My Father The Werewolf

Chapter Two The old man had seen them from his cabin -- the last cabin of its kind along this stretch of rolling dunes south of Pismo Beach. Both man and cabin had been here for a long time. Once Pismo had been a quiet little beach town between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a haven for artists and a few early hippies, and cabins like Sid's had dotted the shore where the cedar forest met the sand. That was before the tourists and the RV and dune-buggy crowds had discovered the place, and pushed most of Sid's kind farther north, or up into the hills. Sid McKenzie clung tenaciously to his little piece of California coast. The fog caressed the land with long, lugubrious fingers, playing in and out of the shallow valleys between the hills that rolled to the shore. Sid knew the fog as an old friend. He knew its moods, its patterns, its movements. Sometimes in summer it rolled in from the ocean before nightfall, smothering everything in a wet gray blanket. Other times it teased and prodded and probed and danced along the contours of the coast, pulling back now and again to reveal the foam of wave tops and the sprinkled stars. Sid knew the moods of Pismo better than anyone. In his youth he had surfed here, on a long board made of pine, sanded and varnished and as lovingly maintained as any sailboat. The board now hung high up on a wall in his cabin. He had left Pismo during the height of the war in Vietnam. He had returned a year before the first full-moon murder. He didn't surf anymore. Now he kept watch. Sid heard the family -- a father and two kids -- before he saw them. The girl and the boy were arguing, oblivious to their surroundings. Teenagers, from the sound of their voices and their vocabulary. The father trailed a short distance behind them, trying to stay out of the argument, interjecting only when one of the kids employed a particularly colorful phrase. Not many people walked this far down the beach from the campground, but that was undoubtedly where they had come from, for there were no roads between here and there, and he could tell they weren't locals. The girl was of medium height, with long, blondish hair and a developing figure. She walked deliberately, striding up the sides of the dunes and pausing on top, hands on hips, waiting for the others. The son was the same height, but wiry, and more active. He had a mop of dark brown hair cut just above his eyebrows and ears, and he wore a black sweatshirt that was a couple of sizes too big for him. He covered twice as much ground as the other two, because while his father and sister walked methodically up each dune, hewing straight on in one direction, the boy described arcs and orbits around them both, running up the faces of dunes and then rolling down them, sometimes darting toward the ocean in pursuit of something interesting. City kids, Sid thought, happy to be away from thieves and muggers and rapists and pushers and prostitutes. Unaware, of course, of the danger that lurked among the dunes. Sid knew. Three times he had come face-to-face with the werewolf of Pismo Beach. Once, he had taken a shot at it but the beast had gotten away. Sometimes months would go by without an incident. Sometimes he would hear howls in the hills and find tracks the next morning, tracks that wouldn't last long in the shifting sand. Sid didn't know who the werewolf was in human form. He speculated that it might be a drifter who returned periodically to Pismo. But it had killed -- oh, yes, it had killed. And was fully capable of killing again. He watched as the family walked farther into the dunes. Soon they were swallowed up by the fog again. Slowly Sid rose and walked into his small cabin. From the wall beside the door he took down his rifle. From a drawer in an antique table he drew out a box of bullets. He returned to his chair on the porch and began to load the gun.Garfield, Henry is the author of 'My Father The Werewolf ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780689851803 and ISBN 0689851804.