Stephen King - Cycle of the Werewolf

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 100.86KB 21 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Stephen King "Cycle of the Werewolf"

JANUARY

Somewhere, high above, the moon shines down, fat and full-but here, in Tarker's

Mills, a January blizzard has choked the sky with snow. The wind rams full force

down a deserted Center Avenue; the orange town plows have given up long since.

Arnie Westrum, flagman on the GS&WM Railroad, has been caught in the small tool-

and-signal shack nine miles out of town; with his small, gasoline-powered rail-

rider blocked by drifts, he is waiting out the storm there, playing Last Man Out

solitaire with a pack of greasy Bicycle cards. Outside the wind rises to a shrill

scream. Westrum raises his head uneasily, and then looks back down at his game

again. It is only the wind, after all...

But the wind doesn't scratch at doors ... and whine to be let in.

He gets up, a tall, lanky man in a wool jacket and railroad coveralls, a Camel

cigarette jutting from one comer of his mouth, his seamed New England face lit in

soft orange tones by the kerosene lantern which hangs on the wall.

The scratching comes again. Someone's dog, he thinks, lost and wanting to be let

in. That's all it is ... but still, he pauses. It would be inhuman to leave it out

there in the cold, he thinks (not that it is much warmer in here; in spite of the

batterypowered heater, he can see the cold cloud of his breath)-but still he

hesitates. A cold finger of fear is probing just below his heart. This has been a

bad season in Tarker's Mills; there have been omens of evil on the land. Arnie has

his father's Welsh blood strong in his veins, and he doesn't like the feel of

things.

Before he can decide what to do about his visitor, the lowpitched whining rises to

a snarl. There is a thud as something incredibly heavy hits the door ... draws back

... hits again. The door trembles in its frame, and a puff of snow billows in from

the top.

Arnie Westrum stares around, looking for something to shore it up with, but before

he can do more than reach for the flimsy chair he has been sitting in, the snarling

thing strikes the door again with incredible force, splintering it from top to

bottom.

It holds for a moment longer, bowed in on a vertical line, and lodged in it,

kicking and lunging, its snout wrinkled back in a snarl, its yellow eyes blazing,

is the biggest wolf Arnie has ever seen ...

And its snarls sound terribly like human words.

The door splinters, groans, gives. In a moment the thing will be inside.

In the corner, amongst a welter of tools, a pick leans against the wall. Arnie

lunges for it and seizes it as the wolf thrusts its way inside and crouches, its

yellow eyes gleaming at the cornered man. Its ears are flattened back, furry

triangles. Its tongue lolls. Behind it, snow gusts in through a door that has been

shattered down the center.

It springs with a snarl, and Arnie Westrum swings the pick.

Once.

Outside, the feeble lamplight shines raggedly on the snow through the splintered

door.

The wind whoops and howls.

The screams begin.

Something inhuman has come to Tarker's Mills, as unseen as the full moon riding the

night sky high above. It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its

coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with

murder on his mind, or a killer tornado. Its time is now, its place is here, in

this little Maine town where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where

small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings

of the Senior Citizens' Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next

week there will be news of a darker variety.

Outside, its tracks begin to fill up with snow, and the shriek of the wind seems

savage with pleasure. There is nothing of God or Light in that heartless sound-it

is all black winter and dark ice.

The cycle of the Werewolf has begun.

FEBRUARY

Love, Stella Randolph thinks, lying in her narrow virgin's bed, and through her

window streams the cold blue light of a St. Valentine's Day full moon.

Oh love love love, love would be like

This year Stella Randolph, who runs the Tarker's Mills Set 'n Sew, has received

twenty Valentines - one from Paul Newman, one from Robert Redford, one from John

Travolta ... even one from Ace Frehley of the rock group Kiss. They stand open on

the bureau across the room from her, illuminated in the moon's cold blue light. She

sent them all to herself, this year as every year.

Love would be like a kiss at dawn ... or the last kiss, the real one, at the end of

the Harlequin romance stories ... love would be like roses in twilight ...

They laugh at her in Tarker's Mills, yes, you bet. Small boys joke and snigger at

her from behind their hands (and sometimes, if they are safe across the street and

Constable Neary isn't around, they will chant Fatty-Fatty-Two-By-Four in their

sweet, high mocking sopranos), but she knows about love, and about the moon. Her

store is failing by inches, and she weighs too much, but now, on this night of

dreams with the moon a bitter blue flood through frost-traced windows, it seems to

her that love is still a possibility, love and the scent of summer as he comes ...

Love would be like the rough feel of a man's cheek, that rub and scratch

And suddenly there is a scratching at the window.

She starts up on her elbows, the coverlet falling away from her ample bosom. The

moonlight has been blocked out by a dark shape-amorphous but clearly masculine, and

she thinks: I am dreaming ... and in my dreams, I will let him come ... in my

dreams I will let myself come. They use the word dirty, but the word is clean, the

word is right; love would be like coming.

She rises, convinced that this is a dream, because there is a man crouched out

there, a man she knows, a man she passes on the street nearly everyday. It is

(love love is coming, love has come)

But as her pudgy fingers fall on the cold sash of the window she sees it is not a

man at all; it is an animal out there, a huge, shaggy wolf, his forepaws on the

outer sill, his rear legs buried up to the haunches in the snowdrift which crouches

against the west side of her house, here on the outskirts of town.

But it's Valentine's day and there will be love, she thinks; her eyes have deceived

her even in her dream. It is a man, that man, and he is so wickedly handsome.

