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Chapter Thirty-Six
Jean was trying to finish up…
Jean was trying to finish up the trim around his front door. While the simple back door wasn’t too badly disfigured by the use of plywood, spruce two-by-sixes, and a low-cost grade of vinyl siding to finish it off, the front entrance to the grand old house was another matter. The back door had ended up with simple store-bought aluminum, insulated, painted doors. The fronts were more decorative. They had multiple panels, and the one on the right had flush-mounted top and bottom bolts. It took some figuring out for the fledgling carpenter. The new doors, with decorative colored glass panels, were awfully expensive in his book, but he took the plunge after doing a fairly decent job of the back.
The carpentry itself was easily understood, especially once you took the old stuff apart. The ornately carved gingerbread-work all over the old porch was a labor of love, and a source of endless frustration with drills and a jig-saw and a scroll-saw.
He planned to stain it as dark as he could reasonably get and still show wood-grain, varnish it five or six times and live with the results. Getting the old stained glass panels reinstalled beside the doorway was even kind of fun, within certain limits. Jean had never really thought about being a carpenter as a job. How long could it take to learn? There were all kinds of young bucks out there on construction sites. Presumably they were making a living. If he could at least get the outside done, he could insulate the inside of the frame, staple on some plastic, and then begin the drywall board. He had to do it in proper sequence.
Jean pulled a nail out of his mouth and shoved the piece of vertical trim up tight with the toe of his left foot. For some reason he always had a hell of a time getting the nail to go in straight, especially when he was on the wrong side and half upside down like this.
Tunk-tunk-tunk…there. It looked okay to start. Now was when the problem usually started. A couple of good whacks and then it would start to bend. He had to really concentrate to get it all the way in. Otherwise, he would have to pull it out and start over.
Since he was standing outdoors, he always tried to keep the cussing to a minimum.
That was just good neighborhood relations. Jean was avoiding trouble like the plague. Time heals all wounds, and it was best to keep busy. In the last couple of weeks, Jean had finally gotten his beginner’s driver’s license. Now when he and Janet went to the local big-box building centre, he got to drive, sometimes showing off like a teenager. When spring rolled around, Jean was looking forward to taking her and Jason for a ride in the red Triumph TR-3 in the garage, if they could get it safety-checked cheaply enough. At her age, Ashley might not appreciate it, but he’d give her a ride as well. As long as there was something to do, and something to look forward to, he was doing okay.
The scar tissue on his inner being was hardening up nicely.
***
One last time, then. If he couldn’t make the shape-shift complete, with what strength and vitality he had in him, then he never would. He would be doomed.
The coyote had feasted on half-eaten cheeseburgers, French fries he found on the ground in a parking lot, competing with the ever-present sea gulls for them. He feasted on fish, landed by local ice-fishermen, but too small to take home. He feasted on stale doughnuts, and stuff he licked out of tins, until he figured he could go no further. If he had eaten another bite, he would have burst. The change was upon him. The coyote was holed up in a hay-barn that didn’t even have a door on it, just a few dozen big rolls of hay pushed in by the landowner. The coyote valued his privacy at the best of times, but he would need all of his concentration. He needed to focus. This weather-beaten old place was a hundred metres away from any houses. While a laneway led in there, there were trees on both sides and brush out back. His senses would be all out of kilter, and he didn’t want to be surprised. Like an athlete, he had trained up to this point. To let the opportunity slip, meant it might never come again.
If he couldn’t change back into a man again, then all of his plans would come to nothing. Worse, he would be condemned to being an animal for all of eternity.
Carlo knew the magic was somehow depleted inside of him. When the time came, when he began to realize what was happening, he began to suffer anxiety attacks.
That’s what it meant to him, to be able to change at will, or even on a whim. But he admitted privately to himself that he had abused the privilege. The temptation was just a little too strong. His heart was racing, but not unpleasantly, exactly.
“One more change.” He sang softly to the rafters of the barn.
“That’s all I need, one more change.” There was sweat, big balls of it, running down his sides.
His legs began to grow, but it seemed so abysmally slowly—would it be enough?
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| Would it be enough...??? |
Already he felt himself to be weak and not as prepared as he would have thought—God, would it be enough? The searing pain in his paws, no. Little hands and feet now.
His neck, and shoulders began to bulge, and distort, and stretch, and now Di Rocca began to grow taller, even as the pounding in his chest, his temples, and in behind his eyes began to become unbearable. A searing agony was the direct reward of his efforts.
