Читать книгу Small Town Monsters - Craig Nybo - Страница 52

Craig Nybo

6

is how the boy went bad.”

“He was a cannibal?” Kurt asked.

“Not a cannibal; an animal. That part of the soul, the dark part, is taken from the most animalistic of instincts. When the boy killed and fed, he was not human. He was the creature—the wolf.”

“He was tried for multiple counts of murder,” Kurt said.

“He was above the law of civilized men. When he gave in to the dark spot on his soul, he stood trial for crimes against nature; and so he was convicted by the court of nature.”

“Wasn’t he executed by the state?” Kurt asked.

“He sat in the chair, that much is true. But man can’t kill that which is made alive by nature.”

“So how was he killed?”

Artemus stood from the table and walked to a dilapidated shelf of dog-eared books. He searched for something specific among the titles printed on the aged spines. “Some time after his first kill, he took a job logging. One dark afternoon just a month after he stared work, his foreman came knocking with his hat in his hands to inform me that my boy was crushed under the weight of a felled ponderosa pine. Foreman told me it was a quick death.”

Artemus ran his finger along the dusty book spines. After a moment, he found what he was looking for. “Ah, here it is.” He drew an aged, leather-bound tome from the shelf and carried it back to the table. “They delivered his body here to this house. I purchased a casket and laid him in state in this room just to offer my final salutations.”

He placed the old book on the table and sat down. “I noticed changes in the body; Danny seemed to recover from his pallor, probably rejecting the poisons pumped into his system by the undertaker. I postponed the burial services and kept an eye on him. It wasn’t long before I found the casket empty.”

“He just got up and walked away?” Kurt asked.

“That he did. He lived mostly in the woods after that, but he came to visit often enough. I kept his comings and goings a secret and I advised him to do the same. But secrets can be