Читать книгу Small Town Monsters - Craig Nybo - Страница 58

Craig Nybo

4

Chapter 13

Kurt sat at the large, faux-wood desk in his office and opened the leather-bound book he had borrowed from Artemus. The front page bore its title in elegant, old-English print—Canis Humanus Lupus: The Cycle And Science Of The Werewolf—as if the text was based on deductive study and reason. Kurt chuckled. He flipped through the pages to get an overall view of what the book contained: countless gruesome illustrations, drawings of wolves, men, and creatures somewhere in between, all performing acts of violence.

The illustrator used woodcut and ink, reminiscent of the sketches found in Andreas Vesalius’s two mid-16th century medical journals; Epitome and . Like Vesalius’s illustrations, those in Artimus’s book depicted flayed and fouled corpses, victims of werewolf mutilations. Each sketch detailed mangled abominations of humanity, skin torn from bodies, heads hanging from exposed sinews.

The drawings mesmerized Kurt with their DaVinci-like intricacy—not the works of an amateur. The consistency in how the artist had drawn the werewolves’ eyes interested him, neither absolutely human nor bestial, a diabolical homogenization of both.

After thumbing through the pages, Kurt flipped back to

Concerning:

Kurt McCammus

Clay Hickman

Harmon Bently

Marilyn Moore