At night, in the little town near Erie, Pennsylvania where the Curtises had paid a brief visit to their daughter's grave, something stirred above it. Something that had lingered in the young girl, and even after her death still lingered near her, because it knew nothing of distance, or time. And it had no place to go, anyway. Before long it would hitch a ride on whatever creature happened along and seemed receptive to it. It was something very small, but something that could be incredibly powerful, too. When the time came. And the moment was right.
The thing there, at the grave, stopped stirring suddenly. And it rested. It was night. The cloud cover was thick, and the moon beyond it at waning gibbous. The thing rested because even those apparently all-powerful entities that dwell on the Other Side must rest. And the moon, even had it been full, would have had no effect on it. That depended on its host. Because the entity that lingered there, at the grave, was a kind of parasite. It was nurtured and it grew on whatever thick, black ooze it found in the human spirit.
When Ryerson Biergarten got in the mood, when he sat down, closed his eyes, and cleared his mind as completely as possible of the dregs of the day, he got a psychic, mental picture of The Park Werewolf. But as is true of most such mental pictures, when he tried to look at it, when he tried to study it as he would study a photograph or a painting in a gallery, the edges and details blurred, became indistinct, and he wasn't at all sure what he was seeing. So what he could see ultimately, in his mind's eye, was the horrific and nightmarish figure of a werewolf that looked as if it had wriggled into a huge nylon stocking.
When this happened, Ryerson, who usually kept his temper on a very short leash, cut loose with a string of obscenities, because seeing and not seeing at the same time can be very frustrating. "Donkey tits!" he hissed, borrowing, he knew, from the old spook in the cellar of the house in Vermont. "Fairy farts!" Then, "Shit, shit, shit!"
He heard a knock at the door of his room at the Samuelson Guest House. Creosote, who'd been happily and noisily chewing one of Ryerson's argyle socks on the bed, looked at the door and whimpered.
"Who's there?" Ryerson called.
"My name's Ashland," a man's voice called back.
Ryerson got out of his chair, went to the door, and looked through the little security peephole. The young, fresh-faced blond man on the other side of the door was trying very hard to smile amiably, as if he knew he was being watched. "Yes?" Ryerson said through the door. "What can I do for you?"
"I'd like to talk with you a moment, Mr. Biergarten."
"About what?"
"About The Park Werewolf."
Ryerson glanced around at Creosote, who was still whimpering. He said, under his breath, "What do you think, Creosote?" Creosote stopped whimpering and cocked his flat, stubby head to one side. Ryerson tried to read him, could read only something like the snow that comes between channels on TV sets. He shrugged, said "Okay," and opened the door.
The blond man who called himself Ashland extended his hand. Ryerson took it.
"I have some information for you," the man said, still trying very hard to smile amiably, though his palms were sweaty and his eyes darted quickly from one area of the room to another. He was clearly nervous.
"You do?" Ryerson said.
"About The Park Werewolf," the man said and nodded at the oak rocking chair that Ryerson had just gotten out of. "May I?"
"Sure."
The man went quickly to the chair and sat heavily, wearily in it. He let his head fall back and sighed. "My God!" he breathed.
"How'd you find me?" Ryerson asked. "How do you know who I am?"
The man let a quick smile-a smile of self-amusement, Ryerson thought-come and go on his lips. "I followed you here," he answered.
"Oh? Well, that answers my first question-”
“There's an article about you in The D and C."
" 'The D and C'? What's that?"
The man looked offended: " The Democrat and Chronicle -the paper. The Rochester newspaper."
"Oh," Ryerson said again. He was a little miffed. He didn't like publicity, especially in the middle of a case; too often it brought out the loonies, which, he supposed, included this man.
Once more a smile of what Ryerson thought was self-amusement flitted across the man's mouth. "Do you really think there's a werewolf loose in The Park, Mr. Biergarten?"
Ryerson went to the bed and sat next to Creosote. "Why don't you simply tell me, Mr. Ashland, what information you have-"
The man who called himself Ashland cut in, "I know who it is."
"Do you?"
"Yes. I know who it is." He looked quickly at Creosote, who had all but torn the argyle sock in half and was continuing to work happily at it, then looked back at Ryerson. "Do you believe me?"
"Should I?" Ryerson asked.
The man looked stunned by the question. He said nothing for a long moment, then yet another smile appeared; it stayed longer this time, and Ryerson guessed that the man was trying to be coy. "Everything I say… is a lie, Mr. Biergarten."
Ryerson inhaled deeply, let the air out slowly, and said, "Yes, I've heard that one, Mr. Ashland."
He looked offended. "It's a woman."
"The werewolf?"
Ashland nodded vigorously. "Yes. It's a woman." He pushed himself to his feet. "But I can't give you her name. I want to, I really want to. But I can't. I won't." He looked quickly, almost frantically, Ryerson thought, at the door, at Creosote, at Ryerson, back at the door, the window, at Ryerson. "I'm sorry; I've got to leave now. You don't mind, do you?"
Ryerson, still on the bed with Creosote beside him, shook his head and said "No," very matter-of-factly, "I don't mind."
The man who called himself Ashland protested, "I'm not crazy, Mr. Biergarten."
Ryerson said, "Neither am I," which clearly confused the visitor, who shuffled in place for a few moments, then went quickly to the door and left the room.
George Dixon, head of security at Kodak Park, pulled open the bottom right-hand drawer of his big gray metal desk and shrieked. There was a tongue-like a pale, dried red pepper-lying in the drawer on top of an old Playboy magazine.
Dixon slammed the drawer shut, found that his breathing was becoming labored from the quick onrush of adrenaline, and forced himself to breathe slowly, deeply. After a minute his breathing regulated itself, and he put his hand on the drawer handle.
"It's just a tongue," he whispered. "Jesus, everyone has one." He took a breath, pulled the drawer open, studied the tongue for a few moments, then closed the drawer slowly.
Would you know? he wondered. Would you really know? Or would you hide it? Even from yourself? Would you have to hide it, for Christ's sake, so you wouldn't go nutsaronee?! Sure you would.
Maybe you do it while you're asleep. Maybe you get up and you run around in some goddamned wolf suit – He shook his head. "Shit, no!" he breathed. How could he be The Park Werewolf? It was impossible. No way, Jose!
But still, he wrapped the raggedly severed tongue up in a napkin, put it in his black lunch pail, and took it home with him. And that evening he put it in a Baggie, put the Baggie in his lunch pail, took the lunch pail to a stretch of Genesee River that he knew no one ever frequented because it reeked of sewage, and threw the lunch pail in.
And again he whispered to himself, "So, it's a tongue. I don't need one. I got one of my own," grinned a wide, quaking grin, and went back to his apartment house.