Few would attempt this process lightly. There was always a price to be paid.
Retching.
Was he too far gone to make it happen? Oh, Great Giitchi Manitou. Please.
The sickening sensation in his guts was the result of the change coming over his internal organs, as they distended, swelled, and morphed into something much more complicated in layout, the sheer difference in size making the transition a painful one. He gasped as whole organs shifted around inside of him of their own volition, a completely and subconsciously-controlled series of events. A huge lump in the wrong place made it extremely difficult to breathe, yet he also noted in approval his own objectivity. Surely he could get through this…argh. Argh. Argh.
Dizziness, retching, retching. Euphoria.
Excruciating pain shot through his chest, yet this was not unexpected. Humble experience reminded him that it was always like this—but was it always this way? The irrational thought troubled him not one whit, and he realized that he was indeed doing it, at least it was possible. It was far from over yet. The coyote known as Carlo Di Rocca prayed and retched, sweated, and convulsed, and tried to change himself back into a human being.
***
He was taking it badly, and he knew it. Teddy no longer cared. He didn’t care what anyone thought. He didn’t even care what he thought anymore. He was just reacting. It felt good and he planned to just keep on doing it. All those times his mom had said, in response to some, cock-a-mamie get-rich quick scheme, all those times when she had asked him, what’s your Plan-B?
Teddy didn’t have a Plan-B. He’d never wanted one, never thought he needed one.
Ted Hiltz was fixing to shoot Frenchie, when the man went inside, to answer the phone. He must have to replenish his nails every once in a while. Teddy watched from the slats located halfway up the steeple on the church across the street from Gagnon’s.
It was brutally cold up there, but he had seen worse, out on the hunting trail. The tune of Fred Bear, by Ted Nugent, went through his mind endlessly. Teddy had seen this old movie. In it, a guy called Shaft cut a hole in a potato, then shoved it over the muzzle of a high-powered sporting rifle. He'd shot out some guy’s tire with it, from the balcony of a high-rise apartment building. The gunshot sounded like a smoker’s cough. Teddy figured the same thing could work for him. He fantasized about just winging him, and watching him flop around on the ground, struggling to get up, just like a bear he once shot from about three hundred metres away. He laughed and giggled at the thing’s antics until Slick or Harry put the thing out of its misery with a bullet to the head. Ted lovingly caressed the butt and breech area of his Heckler and Koch HK-91 assault rifle, which he had never actually used. What a shame that was. Imagine spending all that money and never firing it. He was going to get his money’s worth tonight. Everything was riding on this one shot.
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| Tedy's HK-91. |
Due to the slats, a scope would have been useless. There just wasn’t enough clearance, but he looked through a hand-held one, watching traffic come and go at the stoplights immediately adjacent to Gagnon’s house. Everything jumped up at you when you got it up to your eye, but holy fuck was that thing cold. Those little details will look good in my memoirs, he thought with a quirky grin.
At this angle, at this range and distance, it was an easy shot. He figured on poking a little wee hole in the window, and no one would even hear Gagnon’s body thud when it hit the floor.
So what if Jeff and Harry weren’t talking to him anymore? They had come at him pretty strong, but he just told them he spilled some gas filling up the snow machine, and they had to let it go. Slick was putting his house up for sale and moving someplace else. Well, good for him. But Teddy wasn’t ready to move yet, to live in poverty, to cook his own meals and do his own laundry, and iron his own shirts.
Frenchie had ruined everything. The boys didn’t even hunt anymore. It was no fun going everywhere by yourself, he had quickly discovered. Teddy got hired at the mill on his eighteenth birthday. He bought a brand-new car within six months, and what with one thing and another, Teddy liked his toys. His softly-featured moon of a face was invisible in the blackness of the steeple, and any small glint off the scope was unlikely to be seen at this time of the night. There was no one about at this hour.
Dinner time, and night was fallen. All he needed was a little patience.
***
It was easy to slip in as Gagnon puttered with the trim in the twilight hour. The front porch light was on, and its yellow glare was all he had for warmth out there. Jean’s tired eyes told him he had better give it up for the night. But one last piece remained.
The coyote heard a faint tapping, tapping, and then a mild cursing, softly, barely audible.
