocked to the floor. It showed Emily, Richie and me at Disneyland. Richie’s arm embraced a costumed Mickey Mouse like a huge stuffed animal.
If those meteorites had fallen everywhere like they had here, I doubted Disneyland would be open today.
The house was deathly quiet. My mind produced creatures in every partial shadow—the broom handle protruding from its coffin-like closet became the thin long hand of a werewolf; the open oven, its defective bulb flickering on and off, was transformed into a repository of budding creatures hatching before my eyes.
There was wreckage everywhere. It was as if the thing that had performed it had done it for the sheer evil joy of destruction. I saw no signs of curiosity; no evidence of a search for knowledge. Only destruction. Vases had been broken into small pieces. The prints hanging in the hallway leading to the front of the house had been dashed to the floor, the glass broken, the etchings themselves claw-ripped. The bathroom door, for no apparent reason, had been torn from its hinges.
Warily, I approached the front of the house. Farther down the hallway, more smashed gewgaws, a Picasso poster sliced as if by a razor blade. The telephone table jutted out from its nook at the edge of the living room. The phone lay on the floor beside it. Slipping my carpet knife out, I brandished it before me, edging toward the phone.
I had to pass the entrance to the living room to get at it. I knew this moment would come and had dreaded it. I almost expected the dead body of my wife to be waiting for me at the entrance, her lost limbs restored to her body, her eyes blank, bloody hand upraised…
I passed the entranceway and looked in.
I saw the Christmas tree torn to shreds, the gaping hole in the picture window, the box of ornaments deliberately desecrated, broken delicate shards of glass scattered everywhere—and nothing else. My wife’s body was not there. There was little blood, only a few dried, curiously anemic patches on the rug and walls.
I found that I had been holding my breath. I let it out again.
I went to the hallway and put my hand on the phone. A fantasy entered my mind. This is what would happen: I would call the police and they would come, and they would listen to my story calmly and would even examine minutely the broken part of the house, the burst hinges in the bathroom, the ripped etchings, the broken front window where the thing had imploded into the house, the pale blood stains. They would listen, and then at the end of my story one of them would call for an ambulance. They would tell me the ambulance was for my son. I would weep and thank them. As the ambulance arrived and then men got out of it with a straightjacket to put me in, I would shout, “Wait!” and then beg them to go into the cellar where my son lay tied up as living proof. One cop would look at the other, and then one of them would nod and give me the benefit of the doubt and go look. What the heck, they would think, it was only fair to make sure. But at that moment my son would call out, “Dad?” and appear at the top of the cellar stairs, completely normal, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He would look puzzled when he saw the cops and the funny-farm attendants, and then he would look at me and say innocently, “Dad, what’s going on?”
And then—
I picked up the phone and it was dead.
I checked the wires, and they were connected. I heard a lifeless hiss that stayed no matter what buttons I pushed. I tried the operator; nothing happened. I listened very hard for voices on the line, but I heard nothing but that faint, dull sound.
“Hello?” I said into it. I must have sounded like a desperate man. I must have sounded like a man who wanted his conjured nightmare to come true, who wanted the men in the padded Ford to come and take him to a place where they could shock him into the real world again.