Bad Moon Risen: A Mike Dodge Mystery

The home was erected in 1935, a totem of privilege amid sweeping poverty and uncertainty born of a horrific world war, a global plague that had filled American cemeteries, and the abrupt and abject failure of hallowed financial institutions.

Abominable taste wasn’t merely its origin story – the design was an amalgam of then-popular architectural fads, portentious “classic” touches, and the homeowner’s narcissistic whims. Nearly a century later, the house at 340 West Winwood was no longer anything anyone might call a showplace, save each fall, when it came alive with arcane horrors.

Tonight, the moon was in full bloom. And I knew all too well what dwelt within.

Millennials.

“Dude, we’re not open ‘til tomorrow,” the guy in the Columbia jacket called from the base of the broad front steps, more than a hint of exasperation in his voice. He was securing the lopsided, over-distressed plank sign welcoming the unwary to The 35^th Annual Big Siblings Haunted House.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m here with Ray Perry — one of his Phi Beta Sigma guys got COVID and he asked would I mind pitching in.”

The kid blinked, never a great sign. “Oh, I was expecting, um…”

“Somebody younger?” I offered him the out, though Ray and most of his social frat members were at or near my AARP demographic.

“So, you’re a brother?” he drawled. “I mean, you know, Phi Beta Kappa brother? Member?”

Lacking a kind bullet or soothing euthanistic cocktail, I feigned doddering obliviousness. “Sigma. Ray’s my neighbor — I do a little web work for the group, and he CPRs my Dell every few years in exchange. He here yet?”

“Ah, he texted about an hour ago. Had to work late on a project. I’m Darin.”

Despite his souffle-settled Terry Crews physique and Ving Rhames mug, Ray was IT, like this guy. Well, not remotely like this guy, who looked like he was born in a cinder block workroom near the boilers full of battle-fatigued PCUs or laptops. Or whatever the cubicle set was using these days. Ray had some ‘splaining to do.

“So I don’t know if Roy told you, but we had to do a little restructuring here.”

“Ray. I know the place is ancient — he said you were using a generator for most of the lighting and effects.”

“Yeah, the city took it for overdue taxes, but there’s some historic landmark suit that keeps ‘em from ripping it down. So they loan it to us every Halloween, if we sign about a million waivers. But that isn’t what I meant. You hear about the complaints?”

“Yeah, something about the monsters being too scary?”

“Shit, if only. Yeah, that was part of it. One of our guys proposed we do something a little different, a little more, um, inclusive. You know Blade.”

“We run in different circles, but yeah, I’m a Marvel fan.” Though I probably looked more like I dated Stan Lee’s sister.

“We thought we’d get away from the old Christopher Lee vampire thing, do something more modern, kinda Twilight-y. And have a Blade-type tour guide to kind of mix it up with the vampires and werewolves and zombies. Like one of those Wild West saloon fight reenactments, except with vampires and, well, you know. Evan runs an MMA dojo on the West Side, so he’s got the moves.”

I harbored a brief moment of dread, given Darin’s near-WP stroke a few moments earlier. But then he waved to a thirtysomething guy with a Wesley Snipes haircut and a Millington Bluebirds tee effortlessly hauling a plexiglass zombie up the warped steps and into the floodlit depths. Evan nodded curtly.

“He’s still kinda pissed,” Darin sighed. “He had the sword and everything. But one of the guys, Gavin, had an aneurysm. He’s like one of these toxic fanboy types, with this creepy kinda Aryan vibe piled on. Ticked off by Anthony Mackie being the new Captain America, about all the women heroes, the Muslim Ms. Marvel, the Jewish Moon Knight, well, you get it. We’ve tried to open up the club a lot, more diversity, but this guy…

“Sorry. So Gavin starts bitching that the MCU’s gonna sue over trademark infringement, intellectual property rights, all that shit, over a Big Siblings Haunted House for underprivileged kids. We tried to call BS, but the president’s a lawyer, so he folded almost immediately.