(wickedness yes love would be like wickedness)

and he has come this moon-decked night and he will take her. He will

She throws the window up and it is the blast of cold air billowing her filmy blue

nightgown out behind that tells her that this is no dream. The man is gone and with

a sensation like swooning she realizes he was never there. She takes a shuddering,

groping step backward and the wolf leaps smoothly into her room and shakes itself,

spraying a dreamy sugarpuff of snow in the darkness.

But love! Love is like ... is like ... like a scream

Too late she remembers Arnie Westrum, torn apart in the railroad shack to the west

of town only a month before. Too late ...

The wolf pads toward her, yellow eyes gleaming with cool lust. Stella Randolph

backs slowly toward her narrow virgin's bed until the back of her pudgy knees

strike the frame and she collapses upon it.

Moonlight parts the beast's shaggy fur in a silvery streak.

On the bureau the Valentine cards shiver minutely in the breeze from the open

window; one of them falls and seesaws lazily to the floor, cutting the air in big

silent arcs.

The wolf puts its paw up on the bed, one on either side of her, and she can smell

its breath ... hot, but somehow not unpleasant. Its yellow eyes stare into her.

"Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes.

It falls upon her.

Love is like dying.

MARCH

The last real blizzard of the year-heavy, wet snow turning to sleet as dusk comes

on and the night closes in-has brought branches tumbling down all over Tarker's

Mills with the heavy gunshot cracks of rotted wood. Mother Nature's pruning out her

deadwood, Milt Sturmfuller, the town librarian, tells his wife over coffee. He is a

thin man with a narrow head and pale blue eyes, and he has kept his pretty, silent

wife in a bondage of terror for twelve years now. There are a few who suspect the

truth-Constable Neary's wife Joan is one-but the town can be a dark place, and no

one knows for sure but them. The town keeps its secrets.

Milt likes his phrase so well that he says it again: Yep, Mother Nature is pruning

her deadwood ... and then the lights go out and Donna Lee Sturmfuller utters a

gasping little scream. She also spills her coffee.

You clean that up, her husband says coldly. You clean that up right ... now.

Yes, honey. Okay.

In the dark, she fumbles for a dishtowel with which to clean up the spilled coffee

and barks her shin on a footstool. She cries out. In the dark, her husband laughs

heartily. He finds his wife's pain more amusing than anything, except maybe the

jokes they have in The Reader's Digest. Those jokes-Humor in Uniform, Life in These

United States-really tickle his funnybone.

As well as deadwood, Mother Nature has pruned a few powerlines out by Tarker Brook

this wild March night; the sleet has coated the big lines, growing heavier and

heavier, until they have parted and fallen on the road like a nest of snakes,

lazily turning and spitting blue fire.

All of Tarker's Mills goes dark.

As if finally satisfied, the storm begins to slack off, and not long before

midnight the temperature has plummeted from thirty-three degrees to sixteen. Slush

freezes solid in weird sculptures. Old Man Hague's hayfield - known locally as

Forty

Acre Field-takes on a cracked glaze look. The houses remain dark; oil furnaces tick

and cool. No linesman is yet able to get up the skating-rink roads.

The clouds pull apart. A full moon slips in and out between the remnants. The ice

coating Main Street glows like dead bone.

In the night, something begins to howl.

Later, no one will be able to say where the sound came from; it was everywhere and

nowhere as the full moon painted the darkened houses of the village, everywhere and

nowhere as the March wind began to rise and moan like a dead Berserker winding his

horn, it drifted on the wind, lonely and savage.

Donna Lee hears it as her unpleasant husband sleeps the sleep of the just beside

her; constable Neary hears it as he stands at the bedroom window of his Laurel

Street apartment in his longhandles; Ollie Parker, the fat and ineffectual grammar

school principal hears it in his own bedroom; others hear it, as well. One of them

is a boy in a wheelchair.

No one sees it. And no one knows the name of the drifter the linesman found the

next morning when he finally got out by Tarker Brook to repair the downed cables.

The drifter was coated with ice, head cocked back in a silent scream, ragged old

coat and shirt beneath chewed open. The drifter sat in a frozen pool of his own

blood, staring at the downed lines, his hands still held up in a warding-off

gesture with ice between the fingers.

And all around him are pawprints.

Wolfprints.

APRIL

By the middle of the month, the last of the snow flurries have turned to showers of

rain and something amazing is happening in Tarker's Mills: it is starting to green

up. The ice in Matty Tellingham's cow-pond has gone out, and the patches of snow in

the tract of forest called the Big Woods have all begun to shrink. It seems that

the old and wonderful trick is going to happen again. Spring is going to come.

The townsfolk celebrate it in small ways in spite of the shadow that has fallen

over the town. Gramma Hague bakes pies and sets them out on the kitchen windowsill

to cool. On Sunday, at the Grace Baptist Church, the Reverend Lester Lowe reads

from The Song of Solomon and preaches a sermon titled "The Spring of the Lord's

Love." On a more secular note, Chris Wrightson, the biggest drunk in Tarker's

Mills, throws his Great Spring Drunk and staggers off in the silvery, unreal light

of a nearly full April moon. Billy Robertson, bartender and proprietor of the pub,

Tarker's Mills' only saloon, watches him go and mutters to the barmaid, "If that

wolf takes someone tonight, I guess it'll be Chris."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Stephen King - Cycle of the Werewolf.pdf

共21页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - Cycle of the Werewolf

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: