Kornwolf (21 page)

Whatever the case, it was hanging over him. Which only confused him all the more—as it wasn't full …

Lord almighty
.

Again, he cradled his head, exhaling.

For all of that afternoon's research, the one thing he couldn't shake—the one thing that hadn't stopped eating a hole in his rambling thought dreams—was Rainer Yokelman's listing of purple or bluish urine as a symptom of lycanthropy, and with it, the one image hanging persistently, now, in his mind, from the past two weeks—more than all of the “sightings” combined, more than the motion detector photo—the observation he couldn't in some way or other attribute to human delusion (which wasn't to be underestimated) and/or deception (by outside parties) was the purplish “spray paint” marking the walls of the Holtwood structures the week before—the bluish goo that, upon inspection, appeared to have rusted around the edges, eaten away by a potent corrosive.

He hadn't been able to figure it then, and he couldn't pretend to shake it now. He was all out of sorts. He didn't know what to believe anymore. He never had.

In the morning, he woke up with less than an hour remaining before he was due at the gym. He dressed, made coffee and checked his original list of goals for the early hours. He hadn't left time to sift through the hate mail. That would just have to wait until later. He wouldn't be able to swing by the bookstore either, not before three o'clock.

One way or another, he definitely needed to turn something in by the end of the day.

He thought about it all the way to the gym …

Whatever the case, Roddy looked good in training.

As that went, watching The Unbelievable spar with Calvin that afternoon would not only interrupt Owen's regularly scheduled torture session with Rhya, Coach Stumpf would actually give him cause, by surprise, for pleasant distraction. Owen could never have seen it coming, as, all morning, Jack had seemed even more dour than usual.

He still hadn't mentioned the article.

Earlier, Roddy had outlined a bad situation pending with one of the juniors, Franklin, the one with the lip on him. Jack was in serious straits with Franklin, apparently.

It seemed to be all he could do to focus on Roddy and Calvin's work in the ring. Which Owen took for a good sign, at least insofar as it indicated that Roddy, by sparring like an able-bodied veteran, was rendering the luxury of distraction affordable. There wasn't much Jack really needed to tell him. Roddy had been fighting for twenty years. He knew every gun on his deck, by now. And their plan was solid: attack the body.

A week before, Owen had sensed a current of tension between them, coach and fighter. Jack had seemed skeptical, nervous, reserved as to Roddy's performance & mind-set in training—and
Roddy, in turn, had been tuning Jack out, getting caught with his back to the ropes too often—at times, it seemed, to
spite
his coach. That tension appeared to have settled by now. Beyond his impressive work in sparring, Roddy was regulating his weight—inching down from 148. He was pulling his roadwork every morning. He was sleeping at least eight hours a night. He was drinking his water. And his diet was on track—carbs in the morning, roughage and lean white meat at night.

And no booze, no grass.

Bobbing and weaving, he walked Calvin down with his hands up, chin tucked, unblinking. He looked like a real contender.

Jack appeared more or less satisfied with him. The only time he really spoke up was to jump on Calvin, not Roddy, to keep his hands up—and cut with the shucking and jiving already. Calvin tended to showboat a bit. But only, in this case, by running from Roddy. They wound up hashing it out in the corner. Roddy proceeded to land his hooks, and, although he might have been holding back, they still looked plenty painful to Owen.

Jack hit his stop watch. “TIME!”

The voice of Aretha Franklin welled up in the cease-fire, warbling out of the speakers. Roddy and Calvin tapped gloves and walked back to their corners. Jack was mumbling—hardly a bitter expression about him—but notably humorless, distant, dazed—in spite of his own better efforts, preoccupied.

Thereby, it came in a flash when, on turning to Owen, he mumbled: “You're in on this, right?”

Owen stepped back, looking over his shoulder to make way for whomever Jack was addressing. But no one was there. He swallowed. He looked back, wide-eyed. “Me?”

Jack waited for an answer.