“And if that wasn’t bad enough, Gavin’s one if these old-school pretentious horror nerds — calls vampires nosferatu, says Twilight was hormonal teen porn and rails about Teen Wolf. We had one of the kids go into a fucking asthma attack over Gavin’s Vlad the Impaler last week. I mean, we’ve had religitroids and Wiccans and parents groups and home-schoolers come after us over the years, but Gavin Birge’s a bloody PR nightmare. We’d love to get him and his redneck cousin Dale out, but they keep things just this side of overt racism. Be handy if the Moon Wolf paid him a call—” Darin spotted my lupine brows rising in the platinum moonlight. “Jesus, sorry — please forget I said that.”

Despite the appallingly poor taste of suggesting the local serial killer trim Big Siblings’ ranks, the notion of Gavin mentoring Millington youth had actually raised my arthritic hackles. I tried to wave it off, but Darin was saved by the bell — a notification chime. He tugged his Galaxy free and glimpsed at the screen.

“Sorry, man — my fantasy league,” he informed me.

Quidditch, I wagered.

“Yo, Griffindork!” Darin greeted. You never lose the reporter’s instincts.

**

“Shit, all we need is you breaking a hip,” Josh frowned. The aforementioned attorney and chief executive, eyeing me like a future testimonial for the other guys. “How about you string some webs on the stairway? Just the railing, don’t want some rugrat breaking their neck.”

He handed me a repurposed Amazon box full of what resembled vintage Amazon packing material. I suppressed a juvenile squeak as I uncovered a nest of faux-spiders nestled under the faux cobwebs.

“Just start on the first floor, all the way up to the dormer. You hear anything weird, don’t fresak — Gavin’s trying to fix the sound system. And just kinda spread out the spiders best you can. You get hungry, Dale brought a bag of pulled pork sandwiches. But don’t go near him – he tested positive for COVID, but fucking showed up anyway. In fact, maybe don’t eat the sandwiches.”

Josh paused. “And, remember, just the railings.”

“Rugrats. Necks. Got it.” I doddered off, Boomer on a mission.

Few seemed to be haunting the Big Sibs Haunted House this All Hallows — the Moon Wolf had hit four times already over the past three months, always during a full moon, thus the wild media creativity.

The first victim had already made the papers back in August, gracing the Millington School District’s first fall public meeting in full camo, armed for the next zombie apocalypse, bellowing about “critical race theory” and non-gender toilets in the face of a 51-year-old, 5-foot-nothing Latinx teacher. Sam or Walt or Earl or whatever his name had been lived about 15 miles outside the district, and that’s where his eviscerated body had been found — behind a roadside tavern at the edge of the ripe corn, fly and abdomen open.

Number Two was a hometown Proud Boy who’d “accidentally” run his Harley into a young woman at a downtown candlelight vigil for George Floyd a few years back. Last I’d seen Charlayne, she was shuttling back-to-school bags at the West Side summer block party with a barely perceptible limp. I didn’t even bother to assign theoretical names to this guy.

Any man’s death, and all that, but John Donne came up about 400 years short of making the 21st Century shitshow. While Harley Boy had landed probation, Number Three somehow skated on whaling the crap out of a Korean-American woman he’d indicted at the Target checkout for “giving us the Chinese AIDS.”

The sheriff’s deputy last month had rattled everybody, especially discovered as he’d been leaking entrails all over his Explorer’s upholstery. That one got splashed all over FOX and Newsmax, at least until the release of a best-of collection of Deputy Walbrook’s tweet-ises on American racial and Judeo-Christian dynamics and email correspondence with Central Illinois’ most elite supremacists.

I applied a rakish tarantula to the second floor landing newel post as I heard incoherent mumbling over the network of Bluetooth mini-speakers sprinkled throughout 340 West Winwood. And then I jumped about a foot as Gavin (I assumed) performed an appropriately curdling sound check. I stepped up the pace as I mounted the last flight toward the attic/dormer, flinging webs like Peter Parker on crack, and tossing the last spider into the moonbeam that stood between me and whatever James Wan horrors the Big Sibs had failed to evict.

That’s when I caught the breathing. Ragged, gasping, agonized breaths. Then they stopped, and I sprinted to the landing even as I heard the footfalls from below.

