I got lucky that not one member of this tribe of boys called me Cootie Queen, but I still felt like that first day of kindergarten. Any conversations I started with the boys slowly came to a dead end once it was discovered how little we shared in common. There was nothing to talk about. The downside to not being able to bond with my new coworkers, it meant I didn’t have anyone to teach me the ropes of how this new job was supposed to be done properly. Perry, my new boss, was hardly around. He had briefly said hello to me the day before and asked how I was enjoying the department. It was a simple exchange of pleasantries where I didn’t gather the impression he genuinely cared whether or not I was enjoying myself. He was just being polite. Other than that, Perry was like a ghost at the job. Never seen but occasionally spoken of as few had seen him haunting random areas of the convention center from time to time. I was starting to wonder if the only way to summon my manager would be to separate myself from the group of boys so Perry could swoop in out of nowhere to scold me for not “staying with the group.”
“I hate that place,” I said to myself as I came home the next afternoon. I was physically sore and mentally exhausted from the long day. It was a workout stacking chairs and continuously moving tables and chairs on large carts. My day was made worse knowing I had to go back at six tomorrow morning. My schedule had been bumped to six in the morning to two in the afternoon.
“You’re home!” Simon exclaimed as soon as I opened the front door. This wasn’t a jubilant exclamation. He looked relieved. Before I could ask why my brother looked so very alarmed, Simon motioned for me to quickly follow him. “Get over here!”
I followed him without asking questions. Simon ran around the foyer of the house to the back-door patio. He whipped it open and shot down the porch, barely paying attention if I was even following him. “What the heck, Simon?”
“Just follow me!”
I did as I was instructed, too tired from the long day to argue. Simon did not reveal anything as he hurried around the house. He was specifically going to the area in the back where my bedroom was located. Soon, I was staring up three floors at the highest point of the house, where my bedroom window was. “What are you going crazy about…” I trailed off mid-sentence. Before my eyes lying on the ground against the house was a very gory sight. My stomach clenched uncomfortably. Lying perched against the edge of the house was a torn-apart deer. It was a very gruesome sight and yet a familiar one. The carcass was that of a dead doe, its hind leg ripped off. The poor creature’s throat had been ripped open, as well as its belly. Guts and intestines leaked out, almost as if someone had worked on gutting the poor creature. There were a few flies swarming around the carcass. The only sounds that could be heard was the buzzing of the flies and nothing else. Simon and I said nothing as we stared at the horrid sight before us. The dead animal looked nearly identical to the one that had been killed by the monster animal in the woods the other night. It wasn’t the same deer; this one was bigger and uneaten.
“I found it when I was going to start painting the second coat like Dad wanted,” said Simon weakly.
I nodded dumbly. Our dad had called earlier in the week and told Simon that to earn his allowance he would have to paint the outside of the house before winter weather came in late November or December. Given our wealthy parents allowed Simon a hefty allowance when he completed chores, the teenager quickly obliged to our parents’ wishes. The house was becoming a brick red, a lovely color compared to the previous stone grey it held when Dad first purchased the house.
“How long has it been out here?” I wondered aloud as I resisted covering my nose. There was a horrible decaying stench attached to the dead animal. There was no telling how long it had been rotting out here. I suspected a few days given the flies and maggots that were covering it.
“That’s not what’s scaring me,” said Simon quietly. “You don’t think this looks very familiar, Ev?”
“I know it does. But you don’t think…”
I didn’t need to finish my sentence to find my brother nodding at me. “Yeah, I think the werewolf did it.”
“We don’t know it’s a werewolf—”
“How many other animals are going to expertly lay a dead deer down against our house?” interrupted Simon impatiently.
I opened and closed my mouth a few times. I couldn’t find words to speak. As bizarre and utterly impossible as it seemed, my brother made a good point. The odds weren’t likely that a coyote had hunted this doe down and just happened to kill it against the side of the house. Say one did, after ripping it open, the same coyote didn’t eat the deer but merely left it gruesomely out in the open and propped it against our house?
“So, the werewolf killed the deer and left it by our house? How would that make sense? Why would it do that?”
Simon looked at the dead deer for a few moments longer before his frightened face turned back to me. “Maybe it’s like the bad guys in scary movies. Maybe, just maybe, the werewolf left it here to show us something.”
I snorted. Part of me had to hand it to my younger brother, he had a knack for storytelling. His words held genuine certainty. He really believed what he was saying. Simon’s green eyes were even wide and fearful. If Simon put his imagination toward writing and not reading comic books and manga, I suspected he had the prospects of becoming a great writer. “And what would it want to show us?”
Simon’s face was quite pale as he stared at me. It was as if he felt his thoughts should have been obvious to me. “It’s showing us that it knows where we live.”
CHAPTER 4
Simon’s declaration had me spooked the rest of the night. I had waved off his ridiculous notion and told him to stop saying stupid things, but his words stayed in my mind even as I made our small dinner of homemade tacos. The sizzling of the raw red meat inside of the frying pan had my stomach churning as thoughts of the deer returned. I couldn’t make myself eat any of the meat when it came time for supper. Instead, I made myself a neat taco salad with all the taco ingredients minus the cooked ground beef. It was a rare moment for me to choose a salad over tacos. Simon’s appetite had not been harmed by the gruesome scene. After he wolfed down seven hard shell tacos, I wrapped up the leftovers and put them in the fridge for Miranda to warm up later. The thought of ever eating meat again was disgusting me as I put it away.
When Miranda arrived home later that evening, Simon and I showed her the dead deer. Our squeamish sister squealed in horror and said she would call the police department early the next morning to tell them about the pack of coyotes.
She neglected to listen to Simon’s persistence that it was a werewolf that killed the doe. Miranda had only laughed when he warned her that the werewolf was warning them it knows where we live. I stayed silent as Simon next angrily ranted that Miranda never listened to him. As much as I sympathized that our elder sister often neglected to listen to what we were saying, his words were hardly believable. I barely believed it, and I had witnessed the monster ripping the deer in the woods apart. Werewolves belonged in the realm of fiction. No sane person would take Simon’s words seriously and not burst into laughter or an eye roll. For the next few days, Simon ignored Miranda whenever she would try talking to him. He claimed to me he was making a point. If she couldn’t listen to him, then he didn’t need to listen to her.