Roddy leaned over the ropes, peering out through his headgear, jawing his mouthpiece to clarify. “You want to work the corner, buddy?”

Owen swallowed again. “Doing what?”

Jack produced a yellow bucket.

Hallelujah.

Spit bucket boy.

At last, O Lord, he was coming home. And for those who had doubted him:
eat your hearts out
…

Owen could not have been more elated. The whole thing was nearly too good to be true. Finally: some time on the inside, working the corner, wading through all of the sleaze and the grit and the nervous anticipation—all of the dead time and agony backstage. And he would be there as a part of Team Lowe: spit bucket boy for The Unbelievable …

Once again, Jack had acknowledged his presence, albeit with less than an excess of jubilance.

Man, The Coach was a weird dude.

Whatever the case, Owen accepted.

It was almost enough to throw him off his game for the rest of the afternoon. But no matter how thrilled he may've been, he still had a deadline back at
The Plea
and, as yet, very little to go on but incomplete research and dwindling scanner reports.

He arrived at the office to find that a total of one complaint had come out of The Basin the night before—and not even a cooker: that lady from Bareville again, with a random gunfire report …

This didn't look good.

A sinking feeling returned to Owen. For three nights now, the disorder in Lamepeter Township had shown a marked decline. What had begun as a drifting lull in the action was starting to make him nervous. The Blue Ball Devil needed a catalyst, something to bring it all together. Synchronization of disparate elements. Mobilization. Order to chaos.

He ended up back at the library, this time in search of astronomical data. Something about the previous evening down in the plaza wouldn't sit with him. The fact that he couldn't remember the lunar phases may have been part of the problem. But maybe
the moon's having come up in reference on more than a dozen occasions that afternoon—each in the line of his unbiased fire—bothered him more. He had questions, as always.

According to an article published in
Mythos Quarterly
, the moon's effect on human behavior was demonstrated clearly through statistical analysis. During the first and last quarters of each lunar cycle, the time on either side of the full moon, the level of registered crime in society rose—unequivocally, month after month. From schools, jails and emergency rooms to public zoos across the planet, everything living was somehow or other affected by the moon's gravitational pull—and the fact was, again statistically, behavior was far less rational while it was full. The reasons were purely scientific: over 70 percent of the earth was covered with water. The human body was made up of roughly that same percentage of water. The moon was known to affect the tides most strongly during the time when its gravitational pull on the earth was greatest, i.e., during the phase when the sun, the earth and the moon were assembled in a line, in that order. It followed, then, that the human body was equally affected during that phase.

However, as Owen continued reading, other sources would maintain ardently, in spite of conventional wisdom, astrology, folklore and chronically “skewed” statistics, that levels of registered mayhem increased during
new
moons as clearly as during full ones. Which did make sense, astronomically at least, as new moons occurred when the same celestial bodies in question were lined up directly (only with the moon in the middle this time) and exerting the same gravitational pull. The new moon was known as the “full moon's ghost.” Related arguments cited statistical peaks in assault and battery at the new moon. Also, emergency admissions to psychiatric facilities reached a pinnacle. A national poll of radio DJs revealed a surge in “loony” calls, as, by report, did the FBI—from people of all walks of life, irrespective of economic and social distinctions, people complaining of being watched by communists, neighbors and little green men—in the days directly surrounding a new moon.

By these studies, public unrest would appear to have risen
twice
a month (at the full and new moons) and fallen in the days directly preceding and following the first and third quarters.