I made what looked to be the master bedroom on the heels of the Sibs. It was like a scene out of Poe, if Poe’d written IPA commercials. In the concentrated glow Darin, Josh, Evan, and a fourth guy – slight, thickly bearded, “Don’t Tread on Me” cap, work boots, like he’d wandered in from the wrong beer ad – formed a half-circle around a guy who just had to be a Gavin. What wasn’t coated with what had been inside Gavin looked self-consciously expensive and just wrong for an evening of haunted housework.

The guy who’d by process of elimination had to be Cousin Dale dropped to his knees into the viscera, shaking soundlessly as his eyes filled.

“Werewolf,” Darin whispered loudly. The room fell silent, out of dread, contemplation, embarrassment, I couldn’t tell.

“No lie—“ The voice was low, weak, and came from the shredded thing below. I felt my heart leap as I spotted two clear blue eyes peering from the mess of skin and blood and tissue, then locking into an eternal stare. 

Dale began to gasp convulsively. Josh tentatively reached out to pat him, flat-handed. 

**

Curtis had been assigned to the Moon Wolf Case, for a variety of reasons that had left him vaguely resentful the last couple of months. That Dale had glared suspiciously at Det. Mead since the moment he’d stepped onto the scene didn’t help foster a community policing kind of environment. The only moment of amusement I noted was when the bros started piling suspicion on the old dude. I was suddenly grateful for my childlike upper body strength and distinctly testosterone-deficient aura.

“Look at him,” Curtis finally grunted. Somewhere in there, I was sure it was said with love. The group nodded and chilled.

“Gavin said—” Darin began, quietly.

“Yeah?” Curtis demanded.

“Gavin said a, uh, a werewolf killed him.”

“Uh, huh,” Curtis said.

“Well, actually,” I dove in, “I kinda think he said the opposite.”

“Dude, we all heard him,” Darin said, suddenly quite defensive toward his lunatic proposition.

I sighed. “You suggested Gavin had been attacked by a werewolf, and, with his last breath, he responded, ‘No lie.’ If you were dying, would sarcasm be your first – or I guess last -- instinct? Would flippancy really be my go-to? ‘You looked like you were disemboweled by a mythical wolf dude.’ ‘No shit, Sherlock. Ya think so?’

“Look, Gavin seemed to think of himself as some sort of gothic intellectual, above the average paranormal rabble. He disdained terms like ‘werewolf’ or ‘vampire,’ saw them as pop culture tropes, at best as overdone pulp. He hated the romanticization of monsters -- liked his vampires, nay, noseratu, bald and pasty and fang-y, as God intended.

“According to the lore, a werewolf’s a human with a genetic disposition to transform into a wolfman generally with each full moon, or who’s been bitten by a werewolf and caught that full-moon fever. The werewolf has no control over their transformation or impulses -- thus the whole attraction to Kristin Stewart thing. Even unto death, Gavin had to have the last word. He wasn’t being snarky with you – he was simultaneously reframing and rejecting your theory.

“Gavin wasn’t savaged by some hairy howling thing out of a cheap monster flick. He was trying to tell you his killer was no lycanthrope. Lycanthropy is the clinical term for being what we call a werewolf, or believing you’re one. Whoever murdered Gavin was not a werewolf nor believed they were one.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Curtis rumbled.

“Now you got it. So, the killer wasn’t a schlep in wolf’s clothing, but we now also know Gavin didn’t know who his killer was. Don’t you think he’d have named him right then and there? Who wastes a dying declaration?”

“But he knows everybody here,” Evan protested. “Nobody else got in or out tonight – I was working by the front door, and your buddy here checked the whole place.”

“Well, ‘buddy’…,” Curtis shrugged.

“Which means it has to be one of you,” I smiled.

“This is hell, isn’t it?” Josh said. “What are you yapping about, you fucking lunatic?”

“Rude, but OK. I mean, what if Gavin didn’t know it was one of you? With only a generator-powered floodlight, he may never have seen him. Or, more likely, since none of you guys had a speck of blood on you, the killer went full-body Ghostface.