The tapping came again. This had a firmer, more confident tone as the hammer rang with a kind of toink-toink-toink, the tones climbing the scale as the nail pounded deeper and deeper.
Di Rocca found a place under the cellar stairs where he could hole up indefinitely. He slipped out of the floppy, felt-lined winter boots, seeing as they were leaving puddles behind.
When Gagnon passed down the main central hallway, on his way out to the garage for the umpteenth time, the rest of the house was open to his inspection, and he knew the way from his previous reconnaissance. He checked a couple of rooms.
Jean had some scrap wood and junk mail, multi-colored flyers and such all lined up and stacked beside the fireplace in the front parlor. Carlo nipped back to the basement, heart thudding at his exertions. Gratefully, he hadn’t seen any big puddles in the kitchen by the back door. But with Gagnon coming and going, even that might be okay. He wouldn’t want Gagnon to go to the bathroom, and return to find a big blob of snow melting away in the exact centre of the living room. He could hardly fail to notice.
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| His feet, slightly sweaty... |
The coyote’s sense of humor was piqued by the way he looked now, in his insulated coveralls, which had been hanging on a nail inside the barn. That was one of the main factors in choosing that particular barn. One stained old over coat. Yes, and the piece de resistance, (with some kind of accent on there somewhere), the ensemble topped off by an incredibly greasy old camouflage hunting cap complete with ear-muff type flaps held by snap-fittings.
While he had no socks, the rubber boots had kept his feet warm if slightly sweaty.
On his way through town, Di Rocca had blended right in, totally anonymous, walking down the streets of Scudmore. It was just too easy to get into Jean Gagnon’s house.
Gagnon had a miter saw set up in the garage, mostly empty now that the Jaguar was gone. He kept going in and out of the back door, and into and out of the garage. The occasional whine of the saw had a timing, a rhythm to the process. Gagnon measured, and marked things, and cut them painstakingly. His amateur status was evident in long delays, with occasional outbursts of profanity. Janet had loaned Jean the saws and most of the other tools, some of the few things of Don’s that she hadn’t sold already. After weeks of study, there was very little about the routine or the layout that the coyote didn’t know or anticipate. As long as he stayed on the sidewalks, in the dark of night, he could come and go as he pleased. He just had to be careful not to leave footprints in fresh snow.
It happened in the kitchen. Jean was going back and forth, tape measure on his belt, and one small piece of board or another in hand, when the coyote confronted him.
Gagnon stopped on a dime, with a look of surprise and a thin squeak from his shoes.
“What? Who the heck are you?” He gasped, he still had that preoccupied look on his face.
The coyote smiled into his eyes. Gagnon’s brow furrowed. There was something oddly familiar about this guy. Coyote stood about his height, and was this guy maybe the plumber?
“I want the money, Mister Gagnon.”
“What money?” Gagnon, completely flabbergasted.
What the hell was the guy talking about?
“I kind of figured you’d be that way.” The coyote sighed. “And now I have to kill you.”
“Oh, that money.” Gagnon’s face flushed with anger. “I’m so fucking tired of you people.”
He stood there glaring at Di Rocca, who had momentary flashes as if he was winking in and out of existence. But the other paid no notice to it.
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| Gagnon: I've fucking had it with you guys. |
“You mean there’s really no money?” The grey eminence of the ancient one smiled. “Maybe it’s even better that way. That Janet Herbert sure looks like a pretty nice lady.”
“What?” Gagnon grunted, his visage darkening and lowering like a July thunderstorm ready to strike.
Jean’s chin came sticking out all of a sudden. Revelation struck. This man was supposed to be him. He stared at himself, the other Jean Gagnon from across the room.
Something in his look must have given him away. He knew it now.
He understood.
The other being, another shape-shifter, took up a fighting stance. He raised his hands up to shoulder level, crouching slightly. He circled in closer, and closer, looking to get a grip. The coyote bared his teeth in a feral snarl, growling like a rabid thing. The pale eyes were cold and dead, lifeless and bleak, but with a glitter of something vicious and cruel, hateful inside them. The two circled in the midst of Jean’s kitchen, the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up.
What kind of evil had he stumbled upon?
Kill or be killed.
“Have you ever heard, have you ever wondered, if like maybe everyone in the world had a twin?” The coyote smiled.
Magic crackled in the air.
Jean understood.
“You son of a bitch.”
End
Images. Louis.
Louis has books and stories on Barnes & Noble.
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