Other sources conflicted wildly, as Owen was quick to discover through research. For every classroom teacher who swore by student behavior taking a turn for the insubordinate during a full moon, for every claim that delinquent behavior increased, and birth rates soared, and sexual activity reached a peak—along with levels of menstruating females—that bartenders oversaw turbulent evenings from Bangkok to Billings, and murders abounded, there was someone to balk at the claim and, as often as not, dismiss it as superstition. One had to watch out for closed-minded naysayers no less than uninformed crackpot enthusiasts. For most of recorded history, even considering the idea that lunar phases might have a bearing on human behavior—i.e., not rejecting it outright as totally baseless paranoia—had placed many doctors at risk of mockery and even persecution within their fields. Only in recent years had thorough statistical and clinical research, performed and reported in books and recognized medical journals, begun to gain acceptance—or at least appear to warrant review. The field had a long way to go to establish a basic, generally accepted groundwork. Owen couldn't have known what to make of it—not in a single afternoon. He was blown away by the lack of conclusive material. He didn't trust anything, yet. For as far back as humankind had been charting the moon—up to 40,000 years, by evidence—for all of the advances in medicine, science, statistics and human understanding, it still seemed that one of the basic phenomenological entities known to the species remained, at least as reflected in semi-reliable terms, a virtual mystery.

From here on, Owen would have to rely on his intuition. Which led him, as such, to a lunar almanac: four thousand years of monthly calendars.

He found the date.

Thursday, October 21st: Waxing Crescent, approaching first quarter.

He'd gotten it right. Which meant, it occurred to him first by deduction, then by consulting the almanac chart, that the new moon had fallen on Saturday—square in the rising tide of unrest leading up to “The Wildest Night in The Basin.”

Owen got up from where he was sitting, and walked a circle around the table. Up at the periodical desk, a slight, mousy librarian looked at him.

He plodded back into an aisle of shelves to process his thoughts without posing a spectacle. There, in the inchoate swirl of computations coming to bear in his head, one voice in particular stood out clearly: Dwayne Gibbons, that rat from the Dogboy—shaking his head almost condescendingly: “
That picture was taken October first
” and “
All I can say is: check your calendar
.”

Owen returned to the table and redirected his attention to the lunar calendar. What he discovered, in doing so, beat the odds to a nearly uncanny degree. The moon had already been full that month—on the
first
, at 1:07 p.m. But, as broken down in the almanac's text, the lunar cycle's duration from start to finish was 29.5 days. Meaning, with thirty-one days in October, two full moons would occur that month—one on the 1st, the other at 12:51 a.m. on the 31st.

Halloween.

Owen regarded the date to confirm.
Blue Moon
, it read in italics.

Man
…

He got up and walked around again.

…
where
had he heard that term?

Stoner.

He returned to the table, pulled
Bad Moon
from his rucksack, sat down and opened it up. He'd read about blue moons the evening before. They were characterized in their own entry. Two separate definitions were offered. The first, a “traditional” blue moon, was listed as the third full moon in a season containing four full moons—which occurred, on average, every five or six years. The second had already been defined by the almanac—a single calendar month
containing two full moons—something that occurred, on average, every thirty months.

Many folk traditions held these cycles to host all manner of
lunacy
. In parts of Siberia, the blue moon was said to push reindeer into aimless stampedes. In Chile, the whole month preceding it witnessed outrageous behavior by housewives and dogs. In Oklahoma, flocks of sparrows would fall from the sky like “raining death.” In Old Germany, werewolves were said to convene in “sabbaths” during the blue moon. These “orgies of madness” revolved around music, dance, fornication and human sacrifice.

Owen returned to the almanac, riding a hunch. October of '74 …

This time he walked right out of the building—with Dr. Diller hissing along: “
They'll call you a madman / don't be a fool
…”

At last, he would heed the doctor's orders.

By now, Owen was starting to feel less in charge of this story than guided along by it. Something was reeling him in to this mess. He'd been caught in the tractor beam once before …

But he had never left the mainland.

Lord, it was hard being Celtic sometimes.

There
was
one advantage to it, though—being Celtic: the Celts had a knack for employing theatrics exactly when they were least appropriate. Charging the Roman garrisons naked. Walking the plank in a fit of laughter …

Once he had gotten a chance to steady his nerves, outside, on a public bench, Owen settled down to configuring.