“But you said you heard voices before Gavin screamed. Wouldn’t he have recognized one of our voices, numb nuts?” Evan sneered.

“What if he didn’t recognize the killer’s voice. What if his friend in that moment wasn’t his friend any more?”

“Yeah, ripping somebody to shreds kinda kills the whole bro vibe,” AAA laughed.

 “What if one of you guys wasn’t you?” I posed. “Look, Detective – you said this whole thing looks like the Moon Wolf.”

“I didn’t not use that name,” Curtis said. “I do not name serial killers.”

“We don’t like to name our monsters, sometimes because it gives them power, maybe sometimes because it makes them too real. Or because it dehumanizes their victims. Even if the victims may have been a little subhuman, anyway.”

“Not my call. Not anybody’s.”

“I respect that, Curtis. But it’s kind of important to understand what we might be dealing with here.”

“Which is?”

“The Son of Sam, Joel Rifkin, Aileen Wuornos, were all born during a full moon. Study about 10 years ago proved the lunar cycle regulates human sleep patterns, and one shrink a while back suggested that because the human body is about 70 percent water, people experience shifts like the tidal shifts caused by the moon. Dude said murder, suicide, aggravated assault, psychiatric emergencies, and fatal auto accidents spike under a full moon.”

“Dude said, huh?” Darin smirked. I was beginning to believe bonding was not possible here.

“In fact, this particular dude got knocked down pretty quick – the moon can affect large bodies of open water, but it would have about the force of a flea on a glass of water, forget about the water in our bodies. My point is, whatever the moon may or may not do, we’re fascinated by it, and are probably affected at least on a psychological level by its perceived powers.

“And what’s a werewolf, really? The brute in us, the animal within that satisfies our hidden violent and carnal impulses? There’s even a built-in rationale, a built-in excuse – the full moon did it. Stephen King argues Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the ultimate werewolf story, even without a liter of lycanthropy. Jekyll’s a pillar of society who transforms into an evil brute named Hyde at night. Hyde tramples a little girl, beats and stomps an old man to death.

“Now, what do we have here? Every full moon, our Hyde, our werewolf, targets the dregs – racists, hatemongers, bullies. So what do we have here, Dr. Jekyll and Robin Hood? But why’s Robin Hood need the full moon as an excuse?”

“What if we all just confessed now?” Evan begged Curtis, who held up a silencing hand.

“Unless to our guy, the werewolf, his internal Hyde, IS driving him against his own chosen nature? We’ve seen what’s happened over the last decade – hell, since 9/11. Rampant conspiracy theories, seemingly reasonable people taking rock-hard positions that fly in the face of science, logic, ethics, any kind of rational thought, human decency?

“What if the Moon Wolf – sorry, our killer – is only convinced he’s a Jekyll. All the hate, the racism, the distortions of truth and the denial of science are his religious, patriotic, cultural truth. When he begins to question it all, when the internal conflict suddenly is too much, he has to rationalize lashing out against everything he’s been led to believe. Our Jekyll is his Hyde, his full-moon insanity.”

“Detective!” Curtis looked up, signaled us to stay put, and took the stairs two at a time.

“You want to say something, Dale?” I asked.

The little man glared at me, then shook his head.

“The deputy was the key – the killer had to be somebody who knew what he was, one of his supremacist brothers. Then I wondered what you might have used to do the kind of damage you did to your victims. The sandwiches – pulled pork BBQ. Meat shredder claws might do the trick.”

Josh gagged, and I guessed Dale had catered a few meetings.

Curtis emerged from the stairwell with what looked like a large costume plastic bag. This one would be called Bloody Shroud of Death, One Size Fits All. I could even see the eyeholes, and I wondered if Dale had caught the irony.

“Crawlspace,” my buddy supplied. “And a pair of Wolverine claws.”

“That’s how you kept yourself clean as you shredded your cousin. We were focused on werewolves, but we were looking for a ghost.”

Dales eyes welled again. “Help me.”

His Big Sibs “brothers” unconsciously backed off a step at the eerily mild, imploring voice they’d never before heard.

“Jeez,” I said. “Help us all.”